A Story

Once you have heard Monica Byrne's story about Bora Zivkovic, Kathleen Raven tells us, you have essentially also heard her own story about him. Her story is actually a bit more complicated, but Raven also writes too ambiguously about the events for my tastes. Her emotion lacks an objective correlative, "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of a particular emotion," as T. S. Eliot defined it. Or, to put in Hemingway's terms, we vaguely sense how we're supposed to feel upon hearing her story, but we can't quite discern "the actual things ... which produced the emotion that [she] experienced." "The real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion," does not quite come into view.

Here's my sense of what happened.

She had had a couple of glasses of wine on an empty stomach. In November of 2010, Raven was a graduate student attending a conference reception, "eager to get [her] name out to potential employers". Zivkovic had obvious potential in that regard and she "ended up in a cab with" him heading towards a restaurant for dinner with a group of people. Though slightly impaired by the wine, she was able to follow his story about coming to America, asking many questions. After dinner, Zivkovic paid for her part of the bill and what follows is best to get in her words:

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.

The story picks up in May, 2012. Raven had won an internship in New York, which offered Zivkovic a chance to see her about once a month when he had business in the same building. They spoke with such familiarity on these visits that a coworker who overheard them thought they might be married. In July, he invited her to dinner and she accepted. She reminded him of the kiss he "stole" when they first met, apparently forgetting to censure him for it. When they stepped outside he told her, like he would tell Byrne a few months later, of his current marital difficulties. She now forced the issue, asking him whether he wanted to sleep with her. He appears to have indicated he would. She told him she was not interested. He apologized.

Although she says that his answer "confirmed [her] worst fears," for some reason, and one that is not specified, they continued to meet. He apparently continued to express a sexual interest in her. As she tells the story, he had not understood that she wanted to nothing to do with him personally. She also seems to have had some difficulty just telling him frankly that she was not interested in being his friend or unrequited love interest. As a result they appear to have had a very complicated relationship, much of which took the form of an email correspondence. He seems to have gotten the impression that clear boundaries had been drawn and that they were therefore able to speak freely. Aside from that kiss on the forehead and, no doubt, some hugging. The relationship never became physical. (Raven certainly does not tell us that it did.)

There is an episode in which everyone behaves very strangely:

This past June [2013], 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.

The date is important. According to the fragments of an email correspondence Raven published, this is almost a year after they appear to have established some ground rules for their relationship. As Zivkovic apparently understood it, "the ‘dangerous’ moments [had] passed, and [they had the] 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." Obviously, Zivkovic thought they were friends and that any problems in their relationship would be worked out between them in private. It's not hard to imagine that Raven (and her husband) thought Zivkovic was nuisance by the time he showed up in their hotel room. What is difficult to understand is how this felt like harassment.

Raven's story is somewhat disjointed, impressionistic. She gives us glimpses of encounters that do seem strange, but that also leave us wondering why she continues to cultivate the friendship. If she was ever his subordinate, she does not say so. (This is a very important piece of information in a sexual harassment story.) She has organized her presentation, not chronologically, but according to the kind of communication that passed between them. First the in-person encounters, then an exchange of emails. (I've tried to restore chronological the order a little here.) Throughout, the reader is looking for the source of the power he had over her. It seems to be mentioned only in passing at the very beginning: she was "eager to get [her] name out to potential employers". As with Byrne, he didn't seem to think of himself as an employer. He just liked her and he thought she liked him.

Throughout she seems to have been in complete control of the boundaries of the relationship. Finally, in August of 2013 she tells him bluntly to stop talking about his sex life to her, and by October she breaks off the relationship entirely. "We can no longer be friends," she wrote to him, arguably at the very moment when he needed friends to stand by him as the accusations of sexual harassment were surfacing. Indeed, from a narrative point of view, the remark is jarring. It reminds us of the earlier definition of the relationship, in which Zivkovic clearly stated that he considered her his friend, indeed, a very close friend. Apparently, she had encouraged him in this belief throughout the past year, and we (the readers) suddenly realize that this is the same period throughout which she felt he was harassing her.

I want to stress, as I did in my reading of Byrne's story, that I am not questioning the facts or even Raven's experiences. I am pointing out some weaknesses in her writing about them. I am suggesting that the emotion she says she felt (that of being harassed) remains "in excess of the facts" as presented. They do not provide it with an objective correlative. She says she "left [their] meetings feeling crushed, confused, cowardly." She says she felt "violated" by a kiss on the forehead that she "didn't ask for". But at no point does she seem to actually get hurt.

Ironically, Raven does provide a formula for another emotion: Zivkovic's despair. Recall that she not only turns her back on him in a time of need but, in that very moment, recasts (for the first time we know of) their year-long friendship as a prolonged campaign of harassment. That moment must have been as jarring for him as it is for the reader. "I am not a suicidal type," he writes to her after she reverses the poles, "but I see no reason to live any more." That's an emotion one can actually find a basis for in the narrative. I submit that it is a poor story that leaves us feeling only sympathy for the would-be villain and only confusion about how the soi-disant victim was harmed.