The Atlantic knowingly published a piece that was not properly vetted, sourced, or fact checked. One example is their printed claim that I invited people to tour my show after hours without security or notification. This is false, and something that they knew was not properly fact checked against existing evidence.

Here is a photo of a security guard standing next to Basquiat’s 1981 painting Irony of a Negro Policeman, taken from the video that was recorded of the July 2019 event. Spector would claim we were present without security the night that the Guggenheim kicked out my guests. This is untrue; the guard is there specifically because I notified the Guggenheim ahead of time, and someone was put in place. Curators are allowed to take guests up without security, but I experienced so much bullying at the Guggenheim, including an email the week before about bullying, that I took no chance and let them know ahead of time, and I filmed it.

During the exhibition, and afterwards, Spector has harassed me and tried relentlessly to spin a narrative that is untrue and incompatible with the facts. Spector cooperated with The Atlantic piece and threw the writer, Helen Lewis, under the bus in a masterful stroke of Girl Boss, White-on-White crime. Lewis’s blog post is indicative of an unhealthy fixation that Spector, the press, and the Guggenheim have shown in attempting to frame me as “ungrateful,” “entitled,” and “crazy,” as well as Spector’s attempt at controlling the narrative of my experience, scholarship, and what happened during Basquiat’s “Defacement.” This has been happening since 2018, and Spector nor the Guggenheim will stop trying to control me or the narratives they feel have escaped their power until they both feel that the story and history has been sufficiently distorted, hidden and forever suppressed.

But the receipts, audios, emails, voice recordings, eye-witness accounts and scores of other evidence tell a completely different story than what been printed since 2019. And it has the power to upend everything, and revealing that a lot of people lied, a lot of money was moved, and a lot of people were involved.

What happened at the Guggenheim is important chapter of history. However, The Atlantic is not the publication that will bring the story to the public, especially considering the sub-par fact checking, vetting and writing standards. Instead, Lewis wrote a sensationalized blog post that looked more at home at the Daily Mail (where she began) than one of the alleged premier publications of note in the States, The Atlantic. Not only were no curators shocked that I brought guests, this is a pretty standard procedure, especially if the guests are prominent, which some of them were. Lewis, making up for the lack of fact-checking, materials and access wrote her lie like it was a gossip column, further digging a hole. Neither The Atlantic nor Helen Lewis would’ve been able to get their hands on this footage without my cooperation or release, and I chose not to participate because I did not trust them. I was justified in this lack of trust in the publication, as I knew that they would print what was untrue, despite my warnings that they did not have access to the material to properly vet the story. Not being able to get your hands on requisite materials and evidence doesn’t mean that you publish anyway. It means you either get the materials, you tell the story you can tell or you kill the story. Good journalists, good editors, good publications and good lawyers know this.