Lumardy Case

Landing

Updates/Corrections
Please lmk if there’s anything wrong or misrepresentative in these files; I will list any edits here.

Intro
Lumardy (Lu) and I were friends from SMS speedrunning and some mutuals from there. The friendship fell apart, and then his manipulative secret slanderous shittalking destroyed other friendships of mine, which emotionally destroyed me. I decided three months ago to talk about it out in the open, and his reaction was to unapologetically start lying about me in public as well. So there are two motives for talking:

  1. To have a defence ready for anyone he talks to about me, for my own protection;
  2. Because I think his behaviour has been disgusting and reprehensible enuff to be worth raising awareness and making everyone consider if this is someone they should support in any way.

It’s been hard to know what to do, since I’ve known for a long time that I had nothing to hide and wanted to talk to SMS friends about this, because I felt so threatened sharing space with him and felt like it was right that people knew what he did. But speaking out would expose me to a threat of further lies and shittalking, of having anyone, say from his 200+ Twitter followers, turned against me. So I had to take my time to thoroly discredit him.

It reads like a handbook of so many techniques used to manipulate people into hating someone and cutting off friendships. It exposes about a dozen deceptions and relates them to the emotional impact they had on me. I don’t think Lu was trying to manipulate people into hating me (I think he was seeking emotional validation and trying to look good to others). But all that matters is he did do that, and it had a harrowing impact on me, and his recent rhetoric shows he’s not sorry at all.

Reading this Doc
This doc’s been really hard to get right. It’s very evidence-driven, to neutralise further lying, but also from my conviction that if I’m going to shape people’s opinions of someone, I’d better really prove what I’m saying. I want to show people what’s been going on and have them think for themselves and draw conclusions, rather than just take sides. But also, there was so much dubious behaviour, and I felt I couldn’t exclude most of it to not make what remained seem like one-offs. So it’s a long case.

It’s 7k words, and there’s a 700-word tl;dr you can opt for instead. But I do really implore people to read the whole thing, and watch the story unravel. First-hand evidence makes manipulation much more vivid and compelling. I tried to write engagingly, make self-contained chapters/sections, put the evidence in-line, and tbh the story has many twists, just from Lu’s capricious nature.

Reading notes:

Contents

  1. Background
    • a | Invading Friendship with 1Ups
    • b | SDLL
    • c | Mixed Signals
    • d | “Friendship Burning”
  2. Venting
    • a | Context for Venting
    • b | Consequences for Me: Bans
    🟥 c | Slander
    🟥 d | Creating False Narratives
    🟥 e | “Psycho Shit”
    🟪 f | Walls Closing In
    🟥 g | Goodwill Rejection
    • h | Consequences for Me: False Sexual Harassment Accusation
  3. Cover-Ups
    🟥 a | Venting To An Entire Discord
    🟥 b | “Updating” SDLL
    🟥 c | Close-Friends Narrative
    🟥 d | Venting Cover-Up
  4. Duplicity
    4.1 Persistent Narratives
        🟥 a | Scatter’s Fabrications
        🟥 b | “Look Out for a DM”
        🟥 c | The Point of Mediating
        🟪 d | Losing Friends
    4.2 Propaganda Campaign
        • a | Cutting Contact
        🟥 b | Actively Spreading Lies
        🟥 c | Twitter Harassment
        🟪 d | Being Harassed
        🟥 e | Euphemise/Exaggerate
        • f | Summary
  5. Epilogue
    5.1 Summarising the Evidence // TL;DR
    5.2 Conclusion

Timeline
This is for reference (skip it for now), in case the timeline gets confusing:

Timeline [CLICK TO EXPAND]
  • Jul 6 2021: Our last discussion of our friendship / where it ended. After Lu sends me a callous message, I decide to leave and come back later to address some of his past abusive behaviours to me.
  • Jul 17 2021: Lu vents to Awesomo about events since Jul 6.
  • Jul 19 2021: Lu and I start talking again after 13 days. He’s initially really combative, then I send him my letter about the 1Ups issue to calm him down. He switches suddenly to being very apologetic and hyper-optimistic to making up with me, which prompts me to take my time to write down the rest of his behaviour I wanted to bring up.
  • Aug 9 2021: Before I’ve written it all down, I attack him over some skeletons in our closet, and relations get strained. He then vents to Scatter, then suddenly cuts contact with me (trying to escape hearing me out), then vents to others in SDLL. Two days later, Lu vents to Awesomo. In this period, I get banned from Discords by Awesomo and Scatter, and receive some rationale for the bans. All aforementioned venting was secret.
  • Aug 12 2021: We start talking again, leading to a long private reconciliation over 3 weeks that eventually succeeds.
  • Sept 1 2021: We start a 2-month break for Sept and Oct, splitting Discords, planning to reintegrate when it ends.
  • Sept 16 2021: My failed attempts to open a dialogue with SDLL lead to me posting a public letter to them, and Scatter responds (including more rationale for my ban).
  • Oct 5 2021: Awesomo tries to mount the false sexual harassment allegation on me, and Lu defends me. Break continues, ends Nov 1. Mediation with SDLL is proposed in the meantime.
  • Nov 18 2021: I suggest to mutuals that I may expose Lu publicly. A mutual tells Lu, who then silently cancels the mediation.
  • Dec 1/2 2021: I ask Lu about the mediation, we have final conversation where I confirm I’ll likely expose him. Lu blocks me Dec 3.
  • Dec 10 2021: No further direct contact between us; exchange of references/subtweets/callouts starts between us lasting ~2 months, in which Lu harasses me with a public propaganda campaign.

1. Background

Mine and Lu’s conflict originated from shitty things he did to me while friends, me trying to address them with him, and that process causing him to vent about me to other people, slandering me and turning them against me. So there are really two cases – this public one raising awareness of his manipulations, and the original private one about what he did within our friendship. This chapter’s about the latter, and is only to give context to our later actions.

Lu and I did eventually discuss the stuff in this chapter; he patiently listened and gave very genuine apologies to me in private. This chapter is the part of the story we were happy to move on from.

I really liked Lu and used to be caring and attentive to all my friends. He however often treated me like shit, most damagingly in how he interfered with my friendships with others.

1a | Invading Friendship with 1Ups
Lu and I had a dynamic with a close friend of mine 1UpsForLife, with whom he’d had a relationship breakdown that traumatised her a few months prior. He targeted my calls with her in an SMS community Discord to try to get close to her again, was disingenuously friendly and personal with me in those calls, while also privately leaning on me to help him with their relationship. It became clear that when engaging like this, he had no interest in me, or will to be nice towards me in private even, and he went on to subtweet me as someone he wished he could tell he didn’t get on with. On confrontation at the time, he denied using me to get closer to 1Ups, then admitted it after I broke off the friendship 6 months later.

Screenshots of Denial + Admission (optional reading) [CLICK TO EXPAND]

(Dodging my indirect accusation with irrelevant reasoning, avoiding my point, denying using me.)

(Admitting my fleshed-out direct accusation, some explanation – 19 Jul 2021.)

This (the “1Ups Issue”) was the worst thing he did within the friendship. I wrote a page combining the full accusation I sent him with all his responses to give a first-hand account, but I’d skip that on first read-thru.

→ 1Ups Issue

1b | SDLL
Lu and I were brought into close contact thanks to me getting involved in a friend Discord called SDLL (streamer Discord of ex-SMS-speedrunner Scatter), via some mutual friends. It was a Discord that I became very active in, amounting to 10k messages and 30h of calls with them, and is the friend group I was removed from following Lu’s venting.

In this group, Lu was negative towards me often enuff for it to be noticeable.

He othered me in many ways – by giving love and compliments in calls that (it later turned out) he intended to everyone except me, by talking over my questions in calls, by co-opting my hang with someone else in a way that excluded me.

His actions came from egocentricity and not thinking of me, rather than anything more deliberate, just like in the 1Ups issue.

1c | Mixed Signals
In April/May, Lu initiated DMs with me daily for 5 weeks, and later admitted he was trying to avoid us becoming friends, by e.g. avoiding talking about other common interests. He only DMed about SMS, because he had nobody else to talk about it with. Despite that, from my side, he was the most active social presence in my life; we’d send 700 messages some days, and topics sometimes got personal much as they had around 1Ups.

What caused me recurring depression here, and with 1Ups and SDLL, is him pushing so much direct contact despite disliking me, and exposing me to a loving attitude only when around other people – how unsure this made me about how he actually felt, whether he meant his warmth, compliments, etc. to me. He started spats with me often and refused to resolve my qualms, or be emotionally honest with me, until it built up into my deep distrust. I couldn’t see clearly enuff to get out of the friendship, and my optimism about it led to my eventual heartbreak.

He mis-signalled the entire friendship, from being conflicted about me the whole time and from wanting to use me for his own ends. This is the stuff I was trying to address with him. He privately apologised for all of it, but only after first destroying my friendships with others.

1d | “Friendship Burning”
I have an example to show the level of emotional dishonesty I was dealing with.

Example (optional reading) [CLICK TO EXPAND]

This was Lu’s reaction after I’d sent him the full 1Ups issue.

Lu explained weeks later that he persistently tried to avoid a friendship with me developing the entire time we were friends, and gave this reasoning for the comment I quoted.

Not premeditated deceit, but an unrelatably disingenuous reaction in the moment, with excuses of panic, or temporary delusions stemming from guilt. It captures how, the entire time we were friends, it was up to me to decipher his actual feelings about me. He promised actions to correct his mistakes, but they never came to pass.

2. Venting

The two themes emerging so far are Lu’s interventions in my friendships, and his aversion to being told he did something wrong (looking at his response to the 1Ups issue when I first brought it up). A quick timeline:

This venting is where the story really begins.

2a | Context for Venting
There was valid context to vent about. It stemmed from errors I’d started to make in our discussions as I struggled to express my many grievances.

That’s all I can possibly explain in this summary. Part of this case is me writing painstakingly-detailed accounts of these issues, explaining my actions and the context, so I have defences from any past or future accusations.

→ Venting Account I, Venting Account II

But I think onlookers getting involved in those details is a distraction so don’t recommend reading them. My point is, for me to go from being a victim of an abusive friendship, to getting cut out of a friend group and having a false sexual harassment allegation made against me (getting to that later)… you’d think I committed hate crimes in how I handled my grievances with Lu or something. But my accounts instead show me being receptive to his concerns, reassuring him that I wouldn’t expose him, him being willing to hear out my long essay, me apologising for and explaining threatening things I’d said. He spun it into something else entirely.

2b | Consequences for Me: Bans
The two outcomes of this at the time were that:

  1. Scatter banned me from SDLL, citing some fabrications.
  2. Awesomo banned me from Papaccino’s Discord, and sent me an extremely abusive message, also citing fabrications.

🟥 2c | Slander
My coming points will mostly discuss techniques Lu used to manipulate others into believing slander about me, but that they believed slander at all is also important. The defence has been made that Lu misunderstood the situation and was venting from genuine emotional panic, so it was unfortunate that it turned out deceptive. To what extent Lu’s factual misrepresentations were deliberate is still unclear.

But comparing with the context I described in my account, the kinds of accusations I heard from Awesomo and Scatter were stunning. I was accused of:

By Awesomo:

You threatened lu to where he’s terrified. Like absolutely terrified.

Forcing lu to think about you by trying to scare him into outting him is sick.

[Awesomo] took the initiative to kick you last night following some stuff you had threatened to do if things didn’t go your way. I don’t know the details but I trust my mods

(^ says Papaccino)

Because he has literally sent me screenshot after screenshot of you gaslighting him. Of you threatening him. Saying you’re going to kill yourself or self harm because he won’t be with you. How he feels unsafe. How he’s terrified of you.

But the gist is he wasn’t interested romantically, you tried to convince him he came onto you when he didn’t, and when he said no, you shut off the friendship. And then made suicidal tweets. And posts in the IL sheet or something

Lu didn’t necessarily say all this stuff himself, and some of it was overreaction from Awesomo; I’ll explore some of what he did say to her and how it led to this later on in this chapter.

By Scatter:

The difference [between me and Lu] is that you seem to feel entitled to a discussion with them that will harm them as much as it helps you.

if you hadn’t … insisted that you have a conversation to work it out

(A spin on the idea of having a right to tell someone what that person did and how it hurt you.)

if you hadn’t … threatened to post all their wrongdoings publicly

(I clearly told Lu I wouldn’t!)

i advised them not to make up with you because it was clear they didn’t want to and your constant refusal to accept it was wearing heavily on them mentally

they were basically resolving it as a favor to you

(Really important – I’ll revisit this in the next point)

Scatter cutting me out of SDLL seems a little extreme from their reasoning. It feels like there’s more to it. I don’t know what was said in secret in SDLL, but a couple of observers give hints:

(“[SDLL members] no longer talking [to me]”)

Time to start unraveling the manipulation (*rolls up sleeves*). I noticed three tricks in what Lu said to Awesomo, which make up the next two accusations.

🟥 2d | Creating False Narratives

Lu tells me he wants (very much) to resolve things with me because he considered me a friend. The next day, he convinces Awesomo I’m forcing him to do that. This outrageous lie is the first hint at the contradictions we’ll see between his stance towards me and how he presented me while venting.

Remember, Scatter later told me:

i advised [Lu] not to make up with you because it was clear they didn’t want to and your constant refusal to accept it was wearing heavily on them mentally

based on my conversations with them, i believed, and continue to believe, that they were basically resolving it as a favor to you

So that’s where that lie came from. The leaked screenshots I have are incomplete, missing what Scatter was told, so this example should be seen as the tip of the iceberg.

This is “venting” where the goal isn’t understanding, rather fostering a negative narrative of someone and being emotionally validated for it, truth be damned. Sticking shit to people is what this is.

I noticed another, more subtle example:

Passive False Narrative (optional reading) [CLICK TO EXPAND]

Awesomo came to a blatantly false conclusion, and Lu just… ignored it. Any shit that sticks is helpful; doesn’t matter if it’s, y’know, true.

🟥 2e | “Psycho Shit”

There’s no context that can save this. He comes back a few hours after doing some venting (let’s disregard what he vented about for this point) to make it clear he’s trying to turn people against me in secret and prevent them from talking to me to get my side of the story. A big clue about his true intentions.

🟪 2f | Walls Closing In
Whatever was said in the venting, spinning how I was struggling to address Lu’s shit behaviours with him, it robbed me of my victimhood and made me out to be such a threat that I was getting removed from multiple communities with no justification given until I asked, and cut off by Lu with no idea of the extent of whom he’d spoken to and what he’d said at all. I felt like the walls were slowly closing in on me and I was defenceless, waking up in chills daily and with a permanent breathless anxiety until things started de-escalating after ~3 days.

🟥 2g | Goodwill Rejection
The manipulations get much worse in the next chapter. Before that tho, it’s important to note that in response to Lu’s escalation, and recognising that it was based on valid feelings and errors on my part, I took really strong actions to immediately fix things, only to have it all rebuked. I stayed firm in my goodwill, and that’s how our eventual reconciliation came about. But the rebuking is also very telling about his malicious motives at the time.

Summary: I took actions to address concerns, including deleting the ominous letter I wrote; I shared with him a transcript of an entire conversation with a mutual about it. Lu instead expected that mutual to take his side, derided me for my goodwill and panic, and only started talking to me after someone he vented to started spreading things out of his control.

Details (optional reading) [CLICK TO EXPAND]

1. As soon as Lu left our conversation, I sent him this, indicating a clear will to address his complaints. He cited his panic as coming from the endless waiting as well as overwhelming amount of stuff to read about, so I committed to addressing the former and for the latter, said I’m still entitled to tell him what pain he caused me. This wasn’t enuff to get a response.

2. The more I spoke to other people, the more I learned about what was bothering Lu, and reflected it, firstly by deleting the long essay I was writing per a mutual’s request, in favour of a more palatable way to bring up my grievances. This gesture still wasn’t enuff for Lu.

3. I told that same mutual that he could share an entire transcript of our conversation with Lu. Pay attention – it’s a gesture that actively prevents manipulation. Do you think I’ve ever gotten a transcript of Lu? No, only leaked DMs.

Aside: Lu went on to explicitly block my attempts to find out basic information about his handling of the situation, in the run-up to this case in December 2021.

4. The mutual spoke in this very accusatory way about me to Lu, while having a much more reasonable tone towards me.

When I brought this up with him, he said:

Aside: this allegation of me writing a “doc on Awesomo” was false and an unfortunate case of crossed wires.

5. After learning more about Lu’s grievances from the mutual, I started explicitly saying that I didn’t intend to expose him publicly if we had a dialogue (nor had I ever, for the record). Not only did Lu never engage with my goodwill attempts to put things right, but he actually derided me for them.

L is for Lumardy.

6. Lu did eventually come back to talking to me to try to resolve things, but the reason was, not my actions, but rather Awesomo getting out of control. He’d fallen out with her in the meantime.

2h | Consequences for Me: False Sexual Harassment Accusation
In October 2021, a month after Lu and I had finished our private reconciliation, Awesomo, aided by Dutchj, tried to cancel me using her conversations with Lu as evidence of me sexually harassing him, without Lu’s permission. This included the personal letter I’d written him about my sexual feelings, which Lu freely shared with her, and ended up with the SMS mods. Lu defended me publicly from this.

It’s been said that this was the one time Lu actually tried to correct misrepresentations and set the record straight, to his credit? I never gave him credit because I knew that if he backed the accusation then I could discredit him. There’s a lot in his own behaviour that both gives context to my own creepy actions to him, and shows up a huge hypocrisy in his venting and reaction. I intended to set this context out in the venting account but had concerns about sharing sensitive info so am leaving it till the end of March to decide how to handle that.

I don’t mean to say his motive was not genuine when defending me from the allegation; his motive is just unprovable because of this.

3. Cover-Ups

By now, we’ve seen a few manipulations and malicious motives of trying to get me to be seen as a bad person, instead of actually addressing problems. After our private reconciliation ended successfully, I still found myself in an odd situation where I remained banned from SDLL and was getting blanked by my former (?) SDLL friends. There was of course more to it.

After all the venting, Lu returned to talking to me on Aug 12. He and I did a private reconciliation of our friendship (the chapter 1 issues), which ended on Aug 31 with a “break” agreement – to split SMS discords and SDLL for 2 months, then reintegrate.

🟥 3a | Venting To An Entire Discord
On the second-to-last day before the break was due to start, Lu revealed that he hadn’t just vented to Scatter, or a few of his closest friends in SDLL, but rather the entirety of SDLL’s active members except me and my closest friend there. That’s an extra 9 people! He’d completely compromised me in SDLL and left me in the dark for 3 weeks.

The fact that I was very active in this Discord for half a year (10k messages and 30h of calls), while it had a secret channel for everybody except me that was then used to discuss me and never reveal what aspersions were cast on my character… is pretty harrowing. I didn’t let that go quietly and wrote a letter to SDLL (part B) dismantling this dynamic. The blame for that is entirely on Scatter.

But with Lu, what strikes me is the same egocentric entitlement he showed when invading my friendship with 1Ups – SDLL was Lu’s friend group so the effect this venting had on me as an active member in that same group was unimportant. Lu was going after 1Ups, so my calls with her were fair game, my feelings not worth considering.

🟥 3b | “Updating” SDLL
What did he mean by “updating” them? As part of our private reconciliation, we settled all of the concerns and misapprehensions that triggered his venting. Not much was said in the secret SDLL channel after the original venting, so I can show the whole of what was said:

This was really where my understanding of how manipulative Lu is clicked. I stopped mentally excusing it eventually. I spotted 5 separate manipulative behaviours in this one message:

  1. He doesn’t explain in what ways he’d misrepresented me to SDLL at all, and moreover alludes to the validity of their impressions of me – all your opinion.

  2. He insinuates a scheme on my part to get back into SDLL… as opposed to, say, a conversation to clear up misunderstandings.

  3. He again (see §2e: “Psycho Shit”) tries to prevent them from getting my side of the story…

  4. … And does this by alluding to them not caring to interact with me anyway.

  5. Finally, note (for later) that he shows he’s aware that he was keeping me in the dark about whom he was venting to (from the day he vented to all of SDLL, 9th Aug, to him letting me know that he had on 30th Aug).

A lot of the same shit about intervening in my friendships, judging them, and crucially, never explaining any of my grievances with him in the first place. Points #4 and #5 here need a closer look, in the next two allegations.

🟥 3c | Close-Friends Narrative
What prompted Lu to vent to the whole of SDLL, and outright tell them to not get my side of the story since they “don’t care to interact with me anyway”?

To revisit this screenshot – it doesn’t matter if I did 10k messages/30h of calls in this discord, because the world revolves around Lu; it’s his friend group, he’s “close to” all of them.

“I am close” vs “you felt close”. In his eyes, not only was he close, but I wasn’t close, so he was entitled to bring them all in on his side.

Also, his motive for informing me that he vented to the rest of SDLL – a group I sent 10k messages/called for 30h in – being based on me “feeling close” to them is bewildering.

He spins “I didn’t know him as well” into “they barely knew you”.

My understanding of all this is that this narrative is an illusion.

Comparing Lu’s narrative to my perception of SDLL (optional reading) [CLICK TO EXPAND]

The others in SDLL had a mix of personalities, some very uncaring towards online (vs IRL) friends, some only looking for people to do things with rather than forming deep emotional bonds. I know from how my close friend in SDLL spoke that a lot of perceptions of friendships were imbued by individuals – my friend sought out warm relationships, so she made me feel like I belonged in SDLL, by telling me where everyone lived and how I could visit them next time I flew over. I say this because Lu was the most insecure and emotionally vulnerable among them, always questioning his friendships, so I reason that this entire “close friends” narrative stemmed from that insecurity.

But more to the point, he tried to force that narrative over everyone else and use it to justify his continual interventions.

🟥 3d | Venting Cover-Up
Regarding Lu’s admission that he deliberately didn’t reveal that he’d vented to all of SDLL (not just Scatter) from 9th Aug to 30th Aug. Well, look at this. When I first revealed I’d spoken to people about raising a complaint with him (early July), he said:

Then on 12th Aug (post-venting), this happened:

I wanted to make sure to not crop anything out of this so I highlighted the important parts. Point is, I related to his fears of having a case made behind his back, and said I answered them by disclosing whom I was talking to at the time. I said it was relevant now because of how walls were closing in on me thanks to the actions (not even just my fears) of parties he’d vented to, and how I was being reassured that he wasn’t spreading it too far.

Lu just outright doesn’t disclose that he’d vented to the additional 9 people I didn’t know about. Recall that he showed, to SDLL on 19th Aug, a full awareness of the implications of this action:

A clean, cool-headed lie by omission, then.

Moreover, his response is ironically mostly a continuing paranoia of what the people I’d vented to thought about him. There’s more:

The hypocrisy and empathetic disconnect are stunning.

4. Duplicity

4.1 Persistent Narratives

Lu had a responsibility to set the record straight on all the slander he’d said about me (whether deliberate or not) and directly fight back on its consequences on me. Until recently, I saw this case as basically being him always doing too little too late. Trying to put things right but realising too late the extent of the damage. But lately I’ve questioned whether he intended to change people’s perceptions at all. To own up to his actions the same way in front of everyone, not just me.

🟥 4.1a | Scatter’s Fabrications
I didn’t get why, despite Lu and I having supposedly reconciled, the same lies were still turning up in Scatter’s account of the situation, posted in mid-September, 2 weeks after the reconciliation ended/break started. This account was a response to a public letter I’d written to SDLL, wherein I addressed some of Lu’s accusations and his actions that had created our conflict in the first place.

I mentioned these fabrications before (see §2c: Slander) and refuted them all in my account. I’ll re-list the ones stated in Scatter’s mid-September account (emphasis is mine). By now, given the underlying evidence, I think Lu understood very well that these were all false.

  1. i advised them not to make up with you because it was clear they didn’t want to and your constant refusal to accept it was wearing heavily on them mentally

  2. based on my conversations with them, i believed, and continue to believe, that they were basically resolving it as a favor to you

  3. if you hadn’t … threatened to post all their wrongdoings publicly

  4. or insisted that you have a conversation to work it out

So it was clear Lu hadn’t done enuff to set the record straight. I considered the possibility that Scatter was dismissing Lu’s changed stance on me because it didn’t suit them, leveraging the situation as a scapegoat for banning me just out of hatred. But a mutual friend said he was convinced, from reading Lu’s vent to SDLL, that Scatter was trying to act in good faith. So I wonder if what’s really going on here is Lu deliberately persisting different accounts of events to different people – “duplicity”.

Notice, we’ve already seen him do this once (see §2d: Creating False Narratives), but that was in a heated state of venting. What we’re looking at now is weeks and months going by.

🟥 4.1b | “Look Out for a DM”

Let’s go back to the final day (31st August) of reconciliation / before the break.

Here again, after just having told me he vented to all of SDLL, he says he was telling them he understood my intentions. But when I looked at that screenshot of what he actually told them (see §3b: “Updating” SDLL), I said it was striking that there was no mention of what my intentions actually were… rather it seems he was just saying that he understood what they were. 🤔

He’s taking on the position with me that he seriously fucked up in bringing them all into the situation.

His approach to fixing things was to tell people to look out for a DM and have me defend myself privately, rather than setting the record straight of his own initiative. One of the people who agreed to look out for a DM then just completely ignored the DM I sent him.

I thought him encouraging them to talk to me showed he was interested in setting the record straight, but in light of his propaganda campaign (chapter 4.2), I think it’s more that I’d backed him into a corner where he had to concede letting me talk to them. Recall that at first, he told them to not talk to me because they “didn’t care to interact with me”.

🟥 4.1c | The Point of Mediating
In October, after Lu threatening to end our break early gave me a panic attack, some mutuals spoke to him and I received this report.

It suggests Lu understands his misrepresentations (he also saw them clearly laid out in Scatter’s mid-September account), and a mediation was planned to honestly retell events and have SDLL members understand them. In November, Lu initiated this mediation like this:

(So ignoring the fact that Scatter is so hostile that many of their friends habitually refuse to challenge their stances,)

I was surprised again to not see any reference from Lu to misconceptions that needed correcting, and taken aback by the implication that he found himself having to sort things out “apparently”, that I was trying to orchestrate a dialogue for some ambiguous reason. Rather than it being of Lu’s will to set things straight, as I’d thought. Hmmmm.

EDIT (2022/04/03): After this message, but before the propaganda campaign (see chapter 4.2), I made it explicitly clear to Lu the importance of correcting the slander, and so gave him a last chance. His not taking it is the basis for why I won’t forgive him. I’m editing in evidence of that here:

Last Chance [CLICK TO EXPAND]

Lu and I discuss the mediation, which he’d initiated (with the message above) 2 days earlier. At this point, I didn’t know what he’d said in that message and was delusionally thinking that he was telling people there were misrepresentations to correct. This is me raising that idea, and him, crucially, not replying.

After the mediation fails, I directly tackle the same idea (the importance of correcting slander), and Lu first denies slandering me, and then falsely confirms that he did tell them the point of the mediation (which I’d fleshed out with him in the above screenshot). I then make this idea crystal clear, and he diverts without cycling back.

I will retell this soon in chapter 4.2, but note for now that this 1st Dec conversation is the same one in which I spoke openly about intending to expose him. So the point where he without-doubt understood the importance of correcting slander coincided with the point where it was looking likely I’d expose him. At this point, he again chose to not correct the slander but rather to publicly discredit me to try to suppress being exposed.

🟪 4.1d | Losing Friends
I honestly can’t begin to explain the impact that losing friends because of uncorrected slander had on me. The friendships I lost were all completely positive, and were just cut with no communication. All from me trying to address abusive behaviours in a friendship and the perpetrator vilifying me for it. I know that ultimately Scatter leveraged control over those friendships to end them, and the friends themselves were quite fine with letting them go. I also know I was vulnerable from past experiences of always being on the outside of friend groups and never making connections with people I liked (like Lumardy in the first place).

But Lu’s gross interventions had a clear risk, of safety in numbers and the resulting wall of awkward drama causing most people to cut ties with the isolated person. You don’t know how badly losing friends will affect someone. To put it bluntly, this ruined my life and I didn’t recover. I feel like no friendship is worth putting time into because it could just get ended by the many other people who hate me for my objectionable communication. But I can’t stop yearning for emotional bonds, so I’m in a state of permanent self-conflict, and have been recurringly suicidal.

But also, I had to live with the mutual friends who did understand what happened pretending I don’t exist in those circles. One of them never stood up for me, never said anything. It was for personal reasons, but it makes me deeply distressed and uncomfortable about the friends I do still have.

4.2 Propaganda Campaign

4.2a | Cutting Contact
I supported this final mediation (Nov 2021) because I felt it could only be positive to retell the story in a group setting, singing from the same sheet. But I already thought it was unlikely to work. I’d started to comprehend some of the manipulative behaviours from chapters 3 and 4.1, and told some mutuals that I thought exposing them was the play. The mutuals disagreed at the time, and one opted to not respond to me for a week, in which time he revealed to Lu that I intended to expose him.

And that was the turning point.

On Dec 1st/2nd 2021, Lu and I spoke for the last time ever, openly about my intent to expose him, which I’d had to reveal.

It started off promisingly with this direct lie ^.

The key implication of pulling out of the mediation is that Lu was trying to find a solution for me, because he thought that if he didn’t then I’d expose him. So when I told him straight-up that I would expose him either way, there was apparently no longer a motive for him to do the right thing.

This was his tone to me, expressing reasonable concerns. Two days later, he understandably blocked me. But I could hardly expect what was to come when he started a propaganda campaign on Twitter.

🟥 4.2b | Actively Spreading Lies
Over the course of 7 tweet threads (Dec 2021 – Feb 2022), Lu started or resurrected 4 false narratives about me and hounded me with subtweets and callouts. In these, he shows that after months of chances, he’s not sorry for slandering me, hasn’t learnt anything, will do anything to save his skin, and thinks of himself as a victim. He tries his best to discredit me and suppress me trying to expose him.

Let’s look at each narrative individually.

1. Not Friends

This narrative is blatantly knowingly fabricated. His pov that I’m a friend he never had outright contradicts what he told me in private. The first tweet hints at his motives – an entitlement to being forgiven and him experiencing a lack of that (my own differing interpretation of his actions) as a gaslight.

2. Not Abuse

The lie here isn’t that it isn’t “abuse” (subjective term, after all) but rather that none of the mutuals said it was. Lu is exploiting the fact that I was getting resistance from all mutuals on raising awareness of his behaviour. Tbh, it took them an inexcusably long time to start listening to me and realise they either didn’t have the whole picture or were defending Lu for selfish reasons, and they’ve all backed down now.

I doubt any of them told Lu they thought it was abuse, but he exploited their silence to misrepresent them. He also makes out that I’m mentally incompetent in the last sentence.

3. My Reason for Exposing

I wasn’t clear to Lu because I was forced to address this way before I was ready to, but he was definitely aware there was more to it than just our underlying falling out (chapter 1). See this discussion (about the failed November mediation):

In DMs: notice him implying he was clear on the point the mediation when proposing it, when (see §4.1c: The Point of Mediating) he obviously wasn’t.

4. Cutoff

I’m interpreting this as the old false Scatter narratives of the problem being my entitlement to having a conversation with Lu, and that Lu was resolving things as a favour to me (see §2d: Creating False Narratives).

By contrast, in DMs: notice him trying to convince me that I was entrapping him in talking to me!

🟥 4.2c | Twitter Harassment
Lu subtweeted and called me out many times. The chronology of his tweets, plus any of my tweets that he was reacting to, are in the raw evidence log, which I included so nothing can be taken out of context, but I’ll commentate it all below as well.

→ Evidence Log

Summary: He reacted to two of my personal introspective threads (one of which characterised his actions in a way he didn’t like) with out-of-context snide subtweets. He reacted to me discussing my progress on writing an abuse case by naming me and spreading lies. He named me again in a disparaging tweet weeks later, out-of-the-blue.

Details (optional reading) [CLICK TO EXPAND]

1.

This subtweet (referencing this idea from our DM) came after this opinion tweet:

Referring to my own opinion tweet of the situation.

2.

He names and shames me after I write about working on an abuse case.

I feel it was harmful for me to allude to the case before I released it. I had so little support from mutuals that I felt like tweeting was my only outlet. Lu’s propaganda campaign was already in full swing by this point (this was his 4th set of tweets).

3.

This subtweet seems to be in response to my personal reflections about myself.

4.

And this callout was just out of the blue almost a month later.

🟪 4.2d | Being Harassed
This threat of harassment (particularly the 27th Jan callout) caused me great anxiety and meant I couldn’t sleep at night for weeks, which broke my sleep cycle for a whole month.

I’ve gone this whole time knowing that Lu will freely shittalk me anywhere and at any time, and that my friends won’t stand up for me. It was up to me to state this case all by myself. And it buried me in darkness, carrying this weight alone for three months.


🟥 4.2e | Euphemise/Exaggerate
It’s a rhetorical technique Lu uses a lot.

Euphemise how he hurt me, emphasise how his mental health hurt him. I don’t understand how 9 people didn’t see thru this word usage.

Ok.

The initial venting post he sent to SDLL is a crucial example – euphemise the “silly stuff” and “cutest of details”, and exaggerate how “he’s holding it back” (it being him moving on). Lu adapts his words to his audience:

The stuff said to Awesomo, “psycho shit” etc., was exaggerations welcomed in that conversation because of her hatred of me. He said to Awesomo “how psychotic is that”, and described the same action as “borderline psychotic” to SDLL, which was at the time also my friend group.

This is all at the heart of his duplicity, how the people he vented to got a totally different vibe of the situation than, say, I did, from his outpouring of apologies in my DMs.

4.2f | Summary
Duplicity is hard to prove, but between:

It seems very likely that he deliberately maintained a false impression of me to SDLL (compared to what he presented to me), which is what lost me friends.

5. Epilogue

That’s the end of the story. I’ll try to recap the plot and tie the patterns of Lu’s behaviour together, then I’ll give a final word on what I think of it all.

5.1 Summarising the Evidence (TL;DR)

I think it’s crucial to try to connect the dots on repeated behaviours, to take them beyond easily-dismissed blips and show they’re deeply-ingrained traits of a person. So I want to list them all as a big-picture refresher (or tl;dr). The blocks labeled “summary” in this chapter will be entirely revising old info, and I’ll add in two new bonus examples as character evidence.

Story
First, to recap the story. It includes 6 key accusations (bold and linked to main doc), and 3 descriptions of the pain it caused me (italicised).

Story (summary, 700 words) [CLICK TO EXPAND]
  • After a year of a rotten friendship in which Lu took advantage of me to get close to someone else and was negative in many ways that interfered with my other friendships, I end things. I start talking to him about his behaviours, and he becomes really apologetic and keen to fix things with me. After errors on my part in handling this resolution, Lu starts venting to people, including friends of mine, about his legitimate anxiety.
  • However, he presents completely different pictures to them than he did to me, including accusing me of forcing him to fix things with me the day after telling me I’m a friend and he “put [his] foot down and said no more” to his bad way of handling friendships (→ §2d: Creating False Narratives).

  • I immediately face bans from Discords run/modded by Scatter and Awesomocity0, including a friend group I was very active in (10k messages and 30h of calls), and the reasoning given is a bunch of bullshit, the kernels of truth of my errors blown far out of proportion. Since Lu’s cut contact with me, I have no idea whom he’s talking to and feel the acute anxiety of walls closing in on me.

  • While I try to atone for those errors, Lu tries to keep the venting a secret, and to get both mutual friends and random people to side with him and not talk to me (→ §2e: “Psycho Shit”). Lu and I then do a successful private reconciliation, where Lu genuinely apologises for everything.
  • However, for 3 weeks, Lu keeps it secret from me that he had vented to an additional 7 people and so turned that entire friend group against me, and ironically vents to me about how he’s afraid of me turning people against him, despite the fact that, during the first week, I disclosed whom I’d spoken to and led the convo to where he had to do the same in order to be honest. He privately shows he understands the implications of this (→ §3d: Venting Cover-Up).

  • During these 3 weeks, Lu understands my motives, yet doesn’t correct any of the deceptive pictures he painted to those people, and manipulates them into continuing to believe those things by avoiding discussing the things directly, instead implying indirectly that they’re still true, and using a narrative that he’s close with those people and I only “feel” close with them to justify them, again, not talking to me (→ §3b: “Updating” SDLL).

  • When I push him on this, he reacts by telling the friends I was closer with to “look out for a DM” (a DM one goes on to ignore), and by organising a mediation in which he falsely implies (again) I’m forcing him to do it, and with no context on why mediate in the first place (= to correct lies) (→ §4.1c: The Point of Mediating). I then clarify to him that I expect him to correct his slander that lost me friends.

  • He tries to convince me directly that I’m coercing him into an ongoing resolution by holding the threat of an exposé over his head, and after I tell him I’ll expose him regardless, he not only gives up on correcting the lies to others, but, in 7 separate tweets/threads spanning 2 months, starts telling deliberate lies (about us never having been friends, about mutual friends not thinking his behaviour was abuse, and more) (→ 4.2b: Actively Spreading Lies) about me and harassing me on public Twitter to try to shut it down. This, combined with the lack of support I get from my friends who don’t comprehend Lu’s manipulation, leaves me in darkness for 3 months, needing to speak up but not being able to until now.

  • I remain banned from that friend group, whose owner still believes the same lies. The loss of two entirely-positive friendships puts me in a state of permanent fear of someone destroying my friendships, and makes me lose faith in having friends while still yearning for the bonding, leaving me on the edge of living.
  • Awesomo tries to cancel me with a sexual harassment allegation based on Lu’s venting to her (partly from jumping to conclusions and partly from being manipulated by Lu), and does so behind Lu’s back, which Lu debunks, leaving Awesomo surprised and in hiding.

Lies
There are many, many confirmed cases of deceit, with contexts ranging from uncontrolled panicked reactions to long-running premeditated lies. I’ll list some important ones here.

9 Lies (summary) [CLICK TO EXPAND]
  1. 1Ups Issue Denial (see §1a: Invading Friendship with 1Ups) )): On confrontation while still friends, dismissing out-of-hand accusations of disingenuous friendship and taking advantage of me; admitting them 6 months later. Panic, then head in the sand, then act like nothing happened.
  2. Friendship Burning (see §1d: “Friendship Burning”): Significantly deluding me on how much he valued our friendship while in an guilt-induced panic. Not premeditated deceit but a kind of unrelatable emotional dishonesty.
  3. Why Resolve Things? (see §2d: Creating False Narratives): paints a totally contradictory picture of something to me vs others (him putting his foot down to resolve things vs me forcing him to), while in a heated state of venting.
  4. Venting Cover-Up (see §3d: Venting Cover-Up): coolly not disclosing for 3 weeks how many people he’d turned against me, despite me being transparent with him on whom I’d spoken to, and leading him in the convo such that he was aware he was deceiving me, which he also acknowledged to others.
  5. Persisting False Narratives (see §4.1a: Scatter’s Fabrications): Lu vents deceptively (perhaps unintentionally) to Scatter, then Lu and I talk things thru, then Scatter repeats the same lies two weeks later, proving Lu never addressed them. So, lying by staying quiet for weeks and months.
  6. No Mediation (see §4.2a: Cutting Contact): Lu DMs me a straightforward, direct and pre-meditated lie.
  7. Friend Strawman (see §4.2b: Actively Spreading Lies (point #1)): 2 weeks after cutting contact for the last time, Lu publicly posts a deliberate strawman that can’t be defended.
  8. Abuse Strawman (see §4.2b: Actively Spreading Lies (point #2)): Lu puts words into people’s mouths, words that are false (tho he might not have known), to discredit me.
  9. Motive Allusion (see §4.2b: Actively Spreading Lies (point #3)): Lu insinuates that my motive to expose him is connected to something we’d resolved before, despite me having heavily implied to him it wasn’t.

Here’s a new lie, unrelated to me, that’s relevant to SDLL. It’s a bit of proof of the trait of making up narratives to look good.

Bonus example: “She wasnt ready” [CLICK TO EXPAND]

One time while collecting evidence in SDLL, I spotted this:

But in a letter he wrote to me addressing my grievances and exploring personal history that made him the way he was towards me, he said:

[gf] broke up with me in the first week of May … and it was for seemingly no reason … she just cited that we didn’t click and that it wasn’t working, no other reason.

He elaborated about their relationship before and his exams after, so I can be certain it’s the same person. The context of the SDLL message was a casual discussion of how he got into speedrunning. There was no reason to lie, just to make himself look better. I didn’t realise until I saw that that Lu is actually a compulsive liar. Sure, some people are voluntarily friends with those, but it stands out to me given everything else.

Manipulations

I billed the case as an exploration into techniques to manipulate people against someone, so let’s list those as well. I’d be remiss to not mention technique #0 tho – lying!

6 Manipulations (summary) [CLICK TO EXPAND]

  1. Painting conflicting pictures of a situation to different people. (→ §2d: Creating False Narratives)

  2. Trying to cut off communication between someone and a group. (→ §2e: “Psycho Shit”), (→ §3b: “Updating” SDLL, point #3)

  3. Omitting background and explanation. (→ §3b: “Updating” SDLL, point #1), (→ §4.1b: “Look Out for a DM”), (→ §4.1c: The Point of Mediating).

  4. Cover-ups and suppression of information. (→ §3d: Venting Cover-Up), (→ §2g: Goodwill Rejection, point #3)

  5. Insinuations,
  6. Euphemising/Exaggerating rhetoric (→ §4.2e: Euphemise/Exaggerate).

I have another new bit of evidence unrelated to me that proves Lu’s trait of hiding wrongdoing to look good. This is one the SMS community should be aware of since it provides missing context to a situation that was in the public eye.

Bonus example: Flop-Like-Fish Subtweet [CLICK TO EXPAND]

(CN: discussion of Tareq and evidence from his Discord – but no abuse in the evidence).

Older SMS runners (2020 and earlier) will know that Lu once had a reputation for writing egotistical tweets about his motivation to speedrun that were dismissive and elitist towards others. They’re all deleted now, but a trace remains in this reply.

The subtweet in question (by Tareq) was a parody of one of these from 2021.

That tweet from Lu (and some comments he made on stream at the time), which disparaged competition at his level from UK runners, had a negative effect on another runner he slighted, who half-jokingly complained in his chat, then started clipping and trolling him. Lu’s elitist/egotistical tendency had been subsiding by 2021 tho, so I took him seriously when he spoke about apologising for this and wishing people would talk to him about it instead of harassing him, and consoled him thru the anxiety it caused him (mostly centred on, unsurprisingly, what people thought of him). I called out Tareq for bullying him, which I still think was the right side to take.

In the abuse doc about Tareq’s Discord, Lu testified (my emphasis):

In terms of my experience with each individual, Tareq is one of the worst people I have ever interacted with. There’s a surprising amount of people in the community who like him and it’s why I’ve fallen for his bait when he decides to be an asshole to me (to protect my image and not want to look bad to people i thought were cool) an example would be a couple months ago where I said I didn’t have much motivation to play sunshine because UK players weren’t giving much competition at the time, he made a tweet clearly directed at me mocking that sentiment and quite a few people who i felt like i had good interactions with before liked and rt’d what he was saying, guy, neb etc etc, it was really the beginning of me realizing that they were incredibly two faced and toxic if they were willing to be friends or talk to tareq frequently. it’s important to note that these people probably feel like they aren’t toxic and things like that but how they come across to people like me who just wanna play the game and meet fun people is quite frankly disgraceful, i don’t want to play sms anymore and it’s because people like that have become figureheads, and how could i feel any different given my interactions

I read this and instantly thought it was a whitewash. Poor SMS player who just wants to play the game mocked over innocent tweet for no reason. Does a great job explaining how Lu felt bad and conveniently leaves out how he made other people feel bad. Is Lu actually sorry if he hides wrongdoing in situations like these?

Anyway, Tareq never got to defend his motives, so I’m going to post what he said in his Discord (content note: does not contain anything abusive).

I think this again sheds light on how Lu represents situations to different people and what his apologies are really worth.

5.2 Conclusion

I imagine it looks like I think Lu is a total scumbag, and I do. But like most people who’ve done awful things, it doesn’t come from a place of evil. His manipulative behaviour clashes heavily with his attitude with me in private. He did manipulate me in DMs as well yes, but not so if we imagine the world were just the two of us and nobody else figured into the situation. His private apologies to me were very genuine and personal, and I still believe them, forgive them, and think he put in a stellar effort.

I didn’t vaue how much you might value the friendship and made some really awful mistakes because of this. I also wrote some stuff to compliment you a few points back and wanted to make this more than just an apology, I’m not just trying to say shit you want to hear so late into this debacle but I figured it would be worth saying that to you because it is genuine stuff I have always thought, even if I never expressed it, I’ve just always felt so awkward about it all.

(The compliments are in reference to me citing that he didn’t pay me a single compliment during our entire friendship that wasn’t about SMS gameplay.)

But it’s hard for me to understand that the same person then persisted bullshit narratives about me to others and lied about me in public to discredit me. No matter how goodhearted Lu is in private, it gets flatly overridden by his extreme paranoia about what others think of him, which I believe is by far the biggest influence on his actions.

He has visceral guilty reactions to being told he did something wrong, but then there’s no acceptance once calm, only denial of the magnitude, lies to suppress the spread of knowledge of the actions, and persistent duplicity of narratives to, I think, assuage his own guilt and protect the validation others gave him for his emotions while venting. His emotions warp the truth.

I think it’s healthy to think of these things, but in the end, it’s moot; the only thing that matters in practice is what the actions were and how they affected me. To have emotional validation etc. come at the expense of someone else is completely unacceptable. He had so many chances to do the right thing, yet chooses to continue to this day to lie about, shittalk, discredit me, in the name of emotional validation and others’ perceptions of him. That’s someone who’s incapable of being sorry in any meaningful way, someone whom I can’t afford to give any more chances. Maybe he’ll improve on the things he did wrong in our friendship, but he shows no remorse for being a thoroly manipulative liar whose actions lost me a friend group I really valued.

There’ll be no forgiveness, no more chances.

Afterword
I really did my best to expose some insidious manipulation that I feel people are often blind to or powerless against. We need to spot recurring patterns. We need to think critically. Ask yourself – who stands to gain from suppression of evidence? What does it mean when you can prove points by just putting two screenshots next to each other, hardly any words needed?

I can’t excuse Awesomo for trying to leverage this case to cancel me for her own personal gain, or for some of the conclusions she jumped to. But she was herself manipulated by Lu’s duplicitous narratives. But in the end, it’s your own choice to not consider the evidence around someone’s personality, to take eir narrative as given, and to take sides based on allegiances rather than evidence.

Thanks.
– shoutplenty