Anonymous wrote:

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?

Catching up on the day’s posts on this. Has this been mentioned? Kolkers piece was deliberately anti dawn. The anti-chronology, and the details left out and those included. For one example the harsssment claim she had - I read someone’s “here is what really happened” version with receipts and I don’t remember the details but even that was just totally miscast. I think his piece was deceptive snd manipulative. So while we are canceling I would nominate him.

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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.

Interesting … non lawyer here … even just reading Kolker’s article without reading all the emails exchanged led me to change my view from early in piece that Dawn was neurotic needy stalker to Dawn being a fragile human who was actually being gas lighted and trivialized by Larson.

To know that she requested arbitration and wanted to settle the matter in a mutually agreeable way but was rejected adds more authentic credibility for Dawn.

I agree with you in general that often the media tries too hard to appear neutral and does not provide all the relevant info in the process. I see that on news apps purporting not to give both right and left wing stories - the right wing outlet stories are often quite absurd unsubstantiated opinion pieces while the left wing outlets try much harder to let the facts speak for themselves.

That said, I am encourage that so many people here are willing to consider things from the perspective of Dawn, however flawed she may be.

I read the NYT article first, without reading anything else prior, and I came out of it Team Dorland, with maybe some reservations, as in: "unless there's some info missing, I'm on Dawn's side."

So I think there was enough there, because I wasn't predisposed, though I might have biases.

THEN, I read all the other stuff and I was like, holy hell, what upside-down hell are we living in, that Sonya Effing Larson is treated as a victim when she 1) plagiarized and 2) was a horrible human being? I went from Team Dorland with reservations to Team Dorland and mad as hell.

Anonymous wrote:Celeste’s Twitter just keeps providing nuggets of her Hypocrisy.

https://twitter.com/pronounced_ing/status/932766932817850369?s=21

https://twitter.com/pronounced_ing/status/1438491300567949313?s=12

Anonymous wrote:Celeste’s Twitter just keeps providing nuggets of her Hypocrisy.

https://twitter.com/pronounced_ing/status/932766932817850369?s=21

https://twitter.com/pronounced_ing/status/1438491300567949313?s=12

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Anonymous wrote:I honestly don't know think anything will happen to any of the authors. Dorland will remain traumatized. The rest will continue like nothing happened. Maybe they'll offer a half-hearted apology. The independent GrubStreet investigation will do a little gentle finger shaking. Maybe some MFA programs will add this incident to their plagiarism training. But otherwise, I don't think anything will change.

I could be wrong, but I think this will have lasting consequences for the CMs. Maybe not financial, but there is and will be a cloud of shame. And every time they are on a forum or a book tour, a little part of them will wonder if someone in the audience will quote the group chat or ask them about this. This stench is going to linger.

Of course I am not accepting everything at 100%, but what can I trust the NYT (the NYT!) with if I can't even trust them to accurately represent a timeline of events where there is incontrovertible evidence of the events? I mean, am I allowed to trust a basic timeline? A chronology?

The answer can't be "haha, jokes on you, always do your own research, reporters amirite?" It can't be that I should expect a reporter to obfuscate actual events in favor of portraying his bias. Or, it should not be, because if we can't trust institutions like the NYT with, at a minimum, factual chronological analysis, what happens to free media?

Anonymous wrote:Reading these details on their friendship/history:

Is heartbreaking. Did Larsen ever like Dorland? If so, what happened? How do you go from giving someone a personalized going away gift, attending parties at their home, discussing loss and childhood trauma, and sharing inside jokes on social media to…. “Eff Dawn and her effing kidney” or whatever?

I think something similar happened to me, though thankfully did not escalate like this and I don’t have this kind of evidence to prove my suspicions. But it was both devastating and deeply weird. You wind up wondering if what you thought was friendship was all a performance, and if so, why on earth? Or was it genuine and then I did/said something to make this person hate me? Or are they just really messed up and don’t really know how they feel about me and both our friendship and their newfound loathing of me are just outgrowths of done other issue that has nothing to do with me?

It’s just very disorienting. And I’ll never know, and like Dawn won’t either. People are so strange.

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