Atlanta Poly Weekend Harbors Abusers and Scapegoats Victims
The following is an email sent to the Relationship Equality Foundation, the organization that hosts and organizes Atlanta Poly Weekend.
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Dear Relationship Equality Foundation,
I've always been a big supporter of Atlanta Poly Weekend. My first year attending, a presenter cancelled at the last minute and I volunteered to step in and do my Online Dating presentation. Last year, I gave two presentations as well as put on a burlesque show. I've also promoted your event on my blog and in many personal interactions. I've done everything I can think of to support your organization because at the time it seemed like a really good cause. Unfortunately, that support has not been mutual.
Last winter, several of my wife's ex-partners, including Shaun McGonigal, engaged in a coordinated smear campaign against me. While most organizations and individuals were able to see that this was a case of resentful exes attempting to continue their abuse post-breakup, your organization accepted their accusations uncritically, gave me no meaningful opportunity to defend myself, and never told me what I was accused of doing. When I provided extensive evidence that all public allegations were false, exaggerated, or left out important context, I was ignored.
Your organization designated Billy Holder (and old friend of Shaun McGonigal's from his time living in Atlanta) as an investigator. Billy's "investigation" was anything but. Billy never got my side of any of the stories that he was told. He never spoke to any of the witnesses that I identified, in person or online, despite numerous opportunities to do so. His conversation with me largely consisted of Billy expressing his anger and disappointment regarding how the Polyamory Leadership Network handled the situation. He never disclosed to me that he was investigating anything. He expressed multiple times that he was in the dark. He outright lied to me by telling me that he didn't know the content of any of the accusations. Instead, he pretended to be my friend and reassured me that he was on my side.
During the weekend that he was in town, Billy gained and then took advantage of my trust. I consented to be in a sexual situation with him having no idea he was acting in an official capacity as an investigator . It felt (and continues to feel) disgusting because I consented under false pretenses. I feel violated. Had he been honest with me, I never would have engaged in any kind of sexual contact with him. I consider his failure to disclose his role to be a major consent breach (in addition to the appalling ethics of an investigator having sex with the target of his investigation).
Billy then turned around and used his position as a member of your board and principal organizer of Atlanta Poly Weekend to get me banned from the event, ostensibly due to the fact that I'm some kind of danger to the community.
Billy also used his influence and position of power to make sure that his friend Shaun McGonigal was able to attend, despite the fact that over the past year he and the Relationship Equality Foundation received reports that Shaun:
once beat his girlfriend so hard that her injuries caused her to miss three days of work
emotionally and verbally abused my wife Gina for over a year
without provocation, threatened to break my nose
manipulated, abused, and gaslit other former partners
Since then, Shaun also beat his wife in a fit of rage, which led to their divorce. Your organization has ignored all of these reports and allowed Billy Holder to protect his friend and scapegoat me.
It is obvious that none of this is about protecting the community or effectively dealing with abuse, and it is about Billy Holder playing favorites and the Relationship Equality Foundation allowing him to do so.
For obvious reasons, I do not wish to attend or support APW, nor will I unless significant changes are made. However, I hope you and your attendees will take the event this weekend as an opportunity to rethink how you handle this sort of thing and make some attempts to establish some actual accountability in your community. Your current system serves only to enable abuse by proxy, empower abusers, and make your community more dangerous.
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For anyone attending APW this year, the only thing I'd ask is that you let the organizers know about your unhappiness with how they handle abuse complaints and request that they establish a system which provides genuine accountability while respecting the humanity of everyone involved.
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UPDATE [6/6/15]: APW issued a statement on its Facebook page:
APW earnestly aims to create a safe place for our attendees, guests, presenters, staff and volunteers. We treat all reports of abuse seriously and are concerned for the people in any situation of abuse. Our first responsibility is to create a convention space that is safe for everyone. We act in good faith within our role as an event to honor the sense of safety in the community at large. In order to support the survivors, we try to give the accusers the benefit of the doubt and the accused a reasonable opportunity to participate in the discussion. Because we support the survivors and are not against the accused, the accused can be welcomed back into the community and APW. While we are part of the community we serve, we are not the arbitrators of personal situations and must focus on the small confines of our event. The Board of Directors reached a consensus regarding a particularly volatile situation outside of our event that was nevertheless disrupting our event, in our opinion. As our community changes, we evolve along with it and use this experience to learn and continue discussions about what creates safe environments. Currently we are in the stage of supporting the survivors:http://emmfett.blogspot.com/…/the-community-response-to-abu… We are learning what it means to support accountability for the accused. It is our hope to learn this alongside the community
In addition to being vague PR-speak, this statement does not reflect any of my or my family's interactions with APW. They have not taken our reports of Shaun McGonigle's abuse seriously, and they have conducted zero followup with any of the multiple people who have contacted them to report his abuse. For example, when Shaun engaged in behavior at a different conference that bordered on stalking me, I reported it to several organization including APW. Their response was to mock me:
But yet, the conference leadership was not informed about the situation nor were any complaints, to our knowledge, brought against that person to the conference leadership as he remained at the conference all weekend. We found this to be odd if you are truly scared to be at an event where he is present.
Never mind that I didn't realize he'd been following and watching me until he blogged about it after the conference. Never mind that the conference leadership was informed immediately, and had been informed prior to the conference about Shaun. Never mind that my wife Gina fled the conference in tears on Friday night because Shaun was there, and didn't return all weekend despite paying over a hundred dollars for a ticket. This has been typical of APW's treatment of us, minimizing and discrediting our fears and working overtime to protect Gina's abusive ex. APW absolutely does not take abuse complaints seriously or support victims. For them to claim otherwise is insulting and degrading to all of Shaun's victims that have repeatedly contacted them to no avail.