Lauren Duca is the feminist writer you probably first encountered during her on-air spat with Tucker Carlson, which concluded with host advising guest, a sometime fashion writer, to “stick to [writing about] the thigh-high boots.” Duca turns out to be . . . not always such a supportive person when it comes to colleagues, some of them women. Or so claims Jezebel, the high-dudgeon feminist site.
As with many items on Jezebel, the piece on Duca is lengthy, chatty, digressive, somewhat overwrought, and written with overtones of envy. It is not particularly important or illuminating. When the piece (eventually) comes to the point, it reports that Duca left the then-Huffington Post (now HuffPost) in 2015 “after being accused of sending cruel and harassing anonymous emails to coworkers.” The piece says “an internal investigation found reason to believe that she’d sent several inappropriate emails to and about her coworkers — and herself — from what was meant to be an anonymous account, many said to be in the space of one disastrous night in October.” Following “a drunken tiff at a company Halloween party in October 2015,” during which Duca reportedly approached a coworker demanding to know why the other person had unfollowed her on Twitter, Duca apparently went online to call herself a “feminazi” to throw inquirers off her trail while referring to colleagues as “bald freak,” “stupid” and “overweight fake blonde.” One person at the company “saw the one about her, was hurt by it,” we are told, and “the hurt lingers.” This isn’t exactly the Jayson Blair scandal. But after leaving the Huffington Post, Duca is suspected by some of having made a few more rude comments about those same now-former colleagues, in 2016 and 2017.
Duca is, you will be unsurprised to learn, one of those women journalists who is forever decrying the online harassment of female journalists. She called the practice “a career hazard” and “disgusting.” The Jezebel story goes on for thousands of words, but a hypocrisy charge is the crux of it. Now you know why fellow journos are a bit miffed with Duca on Twitter. At 28, Duca is teaching a course at NYU this summer so the next generation can be the beneficiaries of her sagacity.