My FanX craziness, annotated
Since this has blown up and become news, I’m going to lay out here all my interactions with FanX (Salt Lake City’s Comic Con).
On May 6, this piece ran in the Salt Lake Tribune. The next day, I emailed Blake Casselman. He’s been the person I usually dealt with whenever I was invited to attend FanX as an author, and in my experience, a good guy. My email:
Blake replied promptly. I’m uncomfortable generally posting private emails, but he was polite and seemed supportive. In it he included a bullet point list of the things FanX was doing to address the issue of harassment and he invited me to pass it along to any other concerned authors. Not included was any mention of what I had requested: a public statement clarifying or refuting Dan Farr’s public comments. My reply:
He replied that a statement from Dan Farr and Bryan Brandenburg would be coming out shortly. (At this point, 16 days later, it still hasn’t come out.) I thanked him. He asked me if Bryan could be in touch with me too and I said yes.
In the meantime, FanX posted their new harassment policy. Blake pointed me to it. My email reply:
On May 17, I was one of many people who received this email:
I read the confidential report that they put together on the sexual harassment accusation from fall 2017. Since it’s confidential, I won’t post it, but there were a number of red flags for me and a lot of language that seemed to belittle the accuser and protect the harasser. I was surprised that Bryan and others thought that the report would be the final word and satisfy everyone. My email response to their report:
I was going to try to let it go, because I have a deadline this week and I really needed to get back to work. But I was so troubled, a few minutes later, I emailed him this:
Since Bryan Brandenburg went ahead and tweeted a screenshot of my first email to him along with his reply (although he deleted parts of his email and didn’t announce that–more on that later) I will post his full email here.
I have questions about the first paragraph. Yay that they’re taking action! But…what about this time? When the accused is a best-selling author? Do rich, powerful men get a pass? Do they work under a separate policy? And I’d like them to acknowledge publicly: do they have a personal relationship with Richard Paul Evans? Are Dan or Bryan friends with him? Are they part of his fraternity for men “Tribe of Kyngs”? Is that clouding their judgment?
But that last paragraph:
I can’t count everything problematic with it. My response to Bryan and the last time I communicated with him:
(for full disclosure, his emails wrap weird, so screenshots were way too long and I’ve cut and paste his email into another document and screen capped those, but I have the original emails if needed) #receipts
I was so bugged by that crazy email that–without revealing who or what organization–I tweeted the last paragraph of it, not including the first paragraph in case it was confidential information:
I figured Bryan Brandenburg didn’t see anything wrong with what he wrote me, and I honestly hoped that if he saw a general negative reaction to his email on twitter, he might be sparked to take a closer look, invest in some introspection, and be sparked to make a change on his own before we went public. Nope. (A fellow author saw my tweet and told me that she got the exact same email! They actually felt good enough about that sexist paragraph to cut it and paste it into an email for someone else!)
But I got a call right after this from a reporter at the Salt Lake Tribune, and discouraged by Bryan’s email, not believing that any real change was going to happen with people who write emails like that unless they’re forced to change, I decided to give an interview.
Soon after that I received an email from Dan Farr, co-founder of FanX. Nothing explosive in it, he was polite and made an offer to speak to me, via email, phone, or in person, to explain, etc. My response:
During all this, I’ve been emailing and texting with other authors, who unbeknownst to me initially, also had been communicating with FanX about their harassment policy. They had also been given the runaround. Lots of people were trying to work privately with these guys for weeks and sometimes months. None of us were seeking to escalate this. Then FanX (presumably Bryan Brandenburg) started to subtweet me, followed by this tweet from FanX’s official twitter account:
In this screen grab, I blocked out my private email address. He didn’t do me that curtesy. Four times he tweeted my email to him with my private email address. I don’t know if it was malicious or retribution for saying that I was going to speak to a reporter or for calling him on his sexist email, but I note that he took the time to notice the worst sentence of his email and delete that before tweeting it but didn’t take the time to notice my private email address and delete that.
Also you can see from all my email correspondence that his accusation “because we wouldn’t apologize for not publicly banning someone” is a lie. But thanks for taking my concerns seriously, Brad! You’re a listener! </endsarcasm> #forgivememypettinessIamtired
FanX has not contacted me. To be fair, as soon as I saw one of the tweets where they put out my private email, I emailed Dan, Bryan and Blake telling them to never contact me again, so I am glad they are respecting that. I do not want to have anything more to do with them.
I have seen that Bryan Brandenburg put out a public apology in which he personally mentions me. I am sure he is sorry. This has been a PR disaster for him and his organization. After all this, I do not personally feel that an apology, made under duress, is enough to restore my confidence in FanX and its leadership. So I will not be attending the con (one of my kids really wanted to go and cried when she found out–that was really hard). I do not want to be the catalyst for taking down FanX. I really hope they turn it around. But there are years of problems (I’m just learning about the Orson Scott Card controversy–ask some FanX people about that) and a pattern of behavior. So I’m not sure what it will take for them to regain the confidence of many of us in the Utah fan community.
In the meantime, listen to women. Believe women.
