Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I was appalled when I heard about this story and sided with Dawn, but damn when I read her posts about her donation my eyes roll back so far in my head it hurts.

I would have had a very hard time not being sarcastic to her. Maybe my problem is I know too many women who do charity for attention. One message she sent to Sonya she talked about attending a charity function with Jayne Seymore and being so proud that the doctor who took her kidney mentioned her kidney "just gushing urine". Ugh.

I would have stopped talking to her and avoided her but I know I would have made comments to a mutual friend about her. In any group I've been in there would be at least one adult who would shut the nastiness down so we would only go on so long.

No one in that group admitted that they were the ones doing the stalking. What an empty echo chamber they were.

commenting on your donated kidney "gushing urine" is basically the equivalent of commenting on your baby's cuteness or first smile or first steps. it's what a kidney is supposed to do! it's the whole point of a kidney!

OK, stick to what you know. I have kidney disease and often my kidneys don’t work and won’t “gush urine.”

DP. The point is that Dorland's healthy kidney did and she was told that by a doctor.

If I’m not mistaken, she was saying her kidney was working in the recipient. Which is a big deal. Organs are often rejected.

Right, that's pretty exciting.

Segue: I know that Dorland is a mother, because there was some reference to her running into Chip Chunk at a baby music activity in LA, right. Is Sonya a mom? No diss, but I became a person with better things to do (than write stories to make fun of my frenemy, chat endlessly with my friends about my frenemy) after I had a kid. And listen, I DO NOT think mothers are sainted. It's just that moms don't have as much time, LOL.

Anonymous wrote:

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:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

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/

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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?

so -- while I get what you are saying -- I do think this is where you have to accept that no media outlet, no reporter, etc is perfect, and that every bit of reporting you read is imperfect and to some degree biased.

i'm a reporter and i would have done this article differently, but fwiw, i'm the same poster who upthread said we need to remember that kolker is a dude, and by being a dude, simply cannot have the same level of true understanding of what mean girl bullyfests involve and look like, or perhaps even the ability to recognize the mean girl bullyfest as arguably the most compelling part of this story. My bias means seeing the mean girl story.

Kolker's bias in this case, as not just as a man but as a bestselling author, is favoring the larger concepts of who owns an idea; who owns a story; what is and isn't literary license/theft. And I get why he has his biases and I have mine, we both come by them honestly.

Sure, everyone has a bias, but in this case, there is incontrovertible evidence of what actually happened that we can all see. Bias might come in around the edges with any story where there is a framework of undisputed facts, but here, Kolker presumably took a look at the same evidence we all have, yet chose to frame his story in a way that leads the reader away from that same evidence.

There is such profound distrust of the media now, such a deep skepticism that had taken ahold of the country. And normally, I give reporters the benefit of the doubt, because I think they are doing good work that's important for a functional country. But when I read articles like this, where nothing exactly untruthful was said, but yet the factual reality is so very different than what the article conveyed, honestly, I get that skepticism. It especially bothers me because absent the court case, I wouldn't have been skeptical. I would have accepted Kolker's framing entirely, unintentionally compounding what Dorland -- who is the victim here -- went through. And that really bothers me.

So, this is still the same problem. We can have access to the exact same evidence and see different things -- or choose to see different things. We've all watched the Rodney King beating video. The cops are beating him: there is no question. Incontrovertible evidence of what actually happened. But that jury, sworn to follow the law, still let most of the officers off the hook.

Oh, and it would take (mostly white) journalists another 20+ yrs after the OJ trial to finally understand: Maybe the OJ verdict was about 75 yrs of racism by the LAPD? The facts about LAPD's significant and documented racism for decades were always there, too.

I'm not saying you shouldn't be pissed at the article, or that the article is great. I'm saying that even professionals bring bias to the table, and time has a way of changing a narrative. Also, you sound smart, which means you are too smart to be readily accepting 100 percent of Kolker's framing, or anyone's framing, all the time, ever.

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:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

Anonymous wrote:Was this already posted?

https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/bad-art-friend-kidney-crisis-donation-altruism.html

Sonya Larson is an idiot and the Chunky Monkeys and Roxane Gay (“do we know she actually donated?”) are horrible assholes.

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/

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I was appalled when I heard about this story and sided with Dawn, but damn when I read her posts about her donation my eyes roll back so far in my head it hurts.

I would have had a very hard time not being sarcastic to her. Maybe my problem is I know too many women who do charity for attention. One message she sent to Sonya she talked about attending a charity function with Jayne Seymore and being so proud that the doctor who took her kidney mentioned her kidney "just gushing urine". Ugh.

I would have stopped talking to her and avoided her but I know I would have made comments to a mutual friend about her. In any group I've been in there would be at least one adult who would shut the nastiness down so we would only go on so long.

No one in that group admitted that they were the ones doing the stalking. What an empty echo chamber they were.

commenting on your donated kidney "gushing urine" is basically the equivalent of commenting on your baby's cuteness or first smile or first steps. it's what a kidney is supposed to do! it's the whole point of a kidney!

OK, stick to what you know. I have kidney disease and often my kidneys don’t work and won’t “gush urine.”

DP. The point is that Dorland's healthy kidney did and she was told that by a doctor.

If I’m not mistaken, she was saying her kidney was working in the recipient. Which is a big deal. Organs are often rejected.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I was appalled when I heard about this story and sided with Dawn, but damn when I read her posts about her donation my eyes roll back so far in my head it hurts.

I would have had a very hard time not being sarcastic to her. Maybe my problem is I know too many women who do charity for attention. One message she sent to Sonya she talked about attending a charity function with Jayne Seymore and being so proud that the doctor who took her kidney mentioned her kidney "just gushing urine". Ugh.

I would have stopped talking to her and avoided her but I know I would have made comments to a mutual friend about her. In any group I've been in there would be at least one adult who would shut the nastiness down so we would only go on so long.

No one in that group admitted that they were the ones doing the stalking. What an empty echo chamber they were.

commenting on your donated kidney "gushing urine" is basically the equivalent of commenting on your baby's cuteness or first smile or first steps. it's what a kidney is supposed to do! it's the whole point of a kidney!

OK, stick to what you know. I have kidney disease and often my kidneys don’t work and won’t “gush urine.”

DP. The point is that Dorland's healthy kidney did and she was told that by a doctor.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I was appalled when I heard about this story and sided with Dawn, but damn when I read her posts about her donation my eyes roll back so far in my head it hurts.

I would have had a very hard time not being sarcastic to her. Maybe my problem is I know too many women who do charity for attention. One message she sent to Sonya she talked about attending a charity function with Jayne Seymore and being so proud that the doctor who took her kidney mentioned her kidney "just gushing urine". Ugh.

I would have stopped talking to her and avoided her but I know I would have made comments to a mutual friend about her. In any group I've been in there would be at least one adult who would shut the nastiness down so we would only go on so long.

No one in that group admitted that they were the ones doing the stalking. What an empty echo chamber they were.

commenting on your donated kidney "gushing urine" is basically the equivalent of commenting on your baby's cuteness or first smile or first steps. it's what a kidney is supposed to do! it's the whole point of a kidney!

OK, stick to what you know. I have kidney disease and often my kidneys don’t work and won’t “gush urine.”

DP. The point is that Dorland's healthy kidney did and she was told that by a doctor.