I’m conflicted here. On the one hand, I’m not in favor of contacting a person’s employer because you don’t like their comments. Plenty of people have sent me te

I’m conflicted here. On the one hand, I’m not in favor of contacting a person’s employer because you don’t like their comments. Plenty of people have sent me terrible emails over the years from their work emails and I have never even considered emailing their bosses. On the other hand, she used her Temple email for the Disqus account and used it to comment on a different university’s journalism lab website, while openly admitting to being a journalism professor. We can question whether it was ethical for Benton to reveal who she was on Twitter (tho I would hardly call this “doxxing” as he didn’t reveal her phone number or address), especially without reaching out for comment first, but I don’t see anything illegal about it. The fact that she is suing Nieman and not Temple makes it clear she has little basis for anything, in my opinion. She was an assistant professor and almost certainly didn’t have tenure (or else she wouldn’t have been fired) and was, given the amount of time she had been at Temple, probably never even going to approach getting tenure. She used her work email to register for a pseudonymous account; there should be no expectation of that email address being private to the site owners or administrators. That’s something a longtime journalism professor (and professed attorney) should know. Moreover, her claims that she didn’t write the worst comment are just laughable. That isn’t how Disqus works. It also doesn’t matter here. It was entirely reasonable and in good faith to assume that comments made under the linked account at websites, where by her own admission she made comments, were by her. Reading the judge’s decision not to dismiss, the only reason the suit wasn’t dismissed is because at this stage, the judge assumes everything written in the complaint is true. I don’t at all expect this case to survive much further, nor for it to be decided in her favor. Putting the legal issues aside, I do think it is fair to find what Benton did to be in poor judgment. He should have reached out for comment first — or really just let it go. Let people have bad opinions. But I hardly think he did anything worthy of a lawsuit. As for Temple, well, she didn’t have tenure and she embarrassed the school. It seems entirely reasonable for them to not renew her contract. But as I said above, she’s not suing them. She’s suing Harvard and Benton. I wouldn’t have done what Benton did, but I am also not overly sympathetic to someone who decided to use their work email to shitpost and then got called out. Was what Benton did unethical? Without reaching out for comment first, I think it probably was. At the very least, it was punching down and unnecessary. Should he be sued for defamation? I don’t think so.