libel

Trump is lawsuit-happy–common narcissist/abuser trait

Just read an article in the paper (though, of course, the online version is much longer) called Trump and the “I’ll Sue You” Effect.  It goes into Trump’s history of making threats to sue for defamation, few of which have actually gone anywhere.  While some people have been intimidated into backing down, some have not.

It’s yet more proof that Trump is just a thin-skinned, big bully, dishing it out but not able to take it himself.  He’ll call people losers and rip on their looks and their personal habits like a schoolyard bully, but if you fight back with comments about him being a bully etc., he goes into a conniption fit.

In fact, I’ve known people like this.  I’ve even gotten a threat of a lawsuit, but I refused to back down, and it never materialized.  As Bill Maher said about Trump,

“Plainly, the guy uses lawsuits as a tool of intimidation and doesn’t care how much he clogs the courts with nonsense.”

The article goes on to state:

“Donald Trump has repeatedly attempted to silence his critics over the years through frivolous lawsuits,” said Mascagni, citing Makaeff’s winning claim as one example. “If you really examine some of these cases, it becomes pretty obvious that Trump didn’t file these suits to seek justice. Rather, he filed them to intimidate, harass and silence his critics.”

This is a common tactic used by abusers and narcissists.  I’ve seen all sorts of abuse bloggers claim to have been threatened with lawsuits or even sued.

As for Trump as president–Are you ready for World War III–but with us as the aggressor this time?

Not that Hillary is much better.  Recent revelations have even liberal Democrats getting upset and saying, “Hillary lied!”  I have a little hope that, because of this, she’ll drop out and let Bernie take over.

Otherwise, get ready for President Johnson.  Or President Stein.  This race may actually make a third-party president conceivable.

 

The Avenger Starts a Flame War (Sociopathic Female Bullies Pt 2)–College Memoirs: Life At Roanoke–March 1995, Part 4

I previously wrote about “the Avenger” here.

I soon discovered the full extent of Avenger’s abusive personality: You could call her the teenage version of Tracy, another abusive and/or personality-disordered bully whom I met later on in life.

Avenger and her boyfriend Lima constantly carried out smear campaigns against innocent people with reckless abandon, yet still some people were so ridiculous as to try to tell me Avenger was a nice person.

Soon after Gypsy’s party, Sharon heard there had been some sort of flame war over Pamela in the forums, and checked it out.  I did also, soon after.

Lima, Avenger and possibly others flamed Pamela and told everyone how “horrible” she was.  Pamela, of course, got upset.  I think she even tried to defend herself, but they just flamed her more.  In the end she said her presence in the forums just brought on more trouble, so she wasn’t going to read or write anything in them anymore.

It’s such a shame when nice people are forced out by mean ones.  It’s such a shame when a bully chooses to justify his or her behavior rather than repenting of it.

I was so upset by this that I wrote a post chewing out Avenger and Lima, and anyone else flaming Pamela, for bullying her.  I unwisely accused them of immaturity–though, as you see in the link above, immaturity is a common trait of bullies–which would keep coming back to haunt me.

Avenger wrote a scathing reply, but she seemed to disagree and yet agree with me at the same time, as Speaker said when I met him on the 8th.

She seemed to defend her actions, and yet say that we should all respect Pamela and let the thread die.  She was sure one to talk about respecting Pamela!  She was as guilty as the rest of them of harassing her.

Lima complained that the thread was old and people should look at the dates of the messages.  Though, from what I’d seen in teleconference, what I said still needed to be said: Even if the thread had died, their harassment of Pamela hadn’t.

Avenger also insisted, “I am mature.”  My future husband Cugan told me once that this statement showed she was immature.  He said immature people don’t like being told they’re immature.

Meanwhile, Speaker avoided Avenger, and often typed “ignore Avenger” when he went online.  When he did this, nothing she did or said online showed up on his computer, as if she were never there.  She was harassing him now.  She knew his embarrassing real name, and teased him about it, among other things.

Once, I found Pigpen and Speaker online, and Pigpen said to Speaker, “Is Avenger being mean to you again?”  (Speaker told me once that he didn’t know why Pigpen and Cankersore liked to come see him every Saturday.)

Stimpy soon sent me an e-mail saying, “Please don’t say any more to them about this.  Do this for me!”  They were vicious people who loved arguing, and that was all I would get out of them.

So I stopped saying anything in that thread.

Probably around the time of the Big Flame War, which happened later that month, Avenger and some of her friends voted in one of the forums on whether or not Franz, whom some of us called Znarf, was cool.

(Franz was in college now, a freshman at MSOE, or Milwaukee School of Engineering, which was also Cugan’s alma mater.)

I voted that he was cool.  Avenger said my vote didn’t count because only the cool people could vote.

Apparently she meant that only her worshippers could vote.  She didn’t seem to want to have anyone else on the BBS considered “cool” except for her and her cronies, and if you disagreed, she ripped into you.

As far as I was considered, everyone in her clique was very uncool, while nice people like my roommates, Krafter, Stimpy, Ish, Speaker, and others were cool.

According to Love Our Children, such polls are yet another means of cyberbullying.

Check out the answer to the “Bullies prey on the weak” myth here: It says, among other things, that “bullies prey on people with a kind heart” and “bullies are irresponsible people who refuse to accept personal responsibility for their behaviour and the effect of their behaviour on other people.”

Also look at the answers to “Victims are unlikeable” and “People who get bullied are wimps”: Basically, these are myths, the victims are normally likeable, and their good points are seen by bullies as vulnerabilities.  Let’s not let bullies decide for us who the cool people are.

Even after discovering that Avenger found this chapter of my Memoirs

–I keep this story in here and haven’t tempered the wording.  This is why:

Because bullying in any form has always been, always will be.  The victims need to know that it’s not right, they’re not weirdos, and they don’t have to let the bullies decide who they are or what they can accomplish.  

Victims of bullying can read the articles I linked to, for ideas on how to combat bullying.  Bystanders can get past the myths and stand up for the bullied.

A year or two after this, Avenger tried to ridicule and harass another woman (who was older than she was, which, I believe, Pamela was too), the same as she did to Pamela.  She said this woman had done something bad to one of her friends.

I didn’t know the other woman’s side, so I don’t know what really happened.  But whatever the case, I thought Avenger should not be carrying this harassment out in the open on the public forums.  I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to see this in the forums.

The woman found Avenger’s comments amusing–things like, she was ugly and fat–and zinged her right back, which I admired her for.  The forum-op broke in and said if the argument continued, she would move it to the Pit forum (which was for arguing).

I think this Avenger is a narcissist, or more likely a sociopath, because of her constant bullying of so many people.  And the way she quickly took offense at NOTHING, flamed you, and then you became her enemy for life.

This was in US News and World Report for March 22, 1999, in the article “E-Mail Nation”:

Emboldened by E-mail’s seeming anonymity, kids send bomb threats to school and hate mail to teachers–and are often suspended from school if caught.  Moreover, they could be sued for libel, says attorney Christopher Wolf of Washington, D.C., if they defame someone’s character in an E-mail (p. 58).

So Avenger was treading dangerous territory here.  She could get in serious trouble if she ridiculed and harassed the wrong person.

I haven’t been on TCB for some time (it’s March 24, 1999), because a couple years later it had become a haven for people like her, and most of the nice people had left.  So for all I know, it’s already happened, and she’s been slapped with a libel suit or two.

After all, she’s not exactly anonymous on TCB: She’d be easy to track down and sue.

Okay, now it’s May 19, 1999, and I’ve been on TCB again.  No one seems to use it for anything other than games and the Internet, so even Avenger hasn’t been on for a while and Lima’s account has been deleted.

Avenger seemed like the ringleader of a clique which worshipped her.  The “clique” title fits because other people were kept out and ridiculed.

Ish said privately to me once, after I read a message from Lima, that Lima just did whatever Avenger did and didn’t seem to have a mind of his own.

Also, Avenger, Lima and a few of the others couldn’t even type a regular, non-flame message without cussing.  Since the BBS was set up to censor such words, their messages kept showing a bunch of asterisks, making them hard to understand.  If the words didn’t show up anyway, why bother writing them?

And the whiny group kept crying “censorship” because their swear words didn’t show up, even though it was a family BBS, and the sysop CD had every right to restrict such words on his own BBS.

As for Avenger, she had a serious persecution complex: She thought everyone over twenty (Lima’s age) was out to get her and all teenagers, and owed her something.  No matter what anyone said, no matter what the subject or how totally unrelated to kids, in her mind it must have been a cutdown on kids.

Not only that, but she and her clique showed absolutely no respect for authority, cutting down on the sysop just as viciously as anyone else–despite the fact that he could ban them all from the BBS if he wanted to.

She’ll get nowhere with that attitude, and if she treats people that way, that’s how she’s going to be treated: It’s the “what goes around, comes around” thing.  Just wait until she has teenagers just like her (though I do hope her and Lima’s future kids will rebel against them and become nice, sweet, wonderful people, like Saffy in Absolutely Fabulous).

I liked to play online with a teenager named Mustang, and we shared stories of our genies (mine was Zara, and I think his was Abu).  To my surprise, I found one day (probably after the Flame War) that he was getting to be good friends with the clique.  I really, really hoped he wouldn’t start acting like them, since he was such a nice, fun guy.

The Big Flame War began after Gypsy’s party and before the BBS party on March 18th, 1995.  I believe it went on for several weeks, so in the beginning I may have still been dating Stimpy (or just broken up with him), and in the end I was with Cugan.

This is how it began: In one of the forums, probably /events, CD and others discussed the BBS bowling party, which was to be on the 18th.  They wondered what time it should be, and suggested some late evening times.

Sharon posted that they should keep in mind that many users were under eighteen and might have curfews; the time should be early enough for them to join in the fun, too.  She was just being sensitive to the needs of the kids online.

That’s it.

Avenger posted, “ExCUSE me!” and how sick she was of adults looking down on kids like that.

????!!!!?????!!!!!?????!!!!!

It was a clear case of someone not reading a message thoroughly and reading in things that were never there.  Stimpy quoted her and replied simply, “Um–um–what?  Um–um–what?”

No matter how much Sharon tried to explain that she didn’t mean it that way, Avenger refused to listen to her.  Instead, Avenger insulted her in various ridiculous ways.  For example, she accused her of sleeping with her professors to get good grades.

Irate at Avenger for defaming my smart and virtuous friend, I wrote that she was totally wrong, and told her off.  I did for Sharon what I would want a friend to do for me.

Avenger and her clique began a vicious attack on the both of us, making personal remarks and cutting us down.  And this all because Sharon was trying to be sensitive to the needs of the younger users!

I didn’t know back then that this was called trolling, or baiting people to start fights online.  I didn’t know that it was best to ignore such mean, rude people, aka, “Don’t feed the trolls.”

Sharon apparently didn’t know this, either, because we both got caught up in a Big Flame War with Avenger and her clique, which included Nobody and Sub-Zero.

Avenger and her cronies threw around all sorts of personal remarks like you hear from children on the playground: making fun of our looks and clothes, calling us “dorky,” ridiculous crap like that.  They proved themselves to be just as immature and childish as Avenger insisted they were not.

I didn’t do that to them.  Heck, even as a child, I did not behave in such a ridiculous fashion.  There is no need to go into details; flame wars on the Internet are now a dime a dozen, and everyone knows now how they go.  But eventually all sorts of people began taking both sides.

When the contested bowling party finally happened, Pearl joined Sharon and me.  Though Pearl and I didn’t bowl, we all joined a group with Krafter, CD, and Ish.  Avenger and her clique were in the lane right next to ours, and CD joked, “Nobody say anything about maturity!”

Avenger ignored us all, of course.  This was Pearl’s first look at Avenger.  She later told Sharon and me that Avenger had this snobby or snotty way of holding her head and looking at people, which Pearl imitated for us.  She said, “It was like she was thinking, ‘I’m hot.'”

Though Pearl wasn’t in the Flame War (and was sick of hearing Sharon and me say “Avenger this” and “Avenger that”), one night she found Avenger online, and argued with her about how Avenger treated us.

One girl told me that Pigpen was two-faced, and would seem nice, then do something really mean to you.  Pigpen pretended to be this girl’s friend, then stabbed her in the back.  I forget the details, but it had something to do with the girl’s brother.

This put me on guard against Pigpen being two-faced to me.  Pigpen had seemed like my friend because I was friends with Speaker.  But now she turned two-faced to me, too, joining in with the Avenger clique, making me believe this girl told the truth.

I got all my forum replies in my BBS inbox, so I couldn’t stay away from them simply by avoiding the forums.

Keep in mind, Pearl’s computer was an 8088, and had no mouse or Windows OS, which was in its infancy.  We were running on DOS.  Also, the BBS’s in S— were different from the ones back home in Indiana, so I didn’t know how everything worked.

On BBS’s in 1995, you got your messages immediately on logging in.  It’s not like an e-mail program in Windows which lets you look at a list of headers before deciding what to read.  Some e-mail programs even let you delete without opening, though Thunderbird does not do this.

But there was no such option on this BBS.  The BBS sent me each message as I logged in, and I had to open it before deleting it.  So every time my bullies replied to one of my forum posts, it came directly to my attention and I had to see what they wrote.

I was increasingly bombarded again and again and again by these creeps, with no way to get away from them, unless I stopped going on TCB.

And why should I be forced away from my new online friends and all the fun of playing games with them, when I had done nothing wrong?  This was also my principal means of communicating with my new boyfriend Stimpy and with Krafter, whom I now knew personally, not just online.

So every time I logged in, I’d get all these attacks in my inbox, and tried to defend myself against them.

Not only did they make personal remarks (calling me ugly etc. etc.), but they twisted my words and told lies about me on the forums, which the more gullible kids began to believe, so they started defending the bullies!

Since they kept attacking my friends and me, I kept defending, since nobody ever told me this was not the way to deal with bullies.  When our friends stepped in to defend Sharon and me, they got hit with the bullying, too.

Yet more proof that Avenger is a narcissist and maybe other Cluster B personality disorder as well–probably even a sociopath–surrounded by sycophants and sociopaths who mob-bullied anybody she wanted.  And no, there was no justification for what they did, no matter what they dreamed up in their sick little minds.  This was a cold, calculated smear campaign.

This whole thing also did a number on my self-esteem, making me doubt myself and my looks, and wonder if I was as awful as they said.  I wasn’t, of course, but the residual effects lingered long afterwards.

I believe it went on for weeks.  I was so upset that I carried it through my days, thinking of it even as I sat in class.  I felt like the dork and retard these creeps called me.

I shouldn’t have let little Avenger and her pipsqueak friends get to me like that, but I did.  It was like middle school all over again.  (And yet she insisted she was mature….)

One big problem with bullying is the way sensitive, kind people are made to look like idiots and nerds by the insensitive, immature and unkind.

Instead of accepting it as a “part of life,” bullying of any kind should be stopped by bystanders and/or those in authority: teachers, parents, forum moderators.  

When a bully is supported by his friends, when authority figures aren’t interested in stepping in–even resorting to blaming you for the bullying, when the bully “gets away with it”–this makes it much harder for the bullied to reach “closure.”

At one point, I heard that harassment online was illegal, so I sent a message to CD asking him to step in.  He said the best thing to do would be to ignore Avenger, Lima and Nobody, and they would get bored and go away.

What he really should’ve done was ban the whole lot of them–

–not just for their constant bullying and harassment of me so I couldn’t even log in in peace–

–but for how they bullied so many others on the forum, gang-style, and occasionally chased people away. 

As I noted earlier, that BBS became overrun with flaming gangs and eventually died.  Not banning bullies is a good way to allow your BBS/forum to be overrun with bullies, while the victims get no justice.

CD and Krafter set up a secret, invitation-only forum, which would not show up in the list of forums.  This way, only the nice people could be in the forum and wouldn’t have to deal with the Avenger trolls.  (I didn’t know this usage of the word “troll” until 1998, so I didn’t actually call them that.)

It was called the /elite forum, and in the beginning included maybe a handful or a dozen people: me, Sharon, Pearl, Ish, Krafter, Stimpy, CD, a young girl named Grace and her boyfriend.  If one of us wanted a friend to join, we mentioned the friend in the forum.  If everyone agreed, this person was invited in.

This worked for a few days, but then Lima, Grace’s brother (talk about siblings who are total opposites), came over by the computer and saw the /elite forum when Grace was online one day.  He got mad, wanted his own forum, and told the others in the Avenger clique, who promptly cried, “Censorship!”

This was ridiculous: Forums often have private sections like this, whether for the admins/moderators, or for people to discuss how they’ve been abused without the abusers and trolls finding it, or for some other reason.

(The Forum has such a section.)

This was the abusers and bullies finding the sanctuary and refusing to let anyone have peace and quiet without their trolling, to let their targets have a safe place to get together without their bullies harassing them.

The /elite forum was scrapped, especially when CD or one of the others decided maybe it wasn’t such a good idea.  The Pit, or /thepit, however, was formed.  Here, anyone could argue all they wanted, but it had to be kept out of all the other forums.  We applauded this improvement.

I finally wrote a message intending to end the whole thing.  I set things straight about accusations made against me, which some of the kids believed merely on Avenger’s word, and said I would stop my part of the argument:

To ALL

I’d like to set a few things straight to everyone who’s been reading this forum, especially to those who seem to think Avenger is some sort of hero for standing up to those ‘b—- college students who think they’re better than us high-schoolers.’

I don’t care anymore if Avenger or Nobody hates me. Avenger’s friends say she’s ‘nice’ and ‘cool’; well, maybe she is in real life, but I’m not dealing with her in real life, I’m dealing with her on here, and this is the persona she’s chosen to have online.

She’s chosen to treat myself (and others) this way online.

I did not start the argument and neither did Sharon; it was, I admit, stupid of me to respond to what was said to me, and be an ‘easy target’; but I learn from my mistakes and will know better next time.

Now I am trying to end this once and for all so there can be peace, or at least a truce. Also, I don’t want everyone hating me without reason.

I never cut on the age or intelligence of anyone in here. I have not made personal remarks, which the argument has turned to. I have merely responded (though ill-advisedly) to remarks made to me, with ‘an equal and opposite reaction.’

Such as IQ’s, etc.–that was merely a sarcastic response to being called a ‘tard,’ as Nobody termed it. I said nothing about his or anybody else’s intelligence, only mine.

As for age–I have nothing against high-school students. I used to be one myself. What I’m against is the immaturity many high-schoolers have, and also–brace yourself for my unexpected admission–many college students.

I am against immaturity in general, especially when it is the cause of someone else’s relationship problems. Many high-schoolers are also–gasp–mature.

But it usually irritates someone older to see blatant immaturity and popularity games in a group of younger people. It irritates me.

Also Sharon was concerned about younger users having curfews and not being able to go to the bowling party.

I have a note which says, “and might not be able to join in the fun,” though I’m not sure where that was supposed to fit in the sentence.

We had curfews too, everyone under eighteen has curfews (usually), and she was concerned. Her message was the focal point of the argument, originally; it has gone too far off base and has no further purpose.

There has been a lot of assuming, reading between the lines, and twisting of words going on here. There have also been personal comments made to me that are actually ludicrous because they’re the opposite of what I really am or look like.

I’ve had many intellectual conversations here and elsewhere, I’m most definitely not ugly, and the thought of ME being a conformist just makes me burst out laughing! Go ahead, tell me more! I like a good laugh.

Plus, Avenger, I never called you–to yourself or to anyone else, not even to myself–a “dumb blonde.”

I do not believe in the concept of dumb blondes. I have at least four blonde friends (natural blonde) who are very intelligent, as well as brunette friends who, it is said (as a joke, not as a rip), ‘are blonde but their hair doesn’t know it.”  (I did not make up this phrase; an intelligent AND blonde friend of mine likes to say it.) And I was in an environmental group in high school.

This paragraph referred to things said by Avenger, such as “you may think I’m a dumb blonde but I’ve been accepted to UW-Stout and I’m in an environmentalist group.”

Anyone who has thought I meant differently about anything than I did, I’m sorry you took it wrong, but you must realize how it was truly intended. And please, before getting on the bandwagon of one side, look at the other side as well.

Plus–I do realize this is the /argue forum, for arguments. Argue away, but if someone doesn’t want to argue, let them be instead of harassing them. It’s much easier on everyone.

}] Nyssa[{

Four years later, this letter still makes me proud.  Ish, one of my supporters, saw my letter and approved.

I soon checked the responses, however: It was just Lima saying, “Blah blah blah,” nothing more intelligent from any of them, and Lima saying we must worship them (or something like that) before we could ever be in their good graces.

Like I even wanted to be in the good graces of a group of bullies.

What, did he get the silly idea that I was apologizing?  I did no such thing!  Obviously he didn’t actually read the post.  Do you see an apology to the bullies anywhere in that post?

I complained to Ish about these responses.  He said that group doesn’t want to read anything longer than a few paragraphs.

Considering how mean these people were in general, I suppose I shouldn’t have expected that they’d listen to me and lay off.  After all, that would violate the sociopath code.

But back then, I didn’t understand this about bullies, having the naïve notion that bullies could be talked into reasonable behavior and apologizing.

Ish and I were in tele when Lima, probably Avenger, and maybe others showed up.  I whispered to Ish that I would act nice to these people because, as the Bible says, that would “pour burning coals over their heads.”

I greeted Lima with the usual “hello Lima bean–olleh amil neab,” but he made some strange remark about “groupies.”  Then he started talking about bowing down and worshipping him!  I certainly didn’t do that, though I may have joked around a bit.

Then Lima and the others ganged up on me, despite my attempts to be nice, and treated me the same as they did Pamela.  Sharon, watching, said I should show them a thing or two by just leaving, so I did.  I then paged Ish about it, and he consoled me.

Sharon wrote a post to everyone saying that those who adopt online “personas” different from their own personalities, should realize that some people online are real, not “personas,” and do get hurt in real life by things they read online.

For the next several days, I refused to go into the forums.  I may even have stayed away from the BBS for a couple days.

CD soon forced Avenger to apologize to Sharon, which she did, sort of, with a public message in the forums.

I was upset, though, because she apologized only to Sharon when she should have also apologized to me.  I deserved an apology for her b**chiness and bullying of me, just as much as Sharon did.

I don’t remember how CD made her apologize to Sharon–maybe he finally threatened to ban her from the board–but it was a victory for our side.

(Either late that year or in the next year, Avenger wrote on the forums how much she liked Third Rock From the Sun, and sympathized with the aliens for being different and being misunderstood.  She actually said she didn’t make fun of people for how they look or dress, because that was stupid.

(LOL

(What a liar and a hypocrite!  She made all sorts of personal remarks about my looks and dress during the Big Flame War, and accused me of being a snob when I was merely quiet and shy!)

Around this time, CD or Krafter posted a warning to all the users on TCB to not use the same password on different BBS’s.

I didn’t go on Solaris, a rival BBS, very much, especially since it was apparently just some kid trying to go up against TCB instead of just having his own BBS and supporting all the other ones in the area.

But it was popular with the Avenger clique, who figured out people’s passwords (such as Pamela’s), began logging in as those users, and left nasty messages to other users and on the forums.

The innocent users looked bad and had to explain that no, they didn’t write the messages.  I was afraid to go on Solaris during the Flame War, for fear the same thing would happen to me.

This is yet another form of cyberbullying and trolling, which still happens online all the time.

This makes me wonder if Lima and Avenger (who got married eventually) and their sycophants have gone on to become hackers and trolls, spreading hate and trouble throughout the Net, hacking into people’s accounts, spreading viruses, etc.

Because you can see above that they behaved just like those sociopath trolls we still find all over the Net, doing the very same things to harass people–for fun.

In maybe 2006 or 2007, Avenger found these memoirs and posted in my guestbook.  She said little other than that I have “an interesting perspective” on what happened.

Mindblowing.

She must have been well into her 20s by then, and more than 10 years had passed. 

Yet she still thought SHE was right, and did not apologize for her actions.

My childhood bullies tended to apologize to me years later, yet she still had this twisted, false view of herself. 

Don’t most people GROW UP eventually?

Yet more evidence that this bully was still stuck at 16. 

Though when I was 16, I didn’t behave that way, and neither did most people I knew, so age is no excuse for her behavior.

After all, this is yet another way she behaved just like Tracy, another possible sociopath I had the misfortune to cross paths with in 2007. 

Sociopaths will laugh at you for calling them abusers, and refuse to admit wrongdoing or apologize for their bullying and abuse.

And that’s what Tracy and the Avenger both did.

 

Index 
Cast of Characters (Work in Progress)

Table of Contents

Freshman Year

September 1991:

October 1991:

November 1991:

December 1991: Ride the Greyhound
January 1992: Dealing with a Breakup with Probable NVLD
February 1992:

March 1992: Shawn: Just Friends or Dating?

April 1992: Pledging, Prayer Group–and Peter’s Smear Campaign

May 1992:

Sophomore Year 

Summer 1992:

September 1992:

October 1992–Shawn’s Exasperating Ambivalence:

November 1992:

December 1992:

January 1993:

February 1993:

March 1993:

April 1993:

May 1993:

Summer 1993: Music, Storm and Prophetic Dreams

September 1993:

October 1993:

November 1993:

December 1993:

January 1994:

February 1994:

March 1994:

April 1994:

Senior Year 

June 1994–Bits of Abuse Here and There:

July & August 1994:

January 1995:

February 1995:

March 1995:

April 1995:

May 1995:

 

Sociopathic Female Bullies Pt 1: Before Tracy, There Was the Avenger–College Memoirs: Life At Roanoke–February 1995, Part 4

Sharon, Pearl and I soon discovered a bullying and smear campaign being carried out on TCB, led by “Lima” against his ex-girlfriend Pamela.

Lima’s usual greeting in Teleconference was “hello” written backwards, or “olleh,” the mirror-image effect Rachel was so fond of.  So I always greeted him with, “hello lima bean–olleh amil neab” or “hello olleh lima amil bean neab.”  But this was before I knew about the bullying.

Now, whenever I went online, I found Lima (a tallish, dark-haired guy of about twenty who worked instead of going to college) and his friends ripping on Pamela.

One day, Pamela came online and he complained about seeing her.  I asked why; he whispered to me (that means, he sent a private message to me) that Pamela was his ex-girlfriend, that she cheated on him and was just awful to him.

After this, Sharon went online one day and found Pamela.  Pamela, a pretty girl with dark hair who was about our age, took her into chat.

She said that Lima and his friends were lying about her, that she never did those things they accused her of.  She said he’d already dated and dumped another girl since her, so Avenger, his new girlfriend (who was only sixteen), was afraid he’d do the same thing to her.

(Actually, a few years later, he married her.  I have no idea if they’re still together, because–even though I can search divorce and criminal records easily in Wisconsin–I never knew their full names.)

Avenger posted sexual innuendos in her profile, which disturbed me because Lima was twenty and she sixteen: Sixteen-year-olds are jailbait in Wisconsin.  In fact, if the police discover that two minor teenagers of the exact same age have slept together, both get charged with sexual assault!  It’s nuts, I know.

“Pigpen” and “Cankersore” were friends of Avenger and Lima.  They were teen-age girls: Pigpen was pretty and slim, and recently broke Stimpy’s heart in a nasty way; Cankersore was plump.  I met them at Gypsy’s party.

Sharon and I witnessed the horrible things Lima, Avenger, Pigpen and Cankersore, probably Nobody, and probably some of Lima’s male friends did whenever Pamela was online.  They waged out-and-out war with her.

She didn’t like being online at the same time as they were, especially in Teleconference, where they’d rip and rip and rip on her with no mercy.

They posted nasty things about her in the forums.  No matter who else was in tele (Teleconference), this group posted everything publicly.  If they whispered anything to her, I don’t know.  This cyber-abuse, cyber-bullying, upset Pamela a lot.

Sometime during this period, I met Avenger online for the first time: I went into tele, finding Ish Kabibble, and Avenger in private chat with a boy who wasn’t Lima.

She came back into the main Teleconference channel and the boy left.  Ish said words like, “I see you brushing yourself off, there, Avenger.  You’d better be careful not to let Lima know you were alone with another boy.”

I made some joke in this vein which I can’t remember now, just some harmless throwaway comment to make her laugh.  Everyone else laughed.  But she turned on me and wrote, “Listen, NEW USER, you’d better be careful.”  I had no clue why she’d say that to me, especially when she wasn’t mad at Ish for teasing her.  It was bizarre.

I believe she left tele soon after, so I discussed it with Ish, wondering what the heck had just happened.  He didn’t know what set her off, either.

When Avenger logged off a few minutes later, she sent a message to me that said, “Avenger is hugging you!”  I paged her with, “So you’ve forgiven me now? 🙂 ”

She didn’t respond because she was already offline.  I didn’t know at the time that this was her logoff message, sent to the entire board, that she wasn’t hugging me personally.

(By the way, I soon began to type “.wave all” before I logged off each time, which sent a message to everyone online saying, “Nyssa Of Traken is waving to you.”  That was my good-bye wave.)

After I discovered my mistake, and that Avenger had not “forgiven” me at all, I dreaded her appearance online, and avoided her.  I grunted “Avenger” with a frown whenever she came online.

I checked her registry.  It said she was sixteen, which I knew to be a volatile age, so I said to myself, “That explains it.”  Well, sort of, since I wasn’t like that at sixteen.

It wasn’t just her age, but her personality.  Of course, I didn’t know that yet.  She was rude and mean to me ever since she first met me, even though I was always nice to people online.

Her attitude problem didn’t go away with age, as I discovered a year or two later, and then around 2006 or 2007 when she found this memoir on my website.  She still refused to admit that she was mean and nasty to everyone, still saw herself as some kind of champion.

At 16, she seemed to hate anyone over 20.  She seemed to think people that “old” hated teenagers.  She turned on them with the slightest provocation–even with no provocation–and twisted anything they said into a slam on teenagers.

She and her cronies ridiculed older users in the forums.  If anyone tried to defend them, she ridiculed them, too.

She was immature, but insisted she was mature (which Cugan later told me was a sure sign of her immaturity).  She was bad-tempered, arrogant and cocky.

I never did anything to her–except disagree with her–yet she hated me.  One of the other users told me there were few girls on the BBS, so many of them hated competition.  (What’s with this “competition,” anyway?)  However, that didn’t excuse how nasty some of these girls got.

After all, Avenger wasn’t just rude to other girls, but to men, too.  Speaker was one favorite target.  So were Krafter, Stimpy and their male friends.  Once, an older guy wrote to her in the forums, “I don’t understand you at all.”

Nowadays, I believe that Avenger is a sociopath.  She could also have other Cluster B personality disorders, considering how easily she took offense, a sure sign of borderline or histrionic disorders.  I soon discovered the full extent of Avenger’s abusive personality, so much so that you could call her the teenage version of Tracy, another personality-disordered bully whom I met later on in life.

But this was not the end.  More on this batsh**-crazy sociopathic female is in the March chapter.  There, her drama-queen antics reached a fever pitch as she tried to mob-cyber-bully me off the board with a massive smear campaign.

That’s what she and Lima did to Pamela, who eventually stopped going on the BBS entirely, yet another nice person intimidated off while the nasty ones took over.  That’s what she tried to do to another girl, Amethyst? a year later–except Amethyst just laughed at her.

Index 
Cast of Characters (Work in Progress)

Table of Contents

Freshman Year

September 1991:

October 1991:

November 1991:

December 1991: Ride the Greyhound
January 1992: Dealing with a Breakup with Probable NVLD
February 1992:

March 1992: Shawn: Just Friends or Dating?

April 1992: Pledging, Prayer Group–and Peter’s Smear Campaign

May 1992:

Sophomore Year 

Summer 1992:

September 1992:

October 1992–Shawn’s Exasperating Ambivalence:

November 1992:

December 1992:

January 1993:

February 1993:

March 1993:

April 1993:

May 1993:

Summer 1993: Music, Storm and Prophetic Dreams

September 1993:

October 1993:

November 1993:

December 1993:

January 1994:

February 1994:

March 1994:

April 1994:

Senior Year 

June 1994–Bits of Abuse Here and There:

July & August 1994:

January 1995:

February 1995:

March 1995:

April 1995:

May 1995:

I am out of danger from my abusers: Statute of limitations has run out

A quick check of Wisconsin laws tells me that the statute of limitations for libel/slander is two years.  I never libeled, defamed or slandered my abusive ex-friends, but when they found my blog, they threatened to sue me for this.

Even if Richard and Tracy were to still think they have a case, it has been between two and a half to four and a half years since I told friends, family, my priest and this blog about what happened, hoping for support, venting and help with healing.  It has also been more than two and a half years since they made this threat.

They have suffered no job losses.  If they even have jobs, I wouldn’t know who they work for, and wouldn’t contact their employers anyway.  That just isn’t the kind of thing I do.  We also do not run in the same circles except online, even though we live in the same city.  They have absolutely no financial losses to claim because of me.

This tells me their threats were just intimidation meant to keep me quiet, that they were all bluster, that they hoped I was easy to intimidate, that they were indeed intentionally trying to gaslight me into doubting what I knew was true.

Instead, I stayed strong and brave, continuing to tell my story, keeping my blog up, keeping my mind and memory strong and secure against the gaslighting.

This tells you, the reader, to be brave and tell your own story of abuse.  Don’t let your abusers silence you!

Controversial Play Tears the School Apart–College Memoirs: Life at Roanoke–March 1994, Part 2

Now for the defining event which essentially ruined what InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF) fought so hard to set up at Roanoke:

You don’t have to agree with the people who were against the school play, but I do want you to understand that nobody was trying to stifle women’s voices or fight against women’s empowerment.

Nor was it IVCF trying to censor people, which is how it was misrepresented to the student body.  This is what really happened:

In March, there was a huge controversy over the school play that was to be put on that semester.

Lucky Spot” had already caused controversy fall semester because it had nonstop cussing and was shown on Family Night without a warning; the language really should have been toned down out of sensitivity to the audience and any Christian actors.

The language added nothing; the play would have been perfectly understandable without it.  It didn’t seem right to make actors use language which may have been against their personal Christian beliefs.  It was, however, a good and funny play.

This next play, “Uncommon Women” by Wendy Wasserstein, caused controversy because of the often vulgar subject matter.  Many people considered it inappropriate at a Christian college.

The year before, my World Lit class had said that we could be pretty sure the old guys who ran Roanoke would never agree to showing the old Greek play, “Lysistrata.”  But “Lysistrata” was tame compared to this play.

Some of the controversial scenes: A girl runs in and says, “I did it!  I’ve tasted my menstrual blood!”  (I have a low tolerance for gore.)  There was also a scene in which a girl shows a virgin the different penis sizes.  I don’t remember more concrete examples from the play, so you’d have to find a copy or video of it.

In Googling this play just now, I discovered that this play was shown on TV back in the 70s, to critical acclaim.  I had never heard of this play, however, and I doubt that many people at Roanoke had, other than the older generations, such as the theater director.

(No doubt my parents did not want me, a 5-year-old, to see it.  As Nazarenes, they probably did not want to watch it themselves.)

A critic from the New York Times called the sex talk funny and believable, though it becomes excessive.  But to me, it wasn’t at all believable, and was all excessive.

As Phil explained it to me, a former member of our IVCF group, Dori, also a theater major, got a copy of the script (hoping to try out), but was irate.

She wrote letters to the churches that supported the college financially, quoted the vulgar parts of the play, said it had no business being performed on a Christian campus, and that IVCF was behind her in this.

But I don’t know why she wrote this about IVCF.  She was on the outs with our club president Pearl, she had not been in IVCF for a while, and IVCF had never even heard of this play.  

The rest of the school, however, got wind of this by March and believed a rumor–namely, that IVCF was against the play.

The members of IVCF had never read the play, and had no official stand on the play, not then or, as far as I remember, ever.  But they were seen as censors.

The Mirror staff showed a grave error in judgment by making a certain Kelly, the most vocal and adamant supporter of the play and foe to IVCF, the main writer of articles about the controversy.  

Rather than do actual, professional, journalistic research, he wrote rumors and opinions and inaccuracies as facts, and fueled the fire against IVCF.  Basically, he was our own Rita Skeeter.

IVCF was ridiculed and verbally abused.

Many of the people, organizations and churches who funded Roanoke threatened to withhold their money because of the play.

I have since learned that Tracy was involved in this play (to my surprise because I believe she was a Christian), and that the actresses made T-shirts which said, “Who’s afraid of Wendy Wasserstein?”  Which really made no sense; nobody was “afraid” of Wendy Wasserstein.  We didn’t even know who she was.

I had no individual stance until after the Play was shown.  I wanted to see it for myself before making up my mind.

I went around listening to people’s various sides of it: I had long talks with Phil about it, since he had the one male part in the play: an announcer offstage.

He said this year’s theme was plays by Pulitzer Prize-winning women, but this play had not won the Pulitzer.

(After just now checking out the plot of the Pulitzer winner, The Heidi Chronicles, I bet it would have been far better received at Roanoke than Uncommon Women.)

We also talked with others about it, such as Julie.  She and Darryl were to change their position after converting to Catholicism a few years later, and feel mortified that they took the stance they did.  But at the time they felt that Roanoke was a liberal arts school, and showing the play was part of being liberal arts.

Kelly apparently didn’t know that I was in IVCF, which he mistakenly thought Dori still belonged to (an example of his lack of research before writing articles).

When Phil and I somehow ended up talking with him about the play after lunch or dinner one day and the cafeteria was nearly empty, he railed in a loud voice against Dori.  He was graphic, crass and embarrassingly loud.

He said he bet she had done things to herself that were like things spoken of in the play, and then moved his hand down to his crotch and started yelling out female cries of orgasmic pleasure.

Phil and I said nothing at the time, but both agreed that what Kelly said and did was far over the line of decency.

Others, such as Astrid and Pearl, thought that a Christian school should not be showing plays with vulgar content.  If this were a secular college, they would have let it go.

Different people in IVCF had different opinions.  Some thought it should be banned; some thought it should be shown; some didn’t know what to think and preferred to stay out of it (that would be me and probably my roommate).

The rumor mill made us sound like a powerhorse, but IVCF was merely a handful of hardworking friends with no real influence in anything, who just wanted to get a group going for Christians to come together and hang out and have Bible studies.  

The majority of people against showing the play did not attend IVCF meetings at all, or rarely attended.  Some of us, regardless of our individual stances, were disgusted at how our little group of IVCF had been dragged into this.

Pepper Steak Derek had started doing a campus talk show in Bossard called “No Holds Barred.”  One night, the topic was the play.

On the panel were four people who he said represented InterVarsity–not representing the people against the play, but IV, though it had no stance: It was just a group.  They were Pearl, Mike, a guy who I don’t think came to IV that often, and Dori–who wasn’t even in IV.

I didn’t go to it for some reason, but Pearl later told me that it was like being in Hell itself.  There was yelling and jeers (people against IV), and people accusing IV of things it wasn’t even doing.  

Pearl and others tried to explain their positions, and I believe they got rudely shouted down.  Once a girl stood up and started rambling on about it, and her thoughts were disjointed and made no sense so the unnamed guy on the panel said, “Excuse me, but what is your point?”

The rumor mill had made IV sound like Bible-thumping censors and jerks, but that was nowhere near the truth.  IV, in fact, never did have an official position on the play.  Kelly, of course, also wrote a biased article about “No Holds Barred.”

Pearl, Mike and Rachel all wrote excellent letters to the editor.

Pearl thought the college should decide if it was Christian or secular, and on that base its decision whether to show the play.

Mike thought that people in the local towns were sheltered; nowadays, after forgetting all about the play, he says he’d be interested in seeing it.

Rachel, who was not in IVCF and was certainly no prude, thought the play should not be shown.  She tells me now that the play embarrassed her, that women can be crass and vulgar, but portraying them that way shows their foolishness, not their strengths.  It doesn’t do women justice.

Somebody, I don’t know who, started a petition to ban the play.  I don’t believe the petition had anything to do with IV.  If anything, it was just one or two people who wanted to do it.  I don’t believe I signed it, either, if I ever actually saw it.

Since Phil was the voiceover, I got to see parts of the script beforehand.  Some made me laugh, so I thought maybe the play would be fine.  The date I went to see the Play: probably April 22.  I don’t know what I did with the program.  I may have tossed it.

I felt the acting was often exaggerated, done to shock and to play to the supporters, done to emphasize the controversial bits, rather than to amuse.

During the intermission, I went out into the foyer to go to the bathroom, and Phil soon found me.  He took me into the entryway, which was separated from the foyer by glass doors, and asked me what I thought of the Play.  I said it was just awful.  Then and/or after the play was over, I said I hated it.  I didn’t care who heard me.

From what I could see, with everything in context now, the Play had no plot or point, and just took whatever chance it could find to be as gross, offensive, or vulgar as possible.  It glorified promiscuity.  And why on earth would anybody want to taste her menstrual blood?

I didn’t consider myself prudish–after all, I liked Lysistrata, The Monk, the Black Adder series and Are You Being Served, and had been addicted to Tales of the City and Melrose Place.  But there was a line I did not like to cross, a line which went past “provocative” or “naughty” and on to “obscene.”  As far as I was concerned, Uncommon Women was on the “obscene” side.

It was like it had been written by a teenager who wanted to shock their elders, or a shock jock, or one of those shock comics we had in those days.  Such things may make adolescents giggle, but they’re not true, lasting art.

Maybe it was making some kind of point about society’s views of women, but that was in the 1970s when the Sexual Revolution was a new thing.  In 1994, it wasn’t at all unusual to hear teenage women talking about sex, or for Christians to be mocked for believing in God and for abstaining from sex, drugs and alcohol.  All through my childhood and teen years, I had been mocked for my beliefs.  I came to a Christian college to find a safe haven for four years where I could hopefully find a husband among a huge pool of men with the same values I held–but instead I found almost none who shared them.  The ones who did, weren’t interested in me for some reason I never could understand.  The guys I did date, kept pushing me to compromise my beliefs.  And now here was this play telling me that my beliefs were wrong, that chastity was weird, as if I hadn’t already heard enough of that every day.

Everybody gave the play a standing ovation, but I thought it was the worst play I’d ever seen.  I later wondered if it would be better to read it, because the acting itself was so terrible, with little attention paid to things like emoting and sounding natural, sacrificing quality to say shocking lines as loudly and mockingly as possible.  This wasn’t artistic–It was nothing but a big F**K YOU.

It was possible that the play would have been much better in the hands of skilled actresses with comedic timing.  I had seen much better acting on that very stage, even from the very same actresses.  For example, if you want to see shocking, controversial subject matter done well with excellent comedic timing, I recommend watching the show Titus from around the turn of the century.

I figured the standing ovation could only have been for putting on the play in the first place despite opposition, and not for artistic value.  I stayed in my seat and only made a couple quiet, cursory claps–even quieter than my soft, shy claps usually are.

This may have been when I decided that the play did not belong on a Christian campus, though I didn’t support Dori’s actions, either.  (It was too late to join one side or the other, however, now that the play had been performed.)

Reading works in Lit class was one thing, often necessary to get a full grounding in Lit education; performing them was another, because it essentially endorsed whatever work was performed.

None of the campus plays I’d seen before this were specifically Christian, especially Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.  But here was a Christian college putting on a play that openly mocked people who wanted to save themselves for marriage and resist looking at others as sex objects.

IVCF did go to the Play, an effort to show that we were trying to be fair and had been given a bad rap, and held a discussion on it after opening night.  However, no one even came to the discussion, which surprised us.

(I don’t believe I saw the Play on the opening night but on the second, though my day planner suggests I did.  I think my not going to the Play that night was the reason I didn’t go to the discussion.)

The lack of anyone at the discussion was a slap in the face, especially considering that lots of people on campus thought the play should not be shown.  Gary’s Christian girlfriend, Diana, not a part of IVCF, had the part of the virgin, and was the only character I liked.  I wondered why she wanted to be involved with such a play.

The memory of this Play was still fresh in our minds when senior year began, and the strange hostility to our group didn’t seem to dissipate much.

Once during a prayer (when once again we prayed at each of the buildings around campus), two girls walked by and began singing “Jesus Loves Me” at the top of their lungs.  (We countered such rudeness with humor, which you can read about when I discuss this in the senior year chapters.)

I was so furious with the rumors and what they did to our hard work that, years later, I still burn to tell people what really happened.  [This part was written and posted online in 2007.]

Years later, I discovered that the play director’s wife misrepresented the opposing point of view in the Summer 2007 issue of the alumni magazine, in an article about her husband, who had retired:

Tracy and the rest of the cast of ‘Uncommon Women,’ remember the controversy about the play?  You suffered as a group because at the time the college didn’t know anything about women’s studies.

I’m still proud of you for responding by wearing those ‘Who’s Afraid of Wendy Wasserstein?’ shirts.  Thanks for supporting [the director] and the idea of empowering women’s voices.

This just re-opened the wound I thought had closed, by making it sound like the people against the play–some of whom were my close friends, and women writers–were ignorant anti-feminists who didn’t want women to have a voice.

First they were accused of censorship; now they are accused of stifling women’s voices?  Come on, now!

This had nothing to do with woman’s “struggle against patriarchal society” or “empowering” women.  This had nothing to do with knowing nothing about “women’s studies.”  (Heck, we’d read Toni Morrison and other women authors in Lit classes.)

Many of the people against the play were women writers, even feminists.

This had everything to do with a Christian college putting on and endorsing a play which glorified promiscuity and made it impossible for many Christians to even try out for it.  For Rachel, it was about women being depicted as foolish.

This was about people refusing to listen to both sides of an argument, instead shouting the other side down and allowing slander to run rampant, and then mocking the opposition after you have effectively silenced them.

How is it “empowering” women to talk about penis sizes and tasting menstrual blood?  Women are struggling with much more important issues than finding a good lay.  We have everything from unequal power structures to abuse and murder to contend with.

How about being “empowered” in positive ways through good, unselfish, equal marriages, children raised to respect others, equal pay for equal work, equal respect, women (and men) choosing to work or stay at home as they wish, women dressing how they like instead of how others tell them to?  How about being empowered by fighting for a society that rejects sexism and rape?

Do we really need vulgarity to accomplish this?

The victors really do write the history books, so we have to be careful.  And journalists do not always tell the whole story, whether through deliberate yellow journalism or through getting facts wrong or through getting their stories chopped up.

And this does real damage to lives and to groups.  Not only did the effects of this slander and libel follow us through the rest of the year, but they continued to follow us through senior year, as I will show.

As far as I know, IVCF lasted only a little while after our last founding member (Astrid) graduated several years later.  And all this fuss was over what–something noble?  No, it was over a play about tasting menstrual blood.  I still hear about “Hair,” but I never hear about this play.

One heartening thing is discovering that, in 2007, the college now has four specifically Christian organizations, where once it had none.  Once IVCF was the only one, and it struggled to survive; now there are others in its place.

Those groups must have enough support and members to survive as four groups instead of one.  It makes me wonder if the atmosphere there has finally changed, if perhaps it has become the Christian college we had once prayed for.

But I have no way of knowing, since I haven’t attended for twelve years now.  I also couldn’t tell you if the college ever put on another controversial play.  [Note this was written in 2007.]

Index 
Cast of Characters (Work in Progress)

Table of Contents

Freshman Year

September 1991:

October 1991:

November 1991:

December 1991: Ride the Greyhound
January 1992: Dealing with a Breakup with Probable NVLD
February 1992:

March 1992: Shawn: Just Friends or Dating?

April 1992: Pledging, Prayer Group–and Peter’s Smear Campaign

May 1992:

Sophomore Year 

Summer 1992:

September 1992:

October 1992–Shawn’s Exasperating Ambivalence:

November 1992:

December 1992:

January 1993:

February 1993:

March 1993:

April 1993:

May 1993:

Summer 1993: Music, Storm and Prophetic Dreams

September 1993:

October 1993:

November 1993:

December 1993:

January 1994:

February 1994:

March 1994:

April 1994:

Senior Year 

June 1994–Bits of Abuse Here and There:

July & August 1994:

January 1995:

February 1995:

March 1995:

April 1995:

May 1995:

 

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