Marie-Evangeline —

Thanks for your concern. I appreciate the passion you bring to your work. I’m sorry that someone, or an institution, abused you.

Setting aside the gatekeeping, arguments from authority, and ad hominem defamation in your post, some facts must be made clear:

GEN is a professional media division within medium.com: here’s the front page: https://gen.medium.com/. And here is the masthead: https://gen.medium.com/about. The Editor in Chief assigned this story to me, a freelancer, after I’d been in touch with the survivors for months. (Two reached out to me on the basis of my previous work.) I was paid an industry-appropriate fee. The Deputy Editor and several other editors, including an editor assigned to read it for sensitivity, reviewed and advised during the month-long process. The piece was vetted by a professional fact-checker, to whom I gave trauma-awareness advice (not professional, but well-educated) for the communications they had to undertake. Two lawyers vetted the article for legal clearance. A professional photographer was commissioned to take the present-day photos, which Salter and Kyssa agreed to pose for together.

I did not write the title. As per industry standards, it was produced by editorial committee to serve the publication’s mandate of cultural relevance and searchability. If you have an ethics concern regarding the title, I invite you to contact the editorial team.

The “diagnosis” of heart palpitations was taken directly from the draft copy of the July 2007 letter from Salter’s lawyer. The copy was obtained from the lawyer himself and cited with Salter’s permission. The phrase is not in quotation marks because the Medium lawyer advised that we not use quotation marks when citing a draft as opposed to the signed copy. However, Salter’s lawyer confirmed the letter’s contents by interview and with the fact-checker.

An earlier draft of this article did in fact contain resources for survivor care, similar to the excellent resources you list, beginning with this article by Rain and Cooke: https://yogainternational.com/article/view/how-to-respond-to-sexual-abuse-within-a-yoga-or-spiritual-community. Editorial ultimately decided that the resources pushed the reporting too far into advocacy to be appropriate for the platform.

There are five survivors of sexual and institutional abuse cited in the article, not three, and each one of them agreed through multiple layers of consent, over several weeks and many conversations, to every bit of data and context that was published. I followed the protocols I followed when reporting on the Jois abuse crisis in The Walrus: https://thewalrus.ca/yogas-culture-of-sexual-abuse-nine-women-tell-their-stories/, and in my book: https://www.amazon.com/Practice-All-Coming-Dynamics-Healing/dp/0473472074. That’s how, in part, I got the assignment.

I’m very confused that you would accuse me of manipulating the stories of survivors without having a shred of evidence for this (and obviously without talking with any of them) and while getting basic facts about this platform and its process exactly wrong.

Given how wrong you are here, and how elitism and shaming based on educational and professional privilege can chill whistleblowing, the ethical choice would be to delete this post and carry on your good work where you can substantiate it.

Regards,
Matthew Remski