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I never said I was a victim of (![[info]](http://www.journalfen.net/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} circumstance) wrote in ![[info]](http://www.journalfen.net/img/community.gif){kind=small} fandom_wank,@ 2004-11-07 17:03:00 |
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| Current mood: | *thud* |
And in the realm of the completely batshit insane...
I've been a part of a small, very friendly board dedicated to the worship of the band Our Lady Peace (a very small fandom indeed) for a couple of years now. The board is called ClumsyMonkey (the CM), and the regulars refer to themselves as CMers. The CMers for the most part know each others' names, read each others' LJs, and several have met in person on various occasions. Since I've been there, there's been a surprisingly small amount of wank and I've generally had good experiences with these people. Until now. (dun dun DUN!)
I've been away from the board for awhile, but several CMers are still on my LJ flist. One of them was known as valienyc. Val was a young woman who'd survived sexual abuse by her father and other relatives, but had overcome it and was now happily married to a man called Cain. They seemed to have the perfect marriage. In fact, everything about Val seemed a little too perfect, until she was recently diagnosed with cancer. Val, who loved to post pictures of herself, was very popular on the CM for being so beautiful and kind, and for having such an attractive and devoted husband, and she received much sympathy every time she reported that life had shit upon her yet again.
But there were some holes in Val's story. Cain, for instance, seemed to be two different guys, according to the pictures she posted. Both were very attractive men, but they didn't look anything alike. Furthermore, the mods at the CM, while checking into some other things about Val that didn't add up, found that all her entries were coming from an IP in Virginia, not in New York, where Val claimed to live. Even when "Val" travelled, all her posts came from Virginia.
"Val", it turned out after much sleuthing, was really Michelle, a first-year student at a university in Virginia. Michelle also had an LJ, supermansdead04, dedicated to the far more mundane details of her own life. But several of Michelle's entries were plagiarized from CMers, both from things they'd posted at the board, as well as things they'd posted to their personal journals. I was by far the person plagiarized most often.
Michelle posted several poems of mine, which she claimed she'd written and turned into her English teacher to have published. She also repeatedly posted rants I'd written about politics, changing a word here and there, and claiming them as her own work. She stole pictures that I'd posted, which my friends and I had drawn, and claimed that they were done by her and a boy she had a crush on. Worst of all, she took personal events from my own life, changed the wording, claimed they had happened to her, and used them to get sympathy from her LJ friends.
Once this was brought to my attention, I searched her LJ and found seven instances of direct plagiarism, as well as three instances where she related the exact same opinions and events I had, but in different words. But by now Michelle had been tipped off, and she deleted both journals before I had a chance to report her to LJ abuse.
Her xanga account, however, is still up. The entry at the top of the page? Yep, that's mine, with some minor alterations (my original is here). I've reported her to xanga's abuse team.
Meanwhile, the CMers were raving mad. They demanded an explanation from Michelle (who was still posting there as "Val"). Michelle's answers were evasive. First, she claimed that she was still Val, but she had lied about her location to escape her father (who she claimed raped her and was still looking for her - even though at another point, she'd claimed he was in jail). When she finally realized that the evidence against her was too much, she changed her story. Yes, she'd invented the character Val, but she'd done it with her friend (who was the girl in the pictures, and who really did have cancer - she swears!); the "Cain"s were her boyfriend and her now-dead-from-cancer friend's boyfriend. Nobody was buying that story either, though, since "Val" had posted a picture of herself a week ago, picturing her wearing a sticker saying she'd voted (for Kerry, she claimed - at least "Val" was a Democrat). If the real "Val" had indeed been dead since August, she was looking mighty good for a corpse.
Michelle/"Val" is sticking to that story - that the pictures are of her friend who died from cancer in August, that she and said friend created "Val" as a joke, and that she carried on with the character after her friend's death "as a way to keep her alive". She conveniently can offer no proof, and nobody's buying the story. Nor has she offered any explanation for the plagiarism other than that "she didn't think she'd get caught".
You can read all about it at the CM thread here. Witness the amazing morphing "Cain"s! Puzzle through her conflicting explanations! Try to figure out what the fuck this chick is smoking!
