Section 4 isn’t particularly interesting or relevant, except for what it reveals about Matthew Johnson’s competence and the extremely arbitrary nature of their charges.
4. Threats of harassment and mischief against SFWA and members
This section will look specifically at threats of harassment and mischief made in SFWA-controlled spaces; other threats can be found in section C.
This investigation has found two threats of harassment and mischief against SFWA and members made by Mr. Beale in a SFWA-controlled space, both in a post later removed by moderators from the online Forums:
You can certainly try it [expulsion]. […] I’ll just tell you right now, I will absolutely be insisting on a Nebula award as part of any settlement.
(See Fig A.26)This would seem to imply that he is suggesting that he means to extort SFWA in some way so as to be guaranteed a Nebula award.
Immediately afterwards he adds:
What I find amusing is that some of you actually seem to think I’m being difficult now. (Ibid.)
It is not difficult to interpret this statement as a threat of harassment and mischief.
The first thing I note is that Johnson gets the figure wrong. There is no Fig A.26. He actually means Fig A.25, which is one of his nine screencapped violations of SFWA discussion forum confidentiality. And it’s interesting to note that he felt it necessary to selectively edit the text of my post, because the whole text shows that not only am I not harassing anyone, I am simply responding to what amounts to eight years of public harassment by members of the organization, including several of the current Board members presently adjudicating this matter.
[REDACTED]
Sure it isn’t. By that standard, you’re going to have to discipline dozens of members who have attacked other members in the Bulletin, the Forum, and in their official capacity as an SFWA officer. And you’re not fooling anyone with that transparent dodge. The “misuse of Twitter feed” already has a clearly defined penalty: “Marking blog posts for inclusion that include threats or personal attacks or obvious trolling will also be grounds for removal.”
My blog has already been removed from the feed. Now the board is discussing if you think you can get away with adding a second penalty on top of that one… for a first offense.
I’m perfectly aware there are some who would love to use this as an excuse to kick me, and anyone who happens to think like me, out of the organization. There are members who have been talking openly about wanting to expel me for my opinions and nothing else since 2005. You can certainly try it. I’ll just tell you right now, I will absolutely be insisting on a Nebula Award as part of any settlement. What I find amusing about this is that some of you actually seem to think I’m being difficult now.
It’s actually impossible to interpret the statement as any such threat. Standing on my rights and adhering firmly to the letter of the law and the organization’s rules is neither harassment nor mischief. As will soon become clear through copious documentary evidence, I have been the object of harassment by multiple SFWA members for eight years, and I am now being harassed by their allies on the Board who have targeted me with this irrational, arbitrary, and malicious report.
As further evidence of the Board’s arbitrary behavior, because Mr. Johnson was referring in his report to moderate-deleted Forum posts to which I have no access, and since other members have made threats against me in the Forums which were deleted by the moderators, yesterday I requested access to both the Forum and the moderator-deleted Forum posts. This morning, I received the following response:
As was noted in earlier correspondence, your access to the SFWA discussion forums has been suspended due to your repeated reposting of discussion forum posts, without permission of the authors, culminating in your blog post of July 10, 2013. The right of all our members for confidentiality outweighs your request in light of your continued repostings. Accordingly, your request is refused.
Matthew Johnson
Canadian Region Director
SFWA
Note that Mr. Johnson’s claim is obviously false as I could not have reposted posts from a discussion forum to which I do not even have access. I merely posted graphic elements from the non-confidential report that Mr. Johnson himself sent me unsolicited.
UPDATE: In light of the “threat of harassment” charges, it may be informative to note that there are no less than 59 instances of actual harassment from what looks like a single individual here on this blog in 2013 alone.
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