What are those politics? “I still think of myself as a liberal,” he said. “But the left moved away from liberalism and I hadn’t realized that yet. If you are a liberal, by definition, you believe that it’s better to let a certain amount of guilty people go free than to jail one innocent man. That’s almost the definition of liberalism. These people on the left aren’t liberals at all, actually. What I’ve come to realize is how close they are to the people on the right.”

Even if Mr. Elliott is innocent of the rape accusations, he is, by his own admission, a damaged person. By 12, he was drinking and dropping acid. At 13, after the death of his mother, he ran away from home. He lived on the streets and ultimately became a ward of the state. In his 20s , he was a stripper and used heroin. Now 46 , h e i s a cross-dresser who gets off on being tied up. He says he almost never has penetrative sex.

He is not private about any of these details. Indeed, he has mined them for several of his books, including “The Adderall Diaries,” “Happy Baby” and “My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up.”

Mr. Elliott and his lawyer think this is fundamental to the case. That given how public he has been about his proclivities, Ms. Donegan and the others who used the list would have been aware of his sexuality. As the complaint puts it: “In these nonfiction works, of which Defendants are aware, Plaintiff openly describes his sexual preferences in detail so that it is clear he could not physically participate in the false, unsubstantiated allegations published about him in the List by Defendants.”

Of course, none of this means he couldn’t have attempted to rape someone.

And the Shitty Media Men list was not the first time Mr. Elliott was publicly accused of bad behavior. In a 2015 essay in Tin House, the novelist Claire Vaye Watkins portrayed Mr. Elliott as a tone-deaf misogynist — and made the case that his “professional sexism” exists on a continuum with sexual violence.

In the wake of his Quillette essay, two more women came forward with complaints.

Lyz Lenz, a former managing editor of The Rumpus, tweeted about an instance where Mr. Elliott “invited me up to your room to watch a movie” and didn’t “take no for an answer.” Ms. Lenz says that he “hounded” her and she “hid under a table.” And Marisa Siegel, who is now the editor of The Rumpus, wrote in an essay about how she was “shaken” after Mr. Elliott “barged” into her hotel room during a conference and stayed for at least 30 minutes.

When I asked him about these stories, Mr. Elliott said: “I’ve certainly been unaware of boundaries and transgressed them without realizing.” But he insists that Ms. Lenz’s and Ms. Siegel’s accounts are not only full of half-truths or lies, but beside the point. “These people are trying to get me to engage in any argument that is not about the fact that I was falsely accused of rape,” he said. “Because they don’t want to talk about that.”