Yes.
Now I am here. The story of how I ended up here and all that happened on the road is now told for my part - at least, the parts of the story that I want to make public. I have made decisions and had experiences and thoughts apart from my Leaky Experiences that made me want to create a place like this. I am not going to share all of them.
But one reason I have no trouble discussing - it is what the heading says - the need for a place fit to contain all my essaylength rants, instead of weighing down diverse forums with them, epxloiting bandwidths and clogging discussions with my endless Torill Length Posts....
Now that the last Harry Potter book has been out for a month, the need for TLP space should have been greater than ever. But my initial reaction was wanting to throw the book at the wall and never read a Harry Potter book ever again. Leave the fandom and forget the whole thing...
But it's been a month. I have had some time to think, to discuss some parts with some friends - and now I think I am ready, finally, to use this place to investigate my reactions the way I thought I should before I read the book. Now, I think I consider the book to be a good one - if you disregard the epilogue, that is. I hate the epilogue. I am going to pretend that the epilogue was never included the next time I reread....
The book is not at all the kind of book I expected it to be. The whole series is not what I thought it was.
Harry ends up as someone dealing with his traumas through denial instead of maturing from them. At least, this is what the epilogue suggests. That disappointed me the most. I still haven't recoverd from that one.
Dumbledore was not a wise man. He had more in common with Voldemort than it is comfortable to contemplate, and his strategic planning was abysmally stupid. And that's putting it mildly. It is a marvel that it all went well for Harry in the end, when Dumbledore's plans and manipulations are taken into consideration. I expected none of this to be true. I have spent a considerable amount of energy during the last couple of years arguing against fandom theories that made Dumbledore deceitful and stupid - and now these theories are canon....
Snape is not only a deeply troubled character, wrecked and very far from good - I knew that already - but he is also pathetic.
The once intriguing Order of the Phoenix has turned out to be not intriguing at all. Instead, they come across as a strangely castrated and lame organisation, a band of yesmen seemingly without any discussions or reflections going on among them, wholly dependent on Dumbledore to tell them what to do, ready to accept any order from him without explanation. Sirius is the only exception, he based at least some of his judgements and decisions on something else than the motto: I trust Dumbledore. But he was completely castrated by his author in book five before she killed him off and explained away all his independence as immaturity or rashness. And what did the Order get for all their loyalty? Their leader sold them out for no valid strategic reason at all... Moody died because Dumbledore had ordered Snape to betray them. It was only luck that saved the rest of them from the same fate. But this, too, is accepted witout question. No one is to criticise Dumbledore. (At least it was accpeted by Harry - it is not clear whether he ever told anyone about this fact - or even allowed himself to realise what a betrayal it was)
Consequently, the Order is without much importance in the final war. (And perhaps they were without much importance in the first war too. After all, everyone lived in terror until the rebounding Avada.) The victory this time was ensured by the disobedient teenagers in Dumbledore's Army raising the fight, not by the adults in the Order. They needed someone else to act first, someone else to think of, choose and initiate actions not ordered by Dumbledore....
All of this sounds like I still hate the book and think it is bad - but I don't. None of the above makes a bad book in my opinon. What I needed to do to start appreciating it, though, was to completely abandon the idea that the Harry Potter books are about Good versus Evil. They are not that at all as I see them now. This is a series that investigates Power in its many variations, for good and for bad, with its many pitfalls, temptations and contradictions - and Harry is the hero because he didn't want Power for himself. It is also a series with a very strong Father/ Son theme, in an (almost) religious sense (thanks Therese!)
Still - I am not quite ready to appreciate this fully. I will need to discuss the themes above from a within the series positions first. A position where the characters and events are taken as real for as long as the discussion lasts. I am so disappointed with some of them, I need to get that out!
Eventually, I will be able to discuss the series from without as well, looking at meaning and underlying themes and how they are developed, etc. Only then may I be able to draw some conclusions about just how good the series is in my opinion.
I think I will need to start with Dumbledore. The deceitful, manipulative, slightly cruel Dumbledore with the high ideals and the good intentions, unable to trust anyone else but himself to make the right choices, for all his lip service to the motto: it is our choices that make us who we are. He wanted to believe in it I am sure, but he still thought he had to engage in all kinds of clever manipulations or open coercions to push people into making the choices he thought were the right ones. The control of information was perhaps the least evil of his manipulations, staging a murder the worst....
My first Torill Length Post from within the series will be about this worst of Dumbledore's several dubious acts - worst both in a moral and a strategic sense.
So, coming up next: A Death In Shame. Check back to read, but since it will be long, it may take a little while...
Tuesday, 14 August 2007
Saturday, 14 July 2007
Closure of the Leaky Experience: Open Letter to Melissa, Part Two
First part of this letter to be read here. This part picks up directly where that one ended.
Was our request to have our texts created for the Essay Project withdrawn a "petty and horrible" act, as you called it in your answering letter to us?
It is clear that we had the legal right to do it. According to copyright laws, any work done for an organisation that is substantial and original enough to be viewed as an independent creation (the compiling of information already out there does not count, neither do mere ideas,) is the property of the one creating it, as long as no clearly stated or signed agreement to the contrary exists. No such clearly stated agreement existed between us, so the bulk of the texts we wrote for the Essay Project did belong to us - even more so since all our work was unpaid.
But perhaps it may still be seen as "petty and horrible" to claim our legal rights under copyright laws to have our work withdrawn from Leaky. I am the last one to argue that what is legal is always nice. You certainly thought it was not at the time, as is evident from your answer to us:
We are under no - repeat, NO - obligation to change a word or submit to any requests you make. You left before you made such requests, denying any right to request anything of Leaky ever again. Further, you did the work for Leaky. It stays for Leaky. Whether you signed an agreement or something to that effect or not, all laws of common sense and righteousness says this was work for Leaky. But you want to be immature about it, and cost your colleagues, who you so often claim you valued so much and were so good to, this extra work simply to be spiteful?
Your chief argument seems to be that no matter our reasons for leaving your site, we should still feel honour bound to uphold Leaky and in no way inconvenience your staff or cost them any extra work. The reason why I say this, is because this inconvenience is something you come back to repeatedly as the reason for what you seem to feel is righteous anger:
I won't allow you to cheat this hardworking staff, who don't bolt the second things don't go their way (leaving a nasty PM in their wakes), out of their valuable time. Everything that needs doing has been done, by me.
(...)
I am deeply, deeply disappointed that we ever made a judgement call to have people so capable of pettiness on staff. This simple, unnecessary busy work that it took to rid our site of your "intellectual property", mindless and effortless as it was, was time I didn't need to spend - was time I could have been working on other areas of Leaky that actually need the attention and aren't the result of adults having hissy fits.
Just to clarify here: our letter to you was politely worded. I don't think it qualifies as a hissy fit. But if you still think that it does, or if you feel that my quotes are taken out of context, and therefore misrepresent what you originally said in any way, just let me know. Then I will post this whole conversation in the full, consisting of our request letter, your answer that I have quoted from so far, and the couple of letters to and fro that followed after that again. (A couple of quotes below will be from these later letters.)
The "simple, unnecessary busy work" you describe, refers of course to tweaking sentences and wordings in our texts a bit, enough to make them no longer recognisable as ours. That was all it took to satisfy copyright laws. It did not mean actually starting on scratch to create anything afresh. We sent our request letter to you on the 26th of February 2006, your answer was receieved on the 27th of February. Then you had done everything that was needed already. So the work involved was not an insurmountable hindrance. Irritating perhaps, inconvenient, sure. Not the thing you would want to spend an evening doing. But not in any way devastating for the project. Scribbulus did go online shortly afterwards and is still very much in existence.
When what it all boiled down to was one evening's work of - in your words - "simple", "effortless" and "mindless" editing and rewording, was it then petty and immature of us to make this grand gesture of claiming "intellectual property" and "withdrawal of our permission" under copyright laws, for something one could argue was of precious little consequence?
I am not going to argue that point, but leave it up to anyone who reads this to decide for themselves what they think. Also leave it up to you to decide for yourself what you think now, whether you have changed your mind since then or not.
I do want to argue your idea that what we did was motivated by spite, though. We had two major reasons that played an important part when we decided to do this. One was because - as I have touched upon in my narrative below - we at this point discussed the possibility of creating an online essay journal ourselves. Then we could have risked accusations of plagiarism if we had used some of our own work, because it would have seemed like we had stolen things from you.
I will grant you this: if we had left Leaky under normal circumstances, you could have had a case against us. You coud have called us disloyal and spiteful for taking our work from you to launch somewhere else just when you were about to go online with your essay section, and indeed accused us of using copyright laws to hurt you.
Because one could of course argue that there is a certain kind of implicit agreement in existence between a webmistress of a faniste and her volunteer contributers - the deal is that both parties are supposed to do the work they do for the fans, not for any personal gain, and therefore willingly share their work.
But we did not leave under normal circumstances. The main reason why we no longer wanted to have our work and our names connected to Scribbulus or even to Leaky, was because of the evidence suggesting so very strongly that Therese had been subjected to an ugly game behind her back, aimed at - or so it seemed - pushing her away from the project she had worked so hard for, a project that in very many ways was her baby. And that this evidence was not taken seriously when it was presented to the admins, first Nick, then the rest. Not taken seriously or even looked into when it was presented to you.
This was - the way we saw it - what constituted a deal breaker. Before this happened we were both very happy to work for Leaky, and wanted nothing more than to see the essay journal we dreamt of creating being published under the Leaky umbrella. But no implicit agreement between webmistresses and volunteers of fansites has ever meant that people must suffer lies and scheemes against them, and still be expected to remain loyal and share their work. This was the reason why we felt fully entitled to reclaim our work in order to be able to use it elsewhere.
What shocked me the most with your letter, and what I still to this very day have great difficulties getting my head around, is the fact that you seemed to think in the exact opposite manner. You seemed to think that leaving Leaky and then reclaiming our work, no matter the reasons for doing this, was what constituted the deal breaker. It is very difficult to understand the following quotes in any other way :
All pretence of "inquiry" into the circumstances regarding your departures are hereby ceased. You have, by this action, wasted all that work on you and your friends's behalf. Therese, have had only two instances in which to gather empirical evidence about you: the day you left, and this. And in both instances you have shown pettiness, churlishness, childishness and impatience, and qualities verging on mean spirit. I had reserved judgment after the first instance because of the stressful situation under which it occurred, and was actually considering weighing the evidence recently afforded to me (...) I had actually considered wasting valuable time on making these determinations, on someone who, when the going got slightly rough, up and left and did so leaving a mean note behind - not because I thought you were owed it, but because I never really had a chance to figure out what went on, and thought it totally possible the whole thing was a misunderstanding, and that you really were as nice as other people were saying you were.
No more. (...) Leaky will spend its time on the people who respect it, and no one else. You have insulted the site deeply, and personally.
You, Therese, left on the very day we were supposed to talk about what was going on - at the time I thought that act driven from tiredness, stress, etc., and tried not to believe it was from simple disrespect. Now I know differently.
(...)
No Leaky staff memeber shalll respond to any further inquiry in any official capacity. (...) This matter is now closed.
I am not going to say anything more about the possible pettiness, childishness or meanspiritedness of our request to have our work withdrawn than I have done aleady. But what about the possible childishness etc. by "up and leave as soon as the going got rough"?
Yes, to anyone reading your email conversations with Therese concerning her role in the Essay Project, her resignation may seem somewhat sudden and abrupt. Because during that conversation, it did seem that you were about to reach some sort of agreement, even though the atmosphere was rather tense. Then Therese suddenly sends her resignation letter, with a pm copy to her fellow staff members, saying she will not work for Leaky anymore because she has been subjected to powergames and negative talk behind her back. This is the pm you keep referring to as "nasty" and "mean" in your letter.
But when Therese decided to "up and leave", she had received the pm Doris forwarded to her that I have quoted earlier (at the end of this entry). This pm shows that she was subjected to "negative talk behind her back", and that two of the admins, Nick and Doris, actually did discuss among themselves the need of getting rid of her.
At that point, Therese believed you had received a copy of this pm too. That was what Doris had told her. In that light, your conversations with Therese do not look good. You took her to task for being stubborn and obtrusive and not wanting to accept Doris as a leader (which she did, and said repeatedly that she did...) You talked to her about how giving up some control and hand it over to Doris would actually be very liberating since it was all in the friendly spirit of Leaky where everybody only wants to help (this is paraphrasing, not quoting). If you had talked like this to her while all the time knowing about this pm where Nick says to Doris that he really thinks they ought to get rid of her, then this conversation would have been a rather nasty sort of game to play, definitely.
Therese thought you did know, and did play with her. Therefore she decided to leave instead of waiting for more of this. And telling her colleagues about her reasons for leaving, yes, she did that too.
But which is the meanest and nastiest - engage in powergames against someone - or tell your fellow staff that these kinds of games against you are the reason why you are leaving?
I am willing to believe, though, that at the point when Therese left, you actually did not know. That Doris had lied to Therese about this, and never showed the pm from Nick to you. This is possible, yes. Then Therese's sudden departure and her talk of "powergames" might have come as a total suprise to you, and you may well have found it annoying and strange.
But what is still very difficult to understand, is your attitude that seems to imply that leaving Leaky in anger for whatever reason, is an act that will forever forfeit anyone's rights to have anything investigated, to be ever reached out to in order to clear up possible misunderstandings, to be ever approached again with the hope of repairing an unhappy conflict - or even only in order to continue a conversation that seems to have been broken for reasons not understood by one of the parties....
You said: You, Therese, left on the very day we were supposed to talk about what was going on - at the time I thought that act driven from tiredness, stress, etc., and tried not to believe it was from simple disrespect.
If this is true, if you really did wonder at the time whether this was an act driven by stress and tiredness only - then why didn't you contact her? You had her email address. And you did reply to her resignation, you sent her a short note accepting it immediately, without any questions. Why? Why not simply ask her: what on earth are you talking about, what power game, who's talking about you behind your back? Then you could have found out. But she had "up and left" ....
By the time you wrote this angry letter, you had received all my documentation about what happened around the time when she left, Doris' forwarded pm included. But this doesn't seem to matter to you, you are still not willing to revise your first impression of someone "bolting the second things didn't go her way" no matter the possible alternative explanations you are given for this behaviour. You were perhaps willing to say "bolted because of stress" - but when she has the nerve to claim ownership to her own work, that slightly patronising explanation is out too.
The impression that you really do seem to think leaving Leaky abruptly in a way that annoys you, does constitute a moral deal breaker no matter the reason, is even stronger when reading this:
I had actually considered wasting valuable time on making these determinations, on someone who, when the going got slightly rough, up and left and did so leaving a mean note behind - not because I thought you were owed it, but because I never really had a chance to figure out what went on, and thought it totally possible the whole thing was a misunderstanding, and that you really were as nice as other people were saying you were.
Of course you had a chance to figure out if you had really wanted to, see above. Many chances, she hadn't gone incognito or changed her mailaddress. But why did you think she was not owed it, if you thought it totally possible that her leaving was due to a misunderstanding, and she was a nice person? Because leaving Leaky in anger, in and of itself, no matter the reason for the anger, is unforgiveable? Because telling other staff about your reasons for leaving, thus exposing a conflict, is unforgiveable?
But in my book, anyone should be owed an investigation of lies against their person from one of your trusted and powerful admins, no matter how angry they were when they left. Even if that anger should have beeen proven to be unreasonable, which is not the case here. Justice is not supposed to be granted only to the ones you like, or the ones loyal to you.
What is more, and what I think it is remarkable that you, as the leader of Leaky, did not understand at the time - and perhaps still do not understand? - is that it was more at stake here than Therese's individual good name. A lot more. You talked about us "hurting Leaky deeply and personally" by withdrawing our permissions to use some texts in an isolated project. But by choosing not to investigate some very serious and specific claims presented to you of corruption in your organisation, because it concerned someone you decided were not owed it - then you actually risked a much, much greater damage to Leaky.
Even in the couple of furious letters you sent to Therese with copies to me, you said about the evidence I had sent you: "of wich there is equal for and against your/Torill's claims" and "with the evidence that is absolutely level in credibility from both sides, I'd be doing at least half the people involved here a huge disservice if I decided that one lied and the other didn't. With further investigation maybe we would have come to the truth -"
So even when you were at your angriest, you did think there was a possibility - a 50% possibility - that something very ugly had happened in your organisation, and that with further investigation, truth might have been discovered. But you decided that Therese was someone who had shown pettiness, churlishness, childishness and impatience, and qualities verging on mean spirit - because she had left in anger, told other staff of the reasons for her anger, and then claimed ownership to her own work - and therefore she was not worthy of justice. So you decided to not undertake that further investigation you thought necessary to decide the truth and be sure to do no one a huge disservice.
This would have to mean, that you were willing to chance a continued corruption to exist in your organisation, rather than having to inconvenience yourself on behalf of someone you didn't like in order to be able to stop the corruption you admitted there was a 50% chance existed.
But the case was and is, Melissa, that you were not supposed to inconvenience yourself on behalf of Therese alone - you were supposed to inconvenience yourself on behalf of Leaky. On behalf of the organisation you were and are the leader of, and on behalf of all your staff. Because if some of your chief admins, someone given considerable control and power over the rest of your staff, in fact had been using extensive lies and manipulations against Therese, lies involving the names of the whole of the old Essay Project staff - and this was not stopped by you - then you were in effect allowing these methods to be used again. You were allowing the corruption to continue and to grow.
The emails where you stated that no furhter investigation into the alleged lies should be undertaken because of Therese's "pettiness", were sent not only to her and me, but also to both Doris and Nick. They conveyed a very strong message about your politics and priorities, about what kind of practice you would be likely to turn a blind eye towards in the future, no matter the evidence presented to you, providing it happened to someone who annoyed you.
And in light of the latest development, in light of all the stories that have surfaced now about continued lies and manipulations in your organisation, it seems that this is exactly what happened. The corruption has continued, you are still turning a blind eye, and no one is held accountable.
(A lot of these stories of later corruptions have surfaced in the comments on Ian's blog And on may 23, 200711:42 AM, Gina - your former head mod - had this to say over there about the continued lack of accountability: I can tell you that I know of four - and possiby a fifth - manager that has gone to Melissa directly about how Doris conducts things. Melissa (rightfully) bears the brunt and responsibility of Doris' actions because she enables and endorses Doris' behaviour and treatment of the staff. When approached by these known four/possible fifth (and I count myself among their lot) Melissa has said that Doris does a lot of work, she is aware of "situations" but, in short, nothing would cause her to remove Doris from her position. If there is no accountability - then what is there?)
Was our request to have our texts created for the Essay Project withdrawn a "petty and horrible" act, as you called it in your answering letter to us?
It is clear that we had the legal right to do it. According to copyright laws, any work done for an organisation that is substantial and original enough to be viewed as an independent creation (the compiling of information already out there does not count, neither do mere ideas,) is the property of the one creating it, as long as no clearly stated or signed agreement to the contrary exists. No such clearly stated agreement existed between us, so the bulk of the texts we wrote for the Essay Project did belong to us - even more so since all our work was unpaid.
But perhaps it may still be seen as "petty and horrible" to claim our legal rights under copyright laws to have our work withdrawn from Leaky. I am the last one to argue that what is legal is always nice. You certainly thought it was not at the time, as is evident from your answer to us:
We are under no - repeat, NO - obligation to change a word or submit to any requests you make. You left before you made such requests, denying any right to request anything of Leaky ever again. Further, you did the work for Leaky. It stays for Leaky. Whether you signed an agreement or something to that effect or not, all laws of common sense and righteousness says this was work for Leaky. But you want to be immature about it, and cost your colleagues, who you so often claim you valued so much and were so good to, this extra work simply to be spiteful?
Your chief argument seems to be that no matter our reasons for leaving your site, we should still feel honour bound to uphold Leaky and in no way inconvenience your staff or cost them any extra work. The reason why I say this, is because this inconvenience is something you come back to repeatedly as the reason for what you seem to feel is righteous anger:
I won't allow you to cheat this hardworking staff, who don't bolt the second things don't go their way (leaving a nasty PM in their wakes), out of their valuable time. Everything that needs doing has been done, by me.
(...)
I am deeply, deeply disappointed that we ever made a judgement call to have people so capable of pettiness on staff. This simple, unnecessary busy work that it took to rid our site of your "intellectual property", mindless and effortless as it was, was time I didn't need to spend - was time I could have been working on other areas of Leaky that actually need the attention and aren't the result of adults having hissy fits.
Just to clarify here: our letter to you was politely worded. I don't think it qualifies as a hissy fit. But if you still think that it does, or if you feel that my quotes are taken out of context, and therefore misrepresent what you originally said in any way, just let me know. Then I will post this whole conversation in the full, consisting of our request letter, your answer that I have quoted from so far, and the couple of letters to and fro that followed after that again. (A couple of quotes below will be from these later letters.)
The "simple, unnecessary busy work" you describe, refers of course to tweaking sentences and wordings in our texts a bit, enough to make them no longer recognisable as ours. That was all it took to satisfy copyright laws. It did not mean actually starting on scratch to create anything afresh. We sent our request letter to you on the 26th of February 2006, your answer was receieved on the 27th of February. Then you had done everything that was needed already. So the work involved was not an insurmountable hindrance. Irritating perhaps, inconvenient, sure. Not the thing you would want to spend an evening doing. But not in any way devastating for the project. Scribbulus did go online shortly afterwards and is still very much in existence.
When what it all boiled down to was one evening's work of - in your words - "simple", "effortless" and "mindless" editing and rewording, was it then petty and immature of us to make this grand gesture of claiming "intellectual property" and "withdrawal of our permission" under copyright laws, for something one could argue was of precious little consequence?
I am not going to argue that point, but leave it up to anyone who reads this to decide for themselves what they think. Also leave it up to you to decide for yourself what you think now, whether you have changed your mind since then or not.
I do want to argue your idea that what we did was motivated by spite, though. We had two major reasons that played an important part when we decided to do this. One was because - as I have touched upon in my narrative below - we at this point discussed the possibility of creating an online essay journal ourselves. Then we could have risked accusations of plagiarism if we had used some of our own work, because it would have seemed like we had stolen things from you.
I will grant you this: if we had left Leaky under normal circumstances, you could have had a case against us. You coud have called us disloyal and spiteful for taking our work from you to launch somewhere else just when you were about to go online with your essay section, and indeed accused us of using copyright laws to hurt you.
Because one could of course argue that there is a certain kind of implicit agreement in existence between a webmistress of a faniste and her volunteer contributers - the deal is that both parties are supposed to do the work they do for the fans, not for any personal gain, and therefore willingly share their work.
But we did not leave under normal circumstances. The main reason why we no longer wanted to have our work and our names connected to Scribbulus or even to Leaky, was because of the evidence suggesting so very strongly that Therese had been subjected to an ugly game behind her back, aimed at - or so it seemed - pushing her away from the project she had worked so hard for, a project that in very many ways was her baby. And that this evidence was not taken seriously when it was presented to the admins, first Nick, then the rest. Not taken seriously or even looked into when it was presented to you.
This was - the way we saw it - what constituted a deal breaker. Before this happened we were both very happy to work for Leaky, and wanted nothing more than to see the essay journal we dreamt of creating being published under the Leaky umbrella. But no implicit agreement between webmistresses and volunteers of fansites has ever meant that people must suffer lies and scheemes against them, and still be expected to remain loyal and share their work. This was the reason why we felt fully entitled to reclaim our work in order to be able to use it elsewhere.
What shocked me the most with your letter, and what I still to this very day have great difficulties getting my head around, is the fact that you seemed to think in the exact opposite manner. You seemed to think that leaving Leaky and then reclaiming our work, no matter the reasons for doing this, was what constituted the deal breaker. It is very difficult to understand the following quotes in any other way :
All pretence of "inquiry" into the circumstances regarding your departures are hereby ceased. You have, by this action, wasted all that work on you and your friends's behalf. Therese, have had only two instances in which to gather empirical evidence about you: the day you left, and this. And in both instances you have shown pettiness, churlishness, childishness and impatience, and qualities verging on mean spirit. I had reserved judgment after the first instance because of the stressful situation under which it occurred, and was actually considering weighing the evidence recently afforded to me (...) I had actually considered wasting valuable time on making these determinations, on someone who, when the going got slightly rough, up and left and did so leaving a mean note behind - not because I thought you were owed it, but because I never really had a chance to figure out what went on, and thought it totally possible the whole thing was a misunderstanding, and that you really were as nice as other people were saying you were.
No more. (...) Leaky will spend its time on the people who respect it, and no one else. You have insulted the site deeply, and personally.
You, Therese, left on the very day we were supposed to talk about what was going on - at the time I thought that act driven from tiredness, stress, etc., and tried not to believe it was from simple disrespect. Now I know differently.
(...)
No Leaky staff memeber shalll respond to any further inquiry in any official capacity. (...) This matter is now closed.
I am not going to say anything more about the possible pettiness, childishness or meanspiritedness of our request to have our work withdrawn than I have done aleady. But what about the possible childishness etc. by "up and leave as soon as the going got rough"?
Yes, to anyone reading your email conversations with Therese concerning her role in the Essay Project, her resignation may seem somewhat sudden and abrupt. Because during that conversation, it did seem that you were about to reach some sort of agreement, even though the atmosphere was rather tense. Then Therese suddenly sends her resignation letter, with a pm copy to her fellow staff members, saying she will not work for Leaky anymore because she has been subjected to powergames and negative talk behind her back. This is the pm you keep referring to as "nasty" and "mean" in your letter.
But when Therese decided to "up and leave", she had received the pm Doris forwarded to her that I have quoted earlier (at the end of this entry). This pm shows that she was subjected to "negative talk behind her back", and that two of the admins, Nick and Doris, actually did discuss among themselves the need of getting rid of her.
At that point, Therese believed you had received a copy of this pm too. That was what Doris had told her. In that light, your conversations with Therese do not look good. You took her to task for being stubborn and obtrusive and not wanting to accept Doris as a leader (which she did, and said repeatedly that she did...) You talked to her about how giving up some control and hand it over to Doris would actually be very liberating since it was all in the friendly spirit of Leaky where everybody only wants to help (this is paraphrasing, not quoting). If you had talked like this to her while all the time knowing about this pm where Nick says to Doris that he really thinks they ought to get rid of her, then this conversation would have been a rather nasty sort of game to play, definitely.
Therese thought you did know, and did play with her. Therefore she decided to leave instead of waiting for more of this. And telling her colleagues about her reasons for leaving, yes, she did that too.
But which is the meanest and nastiest - engage in powergames against someone - or tell your fellow staff that these kinds of games against you are the reason why you are leaving?
I am willing to believe, though, that at the point when Therese left, you actually did not know. That Doris had lied to Therese about this, and never showed the pm from Nick to you. This is possible, yes. Then Therese's sudden departure and her talk of "powergames" might have come as a total suprise to you, and you may well have found it annoying and strange.
But what is still very difficult to understand, is your attitude that seems to imply that leaving Leaky in anger for whatever reason, is an act that will forever forfeit anyone's rights to have anything investigated, to be ever reached out to in order to clear up possible misunderstandings, to be ever approached again with the hope of repairing an unhappy conflict - or even only in order to continue a conversation that seems to have been broken for reasons not understood by one of the parties....
You said: You, Therese, left on the very day we were supposed to talk about what was going on - at the time I thought that act driven from tiredness, stress, etc., and tried not to believe it was from simple disrespect.
If this is true, if you really did wonder at the time whether this was an act driven by stress and tiredness only - then why didn't you contact her? You had her email address. And you did reply to her resignation, you sent her a short note accepting it immediately, without any questions. Why? Why not simply ask her: what on earth are you talking about, what power game, who's talking about you behind your back? Then you could have found out. But she had "up and left" ....
By the time you wrote this angry letter, you had received all my documentation about what happened around the time when she left, Doris' forwarded pm included. But this doesn't seem to matter to you, you are still not willing to revise your first impression of someone "bolting the second things didn't go her way" no matter the possible alternative explanations you are given for this behaviour. You were perhaps willing to say "bolted because of stress" - but when she has the nerve to claim ownership to her own work, that slightly patronising explanation is out too.
The impression that you really do seem to think leaving Leaky abruptly in a way that annoys you, does constitute a moral deal breaker no matter the reason, is even stronger when reading this:
I had actually considered wasting valuable time on making these determinations, on someone who, when the going got slightly rough, up and left and did so leaving a mean note behind - not because I thought you were owed it, but because I never really had a chance to figure out what went on, and thought it totally possible the whole thing was a misunderstanding, and that you really were as nice as other people were saying you were.
Of course you had a chance to figure out if you had really wanted to, see above. Many chances, she hadn't gone incognito or changed her mailaddress. But why did you think she was not owed it, if you thought it totally possible that her leaving was due to a misunderstanding, and she was a nice person? Because leaving Leaky in anger, in and of itself, no matter the reason for the anger, is unforgiveable? Because telling other staff about your reasons for leaving, thus exposing a conflict, is unforgiveable?
But in my book, anyone should be owed an investigation of lies against their person from one of your trusted and powerful admins, no matter how angry they were when they left. Even if that anger should have beeen proven to be unreasonable, which is not the case here. Justice is not supposed to be granted only to the ones you like, or the ones loyal to you.
What is more, and what I think it is remarkable that you, as the leader of Leaky, did not understand at the time - and perhaps still do not understand? - is that it was more at stake here than Therese's individual good name. A lot more. You talked about us "hurting Leaky deeply and personally" by withdrawing our permissions to use some texts in an isolated project. But by choosing not to investigate some very serious and specific claims presented to you of corruption in your organisation, because it concerned someone you decided were not owed it - then you actually risked a much, much greater damage to Leaky.
Even in the couple of furious letters you sent to Therese with copies to me, you said about the evidence I had sent you: "of wich there is equal for and against your/Torill's claims" and "with the evidence that is absolutely level in credibility from both sides, I'd be doing at least half the people involved here a huge disservice if I decided that one lied and the other didn't. With further investigation maybe we would have come to the truth -"
So even when you were at your angriest, you did think there was a possibility - a 50% possibility - that something very ugly had happened in your organisation, and that with further investigation, truth might have been discovered. But you decided that Therese was someone who had shown pettiness, churlishness, childishness and impatience, and qualities verging on mean spirit - because she had left in anger, told other staff of the reasons for her anger, and then claimed ownership to her own work - and therefore she was not worthy of justice. So you decided to not undertake that further investigation you thought necessary to decide the truth and be sure to do no one a huge disservice.
This would have to mean, that you were willing to chance a continued corruption to exist in your organisation, rather than having to inconvenience yourself on behalf of someone you didn't like in order to be able to stop the corruption you admitted there was a 50% chance existed.
But the case was and is, Melissa, that you were not supposed to inconvenience yourself on behalf of Therese alone - you were supposed to inconvenience yourself on behalf of Leaky. On behalf of the organisation you were and are the leader of, and on behalf of all your staff. Because if some of your chief admins, someone given considerable control and power over the rest of your staff, in fact had been using extensive lies and manipulations against Therese, lies involving the names of the whole of the old Essay Project staff - and this was not stopped by you - then you were in effect allowing these methods to be used again. You were allowing the corruption to continue and to grow.
The emails where you stated that no furhter investigation into the alleged lies should be undertaken because of Therese's "pettiness", were sent not only to her and me, but also to both Doris and Nick. They conveyed a very strong message about your politics and priorities, about what kind of practice you would be likely to turn a blind eye towards in the future, no matter the evidence presented to you, providing it happened to someone who annoyed you.
And in light of the latest development, in light of all the stories that have surfaced now about continued lies and manipulations in your organisation, it seems that this is exactly what happened. The corruption has continued, you are still turning a blind eye, and no one is held accountable.
(A lot of these stories of later corruptions have surfaced in the comments on Ian's blog And on may 23, 200711:42 AM, Gina - your former head mod - had this to say over there about the continued lack of accountability: I can tell you that I know of four - and possiby a fifth - manager that has gone to Melissa directly about how Doris conducts things. Melissa (rightfully) bears the brunt and responsibility of Doris' actions because she enables and endorses Doris' behaviour and treatment of the staff. When approached by these known four/possible fifth (and I count myself among their lot) Melissa has said that Doris does a lot of work, she is aware of "situations" but, in short, nothing would cause her to remove Doris from her position. If there is no accountability - then what is there?)
Thursday, 12 July 2007
Closure of the Leaky Experience: Open Letter to Melissa, Part One
I have spent the larger parts of my spare time the last few weeks reading and re-reading old mails, comments, all the other blogs out there - even searching for old threads at the Leaky archives.... and pondering over my own reactions. What telling the story now and reading the other stories told have touched inside. Some of the wounds go deeper still then I realised, and the strength the hurt still holds is astounding and somewhat unexpected. This is the reason why telling this story took so much longer than I thought it would when I started this blog on the 12th of May - two months ago already. And there I was thinking that I could finish the narrative of how I ended up here and all that happened on the road in just a few weeks...
But now I am here, finally, ready to end the telling of this narrative for my part by a final open letter to Melissa. Melissa Anelli is the current webmistress at the Leaky Cauldron, and the one who has been in charge for as long as I have been involved there. She is not directly responsible for everything that has happened and for all that anyone has done or not done, but she is the leader, a position she also claims and recognizes for herself, no matter how reluctantly she may or may not have originally accepted it. And as the leader, the final responsibility must be placed at her door. If anyone is to assume the responisibility for change, it has to be her. This is how it is in any organisation.
I will have to post this letter in two separate entries, to have enough space to say all I want to say. Here is the first instalment:
Dear Melissa
Contrary to what you may think right now, my object with everything written in this blog is not and has never been to "tear Leaky down". I would never want that. I would like to quote again the beginning of my farewell letter to you:
I want to thank you for all the wonderful times I have had because of Leaky. It started as you know in the old Leaky comment threads. They used to be a very important part of my life, an outlet, a refuge, an asylum and an endless invigorating source of energy. I couldn't believe it when I was invited to be part of the team of the new forum a year ago, and the first weeks of January 2005 were among the happiest times of my life, when we were all planning the new forum together, and being so full of dreams of how great it would be... This will always be true, and no matter what, I will forever be grateful to Leaky for giving me this, it was more important to me than you will ever know! Thank you Melissa, for enabling this, and to Nick and Sue too, who were part of that first period, both the comment threads and the first days of the forum. You will all have a special place in my heart forever because of this, and the term "The Leaky Cauldron" will always mean something truly special for me!
This is still true for me, every single word of it. In fact, the reason why the conflict with you still hurts is precisely because I used to love Leaky so much and it was so special to me. It still is, in many ways.
I also want to quote here something I wrote in the comments on Ians blog:
I do not wish to "tear Leaky down" as you say Ian. On the contrary, in fact. Leaky was once a fantastic fansite, the very best, and it still has that potential. It was my first home on the net. I wouldn't want to see it sink. It is wonderful for me that so many of you here state in your comments how much you love the forum I was once allowed to participate in creating. It means we must have done some things right. I don't want it shut down, I want it to blossom. I want to see the old spirit resurrected and live on. Whatever I am posting here is not meant as an attack on Leaky or its devoted members. It is an attack on some of the actions of the current admins, in the hope that they may finally learn from their mistakes. If they could only realise just how fantastic their staff and their membership are, if they could only learn to truly value them and treat them with respect, instead of seeing them as vehicles for their own recognition....that would be all it took. They do not need to change all their ways. But in the sadly all to likely event that they will learn nothing and change nothing, I also hope that posting our stories here can serve as a warning for others, whether they want to be a member of the Leaky staff or not. So that they may be able to protect themselves from harm. That is all this is about. It is not about "everything that happens at Leaky is crap".
I repeat this here now because I want to make it very clear where I am coming from in writing this. This place is not a general "Bash Leaky blog"
Like I said in the quote above, I have written about my Leaky Experience to present an alternative version of events, so that past and present staffers of Leaky may have an alternative narrative and an alternative version of events to read, in order to be able to compare and judge for themselves. But also to heal my own wounds, because I admit that I have been wounded.
And some of my deepest wounds from the Leaky Experience come from you Melissa. But I think it is very possible that you are not fully aware of this. I think you are perhaps not fully aware of what people may come to see as implicit promises in your behaviour, both as the webmistress of the site and in your talent for making people feel welcomed, appreciated and wanted in a fabulous warm and vibrant HP community of friends on the net. And the hurt that may follow after this when you later seem to ignore people, allow them to be abused or even lash out in ways you yourself maybe see as only being a bit too defensive when dealing with the unreasonable or obtrusive among your staffers. I will try and explain how I have experienced this below.
Let me first state here in way of a disclaimer that I do not believe for one second that you are an evil sadist, callously and cynically setting out to hurt people. I do not believe this of any of the Leaky admins, and I certainly do not believe this of you. I believe that you may be at least interested in hearing my point of view to the full, even if you after that might want to discard all of it as being of no consequence.
Because I do choose to believe that you are a person able to understand points of view different from your own, if you would only take the time to listen, and not automatically jump to the conclusion that people are trying to attack or offend you - or attack or be disloyal to "Leaky" - when they speak their mind, or give an opinion contrary to your own.
I think this last tendency of yours played a large part in the conflict between you and Therese and me. And from what I hear from the experiences of others, it seems to play a large part in several other conflicts at Leaky as well, and also in the bitterness that may result in people leaving. So I am going to go through your reactions in your conflict with us here, and explain how that felt and was interpreted from our point of view, in way of example. Yes, it is personal. All of this is. It is not to be avoided anymore, after all that has transpired. If you don't know what I mean, read again all the entries of this blog, and the comments to the various entries over at Ian's blog.
Since it has taken me so long to be ready for this letter, and there is now a timegap of some consequence between this entry and the earlier ones containing my narrative, a short re-cap of this conflict is perhaps in order (for the longer versions, see earlier instalments, especially The Therese Appreciation Chapter , Suddenly the Glove Hits , The Lies and Corruption Continues.):
I wonder if it is possible for you to really understand how this hurt, and how disappointed I was. I felt let down in the most basic of ways.
When I first joined your staff, you were incredibly welcoming and supportive. I felt that you were a person who really cared about us. When I mailed you and was so unhappy and felt so guilty because I needed to take a break from modding for a while, you immediately came back to me and reassured me that I could of course take a hiatus whenever I wanted to. You said that just the fact that I wrote and told you about my problems proved to you that I was the kind of person you wanted on your staff. That meant a lot to me. When Lilly told you that she had to sometimes be away because of her health problems, you were equally supportive, in a very warm, personal manner, begging Lilly to keep you updated about her situation or else you would be a wreck from worry. We really believed that. And do you remember that little troll who got so mad at me because I modded her that he/she registered under a new account with the username ihatetorill and started to abuse me all over the forums? Again, you showed your great concern, went out of your way to reassure me that nobody would be allowed to treat any of your staff like that, and you even checked with Lilly whom you knew was my close friend to be sure I was ok.
So, I really did believe you cared about the welfare your volunteer staff. All my personal experience pointed to that. Yes, I was sometimes mightily frustrated over some of your priorities and decisions and styles of leadership - what I have discussed in earlier entries here under the headings Absence and Micromanagement. But this is on another level altogether. This is what it would have been possible to also discuss under the headings growing pains and a site run by amateurs.
But when I realised what had happened to Therese, when I compared what Nick told me to what the former EP staff told me and saw how a pattern of something very ugly seemed to appear - then I trusted you to be the person to go to for help and protection. I felt absolutely convinced that you would never want to accept that kind of conduct from any of your admins, never want any of your devoted volunteers to be subjected to ugly lies behind her back to get rid of her. I felt confident that you would at least look into the matter - if you had wanted to talk to the people involved directly yourself, and not only take my letter as sufficient evidence to act upon, that would have been more than ok with me. In fact, that was something I expected and was ready for because it would have been very reasonable.
I never expected that you would do nothing. Say nothing, just let everything continue as before. But instead yell and throw insults at us when we later came back and asked you to not use our work.
I am still trying to understand this, still having conversations with you in my head over it. Pathetic? Perhaps .... but that is how much it hurt.
To be continued....
But now I am here, finally, ready to end the telling of this narrative for my part by a final open letter to Melissa. Melissa Anelli is the current webmistress at the Leaky Cauldron, and the one who has been in charge for as long as I have been involved there. She is not directly responsible for everything that has happened and for all that anyone has done or not done, but she is the leader, a position she also claims and recognizes for herself, no matter how reluctantly she may or may not have originally accepted it. And as the leader, the final responsibility must be placed at her door. If anyone is to assume the responisibility for change, it has to be her. This is how it is in any organisation.
I will have to post this letter in two separate entries, to have enough space to say all I want to say. Here is the first instalment:
Dear Melissa
Contrary to what you may think right now, my object with everything written in this blog is not and has never been to "tear Leaky down". I would never want that. I would like to quote again the beginning of my farewell letter to you:
I want to thank you for all the wonderful times I have had because of Leaky. It started as you know in the old Leaky comment threads. They used to be a very important part of my life, an outlet, a refuge, an asylum and an endless invigorating source of energy. I couldn't believe it when I was invited to be part of the team of the new forum a year ago, and the first weeks of January 2005 were among the happiest times of my life, when we were all planning the new forum together, and being so full of dreams of how great it would be... This will always be true, and no matter what, I will forever be grateful to Leaky for giving me this, it was more important to me than you will ever know! Thank you Melissa, for enabling this, and to Nick and Sue too, who were part of that first period, both the comment threads and the first days of the forum. You will all have a special place in my heart forever because of this, and the term "The Leaky Cauldron" will always mean something truly special for me!
This is still true for me, every single word of it. In fact, the reason why the conflict with you still hurts is precisely because I used to love Leaky so much and it was so special to me. It still is, in many ways.
I also want to quote here something I wrote in the comments on Ians blog:
I do not wish to "tear Leaky down" as you say Ian. On the contrary, in fact. Leaky was once a fantastic fansite, the very best, and it still has that potential. It was my first home on the net. I wouldn't want to see it sink. It is wonderful for me that so many of you here state in your comments how much you love the forum I was once allowed to participate in creating. It means we must have done some things right. I don't want it shut down, I want it to blossom. I want to see the old spirit resurrected and live on. Whatever I am posting here is not meant as an attack on Leaky or its devoted members. It is an attack on some of the actions of the current admins, in the hope that they may finally learn from their mistakes. If they could only realise just how fantastic their staff and their membership are, if they could only learn to truly value them and treat them with respect, instead of seeing them as vehicles for their own recognition....that would be all it took. They do not need to change all their ways. But in the sadly all to likely event that they will learn nothing and change nothing, I also hope that posting our stories here can serve as a warning for others, whether they want to be a member of the Leaky staff or not. So that they may be able to protect themselves from harm. That is all this is about. It is not about "everything that happens at Leaky is crap".
I repeat this here now because I want to make it very clear where I am coming from in writing this. This place is not a general "Bash Leaky blog"
Like I said in the quote above, I have written about my Leaky Experience to present an alternative version of events, so that past and present staffers of Leaky may have an alternative narrative and an alternative version of events to read, in order to be able to compare and judge for themselves. But also to heal my own wounds, because I admit that I have been wounded.
And some of my deepest wounds from the Leaky Experience come from you Melissa. But I think it is very possible that you are not fully aware of this. I think you are perhaps not fully aware of what people may come to see as implicit promises in your behaviour, both as the webmistress of the site and in your talent for making people feel welcomed, appreciated and wanted in a fabulous warm and vibrant HP community of friends on the net. And the hurt that may follow after this when you later seem to ignore people, allow them to be abused or even lash out in ways you yourself maybe see as only being a bit too defensive when dealing with the unreasonable or obtrusive among your staffers. I will try and explain how I have experienced this below.
Let me first state here in way of a disclaimer that I do not believe for one second that you are an evil sadist, callously and cynically setting out to hurt people. I do not believe this of any of the Leaky admins, and I certainly do not believe this of you. I believe that you may be at least interested in hearing my point of view to the full, even if you after that might want to discard all of it as being of no consequence.
Because I do choose to believe that you are a person able to understand points of view different from your own, if you would only take the time to listen, and not automatically jump to the conclusion that people are trying to attack or offend you - or attack or be disloyal to "Leaky" - when they speak their mind, or give an opinion contrary to your own.
I think this last tendency of yours played a large part in the conflict between you and Therese and me. And from what I hear from the experiences of others, it seems to play a large part in several other conflicts at Leaky as well, and also in the bitterness that may result in people leaving. So I am going to go through your reactions in your conflict with us here, and explain how that felt and was interpreted from our point of view, in way of example. Yes, it is personal. All of this is. It is not to be avoided anymore, after all that has transpired. If you don't know what I mean, read again all the entries of this blog, and the comments to the various entries over at Ian's blog.
Since it has taken me so long to be ready for this letter, and there is now a timegap of some consequence between this entry and the earlier ones containing my narrative, a short re-cap of this conflict is perhaps in order (for the longer versions, see earlier instalments, especially The Therese Appreciation Chapter , Suddenly the Glove Hits , The Lies and Corruption Continues.):
- Therese worked as head of the original Essay Project - what is now Scribbulus. This as approved of by you. I, among several others, worked with her on that project
- This project originated out of the Lounge, and Nick, as admin for the Lounge, was also the admin Therese related to. She received nothing but support and friendly reassurances from him about the work being done.
- Then Doris was made site wide project overseer, and Therese was asked to co-operate with her in that capacity. Originally, Therese welcomed this.
- Shortly before Christmas 2005, Therese contacted you to get a clarification of her role in the project
- Sometime during the exchanges of emails over this, Therese received a pm from Doris, where Nick was cited as saying (to Doris) that he really thought they ought to get rid of Therese. Doris told Therese that you had also received a copy of this pm.
- Then Therese "up and left" - wrote a resignation letter she also sent as a pm to her fellow staffers, and left Leaky for good.
- Shortly afterwards, Nick contacted me to explain what had happened. He said that they had wanted to get rid of Therese because she was difficult to work with, yelled at her staff in pms and that nobody liked her but me. The evidence for this was several complaining pms her staffers were supposed to have written to Doris. He admitted to me that it was Doris who had told him this, and that he had not seen any of it.
- With Nick's consent, I approached all the staffers of the then Essay Project. They all denied to have ever complained about Therese to anyone, and instead claimed to like her.
- I collected all the evidence for this, and sent it to you with a copy to all the admins and the old Leaky staffers
- Then nothing happened. No reaction or answer from you that we were made aware of.
- Because Therese felt that her work for the EP had been wrongfully appropriated when she had been scheemed against in this way, and because we wanted to try and use our work elsewhere, we wrote you a letter and asked you to withdraw our work - our intellectual property - from the Essay Project
- Then we received one of the angriest and rudest letters I have ever read, starting like this: Never, in nearly five years on Leaky, have I seen such petty, horrible behavior.
I wonder if it is possible for you to really understand how this hurt, and how disappointed I was. I felt let down in the most basic of ways.
When I first joined your staff, you were incredibly welcoming and supportive. I felt that you were a person who really cared about us. When I mailed you and was so unhappy and felt so guilty because I needed to take a break from modding for a while, you immediately came back to me and reassured me that I could of course take a hiatus whenever I wanted to. You said that just the fact that I wrote and told you about my problems proved to you that I was the kind of person you wanted on your staff. That meant a lot to me. When Lilly told you that she had to sometimes be away because of her health problems, you were equally supportive, in a very warm, personal manner, begging Lilly to keep you updated about her situation or else you would be a wreck from worry. We really believed that. And do you remember that little troll who got so mad at me because I modded her that he/she registered under a new account with the username ihatetorill and started to abuse me all over the forums? Again, you showed your great concern, went out of your way to reassure me that nobody would be allowed to treat any of your staff like that, and you even checked with Lilly whom you knew was my close friend to be sure I was ok.
So, I really did believe you cared about the welfare your volunteer staff. All my personal experience pointed to that. Yes, I was sometimes mightily frustrated over some of your priorities and decisions and styles of leadership - what I have discussed in earlier entries here under the headings Absence and Micromanagement. But this is on another level altogether. This is what it would have been possible to also discuss under the headings growing pains and a site run by amateurs.
But when I realised what had happened to Therese, when I compared what Nick told me to what the former EP staff told me and saw how a pattern of something very ugly seemed to appear - then I trusted you to be the person to go to for help and protection. I felt absolutely convinced that you would never want to accept that kind of conduct from any of your admins, never want any of your devoted volunteers to be subjected to ugly lies behind her back to get rid of her. I felt confident that you would at least look into the matter - if you had wanted to talk to the people involved directly yourself, and not only take my letter as sufficient evidence to act upon, that would have been more than ok with me. In fact, that was something I expected and was ready for because it would have been very reasonable.
I never expected that you would do nothing. Say nothing, just let everything continue as before. But instead yell and throw insults at us when we later came back and asked you to not use our work.
I am still trying to understand this, still having conversations with you in my head over it. Pathetic? Perhaps .... but that is how much it hurt.
To be continued....
Saturday, 30 June 2007
Communication with Sue
I thought I should give Sue, as one of the Leaky admins who has come here to communicate, the same prominent space here as my own entries and Nick's comments. The following is my open letter to her from the entry "Open Letter to Sue and Doris" below, her answer to this letter, and my comment to her answer again. To make it clear who has written what, I will put Sue's words in italics, but other than that, I have not edited her words, obvioulsy:
Dear Sue
You know, my darling Sue, that whatever differences we may have had, we have sorted them out long ago. I consider you to be my friend. Maybe you have not always been certain that I am your friend - but I assure you, I am. However mad you may have been with me at times, I have never heard that you have ever badmouthed me behind my back. Ever. Whatever you had to say you said it directly to me in private pms - as you would never yell to me in public either. You are a great enough person to apologise when you think you have done wrong, and I have never ever heard that you have deliberately done anything to hurt anybody. Leaky would have been a much better place for its staff to be if the rest of the admins had taken your example in these matters to heart!
And you are aware of the fact that the Leaky News section would have sunk a long time ago if you hadn't kept it going, aren't you? I am not sure you are always given the credit or appreciation you are due over there, by the management of the site that is....... The fandom truly loves and appreciates you, though!
I say this here and now because I think that you may have been hurt and confused when so much anger and venom have been directed towards the "Leaky admins" lately - since you are sometimes included in that "admin" group too. I therefore hereby state as loud and clear as I can: Sue Upton is my friend and I have no issues with her. She is not responsible for the recent problems at Leaky described in this blog.
Here is Sue's answer of 30th of June, in the comments:
Dear Torill,
I had not known about this letter until Kimmy told me, and I have pondered on how exactly to respond, so Im sorry for the delay in responding(had the plethora of news, PotterCast stuff, and other family emergencies on top of things so Im way behind as usual) and I thank you for writing this in the first place-wow! What an amazing letter thank you!
You did of course nail my emotions and what I was feeling about all of this on the head, and I'm still amazed (and as always, impressed) with how you can see what I'm feeling inside-you are amazing on many levels but this has long impressed me. Yes indeed, I have been horribly sad, horribly upset for those who truly know me know this just was NOT what I ever wanted for Leaky, nor any of us did! truly I believe this, and because I take all of this so close to heart, all these events have torn me bit and soul, just like Tom Riddle.
I still believe to this very day the strength of the site has always been the people(ie ALL CAP PLURAL MORE THAN ONE PERSON), whether those who are still on staff or have left and the readers-we are all Potter fans and I never thought members of the website would become so disliked, have such controversy around it or that well, it would be like this. None of us did! Naive and silly perhaps, but part of me also very much wants to keep on working as hard as possible to try to improve things (and yes I actually do believe Leaky Senior Staff and a whole bunch of others honestly want to improve things, maybe not happening in the manner nor speed some may wish but i swear it's not being forgotten small comfort to some but i swear its true.)but heh other days I simply want to walk away altogether I mean just screw this, and I dont know why I get out of bed. Yes it is true, I am very conflicted at a time when it is supposed to be the best for our fandom.
I really do not want to get into commentary about others because yo u addressed such a lovely letter to me personally-hope you can understand this, and so I wish to respond solely to you.
Torill, please know I do HUGELY miss the "old days" just like Moody and Sirius reflecting on the old crowd as DD called it; I do long for what our little group had, and would very much like things to be different. I feel as if most of my playmates, Pottermates and online friends have vanished or I've simply been so freakin overwhelmed and busy Ive failed horribly and quite pitifully at maintaining the ties contact and communication to the ones I love the most. Somedays I think Kimmy is the only one who is so gosh dang bloody stubborn persistant and utterly refuses to let me slide into my turtleshell of isolation, and god bless her for that! if it were not for her, no one would know I am still here save for an occassional post or a goofball comment or giggle on pc. The rest of my friends should rightly just kick my sorry butt and I have no other words than to say Im sorry, but I am.
I was thinking the day that we got the news about the release date, and how Jo was feeling, also about how far this journey had taken me, and whether or not it was ending up in a manner and place that I would reflect on with such joy. I had always in the back of my mind rather hoped it would be our small band of Cauldron's army being together online in some mass post-reading chat, but I am not certain if that would happen or if others would welcome my presence there.
I do love my job at Leaky, and I work very hard, and am frankly very proud of all the accomplishments our entire team have achieved-past and present staff included!!!! Im sure as hell not perfect in my job, but I do try, however I am also honest and realise anyone with a bit of effort and sheer enthusiasm could easily do the same with the news, but I did appreciate your kind words, truly truly very much!
I really never ever ever ever in a million years wanted to become a "celebrity fan" and it is something I struggle daily with, for all I really wanted was for our website to continue to grow in respect love and a true appreciation of the readers and for the staff. I think of myself as being just like every one else in our fandom (yes I am sorted into the right house I think), and I bloody well know how lucky I am so I have no room to weep perhaps for the things I miss or have lost, but honestly I really wanted to and believe with my heart and soul that the fandom is for all of us-all of us. I hope that others reading these words will know that to be true, although the other day someone posted about senior staff and left my name off it, so Im not even certain if people really much notice me other than the goofball squeeing.
I think Leaky wants us to all be part of a good experience and hell yes I wish I could change things, make things better over night but I cant but again I think things can improve, hopefully it just isnt too late (i mean my love of HP isnt ending on July 21 -is yours!)
Torill, please know this: I always think with great fondness of our past communications and working together to make the forum, and while yes we did have our (few) disagreements, they were settled and I also appreciate you mentioning that as well. I still remain awed by you, same as I felt when we were always posting on the leaky comments, pre-forum days (even sharing the Cuaron love! :)) My respect for your intelligence, care, concern, and most of all heart, has not wavered one iota, no matter how things have transpired since.
I do not know what else to say in this long rambling (Torill -length ;) ) response, but I personally will always carry the laughter conversations and joy and love of Potter that brought us and all the ones Ive drifted from, together in the first place.
All best,
Sue
And this is my answer to her:
Sue - thank you so much for your lovely answer - thank you thank you for coming here and sharing your thoughts and reactions with me and everyone. It means a lot more to me than you maybe know. And of course I am totally ok with the fact that you choose not to comment on what does not concern you, but only answer my letter to you. That is all I could have hoped for or wanted, so thank you again!
Your great heart and your honesty shines through in this answer - and that does not surprise me, because you were always so real. There was never a shred of calcualation behind any of your reactions, ever.
I am so sorry that you are hurting, sorry that a predictable side-effect of telling this story of my Leaky Experiences would be to cause you pain, make you upset, sad and sorry. Because you truly love Leaky, you love the people there, you love the fandom. You have always wanted to be a part of something great and wonderful, to share, participate, contribute and then be respected, included and loved in return. And now so much conflict and dislike and corruption is happening around you at the very place you invested so much of yourself in...
I truly wish it could have been different. I, too, would have so much wanted to be able to celebrate the last launch, the final revelation of the whole plot, the whole story, together with a huge family of Leaky friends who should have had so much to celebrate and cherish and congratulate each other for. It should have been like that, it really should, and it is such a shame that it is not.
But sadly enough, I do not believe that to remain silent in order to protect you - or anyone else of the good guys like you - from hurting would have been helpful at all at this point. You say that you believe things can change, can improve for the better and that every member of the senior staff wants this - I so hope you are right! I could wish for nothing better.
I am not so sure I can share even your modest amount of optimism, though. But I do know that if there is going to be even the slightest chance of improvement, of righting what is wrong, then we have to speak up. To be silent about our experiences of wrongdoings because it may be hurtful for some to hear about them, will only enable them to continue unchecked. You can only change what you are aware of.
You could say it should have been kept "within the family" and not made public, and yes, I would have preferred that too. I originally tried to achieve something by going to the admins and the ones directly involved only - by being descreet if you will. But that had NO effect. Then I have been silent for more than a year - and that has not done anyone any good either. Now I am talking, and good people like you are hurting...
Will it help? I don't know. But at least, there is a chance that maybe things will be taken seriously now, not just swept under the carpet and retold to be only about "misunderstandings" that no one needs to address....
A small chance. But yes, perhaps. I think an important first step towards real change would be to listen carefully to the complaints and stories of those who have left. To take what they say seriously, to talk to them in all honesty in order to learn and to grow, not in order to accuse or defend or deny. But what I have seen and heard so far are only attempts at discrediting the leavers as liars and troublemakers; and a retelling of old lies. This is not giving me much hope.
But maybe you are right, maybe there is a willingness behind the scenes that we on the outside do not hear about, a willingness to look at what has happened with honesty in order to stop abusing and manipulating practices. That would be truly great. Truly great. I wish.
Finally - my darling Sue - why do you doubt whether anyone would want to include you in a huge online post-launch "reading and squeeing together" chat??? Whatever gave you that idea? I would just love to share the first experience of the book with my online friends - the more the merrier - and YOU are definitely one of my online friends! I know for a fact - and I think you know this too if you stop and consider for a moment - that so many people out there also consider you one of the good guys. You have very very many friends Sue. Whether we are "inside" or "outside" Leaky these days should not be what matters, should it?
Again - thank you for answering me, both Nick and Sue. My next instalment here, which I am now off to write, will be my open letter to Melissa.
Dear Sue
You know, my darling Sue, that whatever differences we may have had, we have sorted them out long ago. I consider you to be my friend. Maybe you have not always been certain that I am your friend - but I assure you, I am. However mad you may have been with me at times, I have never heard that you have ever badmouthed me behind my back. Ever. Whatever you had to say you said it directly to me in private pms - as you would never yell to me in public either. You are a great enough person to apologise when you think you have done wrong, and I have never ever heard that you have deliberately done anything to hurt anybody. Leaky would have been a much better place for its staff to be if the rest of the admins had taken your example in these matters to heart!
And you are aware of the fact that the Leaky News section would have sunk a long time ago if you hadn't kept it going, aren't you? I am not sure you are always given the credit or appreciation you are due over there, by the management of the site that is....... The fandom truly loves and appreciates you, though!
I say this here and now because I think that you may have been hurt and confused when so much anger and venom have been directed towards the "Leaky admins" lately - since you are sometimes included in that "admin" group too. I therefore hereby state as loud and clear as I can: Sue Upton is my friend and I have no issues with her. She is not responsible for the recent problems at Leaky described in this blog.
Here is Sue's answer of 30th of June, in the comments:
Dear Torill,
I had not known about this letter until Kimmy told me, and I have pondered on how exactly to respond, so Im sorry for the delay in responding(had the plethora of news, PotterCast stuff, and other family emergencies on top of things so Im way behind as usual) and I thank you for writing this in the first place-wow! What an amazing letter thank you!
You did of course nail my emotions and what I was feeling about all of this on the head, and I'm still amazed (and as always, impressed) with how you can see what I'm feeling inside-you are amazing on many levels but this has long impressed me. Yes indeed, I have been horribly sad, horribly upset for those who truly know me know this just was NOT what I ever wanted for Leaky, nor any of us did! truly I believe this, and because I take all of this so close to heart, all these events have torn me bit and soul, just like Tom Riddle.
I still believe to this very day the strength of the site has always been the people(ie ALL CAP PLURAL MORE THAN ONE PERSON), whether those who are still on staff or have left and the readers-we are all Potter fans and I never thought members of the website would become so disliked, have such controversy around it or that well, it would be like this. None of us did! Naive and silly perhaps, but part of me also very much wants to keep on working as hard as possible to try to improve things (and yes I actually do believe Leaky Senior Staff and a whole bunch of others honestly want to improve things, maybe not happening in the manner nor speed some may wish but i swear it's not being forgotten small comfort to some but i swear its true.)but heh other days I simply want to walk away altogether I mean just screw this, and I dont know why I get out of bed. Yes it is true, I am very conflicted at a time when it is supposed to be the best for our fandom.
I really do not want to get into commentary about others because yo u addressed such a lovely letter to me personally-hope you can understand this, and so I wish to respond solely to you.
Torill, please know I do HUGELY miss the "old days" just like Moody and Sirius reflecting on the old crowd as DD called it; I do long for what our little group had, and would very much like things to be different. I feel as if most of my playmates, Pottermates and online friends have vanished or I've simply been so freakin overwhelmed and busy Ive failed horribly and quite pitifully at maintaining the ties contact and communication to the ones I love the most. Somedays I think Kimmy is the only one who is so gosh dang bloody stubborn persistant and utterly refuses to let me slide into my turtleshell of isolation, and god bless her for that! if it were not for her, no one would know I am still here save for an occassional post or a goofball comment or giggle on pc. The rest of my friends should rightly just kick my sorry butt and I have no other words than to say Im sorry, but I am.
I was thinking the day that we got the news about the release date, and how Jo was feeling, also about how far this journey had taken me, and whether or not it was ending up in a manner and place that I would reflect on with such joy. I had always in the back of my mind rather hoped it would be our small band of Cauldron's army being together online in some mass post-reading chat, but I am not certain if that would happen or if others would welcome my presence there.
I do love my job at Leaky, and I work very hard, and am frankly very proud of all the accomplishments our entire team have achieved-past and present staff included!!!! Im sure as hell not perfect in my job, but I do try, however I am also honest and realise anyone with a bit of effort and sheer enthusiasm could easily do the same with the news, but I did appreciate your kind words, truly truly very much!
I really never ever ever ever in a million years wanted to become a "celebrity fan" and it is something I struggle daily with, for all I really wanted was for our website to continue to grow in respect love and a true appreciation of the readers and for the staff. I think of myself as being just like every one else in our fandom (yes I am sorted into the right house I think), and I bloody well know how lucky I am so I have no room to weep perhaps for the things I miss or have lost, but honestly I really wanted to and believe with my heart and soul that the fandom is for all of us-all of us. I hope that others reading these words will know that to be true, although the other day someone posted about senior staff and left my name off it, so Im not even certain if people really much notice me other than the goofball squeeing.
I think Leaky wants us to all be part of a good experience and hell yes I wish I could change things, make things better over night but I cant but again I think things can improve, hopefully it just isnt too late (i mean my love of HP isnt ending on July 21 -is yours!)
Torill, please know this: I always think with great fondness of our past communications and working together to make the forum, and while yes we did have our (few) disagreements, they were settled and I also appreciate you mentioning that as well. I still remain awed by you, same as I felt when we were always posting on the leaky comments, pre-forum days (even sharing the Cuaron love! :)) My respect for your intelligence, care, concern, and most of all heart, has not wavered one iota, no matter how things have transpired since.
I do not know what else to say in this long rambling (Torill -length ;) ) response, but I personally will always carry the laughter conversations and joy and love of Potter that brought us and all the ones Ive drifted from, together in the first place.
All best,
Sue
And this is my answer to her:
Sue - thank you so much for your lovely answer - thank you thank you for coming here and sharing your thoughts and reactions with me and everyone. It means a lot more to me than you maybe know. And of course I am totally ok with the fact that you choose not to comment on what does not concern you, but only answer my letter to you. That is all I could have hoped for or wanted, so thank you again!
Your great heart and your honesty shines through in this answer - and that does not surprise me, because you were always so real. There was never a shred of calcualation behind any of your reactions, ever.
I am so sorry that you are hurting, sorry that a predictable side-effect of telling this story of my Leaky Experiences would be to cause you pain, make you upset, sad and sorry. Because you truly love Leaky, you love the people there, you love the fandom. You have always wanted to be a part of something great and wonderful, to share, participate, contribute and then be respected, included and loved in return. And now so much conflict and dislike and corruption is happening around you at the very place you invested so much of yourself in...
I truly wish it could have been different. I, too, would have so much wanted to be able to celebrate the last launch, the final revelation of the whole plot, the whole story, together with a huge family of Leaky friends who should have had so much to celebrate and cherish and congratulate each other for. It should have been like that, it really should, and it is such a shame that it is not.
But sadly enough, I do not believe that to remain silent in order to protect you - or anyone else of the good guys like you - from hurting would have been helpful at all at this point. You say that you believe things can change, can improve for the better and that every member of the senior staff wants this - I so hope you are right! I could wish for nothing better.
I am not so sure I can share even your modest amount of optimism, though. But I do know that if there is going to be even the slightest chance of improvement, of righting what is wrong, then we have to speak up. To be silent about our experiences of wrongdoings because it may be hurtful for some to hear about them, will only enable them to continue unchecked. You can only change what you are aware of.
You could say it should have been kept "within the family" and not made public, and yes, I would have preferred that too. I originally tried to achieve something by going to the admins and the ones directly involved only - by being descreet if you will. But that had NO effect. Then I have been silent for more than a year - and that has not done anyone any good either. Now I am talking, and good people like you are hurting...
Will it help? I don't know. But at least, there is a chance that maybe things will be taken seriously now, not just swept under the carpet and retold to be only about "misunderstandings" that no one needs to address....
A small chance. But yes, perhaps. I think an important first step towards real change would be to listen carefully to the complaints and stories of those who have left. To take what they say seriously, to talk to them in all honesty in order to learn and to grow, not in order to accuse or defend or deny. But what I have seen and heard so far are only attempts at discrediting the leavers as liars and troublemakers; and a retelling of old lies. This is not giving me much hope.
But maybe you are right, maybe there is a willingness behind the scenes that we on the outside do not hear about, a willingness to look at what has happened with honesty in order to stop abusing and manipulating practices. That would be truly great. Truly great. I wish.
Finally - my darling Sue - why do you doubt whether anyone would want to include you in a huge online post-launch "reading and squeeing together" chat??? Whatever gave you that idea? I would just love to share the first experience of the book with my online friends - the more the merrier - and YOU are definitely one of my online friends! I know for a fact - and I think you know this too if you stop and consider for a moment - that so many people out there also consider you one of the good guys. You have very very many friends Sue. Whether we are "inside" or "outside" Leaky these days should not be what matters, should it?
Again - thank you for answering me, both Nick and Sue. My next instalment here, which I am now off to write, will be my open letter to Melissa.
Wednesday, 20 June 2007
Communication with Nick
I had planed to continue the closure of my Leaky Experience by posting open letters to Nick and Melissa next. But in the mean time, Nick responded to what I have been writing here, first on his livejournal and then in a comment to the entry below.
That changed my plans a little. I am very glad you responded Nick - now I know something about what your reactions are, and can also talk to you directly in a much more real way than I thought would be possible. Of course, I am not so happy about the content of what you have to say - but I don't think you expected me to be that either...
I will give proper space to what you said to and about me - I think that is only fair when I have been so outspoken myself. I will post the quote from your livejournal first, then your comment to my open letter to Sue and Doris below, both without any interruptions from me. Then I will respond to both, incorporating into that response some of what I had already planned to say to you.
What follows below are the copy-and-paste versions of what you posted. I have not edited anything, but of course the formatting shows up differently here than on your blog or in the comments. I have put it all in italics to distinguish clearly what are quotes from you and what is written by me.
So, here goes. This is what Nick posted on his livejournal on Jun. 18th, 2007
My Fresh Perspective
I am not posting this as a staffer of any website, but as an independent person; the thoughts I share below are my own.
----------------------
I've just recently been pointed to a blog by a former Leaky staffer named Torill (she openly shares her name there, so I don't feel it's a violation of her privacy to share it here) that was fairly recently-created (May of this year), which, despite its unassuming title, seems to have the sole intent of dragging the good name of Doris Herrmann through the mud for events that happened a year-and-a-half ago, and which greatly involved myself. Doris has taken the high road by not responding to these posts, but I--lowly though it is--feel the need to share my perspective on the story here on my blog, because I think that without my input, assumptions are being made and conclusions are being jumped to about why I had decided to seek a new leader for the then-Essay Project that are completely false. I was sent several PMs and e-mails that were written by staffers, both from those who worked on the then-Essay Project and those who worked with Therese in other capacities, sharing their thoughts on Therese. Some of these were sent on by the writers and some were forwarded by Doris. Several of the writers were very outspoken at the time among the staff in their negative opinions of Therese. The comments all expressed the feeling that Therese was often hard to get along with, and many also shared that she lacked effective leadership skills to manage the project, in their writers' opinions.
I know that for my own part, I was disappointed to find out that the website that Therese had shown as part of her credentials was only filled with essays written by her, and one by a friend (at the time, t may have changed now). I was under the impression--and I may have jumped to this conclusion completely on my own--that when Therese said that she ran this site, she was in charge of a staff of some sort and had dealt with essay submissions, but that was not the case. At the time, she had no other previous experience with leading essay projects or online staffs, so this site factored greatly into her being asked on board for the project. These details were pointed out to me in December, and were a factor in my decision to seek out a different leader for the project.
I hope that all of this has shed some light on the situation and helped to show the other side to the story.
I have disabled comments in this post because of the potential to abuse them.
--Nicholas A. Rhein
And this was posted in the comments to my last entry below:
I am not posting this as a staffer of any website, but as an independent person; the thoughts I share below are my own.
------------------------
I must say that in your capacity as a forum moderator and as a staffer in the Essay Project, you had very little opportunity to witness first-hand whether or not Doris lied about anything, since you weren't privy to that information. What you were privy to was gossip, as you say: "Too many stories have surfaced for anyone to be able to deny this pattern now. For those who have heard all the stories about your lies, such a denial will amount to nothing less than the enabling of abuse." I, on the other hand, was very much privy to the truth rather than twice-told tales of dubious intent, and I NEVER witnessed her lie to the staffers or to myself, and to this day consider her one of the most principled people I know. I would also like to clear up one point that is, in fact, a lie on Torill's part: "I have no grudges against you for approaching Melissa and trying to become her friend so that you could get a more influential position at Leaky." Given that you were not privy to this information, I do understand why you have it wrong. I was in those e-mails, however, and know for a fact that it was they who approached Doris asking her to be project coordinator (Doris was the first person who immediately sprang to mind), and I approached her to be my co-administrator on the forum, not the other way around. I'm not sure why you think it was the other way around, but my immediate impression is that you listened to gossipers who claimed it to be so. Most Sincerely, --Nicholas A. Rhein
Here is my response:
My initial reaction after having read this thoroughly - was utter confusion. I didn't know what to think, and whether I understand you at all any more. Your two versions of the story - the one you revealed to me in January/February 2006, and the one you are telling now, especially in your Livejournal entry, do not add up. Either you lied to me then, or you are lying now.
Or you have completely changed the events around in your mind during the time that has passed, and honestly do remember it like you describe it above. Then we really are dealing with something that may be termed "The Art of Denial". But then you cannot have read very thoroughly what I have written on this blog, because that ought to have jogged your memory. And I would be very disappointed to learn that you had written the livejournal entry above, describing my blog, even stating what you think its sole intent is supposed to be - without having read my blog properly first...
No matter how I look at it, it doesn't add up.
Those of you reading this who have read my earlier entries, and followed all the citations and quotes I have presented there, may be a bit bored by the following. Because I am going to go through some of the evidence yet again. If the above really is about denial - if you really have forgotten Nick, and convinced yourself that the lies are the truth, then I want to try and wake you up. I used to think of you as my friend. When I left Leaky in January 2006, I wrote this to you in my farewell letter, cited in The moderator experience post far below:
thank you Nick, for being so approachable, supportive, fair and among the least defensive and power-hungry people I have ever met!!
- and I meant every word! You may not believe this, but one of the things I have grieved the deepest through all of this, is the loss of you as my friend. I remember when you first came on board the old comment threads of Leaky, calling yourself Malecrit, determined to see if you could rile us Potterfans up a bit. Then we engaged in some real, invigorating and fun discussions, and then you shed that provocoative disguise and signed up as Scabbbers - sharing in the great experience that was Leaky in those days. For me, as for many others, you were a large part of what made it great. When you created the forum and agreed to invite me on as a mod, I couldn't have been happier. Even though I sometimes wanted to pull out all the hairs on my head from sheer frustration when you hopped along and started new things before you had thought them through properly, I always thought of you as one of the really good guys. I trusted you without reserve. I think you know that.
And here you are now, claiming that my sole intent with this blog is to "drag the good name of Doris Herrmann through the mud", repeating the old lies against Therese yet again, this time with your name under them. I really really want to ask "What happened to you" - even if I will never get any answer...
So let me see if it is possible to wake the old Scabberino up again, then. If sleep or enchantment or denial is what this is about, that is. I honestly don't know anymore...
You say: I must say that in your capacity as a forum moderator and as a staffer in the Essay Project, you had very little opportunity to witness first-hand whether or not Doris lied about anything, since you weren't privy to that information. What you were privy to was gossip.
The information I had about what Doris said against Therese, the information I set out to investigate by approaching all those of the old EP staff who were supposed to have said she was often hard to get along with, as you call it now - doing that investigation with your explicit consent, remember - that information came to me through - you Nick. You were my source. I have been very explicit about that, stating very clearly where I had my information from, by citations. From chats with you. And now you say: I, on the other hand, was very much privy to the truth.
So which is it, the information you shared with me back then - gossip or the truth? It can't be both Nick. And if it was gossip, then you were the gossiper.
You say: I--lowly though it is--feel the need to share my perspective on the story here on my blog, because I think that without my input, assumptions are being made and conclusions are being jumped to about why I had decided to seek a new leader for the then-Essay Project that are completely false. I was sent several PMs and e-mails that were written by staffers, both from those who worked on the then-Essay Project and those who worked with Therese in other capacities, sharing their thoughts on Therese.
Here it is implied that before Therese left, shortly before New Years Eve 2005, you had received mails and PMs from staffers, those who worked on the old EP project included, and that this is why you wanted to seek a new leader for the then-Essay Project.
If this is the truth Nick - then what on earth were you playing at when you contacted me on January 8th, and during our chat said the following things to me (see the citations in context here: http://torill-underthemagnoliatree.blogspot.com/2007/05/lies.html)
scabbersakapeterpettigrew: I worried privately that Therese might not be a very good manager, as many of the EP staff shared complaints or worries about her leadership and her way of working with them
(...)
scabbersakapeterpettigrew: At least two of the EP staff shared complaints with Doris.
(...)
scabbersakapeterpettigrew: They had been yelled at, apparently, in private messages, about things
scabbersakapeterpettigrew: (....)Doris could fill you in more, I do not know the details
If they had indeed written to you, or you had seen the pms and e-mails in question yourself - why didn't you tell me this when I asked, why didn't you cite from them or at least tell me the contents properly to convince me? Why did you claim instead that you did not know the details?
When I contacted you again after several of the staff had told me they had no complaints against Therese, on the 14th of January, you were even more explicit about not having seen these things yourself, and that your information came from Doris:
scabbersakapeterpettigrew: ****, ****, and **** have all sent Doris PMs from Therese that they considered inappropriate, to my knowledge
torillgrnhaug: Nick, have you seen those?
scabbersakapeterpettigrew: No, I haven't, but Melissa has
(....)
scabbersakapeterpettigrew: Let me see if I can find my conversation with Doris about it
torillgrnhaug: ok, I'll wait
scabbersakapeterpettigrew: Doris says that, according to her conversations with the EP staff, none of them liked Therese--this is as of December 27
torillgrnhaug: none of them?
scabbersakapeterpettigrew: Other than you
scabbersakapeterpettigrew: I'm not sure if she was exaggerating or not
torillgrnhaug: and the pms that **** has sent to Melissa - has Melissa said that to you, that she has seen it?
scabbersakapeterpettigrew: No, she hasn't
Then you agreed that it would be a good thing to approach the EP staff and ask them whether they had actually ever said any of these things to Doris. You agreed to that even after I had said this:
torillgrnhaug: because, what I fear, is that Doris may b lying
torillgrnhaug: I don't want that to be true, but it sounds like it.
If the version above is true, why didn't you protest vehemently here? Telling me nononono, Doris is not lying, they have written to me, I have seen those pms, you must believe me. Instead you gave your consent to my investigation:
torillgrnhaug: is it ok if I do investigate, and ask them directly, at least **** who appears to be not at all easy to intimidate to me?
scabbersakapeterpettigrew: Yes, that's fine
But if the version in your livejournal were the truth, Nick - then to send me out on that kind of investigating quest, instead of just forwarding me the pms you now claim you were in possesssion of - that would have been really really cruel as I see it. Really playing a very nasty game with me. Especially since you were the one who initiated all these discussions of what happened when Therese left, by approaching me on your own accord on tne 8th of January, telling me about your concern for me. A concern I believed was genuine:
scabbersakapeterpettigrew: I wanted to ask you first if you have any questions about the essay project
scabbersakapeterpettigrew: Anything at all that I can answer
torillgrnhaug: what kind of questions do you mean?
scabbersakapeterpettigrew: Stuff that we might not have filled you in on
scabbersakapeterpettigrew: And I will try afterwards to explain why Therese left, to the best of my knowledge, because I am not sure, but I think that is weighing heavily on your mind
If you at this point had documentation that you neither told me about nor showed me - then saying to me I will try afterwards to explain why Therese left, to the best of my knowledge is a cruel lie - because then you were very far from explaining to the best of your knowledge.....
Maybe your intent has been to defend Doris as your friend by making yourself out to look like the one having all the pms and mails, make it look as if she had nothing to do with it. This could be seen as heroic, because if your livejournal version is to be accepted as the truth, you do look bad now. At least to me.
It is still not enough to clear Doris' name completely, though. The conversation she had with me where she reassured me how no one saw Therese as trouble, I had to believe that ... after she had forwarded to Therese the PM you wrote about getting rid of her - this is still lying, and not in a very pretty way either..
But I do not believe your livejournal version Nick, no matter what motive you may have had to write it. As late as 18.02.06, you sent me large parts of the YIM conversation you had with Doris on December 27, 2005. Here it is clear that your judgment on Therese was based on what Doris said, not on any mails or pms you had received (PFG is paperflowergirl - Therese - and I suppose the words in [brackets] were added by you?:)
(20:10:40) Doris: I also have asked her [Melissa] for TLC [e-mail] accounts [for the EP] - but - I will also tell her that I think PFG is a mistake for this project -
(20:10:48) Doris: as she is running away staff
(20:10:54) nickrhein: That's fine
(20:10:59) Doris: and pushing your forum mods to the point they hate that project
(20:11:13) nickrhein: Gah, I wish I knew what were going on with my own staff
(...)
(20:12:44) nickrhein: That's fine, then--if we discuss replacing Therese, then I will not stand in the way
(20:13:24) nickrhein: If she's as troublesome as you say, then it seems like we may need to replace her after all
(...)
(21:43:20) nickrhein: I'm writing you a PM--about Therese, and about the fact that I'm thinking she ought to be replaced, because I ultimately trust your judgment on her.
- None of this is the main thing though. The main reason why the content of either one of your two versions are not believeable, is of course because all the old EP staff members have - repeatedly - denied to have ever complained about Therese. Even after they were sent all the documentation cited in the entry "The lies" below, they have stood by this. This is what really needs to be explained Nick - if they had the courage to speak to you or Doris or both of you about how bad Therese was - why then should all of them have wanted to withdraw their complaints about her after she had left Leaky? What is this supposed to be about - coercion, threats, blackmail? It doesn't stand to reason.
This is also one of two main reasons why I do believe the stories that have surfaced recently about Doris' lies and manipulations - the stories you claim are gossip. It is as Gina said in the comments - she believes what I say because she has had similar experiences herself. I believe her when she talks about lies and manipulations, because I know that Doris is capable of those, sadly enough.
The other main reason is because the stories are actually not gossip. Gossip is when you spread around stories based on hearsay, what you have heard and think maybe happened to someone. What we have now are specific stories told by different people, who all tell of their own, first hand experiences. They do not only pass on what they have heard somebody else say. Some of them are people I know and respect. And yes, based on my own experiences, the stories are all too believeable.
Getting very long now, even for me, but I think this was necessary. Before I shut up for now I finally want to talk about the "Golden Perch" - the "site" you claim factored greatly into Therese being asked on board for the EP project.
You say on your livejournal:
I know that for my own part, I was disappointed to find out that the website that Therese had shown as part of her credentials was only filled with essays written by her, and one by a friend (at the time, t may have changed now). I was under the impression--and I may have jumped to this conclusion completely on my own--that when Therese said that she ran this site, she was in charge of a staff of some sort and had dealt with essay submissions, but that was not the case. At the time, she had no other previous experience with leading essay projects or online staffs, so this site factored greatly into her being asked on board for the project. These details were pointed out to me in December, and were a factor in my decision to seek out a different leader for the project.
Therese was "asked on board" in May or June 2005. From what it sounds like in the quote above, you were at that point convinced that she had experience from being in charge of staff running an essay site, dealing with submissions etc. This is a bit surprising.
Yes, Therese did tell us about her dreams and her visions in the old Essay thread in the Room of Requirement forum. She posted a link to what she had made as a visualisation of her dream. It was a page titled "The Golden Perch" - with a very beautiful layout that she had created - at least I thought it was beautiful - showing what she had in mind. But she did not in any way present this as something already run as a public Essay site. She said very clearly that she knew this was a project that would be too big for one person alone, and that she couldn't create or run something like that on her own. She hoped she could to do it in co-operation with Leaky. There weren't several essays posted on the site - as I remember it, none - but she may have posted parts of something essay-like on there, as examples.
But maybe you did misunderstand what she was talking about in that essay thread. Maybe you did think it was more finished than Therese claimed it to be. I think what you say about this in your chat with Doris that you forwarded to me, is a bit confusing. But maybe this is precicely because you were a bit confused about it yourself at that point, about what the page "The Golden Perch" had actually implied.
(Doris talks about a communication with Therese, where Therese honestly says that she has had no prior experience with essay journals. Italics mine)
(23:20:57) Doris: ok - sorry - I thought you said she had done this before?
(23:21:08) nickrhein: Nah, she hasn't
(23:21:20) Doris: you told me she had a forum
(23:21:39) nickrhein: There are people in the EP who know how to write good essays and to some degree how to critically analyze them
(23:21:42) nickrhein: Oh, she had a site
(23:21:49) nickrhein: It's offline now
(23:21:54) nickrhein: The Golden Perch
(23:21:59) Doris: but she told us - look at the post
(23:22:04) Doris: that she had never done it
(23:22:08) nickrhein: Yeah, I don't know why she didn't mention it
(23:22:18) nickrhein: In her thread in the RoR she talked a lot about her site
(23:22:19) Doris: I asked her specifically
(23:22:33) Doris: I just caught that comment - but you never saw the site did you
(23:22:47) nickrhein: That's a large part of why I took her on, because she seemed to already be doing an HP essay project of sorts
(23:22:50) nickrhein: No, I did
(23:23:13) Doris: Was it functioning then? And why would she tell me she had never done a site
(23:23:21) nickrhein: It looked like an impressive start
It did look like an impressive start - an sketch of something that could have been great. But she never claimed that she had actually finished or opened it, let alone hired staff or accepted essay submissions..... And no, it does not exist as an essay journal now. It never did. Which is to our loss, I think.
Sunday, 17 June 2007
Closure of the Leaky Experience - Open letters to Sue and Doris
It has been a while since my last entry now....
I wrote down my story of all that happened on the road in my HP fandom journey and thought that would be enough to get started on what I really want to say here under the Tree. But I think I still need to say a few more words to close the door on the Leaky Experience for myself. The time since my last entry is too telling, I cannot fool myself.
I think I will do it in the form of "open letters" to Sue and Doris and Nick and Melissa. I want to finally write down and make public the thoughts that have been haunting me since the beginning of 2006 - it is time for me to get them out of my head now - I need the space in there for other things!
So, for want of a true pensieve, let me use this place to deposit my recurring dialogues with the Leaky admins. This entry will contain my open letter to Sue and Doris - I will post the letters to Nick and Melissa later.
Dear Sue
You know, my darling Sue, that whatever differences we may have had, we have sorted them out long ago. I consider you to be my friend. Maybe you have not always been certain that I am your friend - but I assure you, I am. However mad you may have been with me at times, I have never heard that you have ever badmouthed me behind my back. Ever. Whatever you had to say you said it directly to me in private pms - as you would never yell to me in public either. You are a great enough person to apologise when you think you have done wrong, and I have never ever heard that you have deliberately done anything to hurt anybody. Leaky would have been a much better place for its staff to be if the rest of the admins had taken your example in these matters to heart!
And you are aware of the fact that the Leaky News section would have sunk a long time ago if you hadn't kept it going, aren't you? I am not sure you are always given the credit or appreciation you are due over there, by the management of the site that is....... The fandom truly loves and appreciates you, though!
I say this here and now because I think that you may have been hurt and confused when so much anger and venom have been directed towards the "Leaky admins" lately - since you are sometimes included in that "admin" group too. I therefore hereby state as loud and clear as I can: Sue Upton is my friend and I have no issues with her. She is not responsible for the recent problems at Leaky described in this blog.
Dear Doris
It is difficult to write this in "you" form - difficult to know what to say to you that would make any real sense to either of us. I would have loved to be able to say "Why?" but I do not expect that question to ever get an honest answer. Maybe not even you know what the honest answer would be?
I want to say that I started out thinking that you were one of my friends as well. I had no reason to think otherwise. You came in and shared the Potter experience with the rest of us, offered your time and your work and what I thought was your personality. You seemed to be of just the right kind: friendly, engaged, reaching out, sharing. We chatted on YIM, you told me stories from your childhood and your marriage, how you took relatives in after the hurricane in New Orleans, how you used Harry Potter and Leaky to engage the children in your classroom. When you were made an admin I was very happy, I really thought you would make a great difference for the better at LL.
Even now I find it hard to believe my own story below when I read the entry about your lies. It is very far beyond anything I expect from the people I deal with, and I never expected it from you. Were all you were and did before this a lie as well - only pretence?
It is unbelieveable to me how you coldly showed Therese that quote from your chat with Nick where he talks about getting rid of Therese - just so she is to understand "where you are coming from as an admin" - and then later pretended to know nothing when you talked to me. How you assured me that no one thought Therese was trouble. How you told me that you believed she was kind since I thought so much of her..... And this line: you know Nick and you know me....
And all the time when you said these things to me you knew you had already sent Therese that PM. Where she gets it spelled out for her in no uncertain terms that you and Nick discussed how you might have to get rid of her.....
It has occured to me lately that people may say that I cannot know for certain whether it was you or Nick who lied. Just to make it clear once and for all: Nick did show me the whole conversation that you quoted from in your pm to Therese - and the accusations that Therese was bullying her team did originate from you, not him. You just edited that part out.
I am so tempted to ask Why??? and How could you??? even if I know this is pointless because I will get no answers. I am so tempted to delve into all kinds of speculations about your motives, even though I know this is not very worthwhile either - because I do not know you. I may guess, I may have hunches, but I know that I do not really know.
I do know that there is a pattern though. In your admin capacity, you do resort to lies far far too often when a conflict occurs between you and your staff members. Too many stories have surfaced for anyone to be able to deny this pattern now. For those who have heard all the stories about your lies, such a denial will amount to nothing less than the enabling of abuse.
Yes, abuse, there is no other way to describe your lies in my opinon. The effect they have had and still do have on people is what makes this harsh word appropriate. To you, they are perhaps only a matter of self defence, of being able to deflect what you see as unresonable blame or criticism or opposition or even competition. Perhaps you lie because people scare you and you feel that they are out to get you. Maybe you think you are never good enough and need to boost the impression you think you must make on others. Maybe to you it is the others who are the abusers, attacking you or undermining you in so many unreasonable ways that you feel like you have no choice but to do what it takes to neutralise them. In order to save not only yourself but Leaky and the "Leaky Spirit" as well. No less. Of course, this practice is the exact thing that will undermine the "Leaky Spirit" if any such thing really exists these days - but you may not understand that.
I don't know. Like I said, I don't know how you think or feel. I am just trying to imagine the least cynical reasons for your lies that I can think of. They may be utterly wrong though.
You know - your ambition is not evil. Your wish to be in the limelight and have your share of the Potter glory is not evil either. I have no grudges against you for approaching Melissa and trying to become her friend so that you could get a more influential position at Leaky. This is very often the way it happens when people are given influential positions in organisations. Things happen to a large extent as a result of informal connections, and there is nothing inherently wrong with that.
But when people start to feel that you see every sign of disagreement or criticism on their part - and there will always be disagreements and criticisms, trust me, some of them even petty - if you see this as dangerous or mean attacks on you that must be squashed by any means possible - then people may start fighting you for real, call you powerhungry and paint everything you have ever done in the worst possible light. If you are never willing to take ownership of whatever mistakes or blunders you or the other admins make - and there will always be mistakes because no one can be perfect all the time - but instead try any excuse, lie or blame to direct the attention away from yourself and onto someone or something else - people may start to use everything they know about you against you and find nothing to excuse or like or even believe. You will have created the very enemies you feared, that were not your enemies to begin with.
And all this is truly sad, utterly tragic - because it is so unecessary. Leaky was a fun place to be, it was not a place haunted by wolves or dangerous rebels....
Sigh. I will stop this rant here. I just needed to say this, myself. I have no idea if this feels even remotely relevant to you, and it will probably have no effect whatsoever on anything at all....
No matter what your motives or reasons may have been or still are, though: the effect of your lies in themselves is abusive and destructive. Someone with the power to do so should stop you, because it is very unlikely that you will be able to stop yourself. I certainly do not expect anything I say here to have any such effect on you. You probably think I am just being plain mean for making all this public in an online blog.
I wrote down my story of all that happened on the road in my HP fandom journey and thought that would be enough to get started on what I really want to say here under the Tree. But I think I still need to say a few more words to close the door on the Leaky Experience for myself. The time since my last entry is too telling, I cannot fool myself.
I think I will do it in the form of "open letters" to Sue and Doris and Nick and Melissa. I want to finally write down and make public the thoughts that have been haunting me since the beginning of 2006 - it is time for me to get them out of my head now - I need the space in there for other things!
So, for want of a true pensieve, let me use this place to deposit my recurring dialogues with the Leaky admins. This entry will contain my open letter to Sue and Doris - I will post the letters to Nick and Melissa later.
Dear Sue
You know, my darling Sue, that whatever differences we may have had, we have sorted them out long ago. I consider you to be my friend. Maybe you have not always been certain that I am your friend - but I assure you, I am. However mad you may have been with me at times, I have never heard that you have ever badmouthed me behind my back. Ever. Whatever you had to say you said it directly to me in private pms - as you would never yell to me in public either. You are a great enough person to apologise when you think you have done wrong, and I have never ever heard that you have deliberately done anything to hurt anybody. Leaky would have been a much better place for its staff to be if the rest of the admins had taken your example in these matters to heart!
And you are aware of the fact that the Leaky News section would have sunk a long time ago if you hadn't kept it going, aren't you? I am not sure you are always given the credit or appreciation you are due over there, by the management of the site that is....... The fandom truly loves and appreciates you, though!
I say this here and now because I think that you may have been hurt and confused when so much anger and venom have been directed towards the "Leaky admins" lately - since you are sometimes included in that "admin" group too. I therefore hereby state as loud and clear as I can: Sue Upton is my friend and I have no issues with her. She is not responsible for the recent problems at Leaky described in this blog.
Dear Doris
It is difficult to write this in "you" form - difficult to know what to say to you that would make any real sense to either of us. I would have loved to be able to say "Why?" but I do not expect that question to ever get an honest answer. Maybe not even you know what the honest answer would be?
I want to say that I started out thinking that you were one of my friends as well. I had no reason to think otherwise. You came in and shared the Potter experience with the rest of us, offered your time and your work and what I thought was your personality. You seemed to be of just the right kind: friendly, engaged, reaching out, sharing. We chatted on YIM, you told me stories from your childhood and your marriage, how you took relatives in after the hurricane in New Orleans, how you used Harry Potter and Leaky to engage the children in your classroom. When you were made an admin I was very happy, I really thought you would make a great difference for the better at LL.
Even now I find it hard to believe my own story below when I read the entry about your lies. It is very far beyond anything I expect from the people I deal with, and I never expected it from you. Were all you were and did before this a lie as well - only pretence?
It is unbelieveable to me how you coldly showed Therese that quote from your chat with Nick where he talks about getting rid of Therese - just so she is to understand "where you are coming from as an admin" - and then later pretended to know nothing when you talked to me. How you assured me that no one thought Therese was trouble. How you told me that you believed she was kind since I thought so much of her..... And this line: you know Nick and you know me....
And all the time when you said these things to me you knew you had already sent Therese that PM. Where she gets it spelled out for her in no uncertain terms that you and Nick discussed how you might have to get rid of her.....
It has occured to me lately that people may say that I cannot know for certain whether it was you or Nick who lied. Just to make it clear once and for all: Nick did show me the whole conversation that you quoted from in your pm to Therese - and the accusations that Therese was bullying her team did originate from you, not him. You just edited that part out.
I am so tempted to ask Why??? and How could you??? even if I know this is pointless because I will get no answers. I am so tempted to delve into all kinds of speculations about your motives, even though I know this is not very worthwhile either - because I do not know you. I may guess, I may have hunches, but I know that I do not really know.
I do know that there is a pattern though. In your admin capacity, you do resort to lies far far too often when a conflict occurs between you and your staff members. Too many stories have surfaced for anyone to be able to deny this pattern now. For those who have heard all the stories about your lies, such a denial will amount to nothing less than the enabling of abuse.
Yes, abuse, there is no other way to describe your lies in my opinon. The effect they have had and still do have on people is what makes this harsh word appropriate. To you, they are perhaps only a matter of self defence, of being able to deflect what you see as unresonable blame or criticism or opposition or even competition. Perhaps you lie because people scare you and you feel that they are out to get you. Maybe you think you are never good enough and need to boost the impression you think you must make on others. Maybe to you it is the others who are the abusers, attacking you or undermining you in so many unreasonable ways that you feel like you have no choice but to do what it takes to neutralise them. In order to save not only yourself but Leaky and the "Leaky Spirit" as well. No less. Of course, this practice is the exact thing that will undermine the "Leaky Spirit" if any such thing really exists these days - but you may not understand that.
I don't know. Like I said, I don't know how you think or feel. I am just trying to imagine the least cynical reasons for your lies that I can think of. They may be utterly wrong though.
You know - your ambition is not evil. Your wish to be in the limelight and have your share of the Potter glory is not evil either. I have no grudges against you for approaching Melissa and trying to become her friend so that you could get a more influential position at Leaky. This is very often the way it happens when people are given influential positions in organisations. Things happen to a large extent as a result of informal connections, and there is nothing inherently wrong with that.
But when people start to feel that you see every sign of disagreement or criticism on their part - and there will always be disagreements and criticisms, trust me, some of them even petty - if you see this as dangerous or mean attacks on you that must be squashed by any means possible - then people may start fighting you for real, call you powerhungry and paint everything you have ever done in the worst possible light. If you are never willing to take ownership of whatever mistakes or blunders you or the other admins make - and there will always be mistakes because no one can be perfect all the time - but instead try any excuse, lie or blame to direct the attention away from yourself and onto someone or something else - people may start to use everything they know about you against you and find nothing to excuse or like or even believe. You will have created the very enemies you feared, that were not your enemies to begin with.
And all this is truly sad, utterly tragic - because it is so unecessary. Leaky was a fun place to be, it was not a place haunted by wolves or dangerous rebels....
Sigh. I will stop this rant here. I just needed to say this, myself. I have no idea if this feels even remotely relevant to you, and it will probably have no effect whatsoever on anything at all....
No matter what your motives or reasons may have been or still are, though: the effect of your lies in themselves is abusive and destructive. Someone with the power to do so should stop you, because it is very unlikely that you will be able to stop yourself. I certainly do not expect anything I say here to have any such effect on you. You probably think I am just being plain mean for making all this public in an online blog.
Friday, 1 June 2007
Corruption Continues
How I Ended Up Here and All That Happened On the Road, Chapter Twelve
I really have no words to express my state of mind as I wrote that letter to the admins, described and quoted from in the instalment below. But I was trusting enough to think that with this kind of documentation, something would be done. I didn't believe Melissa was the kind of leader who would allow any of her staff to be abused. I was sure she would take actions against it, now that she knew.
I can't even begin to tell you how sad I was when I realised that I was wrong in this trust. Remember, I used to love Leaky. It was my first home on the net. I was proud of its successes and anxious about its failures. I had been so proud to be part of its staff, and had fully believed in the idea of the "Leaky Spirit" of friendship, inclusiveness, fun, maturity. The backstabbing of Therese was so utterly, totally against this Leaky Spirit that I had a very hard time adjusting to the fact that it did happen, and that the people responsible for it continued to be in charge, unchecked, and even continued to talk about the Leaky Spirit in the same way as before. As if nothing at all had happened.
I sent the letter not only to the admins, but also to all the members of the old Essay Project. I wanted to give them a chance to speak up should they feel that I had skewed the information or indeed misunderstood something. They did not protest anything. Instead some of them wrote to me and expressed support and sympathy. This told me that I had not overreacted or misunderstood. None of the admins came back to me with any questions or protests either. Doris contacted me shortly before I sent the letter - when Nick had receieved all the documentation - and asked me to schedule a chat with her, which I did. The date for this chat was set till after I had sent the letter, and she never showed up.
Therese and I kept in touch for a while, discussing ways to continue the essay project outside of Leaky. We wanted to build on the substantial material we had created already. But Leaky's Scribbulus, which would contain most of our written material, was about to be launched. We were concerned with the risk of being accused of plagiarism if we published our own work after their launch. So we checked the legal implications - did we have any rights over that material, even after we had left Leaky? We found that yes, as long as no explicitly stated agreement existed between us and Leaky, saying that anything we created would belong to them, the copyright of all our independently written work was still ours. We were never employees.
Of course, had we left the site under normal circumstances, we would never have even contemplated pulling our work, or thought about any legal implications. But after the backstabbing of Therese, and the admin's failure to repair that in any way, we no longer felt any loyalty towards Leaky. So we wrote a letter to Melissa where we withdrew our permission to use any of our written work in their new Essay Project Scribbulus.
I am still not sure how wise this was. Our own essay journal never happened, for various reasons, none of which being difficult or corrupted people. Melissa did comply to our request by changing the wording of our texts enough to make any potential later accusations of plagiarism impossible, even though she protested that these texts were our intellectual property. Except that she insisted that all the threads in the new Essay Forum should still be posted in my name, with my old avatar and everything - even though the whole content of my original posts were rewritten. I never understood the reasoning behind that, but did not find it worth arguing over.
But Melissa also seemed to experience our request as something particularly meanspritied. Apart from telling us what she had changed in our texts and how, the gist of Melissa's answer to us was that she had never ever in all her time at Leaky been so disappointed in someone. The reasons she presents for this are that Therese, in addition to her request to have her work withdrawn from Scribbulus, did not "stick around the extra 12 hours" needed to "talk things out" before she left shortly before New Year's Eve, leaving a "nasty pm" behind. Melissa says that "in both instances you have shown pettiness, churlishness, childishness and impatience, and qualities verging on mean spirit."
Melissa used this opportunity to declare that "All pretense of "inquiry" into the circumstances regarding your departures are hereby ceased. You have, by this action, wasted all that work on you and your friends's behalf." She says that she "was actually considering weighing the evidence recently afforded to me - of which there is equal for and against your/Torrill's claims, especially since the case for you was so spotted in empty pockets, subjective holes, and biased interviews" but now this will not happen. Melissa tells us how she will not spend any more time on Therese who, among other things, she describes as someone who has "insulted the site deeply, and personally."
I of course cannot say whether Melissa would have actually "weighed the evidence presented to her" if we had not made this claim of ownership to our own work. But both Doris and Nick received copies of this correspondence, and whatever else it did, it told them in no uncertain terms that no investigation of the lies against Therese would take place.
Perhaps I should not exaggerate the importance of the events I was a part of - it is always tempting to do that. But I cannot help speculating on whether the fact that Doris got away with her corrupted way of dealing with Therese, even though it was all thoroughly documented, was what opened the gates for this kind of practice to be used so often later.
Because Therese was not to be the only victim. Even as I was in the middle of the process of trying to persuade Nick to take some action based on the evidence I gave him concerning Therese, I heard of how Doris also attacked Bel. Bel had admin status at this point - or at least she had access to the admin control panel to do admin work for the site. Her "promotion" to this admin status was never announced with the kind of fanfares that followed Doris' appointment, though.
Nick told me how the "conflict" between Bel and Doris weighed heavily on him, as he thought of them both as friends. He described going between them and trying to make them reconcile. And he told me how Doris had presented him with the same accusations against Bel that she had done against Therese: someone had complained to her how Bel had yelled at them in private conversations....
Bel was my friend though. I talked to her often. With her unassuming attitude and quiet work for the site without craving for either glory or recognition, I found this idea just as unlikely as the idea of Therese being someone who would be abusive of others.
I went straight to Bel and told her all about these accusations. She was truly shocked. She told me how she went through all her saved YIM chats and pms to see if she could have said something to somebody that they might have experienced as unfriendly or yelling, but could not find anything. I went back to Nick and tried to persuade him to investigate this as well. Now that he had seen how Doris had lied against Therese, he could not take Doris' accusations at face value. He had to go to the person Doris named as the complainer, and ask them directly.
I don't know if he ever did. Bel eventually left the site as admin, and only stayed on in her capacity of Floo Team member - responsible for the forum supposedly owned by the Lexicon at the Leaky Lounge. Doris stayed.
Then there was Puffin, one of the original mods like me. She had to take a hiatus for a while, due to personal issues and severe computer problems. She had cleared this with the admins, and received nothing but support and reassurances. When she was ready to come back - this was after I had left - the forum had changed software and was now using a system with a slightly different mod control panel. Puffin was told by Doris that all the other mods had gone through a "retraining" procedure. Until Puffin had done the same, she was told she could not come back as a mod. She did go through several "training sessions", but according to what Puffin says, she missed one of them. Then she was eventually sacked.
One could argue that a forum manager is in her rights to set the standard of what kind of training any mod must have to be allowed to function in that capacity. But I know from other mods - Lilly, Gina - that no one else was required to go through the kind of "retraining" procedure with Doris that Puffin was forced to do. Lilly had also been away for a longer period of time and came back to the new control panel, but was never asked to do any "retraining". Again, a lie.
And now, with the explotion of stories from staffers who have left Leaky recently, to be read on Ian's blog and on other places you can find links to from there - it seems the corruption has not been limited to these cases only. It seems to have continued, grown and spread out to become what seems like a common practice whenever something occurs that may look like a conflict.
This is all so sad - because it all seems so unecessary. The staff at Leaky is not a bunch of rebellious anarchists - they have all wanted to work with dedication for a site they loved. When Doris was made an admin responsible for "picking up the adminstrative slack", she was welcomed by all. Why does she believe she must rule through corrupted methods? Why is this allowed to continue, and why are the ones reacting to it, protesting or leaving or losing their loyalty to Leaky because of it, described as the problem instead?
I really have no words to express my state of mind as I wrote that letter to the admins, described and quoted from in the instalment below. But I was trusting enough to think that with this kind of documentation, something would be done. I didn't believe Melissa was the kind of leader who would allow any of her staff to be abused. I was sure she would take actions against it, now that she knew.
I can't even begin to tell you how sad I was when I realised that I was wrong in this trust. Remember, I used to love Leaky. It was my first home on the net. I was proud of its successes and anxious about its failures. I had been so proud to be part of its staff, and had fully believed in the idea of the "Leaky Spirit" of friendship, inclusiveness, fun, maturity. The backstabbing of Therese was so utterly, totally against this Leaky Spirit that I had a very hard time adjusting to the fact that it did happen, and that the people responsible for it continued to be in charge, unchecked, and even continued to talk about the Leaky Spirit in the same way as before. As if nothing at all had happened.
I sent the letter not only to the admins, but also to all the members of the old Essay Project. I wanted to give them a chance to speak up should they feel that I had skewed the information or indeed misunderstood something. They did not protest anything. Instead some of them wrote to me and expressed support and sympathy. This told me that I had not overreacted or misunderstood. None of the admins came back to me with any questions or protests either. Doris contacted me shortly before I sent the letter - when Nick had receieved all the documentation - and asked me to schedule a chat with her, which I did. The date for this chat was set till after I had sent the letter, and she never showed up.
Therese and I kept in touch for a while, discussing ways to continue the essay project outside of Leaky. We wanted to build on the substantial material we had created already. But Leaky's Scribbulus, which would contain most of our written material, was about to be launched. We were concerned with the risk of being accused of plagiarism if we published our own work after their launch. So we checked the legal implications - did we have any rights over that material, even after we had left Leaky? We found that yes, as long as no explicitly stated agreement existed between us and Leaky, saying that anything we created would belong to them, the copyright of all our independently written work was still ours. We were never employees.
Of course, had we left the site under normal circumstances, we would never have even contemplated pulling our work, or thought about any legal implications. But after the backstabbing of Therese, and the admin's failure to repair that in any way, we no longer felt any loyalty towards Leaky. So we wrote a letter to Melissa where we withdrew our permission to use any of our written work in their new Essay Project Scribbulus.
I am still not sure how wise this was. Our own essay journal never happened, for various reasons, none of which being difficult or corrupted people. Melissa did comply to our request by changing the wording of our texts enough to make any potential later accusations of plagiarism impossible, even though she protested that these texts were our intellectual property. Except that she insisted that all the threads in the new Essay Forum should still be posted in my name, with my old avatar and everything - even though the whole content of my original posts were rewritten. I never understood the reasoning behind that, but did not find it worth arguing over.
But Melissa also seemed to experience our request as something particularly meanspritied. Apart from telling us what she had changed in our texts and how, the gist of Melissa's answer to us was that she had never ever in all her time at Leaky been so disappointed in someone. The reasons she presents for this are that Therese, in addition to her request to have her work withdrawn from Scribbulus, did not "stick around the extra 12 hours" needed to "talk things out" before she left shortly before New Year's Eve, leaving a "nasty pm" behind. Melissa says that "in both instances you have shown pettiness, churlishness, childishness and impatience, and qualities verging on mean spirit."
Melissa used this opportunity to declare that "All pretense of "inquiry" into the circumstances regarding your departures are hereby ceased. You have, by this action, wasted all that work on you and your friends's behalf." She says that she "was actually considering weighing the evidence recently afforded to me - of which there is equal for and against your/Torrill's claims, especially since the case for you was so spotted in empty pockets, subjective holes, and biased interviews" but now this will not happen. Melissa tells us how she will not spend any more time on Therese who, among other things, she describes as someone who has "insulted the site deeply, and personally."
I of course cannot say whether Melissa would have actually "weighed the evidence presented to her" if we had not made this claim of ownership to our own work. But both Doris and Nick received copies of this correspondence, and whatever else it did, it told them in no uncertain terms that no investigation of the lies against Therese would take place.
Perhaps I should not exaggerate the importance of the events I was a part of - it is always tempting to do that. But I cannot help speculating on whether the fact that Doris got away with her corrupted way of dealing with Therese, even though it was all thoroughly documented, was what opened the gates for this kind of practice to be used so often later.
Because Therese was not to be the only victim. Even as I was in the middle of the process of trying to persuade Nick to take some action based on the evidence I gave him concerning Therese, I heard of how Doris also attacked Bel. Bel had admin status at this point - or at least she had access to the admin control panel to do admin work for the site. Her "promotion" to this admin status was never announced with the kind of fanfares that followed Doris' appointment, though.
Nick told me how the "conflict" between Bel and Doris weighed heavily on him, as he thought of them both as friends. He described going between them and trying to make them reconcile. And he told me how Doris had presented him with the same accusations against Bel that she had done against Therese: someone had complained to her how Bel had yelled at them in private conversations....
Bel was my friend though. I talked to her often. With her unassuming attitude and quiet work for the site without craving for either glory or recognition, I found this idea just as unlikely as the idea of Therese being someone who would be abusive of others.
I went straight to Bel and told her all about these accusations. She was truly shocked. She told me how she went through all her saved YIM chats and pms to see if she could have said something to somebody that they might have experienced as unfriendly or yelling, but could not find anything. I went back to Nick and tried to persuade him to investigate this as well. Now that he had seen how Doris had lied against Therese, he could not take Doris' accusations at face value. He had to go to the person Doris named as the complainer, and ask them directly.
I don't know if he ever did. Bel eventually left the site as admin, and only stayed on in her capacity of Floo Team member - responsible for the forum supposedly owned by the Lexicon at the Leaky Lounge. Doris stayed.
Then there was Puffin, one of the original mods like me. She had to take a hiatus for a while, due to personal issues and severe computer problems. She had cleared this with the admins, and received nothing but support and reassurances. When she was ready to come back - this was after I had left - the forum had changed software and was now using a system with a slightly different mod control panel. Puffin was told by Doris that all the other mods had gone through a "retraining" procedure. Until Puffin had done the same, she was told she could not come back as a mod. She did go through several "training sessions", but according to what Puffin says, she missed one of them. Then she was eventually sacked.
One could argue that a forum manager is in her rights to set the standard of what kind of training any mod must have to be allowed to function in that capacity. But I know from other mods - Lilly, Gina - that no one else was required to go through the kind of "retraining" procedure with Doris that Puffin was forced to do. Lilly had also been away for a longer period of time and came back to the new control panel, but was never asked to do any "retraining". Again, a lie.
And now, with the explotion of stories from staffers who have left Leaky recently, to be read on Ian's blog and on other places you can find links to from there - it seems the corruption has not been limited to these cases only. It seems to have continued, grown and spread out to become what seems like a common practice whenever something occurs that may look like a conflict.
This is all so sad - because it all seems so unecessary. The staff at Leaky is not a bunch of rebellious anarchists - they have all wanted to work with dedication for a site they loved. When Doris was made an admin responsible for "picking up the adminstrative slack", she was welcomed by all. Why does she believe she must rule through corrupted methods? Why is this allowed to continue, and why are the ones reacting to it, protesting or leaving or losing their loyalty to Leaky because of it, described as the problem instead?
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