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amediaThis is another followup to the rough-draft account at http://amedia.livejournal.com/58414.html
Reprinted with permission of the author, Kathy Agel
To: fca-l@trickster.org
From: Kathy Agel
Subject: Re: [FCA-L] Seeking fan abuse essays
Stuff like that, mostly. But also things like...creating multiple identities ona list to stir up shit.
Some of you may remember that I posted about this about a year ago. This has happened in Rat Patrol fandom, specifically on the Yahoo Club that existed at the time -- one person created 600 sock puppets and claimed that they were all members of a fan club that had existed since the 60s, the members of which had written thousands of stories that appeared in hundreds of zines, and sponsored a con that drew 2000 attendees and all the cast members. This person used several sock puppets (those that stand out are a doctor in the Israeli Army, who had been smuggled out of Nazi Germany in a coffin; a Native American who worked as a translator; a former member of the Wehrmacht; a psychologist who loved to attack people on the Club and psychoanalyze them in posts to humiliate them) to control other members, mostly people who were new to fandom (those of us who had been in fandom for years were suspicious of her, and rightfully so. We rarely posted, because if anyone who was known as an old-time fan posted to the club, we were attacked. I was a favorite target because I'm not only a writer and zine editor, but an administrator of a couple of lists in the fandom and a con chair).
Hundreds of zines? Why had none of the active RP fen ever seen them? Few fans hold onto zines for decades -- and to think that 600 people would all keep those publications, that none of them would ever turn up on a sales list or in a used zine box? (The socks refused to discuss any of the zines in detail, becaue they were private, dontchaknow, and they'd need the express permission of the writers. Uh-huh.) And a huge convention with that many members years before the first Trek committee con would have drawn plenty of media attention -- but none of us had ever heard of -that-, either. One sock even claimed to be Justin Tarr, the actor who played Private Tully Pettigrew.
And then came 9/11. One member (a male sock) posted that 18 of their members had been at the WTC (18 members of one fan group all worked in one place?). 6 were known dead (this was the morning of the following day, when known dead was an iffy thing), 6 were missing, and 6 were safe. One fan, who had lost friends in the disaster, confronted one of the socks who had supposedly escaped, asking her where she had been and how she got out. The sock got huffy, refused to give any information, even as to the floor she worked on.
The information about the 18 at the WTC was posted only to a few venues (Rat Patrol and Garrison's Gorillas clubs, a RP writers' mailing list with 600 members -- a group which saw 150 people join in one day. Uh-huh). A well-meaning fan took the information and started posting it to other lists. When this got back to the sock master, she posted in that same male persona to repimand that well-meaning fan. The members who were lost were members of no other mailing lists anywhere (what, none of them was on a book discussion list, or a needlepoint or gardening list?), and it should have not been forwarded outside the groups where it was posted.
Fast-forward to Eclecticon. At the con, some old-time RP fen decided that we were going to take the Club back (just the club, as there had never been any problems on Ratpatrol-L, the list I've run for 5 years. The sock master knew better than to tangle with me on my list, because I won't stand for the type of bullying she practiced on the Club -- bullying that was done with the tacit approval of the fans who had pretty much stolen the Club from its founder. She tried it once on Ratpatrol-L, and was slapped down -- hard. Nobody bullies people on my lists. EVER). Another sock said she'd attended Eclecticon, and was disappointed (according to her, the con was both too large and too small at the same time, and while she attended a couple of panels -- neither of which she could name -- she spent most of her time in her hotel room, reading -- but then later said she had stayed at her in-laws' that weekend), and met a boisterous little boy, three or four in age, in the dealers' room, who was all excited at seeing his grandpa's face on a zine at Cinda Gillilan's table. Well, said sock got into a discussion about the zine and the child, and discovered that lo and behold, the child's mother was none other than Justin Tarr's daughter, who was also attending the con. They had a lovely time bonding, and it was the highlight of the con for her.
After reading this, I checked the registration forms, which show real name and address. The only Marcia who attended is a personal friend, and I knew it wasn't her. And as to a little boy being at the con? She picked the wrong thing to lie about. The only small child at the con was my goddaughter, who is 9. And since I spent virtually the entire weekend at the Orphan Zine table directly across from Cinda's table, if there had been a boisterous little boy in attendance, I damned well would have known about it.
But to get my ducks in line, I asked other dealers (including the fan staffing Cinda's table when she wasn't there), staff and gophers and a sampling of attendees if they'd seen a little boy at the con. No one had. And we knew we'd caught her.
Several of us came up with several posts detailing her lies, which we posted to several RP-specific mailing lists. The name chosen as the poster was Maquisbabe, an ID we created to protect the person who did the actual posting. Some of the socks protested that the posts were lies, but too many of us were able to refute her lies about fandom and the convention. This went on for a couple of days, with the socks on the defensive, and that weekend, the socks started disappearing -- we sat at our computers, refreshed the screen, and watched the 600 disappear, one by one. The website she ran, listing zines (but only those that met her strict guidelines -- naturally, any people not of their publishing group had a hard time getting their zines listed) disappeared, to be replaced by a page that said "Sock puppets can't code web pages."
And we haven't seen her since.We discovered later that several of the zines their 'publishing group' (8 fans, who turned out to be 4 real fans -- including the puppet master -- and 4 socks, who we referred to as The Gang of Eight) contained plagiarized material. Stories had been lifted off the net and published under the names of the socks. These zines have been removed from the market by her publisher, who probably took a financial bath on them.
On a parting note, I found her 9/11 lies to be reprehensible. Real people died in that attack, and she had to use it to further consolidate her control over the Club. It affected me personally, because at 5:30 on the afternoon of the 11th, my ISP went down -- its mail servers were located 1/4 mile from Ground Zero, and when 7 World Trade Center collapsed, my access went out. People didn't hear from me for several days, and hearing that 18 Rat Patrol fans had been in the WTC (somehow this mutated to a fan gathering at the Towers -- a fan gathering at 8:45am in an office building?), many people assumed the worst. Friends whom I'd been in contact with by phone assured them that I was fine -- I live and work over the Hudson in Jersey, not in NYC.
So that's my little tale of woe. I'll leave it to someone else to tell you about the psycho fan who's been running amok in other fandoms (Rat Patrol, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Dark Shadows, Hawaii 5-0), setting up sock puppets (who either support each other, or argue with other), making racial slurs, posting profanity, making threats of physical violence (including a death threat to one member), and threatening suicide.
Reprinted with permission of the author, Kathy Agel
To: fca-l@trickster.org
From: Kathy Agel
Subject: Re: [FCA-L] Seeking fan abuse essays
Stuff like that, mostly. But also things like...creating multiple identities ona list to stir up shit.
Some of you may remember that I posted about this about a year ago. This has happened in Rat Patrol fandom, specifically on the Yahoo Club that existed at the time -- one person created 600 sock puppets and claimed that they were all members of a fan club that had existed since the 60s, the members of which had written thousands of stories that appeared in hundreds of zines, and sponsored a con that drew 2000 attendees and all the cast members. This person used several sock puppets (those that stand out are a doctor in the Israeli Army, who had been smuggled out of Nazi Germany in a coffin; a Native American who worked as a translator; a former member of the Wehrmacht; a psychologist who loved to attack people on the Club and psychoanalyze them in posts to humiliate them) to control other members, mostly people who were new to fandom (those of us who had been in fandom for years were suspicious of her, and rightfully so. We rarely posted, because if anyone who was known as an old-time fan posted to the club, we were attacked. I was a favorite target because I'm not only a writer and zine editor, but an administrator of a couple of lists in the fandom and a con chair).
Hundreds of zines? Why had none of the active RP fen ever seen them? Few fans hold onto zines for decades -- and to think that 600 people would all keep those publications, that none of them would ever turn up on a sales list or in a used zine box? (The socks refused to discuss any of the zines in detail, becaue they were private, dontchaknow, and they'd need the express permission of the writers. Uh-huh.) And a huge convention with that many members years before the first Trek committee con would have drawn plenty of media attention -- but none of us had ever heard of -that-, either. One sock even claimed to be Justin Tarr, the actor who played Private Tully Pettigrew.
And then came 9/11. One member (a male sock) posted that 18 of their members had been at the WTC (18 members of one fan group all worked in one place?). 6 were known dead (this was the morning of the following day, when known dead was an iffy thing), 6 were missing, and 6 were safe. One fan, who had lost friends in the disaster, confronted one of the socks who had supposedly escaped, asking her where she had been and how she got out. The sock got huffy, refused to give any information, even as to the floor she worked on.
The information about the 18 at the WTC was posted only to a few venues (Rat Patrol and Garrison's Gorillas clubs, a RP writers' mailing list with 600 members -- a group which saw 150 people join in one day. Uh-huh). A well-meaning fan took the information and started posting it to other lists. When this got back to the sock master, she posted in that same male persona to repimand that well-meaning fan. The members who were lost were members of no other mailing lists anywhere (what, none of them was on a book discussion list, or a needlepoint or gardening list?), and it should have not been forwarded outside the groups where it was posted.
Fast-forward to Eclecticon. At the con, some old-time RP fen decided that we were going to take the Club back (just the club, as there had never been any problems on Ratpatrol-L, the list I've run for 5 years. The sock master knew better than to tangle with me on my list, because I won't stand for the type of bullying she practiced on the Club -- bullying that was done with the tacit approval of the fans who had pretty much stolen the Club from its founder. She tried it once on Ratpatrol-L, and was slapped down -- hard. Nobody bullies people on my lists. EVER). Another sock said she'd attended Eclecticon, and was disappointed (according to her, the con was both too large and too small at the same time, and while she attended a couple of panels -- neither of which she could name -- she spent most of her time in her hotel room, reading -- but then later said she had stayed at her in-laws' that weekend), and met a boisterous little boy, three or four in age, in the dealers' room, who was all excited at seeing his grandpa's face on a zine at Cinda Gillilan's table. Well, said sock got into a discussion about the zine and the child, and discovered that lo and behold, the child's mother was none other than Justin Tarr's daughter, who was also attending the con. They had a lovely time bonding, and it was the highlight of the con for her.
After reading this, I checked the registration forms, which show real name and address. The only Marcia who attended is a personal friend, and I knew it wasn't her. And as to a little boy being at the con? She picked the wrong thing to lie about. The only small child at the con was my goddaughter, who is 9. And since I spent virtually the entire weekend at the Orphan Zine table directly across from Cinda's table, if there had been a boisterous little boy in attendance, I damned well would have known about it.
But to get my ducks in line, I asked other dealers (including the fan staffing Cinda's table when she wasn't there), staff and gophers and a sampling of attendees if they'd seen a little boy at the con. No one had. And we knew we'd caught her.
Several of us came up with several posts detailing her lies, which we posted to several RP-specific mailing lists. The name chosen as the poster was Maquisbabe, an ID we created to protect the person who did the actual posting. Some of the socks protested that the posts were lies, but too many of us were able to refute her lies about fandom and the convention. This went on for a couple of days, with the socks on the defensive, and that weekend, the socks started disappearing -- we sat at our computers, refreshed the screen, and watched the 600 disappear, one by one. The website she ran, listing zines (but only those that met her strict guidelines -- naturally, any people not of their publishing group had a hard time getting their zines listed) disappeared, to be replaced by a page that said "Sock puppets can't code web pages."
And we haven't seen her since.We discovered later that several of the zines their 'publishing group' (8 fans, who turned out to be 4 real fans -- including the puppet master -- and 4 socks, who we referred to as The Gang of Eight) contained plagiarized material. Stories had been lifted off the net and published under the names of the socks. These zines have been removed from the market by her publisher, who probably took a financial bath on them.
On a parting note, I found her 9/11 lies to be reprehensible. Real people died in that attack, and she had to use it to further consolidate her control over the Club. It affected me personally, because at 5:30 on the afternoon of the 11th, my ISP went down -- its mail servers were located 1/4 mile from Ground Zero, and when 7 World Trade Center collapsed, my access went out. People didn't hear from me for several days, and hearing that 18 Rat Patrol fans had been in the WTC (somehow this mutated to a fan gathering at the Towers -- a fan gathering at 8:45am in an office building?), many people assumed the worst. Friends whom I'd been in contact with by phone assured them that I was fine -- I live and work over the Hudson in Jersey, not in NYC.
So that's my little tale of woe. I'll leave it to someone else to tell you about the psycho fan who's been running amok in other fandoms (Rat Patrol, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Dark Shadows, Hawaii 5-0), setting up sock puppets (who either support each other, or argue with other), making racial slurs, posting profanity, making threats of physical violence (including a death threat to one member), and threatening suicide.
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no subject
Date: 2006-06-27 06:06 pm (UTC)Brick on her head
Date: 2006-07-01 01:21 pm (UTC)Okay, my blood pressure's back up now...time for coffee...
Re: Brick on her head
Date: 2006-07-01 01:37 pm (UTC)If you're who I think you are, then I remember your replies to Judy Z on the RP club, in which she sidestepped and acted like an ass (no surprise). I'm almost sure we did meet in chat at least once.