How We Have Fulfilled Requests, Part 1 of 10
This post (1 of 10) is a portion of our larger report on “How We Have Fulfilled Requests of People Who Have Reported Harm.” Follow this link for an introduction to our terminology, how we facilitated and organized requests, and for a table of contents for each request.
Accountability Request 1:
Communication with professional organizations Charlie is/was affiliated with to address the harms he caused.
Contributors have requested that Charlie contact the ethics committees of the organizations to which he reports, informing them of his harms so that they can take appropriate action and help hold him accountable. We worked to honor this request by contacting all organizations Charlie was affiliated or credentialed with. We also contacted event planners for venues, clubs, and organizations where Charlie taught between 2016 and 2018. The list of places was collaboratively developed and involved: Some of us on the team listed what we already knew of Charlie’s teaching gigs and certifications and collected what organizations community members stated as relevant, and Charlie did a deep dive into his calendars and documents, plus more detailed below. The scope of this request expanded over time as the list of harms identified by Contributors and the pod also expanded. The pod and Charlie began connecting with organizations at various times before and during our accountability process, so not all points of contact included comprehensive lists of harms and concerning patterns of behavior. And Charlie’s initial contacts with governing organizations before our accountability process began were not in line with the spirit of the request (and sometimes actively downplayed what was going on). Below, we offer more detail about these various points of contact.
Before our formal accountability process
In September of 2016, Charlie emailed the Association of Certified Sexological Bodyworkers (ACSB), which oversees those practicing sexological bodywork, to find out who he should contact. Around this time, Charlie was encouraged by individuals online as well as fellow professionals to proactively contact organizations about what was going on (which at the time was mostly framed as an issue “outside his professional role” and mostly focused on harm regarding a past intimate partner). He also received a direct request from a community member via Facebook to report himself and his behavior to the ACSB and AASECT. Charlie has shared with us that he contacted these organizations primarily out of a sense of compliance with these suggestions and requests. In his own written communications with the pod and consultant: “I contacted the ACSB, informing them that I had a situation that I wanted to bring to their attention. I reached out to them because I knew that [a Harmed Individual] was in the process of reporting me to them.” Regardless of intention or primary motivations, Charlie’s early outreach to the organizations had the impact of getting his narrative in the mix ahead of the reported grievance. This behavior follows some of his patterns of narrative control.
Furthermore, it’s worth noting that in this case as well as in 2016, the main harms that were being brought up centered primarily on abuse in a relationship and the ensuing blog and social media posts, and didn’t yet include other harms that took place while Charlie was teaching in person or in a more direct professional role. This, we believe, allowed both Charlie and the organizations to dismiss or downplay those harms as occurring within the realm of “personal, not professional,” even though this certainly influenced and connected with his professional behavior, spaces, and resources.
After both Charlie and at least one community member reached out to ACSB, a representative of the organization contacted Charlie through email. Charlie’s response was to ask that representative for a Skype call. (Switching modes of communication from documented written email to in-person, phone, or video call to avoid a record of what was said was a pattern we saw frequently — and one that allowed Charlie to be evasive and potentially engage in gaslighting. These are patterns we have noted and worked on with Charlie. He has made changes in his communication to be more transparent and accountable, though work remains to be done here as well.) Although Charlie doesn’t recall the specifics of that call, he sent the representative a followup email with some details of the timeline, at their request. The closest he got to naming his actions as abuse in this email was: “Sept 2016: I became so upset and triggered that I lost it. I wrote a blog post in which I described my behavior as abusive in the hopes that my taking responsibility for my actions would placate them.”
Charlie did not explicitly name the harm or abusive patterns, as he did not yet see it that way. It wasn’t until Charlie was able to take a step back, learn more about his patterns of harm, and engage in learning during the accountability process that he was able to acknowledge the abusive patterns within the harm he caused and the collusion he sought. It’s our understanding that the ACSB Grievance Committee convened to discuss the complaint they’d received and made a decision they communicated to both Charlie and the person who reported him about a month later, in October 2016. The organization’s response at the time was that this was a private matter and not one they should (or even wished to) exert authority over; if the complaint had involved a client, it would have been a different matter. (It’s also worth noting that Charlie didn’t know who wrote to the ACSB about him until the organization forwarded him an email containing this person’s contact info. While it’s outside the scope of this post to delve into issues of organizational collusion or harm, this bears naming. It is, however, our understanding from third-party information that ACSB is in the process of creating a more robust set of guidelines to protect those who report violations of their ethics code.)
Charlie also contacted the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists (AASECT), which had certified him as a sex educator in 2006. Charlie gave up his certification in 2014 because their ethics code didn’t encompass sexological bodywork, which he was doing. However, in reaction to the individual making the same report about his harmful behavior as they did to ACSB, Charlie reached out to the AASECT ethics committee “for guidance” in September 2016. He received a response from AASECT expressing concern about his behavior on social media and how it would impact his clients. The organization encouraged him to step back from teaching on consent and boundaries. Charlie did not immediately take their advice.
When he finally did commit to taking a temporary step back from teaching and speaking engagements in late January 2018, it was not as an answer to the requests but instead because, in his own words, “I needed to slow way down and focus on what I needed to be doing for myself.” Once the formal accountability process was underway, our team worked with him to examine his motivations for this decision and the need to step back for the community’s sake. This also meant calling him out on more charitable, revisionist takes of his motivations that contradicted things he’d previously said. Some details about the pause in public speaking and teaching will be addressed further under Request 2.
During the accountability process
After the pod finished collecting narratives of harm, there was a renewed request from concerned parties that the pod engage with organizations Charlie was affiliated with. In support of this request, the pod contacted about a dozen organizations Charlie had been involved with to share the Narrative Collection — Summary of Harms Medium post (after it was published in late July 2021). The pod also included the stated request from Contributors for organizational accountability, a link to the Medium site, and an invitation to engage with the pod. The Summary of Harms post included a more extensive set of patterns of harm and ethics violations — as documented by our team — than the list of harms initially shared with organizations by Charlie in 2016. It was important to us that we contact organizations with information and support that would be harder to dismiss, especially in light of how they had handled previous grievances about Charlie. We hoped equipping these organizations with more information about the breadth and impact of Charlie’s behaviors would allow them to engage in a thorough reevaluation of any previous decisions they may have made. Preparation for this outreach took a considerable amount of time, as we needed to, among other things, ensure we had a complete list of organizations and receive consent from certain Contributors to share various pieces of information.
Most organizations did not respond, so a follow up email was sent in August 2021. At that point, some organizations sent a simple acknowledgement of our notification.
ACSB was one organization that did follow up and wanted more information. In addition to the information we sent to them in July 2021, ACSB requested more specifics about the work that Charlie and the pod have done to address the harm reported in the Summary of Harms post. The pod followed up with an email describing the work we have done with Charlie. They thanked us for informing them and expressed an intention to look into the matter. As of the publication of this post, we have not heard back from ACSB.
We have also done a lot of work getting Charlie to assess his relationships with various organizations. First, we had him create a list of organizations and individuals who had backed him up directly and/or indirectly when public calls for his accountability were made online and elsewhere. Those who backed him up indirectly included (but were not limited to) people involved with places where he taught, conferences he spoke at, podcasts he was on, books he contributed to, and more. We asked him to think about who may have enabled some of his abusive or manipulative behavior and went into detail about some of the ways that could manifest, especially in the form of passive enabling. It’s worth noting this was not just asking him “who do you remember?” but also searching emails, pulling our own collective documents and receipts (of which we had many), combing through archived links, reviewing presentation lists and calendar entries, and more until a robust, thorough (yet likely imperfect) list was made. This list (along with a separate list Charlie provided of all his recent gigs and organizational affiliations) helped to inform which organizations we reached out to in July 2021.
The pod consultant addressed issues of organizational enabling and collusion in the monthly all-team meetings. They also gave feedback and resources as needed, as well as combed through many of these documents to point out gaps in understanding and offer further questions or actionables for follow-up. The pod also had several conversations with Charlie (both in pod meetings and in two-on-one meetings), encouraging him to explore the topics of collusion and enabling from a variety of angles. During and following those conversations, members of the pod asked pointed questions about the relationships he’d cataloged, the impact of the enabling behavior on his own path toward accountability, and how that enabling behavior may have contributed to the harm of individuals or the community in general.
Follow this link to go to the Request 2: For Charlie to pause or reduce his work.
Follow this link for an introduction to our reporting on requests and a table of contents for each request.
