The Atlantic cuts ties with prominent contributor after rape allegation

By Laura Wagner

and

Will Sommer

February 5, 2024 at 7:10 p.m. EST

Listen

4 min

Share

Comment962

Add to your saved stories

Save

The Atlantic magazine has cut ties with writer Yascha Mounk, one of its prominent contributors, after a woman accused him of rape, the magazine announced in a statement Sunday.

“We have not published any new work by the freelance contributor since being made aware of the allegation,” the Atlantic statement read, adding that the magazine “suspended our relationship” with the writer last month.

Mounk, an author and political scientist, told The Washington Post that “I am aware of the horrendous allegation against me. It is categorically untrue.”

The Atlantic’s announcement, which a magazine spokeswoman issued on social media, came hours after writer Celeste Marcus accused Mounk of raping her in her own post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Marcus’s post included a screenshot of a Jan. 7 email exchange she had with Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, in which she accused Mounk by name of assaulting her in her apartment in June 2021.

She also included a link to a January essay she wrote for Liberties, a literary journal where she is the managing editor, which explored the aftermath of rape, including her own experience.

“Believe me, this is not a wild or mischievous allegation,” she wrote to Goldberg. The editor responded by thanking her and telling her that “we are taking this allegation extremely seriously.”

Mounk, a German-born scholar of democracy and populism at Johns Hopkins University, has gained renown for his writing skeptical of “woke” ideologies and “cancel culture.” His 2023 book, “The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time,” which decried what he sees as an overemphasis in liberal politics on race, gender and sexuality, received positive mentions from several writers with large audiences, including New York Times columnists Bret Stephens and David Brooks.

On Sunday, Marcus wrote on X that she had “not gotten a single update” from the Atlantic since Goldberg’s initial response. “I will not be raped with impunity,” she wrote in her social media post.

Share this articleShare

Although Mounk was not a full-time staff writer at the Atlantic, he held a “contributing writer” title at the magazine, where he published 11 pieces in 2023.

Mounk, who has more than 135,000 followers on X, hasn’t posted on the site since Jan. 7, the same day Goldberg received Marcus’s email making the allegation.

Atlantic spokeswoman Anna Bross, in her statement, added that the magazine “will, of course, be following any potential new developments in this matter.”

In her essay about the incident for Liberties, a quarterly literary review founded by Leon Wieseltier — an influential former editor at the New Republic who himself apologized in 2017 after colleagues accused him of sexual harassment — Marcus wrote about the torment that follows a sexual assault and wrote about her own experiences. She did not name Mounk in that essay.

“When the shrieking stops, when you transition out of the shrieking phase, you will reach the phase at which all you can think and talk about is the rape,” she wrote. “You will talk incessantly about your rapist, what he is doing, where he is living, whether or not you should call the magazine where he works and inform them that they are employing a rapist.”

In a statement to The Post on Monday, Marcus described the essay as “in no small part about the wreckage wrought by being treated as if my rape was an insignificant trauma.” She said Goldberg’s decision to “withhold transparency about action taken — if any was indeed taken — after my allegation was made” was unexpectedly painful.

“I had prepared myself for the pain an investigation would surely yield, pain which would be mollified by the fact that I would have opportunity to submit evidence and make my case. I had not prepared myself to be ignored,” she said.

In her essay, Marcus wrote that she did not report the rape to law enforcement “because I was broken and could barely function at the time. … In all likelihood it would have yielded only more pain, and only for me.”