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Was our request to have our texts created for the Essay Project withdrawn a "petty and horrible" act, as you called it in your answering letter to us?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perhaps it may still be seen as "petty and horrible" to claim our legal rights under copyright laws to have our work withdrawn from Leaky.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?)

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.):

• 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.

One of the things that really hurt in this - and still does - was the incredible discrepance between your reactions to the two letters with my signature under them, that you recieved concerning this matter. I had expected something close to the sentence above to be your immediate, spontaneous reaction when you received evidence suggesting that one of the volunteers who had devoted so much of her time and love and working capacity for your site, had been made the victim of an ugly backstabbing campaign. But no - your anger and your outrage only came when someone who had worked for you earlier claimed ownership to their own work. To my claim that one of your staff had been the victim of ugly lies against her person, you found either of us worthy of no reaction whatsoever.

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....