Anonymous wrote:Aside: I had never heard of Chip Flunk, but I looked him up and read about his $800K advance novel, "Cape May." It's about a young and innocent Georgia couple who meet an older, sophisticated couple while honeymooning in NJ. I don't know why I like this premise, maybe because it sounds messy!! And involves emasculation, probably. I'm going to hold myself back from paying money for it.

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Anonymous wrote:Oh great, now Lithub is weighing in today and doubling down on the white woman tears. I seriously want to burn down the entire mainstream literary establishment right now. I will go out of my way to tell everyone I know to stop buying their books. So, is it fine for a POC to plagiarize a white woman? It seems a resounding YES. The only issue here is that Dawn didn't quietly oblige.

An excerpt:

"For me, Dorland’s claims conjure memories of white women abusing the legal system to protect their own privilege. As one scholar observed, history contains endless examples of white women weaponizing their tears and feminine fragility. We know some white women abuse the criminal justice system to threaten and intimidate people of color. But we often forget the history of white women abusing the civil system to achieve equally as pernicious ends. Scholars have studied this issue, with interesting research interrogating white women’s allegations of intentional infliction of emotional distress.

Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress (IIED) is a civil claim that provides compensation for the intentional infliction, by extreme and outrageous conduct, of severe emotional distress. In these claims, plaintiffs, like Dorland, must prove that the defendant’s conduct “goes beyond all possible bounds of decency, and is regarded as atrocious, and utterly intolerable in a civilized community.”"

https://lithub.com/dorland-v-larson-on-the-legal-disputes-at-the-heart-of-bad-art-friend/

Why didn’t he just name-drop Emmitt Till? You know, for “context.”

This man is a clown. Sonya made claims in her lawsuit that conflict has caused her distress, sleepless nights, weight loss, etc. Is she enacting feminine fragility in order to achieve her ends too? Maybe Dorland's claims don't meet the legal threshold for IIED; that doesn't mean they were malicious.

Anonymous wrote:Since the internet never forgets anything, Roxanne's deleted tweet. I don't even get what she was driving at. Roxane Gay herself had nothing to do with this matter until she inserted herself.

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Anonymous wrote:If the court documents were public, how/why did Kolker miss what really happened?

I have wondered the same thing myself. Perhaps he was part of the same literary scene and so took Larson's description as fact, and did not fact check? But then again, I don't think anything he said was overtly untrue, it's just laid out in a way that significantly distorts the truth. I don't know, in other words. But I have wondered.

LOL I thought this board was full of lawyers, not writers. Lawyers of all people should know that court records are fascinating and helpful, but they are never a whole story, and they do not capture emotion, nuance or context. And plenty of court filings are, by design, meant to distort.

While that is true (lawyer here), people aren't talking about the pleadings in this case. They are talking about the evidence, i.e. the record of emails/texts both between Dorland and Larsen, and then between Larsen and others.

They outline several factual issues that are not mentioned or obscured in Kolker piece. These are facts not in dispute, not legal arguments. Stuff like the timeline and places where Larsen was clearly lying to Dorland. There's no nuance there -- Larsen was saying one thing to Dorland while saying the opposite to her friends, and in some cases telling her friends that she was in fact lying to Dorland.

Kolker is an investigative journalist. It is frustrating that he took Larsen's account of her motivations and the sequence of events as factual, when there was evidence available that undermines that narrative. And I'll also note that most of what is in the court evidence back sup what Dorland says about her own motivations in a way that makes them more understandable, but Kolker chose not to include that evidence (and thus made it seem like Dorland was the one obscuring the truth).

When I read those emails between Dorland and Larsen in full, as opposed to the snippets and descriptions in Kolker's piece, my conclusions were completely opposite. That's a huge problem! It means he inaccurately represented this key exchange between them in a way that is, in your phrasing, a distortion. Why would he do that? If the goal was to present "both sides" and let readers decide, why present that key exchange in a way that supports Larsen's narrative, when the emails themselves show that Larsen was being duplicitous. I don't get it.

Would you or some of the other really thoughtful posters be willing to bring these points up in response to Kolker’s Twitter link to this piece? Or publicize it otherwise in a way that would reach him? I checked it yesterday and was surprised to see no real commentary. I’m kind of shocked by how little effort he made to look at the court documents (lazy case) or how blithely he disregarded the truth in a very effective effort to get clicks(cynical case). I thought Hidden Valley Road was fascinating and well-written and am incredibly disappointed with him now.

I also wanted to highlight the PPs who suggested that Larson’s only way out of this mess with a shred of reputation is to donate a kidney. I would love it if we created a DCUM group novel or short story about this. I really think we have something here!

Anonymous wrote:Man. Someone on Reddit found Dawn's Facebook profile (I won't post it here because I'm not sure how I feel about it re: respecting privacy and I don't want to condone stalking), but honestly Dawn's social presence feels so... normal. The things that a lot of people would post about, in the same tone. She also clearly has a lot of people who like and support her (obviously, gleaning only as much as you can from social media). She seems cheery, sunny, positive, loved, if perhaps a little "extra" as one might say -- but so are so many other people on social media, if not most! I can bet that 99% of the "Team Sonya" folks have posted things on their own social media that were way more self-promoting/"narcissistic"/self-centered than the stuff that I saw on Dawn's public-facing page.

Another thing. The person who initially posted Dawn's Facebook profile basically pointed out that Sonya had left comments here and there (typically small, inane comments like "Fabulous!") on some of Dawn's pics, so the idea that she was trying desperately not to be friends with Dawn is completely shot.

Sorry, sorry, I know this is getting borderline stalker-y, and this is as far as I'll go unless new information comes out.

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Anonymous wrote:Aside: I had never heard of Chip Flunk, but I looked him up and read about his $800K advance novel, "Cape May." It's about a young and innocent Georgia couple who meet an older, sophisticated couple while honeymooning in NJ. I don't know why I like this premise, maybe because it sounds messy!! And involves emasculation, probably. I'm going to hold myself back from paying money for it.

He got an $800k advance for that beach read?! Who’s even heard of this guy?

Anonymous wrote:So, Celeste is back on Twitter. Guess it's really over for her. Glad she can wipe her hands of it.

Anonymous wrote:The thing that gets me in all of this is how irresponsible the NYT author (Kolker) was in the retelling. What if this entire issue had been handled in arbitration (which Larsen refused, Dorland was okay with), meaning there would be no public documents? We would just have had the NYT timeline and framing, not the original source documents, which tell a wildly different story than what the NYT published.

It is bothering me how divergent the actual evidence is from the NYT narrative. In the NYT, Dawn sounds crazy, clinging, annoying, etc. Problematic in many ways. But when you read the actual evidence -- produced by Larsen herself in litigation! -- suddenly that largely falls away. You end up with a vulnerable woman who painfully starts to piece together, over years of time, how she's been maltreated and gaslit, someone who doesn't look anything like what Kolker portrayed.

If the hard evidence hadn't been there for us to assess on our own, how destroyed would Dorland have been by the NYT article? How complicit is the NYT in this entire affair?