This saddens us more than any other news we get on our site. When we see bullying online to this degree, it reminds us that bullying cannot be ignored. This mentality of “ignore the bully and he will go away.” Sorry, it just doesn’t work.
Category: Bully Crime
Edit: The IP address of the sender was traced and we now know he/she lives in Newbury, UK. We understand that action is being taken against the culprit behind these emails.
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We received screenshots of two emails sent to one of our blog readers attacking fantasy author Melissa Douthit. We were also given permission to share them with our readers and alert people to be on the lookout for libelous emails like these that attack and libel any author or reader.
We have said in the past and we’ll say again — none of us here, neither Athena, Peter, Stitch, Tink, nor me, are authors. We also state this in our sidebar and Who We Are page.
The review MLW is accusing Melissa of writing is this one:
We want to let our readers know that everything said in these emails is FALSE information and reminds us forcefully of an attack on another Melissa, Melissa Foster, who was targeted by a failed author banned from Goodreads. So was Hugh Howey. Both Melissas and Hugh are innocent of the accusations made against them and we find the harassment and libeling of these authors disgusting and despicable.
Melissa Douthit has been accused of many things of which she is completely innocent. She has been accused of creating sock accounts in order to one-star other authors’ books and five-star her own. She has been accused of stalking, harassing, and attacking reviewers. And she’s been accused of being the founder of our blog and of the Facebook group WIN.
We know our readers already know this, but none of this is true. Melissa became a target of bully abuse two years ago when she . She left Goodreads in February of 2012 and stated clearly that she would never return. Just recently, she has published an article . She’s endured being harassed, stalked, carpet-bombed, and threatened.
We ask our readers to alert us if they see any of these libelous emails circulating around the internet. If you happen to receive one, please report it and inform the victimized party immediately.
Thank you!
Today we are sharing with you a very sad story. Unfortunately, it’s a story we’ve seen before and it is something that happens when bullies take their bullying too far. It’s about a boy in Ireland who committed suicide after being bombarded with abusive messages from online cyber-bullies. After his death, his mother urged these sites to provide the police with the identities of the abusers so they could be held accountable for their actions.
Because we’ve seen this before, we urge all parents who have teenagers to keep watch over what is happening in their social media accounts. Please don’t let your child become a victim of online abuse.
We received some disturbing news just recently from an author who emailed us to thank us for our efforts at stopping the bullies. She said:
So we went and looked on the thread and sure enough we found Jenna’s original comment:
And then soon after that, they started harassing and cyber-stalking her. Book was the first to comment after hunting down Jenna’s information:
Right afterward, Jenna learned that someone hacked her account:
Sadly, this doesn’t surprise us. We know of two previous hacking crimes committed by the bullies. First, in our post, GR Silences Authors, Part 1, we reported a case where an author’s Facebook and email account were hacked:
Another case was in our post, Bully Crime, when they tried to hack into our Bluehost account:
As we said in our post, Jenn Falls on Bullying and Critiquing, the people who do these kinds of things think it makes them cool:
These people do these things and cop these attitudes because they think it makes them “badass” or in other words, they think it makes them look cool. But it doesn’t make them look cool. It just makes them look like foolish, little children.
If you would like to see what we mean, we grabbed a couple screencaps of two trolls who migrated over to BookLikes and were celebrating that they made our BBG and BBB lists (and unlike what they think, there’s a very good reason they’re there):
We also found two baddie wannabe’s on GR who seem to believe that we just recently created our BBG list:
Sorry, you two, but you’ll never be on our list. You haven’t been around long enough to know that our BBG list was created right when we started our blog, last year in July of 2012. So you can be as bad as you want, we won’t put you on our list. BUT… we will report you to GR and Amazon if you start crossing the line.
Fair enough?
In any case, if any of you think that being a BBG, a BBB, or an AFT makes you look cool, it doesn’t. It just makes you look like an ass. Not a badass. Just an ass.
We were going to put this as an addendum to our post, Author Hatred Growing at an Alarming Rate, but instead we thought we’d write about it in a separate post altogether. After sharing our views regarding the extreme hatred directed toward authors for the books they write, we were tipped off to a story about outright violence against one:
The article our blog reader mentions above is about an author who suffered violent attacks against her person because of a book she wrote:
Then, it goes on to say:
The local New Port Richey Patch also published an article about these incidents on April 2nd, and another news update today shows escalating forms of violence including a plastic bottle chemical bomb that exploded in her front yard on the evening of April 15th. Interestingly, this ‘bombing’ happened just a few hours after the Boston Marathon attacks had begun to fill media headlines. Kyrja’s stepdaughter Heather inhaled fumes from the explosion and is under medical treatment for damage to her respiratory tract.
Local police are currently investigating these incidents. Kyrja is offering a $200 reward for any information about the perpetrators of the shootings and the chemical bottle explosion. Tips leading to the arrest and conviction of whoever is behind the incidents can be emailed to Kyrja at and the police department can be called at . You can visit her to send along messages of support, or visit her book fan website at www.friends-of-rupert.webs.com.
Her Pagan children’s book, “Rupert’s Tales: The Wheel of the Year” follows the adventures of Rupert the Rabbit who discovers the different Pagan holidays. A short biography of Ms. Withers’ spiritual journey from a devout Roman Catholic to a practicing Pagan, and her inspiration for writing “Rupert Tales”, was .
Please stay tuned to PNC Florida and The Wild Hunt for developing updates to this story. Our thoughts and prayers are with Ms. Withers, her family, her neighbors and community.
This is frightening — to write a book and then be physically attacked for it. Hatred is a poison, indeed.
This isn’t an isolated incident either. Here’s another similar story shared with us by Goronwy:
I don’t know if you’ve read that something similar happened to Charlaine Harris:
A group of readers formed the “Annie Wilkes Brigade” and threatened the life of Charlaine Harris, author of Sookie Stackhouse, promising to destroy her and her career:
In a comment on our last post, Karig describes this kind of behavior perfectly:
Well, we have the phrases “road rage” and “nerd rage”; I guess in this case “book rage” would be appropriate for “‘That’s All’ Ash” above.
Carroll also has some apt descriptors for it:
Book-rage, reader-rage, review-rage, all would aptly apply. I still call it hate though.
Above, Karig is talking about That’s All Ash’s review that we featured on our previous post. In it, she takes out her anger from reading the author’s book on the author herself. Something that should never be done and yet happens all the time on GR. In the past, we’ve given numerous examples of hatred directed toward authors because of harmless books they’ve written. For example, in our post Bully Wank, we shared a few reviews that show just how unhinged readers can get over books:
Here’s one from our post, Bully Attacks This Week:
And here, we show Mahala threatening an author, saying she has a loaded gun:
But our classic example of author hatred can be shown quite concisely in our post, Authors, I Will Destroy You, where crazy Ridley threatens to “destroy” any author that approaches her:
There are many, many more examples. Too many to put into one blog post and unlike what the bullies believe, this kind of hatred toward people who write books is not harmless. We strongly beg to differ on that opinion. It’s not only unhealthy, it’s dangerous and potentially lethal. This book rage — this is the kind of hatred that leads to stalking and violence, violence like the kind directed toward authors such as Charlaine Harris and Kyrja Withers. This hatred runs rampant on GR and it’s irresponsible of Amazon to let it continue. If they don’t put a check on it sooner or later, it’s only a matter of time before an author is killed.
Below is the post we published on August 21, 2012, that covers Minerva’s huge fail when she tried to continue to libel an author on Wikipedia, only to receive a slap on the hand. What we find interesting about her attitude is that she assumes that what she is doing is right and acceptable when it clearly is not. Why does she assume this? Because Goodreads has allowed people like her to engage in this kind of criminal behavior without rebuke or penalty. In short, Goodreads has fostered this type of bullying and to this day, continues to do so.
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Well, that didn’t take long! Stop Them’s second comment has suddenly reappeared on Mistress Owlpoo’s site. Hmm… *scratches chin* Wonder why.
We love the fact that Miss Owlpoo is so excited to be featured on our site. That’s like your number one fangirl squeeing because you noticed her. How speshul! And… and … she has dedicated another post to us! Here are some screenshots:
Peter, can we get a translation on that?
PP: Why, sure you can! Here you are:
Fact: I think quotation marks are called inverted commas and don’t realize how that alone shows that my comprehension levels are quite low, thus resulting in my baseless conclusions. Fact: I don’t know the difference between fact, slant, and opinion. Fact: None of what I say is important, relevant, and nothing I say proves a point in anything or changes any of the real facts: that there are reviewers posting reviews and ratings that are based on the author and not the book. Fact: I delete comments that prove otherwise because I hope the readers of my blog will be too stupid to go to the site I’m targeting and see for myself what is really going on there. Fact: Dougie Brimson noticed Amazon members using multiple social media accounts to perform malicious acts on others. Fact: Dougie Brimson launched an investigation. Fact: STGRB featured Dougie Brimson revealing one of the perpetrators in a falsehood, thus proving his assertions. Fact: Dougie Brimson was wrongly accused of making false assertions. Fact: STGRB has always published public information and has never put anyone in danger or at risk.
Alright! Thanks, Peter!
So… Miss Owlpoo says:
So, you keep getting your little friends to delete it, STGRB. We’ll see who Wikipedia locks out for wrongful editing.
Oh, okay! Check it:
Notice she edits it 8 times! This woman does not give up! As she edits, she says to both Goodbelle and Apollonia1992:
There is no reason for this section to be removed. It is relevant information with correct citations.
Then, Wiki’s Jethrobot jumps in and reverts her changes, saying:
Forums are not reliable sources. Do not add defamatory content using these sources again.
Ooh, burn! You really shouldn’t play with fire, there, Missy Minerva.
But guess what! She doesn’t give up. She edits it again! And it gets reverted again! Unbelievable!
Then she says on her blog:
And this is us, crowing! Cock-a-doodle-doooo! We warned yoooou! Mistress Owlpoooo! Because that’s really what “your facts” amount to. Minerva’s facts = owlpoo. You didn’t get anything right, except for the fact that you got dissed by Wiki and that we featured you on our site. If you want the real facts, see Peter’s translation.
But… *scratches head* There is something a bit odd, here, don’t you think? Who could have such a passionate hatred for Dougie Brimson? Gosh, that’s a tough one. I think we can all guess who you are.
And speaking of that, Athena asked me to thank all of our awesome visitors for participating in reporting her to Amazon. Athena has been letting us (Peter and me) do the posts because she is working with Stitch and the gang to rid Amazon of bogus accounts. Apparently, there is more than one person using sock puppets. Imagine that. Surprise! Surprise!
The efforts are working, though, because we’ve had several authors contact us to let us know that some suspicious one-star reviews have suddenly disappeared from their books. We say suspicious because these accounts were either new or empty and/or had no review history other than those particular reviews. So good job, everyone!
And that’s all folks! Stay tuned for our next post, Another Dedication To Our Excellent Visitors.
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An addendum. Below is a screenshot from Good Belle proving that Minerva was wrong in her assumption that it was okay to libel a “living person” on Wikipedia:
Below is a post we published on August 19, 2012 about a site called Stop the STGRB Bullies owned and authored by Mistress Minerva (who some claim to either be Looney or the Holy Terror). Minerva’s site was really the beginning (and ending) of the bullies new weapon of choice — libeling authors via Wikipedia.
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How flattered are we to learn that the bullies are obsessing over our site so much that they are actually creating whole websites for the sole purpose of fighting our efforts to expose them (from Goronwy):
Some of them have set up whole sites devoted to STGRB! Let’s start guessing who this one is (she even took the time to ‘edit’ Brimson’s wikipedia page a couple of days ago)
What devotion, I tell you! As our Good Belle says, it’s “beyond adorable”:
Oh my gawd, how cute they are over at the “stop the STGRB” blog! Such fangirls of this site! Obviously they’re so attached to this site they had to make it their whole lives! It’s beyond adorable!! 😀
So, you’re probably wondering, what do we have in store for you today? Well, one of our site visitors, Stop Them, who initially wasn’t a fan of our site, left this message for us:
Not a fan of your site but you might want to know that the Stop the Stop the GR’s bullies site is blocking posts that don’t agree with them 100%
Here is what I tried to post that they blocked. I hope you aren’t assholes like them and will post my comment even if I don’t agree with what you site is all about.
Alright, so, instead of giving you the entire comment, because it’s really long, we’re going to show you the screenshots Stop Them emailed to us. The screenshots should say it all. Notice the name: Miss Minerva, the Roman version of Athena – sooooooo original! No wonder Athena was amused.
So… so… she won’t publish Stop Them’s comment because she doesn’t want to post links to our site even though her blog is – wait for it – dedicated to obsessing over our site! Uh… okay. Does anyone understand that because we don’t. She also says that we take things “totally out of context” even though we publish ENTIRE conversations with screenshots nonetheless to show our readers what is really happening.
You know what I think, there, Missy Minerva? I think your full of owlshit. I think you are. I think you’ve been hanging around your owl a little too much. I think you didn’t publish Stop Them’s comment because you don’t want someone to prove that you are TOTALLY WRONG. We have addressed the issue of improper reviews on our site. We did it on our Bully Reviews post and on the subsequent post after it. And we will keep doing it until GR cleans up its book pages for good.
We also have a screenshot of what you did to Dougie Brimson’s Wiki page:
It has since been edited out by one of our site visitors, but if it pops back up again, we’ll be sure to report you to Wiki and edit it back out again. Slander and lies are not tolerated on Wiki and if you engage in this behavior, you can lose your Wiki editing privileges. Just so you know.
A lot has been happening on GR recently, not the least of which a campaign being launched by the bullies to silence authors who speak up about the abuse on the site. And not surprisingly, the GR mods are playing along. But before we get into this, we have some news for you, some good, some not so good:
1. It appears as though our Twitter stalker (remember her – the one who stood in line to get concert tickets while she furiously sent us insane tweets one after the other? Yeah, her!) has finally gotten her just desserts. We were contacted by one of our sources who told us that she and her husband are being investigated by the police for crimes against an author (i.e. death threats, etc.):
It’s true, if you check her blog and , they’re completely gone. This isn’t the first time the bullies have physically threatened someone. Just take a look at our post Bully Threats and you’ll see a few there.
2. An author (and her husband) who was attacked last year, with whom we have had contact ever since, has just recently reported to us that someone has been consistenly hacking her Facebook and email accounts. She and her husband have the FBI looking into it:
And again, this isn’t the first time the bullies have tried to hack into accounts (this time succeeding). We’ve shown that they tried it on our hosting account in Bully Crime.
3. We were informed just recently that another author we know has had her books banned from Dear Author because she “associates with that site.” Apparently Jane Litte seems to think that authors who are affiliated with our site are too much of a danger to her reviewers. We died laughing when we heard that. She doesn’t realize that they are a danger to themselves because of the way they behave, like harassing and baiting authors for instance (click here and scroll down to view screenshots of this).
Give it up, Janey! Everyone knows about you and your reviewers. They can see right through you.
4. We were given a link by a site visitor to an article written by Tamara Ward about a Q&A session between authors and GR staff. Tamara’s post starts with this:
Hello, WG2E-land! Last week, Goodreads staff held office hours, an online session where both the Goodreads author marketing coordinator, Cynthia Shannon, and director, Patrick Brown, answered questions from writers. Writers could ask questions live or post them beforehand on the discussion thread.
I’ve tried to hit the highlights of the office hours in this post, but if you want to read the blow-by-blow, visit the group discussion on Goodreads at . Better yet, join the group at ! Though discussion on last week’s office hours has been frozen, perhaps, in the future, Goodreads staff will have another session.
If you scroll down a bit on the page, you will see that a few authors who know what’s really going on chimed in with their concerns:
If you read the Q&A session by clicking the links Tamara gives, you will notice how they conveniently avoid talking about the real problem that plagues GR, namely the GR bullies and their consistently vicious attacks on authors.
And this brings us to the point of our post. Look at the link Rick left to a Goodreads feedback discussion called . You’ll see some familiar names. This is just the beginning of what appears to be a growing campaign on GR to silence authors.
Once such author, , was silenced by the GR staff when the trolls began an attack on him and then reported to him the GR mods on trumped up charges:
Why was he reported and banned? Because he wrote blog posts (on his own blog!) speaking out about the GR/Amazon trolls:
Accused Of Spamming
The Trolls Arrive!
And the attack ensued:
And then:
And there you have it! GR does not allow authors freedom of speech. If they speak up about the abuse happening on the site, they are silenced.
For tomorrow’s post, GR Silences Authors, Part 2, we will be talking more about the GR feedback discussion mentioned above called .
Stay tuned!
When we said that there is something rotten at the core of GR, we were right. To recap from our previous post, Something Rotten at the Core of GR, we told you about what happened to GR member Kathy when she and Angela had a disagreement in the then secret Asshat group. (To read that discussion, go to Asshats Will Be Asshats). After we published their disagreement on our site, Kathy suddenly found that her account was being tampered with by one of the moderators at GR. That is, her reviews and messages started disappearing. When she tried to replace them, her account was deleted altogether:
What’s more, Eve Thomas who had announced she was back on GR to promote her new book on domestic violence, suddenly found that out of nowhere, one of her blog posts had been deleted and then shortly after that, her account was completly blown away as well.
What do these two women, Kathy and Eve, have in common? They both had run-ins with Angela.
Not only that, shortly after our publication of Something Rotten at the Core of GR, we had a wave of people contact us to let us know that when they had shelved as Badly Behaving Author, their accounts, too, were booted from the site (which made me almost choke on my wine when I read . Can we say that Angie is just a tad hypocritical? Why, yes, I think we can!).
In the comments on our last post, speculations went flying everywhere about the Goodreads staff being involved in the corruption and criminal activity. Now, given a new piece of evidence, we know for sure that they are. A site visitor sent us this screenshot of a taken from Angela’s review of Kristin Michelle Adam’s book:
For all those who don’t know what TPTB stands for, it’s “The Powers That Be”. So, now we know that Angela is one of “The Powers That Be” on Goodreads, which means that she is either a moderator or some kind of manager.
Is this all starting to make sense now?
Now, let’s give you a little taste of what Angela is like:
As you can clearly see, she is a very angry woman. To read more about Angela, you can go here and here.
So what is our message today? Why are we showing you this? Because, these are the kind of people who are running Goodreads.
We’ll say that again, this time a little more loudly:
THESE ARE THE KIND OF PEOPLE WHO ARE RUNNING GOODREADS!
With Angela being TPTB on GR, the site is really getting to be exactly the kind of snake pit Absolute Write has become with Macallister Stone as its owner and moderator (if any of you don’t remember our post on AW, please read The Banning of Robin Sullivan).
So, on that note, we’re going to end this post with a comment left by Karig:
Aaaaand this is why Goodreads is utterly worthless for authors: The inmates are running the asylum over there — or, at the very least, one of the inmates has access to the security office.
You’re absolutely right, Karig. The nutters are indeed running the asylum.
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An addendum. We wanted to show you by A.H. showing her reaction to GR friends with whom she has just had a falling out. The post is very telling about her character:
We now have her listed on our Biggest Offenders list and on our Scary Run Fast sidebar.
Whatever you do, watch out for this one!
We just received this message from a site visitor:
Immediately, we went to the link and took a screenshot of :
As far as we’re concerned, this was crossing way over the line, although we’re not really sure what they were trying to accomplish. Their claims against us are false as anyone who reads our blog can clearly see.
Eve is absolutely right. If these bullies didn’t behave this way, we would have nothing to post about them. All we are doing is simply reporting on their behavior and showing our readers the screenshots.
As for our relationship with Eve, there is none. We want to make it clear that she is not affiliated with our site in any way. We simply posted the information about the attack on her when she tried to apologize. We were tipped off about the attack, not by Eve, but by other site visitors who will remain anonymous for their protection (from the bullies.) We sincerely hope that everything works out with Eve’s charity and that the bullies are held accountable for their actions.
