A Final Update from the Polyamory #MeToo Survivor Support Team

Please read this April 13, 2020, update from the survivors and read their stories. To view everything that’s been released publicly, visit our tracking document.

This is probably the last update on the activities of the group alternately called the survivor support or advocacy team (sometimes also called the “survivor pod”).

What this is

This statement is intended as one step in taking responsibility for the mistakes we made in this process, and to hand over the process to the survivors. We will explain specifically where we believe the survivor pod went wrong, and some ways in which we ended up further harming the survivors we originally set out to help.

It is important to remember that intent does not equal impact, and it is very common in survivor support situations for the intent to be good but the impact to turn out traumatizing. We are trying to hold ourselves to the same standards of accountability we expect from others who have committed harm.

Bear in mind that this statement is only endorsed by the people who have signed it. Other participants in the survivor pod may have other perspectives.

The short version

Due to internal dysfunction and other factors, the survivor pod ended up cutting survivors out of many of the decisions they should have been most involved with. We withheld information from survivors, and we pathologized, infantilized, and dismissed those who challenged this structure or attempted to have input into our process. We refused to let survivors set priorities. We justified these choices using procedural excuses, rhetoric about “transformative justice,” or concerns about pod member well-being.

Having done this, we then made decisions that put survivors at greater risk and deprived some of them of some of the most significant potential benefits of this process. These actions were rooted in our own lack of experience supporting survivors, our own personal agendas for the process, our own emotional fragility, and our unwillingness to challenge certain power structures (such as not believing survivors) that existed both within and outside of the pod.

What this is not

This statement is about the actions of the pod, and not survivors. It does not invalidate any of the factual claims made by survivors through this process, or put their stories in doubt. This is also not a vindication of the multiple dismissive public responses by Franklin, or his pod members and advocates, toward survivors and this process.

It’s also not a validation of any of the various uninformed claims made about the process while it was ongoing. Anyone claiming to have been “proven right” by the information presented here likely hasn’t even read this far.

Our interactions with the Author’s pod

One of the most damaging mistakes we made concerned our interactions with representatives of the Author’s pod.

Our original letter had offered a list of proposed accountability actions (“asks”). This offer had no conditions attached other than the Author or his pod asking for the list.

Additionally, the first person who wrote us from the Author’s pod offered information about his claims. Without seeing the actual written exchange with our liaison, and without consulting any of the actual survivors, the survivor pod refused to send the list of asks that had been promised to the Author, and also rejected the offer to have the Author’s pod provide information detailing some of the Author’s claims. Since the survivor pod already had extensive evidence contradicting the Author’s claims (i.e., we knew, and could prove, that the Author was lying to his pod), these decisions harmed survivors and put them at risk. These actions also prevented the Author’s pod from getting full information on the survivor requests and other useful information about the harm done and the Author’s behaviors, hampering that pod from making informed progress.

Eve raised these issues with us about eight months ago, when she and the other survivors were finally given access to the correspondence between the pods — which had been withheld from them until the summer of 2019. The delay in addressing these failures since then is the responsibility of the survivor pod, and is due to the length of time it has taken for some of us to understand and admit where we erred. Notably, this reality directly contradicts one of the Author’s main narratives about our process: that the Author’s former co-author was secretly pulling the strings from behind the scenes. In fact, this individual was denied any input whatsoever into our interactions with the Author’s pod, and was given extremely limited (and often inaccurate) information about them.

Had the survivor pod honored the requests made by survivors months before the first exchange with the Author’s pod, the correct people would have been involved in these decisions, and the list of asks that was initially offered to the Author would have been provided to his pod. That list, which had been approved by survivors before the call-in was sent, is here. Further, survivors and others from whom the Author’s pod had requested information would have been given the choice of whether to give that information or, where appropriate, be connected directly to the Author’s pod. This choice was not given to them.

Again, this does not mean that the Author’s pod was ever fully equipped to address his behavior even with the information they could have had, or that the Author’s words or actions have ever indicated any real interest in owning the harm he has done to his partners, or stopping. But his pod was certainly not going to be effective, even at simple harm reduction, without the information the survivor pod had, and when it came time for us to provide it (and without first consulting the people we ostensibly represented), we withheld it.

After this we published a post called Concerning FV Survivor Pod Boundaries. In it we stated that “we’ve not yet seen evidence that the Author has assembled a pod that is, as a whole, truly interested in creating or running an accountability process for him, but they have shown a great deal of interest in investigating and critiquing our process.” There are several problems with this statement. First, we never defined “true interest” in our original communication (or anywhere), thus creating a potentially impossible-to-meet standard. Second, we did set out much more minimal conditions for providing the information we had offered, and the conditions we initially set out (being asked) were met. In general, the statement misrepresents the interactions between the two pods and elides the fact that the survivor pod was actively rejecting input from the survivors it claimed to represent, and also misinforming them about both outgoing and incoming communications. Whether or not anything constructive would have come from continuing to communicate with the Author’s pod is an open question, but by that time the bulk of the damage was done.

On Reid Mihalko’s role

Another early mistake we made was the expansion of Reid Mihalko’s role as a “liaison” between the survivor pod and the Author’s accountability pod.

Reid was originally selected to convey the “call-in letter” — the first private set of asks — to the Author. After this was done, however, his role expanded to liaising with the Author’s pod once it was convened. The survivors were never consulted about this development, and due to the siloed structure we established, Reid had no way to know this. Ultimately, he wasn’t qualified to act in this crucial and extremely delicate expanded role, and the decision-making process of the survivor pod itself in this matter still isn’t even clear to all its members.

Also, no one who had been harmed by Reid’s behavior was ever directly consulted about his involvement — only people involved in running his process. In light of what we have learned from this process about the importance of centering survivor voices and the ease with which they can be erased, some survivors and pod members from this process have since come to see this as a mistake.

In addition, the survivor pod in turn had only one person liaising with Reid, who also had no experience with such a role. Due to the information bottleneck and distortions this inefficient structure created between representatives of the Author’s pod and our own team, most of our team, and all survivors, repeatedly received incomplete or inaccurate information about the communications that had taken place between liaisons. As a result of this, we made uninformed decisions.

What now?

Most members of the original survivor pod and advisors are no longer involved in the process. As of this post, there is no longer any “survivor pod” as such. A few former pod members may continue in support or advocacy roles with survivors, as a group or individually.

Kali Tal, who joined the process last September to help document the final testimonies, has also begun a rigorous analysis of our process, which will be published.

The survivors will continue with a process they control. They will speak for themselves by taking over this Medium account, establishing a new group email for outside communications, and through other forms of communication as they see fit. They have written their own update on these matters, and their plans, here.

Going forward, we ask that you listen to them. We’ve said enough.

Jakob Liljenwall
Pepper Mint
Louisa Leontiades
Marissa Stein
AV Flox
Anne Honeycutt (as a witness*)
Crystal Byrd Farmer (as a witness*)

*Anne and Crystal were pod members, but not at the time of the events described.