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?