The Silencing of #MeToo Reporting in Germany
Ulf Wittrock / EyeEm
Two journalists documented 30 cases of alleged sexual abuse perpetrated by an HIV doctor in Germany; many of the testimonials came from vulnerable gay men who were working in the sex trade or who had only recently immigrated to the country when they sought medical care at the doctor’s clinic. A criminal investigation had been launched against the doctor, who had also pledged not to see patients alone for the time being. The journalists published their findings only to be forced to take them down. They hadn’t made errors, nor had sources recanted. As Caitlin L. Chandler documents in a feature for
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The Doctor vs. #MeToo
How an HIV specialist in Germany is using media law to erase reporting of sexual abuse allegations against him
One day in June 2019, Juliane Löffler was at her desk in
BuzzFeed Germany’s Berlin office when a notification popped up on Slack. A colleague had sent her a link to a Facebook post that was circulating online. In the post, a prominent figure of Berlin’s queer scene revealed that his doctor had assaulted him. It was time, he wrote, to break the silence. Löffler, a reporter who covers the LGBTQ community, noticed that although the doctor wasn’t named, many people in the comments seemed to know who he was. Then she saw that several people had written that the same thing had happened to them. Löffler began making inquiries. A few weeks later, she ran into Thomas Vorreyer, a political reporter at