The LA Times on the assault on Elena Ferrante’s privacy.

Ferrante had closely guarded her secret. The author specifically said — in her rare interviews — that she treasured her anonymity.

And that should be her right. Authors don’t have to tell us anything about themselves. Not one thing.

Gatti’s article was met with outrage by many in the literary community, including Roxane Gay, Ruth Franklin, Philip Gourevitch and Pamela Paul, decrying the journalist’s exposure of Ferrante’s true identity.

Rob Spillman, the editor and cofounder of the literary magazine Tin House, called Gatti’s report “immoral” and “unethical” and suggested that readers consider canceling their subscriptions to the New York Review of Books.

It is highly immoral and unethical and the NYRB should never have published it. Doing so is a punch in the face to all their writers, and to their readers too.

Gatti defended his report to the Guardian, asserting that “she and her publisher seemed not only to have fed public interest in her true identity but to have challenged critics and journalists to go behind the lies. She told us that she finds them ‘healthy.’ As a journalist, I don’t. In fact, it is my job to expose them.”

No it is not, you self-righteous shit. It is not your job to strip away the anonymity of people who want to be anonymous unless they are using that anonymity to do harm.

Gatti told the Guardian, “I believe that by announcing that she would lie on her own ‘autobiographical’ essay, Ferrante has in a way relinquished her right to disappear behind her books and let them live and grow while their author remained unknown.”

Spoken like a rapist. Spoken like a man who thinks he has the right to ignore the stated, explicit, fervent wishes of a woman who writes novels, and strip off her pseudonym as he would strip off her clothes before raping her.