Ms. Donegan, who wrote that she had graduated from college in 2013, began by explaining that she was the person who had first “collected a range of rumors and allegations of sexual misconduct, much of it violent, by men in magazines and publishing.”

She added, “The anonymous, crowdsourced document was a first attempt at solving what has seemed like an intractable problem: how women can protect ourselves from sexual harassment and assault.”

After acknowledging that the list had its pitfalls and made many people uncomfortable, she explained that she had never expected it to gain the attention of people beyond the group of women in media who were its intended audience.

But as more and more women added their own names and descriptions of inappropriate behavior to it, the list began to circulate far and wide. It was mentioned in an article on BuzzFeed and a version was posted on Reddit.

“I had imagined a document that would assemble the collective, unspoken knowledge of sexual misconduct that was shared by the women in my circles: What I got instead was a much broader reckoning with abuses of power that spanned an industry,” Ms. Donegan wrote.

It is likely that the Harper’s article, which had yet to reach its final version on Wednesday, will be revised to reflect Ms. Donegan’s revealing herself as the person who created what became an important document at a time when powerful men in the media and other fields have been called out and punished not only for instances of alleged rape and sexual assault, but also for modes of behavior that seemed acceptable in workplaces just a decade ago.

Hours before the publication of Ms. Donegan’s story on The Cut, Ms. Roiphe said that she herself did not know the identity of the person who had started the list and added, “I would never put in the creator of the list if they didn’t want to be named.”