You Can Never Let Them Think They Have A Chance

I don't remember the first time someone hit on me as a reporter. I believe this is because my brain has come to treat these events as unremarkable. For any woman in journalism, they pile up over the years. What I can recall are the worst examples. Like the guy my friends nicknamed Mr. Creepy.

We called him Mr. Creepy (I have changed his nickname somewhat to make it less identifying, but it did include the word "creepy") because he constantly asked me out for drinks. He could do this because he was one of the officials on my beat—covering several small cities for the Miami Herald , a typical job for an early-career reporter—and "asking a young reporter out for drinks over and over, no matter how many times she says no, even though you're married, and she can't choose not to be around you" wasn't against any city code. It did, however, run against the code of journalists: the very good and obvious rule that getting romantically involved with sources, or even appearing to, is off limits.

I don't recall saying anything to any of my supervisors at the time about it. Even if I had told someone, there was nothing the paper could do about it. They had no control over him. If anything, saying something would get me moved off my beat, possibly onto one I did not want, and potentially flagged as a complainer. Every other female reporter dealt with it, right? So I dealt with it too.