Lumardy Case | Updates (2022/04/03)

I want to get some closure and peace on the Lumardy case for now. I’ve thought about things for a week and want to openly share my thoughts with everyone, on:

  1. my stance on the case,
  2. thoughts about Lu’s apology,
  3. personal worries, and
  4. some questions raised about my motives for the case.

These sections are ordered from most to least important, with the first 2 being the main ones.

While Lu is gone, I also want to put down the weapons and leave things where I’m not proactively raising awareness of the case, and am instead trying to peacefully recover a bit and let him do the same. That’s why I wanted to write down my stances and thoughts, then move on.

1. My Stance: No Forgiveness

I stand by what I said that personally, this situation went beyond anything I can forgive or engage in repairing, and I think I’ll feel threatened by Lu for a very long time. But I wanted to talk more about my opinion on objective notions of forgiveness, like balancing my feelings with Lu’s rights in any situations we may cross paths going forwards. People have said to me that, altho Lu’s actions were clear, it was less clear if he’d been given enuff of a chance to understand the importance of correcting slander (that had ended my friendships) and a chance to react. It’s my view that I gave him more than enuff chances and so his refusal should be seen as deliberate. I’ll justify that here:

Details (optional reading) [CLICK TO EXPAND]

This is overall hard to prove since we had long periods of silence since September (by his wishes and not mine), and I relied on mutual friends to communicate the message to him (fuck knows what they said). Before then, I’d made it clear in August (see example) that I considered Scatter’s interpretation of events completely wrong (I called it a gaslight), yet Scatter repeated that interpretation in September. That was Lu’s first big chance.

But there’s one example that makes this clear to me, Lu’s last big chance. See the whole of §4.1c | The Point of Mediating, to which I added an optional block at the end just now, for proof – to summarise: after Lu mooted a mediation in SDLL without explaining what the point of it was and pretending it was my initiative, I made him aware twice, very clearly the second time, that he wasn’t addressing his slander of me to SDLL, and he ignored both messages and refuted that he’d even slandered me. He then went on to start his Twitter propaganda campaign to discredit me (because I’d also told him I intended to expose him).

This is the rational basis for why I will never compromise, and do consider the whole thing unforgivable. The emotional aspect is crucial too – the mental toll it took to then bring the truth out completely alone, for 4 months, getting disbelieved by friends along the way. There’s no good way to really account for that damage in the forgiveness equation. My intention with this case (beyond discrediting Lu) is to protect myself by making everyone in my vicinity aware of what happened, and hence try to put as much space between myself and Lu as I can, all indefinitely. The effectiveness and reasonableness of that will depend on everyone else. But from my own end, I want him to not come back.

2. My Thoughts on the Apology

My stance of no forgiveness means I’m partly insulated from having to interpret Lu’s apology, but I think it’s healthy to comment on it still. I do greatly appreciate the apology, first of all.

My opinion is balanced, slightly positive. Starting with the negatives, I think from reading the apology, you wouldn’t think I proved a systematic manipulation case against him. His discussion of the case material only really matches chapters 1 and 2, about the way he handled our friendship and his reckless venting, and not chapters 3 and 4, about how over weeks and months, he deceived me, SDLL and the public on Twitter, to maintain a state of people perceiving me as bad, him as the victim, and information that would correct this not getting spread. Also, I say “reckless” venting but the reaction I’ve gotten from readers to the example in §2d | Creating False Narratives goes beyond that and into saying it’s either insanity or malicious intent.

However, it can take a lot to even personally come to terms with your own wrongdoing, so I’m not saying Lu is deliberately downplaying anything, and am not trying to encourage him into further apologies. There’s a lot to signal that this is genuine – he:

  1. has a similar stance to SDLL currently,
  2. linked my case in his apology,
  3. acknowledged that his friends’ support was enabling him to get away with it,
  4. said that my behaviour stemmed from situations he’d caused (which discredits the old allegations that constituted the slander against me),
  5. alluded to having done similar things outside of his relationship with me, which helps me feel seen, and most of all:
  6. admitted the case as a whole – “because quite clearly, it is fair”. I’ve maintained open communications with everyone, even explicitly asking mutuals if there was anything that needed correcting, and will continue to publish updates at the very top of the case document. So it means a lot to be able to agree with Lu that all the major points I made in the case are right, and matters less that he didn’t comment on some of them directly. We, and all readers, know where we stand on the facts.

It’s important for me to be insulated from interpreting this apology deeply because there’s a lot of uncertainty given his history of both deliberate and self-deluded lying. Explained below:

Details (optional reading) [CLICK TO EXPAND]

This apology reminded me of his guilty admission to the 1Ups issue and how he told me he didn’t want to let the friendship burn (see §1d | “Friendship Burning”) – he persisted this optimism for 3 weeks, then manipulatively vented about me and later still took the whole “friendship burning” sentiment back. This new apology is different since he waited two days to respond and made himself publicly accountable, but it’s still astute for me to not readily believe or get invested in it.

Again tho, I reiterate that the situation is, for me, beyond forgiveness. I think it’s best for him to start with a clean slate, and I want him to not come back to spaces I’m in. Practically, of course, it’s more complicated, which I’ll discuss in the next section.

3. My Personal Fears

I want to talk a little about the things I’ve been worried about in the case’s aftermath. In each point, I’m mostly worried about my own mental safety in the future. But the conclusion is always that I can’t predict what’ll happen and so need to try to make peace with the open-endedness of it all and move on.

  1. Hardly anyone has reached out to me, and there wasn’t much traction on Twitter, so I have no idea what most people think. I tried to get everyone to focus on the evidence but, I guess inevitably, most reaction seems to have come from people who like or support me in general. The abuses had really bad consequences on me, but I depend on the public to decide how much I should be treated as a victim and afforded protection. My mind’s been busy drawing analogies to other cases, thinking of (1) how manipulating friends into hating someone is seen vs things like bigotry, hatefulness etc., (2) how me being the only victim of my case makes people reluctant to take sides, (3) how I’m disliked by a lot of mine and Lu’s mutual acquaintances.

  2. I worry about Lu coming back one day, and both what kind of reaction would come from everyone (per point #1) and whether I’d myself be able to handle it. While writing the case, I was in the mindset that I’d resist his hypothetical presence by actively spreading awareness of my case. But in the days after releasing it, I fell into such a discomforted depression that I imagined myself receding from those spaces instead, with no emotional energy to fight. I have no idea how I’d react and what’s supposed to happen next, from me, Lu, mutuals and the public. Uncertain future.

  3. It should be noted that SDLL is shielding Lu, and offers him a safe place while he’s gone from Twitter and/or the SMS community. I want to draw a line in the sand between myself and anyone who continues to support Lu, but it’s impossible when we have such a tangle of mutual friends. Some of them were friends with Lu for much longer than me and so want to invest themselves into considering his redemption, apologies, psychology etc., which I’m personally trying to avoid because of the huge uncertainty in it. I’m naturally much more comfortable interacting with people and spaces that have no association with Lu, and so am worried about how I’ll react to those mutual friendships going forwards.

4. My Motivations for Writing the Case (revisited)

This optional part is to answer some questions. Somebody asked whether this case comes from me not being able to accept the shit-happens realities that (1) friendships sometimes die because of manipulative third parties, and (2) it’s a two-way street where those friends I lost didn’t care enuff to fix things. I’ll answer both:

Point 1 [CLICK TO EXPAND]

I knew I was wronged, but why did I then go to such lengths to expose it instead of accepting my fate? Many times in life, particularly legally, you’d like to hold someone accountable but can’t because it would cost you so many resources as to ruin your life. However, my background of trauma due to being ostracised from friend groups and not being able to make things work with people I liked was so great that I was unable to swallow this, and felt I had to say something to people who interacted with both me and Lu, to save myself from the intense distress of not being visible and of listening to people say, like, “this person is great; I hope he’s around more often” and the like. That’s really where it came from, rather than me considering myself a righteous victim of abuse.

I did really just want to talk about it, but I was also bound by both the risk of retaliation (during Lu’s then-active propaganda campaign), and the conviction that if I was going to influence people’s opinions of someone, I had better prove my case properly. That’s how the case ended up with its lengthiness, thoro presentation, and somewhat neutral tone (despite me feeling the emotions of victimhood deeply while writing it).

Point 2 [CLICK TO EXPAND]

It’s true that the friendships I lost were weak, and better friends would have reached out to me. But I didn’t really regard them as good friends in the first place. I didn’t react so badly because of heartbreak or emotional betrayal, but rather the loss of what those friends did offer me, which was regular interactions, positivity, and mutual interests/activities I had few other people to explore/do with. Those friendships were regular for me for good reason – they offered a space for me to be comforted and motivated to do things, while I was enduring low socialisation due to the pandemic, disaffection about the quality of my IRL friendships, and oppression from daily building-site noise I was trying to escape. It’s a privileged position to say to someone like me, “oh you shouldn’t put so much value into friendships like that”.