When Ben Ryan, a 27-year-old writer for a little-known magazine, was contacted by Jann Wenner, one of the most powerful figures in magazine publishing, the young man leapt at the chance to come in and pitch some freelance stories.
It felt like his big break — “the beginning of the end of waiting for something to happen professionally,” he remembers telling his father.
“I felt like this was the beginning of me making it,” Ryan said. “That’s how naïve I was at the time.”
That was 2005. Ryan, now 39, says he’s not naïve any more: The invitation that started with such high expectations ended, he told BuzzFeed News, with an offer of career advancement in exchange for sex.
Sitting in Wenner’s corner office, Ryan did his best “to seem incredibly knowledgeable and professional,” while Wenner leaned back with his feet on the table. Ryan left with an assignment for Men’s Journal.
Ryan said Wenner called now and then to check in, then again one evening with an invitation to his Upper West Side townhouse.
The publisher greeted his guest, fixed him a drink — “like a sidecar; one of those old, fancy, mid-century lowball glasses,” Ryan recently recalled — and sat with him on a couch. Wenner had been out as gay for 10 years by that point, and Ryan said he was aware that he might have expectations, but the young writer figured he could hold the line. Then suddenly, said Ryan, his host pounced.
“I had Jann Wenner’s tongue in my mouth,” Ryan said. “I went along for a second but then said something to the effect of ‘Oh please, I’m not that kind of girl.’”
Feeling “totally grossed out,” he said, he remarked that his psychiatrist had predicted that would happen.
At the suggestion that anyone else might know about their encounter, Ryan said, “It was like the entire temperature of the room changed in a flash.” Wenner “got very upset and was pseudo-threatening of how bad it could be if this got out.”
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