Personal and Professional Statement from Kelsey Maurine Brickl
Since making a Tumblr under my own full name, I have been made aware of a rather concerning, if impressively stale, situation on this platform involving a deeply unstable Tumblr user, apparently an Iranian civilian living in London, who has spent several years maintaining that I somehow orchestrated an elaborate conspiracy against her during a long-ago online feud.
(Worthy of Jason Bourne, perhaps, but... not true.)
Whether this individual objects to my morals, my professional life, my volunteer work, my disability civil-rights enforcement work, my poetry, my historical fiction, my blog for The Times of Israel, my satirical essays critiquing Trump and American suburban interior design, my promotion of Palestinian statehood, my "sit-down" comedy, my personality, my family, or simply my continued existence, I cannot say.
Her campaign most notably includes a post using my full legal name, linking me to various and sundry usernames and hobbies, and making a series of paranoid and entirely false claims about my supposed behavior, some of which are very serious.
For the record, any claim that I have deliberately endangered another person, attempted to have anyone harmed, or engaged in the conduct she describes is entirely untrue.
My own statements and writing on the topic of explicit parasociality have made my position quite plain.
Naturally, despite the post being several years old, this matter has been reported to Tumblr’s Legal and Trust & Safety teams for defamation, threats, targeted harassment, and violations of Tumblr’s own platform policies.
One does not simply publish someone’s full legal name alongside demonstrably false and inflammatory allegations of serious wrongdoing and assume there will be no consequences.
I have no interest in engaging with this individual or participating in her fixation. I do, however, sincerely hope she finds the stability and support she appears to need.
That is all.
