How Cosmopolitan magazine profiled a top-secret hate group investigator
Cosmopolitan’s features editor Andrea Stanley typically tackles big, important stories about politics, culture and “anything that impacts our readers lives.” So when she learned about a top-secret investigator who has been monitoring the online behavior of men who display signs of violence and misogyny online, Stanley set out to score an interview with the woman, who she calls “K.”
“I think she would have preferred for us not know about her,” Stanley told Brian Stelter on the latest Reliable Sources podcast. “And she was not interested at all in being profiled or speaking to us or talking to us about her work.”
There is a good reason for K to want privacy and anonymity. Stanley wrote in her Cosmo story that K is an “elite investigator who tracks angry men online.” She is known by some in her circle as “The Savant” because she has what Stanley calls an “uncanny ability to suss out when, exactly, hate speech will morph into violent action.” Stanley reports that K’s life “depends on her anonymity,” which is why she went to great lengths to protect K’s identity in the story.
Stanley said it took several weeks to get K to agree to an interview and it was granted on the condition that she leave out details that would give away K’s location and work methods. She worked with handlers to communicate with K, whose name she still didn’t know two weeks before her reporting trip, Stanley said.
“It really was a song and dance for a couple of weeks,” Stanley told Stelter about her efforts to court K for a profile. “Because of the nature of what was going on at the time, she did feel compelled to let people know that there is a threat, it is worse than it’s ever been, but there are people working to try to correct it and make it right.”
Listen to the whole podcast here:
In her conversation with Stelter, Stanley cited an Anti-Defamation League report released last year that linked misogyny to white supremacy, which she said prompted her to “look at misogyny in the same way that we do racism and hate crimes against Jews.”
“This was so important for us to cover at Cosmo,” she said. “And this story felt so relevant because it all started off with this tie to misogyny and a lot of these men who go on to become mass shooters — it very much starts with women.”
Stanley’s story, titled “Is It Possible to Stop a Mass Shooting Before It Happens?” was published online on Wednesday and it will appear in the September issue of the magazine. It details K’s experience of tracking potentially violent men online and reporting them to authorities before they stage large-scale attacks.
The country is still reeling from two such attacks that took place just this past weekend. In El Paso, Texas, a shooter killed 21 people on Saturday at a Walmart. Police say they believe the suspect had written and posted online a document filled with hatred aimed at immigrants and Latinos. Hours later, another shooter killed nine people at a bar in Dayton, Ohio. The motive behind that attack is still unknown, but police say the shooter there had previously expressed a desire to commit mass shootings.
Sadly, the El Paso shooter and his so-called “manifesto” were not on K’s list. K told Stanley that it is “heartbreaking, devastating” for her when she fails to identify someone who ends up carrying out a mass shooting.
