I spent the first half of this week at my alma mater, Ohio University, for a journalism conference about social media and storytelling. And I ended up falling a little behind on the newsletter, which means you’re getting a jam-packed dispatch today. There are three stories I wanted to write about, and they all involve a backlash. There’s a backlash against the New York Times, a backlash against a pop star’s minidress, and a backlash against the wave of Hollywood influencers who joined OnlyFans back in 2020. And there’s a common thread here, which is how these media discourses actually deflect from the issues of sexual abuse and exploitation they claim to address.

A few days ago, The New York Times published a piece from opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof called “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians.” It is a deeply-reported feature about Israel’s state-sanctioned sexual torture and abuse of Palestinians that questions why an ongoing, well-documented epidemic of violence is ignored and enabled by people in power.

“I’ve had a career covering war, genocide and atrocities including rape, sometimes in places where the scale of sexual violence is far greater than anything committed by either Hamas militants or Israeli guards or settlers,” Kristof wrote. “Yet our American tax dollars subsidize the Israeli security establishment, so this is sexual violence in which the United States is complicit.”

The column begins with an interview with a Palestinian freelance journalist who described Israeli prison guards raping and torturing him in 2024. Kristof interviewed 14 Palestinian men and women who said they were sexually assaulted by Israeli settlers and security forces. He worked to corroborate their accounts, cited reports from the United Nations and beyond, and relayed how Israel’s government has protected soldiers accused of rape. Kristof is far from the first person to report on this, but by publishing it in the Times, his work represents a shift in the status quo at an institution hundreds of prominent writers and journalists have boycotted over its anti-Palestinian bias in the past.

It’s both shocking and the least surprising thing in the world that Kristof’s piece has generated an enormous backlash against him and the Times for daring to report that Israel uses sexual violence as a weapon of colonization. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is threatening to sue the NYT for libel, hundreds of pro-Israel protestors gathered outside the newsroom’s NYC office yesterday, and most of the follow-up reporting about the piece is about the ensuing controversy and whether the victims interviewed are credible. That shouldn’t even be a question, given the scope and precedent of the reporting, but lots of people prefer to undermine victims instead of grapple with the horror of rape and sexual violence. It’s a classic deflection tactic.

Generally speaking, a lot of people also pay lip service to the idea that male victims deserve more attention and support. But when they come forward, their stories are apparently too politically inconvenient. There is little empathy extended to incarcerated victims and to the issue of sexual violence in the prison system, which is where many men and boys are harmed. Tolerating this violence is only possible through extreme dehumanization.

The Times has spent the last several days vehemently defending Kristof on X, including from false claims that his piece was being retracted over source credibility. One particularly annoying claim I saw amplified by other journalists was that Kristof’s piece was less credible because it was in the opinion section. I know first-hand that the fact-checking and editing process for the NYT opinion section is just as (if not more) rigorous than other publications’ news sections. I also know that in general it is easier to publish reporting that subverts traditional newsroom biases in the opinion section. That doesn’t make it any less worthy.