This goes some way to explaining the gap between male and female representation in STEM subjects: a feminist TIME journalist has claimed that “15,000” people attended a Slut Walk for which, by most estimations, barely 300 showed up.

In an op-ed for the magazine’s website that has since been altered to read “thousands,” which is still inaccurate, journalist Erica Williams Simon heavily implied she was present at the event, writing, “The solidarity was palpable and the energy electric.”

Simon later admitted on Twitter that her piece “was not a recap of the march,” although she evaded directly confirming whether she had been there or not.

https://twitter.com/Nero/status/651147641363951616

https://twitter.com/Nero/status/651151663101644801

Simon did not explain when asked why Amber Rose Slut Walk organisers told Breitbart that the Slut Walk had 6,000 registrants but told TIME that number was 15,000. Merely a few hundred showed up for the march, from which this correspondent was ejected.

https://twitter.com/Nero/status/651146577575211009

Little wonder: apparently, organisers prefer their journalists more impressionable and credulous. They call the cops when real reporters show up asking more difficult questions. At one point Simon attempted to blame an “editing error.”

https://twitter.com/Nero/status/651151890625916928

Simon describes herself on Twitter as a “speaker, writer, TV commentator, editor” and on TIME‘s website as “a strategist, cultural critic, speaker and media maker” whose work “focuses on communicating the personal values, ideas and habits that lead to radical social impact.”

She is a deputy editor for Upworthy.com and a “World Economic Forum Global Shaper” as well as a contributor to the TIME website.

Given the enormity of the gap between her estimate, which she claims was a figure of “registrants” provided by an Amber Rose representative, and the real number of Slut Walkers, Simon today become an object of ridicule on social media.

What remains a mystery, though, even if we take Simon’s sloppiness and lack of fact-checking at face value, is why she invented colour about an event she wasn’t at. Why did Simon claim that the “solidarity was palpable and the energy electric” when she had no idea?

https://twitter.com/Nero/status/651146889203617794

The alternative is just as damning: that Simon attended, but that she either purposefully misrepresented the number of Slut Walkers or, perhaps even more humiliatingly, can’t tell the difference between 250 people and 15,000. A feminist who can’t do math? Say it ain’t so!

https://twitter.com/Nero/status/651149609402654724

https://twitter.com/Nero/status/651153783632719872

https://twitter.com/Nero/status/651150121392992258

Simon did not respond to further requests for comment.

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