Magazine launch off over editor’s ‘offenses’
Leon Wieseltier, a prominent editor at the New Republic for three decades who was preparing to release a new magazine this fall, apologized Tuesday for “offenses against some of my colleagues in the past” after several women accused him of sexual harassment and inappropriate advances.
As those allegations came to light, Laurene Powell Jobs, a leading philanthropist whose for-profit organization, Emerson Collective, was backing Wieseltier’s endeavor, decided to pull the plug on it.
“Upon receiving information related to past inappropriate workplace conduct, Emerson Collective ended its business relationship with Leon Wieseltier, including a journal planned for publication under his editorial direction,” the organization said Tuesday. “The production and distribution of the journal has been suspended.”
A spokesman said Emerson Collective would not elaborate on the nature or source of the information. But stories about Wieseltier’s behavior are now surfacing in the aftermath of revelations about Harvey Weinstein’s alleged sexual assaults and harassment of women.
A group of women who once worked at the New Republic had been exchanging emails about Wieseltier’s behavior in and out of the magazine’s office in Washington, according to one person who has seen the chain and described its contents.
Several women on the chain said they were humiliated when Wieseltier sloppily kissed them on the mouth, sometimes in front of other staff members. Others said he discussed his sex life, once describing the breasts of a former girlfriend in detail. Wieseltier made passes at female staffers, they said, and pressed them for details about their own sexual encounters.
One woman recounted that while she was attempting to fact-check a column Wieseltier wrote, he forced her to look at a photograph of a nude sculpture in an art book, asking her if she had ever seen a more erotic picture. She wrote that she was shaken and afraid during the incident.
Wieseltier often commented on what women wore to the office, the former staff members said, telling them that their dresses were not tight enough. One woman said he left a note on her desk thanking her for the miniskirt she wore to the office that day. She said she never wore a skirt to the office again.
According to the women, male staff members routinely witnessed Wieseltier’s behavior and did nothing.
Wieseltier did not immediately respond to a request for comment about specific allegations. But in an email, he offered an apology.
“For my offenses against some of my colleagues in the past I offer a shaken apology and ask for their forgiveness,” he wrote. “The women with whom I worked are smart and good people. I am ashamed to know that I made any of them feel demeaned and disrespected. I assure them I will not waste this reckoning.”
The new magazine project, Idea, was going to be something of a comeback for Wieseltier, the former longtime literary editor of the New Republic and one of the most eloquently pugnacious survivors at a magazine as famous for its internal office dramas as for its agendasetting political journalism.
Three years ago, Wieseltier helped lead an exodus from the New Republic after Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes abruptly fired the editor and changed the magazine’s direction. Wieseltier has served as a contributing writer and critic at the Atlantic magazine and as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. His friendship with Powell Jobs led Emerson Collective to purchase a majority stake in the Atlantic in July.