Two prominent journalists once chronicled their time working in Russia in a novel, including alleged tales of statutory rape and asking their female coworkers to perform fellatio on them.
In a time where powerful men are facing accusations of sexual harassment, reports of misconduct and crude quotes from former interviews by Rolling Stone contributor Matt Taibbi and writer Mark Ames have resurfaced throughout the internet.
Taibbi and Ames wrote a book together, entitled “The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia” that chronicled how they created their biweekly tabloid “The eXile” while in Russia and how they chased down their biggest stories. Taibbi has said the book is satire, but it contains a note at the beginning saying it is a non-fiction work based on true events in which some people have had their names changed.
The book contains some troubling passages about the way the men treated their female counterparts, namely one example in which Ames describes a coworker asking the two writers to stop trying to force the female employees to give them blow jobs while at work.
“You’re always trying to force Masha and Sveta under the table to give you blow jobs. It’s not funny. They don’t think it’s funny,” Kara complained. “But… it is funny,” Matt said. We have been pretty rough on our girls. We’d ask our Russian staff to flash their asses or breasts for us. We’d tell them that if they wanted to keep their jobs, they’d have to perform unprotected anal sex with us. Nearly every day, we asked our female staff if they approved of anal sex. That was a fixation of ours. ‘Can I fuck you in the ass? Huh? I mean, without a rubber? Is that okay?’ It was all part of the fun,” Ames describes in the passage.
There also more startling passages in the book where Ames discusses how his “pervometer” went off when he learned that the girl he was sleeping with was 15 instead of 16, as well as a passage in which he allegedly a coerced a young girl to get an abortion because he felt that children were disgusting.
“When I went back into the TV room, Andy pulled me aside with a worried grin on his face. ‘Dude do you realize…do you know how old that Natasha is?’ he said.
“‘Sixteen?’
“‘No! No, she’s fif-teen. Fif-teen.’ Right then my pervometer needle hit the red. I had to have her, even if she was homely,” the book notes.
While conducting interviews about the book in 2000, Ames also made the claim that Russian women wanted to be forced into having sex.
“Russian women, especially on the first date, expect you to rape them. They’ll go back home with you and say, ‘No, no, no,’ and if you’re an American, you’ve been trained to respect the ‘No,’ because you’re afraid of sexual harassment or date rape, and so you fail over and over. But it took me a while to learn you really have to force Russian girls, and that’s what they want, it’s like a mock rape,” Ames told the Observer in 2000.
Taibbi released a statement saying that the book is “satire” and does not reflect any biographical information. Regardless, he says he still regrets writing it.
“The behavior he describes is reprehensible. It is also, like a lot of things in the eXile, fictional and not true–I have never made advances or sexually suggestive comments to any co-worker in any office, here or in Russia,” Taibbi said over Facebook. “While the events described are not a biographical reality, this is not to say I don’t have regrets about the eXile, which was conceived as giant satire.”
The Daily Caller News Foundation contacted two employers of Ames to request his contact information, but received none in time for publication.
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