Real letters. Real rage. A legal threat for asking about harassment policies. A nightclub with lingerie dancers. A steakhouse run by my former Chassidic martial arts partner. And an industry that has spent twenty years building the perfect infrastructure for protecting predators and calling it networking. Let's get into it.

The previous articles in this series have been passed around for weeks.

Women's groups have contacted me. Every major conference. Every podcast. Every Slack board where this industry goes to process its feelings about things it would prefer to never actually process.

Not one podcast. Not one trade publication. Not one industry voice with a microphone and a Spotify deal has said: yes. This is real. This is our industry. We need to talk about this.

It is not ignorance. This newsletter reaches nearly 35,000 people in this industry. Every week. The YouTube channel is larger than most competitors combined. The void has read it. The void forwarded it. The void discussed it in their group chats and went very, very quiet in public.

This is not about me. Don't like me? Fine. I will buy ads on your podcast. You will make money. Cash the check and never say my name once. Talk about the issue. Talk about the women. Talk about the silence.

Every single one of us over the age of thirty is complicit. Some more than others. Some in ways that are documented and embarrassing and involve electrical tape. But all of us. We could not have built our careers in this industry without this industry being exactly this bad. The parties were the networking. The culture was the infrastructure. The looking away was the price of admission and we all paid it.

The podcasters know this. The conference owners know this. The trade publications know this.

And that silence is what she hears every single day when she decides, again, not to say his name.

I have been getting messages calling me brave. Calling me a mensch. Calling me the conscience of an industry that frankly needs a conscience the way a fish needs a bicycle, which is to say desperately and also it is unclear if the fish knows this.

I am not your hero. I am not your white knight. I am not the enlightened man who discovered feminism at fifty and decided the most important thing to do with that discovery was make sure everyone watched him have it.

About a year after getting remarried I built a playground for the kids. Fixed up the house. Became a chaplain again. Helped the sheriff's department with funerals. And then I wanted to tell stories again. Just stories. Help people navigate the magnificent sprawling fuckery that is adtech. Something that wouldn't cost me sleep.

I really tried.

It lasted about as long as you would expect. Because the deeper I dug the more I found an industry broken in ways I had not fully let myself see. Wasteful. Dishonest. Lying to clients with such industrial confidence and at such magnificent scale that the lies had become the product. The kind of misdirection that twenty years ago would have had people in handcuffs but has since grown large enough that it graduated from crime to just how things work.

And then the women started writing. And that itch came back. That specific relentless won't-let-me-sleep itch. It is not leaving.

Now let me tell you exactly who you are dealing with.

I was at every party. The kind this industry threw when it thought nobody was writing it down. I have a specific memory of an adtech party where men who are now C-suite at companies like Hulu and The Trade Desk were drinking heavily and doing cocaine in corners while I was across the room taking photos of myself with women wearing nothing but electrical tape. Not strategically placed. Not minimal coverage. Black electrical tape. The kind you buy at Home Depot. Wrapped around the body in strips, crossing the torso, the arms, whatever geometry the person applying it decided constituted an outfit at an official industry event that somebody's marketing budget paid for and somebody's legal team presumably blessed.

I spent months trying to delete those photos. If you look hard enough you might still find some. I told my wife before we got married because she deserved to know who she was marrying.

One day I looked in the mirror and asked myself what the hell was wrong with me. Not a lightning bolt. Just a man looking at himself honestly for possibly the first time and not liking what he saw.

That is my shame to carry. Not anyone else's.

I am telling you this because if I am going to write about a culture I am now calling out, you deserve to know I was part of building it. I was one of the guys those events were built for. I was comfortable there. I smiled for the camera.

I woke up. It took longer than it should have.

Now here is the other reason I am saying this. Because I know exactly what happens next.

Someone is going to make this about me. Not about the women. Not about the policies. About me. It will start in the anonymous Slack boards, because it always starts there. Someone will call me a joke. Someone will forward a screenshot of some guy explaining that the Rabbi of ROAS is unhinged, is a hypocrite, is the wrong messenger.

It means: shut up or you're next.

It means: look what happens to people who make noise.

I am the worst possible person to be doing this and I am doing it anyway because the best possible people have been silent for twenty years and the women in my inbox are still rewriting their trauma at 2am so a predator cannot identify them by the specific gravity of their pain.

And the people trying to make it about me know exactly what they are doing. And so do the women watching them do it.

I have two adopted kids. Three adult kids. A sixteen year old going on twenty-six already more sorted than most of the executives I am writing about. They have first claim on my heroism. There is not a surplus sitting around waiting to be deployed on behalf of an industry that could fix itself tomorrow if it simply decided to give a damn.

I do not care what this industry thinks of me. I lost that need years ago fighting against child predators. You cannot be liked and do what is right. Not always. Not even most of the time.

I picked.

ADOTAT is nearly 35,000 people. A place where the industry's actual stories get told because apparently there is a significant appetite for truth in a business that has spent decades making a very comfortable living from the carefully managed absence of it.

I cannot stop for the same reason I cannot stop writing this. Because the alternative is being someone I have already decided I am done being.

Not the angry mail. Not the "who do you think you are" mail from people who have spent careers tending a culture of silence like a prize-winning orchid that will die the moment anyone opens a window.

Not the mail from guys who have worked the hotel bar circuit for twenty years and made the catastrophic error of mistaking "nobody stopped me yet" for "this is fine and also my personality."

The other mail.

Mail from untraceable email addresses created specifically to contact me. From people who rewrote their own words three times because they were bone-deep terrified their tone would give them away. Professionals. Adults. People with mortgages and LinkedIn profiles full of recommendations from colleagues who have absolutely no idea what happened to them at the last industry conference.

Rewriting their own trauma with the care of someone defusing a bomb in a building they still have to work in, so a predator cannot identify them by the specific gravity of their pain.

The stories came to me. Day after day. Women writing from accounts created for this purpose and no other. Many said the same thing: don't share the details. Don't share anything identifying. Don't even share the shape of the story.

Because they know what this industry does to women who speak. Some of them are living proof.

And then there is this one.

He is still here. Still working. Still collecting badges and speaking on panels and shaking hands. And she is the one living in fear.

I will not tell her story. What I will tell you is that she exists, she is real, and the reason you don't know her name is because this industry has made it more dangerous to be a victim than to be a predator.

Laminate that sentence. Put it on the wall of every HR department and conference organizer and trade publication in this business. Read it out loud every single time someone asks why women don't just come forward.

Rob Beeler is the only conference owner who called me. Voluntarily. Before anyone was watching. Before there was credit to collect.

Beeler.Tech has a women-only WhatsApp group run by a woman on his team. Dedicated groups at each event. First-timers told proactively. Any attendee who wants connection gets a group built on the spot. In writing. In the terms of use. Findable before you register.

It doesn't yet have an explicit removal protocol. That is the next layer. But Rob showed up before he was pressured to and that matters more than people in this industry understand.

Charlie Hinnant built Rave Me Away — an app that lets attendees share location, connect with each other, and reach on-site safety staff in real time, from their phone, while it is actually happening. Not a concept deck. A functioning product. Existing right now. Built by someone who understood that a problem you can see is a problem you can solve.

Rob and Charlie are not the story. They are the proof that the story everyone else is telling — that this is too hard, too complicated, too expensive — is a lie.

I sent formal letters to two PR companies after receiving complaints about both. One question: what is your policy on sexual harassment?

One sent me a legal threat.

The other told their clients I was harassing them.

By asking about their sexual harassment policy. In a formal letter. With punctuation.

They do not have policies. And when you ask, they come after you.

Next time someone asks why victims don't come forward: hand them that paragraph.

I am not a victim. I am a retired guy with nothing to lose. And even I got a legal threat.

I am not identifying anyone. Some rewrote their own words so their phrasing wouldn't give them away to the people they are afraid of.

One person, a former CEO of a major company in the industry bought by another major company, told me this and I am bolding it and leaving it completely alone:

"Large companies are run by HR and lawyers who you would think would be better at protecting their people. But it's not the case. Lots of bad behavior gets allowed. Not sure if it's apathy or fear. Maybe both."

Maybe both. Apathy calcified into permission. Fear dressed up as professionalism. The vocabulary institutions use when what they mean is: we have decided not to do anything about this and we would appreciate it if you stopped asking.

This is where I have to tell you about the conference I am not invited to.

One woman described Possible with a precision I could not improve: "Possible is basically a male fantasy wet dream." Employees in bikinis. Women walking around barely dressed. The whole aesthetic calibrated around a species of male comfort that has nothing to do with programmatic advertising and everything to do with who this industry has always quietly decided these events are actually for.

Possible is held at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach. The kind of place that makes you feel like you wandered into a James Bond film where the women are set dressing, the men are the plot, and everyone has agreed to pretend this is simply the natural order of things. Beautiful. Expensive. Dripping with old-school male-gaze glamour that makes it the perfect backdrop for an industry that has never fully decided whether it is a professional conference or a three-day permission slip for men far from home operating under the impression that distance equals consequence-free.

The nightclub hires women to dance in lingerie. Actual lingerie. It also employs what it tastefully calls "atmosphere models."

Women hired to make powerful men feel like the room was built for them. Which at this conference, at this venue, it was.

And then there is the steakhouse.

Run by David Einhorn.

David Einhorn is my former Chassidic martial arts partner. From decades ago. Two observant Jewish men doing martial arts together, which is already a sentence that does not exist in most people's lives, and now one of us is writing about sexual harassment in adtech and the other runs the steakhouse at the conference I am writing about.

David. Brother. We have so much to talk about. Call me.

Now. The men go to the nightclub. Some are drunk. Some are 1,200 miles from home and from anyone who knows their name outside a badge. Some run things through the company card under entertainment. And some, when the tab gets rich, look around the room at the women who work in this industry who are also at this conference, also now in this hotel, in this entire carefully constructed male fantasy, and do the math that drunk men with expense accounts have been doing at industry conferences since the first industry conference.

Possible's response? No harassment policy. No reporting system. No removal protocol. Nothing.

I could name companies all day. I have the list. The list is basically the industry directory. But naming ten makes the other ten look good and the other ten are not good. There is no honor roll here.

I am going after Possible not because they are the worst. Because they are the most perfect example of how we just accept everything. I interviewed the CEO of Possible. The interview was reportedly cited as a reason the company was acquired. I was in the room. I am now asking why nobody ever talked about what the room actually looked like.

How many trade publications noted that Possible is held at a venue built around a male fantasy aesthetic?

I also notice I have not been invited to Possible. The conference most comprehensively not inviting the person asking about conference safety is the conference held at a venue with lingerie dancers, atmosphere models, and zero harassment infrastructure.

I am absolutely certain that is a coincidence.

What exactly are you waiting for.

Every conference opening in the next 60 days needs to do one thing.

Send one email. To every registered attendee.

Here is our harassment policy. Here is what results in immediate removal. Here is how to report. Here is who handles it. Here is what happens next.

Thirty minutes to write. Zero dollars to send. One email standing between your event and the unbroken tradition of making women calculate their safety while men calculate their bar tabs.

Call Charlie Hinnant about Rave Me Away. Call Rob Beeler about what he built. Call me at [email protected]. I will build the infrastructure with you and give you full public credit to 35,000 people. This offer has no expiration date.

But before you close this tab I need you to sit with something.

There is a woman in this industry who was raped by her supervisor.

He is still here. Still working. Still attending conferences. Still walking into the same rooms she has to calculate whether she can safely enter.

She contacted me from an untraceable account she created for this purpose and presumably never opened again. She told me what happened. She told me she does not want anyone to know.

Not the memory. Him. The actual living person. Still here. In this industry. In these rooms.

And she is still rewriting herself around that fact every single day, still choosing her words with the care of someone who knows that

if you are not careful enough. If you are not small enough. If you take up too much space or make too much noise or trust the wrong person in the wrong room.

Every conference without a policy told her she was right.

Every buried complaint told her she was right.

Every killed story told her she was right.

Every one of us who knew something and said nothing told her she was right.

The Rabbi of ROAS. Troublemaker. Former contributor to the exact problem I am now writing about, which is either hypocrisy or growth depending on what you think of me, and as established I do not particularly care which. Still here. Still angry. Still married to a woman of extraordinary patience. Still not invited to the conferences that need this conversation most, which at this point feels less like an oversight and more like a confession.

[email protected]

Nearly 35,000 people. Every week. Watching.