2025 starts with really “great” news: the right-wing AfD party is bragging about making an obviously false criminal report about a project from the German self-help community and a journalist that I had hoped never to hear from again has published a piece on pedophiles. Let's start with the media thingy:
I'll come straight to the point: I think what Andrew Gold has produced is sensationalist bs. On January 8th, Mr. Gold published an article along with a video under the title The Full Story About the Pedophile I Met in the Park. The video starts directly with a lie that kind of portrays German medical confidentiality as absurd, and it doesn't really get much better from there.
The man turned up on the GSA forum 5-6 years ago looking for interview partners. He found at least two willing contacts there: Zidane and Silas. Unfortunately. Originally there were more, but some (like me) refused to be interviewed because he couldn't offer us any meaningful basis for trust at the beginning and didn't behave any more professionally later on. I would advise everyone in the community to do the same. The present video by him should suffice as the sole reason.
Back then, it stood out that contact with him was very erratic: sometimes he would talk about a book, sometimes a podcast, then first an article and later a book ... In between, we wouldn't hear back from him for weeks or months at a time. Questions about the details of his plans and the projects he wanted to interview us for were often met with excuses. I'd like to take this as an opportunity to take a look at a few characteristics of good or bad media contacts. But I should take more time for that than for this short blog post. Just this for now:
Press people do what they do because it's their job and it pays their bills. Commitment may come into the equation, but if it didn't pay the bills, these people would be doing something else for a living. So it is a job for them. For us, it is “our topic”, sometimes a life burden or trauma, sometimes a calling or a passion to raise awareness and talk about it. Above all, however, it is risky for us. Hardly anything can be riskier for a person with pedophilia than talking about it to strangers. This creates a real imbalance in contact with journalists: we have the story, they (or their media companies) want to make money from it; we have the risk, they have a job.
Your safety is worth more than getting your story printed, so please don't under-sell yourself. It is the job of the journalists to use professionalism and flexibility to reduce the requirements and the risk for you to such an extent that your effort is minimal.
This means, for example: You are not the one asking for something, they are. You have a story, they want it. If you have travel costs or lose a day at work, they have pools from which this can be reimbursed. If something is difficult to do anonymously but is important to you, they will find a way to make it possible for you, provided your safety is really important to them. Above all, however, THEY must arrange the circumstances of an interview in such a way that you feel safe and comfortable entrusting them with your personal and possibly quite intimate thoughts. So that you feel comfortable with the process and the outcome before, during and long after the interview. If they don't, it shows either unwillingness or unprofessionalism and is not a trivial offense that should be overlooked. In my contacts with the media, concessions of this kind have always come back to bite me: the pieces where I had to turn a blind eye during the collaboration have always turned out to be rubbish. Absolutely no matter how nice and personally committed my contact person had seemed.
I have been notified that several members of the community have filed complaints against a female AfD member. She had made inflammatory and misleading allegations about the team behind Wir-sind-auch-Menschen.org (WSAM) on X (formerly Twitter) and recently boasted with having reported these allegations to the police. See this post by WSAM on this. Fraudulently reporting a criminal offense where there is none is itself a punishable offense.
Based on my own experiences with criminal prosecution for incitement/hate against us activists, I have little hope that anything meaningful will be done against the politician. But sometimes there are signs and wonders. I am of the opinion that her actions and the posts in question are absolutely clear-cut criminal offenses. The question remains, of course, whether the authorities are even interested.
I wish Sirius, Rubricappula, Regenbogenfisch and their colleagues all the best, lots of strength and that they themselves and their great work online will remain unharmed.
Update regarding Andrew Gold:
At Kinder im Herzen Sirius and Rubricappula have addressed Mr. Gold in an open letter on January 24th: https://kinder-im-herzen.net/blog/open-letter-to-andrew-gold
Update regarding AfD (Vanessa Behrendt):
Consuela posted on Wednesday that he has filed a criminal complaint: https://www.mapblog.xyz/?p=1012
Second update regarding AfD (Vanessa Behrendt):
According to a new post by WSAM the police has investigated the criminal report by the AFD against them and in result closed the case. So there will be no prosecution whatsoever. That is a first burden off my heart and surely off their hearts as well.