amedia | rough draft - RP sockpuppeteer account

Inspired by the recent account of the activities of "msscribe" in HP fandom, those of us in Rat Patrol who survived a very similar experience have decided to try to post a public account as well.

Here is a most-names-removed version of the account I sent to a number of people a few years ago. Anyone who has info to add (

shawan_7, this is your cue), please comment!

ETA: Additional material can be found at:
http://amedia.livejournal.com/58790.html (miscellaneous tidbits and an account of the C&D that occurred before the sock puppet fiasco)
http://amedia.livejournal.com/58962.html (Kathy Agel's account of the sock puppet fiasco as posted to FCA-L)
http://amedia.livejournal.com/59214.html (maquisbabe's posts to the Yahoo Rat Patrol club)
http://amedia.livejournal.com/59449.html (links to responses with additional info from alternate perspectives)
http://community.livejournal.com/fanthropology/241541.html (my post linking to this post on fanthropology - garnered some good comments)
http://community.livejournal.com/fanthropology/241829.html (mecurtin's fanthropology post "Diagnosing Malicious Puppetry" - a thoughtful post plus more good comments)
http://www.journalfen.net/community/fandom_wank/402274.html?thread=29989986#t29989986 (discussion of the RP sock puppet fiasco on fandom_wank in 2004 - includes concise accounts by one of the Jedi and by Nancy's friend)

I originally wrote this account in 2002; I've been trying to edit it to make things clearer. Suggestions welcome!

A couple of years ago (i.e. in 2000), there was a small but active group of Rat Patrol fans, most of whom knew each other by postal mail or email and had chatted on the phone or met in person. (For now I'll refer to these people as "oldtime fans," but there must be a better appellation.) In addition to an email listserv run by Kathy Agel, a new group called the Rat Patrol Yahoo Club had sprung up, attracting additional fans from the Internet. It seemed to be doing pretty well. There were some new Canadian fans (RP was being rerun in Canada at the time) and other new fans who were fitting in quite well, as well as some guys named Max, Keith, and Gene, who wandered in from somewhere and tended to "top" whatever everyone else said, but otherwise behaved themselves. Two of the new fans were writing hilarious episode synopses for a popular Rat Patrol fan website, and they also came up with an idea for a new fanzine, that would be an all hetero-romance anthology called "Romancing the Rats." We all made positive noises about it. Another one of the newer fans had an idea for a zine to be called "Rats on the Edge," which would feature stories that put the Rats (or Dietrich) into unusually challenging situations where they might be forced to act in a way that would normally be out of character. We made puzzled but positive noises about that as well.

Then a rather odd thing happened. The aforementioned guys, along with a woman going by the screenname CatO, who had previously been active in Garrison's Gorillas fandom, ~~a woman named Sofi~~ a guy who claimed to be Rat Patrol actor Justin Tarr, and the three new fans formed a kind of syndicate and announced that they would all work together on both new zines. The group was called "Rainbow Butterfly Press," but was quickly nicknamed "Gang of Eight" for their high-handed attitude and heavy-handed tactics. They accepted very few submissions and sent back brutal, nasty, and inaccurate edits to anyone whose work they didn't like (=who wasn't in the inner circle).

Also around this time, one of the club members began complaining of getting unpleasant private emails from other members off-list. She mentioned this on-list, but I don't know of anyone she talked to about it privately. She was a girl who had actually ~~once dated Justin Tarr for a few months~~ corresponded with Justin Tarr for a couple of years and was hoping to find him again. She tended to get into scraps with CatO, Max, Keith, Gene, and Sofi during chats. They told the rest of us in chats that this girl was actually dangerous and a potential stalker; when we saw her in chat, she did seem to come across as obsessed or irrational (of course, that's how the socks were manipulating people's perceptions).

More strange things happened. One of the oldtime RP fans who had recently decided to edit a genzine received a submission from one of the guys; it was an explicit hetero-adult story and not even a good one. She turned it down, of course, but got savaged both in chat and in private emails for doing so. Most of us would have blown this off, but this particular fan was suffering from insecurity and fled to another fandom--a loss to Rat Patrol.

Another oldtime Rat Patrol fan announced on the list that she had managed to get hold of Gary Raymond (the actor who played Moffitt) and he was willing to come to the U.S. for the Long Range Desert Convention. A little later, one of the guys, Max, said that he had gotten hold of Justin Tarr (the actor who played Tully), and forwarded some vague friendly noises from him. Max explained that although Justin (unlike Gary) had Internet access, he was not willing to come to chats or participate directly on the club because he was afraid of the aforementioned former girlfriend. However, Max occasionally forwarded messages from Justin to the club members.

While most of the active listmembers were away at MediaWest (2000, I think) the club's founder stepped down, citing vague reasons for distress, apparently something to do with the nastygrams that the girl who dated Justin had been getting. We later learned that she had been receiving private nastygrams herself, but didn't think any of us would take her side, so didn't share them. One of the two fans who had originally proposed the Romancing the Rats zine took over running the club. She had once been a sweet, bubbly person with a terrific sense of humor, but she gradually became more and more hostile and defensive.

Over a period of time, there developed an obvious rift on the club. The Rainbow Butterfly Press folks tried to spin it as Americans vs. Canadians or printfen vs. netfen or the email listserv vs. the Yahoo club, but it didn't fall clearly along those lines. There was an underlying current among the Rainbow Butterfly folks that men and married women were superior to typical unmarried female fans, and that the people from Rainbow Butterfly were the best writers and editors in the world. Anyone who said anything favorable about anyone else's fanzines tended to get trashed both on and off the club, and the new clubmom wouldn't stop it. Indeed, she was likely to delete posts she disagreed with.

Chats became more and more touchy. ~~One of the guys - Gene, I think -~~ "Justin Tarr" claimed to be a professional editor. The fan who was working on the Long Range Desert Convention, who used to be an editor at a publishing house in New York (Random House, maybe, I forget) tried to talk shop with him once, but he was rude and dismissive.

Then we were informed that CatO, Sofi, and the guys were actually members of a much larger RP club that had been going on for thirty years, with hundreds of members, quite a few fanzines, and several international conventions. Of course, everyone wanted to see the fanzines - I was fascinated by the idea of another world of fanzines co-existing with the one I'm familiar with, like dark matter in the normal universe. It didn't seem totally unbelievable since most of the people I knew came into RP through media science fiction fandom, and I knew there was a whole world of WWII enthusiasts who were for the most part unconnected to us. But they refused to produce the zines - they were lost, or packed away, or too fragile to share. And their claims of 2000-member cons in places like Tokyo certainly didn't sound realistic.

The members of this supposed earlier club then began joining the Yahoo RP Club. Every new member who joined caused an automatic welcome message to be posted to the club. By strange coincidence, large numbers of people tended to subscribe every time an interesting conversation got going; the welcome message and the new members' responses would make it very difficult to follow any other threads. We took to referring to that group as "the 700 Club."

In the meantime, the owner of the email listserv was getting a lot of private nastygrams, mostly from Sofi, and got into the habit of forwarding them around to some of us. The email listserv owner tends to get into scraps with people on a regular basis, though, so at first I didn't pay a lot of attention to them.

A very earnest fan named Nancy (not one of the oldtimers, but apparently a real person), in an attempt to heal the rift, started a new activity that everyone could join in on. This was a storyboard, to which anyone was welcome to post a chapter of an ongoing story, following a few simple rules. Several of the Gang of Eight joined, broke rules repeatedly, tried to prevent anyone else from posting, and finally left in a huff, demanding that all their chapters be removed (thereby leaving gaping holes in the storyline). Nancy had a very good friend and defender who was also clearly a real person (and a different person than Nancy), [ETA: Ruth], and the two of them were obviously on the side of the angels; those of us from the old guard nicknamed them "LightSiders" (as in belonging to the Light Side, not the Dark Side).

The Gang of Eight brought out three issues of each of the two new zines (Rats on the Edge and Romancing the Rats) at the LRDC in May 2001. They were agented by Cinda Gillilan's Neon Rainbow Press, a reputable dealer who is not implicated in any of this. CatO brought along an armload and sold them next to the orphan zine table, then took prepaid orders for Cinda to fill. One of the other new editors was also there, as were some other Canadian fans; the rift seemed at least partly healed.

After the con, though, things got bad again. A bunch of us oldtimers compared notes and decided that obviously the several hundred fans from the earlier club weren't real. After some more note-comparing, we decided that some of the Gang of Eight weren't real either. We'd met CatO and one of the three original editors at the LRDC, and enough people had met the other two original editors that we were pretty sure they existed. That left Sofi, Max, Gene, and Keith. No one had ever met any of them in person or knew anyone who had, and they all seemed to act pretty much in unison on every issue. We began trying to guess who was a person and who was a puppet, and who was running which puppet. We pretty much settled on the woman who had taken over as clubmom as one of the possible suspects (the other two original editors, including the one we had met at the LRDC, had pretty much dropped out of sight), and CatO as another possible suspect.

In the middle of all this, a new character arrived, a guy named who signed himself "iamtheonlyweasel" (quickly nicknamed "The Weasel"). He backed up everything the sock puppets said and did, but he didn't write in the same style or make the same grammatical errors. Indeed, he had an talent for creative invective. He nearly got kicked off the email list for suggesting that someone (either Nancy or Agel) had her head so far up her ass that there were spincter marks around her neck. (Agel was SO not amused.)

Then we got a break in the case. Remember that CatO was selling Rainbow Butterfly Press zines by the orphan zine table at the LRDC? It turns out that she refused to pay the orphan zine commission to the con (which went to charity), and sent the con-mom some surprisingly abusive, hate-filled email about it. A fan who was helping with post-con paperwork forwarded the email to the rest of us oldtimers, and one thing was really obvious from both style and content: the same person who wrote this email also wrote the nastygrams to the email listserv owner from Sofi.

A number of the oldtimers met at Eclecticon in November 2001. We pooled what limited knowledge we had and attempted to formulate a plan. It was obvious that the sock puppeteers had some very specific strategies. For instance, almost all their victims fit a certain pattern: (a) they were recognized for an accomplishment and (b) they were vulnerable. The first girl attacked had actually corresponded with Justin Tarr (which the sock puppeteers clearly saw an accomplishment to be jealous of). The puppeteers deliberately provoked her to make her *seem* crazy to the rest of us. There was method to this madness - as long as she seemed to be a threat, they didn't have to produce the real Justin. The genzine editor, another victim, was well-known as a gifted writer, but recently mentioned in chat that she was being treated for depression and was nervous about editing her own zine for the first time. The original club founder had not only founded a successful club, but had edited a zine (APO North Africa) and written a Rat Patrol novel; as far as vulnerability goes, not only was did she suffer from insecurity, but her mother was dying at the time. Also, driving her away enabled them to put one of their own in charge of the club. The LRDC con-mom had put on a wonderful convention and edited a successful zine; when attacked, she was going through a typical case of post-con blues.

Another pattern we had noticed was that every time someone mentioned something good that didn't have to do with the Gang of Eight, we were immediately drowned out or even contradicted. One of the oldtimers suggested we take advantage of that - everybody talk up Eclecticon to make the sock puppeteers mad, and maybe they'd make a mistake.

That's exactly what happened. A new sock puppet, "Marcia," appeared who claimed to have been at Eclecticon. In order to top our fun-filled account, she even claimed to have met Justin Tarr's grandson there at Cinda's table! On a different list for Justin Tarr groupies, the person posting as Justin Tarr acknowledged that this was true. But there were so many errors in this person's account that it was easy to prove false - which meant, by extension, that the person claiming to be Justin Tarr had to be fake as well.

In early December, someone posted three posts at 6 a.m. to the Rat Patrol club. One of them laid out the evidence that "Marcia" could not possibly have attended Eclecticon. The second one explained that the person posting as "Justin Tarr" couldn't possibly be the real Justin Tarr since he had confirmed Marcia's false account. The third, entitled, "Jealousy, Cruelty, and Cowardice" outlined the attacks made upon individuals. They were deleted by the clubmom a few hours later, but the damage had been done. A few people posted protesting the three posts, but those posts were deleted as well. All of the hundreds of puppets from the 30-year-old club unsubscribed, one after another, over the course of a few hours. So did the more prominent/individual puppets like Max, Keith, Gene, and Sofi, as did CatO and finally, the new clubmom. The original club founder came back.

It was spooky. There were a few days of stunned silence, and then people who had been lurking for months, afraid to post because of the all the nastiness, began poking their noses out. Explanations were made and repeated. There were some people who still didn't believe it, and thought that the sock puppets left because the three posts were nasty lies that hurt their feelings. The Weasel was among them - at first.

Unbeknownst to those of us who had been at Eclecticon, ~~the storyboard girl~~ Nancy and ~~her friend~~ Ruth ("the LightSiders") had been quietly working on one of the original editors (the one who proposed "Rats on the Edge") and on The Weasel. The three posts hadn't quite convinced them, but it had planted a seed of doubt in their minds, and the Weasel was usefully geeky. Among the four of them, they got what they needed to check the Internet Protocol addresses of the messages posted to the main Rat Patrol club as well as the private Justin Tarr groupie club.

The IP addresses for every sock puppet, from the 700+ old-club members to the individuals like Sofi and Max, indicated that every single post came from one person. Some of them traced back to CatO's home computer; many more of them traced back to her work computer. We were dumbfounded. We had assumed there was a ring of puppeteers: there was only one. The Weasel had once hated us just because his "friends" did; now he hated "them" much more because he realized he'd been deceived and betrayed, and became a staunch ally to the LightSiders. He posted the IP information in detail to several RP lists, including the Yahoo club, the email listserv, and the Justin Tarr groupie list.

At this point, all that was left was mopping up. We posted discreetly, not naming names, to several multifandom lists describing the pattern and what to watch out for. (She had done the same thing in Garrison's Gorillas fandom, and ~~no one had warned RP~~ most RP fans hadn't known about it.) Nancy told CatO's supervisors what she had been doing with her computer on company time, and she got fired. ETA: At the time I thought that was foolish and possibly dangerous, but I have since learned that there were very good reasons. As near as we can tell, there have been no repercussions; we were afraid she would retaliate. We did learn something very funny, which was that, while we were calling Nancy & her friend "Lightsiders," they were referring to the oldtimers as the "Jedi Knights." Same metaphor!

It turned out that many of the stories in the six zines published by Rainbow Butterfly Press were written by CatO under various pen names; a number of the others had been plagiarized. The RBP webpages vanished overnight, and the zines were pulled from Cinda's press. I suppose they're collectors' items now!

The woman who originally proposed Rats on the Edge broke away from the group of CatO's insiders to join with the LightSiders and successfully remained active in fandom. ~~Storyboard girl's friend (this is awkward because I don't have permission to use names yet) has successfully salvaged the poor girl who had proposed Rats on the Edge; the two of them~~ She and ~~Nancy's friend~~ Ruth had put out at least one zine together when I wrote this account in 2002 and were working on another. The other two girls, the ones who had proposed Romancing the Rats, are apparently gone for good. [Note: I think one of them has finally resurfaced.] [ETA: I think both?]

~~Nancy's friend~~ Ruth came to Eclecticon in 2002, so the Jedi Knights finally met one of the LightSiders, and she told us what the girl from Rats on the Edge had shared with her about what it was like to be part of the inner circle. None of them knew that Max and Keith and Gene and Sofi and Justin Tarr weren't real; it was like a cult, complete with brainwashing and mind games. Really creepy stuff. Some serious personal damage was done to the insiders; all were shell-shocked, and one of them (the one who was put in the place of the club mom) ended up divorced.

There was an almost soldier-like camaraderie among those of us who had been there on St. Crispin's Day, if that makes sense. But there was also a lot of regret for the people who had been hurt, both inside and outside the circle.

I know this leaves out a lot - the pseudo-foreign posters who couldn't fool the ESL teacher among the oldtimers; CatO's claims to be the mother of a cadet in one of the service academies who was following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather; the whole 9/11 mess with sock puppets trapped in the World Trade Tower. Hope this will at least provide the bare bones on which to hang a more complete story.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

amedia.livejournal.com

Thanks for the GG info - I've emended above. This is definitely a work in progress and I appreciate all contributions!

I had the vague impression that she had finished her work in GG fandom and then came over and started working on RP fandom (early in 2000, I think). Does this tally with your recollection? Or was she running this scam on two fandoms at the same time?

Btw, if anyone's interested I still have Amy_Portell_Not's posts and can post them here, if amedia doesn't mind.

That would rock. Thank you!

From:

rough draft - RP sockpuppeteer account

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