The editor-in-chief of Fairfax Media’s The Age, Mark Forbes, has resigned and apologized to a woman over a sexual harassment incident. This scandal comes only months after The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald falsely accused Return Of Kings and its proprietor of “promoting rape” and other forms of sexual assault. The Age, which covers Melbourne and the state of Victoria, is the sister Fairfax paper of The Sydney Morning Herald, which covers Sydney and the state of New South Wales. As a result, these publications significantly reproduce the same “stories,” including the various defamatory articles about the ROK meet-ups earlier this year.

More shockingly still, The Herald Sun claims Fairfax knew about the allegations for two weeks, before eventually suspending Forbes only last week. Return Of Kings will be the first group of people to defend and actively campaign for due process, not hysteria, in determining sexual harassment or assault allegations. But Forbes’ admission of responsibility in recent days raises the specter of Fairfax potentially knowing the exact details of the incident and doing nothing about it for days.

And it gets worse. The Guardian reports that a second woman has come forward, claiming that Forbes made comments about her breasts at a function earlier in the year. Inasmuch as this second accusation should require actual proof to be taken seriously and shouldn’t be believed because of an initial admission about something else, Fairfax Media has brought this situation on itself. By constantly reiterating the fiction that rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment are regular experiences for Western women, male Fairfax employees can hardly complain when amorphous, seemingly opportunistic allegations are made against them.

Let’s remember that at the time of the alleged second incident, February 2016, Fairfax had already vilified Roosh and Return Of Kings, mostly for a satirical piece from the year before. It should have been keeping an eye on Mark Forbes, though, not denigrating an online website and obliquely attempting to incite violence against its owner and his family.

Ironically, it seems that Fairfax Media might have a “rape culture” dilemma, not Return Of Kings.

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Hypocrisy much?

Fairfax Media went into great detail and to great lengths in January and February to maliciously portray Return Of Kings as a supposed lightning rod for “legal rape advocates.” Yet its accounts of the sexual misdeeds of its former Age editor-in-chief are decidedly sanitized. They do not mention, for example, that Forbes was alleged to have groped the buttocks of a female journalist, which is a lot more serious than the generic umbrella term of “sexual harassment.”

Compare this to the treatment Return Of Kings and Roosh received in early 2016. A satirical piece on personal responsibility, directly modeled on Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, was dissected hamfistedly by ideologically-driven Fairfax journalists and used to generate third-party threats of violence against men who only wanted to meet with other men for drinks. To add insult to injury, Fairfax publicly and effusively thanked Forbes for his thirty years of “service” after he admitted responsibility for the sexual harassment.

In large part, all the vitriol unleashed against Roosh and Return Of Kings in January and February started with columns penned by Fairfax journalists, such as the violence-inspiring Phoebe Moloney. Having read Moloney’s ridiculous piece, in which she underestimated the number of monthly ROK articles by nearly a hundred, a group of teenagers organized a Facebook event where participants would bring knives to a central Sydney Starbucks for the purpose of castrating ROK meet-up participants.

In light of this and other deplorable developments at this time, I wrote to Stuart Washington, managing editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, insisting that he correct numerous inaccuracies in Moloney’s piece in particular. In reply, he restated Fairfax’s unsupported allegations that we advocated “rape.” It is interesting to juxtapose Washington’s willingness to defend drivel written about us then with the apparent reticence of The Sydney Morning Herald now to have its reporters mention the exact nature of Forbes’ sexual harassment.

This is what happens when you churn out “listen and believe” articles about “sexual assault” all the time

Either former Age editor-in-chief Mark Forbes did indeed sexually harass the woman in question or he didn’t, but had to go anyway. I would not be surprised if the latter scenario is the true one. Resisting claims of sexual harassment in a workplace as notoriously leftist as Fairfax Media is often about as fruitful as having as a snow-shoveling business in central Australia. The Daily Life section of both The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald is the worst of all, combining incessant articles about “rape culture” with simultaneous attacks on women (regarding their fashion sense) and support for them (if they’re fat and feminist).

In writing articles that emphasize “listen and believe” and/or acquiescing to them, male Fairfax employees are paradoxically opening themselves up to a maelstrom of false accusations. I do not feel sorry for these men, or sympathize with any fear they might feel in crossing their female colleagues in a professional setting. My overriding concern, however, is for the general society negatively impacted upon by claptrap such as polemics about “rape culture.”

A retraction, let alone apology from Fairfax Media for how we were treated in early 2016 will not be forthcoming. All I can suggest is that Fairfax should be more focused on its own toxic workplace culture and the other Mark Forbeses it might be employing than the political and social non-violence that characterizes Return Of Kings.

Read More: How To Incite Human Beings To Violence Through False Headlines

