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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Ok, so some key details from the court filings that provide a lot more context around why Dawn originally reached out to Sonya. 
[b]The NYT article makes it sound like she literally emailed to ask why Sonya hadn't been liking her Facebook posts. Which I agree would be deranged. That's not what happened. Here [/b]it is:

- Dawn starts FB group, posts stuff there
- Dawn donates kidney
- Sonya and several other Grubstreet "friends" look at every post in the group (which Dawn can see she is doing as admin of the private group) but does not interact with them. But Dawn says nothing.
- Dawn attends a writing conference with Sonya and several other people from Grubstreet (Sonya was actually running the conference). Dawn has known these folks for years, and several of them are in that private FB group, and she knows they have been looking at the posts because she has seen it. Including Sonya, who has looked at all of them. Keep in mind, Dawn donated the kidney not that long before the conference (less than a year). But as Dawn interacts with people at the conference, no one says anything about the kidney donation even though she knows they've read her posts about it. She gets a weird vibe from this.
- A mutual friend posts on Facebook that Sonya read a short story at a reading that was about kidney donation and tags both Dawn and Sonya in it. Dawn is surprised.
- Dawn emails Sonya to follow up on seeing her at the Muse conference and includes one sentence where she says that she heard Sonya had written a story about kidney donation, thinks that's cool, and asks if she could read it. She says nothing about the FB group in this email.
- Sonya replies (lies) that the story isn't ready yet (the story has already been recorded for release on Audible at this point) and that it was merely inspired by Dawn's donation but not based on it (also a lie -- at this point the story includes Dawn's letter verbatim and Sonya has only recently changed the characters name from "Dawn" to "Rose)
- THEN Dawn replies with an email noting that she was surprised to hear about Sonya's story because she had noticed that Sonya had been reading but not interacting with Dawn's posts about her own kidney donation, and that Dawn had wondered if maybe Sonya didn't approve of the donation. At no point does Dawn say Sonya should have been liking or commenting on the posts -- she simply notes that since Sonya had not interacted with the posts, it was surprising to Dawn that Sonya was interested enough in the topic of organ donation to write a story about it.

Sorry for the detail but this is all right there in the court filing, including texts of these emails. When you read it, Dawn's actions come off as incredibly reasonable! She does not seem needy at all. If anything, it seems like she's just trying to figure out if she should remove Sonya from the private FB group (which is the opposite of needy -- she is trying to observe someone else's boundaries). She does seem a bit miffed that Sonya has not acknowledged her kidney donation in any way, but... this seems reasonable when you read Sonya's emails, which are very friendly and familiar.

[b]The description of these events in the NYT is frankly bizarre, and fully buys into Sonya's (false) version of events that Dawn emailed her out of the blue to ask why she wasn't liking her kidney posts.[/b] But if you read the emails, this never happened. The fact that Kolker describes it that way in the article is just plain false.[/quote]

Thank you for the timeline and stating this. 
Some of us (ok, only me it seems) have only read the NYT story, and it reads no-thing like you've written here.

Yes, based on the NYT story, I thought Dawn was obsessively watching her Facebook posts to see who commented and who didn't -- then having the unmitigated gall to reach out to those who hadn't praised her enough.

In the article, she wholeheartedly came across as someone who was greatly lacking in self awareness, social prowess, and she was exhibiting some massively cringeworthy attention-seeking behavior.

Add that to the fact that the NYT story sort of implies or makes it seem like Dawn was obsessively searching the internet 24/7 for anything related to Larson and her work, once the co-worker from Grubb Street told her about Larson's kidney related story (otherwise how would Dawn have known about ALL of those updates about Larson's book?).

In reality though, what the NYT had failed to distinguish was that Dawn had probably simply set up a Google alert using parameters such as "Sonya Larson + kidney".

That was incredibly smart of Dawn, as it ensured that she would be notified the second that ANYTHING was posted on the internet with those words linked together, and she'd get that email alert instantaneously (I'm making the assumption that's how Dawn found out about each of Larson's book updates so quickly after they were released? God knows her "friends" at Grub Street certainly weren't giving her a heads up (with the exception of the one guy who set everything in motion originally).

But, I guess pragmatically setting up a google alert is far too practical & boring to be mentioned by the NYT -- best to amp up the drama and run with the angle that she was obsessively searching the internet 24/7 for any whiff of Larson's story.

This story is so exploitive and it has such predatory feels, it went as far as to report on Dawn's history of slapping herself during self-harm attacks.  I felt so icky and like *I* was violating her trust (and some kind of hippa laws) as I was reading the way they reported it, so I cannot imagine how frustrating & emotional it must be for Dawn to read articles such as this. 
  
Compared to what you all have provided, this story seems super crafty & duplicitous.
It appears like they took extensive liberties with the truth, and combined it with straight up layers of deception -- if not outright lies.

All that, just to sell a few papers (or whatever the futuristic version of that quote is?)
Just to get more clicks?

The truth & reality are shockingly different than what the NYT story offered, and that is SO exceedingly frustrating... especially now, after reading all of the timelines & updates that they [i]somehow[/i] forgot to provide (but thankfully you all did!).

I'm just really very sorry that I'm literally now walking into this story, 80+ pages in.
I've most definitely derailed you all since my initial comment yesterday, discussing things you've already covered probably in the first 20 pages of the thread.

I really did [i]WANT[/i] to try to read the whole thread through... but damn, 80 pages is daunting!

Thank you to all of you who've provided me/us with the actual facts, details and (gasp!) truth, rather than simply regurgitating an already re-spun & salacious story (the story that I naively fell for).

Most of all, thank you for everything you've done to ensure that the truth gets out (including the (respectful) schooling of someone who quite literally stumbled face first into an 80 page long thread and (unintentionally) decided to derail it completely).

You're all doing God's work (and I'm an atheist!).

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