Last night, a Brooklyn-based literary blogger/podcaster/personality named Edward Champion suddenly began attacking the novelist Porochista Khakpour on Twitter, after Khakpour tweeted about Champion’s private threats against her. Before the night was over, Champion had been kicked off Twitter, and several other writers and literary agents had come forward to tell stories of Champion’s threatening and bizarre behavior.

It was the second time this year that Champion—a longtime fixture of New York’s publishing scene, thanks in part to his nine-year relationship with Sarah Weinman, the news editor of the influential Publishers Lunch newsletter—had been the center of a storm of publishing-world anger and controversy.

In June, he’d written a disturbing and misogynist 11,000-word rant on his website, Edrants, largely directed at former Gawker editor and novelist Emily Gould. Gould and others responded on Twitter; Champion, in turn, claimed to have received death threats, and then himself threatened suicide.

Champion disappeared from Twitter. For a while. Around 11:00 p.m., Khakpour, a novelist and writer-in-residence at Bard, tweeted that Champion was demanding she apologize for deleting a comment he’d written on her Facebook page insulting Slate editor Dan Kois—or else.

Around the same time, and also on Twitter, Champion both confirmed his threat to reveal whoever photographed Khakpour nude and declared her an “an awful narcissist who squeezes everything she can from you and then dumps you.”

(Twitter eventually suspended Champion’s account.)

Some of the subsequent discussion within Twitter’s literary community—about why Champion repeatedly harasses and threatens other writers yet still manages to interview mainstream authors for his podcast, The Bat Segundo Show—focused on his relationship with Weinman. Mallory Ortberg, proprietor of The Toast, ventured:

It seems worth noting that in close-knit, relationship-dependent industries like publishing, the line between “fear of pissing off a powerful journalist” and “fear of upsetting a friend” is often difficult to identify. Weinman, though, is also an “editor” of Champion’s blog:

Weinman has so far responded only to Khakpour, before bemoaning “internet drama”:

And then, later:

Champion’s account has not yet been restored by Twitter. But one of his Facebook followers captured a statement he posted there after learning his Twitter account was disabled. In it, he indicated that Weinman had broken off their relationship:

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