Lumardy Case | Theo’s Accounts

Theo (aka Pre_Hooktail, ZipZipW) was a mutual friend of mine and lumardy’s who helped me with the original case (published March 2022), asking for his name to be left out of the final publication and for me to clear only a minimal amount of his messages for publication. He reviewed it prior to release, saying:

i don’t really have any overarching problems with what you’ve written. i agree with the general sentiment of it in its entirety

More than that, tho: there’s a kind of plot-hole in the original case, that the creating false narratives we caught lumardy doing red-handed with awesomocity0 had no direct evidence for it in sdll because of the high level of operational security with which they conducted the secret-channel-based ostracisation of a friend. there was only indirect evidence from the high density of manipulation shown in the few screenshots that did get out. Theo asserted that disclosing the contents of #trusted would mean he doesn’t deserve to be #trusted, which meant that I had to take his word to confirm the circumstantially-evidenced duplicity lumardy was engaging in to keep me ostracised for 7 months until the case was published – that this was actually happening, and not, as I had first thought, largely a result of scatter hate-crusading against me.

Theo has started engaging in denial of the lumardy case off the motive of wanting to be with SDLL (see also this), so I noticed the hole that this opened up in the case. What follows here, then, is direct quotations of what he said to me to convince me both of lumardy’s duplicity and of the validity of the entire case, as he had reviewed it. These quotes can be read in context thru the s1jzld archive, available to responsible readers on request from the open SMS Discord per the sensitive-evidence policy.

Even if Theo and SDLL can convince people that the duplicity didn’t happen, which I find unlikely since the case is now watertight, that would imply that Theo put me thru an intense betrayal, looking at what he said.

So, here are his raw communications helping me to work the case, Feb and Mar 2022. I edited them into sentences (with “,” or “.”), highlighted the crucial bits, and added square-bracketed context, including my own quotes.

2022/02/17 1/2

i realize your view of this is coming from several months of previously thinking that scatter’s actions were in bad faith, but i’m insisting that this is a false assumption. so it’s up to you whether or not you trust my judgement, but that’s my two cents. if it’s starting to look like i’m just here to defend my friends instead of giving you my honest assessment of this situation, then hopefully i can remove any doubts about that in my next answer.

2. lu’s side of things is very difficult for me to fully grasp, particularly because they’ve made an effort to avoid talking about it. so i can only catch glimpses of their attitude towards this situation from off-handed comments, how they respond when i tell them that i’m not comfortable with what they’ve said, and the things they’ve said on twitter and stuff. i believe the avoidance comes from the guilt they experience when they realize the extent of what they did to you, and not being able to fully accept the ramifications of that means about them as a person. it’s clear there are some brief moments of lucidity, maybe some genuine apologetic behavior, but these are very rare compared to how often they try to suggest that they’re the victim here, if there’s a victim.

in almost every case, as 1ups said earlier, they seem to feel guilty because other people have signaled to them that they’ve done something wrong, not out of a genuine reflection on how their actions have affected you and your wellbeing. “it’s a very scary thing to imagine the people you know finding out about something you did wrong and wondering how they’d react tbh” in their recent twitter thread. there’s no apology there. they’re making themselves out to be a victim in that they’re burdened by this horrible thing they’re afraid of. they allude to their anger, depression, sadness, and apathy which have resulted from all of this. but not their guilt. or shame. no mention of regret. they minimize their responsibility in all of this, “i always think i’ve done something cataclysmic when actually it’s just a kind of shitty thing i did and i’m not irredeemable”. “i’ve always struggled…”. “i think we just aren’t made for this form of communication” and other excuses.

i’m sure you’ve already picked these statements apart yourself, but i point them out because i want to say that the same patterns exist in some of what they’ve said to me. there was one particular instance which i found to be deeply unsettling. when i read it, it completely changed my perception of this situation as a case involving two victims whose personalities clashed in an unfortunate way to a situation where one person simply abused the other, case closed. the extent to which their actions were affected by the depression and social confusions they were dealing with at the time is still a very important consideration, of course. but i can’t continue to take them seriously in good faith. and after some reflection, i’ve also recognized the same behavioral patterns in how they’ve treated me. things which, over the past few years, i’ve just shrugged off as “huh, that was kind of mean, but oh well i’m not gonna let that bother me”. but which are now quite difficult to ignore in light of this.

anyway, all of this is to say, beyond suggesting that their actions weren’t as bad as they looked and were caused by external pressures they were facing at the time, their side seems to be that they were the target of an unjustified cancellation attempt. they generally avoid advertising this, apparently because they don’t want to bring attention to it, but occasionally they do. so i can appreciate your desire to tie up this loose end and defend your reputation. i’m unsure about where i stand with lu at the moment, it seems like we’re still friends on the surface, and i feel like many of the defenses i’ve made for lu in our dms in the past still have some merit. but only some. i won’t be making any more efforts to defend lu’s actions, and i won’t be hindering any efforts you make to publicize them.

2022/02/17 2/2

i think this [scatter’s removing me from sdll] has to be considered an accident which could have been done by anyone. and if someone is responsible for it, it was lu, who made conscious choices to influence scatter’s perception. lu made you out to be so dangerous that it was vital to keep you away at all costs. the document you released about sdll probably only reaffirmed that narrative in their mind.

after some consideration, i think i’ll also add, even though they weren’t aware of exactly what went down between you and lu, they were very clearly aware of the effect that this conflict had on their community. by no stretch of the imagination could it be considered anything other than extremely negative. and so i think it’s more than reasonable to say that, as the community leader, they believed they had a responsibility to the community to not reinvite this dynamic back into the discord by unbanning you, as that action could have had the very predictable side effect of causing more destruction.

2022/02/19

i think there’s another important factor here relating to differences in what we’ve said to different people, and that’s that opinions have changed significantly over the course of all this. early on, i think i supported lu quite a bit more. i was saying as early as march of last year that i was very uncomfortable with how lu was treating you, enough that i stopped checking sdll for a good while because i didn’t want to have to think about it. at that time though, i wasn’t convinced that lu deserved to be the subject of a document like the one you were putting together. it seemed to me that tensions were quite high and you were both caught up in the heat of things. and that if you were to take some time to let things settle down, you’d see it the same way.

but like i’ve said recently, now that the dust has settled and i’ve had some time to come to terms with the evidence you’ve presented, my own experience with lu, and the implications of those things, it’s really fucking obvious that i didn’t have the full picture back then. maybe because i wasn’t willing to accept what it meant about lu and my friendship with them. it was a really tough pill to swallow, but i’ve since swallowed it. the reason i bring this up is because, when i look back at the conversations i’ve had, i can see a general trend towards supporting your case. but at the beginning, i think i said things which i don’t agree with anymore.

2022/02/27

i assume when you talk about venting behavior, you’re talking about lu’s habit of mischaracterizing you to the rest of us - i want to clarify that when i called this venting, i wasn’t trying to pass it off as acceptable, i was only trying to give it a causal explanation. i fully agree this is unacceptable behavior, and i felt the same way when i wrote that. maybe my writing didn’t communicate it clearly enough.

2022/03/06

I think we’ve largely agreed that scatter had a responsibility to consider to consider the potential consequences of removing you from the server. whether or not they adequately fulfilled their responsibility is complicated. i still think their misconceptions informed their actions to such a degree that we have to consider lu responsible for those consequences.

2022/03/17

obviously my friendship with lu has been fundamentally weakened by all of this, i’m pretty sure they know that. i don’t know yet how much my opinion of lu will change after reading the doc, so that’s still a bit up in the air. but at the moment, i’m still stuck on the idea that the majority of lu’s behaviors in this case were influenced by external factors and motivations rather than a direct intention to hurt you. lots of the disparaging they did came from wanting peace of mind for their own self esteem and reputation, meaning a lot of it was a knee-jerk self preservation effort. things like trying to get close to you so they could get closer to 1ups weren’t motivated by hating you, they were motivated by other intentions. not in every case of course, i think they do actually hate you. but their emotional stability was a mess for the entire duration of your contact with them. my point is, i still need a better understanding about how much these external factors were responsible for their behavior. obviously hurting someone as collateral damage when you have other goals isn’t acceptable. but at lu’s age [22] and circumstances, it’s hard to judge exactly how much i need to hold them accountable for what they did. so i haven’t been able to decide yet whether this was unredeemable or if it’s something that can be carefully addressed and learned from so it stops and doesn’t ever happen again. the easiest thing would be for me to just walk away from it, but part of me feels like that would be the lazy choice.

2022/03/23

alright i’ve read through [the case]. overall, i don’t really have any overarching problems with what you’ve written. i agree with the general sentiment of it in its entirety. i’ll want to reread this again tomorrow of course to see if i can catch anything else. but before i do, there are a few things which you might want to consider changing to help this flow easier.

i think it’ll help the document go over better in sdll if you rework this sentence so it doesn’t include the word “trigger”. i’d also scratch [“i would have to have committed war crimes”] given the current political climate. you might want to consider going through and replacing all instances of “he” with “they” when referring to lu, probably wouldn’t be much effort with ctrl+f [shout: i added a pronoun note]. i can appreciate the parallels you’re drawing with the boris johnson thing, but i’d remove it entirely if you were you. it reads more like poking fun/taking a quick stab at an opportunity for cheap revenge, rather than something which is actually being used to help illustrate their character. especially since you call it a comic aside. as i see it, there’s no place for joking around in this document, especially not at lu’s expense [shout: dark humour is a coping mechanism]. it slightly detracts from your credibility and the document would read much better with a more serious wrap-up paragraph in place of this one.

since you asked me to do some debiasing, there are one or two things i think i should say. actually after reviewing over some notes i took, i don’t feel the need to make one point i was gonna make here, so i’ll just make this other point. even though it’s briefly alluded to in some of lu’s quotes, i don’t think the external stresses lu was facing were adequately addressed. i realize it isn’t really your responsibility to give lu the benefit of the doubt on that to any extent, but again i feel obligated to argue that it was at least a significant factor in many of your interactions. at least a quick mention of the fact that you recognize they were dealing with some depressive episodes throughout would go a long way. not as an excuse for some of their actions, but as an explanation for part of why they lacked the emotional stamina to meet your expectations.

i have to say, i think i’m about where i expected to be after reading this. that is, leaning even closer to your interpretation of things now that i’ve seen some of their behaviors outlined in clearer detail. things which i wasn’t completely ready to call “manipulation” are now pretty clearly like. manipulation.

i think i’ll decide what my standing is with lu based on their reaction to this. whether they approach it responsibly or not. oh one other quick point, i’d take out the Lul. for the same reasons as above.

2022/03/24 1/3

when i suggested this [mentioning “you recognize they were dealing with some depressive episodes throughout”], i thought a good place to put it would be towards the end where you were mentioning that a lot of their good-hearted nature was flatly overridden by extreme paranoia. a lot of it was also flatly overridden by their lack of emotional stamina, i believe. to that point, i’m kinda surprised you’re saying this [“it implies their depression was more significant than the average reader’s, which is questionable”]. in my opinion it’s not even remotely questionable, lu’s self esteem is extremely low and they seem depressed just about all the time. i’d go as far as to say that they’re easily one of the most depressed people i know online.

2022/03/24 2/3

idk man. i mean, we’ve talked about it, so i know why, but, the sheer brutality of it all is just fucking messed up. i’m sorry it’s all happened. hopefully it’ll be a good cry.

2022/03/24 3/3

i think this is the main thing [“maybe from your perspective, lu needs to realise the gravity of their actions and have a chance to actually change”], more so than your second point. so many years of knowing lu makes me think they can change. and i’d be a pretty awful person to just give up on and abandon them when i know i have the patience to see to it that they do change. i also want to pillow the burden on my other friends in sdll. it would be so much harder on them if they suddenly have to choose whether or not lu’s gonna keep being in the group, it would be much easier on everyone if they just recognized there’s a problem but it’s being actively worked on.

2022/03/25+

[doc posted]