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....