Here's a long-form account of interactions with Bora Zivkovic:
My story begins in November 2010 at the National Association of Science Writers (NASW) conference in New Haven, Conn. As a graduate student in the Health and Medical Journalism master’s program at the University of Georgia, I was eager to get my name out to potential employers. On that Saturday evening, with conversations ricocheting off the walls of the Peabody Museum of Natural History, I felt overwhelmed. I drank two glasses of wine. A group of us stood outside later, waiting for cabs to take us to the restaurants. I ended up in a cab with Bora. On an empty stomach, and with the alcohol slowing down my cognition, I remember acting fascinated by Bora’s story of how he arrived in America. I asked question after question, as journalists do. We arrived at the restaurant. We all ate. The restaurant check arrived. Bora pointed to me and another girl. “I’ll pay for theirs,†he told the waiter. If I recall, there were about six other women—and perhaps one other guy—sitting at our table. After dinner, I made my way to the hotel lobby, anxious to get away from Bora because I knew I was putting myself in a risky situation. But somehow we ended up standing together in front of the elevators. “Let’s go up to the bar at the top,†he suggested to me. I nodded. Once there, I ordered a plain Coke. He talked and talked. I don’t remember much. I do remember, as we later both stood waiting for the bell to signal my floor, that he leaned over and kissed me on top of my head. I mumbled a farewell as the doors opened and walked away.
Fast-forward to May 2012. I’d been recently hired by Nature Publishing Group to complete a graduate-level news writing internship in New York City. During his near-monthly visits to the same building for Scientific American, he visited me at my desk. After he finished talking to me once, my co-worker leaned over to me. “Was that your husband?†she asked me. “Oh, god, no!†I said.
I agreed to meet Bora for dinner in New York at some point in July 2012. While we sat in the restaurant, Bora looked around anxiously, as if NSA itself might be watching. I ordered one glass of wine. During conversation, I said: “You know, you stole that kiss from me at Yale in 2010. I did not ask you to kiss me.†Then, kicking myself for not saying that I felt also violated, I sat silently while he talked and we finished dinner. We walked outside. It was a balmy evening in the city. With the wine or with that city’s energy, I suddenly thought: Maybe this is a good thing. Maybe Bora does want to be my friend and I can learn, with him, to stand up to men in positions of power.
After a few moments of walking, Bora said to me, apropos of nothing: “I have not had sex with my wife for seven years.†Speechless, I walked on in silence. He described his frustration about this situation. After he stopped talking I said: “Are you suggesting that you’d like to have sex with me?!†He confirmed my worst fear. “Well, I’m sorry, but I am not interested in that. I’m happily married,†I said. He apologized and brushed it off.
We met several more times that summer. With each visit, my confidence and willingness to speak up withered. I left our meetings feeling crushed, confused, cowardly. He joked that he wished he could sneak into my apartment on the Upper West Side.
This past June, at the 8th World Conference of Science Journalists meeting in Helsinki, I participated on a panel with my incredibly talented fellow science journalists. Bora recruited all of us and organized the panel. On the night before the meeting began, he arrived to the official conference hotel late at night. “Which room are you in?†Bora texted before or soon after he entered the hotel. I sent him the room number where my husband and I stayed. “Can I come by and see you now?†he texted. “No, I’m afraid we have to wait until tomorrow morning. My husband is already in bed, sorry,†I texted back. A few moments later, I heard a knock at our door. I opened it expecting to see housekeeping staff. Bora stood there. He said, “Hi!!†and walked past me into our room. My husband sat shocked in our hotel bed. Bora grabbed me in an embrace, picked me up, swirled me around, and kissed me on the cheek. After a few minutes of small talk, he left.
This past August, I excitedly participated in a climate conference in Washington, D.C. Bora was also there. He stuck to my side like glue, or so it felt. Paranoid that people were glaring at me and wondering why he hung out with me, I tried to distance myself from him. One night after the conference we walked to a café to buy gelato. While sitting on steps in front of a building, Bora brought up the topic of sex with his wife again. I pleaded with him. “Actually, could you please not tell me any more about your wife without her permission?†And I added: “I do not want to hear about you and she having sex anymore.†He backed off, as he had done in past instances. “I’m sorry—I keep thinking that talking about it might help you,†he replied. “I don’t think it does,†I said.
There are many other examples, instances, encounters. And then there are the emails.
But it’s time that you see this side of Bora that I have seen. I want you to understand. This must stop.
For brevity and ease of reading, I have copied and pasted below a selection from numerous emails between Bora and I.
August 2, 2012: KATHLEEN WROTE: That you respect my limits and boundaries will make me all the more aware of yours. Now I have begun to relax and know that things are off to a fine start!
August 3, 2012: BORA’S REPLY: I likewise feel that the ‘dangerous’ moments have passed, and that we have a beginning of a wonderful friendship, having each other as confidants, enjoying each others company, enjoying intellectual discussions, sharing deepest secrets with complete trust, and yes, feeling safe to do flirty things with each other fully knowing it does not mean a breach of trust — just our little shared secret, little “speaking in code†that only you and I understand. So happy we resolved this like smart, civilized, mature people.
May 20, 2013: BORA’S REPLY: [an excerpt from a much longer email] …There’s no way in hell I can or could do anything like that with you. Not now. Not last year. You are a very different person. Catholic guilt, Southern childhood, personal history — for you probably everything physical is sexual and in a negative way. Both last year and before/after, if I kissed your lips or grabbed your ass, you’d have freaked out! I’d mean it in a totally friendly nonchalant kind of way — as a non-sexual act even at the time when I wanted you — but you’d understand it very differently. So I am glad that on the very first night (and then clarified once more later), our agreement also included these kinds of rules, where can lips and hands go or not go when we hug. Much better that way than me making a mistake at some point, losing your trust that way…
What I see here is the collision of two damaged people.
Note early on the writer goes on about the two glasses of wine, the empty stomach, feeling overwhelmed. You can sense her passing on having any agency. Maybe she was buzzed on two glasses of wine and an empty stomach, but you get the sense it was, to her, something that happened to her, rather than something she did. And apparently it colored the situation and everyone was supposed to, what, know she was two wine drunk? Apparently she was previously the victim, if we accept her history at face value, of some guy grooming her when she was 16. However, among his horrible transgression was noticing she missed a spot when shaving her legs.
On the other hand, Bora is simply off. Apparently he is either in an unhappy marriage or is some guy trying to get pity points by portraying it as such. I don't know if he is looking for hot weasel sex or is just a kind of feckless unhappy guy desperate for attention, affection and affirmation. Although I hate the whole "creepy guy" trope he is, well, kind of creepy. I don't know if that's from the language barrier, culture or just his being an awkward geek, but just as he's hanging on people like human fly-paper, back when he had the status, he was hung on himself.
There's musical chairs of mutual using going on, until one person breaks the clinch and wins by claiming they were used. A lot is being made of the power differential and there's something to that. Of course, it's exactly that power that made a jittering socially inept grease smear like Bora so interesting in the first place.
But if Bora is such an unhappy guy, as I think he is, that puts a new dimension on P.Z Myers demanding bottomless self-flagellation in the public square. He's lost a lot, and perhaps rightly so, but he hasn't lost everything. Yet. Maybe the Freethought Bullies, consciously or otherwise, want to see of they can up their sense of personal power by driving someone to stick a gun in his mouth.
