Rocked by Scandal: HIY and New Gallifrey (February 2018 on)

[pirate_anon]

Rocked by Scandal: HIY and New Gallifrey (February 2018 on)

I can't tell the story of HIY's harassment without
discussing my own relationship to Panopticon. So let's take a
moment and talk about how I got to know them.

I delete my tumblr months before all this happens, so a lot
of things are lost or forgotten, but I know that I'm in contact with
Panopticon by June of 2016, because that is the fle-date on the
screen-caps they give me about Secretgal. They are curious about
my reports on cults within the plural community, and start
reblogging them on their (now-deleted) plural/otherkin/
fctionkin cult-survivor tumblr, alterhumanabusesupport (2016,
November 28). We talk about plural cults, and I fnd myself liking
them--or rather, the persona they are showing me. When they
create their Dreamwidth account, I friend them there, and at
their request, I add them to the highly restricted cult flter on my
blog (Panopticon, 2017 March 8). Due to being completely
unfamiliar with fctionkin or Dr. Who circles, I am unaware of
AUK, the Toast of Rassilon, and all the rest. Needless to say,
Panopticon's persona with me is completely different from their
behavior elsewhere.

Still, in hindsight there were plenty of warnings.
Panopticon seemed to constantly be running into cult leaders
and abusers, constantly blogging about the fghts they were
having, but all in a strange vague way that made it hard to be sure
what exactly was happening. However, since I wasn't that close to
Panopticon, I chalked it up to their youth and didn't pay close
attention. That was my fault.

In June 2017, I create a Dreamwidth community called
browncastle. Though I create it, I do NOT want to mod; I know
that I am completely unsuited to the job and hope to slough the
responsibility as quickly as possible. Panopticon asks to join,
becoming the frst member and the second mod, and then they
request HIY join. I don't know HIY from Adam, but Panopticon
vouch for them, so I let them in.

About a month later, the AUK scandal hits, and Cass of
Panopticon resigns from the Lord Presidency of the Gallifreyan
Tradition Society, naming HIY as their successor (Panopticon,
2017 July 21). This shows HIY's high rank within the GT
hierarchy, but they last less than six months before abruptly
leaving the group in December, under mysterious but clearly
negative circumstances. They create their own group, New
Gallifrey, and write in their GT resignation speech, "I have not
really been able to accomplish what I want in my Presidency, and
have found meetings of the Council unnecessarily tense as a
whole [...] Most particularly, I have had difculty working with
Patrician Chancellor Cassandra [of Panopticon] and Healer-
Advisor Isa [...] I wish GT the best going forward, and hope that it
will be able to resolve its disputes in more professional ways in
the future, and actually adhere to the RoC [Rules of Conduct,
possibly] in Council meetings when there is conflict" (2017,
December 17).

Clearly there is a story here, but the details remain a
mystery. Cass only says, "Our community has been rocked by
scandal. I accept my part in it, though I do have reservations. I
have nothing to say about our former President’s resignation,
except that I hope they can forgive me" (2017, December 18).

Much like their pseudo-apology regarding AUK, this post
begs for further explanation. What scandal is involved? What has
Panopticon done and what exactly are they taking responsibility
for? It isn't clear, and while they talk about forgiveness being
earned, they never state any plans to atone, and they certainly
never apologize. And just like with AUK, it will take only about
two months for Panopticon to completely change their story and
claim HIY is an abusive cult leader, entirely at fault for
everything.

On February 11th, 2018, Panopticon starts vagueposting
that HIY is abusing them and has stolen their art. The comment
thread where they disclose this to me is sadly lost, on account of
their deleting their account, but I remember them telling me that
HIY is an abusive cult leader building a Dr. Who cult that
worships Rassilon. I remember being quite alarmed, but when I
ask if they want me to remove HIY from the browncastle comm,
Panopticon never responds.

Three months pass, and even though Panopticon stays
active on Dreamwidth, they never respond to my question. They
even vaguepost about HIY (screencap available upon request),
but only under a completely different name, insuring I stay
confused and ignorant. Despite this, I have a nagging suspicion
that Panopticon wants me to do something, but I'm not clear
what, and I don't like feeling as though I'm expected to read their
mind. And what has HIY done, exactly? Where are the
screencaps, the explanations? Are they an art thief, an abuser, a
cult leader, what? I also fnd myself slightly put out; how is it
possible that my community has only three active members and
already one is being accused of being a cult leader? (Especially
since the only reason I let HIY in at all was because Panopticon
vouched for them.)

Even stranger is that HIY clearly doesn't know about the
accusations. They keep posting in browncastle as though nothing
is amiss, including personal posts that they most assuredly
wouldn't share around an enemy. And months after Panopticon
privately accuse HIY of abuse to me, the Gallifreyan Tradition
Society is putting on a show of public solidarity with New
Gallifrey, to rebuff the excommunicated Shilo (2018, May 24). It's
all surreal. I have no idea what's going on.

Come the end of June, my nagging feeling of uncertainty
fnally gets to me. Why does HIY seem so oblivious? Why isn't
Panopticon giving me a straight answer? If HIY is so dangerous,
why are New Gallifrey and Gallifreyan Tradition still showing
public solidarity? Something smells bad about the whole
situation, and I fnd myself looking over Panopticon's words with
a more critical eye.

The more I read, the more confused and uneasy I get. I
fnd a post from Panopticon claiming that "manipulative things
were worked into the foundation of GT" from the very
beginning, though of course they claim it wasn't them who did
that, but their excommunicated follower Shilo, who they only
refer to as "[ANATHEMA]" (screencap available upon request).
At this point, the Gallifreyan Tradition Society hasn't even been
in existence for three years; how can it be so saturated with
abusers and cult leaders? And if it's such a haven of manipulation
and abuse, why hasn't Panopticon shuttered the organization to
try and sort out the root problems? I decide to quietly try fact-
checking Panopticon's words to try and get some clarity.

It's hard going. Panopticon not only avoids any screen
-caps and direct quotations; they also avoid calling anyone by
screen-names I can recognize or check--Shilo is "[ANATHEMA],"
HIY is "Rory," and AUK is "angry parrot noises." It's hard to tell
who is who, or how many parties there are. For a while, I seem
awash in a sea of vagueposting, all implying and nudging and
suggesting without anything defnite or certain.

Eventually, though, Panopticon gives enough detail for
me to fnd a source. It's in their post joking about Rassilon getting
banned (again) from doctorwhokin: "Someone (not naming
names, but it was defnitely R. Prydonius) got our IP blocked
from [doctorwhokin] on Tumblr. I mean, thank you for trying to
help, but with all due respect, you sound like an anime villain"
(2017, August 22).

I have a time period. I have a screen-name. And I have an
unusual turn of phrase that sounds like a possible direct quote. It
takes some digging, but I fnd the post (doctorwhokin, 2017
August 22a). And I realize that Panopticon has totally
misrepresented the situation to me. The way they talked, I
thought people were coming to harass them, but really, it was
THEM ban-evading so they could harass others! And who IS this
AUK/"angry parrot noises" person, anyway?

Through trawling doctorwhokin, I fnd AUK's screen-
names, then their posts. I see Panopticon's responses. And I realize
that all of Panopticon's accusations about HIY are in fact
regurgitations of accusations AUK made about Panopticon's own
behavior, only with names and roles reversed. It seems almost
ridiculous to even consider, but I fnd myself wondering: are they
setting HIY up to be the fall guy? And if so, why?

I start digging into the actions of the Gallifreyan Tradition
Society, and my misgivings only increase. I discover that they
have ofine households with adoption ceremonies (Gallifreyan
Tradition Society, 2017 September 17), and that Panopticon
apparently see being a spiritual leader as their career path: "GT is
my job. Serving my Patron [Rassilon] is my job. Taking care of the
people I love is my job. Providing accurate information about
nonhumanity and plurality is my job. [...] These things will always
be 100% at the forefront of my mind, and I could never commit to
a job I’m not fully able to commit to" (2017, December 27).

However, in the very same post, they say, "I refuse to take any
money from the government," meaning that unless they're
independently wealthy (which clashes hard with the poverty
they espouse to have), they must be fnancially supported by
their followers. All of this sounds... well. Cultish.

(It also directly contradicts Panopticon's claim on October
12, 2015 that "I get a disability check every month cos I'm autistic,
and I found out that my dad and stepmom are using it to buy
dope.")

However, I'm still uncertain. Is it possible this is all some
conspiracy to defame and abuse Panopticon for some reason? It
seems laughable, but by this point the circumstances are so
bizarre that nothing sounds too improbable. I don't know HIY,
and just in case they ARE a cult leader, I'm not sure I want to
interact with them and ask them what's happening; doing so
could risk Panopticon's safety, not to mention my own. And if
HIY are the true victim, how can I tell them that? Why should
they believe me, a complete stranger? What if they see ME as
being the problem? What's the right thing to do?

I ask Panopticon, again, to tell me what's going on so I can
make a move in browncastle. I wait a week, get no answer, and
fnally just give up and decide to leave browncastle. I don't know
what's going on, but I want no part of it. Not my circus, not my
monkeys, I tell myself.

Within 48 hours of my departure, Astrid of Panopticon
triumphantly crows about banning HIY from browncastle on
Dreamwidth (screencap available upon request), rattling off all
the accusations and details I was requesting for months. It feels
like they were waiting for me to either leave or act on their
implications, thereby absolving them of the necessity of
communicating outright.

By this point, every alarm siren in my head is going off,
and I decide that I no longer care if there's a conspiracy. Even if
HIY and AUK really are as bad as claimed, Panopticon is giving
me the active heebie-jeebies, and even their own public defenses
are piling up into a heap of awfulness: that Gallifreyan Tradition
had manipulation baked into it from the very beginning, that
they almost became a cult under the Analog Theory, that
Rassilon went anonymously to avoid blocking to harass AUK on
doctorwhokin, that their headmate Sofa Lamb is a self-
proclaimed cult leader who needs a full system dog-pile to
prevent her from creating another cult. I may not know what's
going on, but that is a level of spite, malice, and lack of
boundaries that I don't want in my life.

Still, I think, Panopticon are young. Maybe they honestly
don't realize how off-putting they are. Maybe they need to be
told, before it's too late. (And if they wildly misbehave, well, at
least then my doubts will be eased.) So I write up a goodbye
message explaining my misgivings and asking them not to contact

me again. A couple friends obligingly check it over to make sure
I'm being neither rude nor a doormat, and once they give me the
OK, on July 5, 2018, I leave it as a comment on Panopticon's
Dreamwidth, (Lee, 2018 July 11). Stripped of the now-dead links,
and with current-day notes in square brackets, it reads:

"Your behavior has been making us increasingly uncomfortable,
and we have decided to part ways.

We had open requests for three months regarding HIY's
behavior so we could make a decision in browncastle, and you never
responded. Instead, you waited until we left, and then took immediate
action. Furthermore, when you DID make posts about HIY, you called
them Rory, or [ANATHEMA], and gave no sources, so we had no way
of knowing who you were talking about or what exactly was
happening. [NOTE: "[ANATHEMA]" was Shilo, not HIY, but at the
time I didn't know that.]

We also fnd it troubling how many times your groups seem to
spawn cults or cult accusations. You yourself mentioned how people
kept getting "sucked into" your Animorphs RP, which was based on role-
playing a false cult, using the same rhetoric and aesthetics of a real one.
[This is the Sharing, a group Cass ran from September 2016 to
March 2018. I chose not to cover it in this write-up.] It got to the
point that you put a disclaimer on the tumblr! If your playful role-play
of a false cult keeps getting people behaving as though it's a real one,
something has gone badly awry.

And that's not your only group where that has happened.
Gallifreyan Tradition has existed for less than three years, and yet it
seems to have been plagued by cult accusations and spin-offs from the
beginning. You yourself admitted that it almost went in a cult-like
direction because you believed you were here to bring on the Intuitive
Revolution. Combined with Cass's relationship with Rassilon, I'm not
sure you should've made this group at all, but you did, and it too has
been accused of being a cult.

You seem to have taken this as a personal attack, instad [sic] of
a warning of what direction Gallifreyan Tradition was going--and
indeed, you yourself said that HIY built the manipulativeness into the
very foundation of the group! [Note: again, this was Shilo, not HIY.]
Whatever happened between you and Auk [sic], clearly something has
gone terribly wrong in Gallifreyan Tradition, that this has happened!
But instead of changing the group, you chose instead to go anonymously
to [doctorwhokin] in the attempt to discredit those accusations, to the
point that you were banned. On top of all this, it was Rassilon, your
Patron, who did this! Going anonymously to discredit someone calling
you out is underhanded enough, but for your Patron to involve himself
shows a concerning lack of boundaries.

Your interest in cults seems to be going to darker and darker
places, and we can not follow you. We hope you change trajectory, and
stop leading groups until you fnd out what exactly is going wrong, and
why this keeps repeating.

Please do not contact us again.

--Miranda [of LB]"

Then I block Panopticon and hope that'll be the end of it,
still wondering whether I'm being fair.

Panopticon's response quickly assures me otherwise.