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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]So almost a month after this all went down, I'm curious about the one thread in the story that seemed the most egregious to me in terms of the NYT article covering up misconduct-- using Dawn's plagiarism suit and her earlier sexual harassment suit as evidence that she was an unreasonably litigious person.  While the article and group texts pretty clearly showed the IP violation to be legit, I haven't heard anything about the sexual harassment claim, even though at least one writer on twitter has talked about CM/Grubstreet members attempting to sexually coerce her.  It sounds conspiratorial but it really seems to me like Kolker tried to frame Dawn Dorland as a narcissistic stalker to make her allegations of sexual misconduct by Grubstreet staff sound bogus.  It doesn't sound like Dawn or anyone else involved wanted to get into the details of this, but it's a much more serious problem, legally, than the trash talking/group stalking.  I wonder if anything's going to come of that, or if Dorland and Lauren Hough and whoever else are (understandably) too burned out to keep pursuing action?[/quote]

I think you are confusing different events. Dorland filed an internal complaint against Larson and others at Grub Street, but it wasn't for sexual harassment. It was for the plagiarism as well as the "freezing out" Dorland experience at the Muse conferences. As an employee of Grub Street, she felt she was being targeted and treated unfairly by her colleagues and she filed a complaint. But this wasn't the sexual harassment complaint.

The sexual harassment complaint, the details of which we don't know, was filed by Dorland against a different writing organization in California. I think all we know about this is that Dorland requested it be handled via mediation (so she wasn't looking for money just resolution) and that the writing org went belly up before it was resolved so it became moot. This one has absolutely nothing to do with Grub Street or Larson or the plagiarism claim or any of the other facts in Bad Art Friend, and since it didn't go anywhere and Dorland specifically requested it be mediated, there is a question as to why it was included in the BAF story since it seems to imply "she's a professional victim!" but there isn't really anything there. And we don't know anything about the facts underlying the case.

As someone who has been sexually harassed at an organization like this (small, arts focused, mission driven), this drives me nuts because these organizations are often incredibly poorly run and it is easy for people with abusive tendencies to exploit disparities in power in order to take advantage of people, which is what happened with me. I wasn't a victim, I just had a handsy supervisor who knew they could touch me inappropriately and there wasn't really anything I could do about it -- there was no HR, they were in a much more senior position at the org, the org had no money so there was no point in bringing a law suit, and since the major currency of the place was access to people like this supervisor, I would not have found many if any allies among my colleagues. It sucks, and it's why I don't mess with places like that anymore, even though as an artist you crave community like that. This happens in all kinds of artistic communities. There was a lot of talk about it in the improv world a few years back during the height of Me Too, as well as in stand up (though that tends to be a professionally driven environment). I've heard of problems at dance and theater organizations, and someone up thread talked about issues in visual arts as well. It's just really, really common.

But the article paints Dorland as oversensitive and litigious and makes a complaint that look spurious while providing no detail. It's upsetting.[/quote]

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