I did a live-tweeted reading and review of this book about The Exile (I will consistently refuse to spell it “the eXile” throughout this essay) by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi over the past few days and this post is a lightly edited version of those threads, for posterity and ease of linking.

Good morning everyone! Today we’ll be reading “The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia” by @MarkAmesExiled and @MTaibbi, published in 2000 by Grove Press books.

"This is a work of non-fiction. While all the characters and events depicted in this book are real, certain names and identifying details have been changed."

I enjoyed this particular acknowledgement: "To Svetlana Negrustuyeva, for making us all that money, and for putting up with two years of relentless sexual harassment."

If you’d like to download a PDF and read along with me, tough shit, you can’t. This book has been totally suppressed from all the usual black market book download sites so don’t even bother trying.

This book claims to be non-fiction, but there is some dispute over that by its own authors which we’ll talk about later on, after we read it. The book consists of 8 chapters, 4 are by Ames and 4 are by Taibbi.

So let’s go! First up we have the Foreword by Eduard Limonov, a Russian writer who founded the National Bolshevik Party, was jailed in 2001, and croaked last year. He writes some stuff about how Ames & Taibbi would be jailed if they wrote The Exile in America. Is it too late? Anyway, let’s really begin.

Chapter One: Into Exile by Mark Ames

This chapter starts with background on young Ames. Ames attended Berkeley in the late 80s and in these early pages he refers to himself and his college friends as “reactionaries” which is quite amusing.

For several pages Ames describes a bad longterm case of scabies he had in California in great detail. It has pretty much zero relevance to anything else in the book but it’s gross and that seems to be the entire point of discussing it.

Soon Ames moves to Prague and hates it because there are other Americans there. Not even 10 pages in and I feel a palpable dislike for Ames. He’s insufferable. This pre-Russia background is boring. Feels like I’m reading padded out content and I’m only on page 6.

Ames returns to California and describes his stepfather dying of brain cancer. Ames says “One thing I was equipped for was tragedy and death.” Two paragraphs later he’s describing his “mental breakdown”. My eyes are rolling back into my skull.

So Ames goes to Russia and starts shooting heroin and gets into the journalism biz, kind of. This chapter kind of sucks and I’m bored out of my mind reading it. Taibbi better raise the game when we get to his chapters.

Ames works as a writer and editor for some trashy free English paper for expatriates and then ultimately leaves and takes most of the staff with him to start The Exile.

Soon Ames publishes his paper which is just a full blown attack on his former employers, he claims to accuse his former boss of being a rapist and criminal, and then hides from the guy when he sees him in a club despite being “six times his size”.

Ames admits to being a coward who can’t stand confrontations. No wonder he’s a journalist. It all falls into place. Passive-aggressive prick who will come at you like a spider monkey in print, then total pussy if you get in his face. Many such cases!

Eventually Ames’ former employer hires Matt Taibbi to take over editing his old paper, and Ames is shitting a brick because Taibbi is a “real journalist” who will show him up and end his new company after just 3 issues.

Mercifully on that note, Chapter one finally ends and we’re on to Chapter Two: Traitor For Hire by Matt Taibbi. Chapter one kind of sucked but I’m hoping this will pick up.

Chapter Two: Traitor For Hire by Matt Taibbi

Matt Taibbi gives us his post-college background and pretty much makes his life sound like a big ol’ train wreck. He doesn’t namedrop where he went to school so you know it wasn’t too impressive (Bard College. I had to look it up).

Matt is an expatriate soon after he graduates college, goes to Russia, does journalism various places in Central Asia, then plays pro basketball in Mongolia where he dyed his hair weird colors and committed a lot of fouls and says he was known as the “Mongolian Rodman”. (Yes, really.)

He gets really sick with pneumonia and has to go back to America, gets well then ends up taking Ames’ old job in Moscow. He does that job for literally one day and then quits and goes to work for Ames at The Exile. This takes pages and pages of not too much interesting happening.

Finally after a bunch of political background about Russia from Taibbi (don’t care) him and Ames are pranking a rival publication by pretending to be someone important on the phone who wants to write for them and has diarrhea. It’s not funny but somehow it’s a huge coup for them.

Publishing the transcript of this IMO not-funny phone call is apparently a major triumph for them and it gives Matt a “predatory thrill”. Young journalist loves destroying people and gets off on it, many such cases. Anyway here's that page, judge for yourself if it's funny.

This ends Chapter two. I’m not really loving this book so far. The outrageous stuff so far seems forced and there's been too much background about each author's prior life. But now that's over so hopefully it'll pick up in Chapter 3, another Taibbi-written chapter.

Chapter Three: The Exiles Meet the Expats by Taibbi

Ames & Taibbi decide to target their main rivals, two other Moscow expat English language “respectable” newspapers. I like this immediately of course, going after journalists is extremely on brand for me as everyone knows.

One of their rival papers is the second-rate copycat rival The Moscow Tribune. They mindlessly ape the market leader (The Moscow Times) and copy what it does in hopes of staying relevant. Meanwhile The Exile are doing the alternative outsider newspaper thing and rating clubs based on how easy it is to get laid there.

Ames and Taibbi posed as a fictitious jewish marketing consultant working for the Moscow Tribune and called around to all the local Western PR agencies trying to hire them on behalf of the Tribune and proposing ridiculous promotional stunts.

They got totally rejected by every agency who then told them in no uncertain terms about the Tribune’s many problems. Then they printed all this stuff in The Exile and gloriously humiliated their rival. Gotta give it to them here, this is A+ trolling. Pretty hilarious.

This total destruction collapses the Tribune’s circulation and over the course of a year they have to massively cut back on staff and publish less often while The Exile is doing the opposite and growing fast. I’m enjoying the book a lot more after this story.

They make fun of the respectable Moscow Times for picking up and reprinting an April Fool’s prank they pulled on someone else claiming Wilt Chamberlain was going to play basketball in Moscow. Not quite as good but let’s keep the crazy pranks coming, they can't all be winners.

…and then we have about ten pages of Matt's investigation into USAID and Russian corruption and there are dollar amounts and boredom and I am suddenly in a totally different book that isn't about pranks and debauchery it's about Matt Taibbi The Super Journalist Uncovering Corruption.

I was wrong, it's way more than ten pages. I'm skipping some stuff here, I can't help it. It's really just that this stuff is just too dated, who doesn't know there was massive globalist corruption in Russia in the late 90s? I'll try not to hold it against Matt.

Matt has the idea to pretend to be a representative of the New York Jets and try to offer a job on the coaching staff to Mikhail Gorbachev. They print up business cards and get a meeting to discuss it but it gets blown. But later Gorby's office faxes them and wants to do it.

They do an article about the prank and though it didn't quite work it was amusing to read about. The joke is that the Jets were "restructuring" which in Russian is "perestroika". A for conception, C+ for execution. So far, I like the prank parts of this book but not the journalism parts.

They're worried for a while that Gorbachev might have them killed for this, but then a few months later Gorby does that infamous Pizza Hut commercial, so they figure he’s not going to retaliate.

In another prank, they convinced the staff at Moscow’s venerable commie newspaper Pravda that the paper had been bought by a blind jewish dwarf personal injury lawyer from Florida named Barry Apfelbaum and he wanted to rename the paper "The Sears and Roebuck Pravda". Amusing.

One of the regular features of the Exile was called "Death Porn" and they would just run pictures of corpses and body parts from recent crimes and add jokey captions. That's gonna be a yikes from me, personally. But the 1990s was a different time.

“Although most people blamed Mark for the paper’s excesses, the truth was that the sicker parts of The Exile were a joint effort.” Remember that Matt demands half the blame here.

Ames & Taibbi would try to think of ideas that would destroy them if they published them, and then ran with them anyway. They once published a "puzzled black face accompanied by a banner headline: N-WORDS: Where Did They Come From? And What Are They Doing Here?" (They didn't really say "N-word", they went full racial slur, FYI.)

They also went after the ex-Boston Celtics black star player of the CSKA Moscow basketball team in that piece and then when they saw him in a bar shortly thereafter they hid and ran away. Journalism!

One more good prank in this chapter, the guys do a full April Fools version of The Moscow Times' entire paper and distribute their version in its place. Not even with a satirical title, they replicate the entire design down to the fonts. All the content is vicious satire.

That was a long chapter, even though I skipped a bunch of pages. Pretty edgy content by 2021 standards especially that N-word thing.

Chapter Four: Michael Bass by Taibbi

This chapter is about some vaguely mobbed up jewish pedophile/rapist who wrote for a competitor. The Exile guys libeled-him-but-it-was-probably-true and then he sort of threatens to have Matt killed.

Matt spends most of the chapter hiding like a pussy from this guy, who ends up agreeing not to kill Matt in exchange for them publishing his rebuttal. He faxes them a handwritten rebuttal full of spelling and grammatical errors, and then they say they won’t edit it for him.

So the guy begs them to let him have it edited and sends them a new cleaned up copy but they decide the original is funnier so they run that version instead. Later the same guy gets mixed up with some real dangerous mobsters and has to go into hiding so nothing happens to Matt.

If this guy is threatening enough to send you into hiding, how are you then gonna disrespect him by publishing all his grammatical errors? It’s a based move no doubt, but it also implies they really weren’t nearly as afraid of this guy as they pretended to be.

Lame chapter. Taibbi kind of sucks here, he’s boring. “Mongolian Rodman” my ass. But the next three chapters are by Ames and he is a drug-addled lunatic so this is sure to pick up when we get his POV.

Chapter Five: Our God Is Speed by Ames

At first Ames’ degenerate drug talk was a huge relief from Taibbi’s tedium, but then it just got real old real fast. Drugs are endlessly fascinating to people who do a lot of drugs. I guess in 2000 this kind of thing was still fashionable.

Most of this chapter is about Ames trying to score drugs and the awful people he has to associate with in order to score drugs. He talks about how great doing drugs is but the effort he has to go to and the people he associates with and what happens to them is just depressing.

All drug literature is tedious in exactly the same way so I won't subject you to any of it. Most of this chapter is just about irrelevant Russian people Ames knew who did a lot of drugs with him before he started The Exile.

They tried to turn The Exile from a biweekly to a weekly fueled on speed and Ames makes fun of Taibbi for loudly snorting lines & getting paranoid. Then they run out of speed & their sales director quits! Oh no! But then they got some more speed, crisis averted. Whew.

End of chapter. Maybe this book is out of print because it sucks? I wanna read about The Exile not how hard it was to get good drugs in early post-Soviet Russia. I think the chapter about hookers is coming up though, so let’s push on. More Ames to come.

Chapter Six: The White God Factor by Ames

Finally the good stuff. This is the really edgy chapter about women containing all the really terrible online quotes which got the Exile boys in trouble in 2017 when MeToo began. There's a lot here, this section will be long.

Ames starts off writing about how many hot young Russian women there are in Moscow and how Western women can’t compete with them in looks or sexuality. Western expatriate men come to Moscow and go pussy-crazy for the Russian women, lose their minds, dump their wives.

This anecdote is pretty telling and probably gets Matt in a lot of trouble. Sexually harassing women is verboten but saying sexual harassment is funny is even worse. Yikes, Matt!

“You’re always trying to force Masha and Sveta under the table to give you blow jobs. It’s not funny. They don’t think it’s funny,” Kara complained.

“But… It IS funny,” Matt [Taibbi] said.

We have been pretty rough with our girls. We’d ask our Russian staff to flash their asses or breasts for us. We’d tell them that if they wanted to keep their jobs, they’d have to perform unprotected anal sex with us.

Nearly every day, we asked our female staff if they approved of anal sex. That was a fixation of ours. “Can I fuck you in the ass? Huh? I mean, without a rubber? Is that okay?” It was all part of the fun.

Ames & Taibbi hire an Asian nerd to review nightclubs and give him an Exile press pass. He writes a club review claiming to have raped an unconscious girl who fell off the bar and passed out in his arms. They use the word 'alleged' here but they don't quite deny it happened.

Ames next digresses into a story about himself always being bad with women, as required in such a book. I think it’s a de rigeur Hunter Thompsonism, you are required to discuss your failures with women as though if you were comfortable flirting with women it would be some kind of personal failing.

Ames then writes about the worst bar in Moscow. He portrays it as an insane pit of debauchery, with flying beer & vomit, dancing on the bar, multiple brawls every night. The Exile guys are regulars, the bar advertises in their paper.

The name of the bar is “The Hungry Duck”.

The Hungry Duck has a Ladies’ Night special which Ames refers to as “rape camp”. The bar opens at 7 but only allows women in (Ames says, “generally between the ages of 12 and 25”) until 9. During that time the drinks for the women are free, they’re “pumped full of free drinks”.

The point of Ladies’ Night is to get the girls as drunk as possible in a two-hour period, then to open the floodgates to the guys and let the rape camp festivities begin. It was a brilliant idea to raise the volume of vomit and semen to levels yet unseen even in the Duck.

The Exile guys are not just observers of this, they’re active participants. For the second ever Ladies’ Night at the Duck, they're invited to be guest bartenders. Born nerd Taibbi is trying to really serve drinks while Ames is just getting wasted and assaulting teenage girls.

Ames picks out a 16-year-old to groom because she's young-looking and intentionally feeds her a ton of drinks, until she falls off the bar and bloodies her face. Ames takes her home at the end of the night anyway and bangs her.

A couple days later the same girl comes to see Ames with a couple of her teenage girlfriends. He takes them to a rich friend’s place and they get drunk in his jacuzzi. Ames finds out one of the girls is only 15 and “Right then, my pervometer hit the red.”

Ames sleeps with the 15 year old, she tells him she has a 3 month old kid but ultimately turns out to have been lying and is actually 4 months pregnant. Ames dumps her when he finds out she's pregnant and refuses to take her calls anymore.

This makes Ames reflect on an ex-girlfriend from the previous year who had told him she was pregnant with his kid. He threatened to throw her off a balcony if she didn’t get an abortion and finally after fighting with her and making her cry all night she gets an abortion.

She keeps bothering Ames so he names her in a column, talking about “what she did to him” and naming her as the “worst woman of the year” for forcing him to threaten to kill her to coerce her into an abortion. She cries to Ames and he says he feels bad for "a good ten minutes".

Keep in mind that this is happening around 1997-98, and Mark Ames was born in 1965. He’s in his early thirties here, this isn’t youthful indiscretion by any measure, Ames is just a sociopathic scumbag.

Ames writes about leaving Moscow to visit the Russian provinces, where the girls are supposedly even easier for Americans to have sex with. More of Ames’ being a piece of shit ensues. Too tiresome to recount, it's more of the same but less interesting.

Next Ames writes about his “closest Russian girlfriend”, who had just returned from doing time in a German prison. He dates her for 3 weeks in which she cheats on him with 20 other guys and gives him VD. This is the one & only girl Ames sounds wistful for in the entire chapter.

And with that, this degenerate chapter finally ends. This is pretty edgy content even for back in 2000, and by 2021 standards? Forget about it.

Chapter Seven: Vanity and Spleen by Ames

This chapter jumps back in time with more background material on Ames, it’s a weird transition from the prior chapter. Does anyone care about what Mark Ames did before he teamed up with Matt Taibbi? The answer is no.

This chapter just makes Ames seem even shallower and more sociopathic. There’s all this self-effacing content about his insecurities which might have made him a bit sympathetic in theory, but after reading the last chapter any sensible person wants Ames burned at the stake.

Wah, Mark Ames feels terror after getting hate mail for writing hateful things about someone. Boo hoo, Mark Ames is sad because Matt Taibbi is stealing his spotlight. Cry, Mark Ames is jealous of Limonov for being more famous than him. It's all fucking cringe.

Only one interesting story here: Some US establishment suits wanted The Exile articles banned from an influential internet site for Russia-watchers, due to the aforementioned “rape” club review article ("rape" always scare-quoted in this context when mentioned in the book).

But then the rest of the Washington establishment folks who read the Russia site rally to The Exile’s defense, because of the sacred principle that “Thou Shalt Not Censor”. My my, how times have changed! This may be the single most dated reference in the entire book!

And that's enough about that. Really glad that was the last Ames chapter, he’s not a pleasant person to read about and I assume even less pleasant to know. It reflects really badly on Matt Taibbi that he was able to get along with a reprehensible sociopath like Ames for so long.

One more chapter to go, and it’s by Taibbi. We’re in the home stretch now.

Chapter Eight: Hacks by Taibbi

Final chapter of the book, Taibbi is gonna close it out with stuff about corporate journalism. I thought this chapter would be boring but there is some interesting stuff here.

Taibbi’s now telling us about his start in journalism… in the last chapter of the book. The structure of this book is just a mess. The eight chapters are really just eight totally independent essays. Anyway half of Taibbi’s family including his dad were journalists. Figures.

The journalists Taibbi knew from his youth were crusty, mean, disreputable mudslinging truth-tellers, and NOW all the journalists are craven lickspittle stenographers for power and he hates their laziness and bourgeois attitudes.

Taibbi thinks journalists should be sociopathic outsiders who print the truth no matter what it costs, and the Western press Russian bureaus are packed with lazy people who have no competition and just make things up because they know they’ll never be caught.

Taibbi writes that when he worked for the Moscow Times (a few years prior to his time at The Exile) he fabricated quotes that were ridiculous regularly just to avoid work and no one ever called him on it because all Russian bureau reporters did the same.

Taibbi names names of reporters who probably made stuff up and shows quotes they probably fabricated. Pretty based but this is people who wrote in Russia 20 years ago so not very relevant today. Comes off kinda quaint two decades later when the media gaslights the entire world.

Pages and pages about Western Russia-based journalists looking the other way at corruption. Matt is outraged. Yawn. I skipped a lot of this stuff, not gonna lie.

Okay, this is interesting. Taibbi tells basically the same story Ames did in the last chapter, about The Exile facing banning from a prominent Russia insider mailing list. But Taibbi’s retelling makes it sound much more sinister and there’s some real AJAB1 energy here, lemme try to summarize it sensibly.

The mailing list is discussing the merits of including The Exile’s serious articles and a Moscow bureau reporter for the Baltimore Sun, Kathy Lally, thinks The Exile should be banned due to their sexism and Ames’ murder threat and coerced abortion article. As one might.

So Taibbi and Ames decide to prank her, they have a female friend call her up pretending to be an Exile-hating censorious Christian missionary and asks Lally to help her file a complaint with FAPSI, which is like the Russian FCC, if the FCC regularly had people sent to the gulag.

Lally is of course kind of interested in helping, she wants The Exile shut down and will cooperate with the Russian secret police to do it. The Exile guys triumphantly run an article about the call, expecting all the other journalists to be infuriated at this censorship attempt.

But what happens is, Kathy Lally gets really upset and everyone sympathizes with her. Because journalism is high school and she’s one of the popular in-crowd kids and Ames and Taibbi are the loser burnout druggie kids everyone makes fun of.

A friend of Lally’s who works as Newsday's Moscow correspondent posts to the list, agreeing that The Exile should be banned, sympathizing with Lally, and accusing Ames and Taibbi of straight-up fabricating the prank phone call.

Taibbi is outraged by this accusation and feels his honor as a journalist has been impugned, so he rushes to her office demanding satisfaction. She just mogs him relentlessly, refuses to take him seriously, and asks him ridiculous questions, like “Is Taibbi an Armenian name?”

She refuses to apologize or even pretend to care about Taibbi’s complaint, so he goes crying to her boss, Newsday’s foreign editor. He says he’s friend of Kathy Lally’s and that he doesn’t approve of their misrepresenting themselves on the phone call with her. Sad trombone.

Taibbi is like, "No! THAT kind of lying is fine and nice and legal but libel is very serious." This guy ain’t having it, why would he? This is Taibbi's side of the story but he's not looking good. Didn't he accuse other journalists of lying with zero proof previously in this very chapter?

Kathy Lally finally gets serious, and Taibbi and Ames hear that she’s been calling all over town asking questions about their visa status and which oligarch is funding them. Taibbi says they’re very vulnerable to the Russian bureaucracy because they have no powerful patron.

Before they can do anything, Taibbi gets a call from his Emmy-winning ex-NBC Dateline dad. His dad just got a voice mail from Kathy Lally’s husband, who offhandedly mentioned he just won a Pulitzer & accused Matt of stalking his wife. He really just cold-called Matt's dad, a stranger, to complain.

Matt is really despondent about it, this guy who is Lally’s husband had been jailed in 1995 by Russian secret services for writing about their chemical weapons program & Taibbi had respected him for that so he’s really disillusioned that all these journalists want him censored.

Then the issue is just seemingly magically resolved when Taibbi’s dad talks to Lally’s husband, drops some comments about it being ironic Kathy’s helping the FAPSI given her husband’s prior experience, and the whole thing just blows over. Weird? But this is Matt's story.

"We are bold independent gonzo journalists who have no powerful backers and live on the edge and boldly tell the truth no matter what (except when we lie) and This One Time we almost got Sent To The Gulag but then My Dad Bailed Me Out Of Trouble." LMAO Matt.

(This anecdote made me realize that obviously Ames & Taibbi probably did secretly have some kind of elite support during this time and they're just not talking about it because if they hadn't had it they probably would have just been killed. "My dad fixed it" is likely a work.)

But anyway it worked out, this all leaves Taibbi filled with burning hate for corporate journalists which he I guess later soothes by... writing for Rolling Stone? IDK. But I like that attitude. It’s not AJAB but at least it’s MJAB.

And, that’s the end. In conclusion, this book is not very good. it’s all over the place in tone and in chronology. My sense of the principals is that Ames is a sociopath asshole and Taibbi is a bit of a weak-willed pussy who went along with it and mostly followed Ames’ lead.

BONUS CONTENT: From The Exile, April 5, 2001

Ames & Taibbi voted a New York Times Moscow correspondent as the Worst Journalist in Moscow. They barged into his office and Taibbi smashes a cream pie in his face while Ames and another Exile guy snapped photos.

A few days later, they publish the photos and reveal that the "cream pie" was made of horse semen. There are also photos of the horse and a horse semen cream pie recipe.

Part of me is like "NYT journalist eats horse cum, haha" but.. even Gawker at its worst wouldn't go there.

I first read this story when it came out almost 20 years ago and it still nauseates me to think about. If the guy had paid to have Ames & Taibbi killed I'd probably consider it justified. I recommend not reading this article, but here it is if you must.

Postscript

In 2017, Taibbi was canceled during the “MeToo” uproar, due to the content in this book. Some events scheduled to promote a book he wrote were canceled and he lost some writing gigs as well, I think.

The article that prompted Taibbi’s cancellation was published in the Washington Post in December 2017, and is by the one and only Kathy Lally. She finally got her revenge, served VERY cold!

Ames pushed back against this on The Exile website and slammed Lally’s dishonesty while calling attention to the relevant history between the antagonists.

However, Taibbi published an extremely craven “apology” rather than pushing back. He tried falling on his sword, with limited success. Matt admits to writing "dumb and hurtful things" when he was "young and a jerk" but vehemently denies EVER sexually harassing anyone and claims the book is satire & fiction, despite the copyright page claims of being non-fiction. Interesting defense.

Are journalists supposed to write fictional books and sell them to publishers and promote them as non-fictional in order to sell more copies? I kinda thought that kind of thing was frowned upon. This is what Matt is claiming though! AT BEST for him this is what happened.

Today Matt Taibbi is one of Substack’s most popular political journalists, and Ames is doing the War Nerd podcast with a former Exile contributor.