re: the slj comment
Like many—maybe even most—folks in the YA Lit community, I’ve been following the discussion about assault and abuse within the industry. That discussion reached a new level of attention with Anne Ursu’s amazing, devastating Medium article collecting over ninety anonymous accounts, and escalated when people began anonymously naming perpetrators and predators in the comments of this SLJ article. Jay Asher, James Dashner, Sherman Alexie, Matt de la Pena, Tristina Wright, and many others were among them. Most of these names were corroborated in other spaces, such as Twitter. The Jay Asher revelations were also covered by Buzzfeed and the New York Times.
The comment function seems to have been turned off tonight (edit: it appears to have been re-enabled), but not before someone left a comment about John Green. The comment was left under the name “why is no one saying it” and reads as follows:
“He reacted extremely violently to teens expressing discomfort with him forcing attention on them, and the YA community came to his aid. Why exactly should anyone trust a community of adult women who turned on teenage girls for calling “creepy” an adult man who compulsively followed, messaged, and tried to ingratiate himself with them when they did not want it?
He’s also friends with, or had a professional relationship with, way more sexual predators than one would think is the average amount. Like calls to like. Why does he end up surrounding himself with rapists and pedophiles if something about their dynamic as people doesn’t resonate with him? (Sam Pepper, Alex Day, Tom Milsom, Mike Lombardo, Austin Jones, Ed Blann, Josh Macedo). The percentage of sexual predators who have been, or are, in Green’s “inner circle” is really worrisome, and I wonder just how many people his illusion of Ultimate Rockstar Status is silencing.”
I want to make it crystal fucking clear that I believe victims. I believe every firsthand and secondhand account from the comments, and I will believe the accounts that will continue to surface as this vital conversation continues. I am an abuse survivor; I have experienced sexual assault; I have done work in abuse awareness and prevention in these spaces. I do not think false accusations are the epidemic MRAs would have us believe, and I don’t even think they’re much of a concern. I have no tolerance for abuse, assault, manipulation, or apologism. I have no tolerance for gaslighting. With all of that said:
This comment is not an account of abuse or assault.
This comment is not even a third-hand account. This comment is a leap to a presumption of guilt based entirely on the snowball-style smear campaigns and resulting pile-ons from around the time of the The Fault in Our Stars and Paper Towns movie releases, which were 1) founded on misinformation, deliberate bad-faith misinterpretation, and the spreading of both as intensified by the internet’s hellish nature and 2) the entire reason I started this tumblr, and as such documented in its content.
To address this comment’s allegations and implications:
1) “He reacted extremely violently to teens expressing discomfort with him forcing attention on them, and the YA community came to his aid.”
This is referencing one of the bigger moments from The Internet Nightmare of 2014/15, during which John reblogged a popular post which said this:
“[john green]’s a creep who panders to teenage girls so that he can amass some weird cult-like following. and it’s always girls who feel misunderstood, you know, and he goes out of his way to make them feel important and desirable. which is fucking? weird?
also he has a social media presence that is equivalent to that dad of a kid in your friend group who always volunteers to “supervise” the pool parties and scoots his lawn chair close to all the girls.”
John’s reblog included this:
“You want me to defend myself against the implication that I sexually abuse children?
Okay. I do not sexually abuse children.
Throwing that kind of accusation around is sick and libelous and most importantly damages the discourse around the actual sexual abuse of children. When you use accusations of pedophilia as a way of insulting people whose work you don’t like, you trivialize abuse. I’m tired of seeing the language of social justice–important language doing important work–misused as a way to dehumanize others and treat them hatefully.”
(It’s since been deleted or made private on John’s blog, but here is Roxane Gay’s reblog. Note the “lets get this enough notes so he has to address it and try to defend himself lmao” and url tag that precede John’s response.)
This is what that “extremely violent reaction” thing refers to. This is what people are talking about when they, to this day, harken back to the time John Green silenced a teenage girl or something.
Many YA authors did come to his defense. A few examples:
Maureen Johnson
Maggie Stiefvater
Maggie Stiefvater again
Libba Bray
This is often painted as a pile-on on this person, and while I want to be clear that I understand how authors (or any community of public figures) circling the wagons can very often (probably, like, most of the time) be a bad idea with bad impacts, this was a reaction to not just the one post, but to the climate of widespread John Green hate and misinformation and straight up harassment at the time.
For some background:
Not only was this an upsetting post on its own, it was made (and gathered momentum) at a time where everybody was making these kinds of posts. TFiOS had gained so much ubiquity that it became the thing du jour—everyone was trying to provide the hottest take, the most incisive thinkpiece, the edgiest post/tweet/meme. Everyone was desperate to prove their discerning intellect and Good Taste by pouncing on the latest thing teenage girls had made inconceivably popular. Combined with the then-prominent YFIP wave and how it had consumed tumblr, making “How many incidents, sound bytes, and human mistakes can I take out of context to put in a bulleted list so we can declare another person evil without an iota of nuance or a moment’s critical thought?” the prevailing discursive format, this made John and his books easy targets. It was a perfect storm. It led literally hundreds of thousands of people to absorb this false, patchwork image of John based off of the posts and tweets and lunchtime conversations they came across before they ever interacted with his work or his actual internet presence.
This stuff was inescapable. At the time, my job involved interacting closely with the Nerdfighter community and its related tags/spaces, which meant I saw how deep it went and how far it spread. It became this huge, tumblr-wide game of telephone, and people accepted it all as shorthand for “John Green is trash.” Like, years after this entire situation, I met someone in a coffee shop who was also deep in this area of the internet and when John Green came up in conversation she started quoting these posts down to the letter as her reasons for hating him—I could remember them from having seen them so much. This turning of the internet tides has had impacts still reverberating now, as evidenced by that SLJ comment.
But at the time, it was particularly harrowing. It made any job or volunteer position even vaguely involving affiliation with John or Hank or their community hell, and I’m intimately aware of how deeply it affected people. Imagine seeing mountains and mountains of hate and harassment not founded in any sort of reality posted ad infinitum against someone you know personally, or work with, or share mutual friends with and thereby care about by proxy; imagine knowing, for a fact, that these posts and implications are not real, but being completely unable to say or do anything that constitutes even a drop in the bucket compared against the way the telephone game has grown; imagine having to see these things each day and see how they affect people around you and the people accused by name and know that you can’t do much of anything about it.
And, listen, it did affect John and his family. To keep it just to things posted publicly: John had been very open for years prior to TFiOS blowing up about his experiences with anxiety and how it affected his interactions with other people, including people in fandom spaces—at conferences, at events, on the internet. When his fame skyrocketed with the book’s (and then movie’s) huge success, the wave of hate that came with it was bound to interact poorly with those circumstances. One example that I always come back to: in this Reddit comment, John talked about how there had been credible threats made against his family and how they worsened his anxiety and led to panic attacks in public places.
The point of all of this being: John’s reply came at a time where he and his loved ones had to see this stuff by the hundreds every single day, which is something I don’t think people take into consideration when they say that his response was disproportionate.
A few posts on this blog about this incident in particular which might provide further insight:
Breaking down willful misinterpretations of the original post and John’s response.
On John “manipulating a young woman’s words” / breaking down some of the reaction to his reply.
Re: misinformation about the original post coming from a “teenage girl” (the urls don’t work anymore because this was years and years ago)
2) “He’s also friends with, or had a professional relationship with, way more sexual predators than one would think is the average amount. Like calls to like. Why does he end up surrounding himself with rapists and pedophiles if something about their dynamic as people doesn’t resonate with him? (Sam Pepper, Alex Day, Tom Milsom, Mike Lombardo, Austin Jones, Ed Blann, Josh Macedo). The percentage of sexual predators who have been, or are, in Green’s “inner circle” is really worrisome, and I wonder just how many people his illusion of Ultimate Rockstar Status is silencing.”
This refers to the time in the Nerdfighter community (which refers to the community surrounding, first, the Vlogbrothers channel and John and Hank’s work, which grew to surround other creators, including many of those named above) in the spring of 2014 when several people began coming forward to reveal that several notable figures had perpetrated abuse, assault, and predatory behavior, often against teenage girls. This began when Mike Lombardo was arrested and later incarcerated for possession of child pornography (including photos and videos solicited from teenage girls who were his fans), sending a shockwave through the community and opening the floodgates for more people to come forward. (To clarify, the Sam Pepper situation was separate from this.) Think of this as Nerdfighteria’s own #MeToo/#TimesUp reckoning years before we had those terms. Many of these abusers’ music was sold on DFTBA Records (now just DFTBA), and many of them were guests at early VidCons.
Whenever these allegations came to light, these people’s work was almost immediately removed from DFTBA Records. They were also uninvited from VidCon if they were being slated as guests, and were never invited again. They were publicly removed from the community.
This comment supposes that John knew, or that his initial association with these people indicates some greater probability of guilt himself. On these fronts:
This post goes deep on explaining that John and Hank, like many people even closer to these abusers, did not know, and dissects the rumors about their responses. It provides background on how this all unfolded.
As we have learned/been reminded of many times over with recent #MeToo/#TimesUp reckonings, every industry/community has its share of abusers. If we were to say that every person who initially associated with someone later revealed to be guilty of abuse, assault, manipulation, etc. were themselves probably guilty of something, every single person would be guilty. Everyone. In a way, of course, that part is true: by virtue of being born into toxic, broken societies built on abuse and assault and imbalances of power and and and, we’re all complicit in some ways and we must all unlearn and do the work necessary to work towards better, safer, more equal spaces. But what this comment implies—that John is guilty, or probably guilty, himself—is a huge, dangerous, unfounded leap.
That closing bit—”I wonder just how many people his illusion of Ultimate Rockstar Status is silencing.”— is the most worrisome part. In a vital, vital moment full of brave people coming forward to share first- and second-hand accounts of abuse, assault, and predatory behavior, this comment dives in to reference a complicated internet situation from years ago. This reference, warped by time and spin and that big ol’ game of telephone, twists what actually happened until it is unrecognizable, until it matches the tone of the actual revelations, and tucks the reference into a context where it does not belong. It tucks the reference into this context in such a way that it could be read as another naming, another account. This is already how it’s being misconstrued (I’ve seen many tweets from Spanish-speaking book folks, in particular).
I am not trying to call “false accusation” on this, because 1) as stated above, I do not think false accusations are even a thing to worry about and 2) it is not an accusation to begin with. It’s something different, insidious, part of a smear campaign dating back almost five years now, and it’s taking advantage of this moment to try to continue that cause. It’s deliberately misleading, opportunistic, irresponsible. It’s trying to take advantage of the prevailing attitude of “we must believe victims”—an attitude that I am 100%, unequivocally, in agreement with, both in philosophy and in practice—to make those overwhelmed by the flood of information and revelations lump this name in with the other actual revelations in those comments. Don’t let it.
I’m happy to clarify anything or field any concerns or provide further context or answer any questions about this in general or just listen.
Further reading:
“On John Green and reading with nuance”
On listening to teenage girls
On the way people talk about John’s interactions with teenage girls
