More victims. More silence. One guy who showed up who wasn't even on my list. And yes, I know I'm kind of an ass.

Someone I respect told me to be careful.

Not careful with my facts. Not with my sourcing. Just. Be careful.

The kind of careful that means: the people you are writing about have money. Real money. Millionaires. Billionaires. People with lawyers on retainer the way you and I have opinions. Unlimited supply. Always ready. Extraordinarily expensive. People who have spent decades building the kind of institutional gravity that can pull a loudmouth with a newsletter quietly out of orbit and into total irrelevance without spilling their drink.

And I sat with it. I embarrassingly, humiliatingly, genuinely sat with it.

I thought about writing about programmatic fraud instead. Something safe. Something that doesn't make anyone's general counsel reach for their phone. Something where everyone in this industry exhales collectively and the powerful people go back to sleeping like babies.

I have great insurance. I'm already retired. I've already sold my companies. The absolute worst thing that happens to me if I keep writing is that some powerful people stop returning my calls. Maybe I lose some friends. Maybe some doors close.

If you know me personally, you know that is genuinely, authentically, not a hardship.

I hate events. I avoid conferences the way most people avoid someone who owes them money and won't return their texts. I have approximately four friends by aggressive deliberate choice. I am a little paranoid on a good day. Probably shouldn't be around normal people for extended periods. I am in constant pain that makes some mornings genuinely difficult to describe out loud. I have enough of my own issues to keep three therapists employed simultaneously. I am not the picture of mental health and social grace.

My wife somehow deals with all of this. I have no idea how. I am not going to examine it too closely because it seems to be working.

And I still almost stopped.

Now sit with that. Really sit with it. If I, with all that insulation, all that retirement, all that "what are they actually going to do to me," felt the gravitational pull toward silence, what does that pull feel like for the women who have everything to lose? The ones still employed. Still needing references. Still trying to build something real in an industry that has predators woven into its infrastructure like load-bearing walls that nobody wants to touch because the whole building might come down and some of those people own the building.

The fact that telling the truth in this industry requires courage is the whole indictment. I don't need to write another word. Frame that sentence. Put it on every HR department wall in adtech. Tattoo it somewhere that hurts.

But I'm going to write more words anyway.

Let me be extremely clear about something.

I am not a trade publication protecting its ad revenue. I am not a conference organizer protecting his speaker relationships. I am not an influencer protecting a brand deal. I have nothing you can take from me that I haven't already chosen to walk away from.

And since we're being honest with each other:

In 1998, I assembled the case with federal investigators that drove a nail in the Gambino crime family.

Not a metaphor. Not a colorful exaggeration for dramatic effect. The actual Gambino crime family. The real one. With actual federal prosecutors.

I have been careful before. In rooms considerably more consequential than a programmatic media conference.

I'm still here.

Try me.

Since the last piece published, my inbox became something I was not fully prepared for even though I should have been because it happens every single time I publish one of these and it never stops feeling like a punch directly to the chest.

More women. Different companies. Different events. Different years. Same architecture without a single variation. Man with leverage and a company that valued his Rolodex more than the people around him. Institution that did the math and decided protecting him was cheaper. Woman left to choose between her safety and her career and then quietly, efficiently, professionally blamed for whichever one she chose.

Yes, two more women are talking to me about the SAME man since yesterday. Since Yesterday.

I'm still in conversations. Still listening. Still taking notes with the care these women deserve and this industry has spectacularly, consistently, almost impressively failed to give them.

To everyone who wrote from an untraceable email address at 2am from a place of fear they should never have had to feel:

I hear you. I believe you. I am not going anywhere.

And this industry should be profoundly, deeply, keep-you-up-at-night ashamed that you had to find a semi-paranoid retired guy with a newsletter to feel heard.

Someone is going to point this out.

Probably on a Wednesday.

Probably in a LinkedIn comment written with the barely contained energy of someone who has been waiting their entire career for exactly this moment to take on “the Rabbi.”

"Pesach is kind of an ass."

Fair

"He's not a woman. He doesn't know these stories from the inside."

Also fair. One hundred percent fair and I am not going to argue with it for a single second.

I am not a woman.

I have never walked into a conference with a survival plan already drafted in my head.

I have never done quiet safety math about the next three days of my professional life.

I have never been told to let it go by a boss who valued a client relationship more than my discomfort.

I don't know these stories from the inside and I never will.

I am not the best person to be doing this.

I am also, apparently, one of the only people doing it.

And that is not a compliment to me. That is a full body indictment of every man in this industry who knows exactly what I know and has decided that knowing is sufficient. That knowing doesn't require action. That knowing is something you can carry quietly in your pocket like a business card you'll never use, next to your conference lanyard and your carefully maintained sense of your own decency.

I am difficult.

I am paranoid.

I am in constant pain.

I have enough personal issues to keep a small therapy practice solvent for years. I am genuinely, authentically not the hero of this story.

But I have a large newsletter, nothing left to lose, and a wife who somehow hasn't left yet.

So here we are.

This is not a redemption arc. There is no arc.

Here is what there actually is: a specific, relentless, won't-let-me-sleep-on-a-good-night thing that fires up every single time I see people suffering and an industry responding with a shrug and a speaker invitation. When I see real pain being caused to real people and the institutional response is to promote the person causing it, something in me physically cannot leave it alone.

I have tried to find an off switch. My wife has tried. There isn't one.

Women in this industry don't need me to tell their stories. They have been screaming them into the void for years while this industry nodded thoughtfully, said "this is such an important conversation," and went back to the open bar. What they have needed is an environment where telling those stories doesn't detonate their careers on contact.

I can't build that alone. But I can be so relentlessly, exhaustingly, professionally, pathologically annoying that the people who can build it decide the noise is more expensive than the solution.

That is the entire plan. It is not sophisticated. It is not noble. It is just loud and it is not stopping.

I put names in print. I asked the conference owners to engage. To work with me. To build something that actually protects the women walking through their doors with survival plans already drafted.

You know how many called?

One. And he wasn't even on my list.

Rob Beeler reached out and walked me through what he actually built. Women's groups. A real safety committee. Pre-event communication so attendees know what exists before they ever walk through the door. Actual infrastructure. Built by an actual human who actually gave a damn without being dragged to it.

A friend confirmed it independently. Unprompted. Voluntarily.

Rob: good job. Loudly. In print. To 35,000 people. Without qualification or asterisk.

The industry default is nothing. Nothing costs zero dollars, requires zero committee meetings, generates zero awkward sponsor conversations, and involves zero acknowledgment that your event has ever had a single problem in its entire existence. Nothing is the easiest product this industry has ever shipped and everyone is absolutely, enthusiastically, professionally crushing it.

Rob chose something. Voluntarily. Before I even knew his name existed. Before anyone was watching. Before there was any credit to collect.

That is what giving a damn actually looks like.

Not a panel. Not a press release.

Not a DEI commitment buried on page 47 of an annual report nobody reads.

A phone call. Some infrastructure. Showing up when nobody asked you to.

It also makes the silence from everyone else so loud I need to briefly leave the room.

To every conference owner reading this: the offer stands and it is not expiring. I am not your enemy.

But I will be your conscience.

Loudly. In print. In front of this entire industry.

Every single week for as long as it takes.

Call Rob. Call me. I will do the work with you. I will give you every ounce of credit publicly and enthusiastically.

Because right now there are women walking into your events doing quiet desperate safety math about the next three days of their professional lives. Scanning your speaker list. Clocking the exits. Already planning which after parties are too dangerous to attend alone.

She deserves better than math.

You have the power to give her better.

So why the hell haven't you?