Lumardy Case | Venting Account (C)

C. “Creepy” Letter

Notice of Publication (Jan 2024)

In April 2022, I decided to not publish this part of my defence, out of mercy since this material is very sensitive and the case as a whole was already quite overwhelming. Since then, Lumardy has engaged in a year-long bullying campaign against me, and someone from SDLL has been excusing his reaction to me confronting his sexual toxicity, which caused Awesomocity0 to try to cancel me for sexual harassment, like so:

there was an unrequited sexual component to this, lu felt understandably threatened

to me it seems like the mitigating mental health factors, effects of public humiliation, age-maturity differences, conflicts of interest, love-triangle drama, and large-scale threats of social schisms were actually what caused all of this

I realised it’s important to not hide evidence of Lumardy’s sexually predatory actions, not only to prevent this kind of denialism, but also to allow others to join the dots on his personality (sexual toxicity is a notable symptom of histrionic disorder) and to generally keep the public more aware and so safer.

See here for the original notice of non-publication.

Original Disclaimer (Mar 2022)

This case is about a letter I sent to Lu about my sexual attraction for him on 9th Aug, which is a large part of the venting case and false sexual harassment allegation that followed.

The defence I’m gonna make here is gonna be very nuanced and include the publication of a shitload of sensitive evidence, so I wanna give a firm justification for why I decided to do it this way.

Justification + Sensitive Evidence Policy [CLICK TO EXPAND]

Nobody is actively accusing me of sexual misconduct anymore, but I am being accused of other things, and underlying that is an established pattern of Lu not addressing false narratives depending on his relationship with the people who believe them. I perceive a risk of having tacit allegations made against me on this matter. The minute Lu told anyone I’d been creepy towards him – not least the sheer fact that it then resulted in a false sexual harassment allegation – was the minute the horse bolted on this issue.

Private discussions about it with observers have revealed suspicions about my actions that stem from expectations of normal sexual conduct, when Lu’s sexual conduct was anything but normal, so it’s important to spell out both the context behind my actions and the hypocrisy underlying Lu’s reaction to them as being creepy (which, for the record, he claims to not hold anymore). I don’t mean to deny they were creepy or that he genuinely felt that way, but I will try to discredit any rational basis to the reaction.

There is an inverse relationship between the amount of doubt in this case and the amount of sensitive evidence I publish. The amount really conveys the extent of some points I make and I felt it’d be insufficient to just assert that some things happened. Just know that my goal is to put this case beyond the possibility of anyone mounting a serious accusation of sexual misconduct against me, and any evidence I included, I felt was necessary for that reason. I’m writing this as part of a wider case so am pretty burnt out on it and history might prove I made bad judgements here.

Anyway, all evidence I publish here is/does one of the following:

  • Directly explains my own actions,
  • Is publicly-accessible, or
  • Is reasoning that doesn’t include much personal info.

I will try to not be too judgemental of evidence and let it speak for itself.

I think it best to not summarise the argument at all, and encourage the reader to either read the entire thing or save emself while ey still can (lol). There are 4 parts:

  1. My personal reasons for my reaction to an incident of disingenuous flirting.
  2. My personal reasons for my mindset going into the “creepy” letter.
  3. Critique and apologies for that letter.
  4. Exploration of background context underlying Lu’s reaction of it being creepy.

Contents

  1. My Reaction to the Flirting Incident
    • Approachability for Sex
    • Flirting Incident
  2. My Reaction to Lu’s Sexual Tweets
    • How the Tweet Affected Me
    • Summary
  3. The “Creepy” Letter
    • Motive
    • The Letter
    • Apologies
    • Immediate Aftermath Dialogue
  4. Lu’s Hypocritical Reaction to the Letter
    • ”Razzing”
    • Making People Uncomfortable
    • Summary
  5. Venting
    • IL Sheet Comment

1. My Reaction to the Flirting Incident

The gist of this case is me trying to interpret Lu’s words about sex, whether they were jokes or serious, whether he intended to give off certain impressions or not. In that sense, I’ll bring up a lot of false impressions, not to assert they were true or deliberately deceptive, but just to explain how I was misled by them. I’ll try to make that clear.

Key background: I was attracted to Lu and interested in a friends-with-benefits type relationship, but never brought up the latter before the “creepy” letter (Aug 9 2021) because of the long-term tensions in our friendship.

Approachability for Sex
In 2020, I had the impression that Lu was very open to being approached for sex and had the same casual attitude to it that I do.

  1. In Scatter’s stream chat, people once joked about a “Lumardy fuck-a-fan contest” as a comedy bit. Lu’s response to that was to say (paraphrase cos I didn’t catch a receipt)

    if people want to fuck me then i’m here for it. i need it too, bud

It’s important to note that the context here was they’d just finished joking, and Lu said this in a serious tone (i.e. straightforward and devoid of the context of the previous joke). In my private reconciliatory chats with him, he didn’t remember the context but regardless excused it as another joke (which would be suspiciously meta imo), or of him trying to appear a certain way, whatever that means. He was, and remains, very slippery and uncredible about this stuff.

  1. Said to me and others while drunk in an SDLL group voice call:

    i sorta just don’t give a shit. if you’re like a person who’s just like really cool, i’m just like broo i wanna fuck you brooo. but like, that’s, that’s kinda, that’s kinda, that’s kinda, that’s kinda it… at my point, you know?

  2. Later in that call:

    yeah, like, for me it’s gotten to the point where it’s like, if you’re just cool to me, and like, we get along, and like, flirt… let’s date. that’s like, the point now, that’s the point i’m at. it’s just, more for me now, it’s just the human… if like i happen to click with like a certain type of person, that’ll be the attraction now, instead of it being like, physical. that’s just what it’s become now.

I don’t wanna drop receipts of this cos I feel there’s an expectation of privacy and I accidentally recorded the call this came from. I’m lucky I did tho because it turned out to give good evidence.

Anyway, this evidence justifies the impression I had that he was easy-going about and open to being approached for sex, which is why I myself discussed it so easily in the “creepy” letter, and why I approached him out of the blue – because he literally said to! That doesn’t excuse the fact that I did that during such a tense period, which is separate context I’ll get to later.

As a bit of further evidence, later in April 2021, we had this kind of open, neutral, group discussion about personal experiences with sex and emotions surrounding it. I include that just to prove that these kinds of discussions were precedented territory for us. Note that every personal strand about Lu was initiated by him himself, and in fact coaxed the conversation in that direction at the expense of talking about other people.

SDLL (public) discussion about sex/emotions [CLICK TO EXPAND]

SDLL (public) discussion about sex/emotions

Flirting Incident

This was a crucial source of contention and confusion that reared its head only after our discussions about ending our friendship started, 6 months later.

This happened in Shine Heads in Dec 2020:

I mentioned the flirt right before deciding to end the friendship (Jul 5 2021), at which point he revealed it was disingenuous.

I didn’t believe him, so I later segued into talking about this during the “creepy” letter (Aug 9 2021).

Obviously, disingenuous flirting is dangerous, and it’s his fault I took it seriously, particularly given the high-effort nature of the flirt. But moreover, I suspected that he was lying about it being disingenuous, and continued to think that until, as part of our private reconciliation, we did a concerted effort in late August 2021 to clear out the skeletons about this stuff from the closet. Then I accepted that it was disingenuous. My reasons for doubting it at first were:

1UpsForLife, who had been even more familiar with Lu than I had been, supported my inference that he was being serious. Specifically, we thought at the time that he was half-joking, not making a serious move targetted at me specifically, but rather signalling a passive interest in something sexual.

2. My Reaction to Lu’s Sexual Tweets

Sometime in ~May 2021, we had another discussion about sex, this time one-on-one, and I found that his stances seemed to conflict with the impression I’d gotten from the stuff I’ve shown so far. He seemed disinterested in casual stuff, instead interested in committed relationships and more emotional meaning, and gave off an impression of asexuality. Which was strange to me since it seemed to clash with the sheer amount he talked about sex before then. But sure, why not.

Then, on Aug 9, the day the venting started, he tweeted this:

People familiar with Lu’s twitter will have seen tweets like this before.

In hindsight, it seems like some of these are clearly thoughtless jokes. But the first one struck me as being consistent with his earlier signalling, so I wondered how his stance had switched back so abruptly. When we talked it out, he justified this tweet as being a rejection of sex-based attraction in favour of personality-based, which was also a theme in one of the earlier quotes I gave. That’s fair, but I think my inferences were also reasonable.

How the Tweet Affected Me
About a week before this tweet (early August), Lu had made another tweet where he wondered aloud why he’d lately been receiving so much interest in his appearance and sexual attention, and in doing so, he elicited more compliments on his appearance and attention, which I saw on my Twitter feed despite having muted him. It bothered me on grounds of humble-bragging and lack of humility, but escalated in my mind, in my situation at the time of trying to address my grievances about our friendship with him while also having tension over not believing that his flirt was insincere. It distressed me so much that I had to take some days off writing that essay, which added to its excessive delay. I did bring this up with him, but in hindsight I think I didn’t have much of a right to complain about it, that it was my own problem.

The second tweet (the 9 Aug one above), on the other hand, I still consider toxic, and the reasons for that stem from the signals he gave / stuff he said that I quoted in part 1, and the patterns of behaviour I’ll discuss in part 4 (in particular, blurring lines between jokes and truths). I surmise that the vast majority of people don’t make tweets like this because they sense some danger or awkwardness in doing so, and I’m trying to put that conviction on a firmer footing by forming a case study around Lu from these pieces of context.

Summary
To tie it all together: I was again distressed by the 9th Aug tweet. Specifically, from perceiving the tweet as a regression in his stance on casual sex to the impressions he gave in part 1, despite having an intervening conversation where he gave the opposite impression. All while not believing his position that his flirt with me was disingenuous (for the reasons I gave in part 1). I basically suspected I was being gaslit.

I don’t think this way anymore of course, but it took a lot for us to later unpack the chaos that informed Lu’s actions and stances, which have been ever-changing.

3. The “Creepy” Letter

Motive
The “creepy” letter was something I wrote, without pre-meditation or re-drafting… I just woke up, saw the 9th Aug tweet, and wrote. Underlying it was the reasoning I gave in part 2 (Summary) – I’m under no illusion that it’s rational or reasonable, but it is what I was thinking and why I was thinking it.

Beyond that, since it was the second time I’d been distressed by what I considered toxic tweets about sex (altho the first tweet was more benign than that in reality), and it was affecting my ability to write my essay about my grievances with Lu, I allowed myself to emotionally react to it.

Also, since Lu had many times in our friendship had visceral, hot-headed reactions that he later calmed down from but hurt me a lot regardless, I decided to not resist that impulse for the first (and only) time in our relationship.

But I wasn’t like him at heart, able to rage at someone with the intent for it to not be that deep. I took my viscerality seriously so I wanted my pov to be fully justified, which led to an exploding rant where I explained myself more and more despite the fact that he, as he later validly complained, never asked. I just really wanted him to understand how I felt, was all.

Moreover, I segued (without even fully realising it) into referencing the tension that not believing him about the flirt was causing me, and tried to compel him to be honest by referencing the fact that I knew him well enuff that he couldn’t hide things from me.

The “creepy” letter resulting from this was the biggest blunder I made in handling my situation with Lu.

The Letter

The “Creepy” Letter

firstly, i was never interested in dating u, largely cos i don’t go for men that way, but also it was clearly not the move after our differing attitudes to resolving conflict came to the fore. this was never love, cos i was never happy with how u treated me and others in general (i did, however, love u as a friend i would take care of, back when i thought we were tight). i did still feel romantically inclined, which was based on your personal self-expression and values (the same feelings that make one think someone is “cool” and worth befriending), but that also fell away in july as part of my depression. the only thing that leaves then is the straight-up sexual attraction, which is still there, i think i’d need to take an interest in more ppl or rly forget about u for that to fade.

based on knowing u from 2020, i thought we had fairly similar attitudes to sex and may be able to make a go of it in a casual context, assuming u were into the idea like i was. it was always my intention to just offer sex straight-up and leave it with u if u wanted to pursue it at any time in the future. i never did tho cos i was always waiting for things to be good with us, to get past the constant cycle of having had a big fight within the past month. in 2020, i instead worried that saying something might make u more inclined to be nicer towards me and hide your true feelings, which i felt i always needed to be soberly aware and wary of. i still do feel like with sex, i can leave most deeper feelings and history at the door, and so would be into it even if i have a generally negative attitude towards u, just as long as i’m not acutely sad or angry.

while i was always wary of the risk of getting rejected having an impact on my attitude towards u and our friendship, my understanding of myself is that it’s sth i doubt i’d struggle with that much, and the distress i have is actually caused by these feelings preventing me from keeping u at the right distance in 2020 and so suffering thru all the stuff i will eventually talk to u about. however, the unfortunate reality for me is that, further to my description of my achilles’ heel, i’ve built up a distorted attitude towards sex thanks to years of not taking care of it properly, suffering from both my own passivity, heteronormative social conditions, and being friends with almost no girls cos of my walk of life (STEM uni/career, instrumental music scenes, fgc and speedrunning). while i don’t need sex to be fulfilled (i go for interpersonal bonding and perfecting skills instead), i do need to quell it to be stable and it can figure heavily in my cost/benefit analysis of whether a relationship with someone is worth it or not.

the last relevant thing to mention here is your own attitude towards me so far. on the topic of that shine heads comment i brought up – let me first clarify that i didn’t think u specifically sought anything/were making a move, i rather read that as signalling an interest in something tbd. i’m surprised you’re willing to admit that u disingenuously flirt with people to make them uncomfortable. i think that’s somewhat fucked up. but to be clear, i don’t actually believe u. u have a history of not being forthright about things and claiming things are jokes to get out of trouble – it’s your first defense mechanism. whether or not u were lying tho, it doesn’t affect me cos i was always willing to table an indefinite offer and let u decide. rather, i got really pissed off by u saying that cos i thought it made u either a liar or a psychopath. to top it off, the whole theme of that convo was your callous dismissal of my concerns, and picking out this strand solely out of all the stuff i was saying just further demonstrated that. moving beyond that specific incident, u should remember that i do know a lot about u, things u’ve said in sdll, things u’ve said to me when drunk, and so much the same way that i could spot discrepancies in your attitude towards me as a friend vs your general attitude, i can also spot contradictions in the things u say to me about sex/relationships vs the attitude u present to others. i suggest just coming clean about everything the same way i have. lastly, part of what will cause me ongoing problems is that you are the only person i know who ever says anything remotely like the 2 things that triggered me in the past 2 weeks. maybe now u will understand why normal ppl behave the way they do on that front.

Apologies
I want to emphasise that I think this piece of writing is completely insane, and remain very embarrassed and entirely apologetic for it. I’ve finished explaining my motives going into it, and the context for the huge tension I felt about the subject matter, and I think those motives do come across in the letter itself. But the main problem with this is the sheer length paired with the aggressive tone, and Lu being overwhelmed by a document like this, on very sensitive matters, coming seemingly out-of-the-blue while things were apparently positive with us (it was the period of Lu being very optimistic to making up with me). The destructive anxiety he felt was entirely on me, and I’m sorry.

There was no excuse for me to vent my deepest fears about his dishonesty by saying I thought his action “made [him] either a liar or a psychopath”. That’s unfair, brutal and inexcusable for me to do.

It was likewise patently wrong for me to try to coax him into being honest with me by referencing knowing him better than he thought so he couldn’t hide – this was the aspect of the letter he found threatening.

Immediate Aftermath Dialogue
As we calmed down and talked it out, I reassured him about the threatening aspect and committed to taking a more good-faith approach to discussing the underlying issue later.

I also apologised for the whole letter and my heated reaction, and we re-established a fragile peace for that afternoon, which lasted until he started venting a few hours later.

4. Lu’s Hypocritical Reaction to the Letter

Aside from the length, tone and attempts to extract honesty from him in the last paragraph, the content of my letter was good. It was clear, and talked only about my own feelings for him and background, to give him context for my anger. There was no part of the letter where I made light of him in a sexual way, or blackmailed him into a relationship, or anything like that.

I take responsibility for making Lu panic with this letter, but as for creeping him out… well, I do acknowledge it was his genuine reaction. It also made me livid that he would react like that given what he himself had done. Per what I said in the disclaimer at the top of this page, I want to explore what I think are relevant context and implications of this.

Reminder: this part isn’t intended to justify the “creepy” letter or argue it isn’t creepy (it is); rather it’s intended to discredit the rational basis for Lu’s reaction. I again apologise if anyone thinks any of this evidence is irrelevant but I sincerely disagree.

“Razzing”

The big question we’ve not answered yet is why Lu disingenuously flirted with me. Recall, I said that I thought if he wasn’t lying then he was a psychopath. That was a crude and inaccurate way to phrase my suspicions about his motives.

After things de-escalated after Lu’s venting, and we’d started reconciling, Lu explained:

This justification of “razzing” needs a closer look (the word means “playfully joking” for the non-Americans in the crowd). When I discussed Lu’s tweets, I spoke about how he had a tendency to blur the lines between jokes and facts on sexual topics, and here he’s saying he joke-flirted with me. His stated intention behind these jokes is to provoke reactions from groups of onlookers. In my “creepy” letter, I accidentally misconstrued this as “making people uncomfortable” – which he never said, to be clear. But did I really misconstrue it at all? Here are his direct justifications of the flirting, from when we dug deep into the topic to exorcise the skeletons from the closet.

its not really about making the person uncomfortable as it is like joking around romantic sorta thing, ive done it with a lot of people and its just sorta quite fun to pretend ur flirting and things like that, i shouldnt have said to make the person uncomfortable thing, i didnt really know how to describe it properly and that looks really predatory on my part

(Again, he didn’t phrase it as making the person uncomfortable, that was my accidental misrepresentation.)

… I don’t recall you making any sexual flirty stupid jokes towards me so it probably wasnt a good idea for me to do it to you, but yeah it was a part of the silly joke flirty stuff that I’ve done before. It was also a way for me to get a group reaction in general in that voice call, and I singled you out, and I apologize if I embarrassed you in the call or anything because of me being jokingly suggestive.

I can understand this kind of razzing working in some circumstances between two friends, say. But the goal in that case isn’t to get a reaction from the public, by singling someone out sexually. I don’t see how this and making that person uncomfortable aren’t the same thing.

EDIT (Jan 2024): Incidentally, i flirted with him in his stream once in a very tame way (referencing him being “cute”), and he replied that he felt uncomfortable.

Making People Uncomfortable
I witnessed something in a group voice call that I think proves the potential for this action to be predatory. In this call, Lu said (direct quote again – it’s the same call I accidentally recorded):

literally, [name redacted] is just a f–… an absolute fucker.. what? What a quen, absolute qu–, quen, quen. She’s an absolute fucker *laffs*

EDIT (Jan 2024): Voice clip here.

This remark wasn’t targeted at me (within the group call); it was targeted at another person with whom Lu had had a romantic relationship previously break down, leaving the other person traumatised and trying to avoid contact with him, while he was at the same time hounding her, in the preceding months. He justified the hounding as being about not wanting to lose a friend he valued.

EDIT (Jan 2024): The person in question was 1UpsForLife, and in hindsight I am pretty sure her trauma wasn’t Lu’s fault at all and she hadn’t told Lu she wanted to avoid contact with him, rather just smothering him in silence as she later did with me.

I think this comment is sexual harassment, and I don’t want to suppose that Lu would pass it off as “razzing”, but I still see the connection.

In general, there was a deep mental hole that Lu got into in this time, which therapy helped him get out of, but I (and others) very much got caught up in the sexual behaviours that it was partly responsible for. For me, it was the insincere flirt, against a backdrop of all the stuff I’ve described that made me doubt it was even insincere.

The final bit of evidence I wanna give is just this random conversation I found in SDLL’s voicebin, which illustrates quite well the nature of the sexual jokes, and how they made other people uncomfortable (“[name redacted] im sorry // I love you pls stay”).

Before showing this, I want to clarify that Lu was often the only one typing in calls – he told me the others in SDLL engaged in similar behaviours, which if true wouldn’t be reflected in this example since it would happen over voice, not text.

SDLL 2020 Voicebin Sample [CLICK TO EXPAND]

Between Lu telling me that others behaved similarly, and Scatter’s instant dismissal of the flirting incident as “razzing”, it seems that Lu’s sexual toxicity was encouraged by the culture in SDLL, and the blind eyes and lack of consideration given to these behaviours, and to where exactly the line is between jokes and truths.

EDIT (Jan 2024): since I’m trying to make it clearer that Lu has a pathological personality disorder, I will add more evidence of the social boundaries he crossed around sex:

Summary
To put it starkly, I wasn’t expecting someone who masturbates in group voice calls with friends to turn around and accuse me of being creepy towards him, as a result of me writing a letter to be honest and try to wean the truth out of him, over disingenuous flirting and blurred-line tweets that arose from of a mire of strange, toxic and creepy sexual behaviours.

I think this accusation is really simple deep down. Shit got too real for him. As soon as I came to him directly about sex – not even acting sexually, just being upfront about it – it was unwanted, unlike the times he’d subjected other people to sexual behaviours they didn’t want. He suggested this himself:

Makes sense that someone would see me in that light and maybe see me as a person to talk about sex with etc if on the face of it im so open about it (even though im actually sort of not? weird one).

Lu’s lack of self-awareness, his inability to reason about the consequences of his actions by imagining them on his own skin, has already been noted jarringly in the main case (chapter 3, Venting Cover-Up).

5. Venting

In light of all this, I think all of Lu’s and Awesomo’s claims are outlandish enuff to not be worth commenting on other than for clarifications. I’ll just list them here.

(I spelled out the reasoning for sending the letter to him, in fact within the preamble I reposted above as part of the letter, and it was far from what he said it was here.)

(I was really just referring to stuff he’d said in my presence because he gave me the impression he would pass things off and lie his way out of it.)

Awesomo’s allegations:

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

Interestingly enuff, these don’t reference me being creepy, but rather hark back to Lu’s conversation with Awesomo in July (before the “creepy” letter). In that conversation, Lu says it seems to him that I ended the friendship because he told me his flirting was fake and he didn’t have a crush on me, and then that’s juxtaposed with my depressive tweets about losing my friend. In reality, I ended the friendship because of Lu’s callous messages.

IL Sheet Comment
One small accusation I do want to address quickly:

No, I was genuinely expressing my heartbreak over losing Lu. It’s not healthy for me to drop hints like this, and to have not said explicitly I was ending the friendship (which left Lu on edge with uncertainty during the time of this comment), but Lu’s more complicit in the latter, I would argue, for not reaching out to me. For never reaching out and always expecting me to do so to fight for the friendship. But yeah, I mean, I’m sorry this comment caused Lu emotional pain, but it was a sincere emotional expression from me.