Ladyparts

by Deborah Copaken

  Yes. Yes! I remembered. Not the specifics of our small talk, exactly, but rather my thought bubbles as he spoke: What a kind man behind that boyish smile. His friends must feel lucky.

  Will texted again the next morning while I was at the end of a bike ride with my friend Rebecca. “I’m not sure if this is the right way to do this,” he wrote, having never been on an app date before, “but would you like to meet for coffee…now?”

  Rebecca and I had just stopped in Harlem to buy sandwiches at Fairway, a grocery store off the Hudson River bike path, after pedaling for several miles. The courtyard of The High Line Hotel, where Will wanted to meet for coffee, was six miles south and (I checked Google Maps) a thirty-one-minute bike ride. “Should I go?” I said to Rebecca. “I mean, look at me.” I was wearing my bottom-of-the-pile, frayed white T-shirt with the outline of a black tree I’d bought at one of those outdoor Christmas craft stalls in Union Square. I thought it would look good under a leather jacket, but I was wrong.

  Rebecca laughed. She’d just finished many years of training to be a therapist. She’d also borne close witness to the pain in my marriage. She was the one, in fact, who was there the night my ex had stood up from the dinner table, right after the four of us had sat down to eat, and announced he was going to the gym. “I mean, it’ll be a pretty good test of who he is if he takes off points for the way you’re dressed to go on a Sunday-morning bike ride, right?”

  I warned Will, via text, that I was unshowered, wearing the ugliest T-shirt I owned, and that I’d be drenched in sweat from biking, but if he was fine with that, so was I.

  A year later, despite the ugly tree tee, we will set down roots together and split the cost of a mold-and-cockroach-free apartment with a dishwasher we’ll find a block and a half from the East River in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with a view of the old Domino Sugar factory out the back window—where Kara Walker once placed her giant ten-foot vagina—and the Empire State Building out front. Before moving in together, not wanting the bad juju of my wedding ring hanging over our bed, I’ll use an X-Acto knife to chip away at the superglue holding it in place in the center of the lotus flower painting I made with it, in the wake of my separation, before taking a solo walk to the top of Inwood Hill forest, where I will toss the ring, unceremoniously, into the woods and say goodbye both to it and to my beloved canopy of leaves.

  Circle #1, 2014 (house paint on wood, acrylic petals, glue, nails, wedding ring), © Deborah Copaken

  Will will accompany me through two new surgeries (knee, 2018; foot, 2020) with a steady hand and outstretched arm. Hospitals, it turns out, are not only his thing, he’ll admonish me for constantly thanking him for his help and apologizing for asking for it. “Stop saying sorry. That’s what people do for one another,” he’ll say, bringing me a pillow to elevate my foot or some water to take my pain meds, utterly baffled that this has not been my experience in love thus far.

  “But how can I name him in a public essay in The Atlantic,” I say to Will—it’s now early January, 2018—“after he wrote that email saying he comes ‘from a grudge-holding desert people’? His best friends are Jared Kushner and Rudy Giuliani! He calls them by their first names. You don’t want to fuck with those people.”

  “Because you have to,” says Will. Will, like Nora, is frustratingly right, most of the time. “Sorry. If you’re going to go public with your story, you have to have the courage to name names.”

  “Okay, okay,” I say. I email Adrienne and tell her I’m willing to name my harasser.

  The Kurson edit drags on and gets meticulously fact-checked. The fact-checkers even call Melissa, my friend and colleague from Cafe, to find out what frame of mind I was in when I came back to the office after my first lunch with him and whether I happened to mention the weird breast commentary to her (I had). Meanwhile, I double down on my search for a new salaried job to stop hemorrhaging four-figure monthly COBRA fees. After sending out over a hundred more letters and résumés, I land a decently paid, relatively fun six-month gig as a senior writer/producer at the World Science Festival that comes with health insurance, and I breathe a sigh of relief.

  On March 9, 2018, while I’m sitting in my World Science Festival office in New York, researching the link between the microbiome and the brain, my editor Adrienne hits the publish button from her office in D.C. on my first story in The Atlantic—“How to Lose Your Job From Sexual Harassment in 33 Easy Steps,” which immediately goes viral.

  Within days, dozens of readers—men and women both, but mostly women—contact me with their own tales of woe not just at the hands of men but specifically at the hands of Ken Kurson. In fact, two days after its publication, Will drives my sons and me upstate for a hike in the woods for my fifty-second birthday, and all I’ll remember about what should have been a peaceful walk through snow-covered trees will be the hundreds of notifications—mostly from strangers, but also from colleagues and friends alike—blowing up in my pocket every second: So many, in fact, that I turn off the phone and create a spreadsheet when I get home that night, to separate out the more troubling first-person accusations from the random missives of solidarity, rage, and “I saw Ken Kurson be a dick to so-and-so, too”s.

  “The Others,” I name the Google doc, in honor of the TV show Lost. It has twelve people on it, carefully organized by name, email, phone number, accusation, and source of the incoming message.

  Here are a few excerpts from some of those messages, which arrived via the usual channels: Facebook, Twitter, my website, email, text, etc. I think it’s important to note that this is the first and only time a personal story I’ve written has elicited such a flood of private missives from strangers wanting to share not only their “eerily similar experience”—this happens often enough, particularly when you write about the fruits of sexism—but their eerily similar experience featuring the same person:

  “I had an eerily similar experience with KK. Not that I was sexually harassed, but he put me in a position that left me unemployed with three kids.”

  “Ken Kurson invited me to a professional lunch in 1999 and sent me an email about my breasts later. I was just starting out as a writer, in my 20s.”

  “Did you know you’re not the only one he offered a job to, then revoked the offer and acted like the person who’d just quit their job was the one in the wrong?”

  “Ken told [redacted], ‘Why are you here? A woman like you doesn’t need to work’ and said she should just marry some rich guy who’d pay her bills.”

  “I also have a creepy Ken Kurson story that can be summed up as: ‘I may have told your colleague I wanted to interview your boss/feature you/your organization in profile but I really just wanted a date and that’s why I set up the meeting.’ ”

  “Ken was a creep to me, condescending as well…I got paid more for being receptive to him. He doubled my pay for taking the flirt.”

  “He was a creepy guy who would send inappropriate messages from his Observer work email address.”

  “I had a similar experience w Ken Kurson…Ken very specifically targeted me.”

  “Your frightening experience with him gave me flashbacks…The way he spoke to me haunts me to this day…Drag the ogre into the daylight.”

  “His only job was to get Trump elected. Once he’d done that, and his ‘best friend’ Jared wasn’t working with him anymore, it was no fun.”

  “In addition to Ken’s $325K salary, he was compensated by being allowed to invest relatively small sums in Kushner real estate deals.”

  Those real estate deals—which, if my source is correct, have made Kurson a wealthy man—were made possible via Cadre, a New York–based real estate company founded by Mr. Kushner and his brother, Joshua. Cadre was funded in part by Yuri Milner—a Russian oligarch who himself is funded by the Kremlin—and others who to this day funnel money through the Cayman Islands, which was technically legal but
not, for Kushner, necessarily ethical, due to both perceived and real impropriety of foreign influence over our government.

  All of this troubling information about Cadre, Kushner, Trump, and Russian oligarchs pours into my inbox in the middle of the Mueller investigation, and I grow downright paranoid. Is my phone tapped? Is anyone reading my emails? Can they hack into my Google Docs? Who are “they” anyway? The U.S. government? The Kremlin? Trump’s lackeys? My friend Virginia Heffernan, who writes about technology and politics and personally knows one of the victims Kurson targeted, calls me on my phone early one morning, out of the blue, while I’m toweling off from my shower. “Download Signal right now,” she says, “and never speak to anyone about any of this ever again over normal channels. Do you understand? You are not safe. Call me back on Signal when you can.”

  Meanwhile, three days after my story is published, the New York Post runs a headline under Keith Kelly’s byline that reads, “Ex-Observer editor joked about my breasts: writer,” followed the next day, March 13, 2018, by, “Observer fashion editor denies knowing about freelancer’s sex harassment claims” over a risible stock photo, more amateur porn screenshot than workplace harassment illustration, of a disembodied woman fending off staged advances from a disembodied man.

  “Oh, for god’s sake, look at this!” I yell half at my screen, half at my co-worker Nils, after digesting both stories. Nils, like me, was fired from Health Today, and I helped him land this position as my officemate because he’s always been incredibly good at his job, kind, and ethical. “Sarah”—the aforenamed fashion editor of the Observer—“responded to my emails with, ‘It doesn’t feel like any of my business.’ How can she claim she never knew about the harassment? And I fucking sent those emails between Sarah and me to Keith Kelly, when he called me for a rebuttal. You were here. You heard me!”

  New York Post, March 12, 2018

  “I did, indeed,” Nils says.

  New York Post, March 13, 2018

  But now I’m on a holy tear. Can’t stop. I feel like I’ve been harassed all over again. “I debunked Kelly’s story with proof before he even wrote it, and he ran with it anyway, under a staged photo of sexual assault and a headline calling me a liar? Fuck him. Shame on Sarah. Shame on all of us. This is not about my boobs! It’s about a multi-step, manipulative, and calculated campaign of sexual and professional harassment—not ‘sex harassment,’ what the fuck is that?—during which the boob comment barely registered as anything but yucky awkwardness before I even understood what was happening. Sexual harassment is not about tits and ass! It’s about power! This man dangled a salary and a full-time job in front of my face then yanked both away like a dime-store sadist when I showed no interest in fucking him. That’s the real crime of sexual harassment. Stealing a woman’s financial future and hijacking her power!”

  But headlines about boobs and photos of women’s disembodied bare legs garner pageviews that sell ads. A woman’s body will always be viewed as a commodity, even in the very reporting of its illegal commodification. Lost wages, lost potential, stolen power? Who’d want to click on those?

  “I don’t envy women,” Nils says to me.

  The next afternoon during my lunch hour, determined to get to the bottom of the various Ken Kurson stories that continue to arrive in my inbox, while also keeping up with my full-time job, I download Signal and speak on the phone to a woman—we’ll call her Pam—who wrote the most troubling message of all, as well as the only one that mentioned the word criminal.

  “I woke up to your article about Ken Kurson. I had an insane, if not criminal, experience with him that I’d love to talk to you about—off the record at first.”

  I quickly realize I am in over my head.

  “What was that?” says Nils, when he hears my end of the conversation. “That sounded bonkers.”

  “You don’t even want to know,” I say.

  “Do you have security?”

  “No.”

  “Seems like you might need some.”

  Pam’s story goes something like this: One day, Ken’s wife, Becky—yes, the same Becky to whom Ken allegedly showed my photo of Durkheim in Inwood forest wearing the Observer T-shirt; the same Becky about whom I received multiple emails from Ken, saying she was going to leave him if he didn’t change his ways—spoke to her friend Jane, a doctor at Mount Sinai hospital. Jane was a mutual friend of both Becky and Ken’s as well as, supposedly, Ivanka Trump’s.

  Jane, based on the information Becky told her, apparently urged Becky to leave Ken. This was around the same time Ken was emailing me, both about coming to work for him and about his wife wanting to leave him.

  Ken, per Pam, blamed Jane for breaking up his marriage, so to take revenge—“I come from a grudge-holding desert people,” indeed—he concocted two pseudonyms, “Eddie Train” and “Jayden Wagner,” to email Pam, a media company employee who was married to Jonathan, Jane’s colleague and boss at Mount Sinai. In his first email to Pam, “Eddie Train” claimed he had direct knowledge that her husband and Jane were having an affair, and he threatened to reveal it publicly.

  Stick with me here, I know it’s complicated and sounds nuts, but Pam’s story will not only turn out to be completely consistent with criminal charges that will be brought against Kurson in a 2020 federal cyberstalking complaint, the whole thing will prove to be even creepier, more calculating, and deliberately fear-inflicting than she’d had time to recount over the phone. Here are the characters again, just to keep them all straight: Pam, the stranger who emailed me and was married to Jonathan, a Mount Sinai doctor; Jane, also a doctor working with Jonathan at Mount Sinai; Becky, Jane’s friend and Kurson’s wife, who will eventually divorce him; Eddie Train and Jayden Wagner, Kurson’s nom de plumes in his emails to Pam; and Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, the president’s daughter and senior advisor respectively, who are also old friends of Becky’s, Kurson’s, and Jane’s.

  When Pam went to find the threatening Eddie Train email again to show her husband, it had, she says, mysteriously disappeared from her inbox. (A few years later, The Intercept will publish a story about government surveillance and apps that provide disappearing message features, but back then she didn’t understand how this could happen. How could a threatening email replete with a claim of her husband’s infidelity just…disappear?)

  Meanwhile, Pam continues, Ken began to stalk Jane throughout the hallways of Mount Sinai, not realizing that his stalking was being recorded by CCTV cameras. He also, under his pseudonyms, started posting dozens of negative reviews of Jane on websites such as Yelp and RateMDs.com. All of these shenanigans made it up the chain of command at Mount Sinai, until the powers-that-be realized they had a PR and security nightmare on their hands. They hired K2 Intelligence, a private security firm that employs ex-CIA and ex-Mossad agents, to protect Jane, and the situation magically disappeared.

  For Pam, however, the situation had not disappeared. In fact, the fear, harassment, and massive life upheaval she’d experienced at Kurson’s hand, in an effort to denigrate the reputations of her husband and his colleague, was, she was sure, a federal crime. And no one was looking into it.

  “Jesse, I need help,” I say to my acquaintance, Jesse Drucker, an investigative journalist at The New York Times who covers this kind of stuff. “I want to help this woman, but I feel like I’m out of my league.” I forward him my Google doc, “The Others”—redacted to remove the name and story of one particular source, who was scared for her life—with the obvious caveat that it was highly confidential and he should not share it further. As Jesse starts looking into each allegation that has come in over my transom, President Trump suddenly nominates Ken Kurson to a post in the White House.

  Because of course this happens.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake!” I say. “The White House?”*

  Jesse’s story, “The Trump Administration Considers an O
ld Friend: Ken Kurson,” appears in The New York Times the following day, and it mentions my story of harassment in The Atlantic as well as Kurson’s denial of wrongdoing: “Concerning Ms. Copaken’s account, Mr. Kurson said, ‘I categorically deny any claim of inappropriate behavior.’ ”

  In response to his categoric denial of impropriety, I write a Twitter thread presenting all of the written evidence of it, email by icky email.

  At the end of the thread, I write the following tweet, never expecting the FBI to actually contact me. I don’t even @ them. I’m just in such a blind rage at having been called a liar by Kurson in the paper of record, I want to set the record straight:

  Soon thereafter, Mateo Gomez, who says he is an FBI agent conducting a background check on Kurson, contacts me via cellphone to ask if he might come to my apartment in Inwood. Frightened that I’m being set up by either Kurson or someone else in the Trump world—How did he get my cellphone number? Can the FBI just…do that?—I call my friend and neighbor MaryBeth Williams, a journalist for Salon, to ask her to please be my “plus one” for my alleged FBI investigation. What if he’s not who he says he is? we wonder. How do you actually know the FBI is the FBI when they show up at your door?

  On Monday, June 4, 2018, Agent Gomez arrives at my apartment with his partner, Special Agent Emily Eckstut, who’s young and kind-faced and wearing sensible flats. Somehow, it’s her shoes that immediately win me over, make me feel at ease, but not before I make both agents show me their badges at the door. Not that I would necessarily know what a fake FBI badge looks like anyway, but it feels like the prudent thing to do. “I figured I’d bring a woman along, since I know this stuff is hard to talk about with men,” Gomez says, and I think, good on you, FBI! That is correct. I definitely do feel better with a female special agent present, thank you. Although I’d feel much better if you hadn’t had to come at all.