Smear Campaign: Garry Tan embraces strategy of defamation and libel

The point: The “Voice of San Francisco,” the “parallel media” project run by Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan’s favorite local blogger, is resorting to false and defamatory attacks. Tan is boosting those attacks to his large X/Twitter following. But these desperate and legally perilous tactics underscore the shakiness of the enterprise. (If you already know who Reynolds is, skip The Backstory head straight to “The Juicy Part.”)

The Backstory: Most journalists in San Francisco prefer to ignore Susan Dyer Reynolds, the editor emeritus of The Marina Times.

The reason is simple: While calling herself a journalist, Reynolds acts more like an anti-journalist. She uses her 20,000-follower Twitter account to regularly blast reporters and newspapers, accusing them of favoring progressive Democrats.

Simultaneously, Reynolds openly takes money from special interests working to erode progressive power in the city. Her regular screeds – consisting mostly of social media posts, with an occasional article thrown in – also serve this purpose.

In 2021, she launched an anti-progressive Substack newsletter called “Gotham By The Bay” with assistance from tech venture capitalist Jason Calcanis, co-host of the right-wing All-In podcast, who helped her raise $60,000. In 2022, her Gotham By The Bay Media company received $100,000 from Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, a group working to unseat progressive elected officials.

Put simply, Reynolds is doing exactly what she accuses others of doing. But she mostly gets away with the bully act because most journalists consider it better to ignore her. That strategy makes sense, up to a point.

But Reynolds is escalating. Earlier this year, she co-founded something called the Voice of San Francisco, a nonprofit publication that seeks to undermine existing outlets. It’s not clear who is funding her, but Reynolds is regularly boosted and praised by Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan, who considers her the city’s top media personality.

“Saving San Francisco one keystroke at a time,” he wrote, praising Reynolds in 2021. “Get em Susan.”

In return, Reynolds regularly praises Tan and can usually be found attacking whoever he’s attacking.

So it came as no surprise, after my recent pieces about Tan, that Reynolds would try to smear me (again). Like most journalists, I usually ignore Reynolds. Her occasional smears usual garner a handful of likes from anonymous accounts.

This time, however, Tan himself boosted Reynolds’ defamatory posts to his 441,000 Twitter followers. So did several other Blue Check accounts with large followings. Curiously, even Heather Kirkpatrick – the head of partnerships at X (Twitter) – boosted the tweet.

As a result of this coordinated boosting, nearly 10,000 people have seen Reynolds' defamatory smear.

Tan even took the step of tagging the top editors of the New Republic – where I have been freelancing my stories on tech plutocrats – in a clear effort to harm my reputation at the magazine and destroy my ability to do freelance work.

So, I’m going to take one for the team by responding decisively to this case of actionable libel.

Here’s why: Reynolds’ false and malicious attack is easily disproven by evidence – including Reynolds’ own words. By deconstructing the smear, I will expose the utterly libelous and shoddy antics she and Tan are passing off as “journalism.”

The evolution of a smear

The juicy part: Last week, after I published a piece on Garry Tan’s continued flirtations with violence, Reynolds attacked me on Twitter.

It was a familiar line: Reynolds falsely claimed that I was “fired” from the San Francisco Examiner after “screaming in the face” of Brooke Jenkins, who is now the district attorney, during an editorial board meeting. For good measure, she also fabricated a libelous story about my time working for Kamala Harris.

Let’s start with the claim about Jenkins. Here are the major problems Reynolds would confront if we have to litigate this matter in a court of law:

1.    There’s TAPE. The only meeting I’ve ever had with Brooke Jenkins – an Examiner editorial board meeting – was taped. The tape proves, conclusively, that Reynolds is lying about the meeting.

2.    There are witnesses. The editorial board meeting was attended by most of the Examiner’s newsroom, including the publisher. Even if the tape did not exist, there would still be half a dozen witnesses who could testify against Reynolds’ false and defamatory claims.

3.    Timeline doesn’t work. Reynolds alleges that I departed the paper after the meeting, but the meeting happened in May. I left the paper a full five months later, in October.

4.    Reynolds mangles basic facts. Reynolds doesn’t even get the basic facts straight. She says I was in a “candidate endorsement” meeting with Jenkins, and she says I became irate because I wanted the paper to endorse John Hamasaki for the DA slot after Boudin was recalled.

But neither Hamasaki nor Jenkins were candidates for DA in May 2022. Jenkins was a spokesperson for Proposition H, the measure to recall District Attorney Chesa Boudin, who was still in office. The meeting was to discuss Prop. H, not candidates for DA.

I don't know if the Examiner had candidate endorsement meetings in the fall of 2022 but, if such meetings occurred, I was already gone. As any lawyer or journalist would tell you, it’s crucial to nail down basic facts like these before publishing explosive allegations.

5.    Reynolds contradicts her own libelous statements. I resigned from the Ex in a letter, but you don’t have to take my word for it. Days after my resignation, Reynolds herself tweeted that I had resigned from the paper in a “scathing letter.” The tweet also marked the first appearance of her false story about the meeting with Jenkins.

So here is the co-founder of the “Voice of San Francisco” clearly stating in a public forum that I resigned. Now, over a year later, Reynolds has maliciously upgraded my resignation into a firing (apparently without realizing that she is contradicting her previous statement on the subject).

Last week, I responded to Reynolds' libelous tweet and informed her that I have a tape of the meeting. At first, she responded with bravado.

“Do you want to test me?” she wrote.

“You’ve already failed the test,” I wrote. “Please proceed.”

She then asked if I was accusing her sources of lying.

(No, Susan, I am saying that you don’t have any sources who are telling you this...at least none who would be willing to lie for you in court.)

 Dragging Kamala into it

The lie about my departure from the Examiner is not the only smear Reynolds is publishing. She is also fabricating a defamatory tale about my departure from Kamala Harris’ office in 2013.

This lie closely mirrors the lie Reynolds tells about my meeting with Jenkins. She says I called Harris a “b--ch” and was then dumped on the side of the road by her California Highway Patrol protective detail.

VP Harris has enough on her plate and I hate to drag her into this. But let’s be clear: My resignation from her office has been written about in outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian and Politico. I’ve had discussions – both on and off the record – with a dozen journalists over the years. They know the exact details of my departure and, in many cases, they have confirmed those details with other witnesses.

Never once has anyone mentioned anything resembling Reynolds’ version of events.

In addition, I maintain ongoing off-the-record conversations with many political journalists. If there was a juicy story like this floating around for eleven years, someone would have asked about it by now. Hell, if Reynolds' explosive version of events had actually happened, I probably would have gotten a book deal out of it.

But it didn’t happen. The only person telling this story is Reynolds, who is clearly on a campaign to libel me. Once again, however, she fails to get even the minor details straight.

For example, I never worked for Harris when she was district attorney of San Francisco. I worked for her when she was attorney general of California. In addition, the California Highway Patrol (CHP) does not provide a protective detail for either the DA or the AG.

Basic, irrefutable facts.

If we must address Reynolds false allegations under oath, she will be the only person telling her fictional version of events. And she will be hard pressed to explain why she rushed to broadcast defamatory claims without bothering to get the basic facts straight.

Reynolds ‘Hateful conduct’ on Twitter

Reynolds has a long pattern of harassment and defamation targeting me. In 2022, Twitter briefly suspended her account for “hateful conduct” after she posted that I was in trouble for “harassment issues” at the Examiner.

As usual, the allegations were false. I reported her tweet, and pre-Elon Twitter decided that it violated rules against “hateful conduct.” Twitter suspended her account until she deleted the tweet.

At the time, it seemed clear to me what was happening. Frustrated by my columns, Reynolds was creating libelous allegations in an effort to harm my reputation, undermine my credibility and intimidate me into silence. It’s really that simple.

At the time, I also made it clear to Reynolds and the Marina Times that I would pursue legal action if this pattern of defamation continued. I also muted her account on Twitter, and so I missed a few libelous tweets that I am only discovering now.

In 2024, with Y Combinator’s CEO and other tech figures boosting her defamatory allegations, Reynolds is pursuing the libel strategy with renewed ferocity.

A strategy of attacks

Of course, I am not the only journalist who has been targeted by Reynolds. She often attacks writers and editors she doesn’t like. Joe Eskenazi of Mission Local is a regular target. So is Michael Barba, the Examiner and SF Standard alum who is now at the Chronicle. After the Chronicle hired Soleil Ho as a food writer, Reynolds wrote an entire Marina Times screed against her.

And this attack strategy is not just being used on the local level. Across the nation, and the world, journalists, disinformation researchers, propaganda experts and fact checkers have come under coordinated assault. In addition to intimidation campaigns and smear campaigns, right-wing forces are using courts and congressional hearings to intimidate and silence researchers and reporters.

Reynolds has been doing this stuff for a long time. But now she's doing it with the help of Y Combinator's CEO, who apparently has decided to get behind her constant efforts to damage my credibility and my reputation via her baseless and shockingly sloppy libel tactics.

More to come.