At last, this saga has reached its predictable conclusion: New York Times Columnist Bret Stephens has pulled out of a planned discussion with the George Washington University professor who called him a “bedbug” on Twitter.

Per the professor, David Karpf, Stephens wanted the event to be closed to the public, a request that Karpf characterized as “unreasonable.”

“I felt that given this order of events, him coming back at this late date and saying ‘I want this to be closed to the public’ was uncalled for. I felt like that was him reneging on the deal, and I said no,” Karpf tells DCist. “They went back to him [with my answer], and he said ‘okay we’re not doing it.'”

Slate was the first to report on Stephens pulling out of the planned conversation with Karpf, who is a professor at GW’s s School of Media and Public Affairs.

The event was set to be a kind of postmortem on an August Twitter controversy that didn’t end well for Stephens, who was mocked all over the internet and eventually deactivated his Twitter account.

It began when Karpf tweeted an offhand joke comparing Stephens to a bedbug, which (at the start of this whole thing) had zero retweets and only nine likes. Stephens then emailed Karpf, cc’ing his university provost, and dared him to come to Stephens’ home and “call me a ‘bedbug’ to my face.” Karpf posted a screenshot of the email on Twitter, and virality ensued.

The GW provost copied on the email, Forrest Maltzman, responded to Stephens, inviting him to come speak about “civil discourse in the digital age” on GW’s campus. Stephens accepted the invitation. And per Karpf, it really appeared this thing was going to happen: they had set a date for October 28, agreed on a moderator, and Karpf had begun reaching out to people to invite them to the event. They were set to publicly announce the talk on Sunday. But last Friday, Stephens reportedly began expressing reservations to the organizers.

“He would only do the event if it was closed to the public and only open to GW students,” Karpf says. But Karpf wanted the event open to everyone. “It’s important to me, because I felt there’s deeper lessons in this about how people mobilize power to protect status hierarchies,” he says.

Plus, there was that whole thing where Stephens wrote a New York Times column that appeared to compare Karpf’s “bedbug” comment to Nazi propaganda. That column, Karpf says, was Stephens dragging the episode even further into the public sphere, which Karpf says he simply couldn’t square with a sudden request to keep the rest of the conversation private. “That seemed like him flexing his biggest resource, his New York Times column, to have the last word,” Karpf says.

A spokesperson for the Times has not responded to DCist’s request for comment on the cancellation. Stephens himself referred Slate to the director of GWU’s School of Media and Public Affairs, Frank Sesno. Sesno wrote back: “We were unable to come to terms on the format of the event, which is why it is not taking place. There was a series of conversations and we never publicly announced the event because, as I say, we could not come to mutually acceptable terms on the format.”

Karpf, for his part, is unsurprised by this turn of events. “The thing I have found giggle-worthy for a month is I would advise anyone [in his position] that they should cancel they event, because there’s basically no win for him in doing it. When he announced he was doing it I assumed he would find a way to quietly back out,” says Karpf, who teaches classes on strategic political communication at GW.

But that doesn’t meant he’s glad it’s not happening.

“I’m curious if there’s a perspective on this that I really don’t understand. Is there a world in which I would emerge from the event thinking ‘you know I really hadn’t considered this in this way before?'” he says. “I don’t know the answer to that. And now we’ll never know.”

Previously:
Why Everyone Is Talking About Bedbugs, NYT Columnist Bret Stephens, And A GW Professor
Post Bedbug Debacle, NYT Columnit Bret Stephens Is Apparently Coming To GW