December 7, 2018: A number of concerning allegations related to one of our freelance writers has come to our attention. As an organization that listens to and champions the rights of the LGBTQ community, INTO has decided to discontinue our relationship with this person. All content written by this individual has been removed from our website.

Yesterday, an article was published on INTO that did not meet the editorial guidelines we created. And there are a few things I need to say…

First off:

While I could go into the HOW/WHY of why the piece missed the mark and should not have been published as is, what I am going to focus on is this: We as editors failed the writer by not working with her to ensure the piece met our standards.

And for that I am personally sorry.

After publishing, the writer immediately faced numerous death threats. No one deserves to be threatened with violence let alone face it for writing an essay on a piece of ~culture~ …good or bad. Ever. As a result, we dropped her byline and put a note up.

We were then made aware of concerning allegations made in the past regarding the writer. Given the seriousness of these allegations, I personally spoke with the writer and immediately launched an internal investigation. INTO was not aware of these until Monday after publishing. And the writer will not be contributing to INTO for the time being.

Moving forward, I am working with the entire INTO team to ensure something like this doesn’t happen again. I will be making some internal editorial changes that will be announced soon.

Today, we will be publishing content directly calling out the missteps in the piece and expanding the conversation. We also have a special guest for a video that was already filmed for Ariana, too.

We at INTO really try our hardest every day to tell stories and have conversations with LGBTQ people that benefit the community, whether it’s on pop culture moments or reporting on LGBTQ asylum-seekers and immigration.

And we can only keep doing this if we hold ourselves accountable.

Zach Stafford

Editor-in-Chief, INTO