December 2019 Pod Update

A Table of Contents for all posts by Charlie’s pod, including the dates each article was published and a brief description of the contents of each post, can be found here

Since our last update, at the end of July, all of the pod members & consultant, as well as Charlie, have been actively engaged in ongoing work. We wanted to give you a brief description of what this work looks like, so that we are ensuring transparency about Charlie’s accountability process. This includes sections on:

Meetings and Themes

Report Collection Process

Health of Team

Communicating to Others

Charlie’s Work

Next Steps

This post was written with tremendous input from all pod members, our pod consultant, and Charlie.

Meetings and themes

We have had 14 meetings, as follows:

• Four meetings with all pod members, consultants, and Charlie present to discuss overall progress and delve into more detailed work
• Four meetings where pod members and consultants (without Charlie) discussed the overall themes of our work and ways to draw Charlie into deeper understanding
• Six meetings between pod members and Charlie (in groups of 2 or 3) to discuss his thinking around his understanding of his role as a leader within his communities, his understanding of the ways his harms have impacted individuals and communities, and other thematic topics.

Report Collection

The report collection form closed on August 16, 2019. Rachel and Bee, who compose the report collection team, have been communicating privately with people reporting harm to ensure their reports are collected accurately and honor each person’s needs and boundaries. They have also worked on compiling the formal reports that came in through the google form, and are using all of these experiences to create a more complete understanding of Charlie’s patterns of harm. A summary report is also currently being prepared.

Health of Team

Throughout this time, our pod members have also been prioritizing their own needs for self care, balance, and (of course) maintaining our professional roles and nourishing our relationships. This has meant that some of us have had to take breaks for short periods of time to attend to other needs, and that we’ve been able to ask each other for support during those times. Accountability work, in general but also in this specific case, requires us to be mentally and emotionally present. And, because we all know that this is not a quick or simple process, it’s important for us to have a group value that prioritizes each person’s safety, balance, and self care.

Some of these breaks have happened organically, and some have been more pre-planned (e.g. vacations, offline periods for members).

Communicating to Others

While doing our work together, we realized that while Charlie had noted in our initial documentation on Medium that he was taking a break from teaching effective January 2018, that information was not noted on his websites. The team did not realize this omission until we were notified that Charlie had responded to an email recommending him as an educator to an organization with the request to set up a time to talk about it. When directly questioned about why and how he responded (read: inviting further conversation rather than directly and immediately stating he was not teaching and why), Charlie noted that his intention was to tell them that he was engaged in an accountability process, and that he would be willing to talk to them about teaching once this process was concluded. This brought up the theme once again of intent versus impact, and in this case, the ways it hurt trust in the pod given that we found out about these interactions not from Charlie. One pod member, who was on the board of the organization that received the email, was able to take time during a pod meeting to discuss the ways that this affected them, both personally and as a board member, and directly engaged with Charlie to ask for him to be accountable for not only his actions but also for the effects that his actions had on them.

Charlie was also asked to participate in other teaching during this time — once for a SAR (Sexual Attitude Reassessment) being offered by a professional organization, once to participate on a panel, and once to engage in an internal professional training that would be recorded and provided to future staff. In these cases, he brought these requests to the pod during our meetings to see if we believed that these fell within the bounds of his previously stated agreement to refrain from teaching workshops and classes. When we asked Charlie why he had not simply said no to these requests, he stated that he was not sure whether these were the kinds of opportunities that were included in his initial agreement, and that he would be willing to say no if the pod thought it appropriate. The pod agreed that these were teaching opportunities that should be turned down, as participating in them would be in violation of his own agreement to refrain from teaching until his formal accountability process ends.

(As a note: after these discussions took place, we realized that the initial reasons that Charlie decided to take a break from teaching prior to initiating this accountability process were somewhat different from the additional reasons that the pod felt important to note, so this was a learning process for us in better communication about understanding intent).

These incidents have pointed out a few places for growth and challenge. Charlie is hesitant to think more globally about the impact of his actions. While Charlie is willing to participate in discussion, set intentions, and abide by the final decision of the pod, he has also refrained from giving full details of situations when initially requested, and occasionally defaults to explaining the whys of his actions rather than deeply considering the ways that they may affect others. These seem to be problematic, longstanding patterns rather than newly discovered ones, and we are still working to unravel them. The pod as a whole continues to call these to his attention and hold a mirror up to him, and challenge him to take deeper and more authentic accountability. We also acknowledge that our work as a pod is also limited by our own biases and the information we have access to at any given time, so it is possible — and in fact likely — that things will change and be revised as more information is shared and discussed over time.

Charlie’s Work

Charlie has been working with the pod to address the themes of the harms, based on what he has learned through his own exploration before and during his formal accountability process. As part of this, Charlie has been engaging in discussions with pod members focusing on the ways that his role as a leader in the community, as well as his identity as a cis white man, have allowed his problematic and harmful actions to go unquestioned and unchecked. He has continued to do work with his therapist & supervisor, and has been regularly meeting with pod members, both in formal meetings and in smaller group or one-on-one conversations.

Charlie has been challenged to re-think his ideas of what leadership is and how he was separating himself from the concept in ways that caused harm while also reaping the benefits of others seeing him as a leader (e.g. social clout, access to new business opportunities, etc.). We have worked with him on better and more fully acknowledging this, and shifting from the idea that he is not a leader to one where he more fully understands that his role as leader — whether or not he sees himself as one or not — requires that his actions be intentional and mindful of the ways he carries power. Not considering himself a leader was both reflecting and creating situations where he would deflect self-evaluation, not uphold ethical standards of leadership, and not appropriately account for his impact on others.

Next Steps

• We will be discussing a draft of the preliminary report of harms with reporting parties who have requested to be informed and kept in consultation. After consultation with reporting parties, we will review the revised report with Charlie before public release. Our intention is to ensure the needs of harmed parties are prioritized and that our process in reporting to the public provides harmed parties opportunities to collaborate, review, and consent on the information shared in our documents.
• We will be sharing a timeline compiled by AV Flox and assisted by community members — including people Charlie harmed — detailing a sequence of events from early 2016-early 2018 surrounding Charlie’s abuse of his then-partner. This timeline also notes ways that other people and organizations acted to support Charlie and prevent him from being fully accountable for his harms. Based on AV’s initial outreach, as well as our subsequent outreach to some of the people who contributed to the outline, we are sharing this with consent. If anyone wishes to amend that permission, please reach out and we can request it be modified to the document owners (AV and a few other people with editing permissions).
• Part of our work will also be to connect with people who colluded with Charlie and enabled his harms, whether passively or actively.
• We have also been revisiting the initial public statement and will be providing a document that shows these changes via our Medium account. The bulk of these changes came as a result of asking Charlie to read through the document again and remove/adjust language that created distance from the harm he caused and painted it in vague or displacing terms.
• Charlie has been writing about his changing view of his role as a leader and the ways he can better account for power when communicating with others to better ward against using power over them. We plan to share that document via Medium as well.
• We are also working on a statement about community engagement, detailing ways that the community can support accountability processes both in this situation and in the future. We anticipate these items to be published within the next few months.

As always, should you wish to contact pod members privately, you can email us collectively at cgaccpod@gmail.com (this email address is shared with pod members only; Charlie and our consultant do not have access to these emails.)