TIL:
But I’d still occasionally see that something had hurt you and I’d worry about you, or I’d see that you had made changes that made a positive impact on your life (you seemed happy with a new diet, your surgery was tough but has made you feel better, you’re going to school for something you care about) and it made me smile.
Your photo in the snow is beautiful, it looks like you’re having so much fun and I’m so glad you have moments like that. But I have trouble processing this empathy for you and something that, from the outside, looks like obsessive negativity. Your own birthday post about Patton is the one I probably should have responded to because it was a combination of those same two things - appreciation of something while including dramatically divorcing language to distance yourself but due to my own volatile feelings about you I went off on someone else’s post as a proxy that still had things I could criticize. So I’m sorry for jumping on another post when I should have been directly addressing you.
These last few paragraphs were written after the bullet points, obviously, and I’m aware that there’s some tonal dissonance here. I still think my criticisms in the first few paragraphs are valid but do not have the energy to rewrite them in a way that is nicer and I don’t think you’d care much if I did anyway (but seriously, I’d recommend unlinking kiddo’s post, make a screenshot of it if you still want to show my response). I don’t know that you and I are ever going to get along but I do know that I am probably done with *this*. If you’d like to work with me to get me to believe what you believe, respond here or message me or send anons, I don’t care at this point. If you think you’ve said and done enough and are secure with the steps that you’ve taken to prove your point, fine, so be it.
Anyone reading this probably knows me, I’ve reblogged from my main before, I’m @ms-demeanor and my own last name pops up there a lot but I’d really like to stress @leperwitch‘s point that if someone has *not* shared their name on tumblr it is not cool to do so. AND I’d like to point out that I’ve heard from at least five people in the fandom now (including leperwitch) that they’re getting creepy anons with conspiracy theories in their inboxes; if anyone knows who this is or has been getting creepy anons the post I make immediately after this one is going to be about that, if you’re interested in finding out who else has been getting this shit please reblog it with your story. If you don’t want to share but just want it to stop using the block button on the anon will block that IP address so the anons will stop and the blogger making the asks will be blocked from your feed unless they go somewhere else to make their posts.
- That putting “!!!!!” on a post by a kid who’s gotten a response from someone on IG is the same as “In fact, it was YOU who encouraged this girl to travel from New Jersey to New York, by HERSELF, to take bass lessons from a man she doesn’t even know”. Sure. *I’m* the sanctimonious one here. Again, if you don’t like being called a liar don’t fucking lie.
- That you’re fine with keeping people you feel were threatened private until you want to prove a point. I thought the entire purpose of calling her Kiddo was to keep her out of this mess, why did you link to her to show off my exclamation points? Should we just start using her name now? (See also why I didn’t link your post @leperwitch )
- That a band member responding to a social media post is a serious about the things they say to their fans. Do you think she got a high five from Corey Taylor too? I think that one came up. Here’s a fun question to ask yourself if you’re into observation and empiricism: how do I know what I know? What I *know* is that a kid who was @ing a bunch of people she admired said that one had responded that he’d love to give her lessons. Did *you* see anything more disconcerting or any followups? Did you see his message to her? Since you’ve already outed this particular person maybe you can share some insight on that beyond what an excitable child who had been messaging a bunch of people she was fans of posted. If you can share that kind of information then *I* will know more and we can make some forward progress on this.
- That there’s child porn in Macumba. Legit had no idea. 100%, that is something I learned that I was not aware of because I hadn’t watched it because I figured it would be too upsetting. That is good to know for the future for completely shutting down any sharing of it and reporting any sharing of it. Actually thank you for that because I was not aware. I knew there was a suicide, I knew there was a scene of a person’s labia being nailed to a table; that’s all I knew because that’s what upset the other person and what I was talking to them about.
- That you *do* believe my standard of evidence is lower than yours *and* you believe the same thing about the rest of the fandom. Can you tell us how many people you know of that he’s attacked? Can you tell us the states in which people have made statements to the police against him so we know where he’s active? Those pieces of specific information would lend a lot more credence to your story, wouldn’t out any victims, and would do a better job of acting as a warning. But age, state, gender, and method of contact for each attack you know about would be a better survey of who could be protected while still not outing victims or detailing their trauma. And if you’d say what jurisdiction charges have been filed in they *could* be public record; I’d pony up five bucks for a name search and the first couple pages of a record if it meant there was proof of what you’re saying so that we could prove to other skeptical people that there’s a credible threat. Jesus fuck, I don’t want a rundown of each attack step by step, that’s depraved, but so far you’ve posted more proof that he’s a bad landlord than you have that he’s actually attacked anyone or perused minors on social media. If you believe this thing is true I want to know why you believe this thing is true but I don’t want to do it in hidden ask boxes where no one can see what’s going on because that’s how rumors and shit-flinging get started.
- That talking about your big, comprehensive post that *everyone* knows about is “cherry-picking.” (It has under 10 reblogs, please tell me that the stat counter you live and die by has it with at least a few hundred views because otherwise your claim of “everyone” is making me doubt your other claims even more). You said it yourself, it’s the most well-traveled post, it’s the one with the most details. It’s obviously the best choice to assess. I’d imagine that a future PI would care more about the fact that their statements could be easily picked apart than the fact that someone was picking it apart.
- That you interpret my social justice blogging as smugness and a holier-than-thou attitude. I’m sure there are plenty of people who see it that way, but I know there are plenty of people in the fandom who don’t and you’re right, that’s not how I want to come off because as it turns out I’m 100% sincere about it.
But I’d still occasionally see that something had hurt you and I’d worry about you, or I’d see that you had made changes that made a positive impact on your life (you seemed happy with a new diet, your surgery was tough but has made you feel better, you’re going to school for something you care about) and it made me smile.
Your photo in the snow is beautiful, it looks like you’re having so much fun and I’m so glad you have moments like that. But I have trouble processing this empathy for you and something that, from the outside, looks like obsessive negativity. Your own birthday post about Patton is the one I probably should have responded to because it was a combination of those same two things - appreciation of something while including dramatically divorcing language to distance yourself but due to my own volatile feelings about you I went off on someone else’s post as a proxy that still had things I could criticize. So I’m sorry for jumping on another post when I should have been directly addressing you.
These last few paragraphs were written after the bullet points, obviously, and I’m aware that there’s some tonal dissonance here. I still think my criticisms in the first few paragraphs are valid but do not have the energy to rewrite them in a way that is nicer and I don’t think you’d care much if I did anyway (but seriously, I’d recommend unlinking kiddo’s post, make a screenshot of it if you still want to show my response). I don’t know that you and I are ever going to get along but I do know that I am probably done with *this*. If you’d like to work with me to get me to believe what you believe, respond here or message me or send anons, I don’t care at this point. If you think you’ve said and done enough and are secure with the steps that you’ve taken to prove your point, fine, so be it.
Anyone reading this probably knows me, I’ve reblogged from my main before, I’m @ms-demeanor and my own last name pops up there a lot but I’d really like to stress @leperwitch‘s point that if someone has *not* shared their name on tumblr it is not cool to do so. AND I’d like to point out that I’ve heard from at least five people in the fandom now (including leperwitch) that they’re getting creepy anons with conspiracy theories in their inboxes; if anyone knows who this is or has been getting creepy anons the post I make immediately after this one is going to be about that, if you’re interested in finding out who else has been getting this shit please reblog it with your story. If you don’t want to share but just want it to stop using the block button on the anon will block that IP address so the anons will stop and the blogger making the asks will be blocked from your feed unless they go somewhere else to make their posts.
I
wanted to take some time to respond to this in the most level-headed
way possible, so if my response is late, know it’s because I took some
time to really ruminate on what was said:
As for the personal issues between us, maybe I come across as a negative person in many regards, but I’ve had a lot of very negative and deeply traumatic things happen to me. I have been a victim of extensive cyber-stalking, I have been taken advantage of by friends in my waking life that I thought I could trust, my own estranged father has been stalking me and my mother for years, which escalated after he applied to work at my former job while I was still working there. Last year was a very volatile, emotional year and I was using my blog to write through the pain and confusion I’ve felt. Sometimes writing out the negative things I feel helps me to eliminate that negativity. It wasn’t until this past month that I realized that what a friend did to me was sexual assault because I had been in denial about it for so long. From understanding that this was sexual assault and putting it in context with a near-abduction that happened just days later, I understood where all this anger in me comes from. It took eight years to figure that out. People have violated me over and over so I just went into offense mode.
When I first entered this fandom it was after being denied a promotion at my old job because the powers than be didn’t think I was the right fit due to my introversion and avoidant personality. I was severely depressed and was contemplating suicide every day. I decided to jump into the Pattonverse as a distraction from the worthlessness I felt inside. My blog had been private before then and I stayed away from people, but finally I just said “fuck it” and decided to throw myself in another fandom, another distraction, because it took my mind off of wanting to die. For the first half of 2016 I thought about killing myself every day. It wasn’t until I left that awful job and took a trip to NYC that i gained a renewed lease on life, and I found something worth living for again. For someone who struggles from clinical depression and anxiety, that was a huge, HUGE deal to feel like life was worth living for once.
It’s a bit sad that all these months you’ve seen my posts and wished that you could talk to me or hoped I was okay. You could have come to me at any point in time and said so. I didn’t hate you, we had a falling out about our opinions on a musician’s display of feminism and that was it. When it comes down to it, we’re not that different. We’ve both had things in our lives that made us they way we are. You didn’t have to be afraid to talk to me or care about me. What I meant by looking at your posts and going “nope” was mostly just a protection measure on my own account. I made friends with someone here years ago who reminds me a lot of you; she was very passionate about social causes and helping women survive domestic violence situations - and because I had a different interpretation of a painting than she did that depicted sexual assault, she went and made a big post about me being a rape apologist and called me disgusting, and she too tagged my legal name in that post. It’s unfair that life has made me assume that everyone is the same. I hate myself for it, but that’s how my mind works.
I don’t want to fight with you. I guess the reason why all of this irked me so much is because you are a very smart and highly perceptive person with sound opinions about things. I read through that birthday reply and felt sick at first, because without talking to me you just assumed I was lying through my teeth and trying to ruin someone’s career for my amusement. No, I didn’t always go about things the best way I could, but I did what I did because I didn’t want to see any other girl, any other kid of any gender, get hurt. Somebody had to be the aggressive one about it. There were fans here who knew about him doing things like this and just swept it under the rug. I couldn’t sweep it. At any point in time you could have talked to me about this. I never blocked you or told you to stay away from me.
The birthday post I made was really personal, maybe too personal. At the end of the day Patton is somebody I highly sympathize with because a lot of people have hurt him in his life, yet he’s come out through the other side of that use and abuse a stronger, better person. Much of the reason I make the posts that I do is because I want fans to appreciate him for who he is, not just as some cartoon character version that’s been projected by fans for so long. Talking with other fans here, hearing their personal stories, building a nice little community of supportive people - in a weird way that’s helped me heal and figure out what I want to do with my life. That’s why that post was so emotional. If it came off as trite or self-absorbed, I’m sorry.
- I only linked to Kiddo’s public Tumblr account to lend validity to my claim; I didn’t post her name or anything personal or private about her. I was just trying to show people who follow me that I didn’t pull an accusation about something out of my ass. Let me put something in better context, too - Trevor had DM’d this girl on Twitter about bass lessons five days after he broke up with his ex-girlfriend, the one who I’m friends with (as in we’ve talked a lot outside of Tumblr, including over the phone). A 13-year-old boy had been approached by him in a similar manner on Twitter, too. Five years ago he met a 15-year-old girl at a gig he did somewhere in Florida and they began corresponding online, and before long she was getting “bass lessons” from him too whenever he was back in the area. Do you see where I’m going with this? The girl from five years ago is someone who used to have a Tumblr account. For a while she openly talked about what was happening but later deleted her posts and abandoned her account. I saw a pattern of behavior out of him, coupled with what I had been told about teen girls he sexually assaulted, and alarm bells went off. I didn’t want this happening again. That’s the reason I made the posts I made in the first place. Could I have done this better? In retrospect, yes. I should have just messaged people in private to be wary of him but at the time I was angry about the way my friend had been treated by him and by how he was trying to solicit these kids online.
- Video Macumba does contain child pornography, and even downloading it could get somebody in deep trouble. I remember when that video was circulating here and it was horrifying to see that grown women had downloaded it and were going on about how it wasn’t as shocking as they expected. One girl even explicitly mentioned the child rape scene and just went “whatever” about it. That is a major, MAJOR thing that made me distrust this fandom. Patton was young when he made that compilation, maybe 22, and likely did it for the sake of shock value. He got the videos largely from Billy Gould and from underground traders. There was this interview on FNM Followers where Patton mentioned a Japanese fan giving him child pornography and he just joked about it. The point is that he was serious warped in the head back then and he had people who were intentionally warping him. A few months ago there was a post that went way more into detail about Billy’s role in all of this and I reblogged it but later deleted it. It’s something I’ve been scared of talking about.
- Regarding the legality of what Trevor did - there is somebody I talk to who is in the process of filing a lawsuit against him and for that reason I’ve had to either delete posts or heavily censor them. I don’t want to put her or her children in jeopardy by posting some of the most concrete evidence I have. I can tell you that through a simple Spokeo search you can find at least 32 individual court records for Trevor and some of them have to do with stalking and harassment suits (as well as a DUI charge). I didn’t purchase the court report but someone else did and told me what they found. He was arrested somewhere in East Asia for sexual misconduct with a prostitute who may or may not have been a sex trafficking victim. I don’t know the full story behind it but I do know he can’t enter the country again without facing arrest. Most of his stateside offenses, to my knowledge, are concentrated in New York. There could be further charges in California and possibly Florida. This is literally all I know concerning that side of things.
- And yes, regarding that one post - it has gotten hundreds of views since I posted it. Maybe it wasn’t shared extensively on Tumblr, but it had a wide reach off-site. The post was shared in Facebook groups and I know that Trevor saw it. This was another factor in my ban from FNM Followers. Before Thanksgiving last year I was getting obsessive views on this post and two others from someone with a Brooklyn, NY IP address. This same IP address combed through 62 pages worth of blog material, singled out several posts, and then seemingly mailed them off to someone (as Statcounter displayed “mailto” links in URLs). It got to a level where I placed a script blocker on his IPs so he couldn’t access my blog anymore. Despite that there have been other users here getting harassing anon messages regarding this whole mess and telling them that I’m dangerous. Two of them in particular share mutual friends with Trevor IRL and I think that’s why they’ve been extensively targeted.
As for the personal issues between us, maybe I come across as a negative person in many regards, but I’ve had a lot of very negative and deeply traumatic things happen to me. I have been a victim of extensive cyber-stalking, I have been taken advantage of by friends in my waking life that I thought I could trust, my own estranged father has been stalking me and my mother for years, which escalated after he applied to work at my former job while I was still working there. Last year was a very volatile, emotional year and I was using my blog to write through the pain and confusion I’ve felt. Sometimes writing out the negative things I feel helps me to eliminate that negativity. It wasn’t until this past month that I realized that what a friend did to me was sexual assault because I had been in denial about it for so long. From understanding that this was sexual assault and putting it in context with a near-abduction that happened just days later, I understood where all this anger in me comes from. It took eight years to figure that out. People have violated me over and over so I just went into offense mode.
When I first entered this fandom it was after being denied a promotion at my old job because the powers than be didn’t think I was the right fit due to my introversion and avoidant personality. I was severely depressed and was contemplating suicide every day. I decided to jump into the Pattonverse as a distraction from the worthlessness I felt inside. My blog had been private before then and I stayed away from people, but finally I just said “fuck it” and decided to throw myself in another fandom, another distraction, because it took my mind off of wanting to die. For the first half of 2016 I thought about killing myself every day. It wasn’t until I left that awful job and took a trip to NYC that i gained a renewed lease on life, and I found something worth living for again. For someone who struggles from clinical depression and anxiety, that was a huge, HUGE deal to feel like life was worth living for once.
It’s a bit sad that all these months you’ve seen my posts and wished that you could talk to me or hoped I was okay. You could have come to me at any point in time and said so. I didn’t hate you, we had a falling out about our opinions on a musician’s display of feminism and that was it. When it comes down to it, we’re not that different. We’ve both had things in our lives that made us they way we are. You didn’t have to be afraid to talk to me or care about me. What I meant by looking at your posts and going “nope” was mostly just a protection measure on my own account. I made friends with someone here years ago who reminds me a lot of you; she was very passionate about social causes and helping women survive domestic violence situations - and because I had a different interpretation of a painting than she did that depicted sexual assault, she went and made a big post about me being a rape apologist and called me disgusting, and she too tagged my legal name in that post. It’s unfair that life has made me assume that everyone is the same. I hate myself for it, but that’s how my mind works.
I don’t want to fight with you. I guess the reason why all of this irked me so much is because you are a very smart and highly perceptive person with sound opinions about things. I read through that birthday reply and felt sick at first, because without talking to me you just assumed I was lying through my teeth and trying to ruin someone’s career for my amusement. No, I didn’t always go about things the best way I could, but I did what I did because I didn’t want to see any other girl, any other kid of any gender, get hurt. Somebody had to be the aggressive one about it. There were fans here who knew about him doing things like this and just swept it under the rug. I couldn’t sweep it. At any point in time you could have talked to me about this. I never blocked you or told you to stay away from me.
The birthday post I made was really personal, maybe too personal. At the end of the day Patton is somebody I highly sympathize with because a lot of people have hurt him in his life, yet he’s come out through the other side of that use and abuse a stronger, better person. Much of the reason I make the posts that I do is because I want fans to appreciate him for who he is, not just as some cartoon character version that’s been projected by fans for so long. Talking with other fans here, hearing their personal stories, building a nice little community of supportive people - in a weird way that’s helped me heal and figure out what I want to do with my life. That’s why that post was so emotional. If it came off as trite or self-absorbed, I’m sorry.
SO I’m aiming for a new kind of tone in my interactions here because I’ve been mulling over this for the last few days and I think the radical vulnerability thing was the right approach.
I’m not the kind of person who is comfortable having things going on privately in the background for a couple of reasons and I think that’s been the foundation of a lot of our head-butting here; you’re trying to protect the people you know and I’m unwilling to learn things that need to be kept secret. I super extra do not want to know something that needs to be kept out of the public eye because it is stressful for me personally to try to juggle that, to try to gauge whether I can educate one person about one thing without betraying the trust of another person.
If I find out that Alice knows Bob’s history because Alice is friends with Charlie, who is also friends with Bob, but doesn’t want people to know she’s friends with Charlie what happens when Darla wants to know if Alice’s information about Bob is reliable? The correct answer is to forward that question over to either Alice or Charlie but if neither of them are available or responsive that means it’s *my* decision about how to educate Darla and I don’t want to give up Alice or Charlie’s secrets but I also don’t want Darla getting herself in trouble because she just won’t take me at my word.
This has been the root of my problem with a lot of what has gone on surrounding the Dunn issue in the fandom and this post is someplace that I think we have a lot of ground to move forward on. There is enough information provided above that I would feel comfortable doing more research without worrying that I’d be digging into the secrets of private individuals who don’t want their friendships divulged for good reasons. The posts that have made in the past here hinge on a “contact me for more info” ethos that only works if you’re sure you’re always going to be on tumblr, if you’re sure your blog isn’t going to be deleted etc, etc. Keeping things out in the open means that even if your blog is deleted and you never answer another ask there the reblogs with the info aren’t getting taken down and can still be found by people who don’t know whether you’re reliable or not but can trust the data. (and I don’t mean “you” to be accusatory here, “you” should be read a general in that sentence.
With that being said, on to response:
1 - Thanks for taking the time, I appreciate that.
2 - Those details are useful information, the fact that he contacts minors through social media is something you’ve brought up before but timelines and proximity to life events is something I hadn’t realized and could be really useful in organizing a plan of avoidance or noticing behaviors that are dangerous.
3 - Again, I just had no idea there was child porn in it, yes the shock-value thing sounds accurate, I know a lot of men who were teenagers in the 80s or 90s who had similar shock collections (though usually with adults). I think part of it may be general fuck-up-ed-ness and youth, I think part of it may have been related to personal trauma, and I think part of it may have just been that the culture of pornography in the 80s and 90s was weird in a way that really just does not scan these days. But I’m down with a 100% moratorium on Macumba; y’all, there’s child porn in that. If you share it I will totally report you.
4 - Sweet, totally makes sense if you’re concerned about causing a problem for ongoing litigation, that I get. Knowing the states where some of this stuff has happened is useful and I’ve already got a link to the spokeo report and will be downloading it so we can put up some information that’s public record and won’t track back to your friends or any minors.
5 - Good that your post has gotten wider range than its tumblr notes would suggest, that’s excellent to know. As to the rest, I can’t speculate, but blocking the IP was probably wise.
6 - Fair, that doesn’t seem totally out of line for confronting someone who is harassing a person who has come forward as a rape victim.
7 - I think I mentioned to you a whiiiiile back that there are a lot of fucked-up (through no fault of their own) people in this fandom and I feel you. Part of the reason I’m so personally attached to FNM is because a lot of the music was what helped me get through realizing what I had experienced was CSA which laid the foundations of reactions that led to multiple later rapes and abusive partners. I am therefore hyper-sensitive when this sort of thing comes up and it sounds like you and I had a lot of the same motivations with very different approaches and that I probably read too much into some of your statements because of my personal issues. It sounds like we were *both* in offense mode and like it grated on both of us.
8 - I’m really sorry that last year had you feeling like that and I’m really glad to hear you’re feeling more in control of your situation and better in general. I hope the upward trend continues.
9 - It sounds like we’re also both avoidant - part of the reason my posts have been so vitriolic is because I don’t like petty conflict but I have trouble getting over things so I bottle grudges and let them go all at once. It’s not healthy and I’m working on it and I’m sorry you got caught in the fallout. I think we’re actually probably really similar in the way we approach things and react to things and don’t trust people, which is probably why we butt heads (I have a very clear, stupid, INTJ Virgo personality that I’m constantly discounting because I know those things don’t really mean anything bud damnit if they don’t seem to apply a lot). I’m going to probably need a cool-down period and to spend some time time reprogramming but I very much doubt I’ll ever immediately distrust you or immediately react to you in the way that I have in the past.
10 - Again, I should have spoken directly to you but I’d stubbornly decided that you were untrustworthy and didn’t want to and I’m glad I’m reexamining that. Your post wasn’t trite or too sappy or anything, and feel the way you want to, I was reading into the language from a not-great perspective and that was my problem. We both seem to want the same things (to have a nice community on tumblr, not to fight, to not have anyone abused or victimized if it could have been prevented). And I think part of the reason I was reading a lot into your post was because, again, we feel the same way. Man, I really like Patton’s music but he’s just some dude. He has a dog and does laundry. He does get dehumanized by being pedestalized and it bugs me. He’s got a killer voice and he’s a very skilled lyricist. He’s been through shit and keeps making good music, and I admire that.
I am sorry I came down so hard on mrbunglefantomas’s post (not tagging ‘cause I’m not sure if she would want me to after that) because it really wasn’t her post I was aiming at so much, though I maintain that shipping real people is disconcerting at best and that fanfic did become a problem in the fandom so I’m leery of it coming back. She didn’t deserve the avalanche of shit she found herself under and I’m sorry for that.
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