August Never Ends

August Never Ends:

ohdeargodbees:

It’s a head splitting cognitive dissonance to be fielding requests for help from friends who have just gotten swatted at the same time as giving someone else numbers on the harassment and abuse perpetrated by GamerGate because someone he’s talking to thinks it’s over and never had a big impact on people in the first place. This entire week has been spent putting out fires started by scriptkiddies and adults who should know better but are too empty to care about their victims. I’ve been trying to take a day to just be a regular person, recenter myself, and have the energy to get back to work with the same enthusiasm I tend to have, but every attempt gets cut short by some fresh, new, horrible news about someone trying to get into my accounts, a new asinine conspiracy theory being used as an excuse to dox people I went to high school with, friends freaking out because anonymous message board people are talking about how to mail them bombs, or just another death threat. At least the death threats have become somewhat routine.

Keep in mind that I’m also writing this about 3,000 miles from the home it’s no longer safe to be at while we try and figure out how to move on from this meteor hitting us and be people again. I miss sleeping in my own bed, having my own space. I miss my cat.

I keep saying the phrase “August Never Ends”. I’m still being threatened over a review that never existed, still being hunted by the crusaders for “ethics” who will spin on a dime to defend child pornography but attempt to burn you in effigy for a poor taste joke made over 10 years ago. That’s nothing new. But there’s a fun new way to be ground down by all this thrown in the mix that I haven’t said much about.

The legal system.

Think GG is hard to explain to a friend? Try a legal system that doesn’t really understand what the internet is yet – it’s like trying to push cooked pasta through the eye of a needle. Try explaining shit like 4chan to an officer who types with henpeck hands and getting handed a police report that makes you feel like praying the abuse away may be more effective. Law enforcement is prepared for familiar things like “here is a death threat, here is someone violating a restraining order, here’s where they openly discuss wanting to rape me”, but trying to convey how things work online is frustrating. Thankfully though, police reports are there to put you in contact with the detective, who you can then actually talk to and get to understand what’s actually going on, if you’re lucky. Police reports are there to essentially go “hey y’all some shit is up do you wanna look into this?”, that will then either be escalated or ignored based on the merit of your case (and a ton of other socioeconomic factors I will not be getting into) and actually figure out what’s happened and what to do about it if anything. And hey, at least the detective on my case plays Halo.

But then there’s court, if you’re lucky enough to get taken seriously. Then you have to stand up in front of a bunch of people and recount your abuse. Then you have to face the people who have abused you trying to justify everything they’ve done and go over how much you had it coming while simultaneously saying it never happened, likely using the fact that it’s the internet to make your case seem flippant and your concerns for your safety seem histrionic. Then there’s the likelihood that you’ll find yourself having to explain the internet to a judge who may or may not even want to know. Sometimes they understand, sometimes they tell you the internet is not a big deal and maybe if you don’t want to get harassed you shouldn’t be online. Sometimes, when they tell you that, you tell them that your entire career is online and you’d have to give it up to effectively do that, and they tell you you’re a smart young kid and should maybe just consider a new career. Sometimes you sit in the magistrate’s office listening to the defense attorney get basic facts wrong, while talking to a judge who also gets basic facts wrong, and you feel a crushing sense of despair at watching people with no stake or perspective on your world decide your fate.  

You wonder what the point was in trying to do things the “right way” – reporting your abuse to the authorities, trying to get people to stop doing criminal shit with the system ostensibly in place to do just that, getting abuse prevention orders from the people knowingly putting you directly in harm’s way – what good it’s been if law enforcement can’t follow the shitstorm, restraining orders are ignored by your abuser, and the legal system doesn’t know or want to know about the world you live and work in.

Then there’s the court of public opinion, at least when you have a mob of Nerd McCarthyists nipping at your heels and spinning up TMZ-style blog posts every time you fart.

I said back in August when I first spoke up about this that evidence didn’t matter to these people and offering “my side” would be another pointless invasion of privacy because providing it to the hateful mob crying for my head over a review that never existed would only accomplish continuing to fragment what little privacy I had left and only give them more things to attack me with.

I’ve not said anything yet, publicly, about the legal proceedings because I really do want to get back to living my life, yet the hateful mob that’s been stalking and abusing my family and openly trying to push me to suicide for the last 5 months seems to have all of my court documents, including things only really accessible to the two parties involved in the case. I’ll leave figuring out who leaked these to you, dear reader. But if anything, the resulting dialog makes me feel yet again, like I am stuck in a nightmarish groundhog day of reliving August, over and over, despite the continued trumpeting that none of this has anything to do with me. My point about evidence not mattering to a group whose only goal is to ruin your life continues to be right.

So you’re faced with what to do when you’ve been so badly abused it’s made international news. Do you go to the police or not? Well, if you don’t, they’ll claim that it wasn’t real because there’s no police report. They did so with Anita (who did have a police report, which was conveniently ignored). If you do enter the system, you have to accept that all of what I’ve already written is what you’re facing down, with little chance at actually seeing justice, be willing to sign up for the years-long process in the event that it actually goes to trial, and know you have little chance of a court order stopping your obsessive abuser any more than seeing people target and hurt your family and the families of those close to you ever did. You also get what is happening now – there ARE police reports, there ARE court documents, and there IS validation by the legal system that what has been done is not ok, but all of that is overlooked to continue to spin the narrative.

Your police reports? The difficulties of explaining online abuse and harassment to law enforcement hurt you twice: initially in your ability to get very real, very horrific things done to you taken seriously by the system in the first place, and then later adding insult to injury by having any inaccuracies or misunderstandings entered onto the report by the officer attributed to you maliciously lying. Not only do you get hit the first time by the despair and frustration in translating internet to real life, but then when it translates back you are blamed over the very faults and difficulties that were hurting your ability to protect yourself in the first place. The well-meaning officer who bothered to take you seriously and tried to navigate a world they didn’t understand is now being used against you by the pitchfork-and-torch crowd all the same. The crowd doesn’t understand or care that police reports are far from the end-all-be-all and that a detective always has to get to the bottom of things, but that doesn’t stop them from blowing it up into cries of perjury and using it to reinforce their prior malicious claims, or to further involve themselves in things as private as domestic violence cases.

The affidavit given to the court? Thinkpieces are written by strangers in bad faith about how your abuse isn’t real, dissecting it and tossing out anything it actually says to instead try and fixate on whatever can be spun to suit the narrative of you being worse than Hitler, without even a way to confirm that any of their suspicions are true. There is no forest, only trees – every sentence becomes fixated on so aggressively that any meaning is lost, any context or nuance is stripped away, and you are denied your humanity yet again. You watch people use the very things proving something deeply wrong happened to you to perpetuate more horror, and are forced to discuss private trauma on a public, hostile stage. You are forced to watch people who want you dead dig into private, painful abuse and call you a liar complete with highlights and notations.

 

The fact that two judges reviewed evidence and agreed that a restraining order needed to be granted? Don’t call it a restraining order, that’s bad PR and sounds serious. Call it a gag order and talk about how stalking, harassment, and raising a mob against your ex who is in extreme danger are first amendment rights being crucially violated. Talk about how it’s stopping someone from getting “their side” out, ignoring the manifesto that was very much one person’s pointed side was the gunshot that has left an entire industry bleeding for five months. Talk about how it’s a miscarriage of justice that someone is not allowed to (but continues to) keep inciting mob violence against someone.  

 

Court transcripts get leaked (pretty shitty thing of someone to do!), and the fact that it was a decisive victory with the judge even having to explain to the defense that they didn’t know how restraining orders worked gets totally ignored. If the first half of a sentence is “This was not explicitly stated”, but the second half is “however it was knowingly done with intent to cause the same thing as explicitly stating it would have”, everything after the “however” is discarded in favor of the narrative, everything is there to serve the purpose of twisting the knife.

What about your behavior in court? Are you calm and composed? Great, get ready to be told you must have rehearsed it so you must be lying. Did you stutter in court? Instead of being a human and scared and having to recount something traumatic in front of a group of strangers, expecting to get ignored, it gets turned into this.

That’s my point. No matter what has been done to you, you’re really the one on trial when you’re fighting for your right to not live under constant threats and harassment. You’ve gained a superpower without even realizing it – you’ve become un-abusable. It’s impossible to these people that anything real could ever happen to you, because they’re coming from a starting point of flat-out ignoring or denying anything that could challenge that view, so every bit of privacy of yours that they inject themselves into is only there to continue pushing that notion. You could save a box of kittens from a burning building and the scandal the next day would be that you must hate dogs. Even if you keep your head down, even if you try to be “the perfect victim” and never instigate things, never fight back outside of legal channels, never let your humanity peek through and react with justifiable anger or hurt, it doesn’t matter. Everything you say can and will be used against you, period. End of story.

It’s important to know that I am not special here – it’s a fate I share with every other woman that is a high-profile target of online harassment. This is not a fluke or just a story of some shitty things happening to someone: this is how things work. This is a system so clearly defined it is predictive – the equation is essentially this. Feed into this machine an outspoken marginalized person with some degree of success or visibility, along with someone with a vendetta against that person, and what you get out is years of abuse and harassment directed at the marginalized individual along with galvanization & growth of communities who participate in that harassment and abuse. Some might see despair in this systematic abuse, but I see hope and opportunity. Systems are known quantities, systems can be disrupted, the variables can be tweaked and changed until they break down, if we have a decent map and try hard enough to understand how those mechanisms work.

Silence is a big part of it. Possibly the biggest.

I originally talked about this back in August, when I started to be fed into this particular woodchipper. The prevailing wisdom of staying silent and hoping for it to go away is false – it’s not going anywhere. These are not “internet trolls” just trying to be fed, and the notion of treating the internet as some sort of alternate dimension that can be tuned out is not an option when you live and work in that space. I post these updates and talk about the specific gears of this machine that I’m caught in, in the hope that it spreads. In the hope that we can talk about this and raise awareness of this system’s existence, and finally do something about it. In the hopes that if the machinations of online abuse on this scale are laid bare, and actually TALKED ABOUT, the problem can get in front of enough eyes and brains to figure out what gears to stick monkey wrenches in, to finally cause it to grind to a halt instead of grinding down the people targeted by it. I’m tired of the only people talking about these things being the ones perpetuating it in the first place. I’m tired of longtime abusers being the only ones willing to talk about it because the people that would stand against this sort of thing are worried about making things worse to the point that the ultimate outcome is that good people do nothing. I want to use the power of online community and awareness raising to help crowdsource solutions to the mechanisms of online abuse.

I want people to start talking about how and why these things work, instead of simply looking at the outcome and feeling bad.

This isn’t written in the hopes that people who have built names on abusing others will suddenly grow an empathy gland and stop. It’s my hope to appeal to those of you who don’t know this goes on, or those who know but don’t know what to do. I know it’s 5 months in and anyone with a lick of sense is weary and tired of GamerGate, but it’s important to keep in mind that the people targeted do not have the luxury of disengaging. It’s important to realize that GamerGate did not happen in a vacuum, and that it’s far from the first mob to form around ruining someone’s life – there’s even a wiki about it.

I have been contacted by so many people who have been targeted in ways that I have, and all of our stories are strikingly similar. Soulcrushingly similar. If we don’t start to address the systems that allow months-long campaigns of terrorizing people to thrive and escalate, I will continue to fear for the next girl with an unstable ex, that they will be sitting where I am right now.

When GG started back in August, I was crashing in an old elevator shaft, converted with makeshift floors and a bunk bed. I spent the whole first week there, unable to sleep because the nightmares were so bad and so instantaneous that I would dart awake, hyperventilating, unable to get back to sleep. The setting was so appropriately claustrophobic and suffocating. It’s been 5 months and the nightmares haven’t gone away, the accusations keep flying, the threats continue and my family continues to be targeted. The same wheels of abuse are still turning, 5 months later. I’ve been coming to terms that this is a part of my life now, trying to figure out what to do about it, and how to move forward with so many people trying to wrap themselves around my ankles. It’s been hard to accept that my old life is gone and that I can never get back to it. But I’ve found purpose in the trauma, in trying to stop it from happening again, to use my experience to show how these things are allowed to happen, and to further a dialog on how to actually stop it.

If I can’t go home, maybe I can at least get out of this elevator shaft.

Maybe I can help end August. Maybe you can, too.