  In a recent article, David Bartels addresses the issue of the band shape of
the genuine binding energy spectrum of the hydrated electron. He essentially
claims that the genuine binding energy of the hydrated electron must be
Gaussian in shape independent of the photon energy used for ionization,
contrary to what was found in our previous work for excitations energies in the
UV (3.6-5.8 eV photon energy). Further, he alleges that the asymmetric
(bimodal) distribution found for the genuine binding energy in our previous
work must have resulted from deficiencies in the scattering cross sections used
in the scattering calculations. Bartels concludes that these deficiencies arise
from an allegedly wrong value of -1.0eV for the escape barrier used in the
original fitting procedure to determine the scattering cross section. In the
following, we show that these claims are unfounded and based on partly
incorrect assumptions.
