“Life Rewards Courage”: More Survivor Stories Released Today
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.
“I just needed my story heard, my story felt and understood by individuals with minds of their own. Because, like it or not, your story… is my story. And my story… is your story. I just don’t have the strength to take care of my story anymore. I don’t want my story defined by anger. All I can ask is just please help me take care of my story.”
— Hannah Gadsby, Nanette
The next set of stories from women who experienced harm from Franklin Veaux has been published. These accounts involve three more former partners and three other women who experienced or witnessed harmful behaviors, all during the period from 2006 to 2012. Please read and share these stories. There is much our communities can learn from them.
The stories published on polyamory-metoo.com, along with ER’s stories so far published elsewhere, now describe experiences from ten women, including seven past partners.
“Harm” vs. “Abuse”
“…thinking about my past situation as abuse didn’t actually help all that much, but understanding that the situation arose from codified gender inequality has helped me a lot. Because understanding it as abuse and maintaining that it was abuse, requires suppressing my empathic response. But instead, coming to a belief that it is not OK for men to use women’s labor, to drain women, to neglect them to further their lives, and to manipulate them (reflexively, consciously or unconsciously) to protect the structures that allow them to do that. Like, it’s not OK.”
— Amber, email to ER, April 24, 2018
Many of the responses we’ve seen to this work have been narrowly focused on drawing a line between “harm” or “being a shitty partner”/”just a bad breakup” and “abuse.” Mostly they seem to be drawing this line so they can announce that the stories of the survivors fall on the non-abuse side and therefore deserve no further attention or consideration.
We believe it’s not productive to argue about exactly where that harm falls, and that a more interesting conversation might be to question the conclusion: is it really the case that as long as one person is harming another without using physical violence (or meeting some other arbitrary criterion), that the person being harmed doesn’t deserve our compassion or our help, or that the person causing harm should not care or try to stop? Almost every time someone has drawn a harm/abuse distinction in public, this seems to have been the case they’re making.
Others seem to be speaking from the perspective of a carceral justice model where the sole purpose of naming harms is to decide who falls on which side of a victim/perpetrator line and, therefore, who deserves punishment and who is disposable. These people often also seem to hold a view that having the experiences of the Author’s partners described, or the Author being asked to listen to them, counts as punishment (while his naming of their experiences in his books and elsewhere apparently does not).
We reject all of this, of course. We’re not seeking to have the Author labelled, defined or punished. Our goal is harm reduction. Nevertheless, mental abuse, emotional abuse, and exploitation are all clinically recognized patterns, and the stories we’ve shared contain clear examples of all of them. But colloquial language is not clinical language, and if some people don’t want to use the word “abuse” to refer to certain behaviors, or to trauma experienced by women, then we’re not going to spend much time trying to convince them otherwise.
What we will try to convince people of is that lying, gaslighting, triangulation, emotional manipulation, and financial exploitation are harmful, and that we as friends and communities need to get better at recognizing them, stopping them, and repairing the damage that they do. Even (and especially) when we are the ones who have done that damage.
On “Co-opting” #metoo
Some criticism we’ve seen online, from both allies and others, has focused on our decision to associate our process with #metoo. As this was an instance of a man in a position of power being called to account for his use of that power to harm women, we felt it was aligned with the broader purpose of the #metoo movement. In addition, this is an example of women who all believed they were isolated and unique in the harm they’d experienced coming together to understand they were part of a broad and long-term pattern — another hallmark of #metoo. To quote Amber again:
“The most powerful thing to me about #metoo was it was a whole bunch of women saying, ‘no, I experienced a real thing,’ and a whole bunch of other women saying ‘I believe this real thing that you experienced.’ And this was a total paradigm shift because I think we were all used to just not being believed a lot of the time. It is very applicable here.”
— Amber, email to ER, April 9, 2018
Louisa Leontiades and Kali Tal have also noted the importance of this solidarity:
“These women have worked together to confirm the reality of each other’s experiences. But they can sustain this effort only if they have the support of other community members who serve as a bulwark against attacks and attempts by Franklin and his supporters to delegitimize them and shut them down.”
— Kali Tal, “My Life Belongs to Me”“None of the women were aware of the others’ experiences. They didn’t know that they were part of a broader, more systemic pattern of exploitation by an intelligent man who had positioned himself as an expert on polyamory, but who seems ultimately to have designed the principles he preaches in order to escape the consequences of his own irresponsible, experimental and often harmful behaviours.”
— Louisa Leontiades, “Melanie: Notes & Material”
Survivor Pod Updates
Former pod member Pepper Mint has announced his own accountability process, which you may read more about here.
Crystal Byrd Farmer has recently joined the survivor pod. Her personal statement will be added to the pod bios page when it is available.
Marissa Stein has identified that providing direct survivor support within a transformative justice framework is not a form of activism best suited to their strengths, and has stepped back from the survivor pod, but continues to support this process and the survivors.
Pod member Samantha Manewitz has recently discussed our work, and confronting harm in polyamory and BDSM more generally, on the Someday We’ll All Be Dead and IndoctriNation podcasts. She will be presenting on gaslighting at the Woodhull Sexual Freedom Summit later this week.
“Financial Ties”
The Author and two of his pod members, ES and SH, have all made reference to financial ties among the pod and survivors. There is some truth to these claims: AM is being paid (from Eve’s share of royalties for More Than Two) as a transformative justice consultant, and Sam is being paid (from the pod’s Paypal pool) in her capacity as a subject-matter expert on trauma and patterns of coercive control to evaluate and comment on the survivor stories as part of Louisa’s work. The rest of Sam’s (considerable) work for the pod is unpaid. In addition, Louisa receives less than $100 per year in book royalties from the company jointly owned by both ER and the Author. Sam was also briefly hired in early 2019 as a consultant for the same company to provide an expert review of a book chapter dealing with abuse.
There are no financial ties among any of the survivors, including between ER and any others, nor is anyone being paid for sharing their experiences. Louisa was not paid for her work documenting the survivor stories.
Professionals rarely have significant volunteer time to offer, and we consider them essential to this kind of process, so we hope that future processes will continue to both include them and compensate them. You can help us compensate ours here.
Troll Accounts
The Author has announced that someone has created multiple accounts on Quora and other platforms impersonating him and sending harassing messages to his friends and followers. He has also added a footer to posts from his Quora account reminding people of this activity. We’ve made clear our position on punishment, which includes harassment, and we endorse neither. Whatever their reasons, whoever is doing this is not helping survivors or the pod, and in fact is actively undermining us. While we strongly doubt these actions are being taken by anyone sympathetic to us, in the unlikely event they are: you’re doing the opposite of helping. Stop.
We’ve also verified all screencaps and posts we’ve shared as coming from Franklin’s authentic accounts, and will continue to do so.
