There are only losers in the story of Harvard Law professor Bruce Hay.

A feature published by New York Magazine this week details how Hay was scammed by two feminists for years, as they used lies and manipulation to cripple his finances, home life, and career.

Reporter Kera Bolonik writes :



“Over the next four years, the law professor would be drawn into a ‘campaign of fraud, extortion, and false accusations,’ as one of his lawyers would later say in legal proceedings. At one point, Hay’s family would be left suddenly homeless. At another, owing to what his lawyer has described as the ‘weaponiz[ation] of the university’s Title IX machinery against Hay,’ he would find himself indefinitely suspended from his job. He would accrue over $300,000 in legal bills with no end to the litigation in sight.”



In one sense, Hay’s story has no moral; it’s a T.S. Eliot-esque tragedy about a lonely man grappling with modernity. In another, it’s a deeply political cautionary tale about what happens when political correctness overtakes common sense. The story can’t help but depict how the illiberal Left eats its own.

According to the feature, Hay got roped into a paternity trap by a feminist lesbian, Maria-Pia Shuman, and a transgender woman, Mischa Haider. Throughout their whole relationship, which saw Hay cheating on his ex-wife, whom he still lived with, Hay repeatedly deferred to both Shuman and Haider, apparently out of insecurity or fear of embodying the patriarchy.

When his ex-wife found out he had supposedly had a child with Shuman, she suggested he take a paternity test. Bolonik writes that Hay felt that wouldn’t have been liberal of him:



“Not only did he trust Shuman, he felt it would have been insulting for a heterosexual cisgender man to question a professed lesbian as to whether she’d had sex with other men. He believed her when she said her sexual relationship with him was an exception.”



Over the years, Shuman has slapped at least four men with paternity claims, also accusing two of them of rape. Both Shuman and Haider appear to have a history of targeted harassment against gullible men. How could they get away with it?

As New York Times columnist Ross Douthat pointed out , an op-ed by Hay shows how he was blinded by his commitment to identity politics. Meanwhile, a piece Haider wrote shows how she exploited her victim status.

In 2016, Hay wrote a Salon article titled , “I thought I could reason with Antonin Scalia: A more naive young fool never drew breath.” An absurd hit piece on the former justice, the article claims to reveal “his less appreciated impact on contemporary physics.” In other words, his rulings made one transgender person quit physics to become an activist. Hay wrote:



“I am close to one of the victims of his operation, a transgender woman named Mischa Haider, whom I got to know during the course of her work on a Ph.D. in physics at Harvard. … Her intellect would have made our brilliant Justice want to hide his head in a bag, to borrow his charming words from last year’s marriage equality ruling. Those who have any doubt about trans mothers should meet Mischa’s children.”



After praising the person he didn’t realize was scamming him, he continued:



“She could not live with herself, she tells me, if she did not devote her talents to helping the many trans women whose lives are decimated by the bigotry and ignorance of those around them. Bigotry and ignorance inflamed by demagogues like Antonin Scalia, whose toxic rhetoric has done so much to incite and legitimate fear of gender nonconformity and elevate it to the level of constitutional principle.”



In short, transphobic bigotry is the late Supreme Court justice’s fault, and Scalia drove poor Haider from academia to activism. Hay champions her cause, crusading against the straight, white man persecuting a trans woman of color.

And yet, the scam she and Shuman played on Hay tells a different story. The New York Magazine feature is powerful, and well worth the read. By the time you get to the bottom, you see how both Hay’s gullibility and his desperation to appear woke led him to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars, endanger his family, and drag them through a cycle of manipulation and lies. This was part of the women’s plan all along.

Equally revealing as Hay’s Salon piece is Haider’s article for Slate, “The Next Step in #MeToo Is for Men to Reckon With Their Male Fragility.” In it, she writes that “women’s and queer people’s liberation from patriarchal oppression is inextricably linked to freeing men from the bludgeons of toxic masculinity.”

Published just this January, the piece exhibits not just mistrust of, but also disdain for, men. Haider writes of “the structural power that men wield in society, especially straight white men.”

If Haider wanted to exhibit her point, that men ought to be put in their feminist-proclaimed place, she did so through her treatment of Hay.

“Maria-Pia and Mischa want money,” Hay told Bolonik last summer, “but only for the sake of squeezing it out of people — it’s the exertion of power.”

Haider and Shuman were merely performing some form of what third-wave feminism has encouraged women to do, restoring the supposed power imbalance by turning the oppressor into the oppressed. Bolonik writes:



“In May 2018, Hay received a barrage of text messages from an unknown number: ‘Find a way to connect if you want a chance to take the last exit before HELL … Take my word, you ain’t seen nothing yet. I promise. Oh and as to your quest for motives? Don’t bother. I just really hate the patriarchy, that’s it.’”



In the end, Hay’s tragic story shows how he fell victim to a system of oppression: a bastardization of feminism that says men must lose their power for women to rise.