Our reply was ill-informed, since we knew nothing about Gawker Media beyond what the person writing to us had told us, and the person who wrote the above email should not have said that we’d be saying no to any further marketing approaches from StackSocial since no such decision had ever been made among the directors of L&L. (And, just for the record, I have no opinion on Gawker either way, as it’s not a site I’ve ever looked at or read. My wife looked at it briefly last night and was less than impressed, but that's about the sum total of L&L's knowledge of the site.) What the reply should have said is that we would look into their allegations before pursuing future marketing promotions, which is what we would do with any such complaint.

So, just to be very, very clear: we are not affiliated with GamerGate in any way, nor have we endorsed the movement. Nor have we withdrawn any advertising because of pressure from the GamerGate community, since there was nothing for us to withdraw anyway. We have simply been drawn into something of which we were entirely oblivious because of the over-zealous reassurances of a member of our staff to what he thought was a concerned user.

Our official statement, a version of which was sent to The Verge and which was also posted on Reddit last night, is as follows:

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Literature & Latte is most certainly not aligned with GamerGate in any way, and we have been somewhat caught off-guard. To be honest, I hadn't even heard of GamerGate until all of this happened. We have, unfortunately, been rather naive. We received several emails complaining about our involvement in promoting Scrivener through a particular company of which GamerGate disapproves. We were entirely unaware of GamerGate and its associations, and the emails we received provided links purporting to prove sexist and bullying behaviour on the part of said company. As our company is - naturally - against bullying and sexism of all kinds, the person on our team who responded to those emails said that we would refuse further marketing approaches, unfortunately before researching the matter further and without consulting other members of the team. That is the entire extent of our involvement. We have not withdrawn any advertising from anywhere, as there was no advertising in place to withdraw. Had our member of staff been aware of GamerGate and the harassment with which it has become associated, our response would have been much more circumspect. We were certainly most surprised to see our reply to what we thought was a genuinely concerned user posted on social media as if we were endorsing GamerGate - we were not.

Literature and Latte is committed to equal opportunities (our company itself comprises an equal number of men and women across all positions on the team). Bullying and harassment, whether online or off, is abhorrent and Literature & Latte does not tolerate such behaviour in any form.

We would like to apologise unreservedly for any offence we have caused in our naive and un-researched responses and the way they have been represented.

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In addition to that official response, I will also say this: bullying and harassment, whether sexist, homophobic, racist or anything else, is never, ever acceptable or justifiable, wherever and however it occurs, and the effect it has on its victims is hideous. I’ve seen some of it first-hand. Julia, my wife and fellow director at L&L, is also a journalist, and some of the online comments I have seen about one of her articles in particular were absolutely disgusting and sickening, of a kind that would never be posted about a man. I’d like my daughters (and son) to grow up in a better world than that, and I have absolutely no time whatsoever for anyone on any side of any movement involved in the harassment of women or of anyone else.