“In 2009, I inappropriately touched a woman at a bar after a poetry reading. In 2005, I got into a fist fight with a man—again, after a poetry reading. I was 26 years old.
Throughout my 20s and early 30s, I rarely appeared in public unless alcohol was promised. I drank to protect myself from a constant state of anxiety, always verging on full-blown panic.
On January 10, 2018 I received a call from a friend I hadn’t heard from in a few years. “Someone named Kate Colby posted on Facebook that you’re a ‘serial abuser,’” she told me. “She tagged a bunch of people, and there’s a link to a website.”
That site, The Poet Joseph Massey Is An Abuser (https://josephmasseyinfo.wordpress.com), contains an anonymously written letter. Its author (one of Kate’s friends, it turns out) sent the letter to various publishers, including Wesleyan University Press, and my part-time employer, the University of Pennsylvania’s Kelly Writers House. Kate tagged all of them in her Facebook post. As the anonymous letter put it, “I hope you end relations with him and make a public statement about it, especially in light of cultural shifts around believing victims.” The MeToo movement was in full swing, and social media was a no-holds-barred outlet for accusations.
The link was shared hundreds of times over the course of the next several days and continued to occasionally reappear, and regain traction, months after Kate posted it on Facebook.
Within 24 hours, Barrelhouse magazine told me they no longer wanted me to host one of their online workshops. Four poets who’d asked me to blurb their books wrote to me, telling me that I shouldn’t bother.
On May 16, an article about me appeared in The Outline, titled The Poet Joseph Massey’s Disturbing History of Abuse (https://theoutline.com/post/4545/joseph-massey-poet-disturbing-history-of-abuse), written by Rebekah Kirkman. When Kirkman contacted me in February to say she was “investigating” the allegations against me, she requested an interview. I was still in shock, and desperately wanted to be transparent. I never should’ve spoken to her. This is someone whose Twitter feed contained entries like “No matter how cool things seem in my life, I am always mad about men,” “perennial hatred [of] men and their abuse of power,” “fuck power fuck abusers [and] fuck men especially.”
Throughout 2018, there were other disappointments, betrayals, disconnections, more online mobbings, and efforts to erase my work completely.
The Academy of American Poets deleted many years’ worth of my work.
All of my poems were deleted in June, 2018, along with an essay about my work by Pulitzer Prize winner Rae Armantrout and my entire profile. The director of the Academy, Jennifer Benka, claimed that the Academy was now abiding by “SaferLit” guidelines. I later found out that Benka is friends with a close friend of Kate Colby’s, this friend being the founder of “SaferLit.” What a coincidence.”
https://quillette.com/2019/07/11/a-metoo-mob-tried-to-destroy-my-life-as-a-poet-by-joseph-massey/