Trigger Warning: The following article discusses rape and sexual slavery.

On March 4, 2014, Gawker’s tech-focused subsidiary Valleywag published “Startup Flying Dateable Women to San Francisco Like It’s Imperial Japan,” stating, “A startup called The Dating Ring has taken its inspiration from an unlikely source: the ‘comfort women’ of World War II.”

Comfort Women were a group of up to 200,000 women who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army. Though comprised of women from Korea, China, Philippines, Taiwan, Burma, Indonesia, Netherlands, and Australia, this article focuses particularly on the Korean Comfort Women and their protest. The remaining Comfort Women are now in their 80s and 90s and are still awaiting a formal apology from the government of Japan, which has downplayed the horror of this episode in their military history. The backlash to Valleywag’s article was immediate, with a predominantly Asian-American group of “Hashtag Activists” flooding the author, Nitasha Tiku, as well as editors Sam Biddle and Max Read, with tweets demanding a retraction and apology.

Nitasha was the first to respond, tweeting, “Twitter seems like an unproductive forum for this kind of debate. Feel free to email,” neatly re-routing the conversation into the private forum in an attempt to shield herself and her employers from public scrutiny. One Bay Area resident, Kiriko Kikuchi, noting the hypocrisy of a company self-promoting in a public space yet deflecting criticism from that same space, accepted Nitasha’s invitation and sent her the following email: