Inner Circle Incident (Patreon)

Hello Inner Circle. I just recorded a video discussing this personally but wanted to make a text post to clarify everything further.

First of all let me say that I read through everything everybody said in the INNER CIRCLE CHAT and I feel so horribly that I hurt so many people. I often hide behind the veneer of irony as a protective barrier and that has shielded me from a lot of criticism before this because nobody could be sure exactly what I "meant." But now that I have developed a much more sincere relationship with my audience, my words have the power to hurt people severely, and that is an incredible responsibility I did not appreciate before this.

I cannot explain how sorry I am for being incredibly careless with this responsibility and hurting so many of you. It doesn't matter what I meant, what matters is how it came across. What matters is the pain that it caused, regardless of my intention.

I take full responsibility for that. I am going to explain what was going through my head not because I am trying to absolve myself of this responsibility, but because I think it is really important to clarify what I meant.

I have been following the Cornell situation and been sick to my stomach over it for weeks. It is a truly nightmarish situation. So yesterday, I was scrolling through Twitter, and I saw that TMZ had posted some text messages that Jane Doe had sent to one of the rapists.

I was very compelled by this. I scrolled through the Quote Tweets, and was overwhelmed by horrific sentiments like, "Well, this proves that it was all MADE UP" Or implying that these text messages invalidated the entire situation and invalidated the fact that she suffered an unspeakably horrific act of sexual violence.

So I fired off a tweet intended to criticize THOSE people. But I did not address my response AT any of those people, I merely fired it off in general, and hoped that people would somehow psychically connect the dots, which they did not.

I in no way was trying to say that there is any nuance to the horrors of sexual violence. This is an important distinction I want to make. There is no nuance to an act of evil such as this.

The people involved, however, are complex. You're all here because on some level my work resonated with you in some way, and this is a theme that I grapple with over and over again.

The fact that the people involved are complication DOES NOT make the horrific act LESS BAD. It makes it WORSE, because the complexity of the people involved.

Another theme I grapple with over and over again in my work is how someone could do something so evil. I often start with the evil act itself, and reverse engineer a character around it. The reason I do this is to try to understand how someone could commit acts of evil against another human being that I find unfathomable.

What I often discover is that the depths of horror to the evil involved are labyrinthian and complicated. And this makes it more horrifying. To me, it is less horrifying to imagine that there are simply evil people in the world, who do evil things.

What is more horrifying to me is that there are good people, who think they're doing the right thing, who are loved by many and who love others, and still do unspeakable evil despite this (or, most horrifically, because of this).

So, my very flippant and insensitive response was directed at the people who were refusing to see the complexity in human behavior surrounding an act of horrific violence and using that complexity to invalidate it.

I said all of this much worse and less articulately in the video version, but I wanted to type it all out here for you as well.

I take you all very seriously and so if there is anything you would like me specifically to answer, please comment and I will try to help mend the wound that I created here.

Thank you all so much for your incredible grace and understanding.