BuzzFeed | The New Republic | CJR
Paul Johansson, the actor who played sleazy ad man Ferg Donnelly on the AMC drama “Mad Men,” allegedly made several sexual overtures during a session with BuzzFeed staffers at the company’s Los Angeles office last month.
He was at BuzzFeed’s office to be recorded for an article published by the news outlet.
Johansson repeatedly touched Editorial Assistant Susan Cheng and asked her whether she ever took people into a meeting room to “make out with them,” Cheng writes:
Then, in the middle of the shoot — for which we asked Johansson to act out reactions to so-called dicks in the workplace — the actor made another comment, one we did capture on camera. “I’m not shy,” he said to my colleagues and me under the hot fluorescent lights inside the studio. I laughed at his improvisation, which admittedly was pretty funny. Then he said, a little too casually, “I’m sweating like a rapist,” wiping his forehead and the sides of his face, seemingly not paying attention to the camera that was recording those very words.
According to a statement from Johansson’s lawyer published by BuzzFeed, Andrew B. Brettler, the actor denies making the “rapist” statement and says the outlet is misconstruing the context of other remarks.
Johansson saying he’s “sweating like a rapist” is, however, recorded, despite the fact that Brettler says “there is no recording that substantiates any of [my] defamatory claims.” In the letter, Brettler also says Johansson never touched me “in an inappropriate or sexual manner.”
Cheng says she tried to shake the incident off, telling herself that uncomfortable interviews are so commonplace that this one didn’t merit an additional response.
In the immediate aftermath of my interview with Johansson, I’d shrugged off one of my colleague’s suggestions to write about the experience and told myself that this was bound to happen one day. Every journalist has had a negative experience with an interviewee at some point in her career, and this was mine, right?
Cheng’s article touches on an ongoing thread in media circles: That female journalists are often confronted by inappropriate behavior from male sources. Marin Cogan, a writer for New York magazine, described a climate of harassment that pervades source-reporter relationships in Washington, D.C. in a 2013 article for The New Republic.
These are the stories you don’t hear, in part because they don’t occupy the fantasies of the mostly male scriptwriters of Washington dramas and in part because women reporters are reluctant to signal to any source—past, present, or future—that they might not be discreet or trustworthy.
Days after Cogan’s article was published, CJR contributor Ann Friedman compiled a list of responses for journalists who find themselves the subject of unwanted advances.
Comments