How We Have Fulfilled the Requests of People Who Have Reported Harm — Introduction

7 min readNov 18, 2022

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.

(This post was written by the accountability pod members and primary consultant in collaboration with a ghostwriter. More information about the decision to hire a ghostwriter can be found in the post.)

Introduction

As we’ve shared before, creating change in situations of ongoing, repeated harm takes many people and many points of intervention. This group (the pod and consultants) began this work with an active focus on Charlie, his behaviors, and the harms he caused for various reasons, but two of the big ones are that 1) he directly asked us for that support and 2) we found it valuable to reduce these harms by going straight to a source of them: Charlie himself. That said, it is both inadvisable and impossible to change these kinds of harmful patterns by just looking at or intervening with a single person and their perspective. So, throughout our time together, we have aimed to center as much of the experiences and needs of the people he harmed as possible and share part of our process publicly to create wider change in the communities he’s in. To do that as responsibly, affirmatively, and ethically as we could — along with looking at all the public information about these situations — we created a way for people to communicate with us about the harms they experienced. When collecting reports of harm and communicating with those who submitted them formally as well as informally, we gave Harmed Individuals (see below) and community members the opportunity to make requests of Charlie and the team. Unless requested by those who reported harm, Charlie did not read individual reports or requests. Instead, the narrative collection team (a subgroup of the pod), with the approval and/or oversight of our Respondents, provided Charlie with anonymized summaries and important themes of the experiences of harm and requests.

When experiences were shared informally, whoever was the first point of contact either a) remained as the point of contact throughout or b) handed the role of contact off to the narrative collection team. Some people who first shared informally went on to offer more detailed, formal reports. Many of the first informal Respondents and Contributors were initially contacted by the primary consultant, Aida Manduley. The consultant had a range of connections to these individuals and could offer a more familiar point of contact or warm hand-off. This is also tied to the fact that before this process formally began in 2018, the primary consultant was actively engaged as a community member in calling Charlie both out and in, as well as supporting others who were doing the same.

A Note on Our Terminology

Within this series of posts regarding requests, we will use the following terms to specify certain groups of Harmed Individuals. These terms represent real people. As such, we will be using the following as proper nouns when referring to people throughout this document.

“Respondents” will refer to individuals who submitted experiences of harm through our formal story collection process spearheaded by our narrative collection team.
“Contributors” includes all the individuals we are aware of who have named Charlie’s harmful behaviors, either formally or informally, directly to any of us or indirectly by making their statements publicly accessible (as in on social media).
“Harmed Individuals” is our way of acknowledging all those who have been negatively impacted, including those who have not spoken out. In this work, we have also kept those folks in mind.

How we Facilitated and Organized Requests

Whether an ask was made by a single person or by various people, we tried to treat all of the requests and the people who shared them with the same high level of respect and care. Because we couldn’t tackle everything at once, we needed to figure out (and adjust often!) how we would prioritize and re-prioritize which requests to focus on. This was done keeping in mind how the requests related to each other as well as our general scope of work. There’s no magical formula for this, but the evaluative questions we used for organizing included:

What is the level of urgency (as stated explicitly by the Harmed Individual and/or as perceived by the narrative collection team and pod)?

For example: If someone told us they could wait on a reply from us or that something wasn’t urgent, that might bump it down the list on this axis. If someone expressed intense distress, how could we honor that and discern between feelings of distress and immediate physical or psychological danger (the latter of which would bump its priority up on this axis)? If someone wasn’t in touch with us directly (which might bump it down in priority due to lack of information, clarity, feedback mechanisms, etc.), was the requester directly harmed by Charlie (bumping the ask higher) or were they more of a bystander (possibly bumping it down)?

What level of safety or harm reduction could result from meeting the request and how might speed affect that impact, as well as the fulfillment of the ask itself?

For example: Would doing something fast but less thoughtfully be better or worse and how so/for whom? How could a request reduce harm and/or create safety for Harmed Individuals immediately versus long term? What actions or requests could stop immediate harm from Charlie more quickly and decisively and have wider impact versus impact on only a few people or spaces? Is someone actively in danger now (bumped up in priority) or is the ask related to something that is no longer happening (might bump it down)?

What kinds of oppression and hardship were Harmed Individuals facing overall — especially if directly related to Charlie’s harms — and what impact might we have on their safety and wellbeing?

For example: If a Harmed Individual had less access to a support system and care, was facing immediate hardship, and/or had more marginalized identities, we would generally want to prioritize requests related to them. Not that we were playing “Oppression Olympics,” but we were aiming to keep equity and justice in mind. We acknowledge how often people with greater power and influence get more support and/or get their harm addressed faster, and we didn’t want to fall into that trap.

What resources (internal and external) did we have available to help fulfill the requests, and how could they be allocated across requests?

For example: Our ability to focus on requests was, at times, impacted by our team’s professional and personal schedules and emotional capacities. There were other times when requests required our team to communicate and coordinate with outside organizations. While working through requests for financial reparations, for example, certain financial limitations needed to be taken into consideration as well. Additionally, some requests required in-depth consultation within the team, utilizing our diversity of skill sets. Due to our own agreements regarding concord and consensus, we tried to limit any one person making a decision and ensure that at least two people were involved in the decision-making process, if not more.

What requests could be addressed sooner versus which would need a longer timeline?

For example: Honoring some requests required a series of scheduled conversations, including deep inquiry with Charlie, while others could be resolved with an email or a brief phone or video call.

What are the individual and group capacities of our team at any given time? What is Charlie’s capacity? (Below are some of the factors we had to consider and which we can retrospectively catalog had an impact.)

Personal factors: Several of us are disabled or have chronic conditions that can interrupt our ability to work. Some of us were moving/changing living situations. Others were dealing with chronic or terminal illness and/or death of loved ones during this process. Several of us changed jobs and/or increased responsibilities/intensity of work or in school. We also dealt with natural disasters in our different regions (hurricanes, flooding and mold, snow and ice storms, and power outages disrupted our lives and work flow in the process). In addition, some of the harms we worked to address were triggering for us as trauma survivors ourselves, and so it took time and resources for us to calm our nervous systems and re-engage.
The pandemic: The COVID-19 pandemic created anxiety, uncertainty, and shifts in our daily lives, income, relationships, and physical and emotional bandwidth. Some of us faced loss of employment and financial hardship related to the pandemic.
Roles: We experienced a lot of fatigue in our more administrative roles and tried various solutions to this, such as creating rotating roles for reporting and meetings. Additionally, our narrative collection team’s focus on providing the highest level of confidentiality and continuity for our Respondents required time, coordination, and frequent in-depth dialogues about ethical considerations.

There was a lot of work outside the specific actions requested by Contributors (which is addressed in a separate post entitled “Charlie’s Patterns”), as we felt it was important to be as comprehensive as we could manage, striving to go beyond the minimum of what was asked of us.

In the following posts, we will detail the requests, how we’ve worked with Charlie and others to fulfill them, and what work is still in progress. While the narrative collection team presented all requests (verbatim when possible and with consent) to Charlie, the pod, and the consultant, some requests have not been fulfilled. Those requests have been addressed in this report, as well as the reasons why they have not been fulfilled (or why they are still in progress).

NOTE: Some of the requests are presented in this report exactly as given to us. Other requests are organized under a single heading to include various people who used slightly different words, or are summarized to protect anonymity.

We have provided separate posts for each request, which can be accessed through the links below: [LINK EACH OF THESE TO THEIR POSTS]

How We Have Fulfilled the Requests of People Who Have Reported Harm — Introduction

Written by Charlie Glickman Accountability Pod