InsaneJournal

Reposted from xanga: Putting the facts on the table
I was recently requested to make this post available again.

Thursday, April 26, 2007

Putting the facts on the table

What is missing is the history that led to the current state of affairs and that needs to be here.

I encountered Pacione as a relative newcomer to the web. I had never posted on messageboards and had just made my very first blog.

I am a disabled woman, 54 years old this coming October. I was encouraged by friends, my editors, and my agent, to make the internet my window on the world since I could no longer do the things physically that I once did.

At the time that I first encountered Pacione, I was naive as far as the internet goes. He approached me on seeing that I was a published writer and asked me to look at his material and tell him what I thought. Now, I have been in the publishing industry for 30 years. I had no idea who NP was, nor had I an inkling of his reputation for vitriol. When I saw the level of the grammatical errors I assumed that he must be in no more than junior high, and possibly a special needs student.

I suggested, as gently as I could, that he needed to take a course in grammar and sentence structure and I recommended Strunk and White to him.

This occured, starting in September of 2003 at Gothic.net.

The reaction I got from him was filled with rage and sexual slurs. It soon became clear that he had gone all over the net to uncover every personal fact about me that he could, and among his discoveries was a blog where I was posting about the fact that I'm a bi-sexual gender queer, who is out of the closet. He threw that in my face immediately.

I reacted in hurt and anger, and then I stopped going to Gothic.net for the space of a month or so. When I finally returned, I found that he was still bad-mouthing me and making outrageous statements concerning my sexual orientation. I left him a few choice retorts and did not return to Gothic net between mid-December to April of 04.



When I returned to Gothic.net in April, I discovered that people there were still bad-mouthing him and I posted that I was very surprised to see this continuing despite his having been banned in December for abusive behavior.

He must have been reading Gothic.net at the time despite being banned, because he sent me, seemingly out of the blue a series of abusive emails that startled me. I responded in close kind telling him to leave me alone. I thought that was that.

However, on June 17th of 2004, Pacione joined HWA, which I was a member of, and immediately went after me again. He posted that he had written a story called "The Fandom Writer" and that it was a "diss story" and a "cautionary tale of plagiarism." And that it was about me.

Coming out of the seeming blue and at a place I had felt safe at up until then, I felt like I had been pole-axed. To make matters worse, when I mentioned this to an editor I was courting in hopes of making more sales, she said to me "Have you seen this?"

What she had seen was that all those months that I thought nothing had been going on, Pacione had been smearing my reputation across the net, posting to every horror board that he could find, including the ones that were mostly pros and fans, the Fandom Writer, and accusing me of plagiarizing him.

What he didn't seem to realize was that, at that time, the only things I had available (both on the net and in print) were sword and sorcery tales that had seen their original publication while he was still in diapers.

Had people taken him seriously, my reputation would have suffered irreparable harm. All that time, all those months that I had written him off and ignored him, he had not been ignoring me.

Needless to say, I lost my temper. I also lost my naivete about the net. I posted an angry blog comment on the state of affairs, and started trying (with more than a little success) to get the Fandom Writer taken down off varioius sites. Meanwhile, my daughter had posted a comment to my LJ "Way to go, mom" and NP had read that. He started stalking her. He also emailed a large number of my peers about The Fandom Writer, bragging that he had hurt me with it, and accusing me of plagiarism, still not realizing that I was not a horror author.

He stalked my daughter and myself for months. When she was hospitalized with what turned out to be kidney stones, Pacione posted the comment to all of my blogs that he hoped she had cancer and would die because "faggots like you [me]" deserved it.

For the next several years, although I tried to ignore him, he would go off on me and start up again, spreading lies and rumors about me and my daughter, attempting to terrorize both of us.

It reached the point where I felt I had no choice but to take the war to him rather than continue to have him bringing it to me when I least expected it.

Among the many things he has done to me, he contacted my publishers and distributors, my agent and my editors, trying to get them to dump me. He called my unlisted phone number that he got from the HWA directory many times trying to humiliate and threaten me. He posted my address and my phone number on the web in several places.

He persuaded a group of anarchist youngsters to spam my daughter's blogs and my own, calling me a "nigger." My daughter got over three hundred abusive posts from Nicky and his little group in under an hour.

Then he made a post accusing me of stealing from Robert E. Howard and he has continued to try and threaten me with the publication of the Fandom Writer (I have screenshots of this).

Over the years, I learned that I was not alone. NP also threatened to rape a 14 year old girl who did not like his work. He has done to many, many others what he has done to me.

At that point, I was forced to regard him as a rabid animal and treat him as such.