CONGRATULATIONS!!! 💖

So sorry, Carly. You don’t deserve this and we hope you can feel comfortable online again. We appreciate you for who you are and the light you bring to the space ❤️

Happy birthday, Folzy!

Thank you so much, that really means a lot to us ❤️

Thank you for your comments. We're really glad we were able to help and we hope the community can continue to work together to make a safer space.

We are sorry you didn’t want to be in our community because of our association with Brandon. We didn’t know this was happening and we were actively being manipulated. We are hurt too and we are trying to take action now.

He has been banned, kicked from our Discord, and we removed ourselves from all of his spaces. There is never absolute certainty that a community is free from an abuser. Abusers hide every day but we will remove them when we find them.

We did not mention that blocking is unhelpful in protecting your community– it is helpful. What is not helpful is preemptively blocking and banning people based on a perceived involvement that hasn't been proven, without allowing them the time and grace to make their own statements

We agree that everyone needs grace and we are asking those who are giving none, to give some.

That feels like an unfair accusation when our perspective is that we were validating that she did not have to act any other way. We were trying to clarify why we didn’t know and do anything in response to accusations that we enabled him. We’re sorry it came across as though she is at fault.

(cont.) We’re sorry for your pain. We hope we can get the grace to share our pain as well. Hopefully as we all reflect we can see that we are more united than it might feel right now.

Looking back at it now, we understand that he was manipulating us. People often don’t know they are being manipulated while it’s happening and we aren’t an exception to that. We shared our experience to add to the context around the problem.

We are sorry you went through this. We hope you can see that a lot of the feelings we are experiencing overlap. We understand the anger of wishing we could have done something. We felt we had to come forward now. We have to reiterate: we are not blaming his victims and we do blame Brandon.

We did not intend for it to come across that way, so we appreciate you pointing it out so we could clarify. We apologize for any words or actions that have contributed to re-traumatizing anyone. Our goal was to shed more light on how difficult it is to speak up.

We agree that people should block/unfollow to protect their peace and we support this. Our concern is more with the actions afterwards where people's characters were attacked. It creates a space that is fearful of having conversations and fearful of offering support.

We understand there will be discomfort in these conversations as they are complex and a lot of emotions are involved. We want to have them regardless of discomfort we may feel. We appreciate you wanting to have a conversation.

Thank you, Lanz! ♥

Every year is ennui year!