My Truth
Or my perception of events. But it’s true for me.
Life this year has had highs and deep lows. I’m writing this to try to set some of it in context, mostly for myself.
A year ago the Spuffy fandom was experiencing a slightly shaky patch. There are currently three archives which store old fic and welcome new material. A year ago the Spuffy fandom was experiencing a slightly shaky patch. There are currently three archives which store old fic and welcome new material. Two years ago, in one of them, an individual made a mistake, and instead of consequences arriving at that time, they came about a year later. The handling of that mistake was not ideal, at either time. Possibly completely unrelated to that issue, in January two of the team in charge suddenly found that they weren’t. It was distressing to many including, I understand, to those who made the decision, but in particular to the individuals most profoundly affected. Possibly completely unrelated to that issue, in January two of the team in charge suddenly found that they weren’t. It was distressing to many including, I understand, to those who made the decision, but in particular to the individuals most profoundly affected.
About a month later on the same archive a story, a work in progress, was deleted at very short notice on the grounds that it was not appropriate for the site. There was something of a fuss made by other members, and the story was reinstated. Connected with this, and allegations of extremely unpleasant messaging, one more of the leadership group departed, and one of the people ousted the preceding month felt it was right to explain her understanding of what had happened in a post on LJ/DW.
I contacted the person concerned, someone I had known since the days when LJ was the thriving centre of the BtVS fandom. Initially I expressed my sympathy, then offered my support if she had an idea of starting an alternative archive site, where writers and readers could feel safe. Ultimately she decided to go ahead and set up a team of five people, including herself, to discuss options and move forwards.
Of those five, one was myself, and two more were people I “knew” from earlier fandom interactions. The fifth was a person I had never encountered previously and who spent much of this year struggling with personal and medical problems: to this day those concerns are almost all I know about her.
We created a FaceBook page initially, partly because there was clearly a niche as another group had closed down its operations there and moved to another platform, partly to begin to gauge interest in alternatives. It was more successful than we had hoped and encouraged us to think seriously about starting a new site separate from social media platforms.
The person who drew the group together is a single mother on a limited income, but she invested a considerable portion of her savings to purchase a domain name, web-hosting and the other things necessary to run a site. We chose to use software which is very dated but very common across many fandoms because it allows the hosting of a very large number of text files without gobbling up bandwidth.
A person who was once connected to the establishment of another archive offered to help, but was somewhat overwhelmed by our ambition and felt the need to withdraw while the construction was far from complete. Three of us worked hard to learn the techniques necessary to create “skins” - the screens you see on going to the site - and struggled to get our heads round the technical side. We were undoubtedly out of our depth.
Then the husband of one of the group, an IT professional with considerable skills and experience, stepped in. He was hugely unimpressed by the original code - it’s a decade and a half old and undoubtedly clunky - and pretty much made it his own. He tweaked a great deal of the “back end” to make it more stable and restricted the design options to make it more straightforward to put together effective skins. He continued to play an important role in running the site and trouble-shooting, setting up on a further social media platform for ease of access in the case of problems, complaints and requests. IOW he made himself completely indispensable.
We opened the site in early summer and I contacted quite a few fandom friends, including some who had moved on from the fandom, and asked them to allow us to host their stories. We were authorised by some of them to upload stories on their behalf, a time-consuming but rewarding task which I applied myself too - far from alone in that.
Meanwhile one of the team had started an account on yet another sm platform, and I suggested a Twitter account, which I created in early August. I’ve been on Twitter for about six years, but really flounder when it comes to technical stuff there, and the only way I could find to create an account was by linking it to my personal account. There may well be better alternative routes; I didn’t know them.
We continued to grow the archive steadily, though the proportion of older material to new was still fairly substantial. We ran an opening “event” and devised ways of encouraging graphic artists to post and new formats to be used - the tech guru was particularly important in this regard.
I tweeted links to the site when new material appeared and boosted the signal of Spuffy material tweeted or linked there. The BtVS fandom on Twitter skews very young, naïve and somewhat tempted to extreme drama.
Then the Queen died.
I posted a tweet suggesting that Spike and Giles were raising a glass to her late Majesty, and liked a couple of others using the account.
And then one user, we’ll call them “H”, tweeted that nobody cared about “that crusty old bitch”; Buffy came back to life twice and would always be her Queen.
I saw this while I was logged in on the archive account, and responded using it - in retrospect unwise of me. I pointed out that Buffy, while an amazing character, is fictional, while the Queen was a real person at that point not yet buried. H doubled down and I repeated more or less the same words.
Our personal life was a trifle complicated at that time. I had spent most of the fortnight leading up to the Queen’s death living in an Oxford college doing in-person readings with a group of academic friends of the complete works of Christopher Marlowe and plays influenced by or influencing his work. (The day after the accession of King Charles III, as it happened, we read Edward III and Richard III.) My mobility was very poor - I found it impossible to walk as far as a supermarket, so lived on sandwiches and salads bought for me by Dave - so I was pretty much permanently exhausted.
We finished on the Friday and spent the weekend packing, leaving the country for our first holiday on the continent since the pandemic started. For three weeks we were out of the country, travelling or staying in rented holiday apartments. Both of us had health problems during this period; physical and emotional in each case. This may in part explain what happened, though I do not offer it as an excuse.
At some point over the weekend another participant joined the discussion on Twitter. We’ll call them “T”. They launched a series of really unpleasant attacks on the Queen, essentially holding her responsible for every fault of British imperialism over the last multiple centuries. I responded calmly, as I saw it, pointing out that there is still a distinction between a fictional and a real person, and that before she was even buried it was perhaps inappropriate to blame her. Even nastier replies resulted. To the best of my knowledge and belief I did not “flame” T until the last one. I should have withdrawn from the exchange much earlier, I know, but I didn’t. In my last tweet before finally disengaging I added “And to think I know people who like you.” That is the sum total of my abuse of T. (The full handle is known in the fandom and I have reason to believe the individual concerned acted as a beta for one of my friends whose work I was busy uploading.)
I should have backed away. It was a weird time - many Brit friends I know shared a strange sense of grief and disorientation. You’d have to be in your mid-late 70s even to remember a time without the Queen, and knowing how many details were inevitably changing - from the national anthem to stamps, coins, all sorts of details of everyday life - unsettled a lot of us. I still consider it to be the height of rudeness to call any recently-deceased person a “crusty old bitch”, actually. I was outraged, felt any decent person would have been.
Then, some while later - I’m blurry on the dates - the team member I knew least posted on the group chat that the Twitter account had been used for political purposes. By the time I saw it there had been an extensive discussion about whether we needed the twitter anyway, what was the account doing and so on. It was all entirely in the third person and seemed to be reaching conclusions without me or the person in a very different time zone. I was upset. It felt as if a kangaroo court had been set up, judging my actions, deciding what would happen next and all without once mentioning my name. I grudgingly agreed to post the text of an apology dictated by one of the others, who had not read any of the exchange, and deleted all the tweets concerned. The emphasis three of the four others put on it all was that I was engaging in political discussion; I did not really grasp how the death of the Queen counted as such - to me it was all about unacceptable abuse of a recently-deceased old and distinguished lady.
Life continued. A number of times - perhaps 8, perhaps a dozen at most - I liked posts or retweeted things, forgetting, to be honest, which account I was in. If you have ever tried running two Twitter accounts you’ll know how easy that is to do.
And then the same member reported on me to the group. Yes, it felt exactly that, like a child telling tales, when a brief direct message to me would have brought me up short and made me do what I later did and undo the likes and RTs. Moreover, the person concerned reported that “someone” had told them the account was liking political stuff. That felt very off to me. At no point did it cross my mind that a member of the archive had contacted the person reporting it - after all, any emails to admins went to all of us.
One of the problems with communication was that between us we were in three or four different time zones. That meant a lot of the discussion happened when one or more of us was either missing or exhausted by the late hour. One on occasion it was past 4am before I got to bed. On one of these late nights (I think - I’m too blurred to recall precisely when each thing happened) I was particularly upset that this person had gone to the group with information from their “spies”. An hour or more later debate with the others seemed to be reaching an agreed way forward, and then that individual came online, read my comment and went into a huge, flaming rant. I replied in kind and told them to F off. Then, some while later - I’m blurry on the dates - the team member I knew least posted on the group chat that the Twitter account had been used for political purposes. By the time I saw it there had been an extensive discussion about whether we needed the twitter anyway, what was the account doing and so on. It was all entirely in the third person and seemed to be reaching conclusions without me or the person in a very different time zone. I was upset. It felt as if a kangaroo court had been set up, judging my actions, deciding what would happen next and all without once mentioning my name. I grudgingly agreed to post the text of an apology dictated by one of the others, who had not read any of the exchange, and deleted all the tweets concerned. The emphasis three of the four others put on it all was that I was engaging in political discussion; I did not really grasp how the death of the Queen counted as such - to me it was all about unacceptable abuse of a recently-deceased old and distinguished lady.
Life continued. A number of times - perhaps 8, perhaps a dozen at most - I liked posts or retweeted things, forgetting, to be honest, which account I was in. If you have ever tried running two Twitter accounts you’ll know how easy that is to do.
And then the same member reported on me to the group. Yes, it felt exactly that, like a child telling tales, when a brief direct message to me would have brought me up short and made me do what I later did and undo the likes and RTs. Moreover, the person concerned reported that “someone” had told them the account was liking political stuff. That felt very off to me. At no point did it cross my mind that a member of the archive had contacted the person reporting it - after all, any emails to admins went to all of us.
One of the problems with communication was that between us we were in three or four different time zones. That meant a lot of the discussion happened when one or more of us was either missing or exhausted by the late hour. One on occasion it was past 4am before I got to bed. On one of these late nights (I think - I’m too blurred to recall precisely when each thing happened) I was particularly upset that this person had gone to the group with information that seemed to have come from outside - as if they had it from their “network of spies”. I used that term. An hour or more later, debate with the others seemed to be reaching an agreed way forward, and then that individual came online, read my comment and went into a huge, flaming rant. I replied in kind and told them to F off.
The next day tempers had calmed, I thought. I apologised for my intemperate language and it seemed to me that the whole affair had been put to bed. I took steps to make the password to the account available to all, but Twitter’s mechanisms wouldn’t allow me to change the linked email.
I thought we had sorted things out. Then two of the original “core four” suddenly disappeared from the group chat, the linked sm platforms and activities on the site. After a few days I was worried, though I knew both had recent/pending house moves, so after sending a few direct messages and getting no answer, I assumed that RL was getting in the way, so I got on with keeping an eye on the various social media and the archive itself, doing the day-to-day stuff.
After about ten days of absence the two returned to the group chat. It was the weekend before Halloween, Dave and I were in London meeting friends, then staying in a B&B with very iffy wifi, and spending time with our daughter, who had been ill so it was the first time we’d seen her and the little ones since early September. I noticed there’d been activity on the group chat, but with the business and the wifi I just let it run - the whole point of having a group was that it didn’t need everyone there at once, right?
We got home very late on the Sunday, so it was the Monday before I really caught up with things and saw that the whole sorry episode was being dragged up again. This time the two absentees were both saying they weren’t sure they really wanted to continue being on the admin team at all. It was all, once more, at a time the member in the most extremely different time zone could be guaranteed to be asleep. This pattern was repeating itself so often it felt deliberate. Who knows? It may just have been unthinking.
It was also Halloween, so they were not prepared to discuss things because they had to take their children out - fair enough. But late at night they started again and it became clear it had suddenly (from my POV) become a “me or them” situation. And, of course, one of the pair threatening to leave was the wife of the tech guy, who would hardly be likely to remain if she went. I emailed the person in the other time zone pointing this out, and they commented on the “power imbalance” when, their morning, my very late night, they joined in.
It became clear to me that this was a deliberate, sustained campaign to make me withdraw voluntarily. Back at the time of the mess about the Queen I had offered to resign, only to be assured “we love you, we don’t want you to resign”. Now I was not ready to go. I went to bed at two am. By this stage I was in such an acute stage of mental distress that Dave had become aware of what was going on and intervened, making it quite clear that he felt what was happening was extreme and unjustified.
The next morning I emailed one of the two who had been absent, asking if they were effectively working as a team. I begged them not to ignore this contact as I now realised they must have ignored other attempts by me. I had a garbled reply saying they were driving to work, not ignoring me, but no substantive response beyond that. Later I discovered from the chat log that my email had been shared and was being characterised as emotional blackmail.
On the Tuesday things started to kick off mid-afternoon, despite an agreement that discussion would only happen when all members were awake and able to take part. The tech-guy’s wife stated repeatedly that she had no trust in me, that trust was gone absolutely, and so one of us had to go.
I became extremely distressed.
Then I had to participate in my regular Tuesday commitment, online Zoom playreading with the academic group. It was a play by Ben Jonson, The Silent Woman. His plays are always long and it was a huge struggle for me to focus. I admit I cut into my arms - pain can be a useful distraction and I had to stay with the reading group to the end of the play. It's a serious academic commitment, you see, not just a bit of fun, though it usually is that as well, to be fair. Not that night.
By the time we’d finished I was a mess, literally and figuratively. Dave had to take over writing on the chat as I was crying and shaking too much. At one point I was told it was ridiculous to get so worked up over a website. And I was literally told “You’re unstable!” (Well, yes. Guess why.) The upshot was that I was removed from all my admin functions with immediate effect. Dave then made me go to bed, so it wasn’t until the next morning that I read the rest of the conversation, some of which seemed to me at the time to be positively gleeful, and some of which was the cheery sharing of photos of members when much younger. I had been disposed of, so they could go back to having fun. The other person who had paid up front for the site also stated that they were withdrawing from the site, after removing me.
The next day I had an email from one of the team saying she was “there for me” - it felt like arrant hypocrisy. It may simply have been tone-deafness in an emotional sense.
The rest of that week is a bit of a blur, to be honest. Dave contacted the Mental Health Crisis Team, I was prescribed various drugs (which is what is keeping me calm enough to type all this) and I had a two or three hour assessment interview with the team to determine a way forward. I have to say, the fact that they took me seriously and did not tell me it was too much fuss over something like a website was validating. R and her husband were with us that weekend - they came for the fireworks at the Castle, the first time they’d been on since the pandemic. We had to tell them a bit and R was loving and supportive - and wanting to plot revenge, bless her.
A week later the same individual who had “reported” me emailed me to say they had tried to use the twitter account but two-stage protection made that impossible. (I had never set that up.) They had an exciting new challenge to announce, so would I share my phone number with them, the number linked to the account, so they could take it over. I’m afraid I refused. Dave wrote on my behalf and pointed out that when “trust” had been made the core issue, they were actually asking me to trust them with my personal details.
I was going to leave it at that, until I saw what their “exciting event” actually was. For some reason they decided a “White Elephant” was a good name for a fic exchange of some kind. In a mood of childish mischief - and I know it was wrong - I used the account to tweet the link to the Wikipedia page defining a white elephant.
The next day an ultimatum arrived from the person who had called me unstable. Delete the account, hand it over, or be permanently banned from the archive - and they would report me to Twitter. Dave again replied on my behalf. He decided that in my currently still very fragile state I should not have any further dealings with the group and asked them to contact me only through him. Neither of us take kindly to bullying or ultimatums, and I’m afraid that his email was icily, and deliberately, polite in a British way that is often described as passive-aggressive.
No surprise, then, really, that he got a response starting “I have no desire to correct the misunderstandings and/or mischaracterizations you've laid out, or to respond to the passive aggressive threats and insults.” There were no mischaracterisations. Or threats. But the email concluded by announcing that my access to the site was being removed. By the time I went to look there was no evidence a user of my name had ever existed. All the stories, gone. Including the “Exclusive to that site” story. All the comments, gone.
Ironically, my outrage all those months ago at the deletion of the WIP from that other site had been exacerbated by the fact that the writer never had a chance to save the comments. I’d downloaded all my comments from that location not long after - but never bothered to do the same from the site that was designed to be, above all else, safe, kind and friendly. The writer concerned was the individual who wrote those emails to Dave and, presumably, then took action.
And on that point, I really don’t see the value of that site continuing. It was founded, as I understood it, with the primary purpose of being supportive, forgiving, helpful - above all, safe. It’s turned out to be none of the above.
I’ve tried very hard to write this as dispassionately and truthfully as I can. This is my truth, my understanding of what happened. I don’t exactly feel the urge to protect that site, but I’m not looking for revenge and not asking for any sort of action. I am still very angry and very distressed. The MH team tells me I need to think in months, not weeks, for recovery. At present just waking up not crying is a victory. I have to take a pill at midnight so I don't actually wake up shaking. (That’s self-pity. Sue me.)
If you have followed me here or on the parallel journal for any length of time you can probably work out names of people and sites. If you haven’t, you really don’t want to, trust me. (Hollow laugh.) I’m not claiming to be an innocent victim here, but I do feel the punishment was way beyond what was justified. The wording on the site describes me as someone "who was entrusted with" the job of being an admin. The power relation that implies is, well, interesting. And I would call it a mischaracterisation. But only if I was being kind.
So, three people have charge of the site now. Not one of them invested actual cash into it. The person who first funded the venture tried to refund me my outlay. As if I could possibly accept that sort of money from her: it was repaid at once, so at least PayPal has profited from the whole sorry affair. As far as I am aware no attempt has been made by the people who now have the site to pay her, or me, our investment. I would not accept their money, but I am disgusted that they have not recognised the moral obligation to repay the person who almost emptied their savings to start the archive.
If you visit the archive site you will see an announcement of the changes in the admin team. It is, from my POV, vindictive, partial and inaccurate. Like so much of this whole thing, the presumption seems to be that I have negligible personal integrity. Dave, FWIW, also feels it is a spiteful version of what happened.
But they say I should believe they all care for me and wish me well.
Now that last bit? I’m calling that for what it is. A damned lie.
So, it's a fandom kerfuffle. They used to be two a penny. Fewer now, as there are fewer in the fandom. A good sign? Great.
If you've read this far, thanks. Once more, I am very much not asking anyone to act or speak up on my behalf. But it's affected me deeply and will take a fair bit of getting over, so I thought I would share it here, so people understand where I'm coming from.
Life this year has had highs and deep lows. I’m writing this to try to set some of it in context, mostly for myself.
A year ago the Spuffy fandom was experiencing a slightly shaky patch. There are currently three archives which store old fic and welcome new material. A year ago the Spuffy fandom was experiencing a slightly shaky patch. There are currently three archives which store old fic and welcome new material. Two years ago, in one of them, an individual made a mistake, and instead of consequences arriving at that time, they came about a year later. The handling of that mistake was not ideal, at either time. Possibly completely unrelated to that issue, in January two of the team in charge suddenly found that they weren’t. It was distressing to many including, I understand, to those who made the decision, but in particular to the individuals most profoundly affected. Possibly completely unrelated to that issue, in January two of the team in charge suddenly found that they weren’t. It was distressing to many including, I understand, to those who made the decision, but in particular to the individuals most profoundly affected.
About a month later on the same archive a story, a work in progress, was deleted at very short notice on the grounds that it was not appropriate for the site. There was something of a fuss made by other members, and the story was reinstated. Connected with this, and allegations of extremely unpleasant messaging, one more of the leadership group departed, and one of the people ousted the preceding month felt it was right to explain her understanding of what had happened in a post on LJ/DW.
I contacted the person concerned, someone I had known since the days when LJ was the thriving centre of the BtVS fandom. Initially I expressed my sympathy, then offered my support if she had an idea of starting an alternative archive site, where writers and readers could feel safe. Ultimately she decided to go ahead and set up a team of five people, including herself, to discuss options and move forwards.
Of those five, one was myself, and two more were people I “knew” from earlier fandom interactions. The fifth was a person I had never encountered previously and who spent much of this year struggling with personal and medical problems: to this day those concerns are almost all I know about her.
We created a FaceBook page initially, partly because there was clearly a niche as another group had closed down its operations there and moved to another platform, partly to begin to gauge interest in alternatives. It was more successful than we had hoped and encouraged us to think seriously about starting a new site separate from social media platforms.
The person who drew the group together is a single mother on a limited income, but she invested a considerable portion of her savings to purchase a domain name, web-hosting and the other things necessary to run a site. We chose to use software which is very dated but very common across many fandoms because it allows the hosting of a very large number of text files without gobbling up bandwidth.
A person who was once connected to the establishment of another archive offered to help, but was somewhat overwhelmed by our ambition and felt the need to withdraw while the construction was far from complete. Three of us worked hard to learn the techniques necessary to create “skins” - the screens you see on going to the site - and struggled to get our heads round the technical side. We were undoubtedly out of our depth.
Then the husband of one of the group, an IT professional with considerable skills and experience, stepped in. He was hugely unimpressed by the original code - it’s a decade and a half old and undoubtedly clunky - and pretty much made it his own. He tweaked a great deal of the “back end” to make it more stable and restricted the design options to make it more straightforward to put together effective skins. He continued to play an important role in running the site and trouble-shooting, setting up on a further social media platform for ease of access in the case of problems, complaints and requests. IOW he made himself completely indispensable.
We opened the site in early summer and I contacted quite a few fandom friends, including some who had moved on from the fandom, and asked them to allow us to host their stories. We were authorised by some of them to upload stories on their behalf, a time-consuming but rewarding task which I applied myself too - far from alone in that.
Meanwhile one of the team had started an account on yet another sm platform, and I suggested a Twitter account, which I created in early August. I’ve been on Twitter for about six years, but really flounder when it comes to technical stuff there, and the only way I could find to create an account was by linking it to my personal account. There may well be better alternative routes; I didn’t know them.
We continued to grow the archive steadily, though the proportion of older material to new was still fairly substantial. We ran an opening “event” and devised ways of encouraging graphic artists to post and new formats to be used - the tech guru was particularly important in this regard.
I tweeted links to the site when new material appeared and boosted the signal of Spuffy material tweeted or linked there. The BtVS fandom on Twitter skews very young, naïve and somewhat tempted to extreme drama.
Then the Queen died.
I posted a tweet suggesting that Spike and Giles were raising a glass to her late Majesty, and liked a couple of others using the account.
And then one user, we’ll call them “H”, tweeted that nobody cared about “that crusty old bitch”; Buffy came back to life twice and would always be her Queen.
I saw this while I was logged in on the archive account, and responded using it - in retrospect unwise of me. I pointed out that Buffy, while an amazing character, is fictional, while the Queen was a real person at that point not yet buried. H doubled down and I repeated more or less the same words.
Our personal life was a trifle complicated at that time. I had spent most of the fortnight leading up to the Queen’s death living in an Oxford college doing in-person readings with a group of academic friends of the complete works of Christopher Marlowe and plays influenced by or influencing his work. (The day after the accession of King Charles III, as it happened, we read Edward III and Richard III.) My mobility was very poor - I found it impossible to walk as far as a supermarket, so lived on sandwiches and salads bought for me by Dave - so I was pretty much permanently exhausted.
We finished on the Friday and spent the weekend packing, leaving the country for our first holiday on the continent since the pandemic started. For three weeks we were out of the country, travelling or staying in rented holiday apartments. Both of us had health problems during this period; physical and emotional in each case. This may in part explain what happened, though I do not offer it as an excuse.
At some point over the weekend another participant joined the discussion on Twitter. We’ll call them “T”. They launched a series of really unpleasant attacks on the Queen, essentially holding her responsible for every fault of British imperialism over the last multiple centuries. I responded calmly, as I saw it, pointing out that there is still a distinction between a fictional and a real person, and that before she was even buried it was perhaps inappropriate to blame her. Even nastier replies resulted. To the best of my knowledge and belief I did not “flame” T until the last one. I should have withdrawn from the exchange much earlier, I know, but I didn’t. In my last tweet before finally disengaging I added “And to think I know people who like you.” That is the sum total of my abuse of T. (The full handle is known in the fandom and I have reason to believe the individual concerned acted as a beta for one of my friends whose work I was busy uploading.)
I should have backed away. It was a weird time - many Brit friends I know shared a strange sense of grief and disorientation. You’d have to be in your mid-late 70s even to remember a time without the Queen, and knowing how many details were inevitably changing - from the national anthem to stamps, coins, all sorts of details of everyday life - unsettled a lot of us. I still consider it to be the height of rudeness to call any recently-deceased person a “crusty old bitch”, actually. I was outraged, felt any decent person would have been.
Then, some while later - I’m blurry on the dates - the team member I knew least posted on the group chat that the Twitter account had been used for political purposes. By the time I saw it there had been an extensive discussion about whether we needed the twitter anyway, what was the account doing and so on. It was all entirely in the third person and seemed to be reaching conclusions without me or the person in a very different time zone. I was upset. It felt as if a kangaroo court had been set up, judging my actions, deciding what would happen next and all without once mentioning my name. I grudgingly agreed to post the text of an apology dictated by one of the others, who had not read any of the exchange, and deleted all the tweets concerned. The emphasis three of the four others put on it all was that I was engaging in political discussion; I did not really grasp how the death of the Queen counted as such - to me it was all about unacceptable abuse of a recently-deceased old and distinguished lady.
Life continued. A number of times - perhaps 8, perhaps a dozen at most - I liked posts or retweeted things, forgetting, to be honest, which account I was in. If you have ever tried running two Twitter accounts you’ll know how easy that is to do.
And then the same member reported on me to the group. Yes, it felt exactly that, like a child telling tales, when a brief direct message to me would have brought me up short and made me do what I later did and undo the likes and RTs. Moreover, the person concerned reported that “someone” had told them the account was liking political stuff. That felt very off to me. At no point did it cross my mind that a member of the archive had contacted the person reporting it - after all, any emails to admins went to all of us.
One of the problems with communication was that between us we were in three or four different time zones. That meant a lot of the discussion happened when one or more of us was either missing or exhausted by the late hour. One on occasion it was past 4am before I got to bed. On one of these late nights (I think - I’m too blurred to recall precisely when each thing happened) I was particularly upset that this person had gone to the group with information from their “spies”. An hour or more later debate with the others seemed to be reaching an agreed way forward, and then that individual came online, read my comment and went into a huge, flaming rant. I replied in kind and told them to F off. Then, some while later - I’m blurry on the dates - the team member I knew least posted on the group chat that the Twitter account had been used for political purposes. By the time I saw it there had been an extensive discussion about whether we needed the twitter anyway, what was the account doing and so on. It was all entirely in the third person and seemed to be reaching conclusions without me or the person in a very different time zone. I was upset. It felt as if a kangaroo court had been set up, judging my actions, deciding what would happen next and all without once mentioning my name. I grudgingly agreed to post the text of an apology dictated by one of the others, who had not read any of the exchange, and deleted all the tweets concerned. The emphasis three of the four others put on it all was that I was engaging in political discussion; I did not really grasp how the death of the Queen counted as such - to me it was all about unacceptable abuse of a recently-deceased old and distinguished lady.
Life continued. A number of times - perhaps 8, perhaps a dozen at most - I liked posts or retweeted things, forgetting, to be honest, which account I was in. If you have ever tried running two Twitter accounts you’ll know how easy that is to do.
And then the same member reported on me to the group. Yes, it felt exactly that, like a child telling tales, when a brief direct message to me would have brought me up short and made me do what I later did and undo the likes and RTs. Moreover, the person concerned reported that “someone” had told them the account was liking political stuff. That felt very off to me. At no point did it cross my mind that a member of the archive had contacted the person reporting it - after all, any emails to admins went to all of us.
One of the problems with communication was that between us we were in three or four different time zones. That meant a lot of the discussion happened when one or more of us was either missing or exhausted by the late hour. One on occasion it was past 4am before I got to bed. On one of these late nights (I think - I’m too blurred to recall precisely when each thing happened) I was particularly upset that this person had gone to the group with information that seemed to have come from outside - as if they had it from their “network of spies”. I used that term. An hour or more later, debate with the others seemed to be reaching an agreed way forward, and then that individual came online, read my comment and went into a huge, flaming rant. I replied in kind and told them to F off.
The next day tempers had calmed, I thought. I apologised for my intemperate language and it seemed to me that the whole affair had been put to bed. I took steps to make the password to the account available to all, but Twitter’s mechanisms wouldn’t allow me to change the linked email.
I thought we had sorted things out. Then two of the original “core four” suddenly disappeared from the group chat, the linked sm platforms and activities on the site. After a few days I was worried, though I knew both had recent/pending house moves, so after sending a few direct messages and getting no answer, I assumed that RL was getting in the way, so I got on with keeping an eye on the various social media and the archive itself, doing the day-to-day stuff.
After about ten days of absence the two returned to the group chat. It was the weekend before Halloween, Dave and I were in London meeting friends, then staying in a B&B with very iffy wifi, and spending time with our daughter, who had been ill so it was the first time we’d seen her and the little ones since early September. I noticed there’d been activity on the group chat, but with the business and the wifi I just let it run - the whole point of having a group was that it didn’t need everyone there at once, right?
We got home very late on the Sunday, so it was the Monday before I really caught up with things and saw that the whole sorry episode was being dragged up again. This time the two absentees were both saying they weren’t sure they really wanted to continue being on the admin team at all. It was all, once more, at a time the member in the most extremely different time zone could be guaranteed to be asleep. This pattern was repeating itself so often it felt deliberate. Who knows? It may just have been unthinking.
It was also Halloween, so they were not prepared to discuss things because they had to take their children out - fair enough. But late at night they started again and it became clear it had suddenly (from my POV) become a “me or them” situation. And, of course, one of the pair threatening to leave was the wife of the tech guy, who would hardly be likely to remain if she went. I emailed the person in the other time zone pointing this out, and they commented on the “power imbalance” when, their morning, my very late night, they joined in.
It became clear to me that this was a deliberate, sustained campaign to make me withdraw voluntarily. Back at the time of the mess about the Queen I had offered to resign, only to be assured “we love you, we don’t want you to resign”. Now I was not ready to go. I went to bed at two am. By this stage I was in such an acute stage of mental distress that Dave had become aware of what was going on and intervened, making it quite clear that he felt what was happening was extreme and unjustified.
The next morning I emailed one of the two who had been absent, asking if they were effectively working as a team. I begged them not to ignore this contact as I now realised they must have ignored other attempts by me. I had a garbled reply saying they were driving to work, not ignoring me, but no substantive response beyond that. Later I discovered from the chat log that my email had been shared and was being characterised as emotional blackmail.
On the Tuesday things started to kick off mid-afternoon, despite an agreement that discussion would only happen when all members were awake and able to take part. The tech-guy’s wife stated repeatedly that she had no trust in me, that trust was gone absolutely, and so one of us had to go.
I became extremely distressed.
Then I had to participate in my regular Tuesday commitment, online Zoom playreading with the academic group. It was a play by Ben Jonson, The Silent Woman. His plays are always long and it was a huge struggle for me to focus. I admit I cut into my arms - pain can be a useful distraction and I had to stay with the reading group to the end of the play. It's a serious academic commitment, you see, not just a bit of fun, though it usually is that as well, to be fair. Not that night.
By the time we’d finished I was a mess, literally and figuratively. Dave had to take over writing on the chat as I was crying and shaking too much. At one point I was told it was ridiculous to get so worked up over a website. And I was literally told “You’re unstable!” (Well, yes. Guess why.) The upshot was that I was removed from all my admin functions with immediate effect. Dave then made me go to bed, so it wasn’t until the next morning that I read the rest of the conversation, some of which seemed to me at the time to be positively gleeful, and some of which was the cheery sharing of photos of members when much younger. I had been disposed of, so they could go back to having fun. The other person who had paid up front for the site also stated that they were withdrawing from the site, after removing me.
The next day I had an email from one of the team saying she was “there for me” - it felt like arrant hypocrisy. It may simply have been tone-deafness in an emotional sense.
The rest of that week is a bit of a blur, to be honest. Dave contacted the Mental Health Crisis Team, I was prescribed various drugs (which is what is keeping me calm enough to type all this) and I had a two or three hour assessment interview with the team to determine a way forward. I have to say, the fact that they took me seriously and did not tell me it was too much fuss over something like a website was validating. R and her husband were with us that weekend - they came for the fireworks at the Castle, the first time they’d been on since the pandemic. We had to tell them a bit and R was loving and supportive - and wanting to plot revenge, bless her.
A week later the same individual who had “reported” me emailed me to say they had tried to use the twitter account but two-stage protection made that impossible. (I had never set that up.) They had an exciting new challenge to announce, so would I share my phone number with them, the number linked to the account, so they could take it over. I’m afraid I refused. Dave wrote on my behalf and pointed out that when “trust” had been made the core issue, they were actually asking me to trust them with my personal details.
I was going to leave it at that, until I saw what their “exciting event” actually was. For some reason they decided a “White Elephant” was a good name for a fic exchange of some kind. In a mood of childish mischief - and I know it was wrong - I used the account to tweet the link to the Wikipedia page defining a white elephant.
The next day an ultimatum arrived from the person who had called me unstable. Delete the account, hand it over, or be permanently banned from the archive - and they would report me to Twitter. Dave again replied on my behalf. He decided that in my currently still very fragile state I should not have any further dealings with the group and asked them to contact me only through him. Neither of us take kindly to bullying or ultimatums, and I’m afraid that his email was icily, and deliberately, polite in a British way that is often described as passive-aggressive.
No surprise, then, really, that he got a response starting “I have no desire to correct the misunderstandings and/or mischaracterizations you've laid out, or to respond to the passive aggressive threats and insults.” There were no mischaracterisations. Or threats. But the email concluded by announcing that my access to the site was being removed. By the time I went to look there was no evidence a user of my name had ever existed. All the stories, gone. Including the “Exclusive to that site” story. All the comments, gone.
Ironically, my outrage all those months ago at the deletion of the WIP from that other site had been exacerbated by the fact that the writer never had a chance to save the comments. I’d downloaded all my comments from that location not long after - but never bothered to do the same from the site that was designed to be, above all else, safe, kind and friendly. The writer concerned was the individual who wrote those emails to Dave and, presumably, then took action.
And on that point, I really don’t see the value of that site continuing. It was founded, as I understood it, with the primary purpose of being supportive, forgiving, helpful - above all, safe. It’s turned out to be none of the above.
I’ve tried very hard to write this as dispassionately and truthfully as I can. This is my truth, my understanding of what happened. I don’t exactly feel the urge to protect that site, but I’m not looking for revenge and not asking for any sort of action. I am still very angry and very distressed. The MH team tells me I need to think in months, not weeks, for recovery. At present just waking up not crying is a victory. I have to take a pill at midnight so I don't actually wake up shaking. (That’s self-pity. Sue me.)
If you have followed me here or on the parallel journal for any length of time you can probably work out names of people and sites. If you haven’t, you really don’t want to, trust me. (Hollow laugh.) I’m not claiming to be an innocent victim here, but I do feel the punishment was way beyond what was justified. The wording on the site describes me as someone "who was entrusted with" the job of being an admin. The power relation that implies is, well, interesting. And I would call it a mischaracterisation. But only if I was being kind.
So, three people have charge of the site now. Not one of them invested actual cash into it. The person who first funded the venture tried to refund me my outlay. As if I could possibly accept that sort of money from her: it was repaid at once, so at least PayPal has profited from the whole sorry affair. As far as I am aware no attempt has been made by the people who now have the site to pay her, or me, our investment. I would not accept their money, but I am disgusted that they have not recognised the moral obligation to repay the person who almost emptied their savings to start the archive.
If you visit the archive site you will see an announcement of the changes in the admin team. It is, from my POV, vindictive, partial and inaccurate. Like so much of this whole thing, the presumption seems to be that I have negligible personal integrity. Dave, FWIW, also feels it is a spiteful version of what happened.
But they say I should believe they all care for me and wish me well.
Now that last bit? I’m calling that for what it is. A damned lie.
So, it's a fandom kerfuffle. They used to be two a penny. Fewer now, as there are fewer in the fandom. A good sign? Great.
If you've read this far, thanks. Once more, I am very much not asking anyone to act or speak up on my behalf. But it's affected me deeply and will take a fair bit of getting over, so I thought I would share it here, so people understand where I'm coming from.