THE LE GOTHIQUE/MOMMA MONKEY SCANDAL
You know that story where Doe Deere threatened to sue Le Gothique for giving a negative review of Lime Crime's lipsticks unless she removed the review and posted an apology?
While I do not agree with Doe Deere or any owner of any company for that matter threatening lawsuits against people who don't give their products or services good reviews their is something about Le Gothique that none of the Lime Crime boycotters have ever discussed.
In January 2008 MommaMonkey (GiGi Silva) who was a member of a knitting community called Ravelry died of Lupus complications. The community mourned her loss because she used to post really cool knitting patterns, sent gifts to people and had even started her own community called Socktopia. After her death her husband Nico signed in to her account and asked people to continue purchasing her knitting patterns as he was going to be donating all the profits to a Lupus Research Foundation. By January 2009 people were still suspicious about MommaMonkey's death especially, since accounts that had the same voice and overall writing style of MommaMonkey were popping up on Ravelry. People began to accuse MommaMonkey of faking her death while others defended her. Someone typed MommaMonkey's Email address into Twitter which led to something which shocked the knitting community. There was a Twitter profile using MommaMonkey's old Email address that was tweeting and posting pictures of tattoo's that MommaMonkey had. The info given on the account was the same as MommaMonkey's, lives in San Diego, has a husband, 2 kids, proficient in handmade crafts. Because of this people began posting blog entries about how MommaMonkey was a huge scam artist.
As this was happening Grey who ran the blog Le Gothique was watching on from a safe distance, relieved that she had enough money to start a new life as a crafty punk blogger and could abandon the old one. Grey got a very big and loyal following on Le Gothique which got bigger each day. Some people even claimed she "honed" her new "Grey persona" using a blog called Miss Cissy. Eventually people realized that Miss Cissy was MommaMonkey to which she then deleted everything.
Grey was very secretive about her appearance and the images she posted of herself she would post lip swatches of her lips but once someone stumbled upon the MommaMonkey info she deleted those along with everything else.
It was discovered that the Le Gothique domain was owned by GiGi Silva.
So this girl "Grey" AKA GiGi Silva, faked her death, lied to everyone and stole charity money. None of the Lime Crime Boycotters have ever addressed this but still paint Grey as a victim to Doe Deere. Like I said earlier I think it was wrong of Doe Deere to threaten someone with a lawsuit for giving her products a bad review but in all fairness I do not know of any other instance of Doe Deere trying to threaten bloggers with lawsuits for giving her products bad reviews so I find it weird that the one blogger she did happened to be a scam artist. Could Doe Deere have known about the strange case of MommaMonkey, could she have known that this woman was a scam artist and maybe wanted nothing to do with her because of that? Once again I am not defending what Doe Deere did, however I feel that it is important that Le Gothique scandal be addressed and since none of the Lime Crime Boycotters have done this I have decided to.
