Search Results for: Jennifer Gonnerman
A Longreads Guest Pick: Kate Cox on Jennifer Gonnerman's 'The Deliverymen's Uprising'

Kate Cox is a freelance writer and editor living in New York.
Nobody will say this, but the secret to New York City survival is a sturdy emotional filter. The flipside of said filter is that hundreds of our daily encounters fail to penetrate: the deli guy, the dry cleaner, fellow commuters—we so rarely engage in any authentic way. Jennifer Gonnerman’s 2007 piece for New York magazine, ‘The Deliverymen’s Uprising,’ did for bicycle deliverymen what the best writing always does; it burst that bubble. A successful longread can disrupt the practiced rhythm of our daily interactions. Gonnerman’s account of the deliveryman revolt against a local noodle shop disrupted mine. I haven’t undertipped since.
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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

This week, we’re sharing stories from Jennifer Gonnerman, Evan Allen, Britni de la Cretaz, Jen Banbury, and Gordon Edgar.
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Longreads Best of 2018: All of Our No. 1 Story Picks

All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2018. Here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.
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Remembering G. Dep, the Rapper Who Confessed to a 17-Year Old Cold Case

Among the standout tracks on Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter V, the long awaited and oft delayed fifth album in the rapper’s conceptual discography, the highlight might just be “Uproar,” a ridiculously bouncy track that is as much of a throwback to Wayne’s glory days as it is a sign of the musician’s continued evolution.
Of note, though, isn’t just the song’s lyrics — but also the beat, produced by Swizz Beatz and a reimagining of G. Dep’s “Special Delivery” beat, a 17-year old song that reigned supreme over the NYC airwaves in the early 2000s (signed to Bad Boy Records, G. Dep was a Harlem native). What’s so fascinating about a remixed “Special Delivery” is two-fold: Wayne uses the beat as he would a freestyle, nimbly interweaving bars throughout the boombap-cum-keyboard laden sample; and the release of “Uproar” brings G. Dep (born Trevell Coleman) back to the current pop culture fold.
As chronicled by Jennifer Gonnerman for New York Magazine, Coleman confessed in 2010 to a cold case murder committed in 1993; Coleman pled guilty to second-degree murder, revealing how he shot a man three times and fled the scene without knowing whether the individual died. In his confession, Coleman outlined why he decided to suddenly come forward: “The reason I turned myself in was because I felt awful about what I did and I wanted to make it right for this guy’s family.”
Gonnerman deftly reports on Coleman, his rise to G. Dep fame, and his current incarceration (at Elmira Correctional Facility until at least 2025), and it’s worth revisiting the 2012 profile in light of Lil Wayne’s “Special Delivery” revival.
At times, his life felt like a series of endless internal calculations, all part of an effort to, as he later explained, “balance myself out.” If he bought a coat, he might scribble on one pocket with a marker before putting it on, just to deprive himself of the chance to wear something completely new. He never had much money, and he was so determined to give away what he did have that a few times he stuffed bills into the coin slots of pay phones, then walked away. Afterward, he’d feel a little better—“I did think, Well, okay, now I don’t have to feel like I have too much regret,” he says—but the relief was only temporary.
Coleman and his wife had separated, but he still stopped by to visit his 7-year-old sons. Some days, he’d be seated with them at the table, sharing a meal, thinking how blessed he was to have such beautiful boys, and suddenly be seized by guilt. Did the man he shot at have any kids? What happened to them? And why should he get to spend time with his kids if there was a chance he’d robbed another child of his father?
Vacating Convictions from Crooked Chicago Cops

A group of corrupt police officers on Chicago’s South Side had been framing and extorting residents for years. Then they planted drugs on the wrong people: Ben Baker and his girlfriend Clarissa Glenn.
In The New Yorker, Jennifer Gonnerman describes how Glenn’s determination to exonerate her husband helped build a case against police sergeant Ronald Watts and his brazenly crooked cronies. Glenn’s campaign consumed her, and Baker’s absence left their children without a father for too many years. Not only was Baker eventually freed, the state attorney overturned many of Watts’ other tainted convictions. One difficult question remains: how many more innocent people still wallow in prison?
No one knows how many men Watts and his officers framed, in part because so many of them pleaded guilty. Watts’s officers at times planted such large quantities of drugs on Wells residents that they were charged with a Class X felony, the highest-level felony after first-degree murder. If the defendant went to trial and lost, he faced up to thirty years in prison. Phillip Thomas, who sold candy from a cart in the Wells, recalled that when he told his public defender that Watts’s officers had planted drugs on him, “she made it quite clear that she didn’t believe me and that my best bet was to plead guilty.” Ignoring her advice, he represented himself at trial. He lost, and was sentenced to six years. Shaun James told his public defender a similar story, and, he said, “She’s looking at me like I’m crazy. She said, ‘Ain’t no judge is ever going to believe that.’ ” James and his co-defendant, Taurus Smith, both pleaded guilty and were sentenced to two years’ probation.
Clarissa and Ben decided to fight the cases against them: Ben’s, from when he was arrested alone, and Ben and Clarissa’s, from when they were arrested together. They assumed that, because the state’s attorney’s office was aware of Watts’s corruption, it would eventually drop the charges against them. David Navarro, the prosecutor who met with Clarissa and Ben in the spring of 2005, told me that he believed them, and spent months investigating their claims about Watts, but he couldn’t prove the allegations. “It’s very difficult to prove a case when your only witness is the guy who has a pending case against him, and that guy has a criminal background,” he said.
Moira Donegan is the Anti-Katie Roiphe We Need

I have run out of jokes about how long this week or month or year has been, not least because this is the fourth time I’ve rewritten a piece I started on Tuesday.
At first it was about Katie Roiphe and the news that she planned to expose the creator of the Shitty Media Men spreadsheet in Harper’s March issue. But then Roiphe told The New York Times that her piece didn’t name a creator of the list:
In a later interview, Ms. Roiphe said that she herself did not know the identity of the person who started the list and added, “I would never put in the creator of the list if they didn’t want to be named.”
Yet, in an email to the woman who created the list — now publicly known to be writer and former New Republic editor Moira Donegan — a Harper’s fact checker had written: “Katie identifies you as a woman widely believed to be one of the creators of the Shitty Men in Media List. Were you involved in creating the list? If not, how would you respond to this allegation?”
This is strange, given that Roiphe’s sole contact with Donegan was a single email in December asking if she had any interest in speaking about the “feminist moment” for a Harper’s piece. Donegan declined, having no idea that Roiphe suspected her of creating the list or had any intention of exposing her as having done so.
It’s not uncommon for fact checkers to assist in the reporting process, as researchers. Still, Roiphe’s approach comes off as duplicitous, even cowardly. Was Katie Roiphe, a woman who has long delighted in publishing contrarian takedowns of feminism — who has for more than two decades been praised, sometimes begrudgingly, for seeming impervious to and even relishing the anger she brought out in other women — afraid to be honest with Donegan? Why would she leave the hard questions to her fact checker, lie to The New York Times, mislead Donegan, and not dare to email her more than once?
I can’t tell you the answer to that for sure, because I emailed Roiphe to ask and she hasn’t written back. I also emailed New York University’s journalism program, where Roiphe is a professor and a director, and got no response. I contacted Harper’s editor James Marcus, who politely directed me to their publicist, Giulia Melucci, who replied: “We can talk about the piece when the piece is published.”
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Roiphe did take to Twitter to defend herself, a bit, employing language so classically Roiphean, I almost laughed:
People who criticize Roiphe are “confused.” They lack “perspective.” In the Times piece about the backlash against her, she characterized it as “hysteria.”
It’s stunning to watch Roiphe use the language of gaslighting with such ease. But of course she did: she’s been doing it for a quarter century, ever since she made her name in the early ’90s by claiming in a New York Times op-ed that men were the true victims of date rape. She’s dined out on the attention ever since, recycling that position: the Woody Allen of cultural criticism.
She has long seemed to see herself as the enfant terrible of the feminist movement, even when the movement itself saw her largely as a privileged dilettante with rich parents, one of whom helped facilitate her ability to be made into a cultural icon. Jennifer Gonnerman wrote well about this in her 1994 piece for The Baffler, “The Selling of Katie Roiphe.” In her piece, Roiphe isn’t a powerful supervillain, she’s a mouthpiece manufactured by The New York Times to shut down a movement that didn’t serve its purposes:
By making Katie Roiphe the new celebrity feminist, the Times aimed to create the illusion of being on the cutting edge of sexual politics. Its discovery and single-handed championing of this latest variety of feminism may have ostensibly served to “further debate,” but it actually did little more than prop up the Times‘ long-standing opposition to feminism’s more radical strains. Coming out of the mouth of a young, self-proclaimed feminist, the idea that date rape is the product of young women’s hysteria had legitimacy.
In that initial Times piece — which she later strung out from an already-long 600 words into a 200-page tome that some misguided Gender Studies programs still inflict on college students — she decided that it can’t possibly be true that one in four women on college campuses are victims of rape, because she hasn’t heard about it. Is it any wonder that her peers did not think it was a good idea to confide in Roiphe, a woman who wrote about them with condescension so lacking in empathy that it comes off almost pathological?
Enter Moira Donegan, the creator of the fabled Shitty Media Men list. Donegan “outed herself,” so to speak, in a magnificent essay published Wednesday night by The Cut:
We spent hours teasing out how these men, many of whom we knew to be intelligent and capable of real kindness, could behave so crudely and cruelly toward us. And this is another toll that sexual harassment can take on women: It can make you spend hours dissecting the psychology of the kind of men who do not think about your interiority much at all.
I could quote endlessly from it, but you should read it yourself, because it is a masterpiece — and thank heavens. It feels so cynical to say that at first I could only whisper it to select friends, but: can you imagine if Donegan was even one percent less talented as a writer? Can you imagine if this piece was even slightly imperfect? Donegan was up against impossible stakes and cleared them with air to spare. She writes honestly and bravely, with grace and clarity, perfectly articulating concepts and feelings that so many of us have been grasping at for months without ever quite gripping.
I have known Donegan was the creator of the list since I first saw it, back in October, because I am a reporter and that is a thing I cannot turn off: I figured it out, found her private Twitter, and requested to follow her. She accepted and followed me back, and after she took the list down, I sent her a message.
“I’m sorry you had to take it down, but thank you for making it. It was the only thing that made me feel not full of despair this week,” I told her.
She thanked me back, and told me she took it down because she was afraid she was putting the women who added names and allegations in danger. “It’s so fucked up that the consequences for speaking out about this stuff are so much greater than the consequences for doing it,” she said. “I hope one day the world deserves all of these amazing women.”
In the months that followed, she became a source of comfort for me. When I was frustrated by some of the backlash, I went to her, and she understood. I could see why she was a nexus in this whisper network, why people trusted her, her ability to make people feel seen and heard and understood. She is, in a way, the anti-Roiphe.
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I say that being a reporter is a thing I can’t turn off, but the truth is, before the list, that instinct in me felt snuffed out. After the first Harvey Weinstein broke, I felt suffocated for days, like I was being buried alive. I didn’t know why. I should’ve felt exhilarated, no? Women were getting justice, and it was all thanks to journalism, the great love of my life. Why couldn’t I see this as a the good thing it was? Why did I instead feel like I was dying? I cancelled plans, burrowed under the covers, and sobbed tears that felt like they both were and weren’t my own.
And then someone shared the list with me. I still acutely remember the feeling of watching it change and grow in front of my eyes. At first I thought the feeling was exhilaration, but then I realized it was relief. It was the feeling of having an extremely heavy burden lifted from you. Do you know that feeling? A magical sort of lightness. As I told Donegan at one point, it felt meaningful, even powerful, amid so much powerlessness.
Jodi Kantor mentioned in an interview with The Cut that she couldn’t have done the Weinstein stories without her reporting partner Megan Twohey (though many media outlets seem determined to give Kantor sole credit). She and Twohey needed each other, not just because it was a monumental reporting lift, but because they needed someone to share the burden of their experience. She said:
One of the saving graces of this process has been the partnership with Megan because this was a responsibility that we each needed to share with another person. We barely knew each other when we teamed up on this story. Not only were we in constant communication with each other and not only did we compare notes, check judgment, and plot strategy on those matters great and small, but the weight of this reporting is such that you just need somebody to share it with. A lot of the stories we heard are incredibly disturbing, and you don’t want to carry those alone.
That kind of support is vital, and not easy to come by. For decades, women have feared speaking out in part because of what a solitary and often isolating experience it was. The internet has been a gamechanger in this regard, and there’s a certain irony in Harper’s — a legacy publication so resistant to the World of Online — not understanding that. The list’s accessibility online connected us to one another, even anonymously. The #MeToo movement on Twitter — which Roiphe no doubt will take issue with as well — did that too. These things made us safer, they made us bolder, and most importantly, they allowed us to support one another in a way we never could before.
That’s what was happening that night as I watched the list grow and tracked the number of people logged into the document. Twenty, then 40, then 70. Even before some of the men on the list were investigated and resigned or fired, seeing all these women put down on paper the things we all knew and burned with the knowledge of felt like the most immense relief. We’d been sharing them among ourselves, whispering them without names or details, partly because we were so sure nothing would ever change, and partly because we were terrified of being branded problematic or troublesome by the older generations whose approval we needed to succeed in this industry and craved after watching them pave the way before us.
In those fluttery, self-conscious whispers lay so much self-doubt and self-blame. This happened; does it sound as bad as it felt? Do you think I’m overreacting? Am I weak? Seeing the charges in words on a page, for someone for whom words on a page are the greatest things imaginable, felt like we were finally throwing out all that harmful self-criticism and holding our heads up and really finally saying, this isn’t how it’s going to be anymore.
It is no wonder that some women reached the conclusion that to be strong and fierce, one must be unbothered.
A foundational premise of Roiphe’s initial argument back in the ’90s was that to speak your mistreatment aloud is to be a victim. This is the truth in which many of us were raised — and it was the truth for a long time, because of the repercussions when women did speak up. Death threats, rape threats, job loss, public humiliation, and worse. Some believed this because it was what they saw with their own clear eyes; others, like Roiphe, out of some calculus that to be women who were not problematic to men was the way forward.
But it is not the truth in which we will thrive. To paraphrase Roiphe’s own words from her coming-out column in 1993, that assertion is not fact. It is advertising a mood. And — unfortunately for Roiphe and for Harper’s, both of whom, it seems, would prefer things stay ever-the-same — the mood has changed.
The women speaking out these past few months, Donegan among them, have changed this math. To speak up is not weakness, it is courage. After Donegan’s piece was published, I watched so many people, men and women, herald her bravery, and it struck me that the momentum of this moment may now be unstoppable. What a rush that is. What a rush, and what an enormous relief.
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week.
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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
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The Defenders

Matthew Van Meter | April 2016 | 25 minutes (6,411 words)
This story was co-published with The Awl and funded by Longreads Members.
On December 20, 2013, Christine Morales got up at seven to make breakfast for Kierra, her two-year-old daughter. They lived in a public housing project in Hunt’s Point in the south Bronx, where Morales worked as a security guard at a grocery store. When they were getting ready to leave, the door of the apartment exploded. Police officers burst in, carrying shields, guns drawn. One waved a search warrant; Kierra started to wail. As an officer pushed Morales to the wall and handcuffed her wrists, her mind raced: she thought through everything she had ever done wrong, trying to understand what had brought the police into her home.
Morales’s arrest instantly set in motion a chain of dispiriting events. Because Kierra was two, and the arrest was for a drug charge, the Administration of Children’s Services opened an investigation. Because Morales lived in public housing, the New York City Housing Authority began eviction proceedings. The police built a case to lock her out of her apartment under a Nuisance Abatement law. Finally, she lost her security license, so she could not go to work.
After spending the night in central booking, Morales was assigned a public defender, Seann Riley, for her arraignment at Bronx Family Court. He asked her about her case and her concerns; she said she just wanted to see her daughter again. The prosecutor read her charge aloud: possession with intent to distribute—Morales’s boyfriend had been dealing drugs out of their apartment. However, Riley pointed out that when police raided the apartment, they had been looking for her boyfriend, not her. The judge released Morales. Meanwhile, her father had taken Kierra to family court, where a lawyer from the child-protection agency insisted that she be placed in foster care for protection. Morales’s boyfriend pleaded guilty to felony drug possession, and, two weeks after her arrest, the prosecutor dropped all the charges against her.
At her family court hearing, Morales learned that Kierra would not be coming home, despite the lack of charges. The judge told her she wasn’t trustworthy, and that her boyfriend had taken the fall for her. She was allowed to see her daughter, supervised, at the child protection facility. When time came to leave, Kierra would ask why she couldn’t go home with mommy, and Morales would try to explain, trying to keep it together until she walked out the door.
Morales’s experience is common in New York, and more common still in the Bronx. Kierra was one of more than ten thousand children placed in foster care, almost all after suspicion of parental neglect—a catchall term that includes everything from excessive corporal punishment to missing doctor appointments. Morales’s poverty was her vulnerability: living in public housing subjects a resident to twenty-four-hour surveillance and automatic eviction after being charged with even low-level crimes.
When the criminal charges against her were dropped, her public defender had technically done his job. The government is required to provide a lawyer to help people through criminal court, nothing more. But Morales’s lawyer was from the Bronx Defenders, which extends representation from criminal court to family court, housing court, and immigration court. Morales was one of 30,000 Bronx Defenders clients in 2014—the only criminal defendants in the city or the country to receive these across-the-board services.
Even after her charges were dropped, Morales had a family attorney and a parent advocate to challenge the family court judge’s ruling. When the police locked her out of her apartment, a civil lawyer from her team got them to let her back in after a few hours. Her advocate, who is not a lawyer, helped her set up parenting classes, and a social worker checked in with her to see how she was dealing with life alone and to offer moral support. Kierra finally came home in June 2014, six months after the arrest. Read more…
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