Stephen Elliott is an American writer, editor, and filmmaker currently living in Los Angeles who has written and published seven books and directed two films. He is the founder and former Editor-in-Chief of the online literary magazine The Rumpus. In December 2014, he became senior editor at Epic Magazine.
Elliott went on the campaign trail and wrote a book about the 2004 U.S. presidential race, Looking Forward to It: or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying About It and Love the AmericanElectoral Process. His novel Happy Baby, edited by Dave Eggers and co-published by McSweeney's and MacAdam/Cage, was released in February 2004. The paperback of Happy Baby was published by Picador in January 2005. His book My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up is a collection of S&M erotica, sometimes referred to as a sexual memoir, published by Cleis Press in 2006. In April 2007, he published an essay about his experiment of not using the Internet for one month, writing: "I could feel my attention span lengthening. I would think about problems until I figured them out." In 2008, he started The Rumpus, an online cultural commentary site. In 2009, he published a true-crime memoir about the Hans Reiser murder trial called The Adderall Diaries, which was adapted into the 2015 film of the same name, in which James Franco played Elliott.
Films
In 2012, Elliott directed the film About Cherry, based on a script written by Lorelei Lee and himself. The film starred Ashley Hinshaw, James Franco and Dev Patel, and debuted at the 2012 Berlin International Film Festival. In December 2012, Elliott raised the funds via Kickstarter to shoot his second film, Happy Baby, based on his novel of the same name. Production was completed on July 7, 2013 and the movie was released in 2016.
In November 2015, Claire Vaye Watkins published an essay in Tin House describing an incident where Elliott was allegedly sexually aggressive and left her uncomfortable. In 2017, Elliot was included on the "Shitty Media Men" list, a crowd-sourced Google spreadsheet containing allegations of sexual misconduct against men in the media industry. The allegations against Elliott included "rape accusations, sexual harassment” and “coercion". In October 2018, Elliot filed a lawsuit against the person who started the spreadsheet, journalist Moira Donegan. After Elliott filed the suit against Donegan, former Rumpus managing editorLyz Lenz accused Elliott of groping her and described on Twitter an incident where Elliott "hounded" her about watching a movie in his hotel room. In an article in The Federalist, Elliott stated that, despite being anonymously accused of rape, "no one has ever come forward with anything resembling a rape charge."
