The Icing on the Icing on the Cake — Leon, FCA and me through 2024

The Fate and Challenge (FCA) project is very close to my heart. Since Marco’s departure, I have helped to build it up into an independent association with a respectable name in the community and among experts. FCA is one of the world's oldest websites by pedophiles about pedophilia that I know of, which clearly opposes all forms of sexual offense. And the association runs the only pedophile self-help forum in German-speaking countries that clearly shares this stance. Fortunately, there are more such websites now and with P-Punkte also a self-help chat, for example. When I left the team in protest, I called the experiences from November 2022 a “final icing on the cake” and believed that the team would let me go in peace.

Unfortunately, they didn’t leave it at that, but instead made some more really strange moves. This is to be my last blog post to work through the events surrounding my departure from the FCA team. Events that also affected Leon and his departure (board member until 2024).

Spring 2024

From the founding of the Fate and Challenge Association until late March 2024, Leon S. Kennedy was one of 2 board members who legally held the power to represent the organization. Caspar being the other one. The articles of association deliberately did not define an order of precedence, such as 1st and 2nd board member. However, he largely stayed out of the self-help aspect and saw his role as primarily focused on technical support and the administrative duties of the board.

In the official team chat, relevant questions directed at him were usually lost amid the flood of other topics, and experience has shown that written communication—including email—is difficult for him anyway given his very busy schedule. That’s why Leon repeatedly asked to be contacted directly (by phone or SMS). This request was largely ignored throughout his entire term, leading him to repeatedly express that he felt left out. While other team members offered words of reassurance, they did nothing to address the issue. This aligns with my own impression: as long as I was still a member of the team, 95% of internal association communications bypassed him (and later, thanks to the creation of separate moderator chat groups, increasingly bypassed me as well), and Leon’s occasional messages in the chat often went unanswered.

As a board member, isn't it reasonable to expect that your colleagues will seek to talk with you on a regular basis? And I mean talk as opposed to mere short written messages or e-mails.

Coordination within the board plays a particularly important role in all matters related to association law, such as planning general meetings or preparing for the admission of new members or volunteers.¹ He told me that he had merely been invited to the 2024 general meeting via email. There was no prior consultation with him regarding the date, the agenda, or anything else. Only once the meeting was already underway did Markus call Leon on behalf of the board (and not even the other board member himself) to ask when he wanted to join. I had Leon on the phone at the time, and the man was speechless! Once he had composed himself, he responded clearly to this latest affront by immediately resigning from SuH. “Take me off everything,” was his request. At a subsequent general meeting, Mano was then appointed to the board in his place. Judging by his previous communication style, this was the worst possible choice.

A few weeks later, Leon had been quietly removed from the team line-up, but there was still no announcement regarding the change in leadership. I found that highly untransparent and, in a way, disrespectful. I brought it up in the forum, but my post was moderated away on the grounds that they didn’t want to discuss “highly sensitive internal matters concerning the team and the club” in the forum. Does a change in the board now count as internal matters? A process that even requires official registration??

I would have preferred a more honest discussion, something like: “We recently held a general meeting and, unfortunately, made a huge mistake in that context. A long-standing communication problem has repeatedly led to great frustration for Leon. As a result, he has now resigned from his board position and ended his club and team membership. We are sad to see him go, but we wish him all the best and will take this as a lesson to work on internal team communication.”

In contrast, how sincere does FCA’s later announcement of his departure from GSA seem? Here is a screenshot:

The message is full of flowery expressions of heartfelt thanks, and it concludes with: “This departure has absolutely no impact on the operation of our projects. Everything continues as usual without any problems.” – Let’s break this down for a moment: How can the departure of a long-time member have “absolutely no impact” on such a small team? Only if that member was completely irrelevant to that team from the beginning.
If “everything continues as usual,” then surely nothing was learned?
And “without any problems” Leon and I wouldn’t have left in the first place.

Ultimately, this flowery post simply negates, stifles, and dismisses what was our last chance to voice our protest, reducing it to a value-neutral statement: “He decided to leave.” Not a hint of a problem is mentioned, and it sounds as if everything is wonderful and all is well – even though Leon’s departure was likely quite a disaster for the organization. And a direct consequence of persistent poor communication. Not even my departure seems to have served as a wake-up call for the team to improve this in the meantime. Why?

As mentioned, the exclusion of Leon has been going on for a very long time and has not been stopped despite repeated requests to do so. This time factor, combined with the lack of communication, are the two main reasons why we are now addressing these issues publicly rather than continuing to handle them internally (which, after all, has yielded no results for years), and why we are also emphatically labeling them as bullying.

Shadows Project

In early June, Leon and I accidentally discovered the unauthorized release of Shadows Project (SP) with the aftermath I have described in my first blog post. According to our current state of information, Markus had presented the project to third parties as “abandoned” and established himself as the new person in charge. That could have looked far more innocent if the text in the new design hadn’t been changed accordingly, mentioning Leon and myself exclusively in the past tense and as co-founders instead of the founders:

• The text pays tribute to Leon in a list of people who “were involved in Shadows Project” and whom to thank for laying the “groundwork of times past”
• “Leon S. Kennedy […] a computer enthusiast who […] is the programmer behind the website and has spent a lot of time and energy making it work.”
• “Max Weber was instrumental in setting up this project together with other supporters.”
• “Max Weber was the administrator […] He left the team in 2022. We would like to thank you for your great work, your enriching ideas and your helpfulness.”
• “Max Weber - Former administrator of SuH [true], founder of SuH [no that would be Marco] and Shadows-Project [true]”

This new version of SP was apparently released in late February 2024.
> By June, 3 months had passed without any notification to us.
> For 1 month of that time, Leon had still been a board member and thus in the bizarre position of simply not being informed about a project that was running on his behalf.
> And about 9 months had passed (since last talking SP through with Markus) without him mentioning the progress of the revision even once in the several private phone calls and instant messages we exchanged.

Update: The issue was clarified during Caspar’s and NewMan’s conversation with Leon and me, in that this course of action had not been intended. They apologized. See also “An Attempt at Mutual Understanding IV”.

Summer 2024

At the end of June 2024, the FCA team informed me via e-mail that all the services they had promised to permanently provide to me as a long-standing operator and board member when I left would be discontinued within a few weeks and that my blog and Shadows Project would be handed over to me. Note the contradiction: promised permanently and soon to be discontinued. (This deadline was later graciously extended) Again without an attempt to deescalate first.

This came out of nowhere to me and felt like a kick in the teeth. The email contained no motivation or explanation for this decision. I want to remind them of the of the key concepts of “reliability,” “transparency,” and “communication.”

What I have since been told about the background, again, I only know because I sought a conversation with Caspar: I'd recently lost my cool once on a peer-support chat dropping the word “bullying” — that had been passed on to the FCA team and they felt like they had to react.

That it was bullying is my honest opinion of the team's behavior and a view that I had expressed to team members before in 2022 and 2023. So this wasn't news to them.

I could have quickly guessed that this might spark some protest by the team. But I am quite shocked by the extent of their retaliation. Why no conversation, why by e-mail without explanation and why so violently? Should the FCA team not have been aware that this practically amounted to “shutting me up”? Deleting my e-mail account of many years and discontinuing the promised hosting of my blog achieves exactly that: silencing my voice as an activist.

Apparently, my openness about my assessment of our interaction was seen as a threat and incompatible with supporting my work. Not entirely incomprehensible, but was it necessary to be presented with fait accompli without any discussion? Was it appropriate? And was it still out of the question for FCA to take a critical look at their own actions?

And again their website kept silent about the whole thing. I wasn't worth to be contacted personally and I wasn't even worth a line.

For me, this meant months of work to set up my own infrastructure and high mental and financial costs. It was only thanks to the willing help of friends from the community that the financial side remained within affordable limits at all! (Keywords “web design” and “programming”)

My contribution

Another factor that likely contributed to this situation is that I’m certainly not a natural team player. I’m angular and edgy, sometimes easily triggered by my own past, and I hold myself—and others—to high standards. Furthermore, I place an unusually high value on direct, open (and, if possible, kind) communication. This is also partly due to my neurodiversity (ADHD)—this is the only way I function well, and this is the only approach I offer to others. But not everyone can manage that, and not everyone can handle it.
To align my perception with reality, I often asked for feedback and even discussed specific issues with professionals (social workers, therapists) and with Leon. The response I always received was that such clear communication is correct and essential for interaction within a team.
So what’s the deal? Am I hurtful, self-righteous, and demanding, or am I just right? Apparently, opinions are divided on my “always be clear and open” approach.

As mentioned elsewhere, when we founded the team, NewMan and I lacked a great deal of experience in how to build and lead a team. We assumed we could simply expand our group of three or four without imposing many rules or new structures. We were never fans of hierarchies and wanted the team to remain grassroots democratic. We really thought it was enough that we all had roughly the same goal. Before this major turning point, I don’t think we had ever really defined for ourselves exactly how we viewed our activism and self-help work, or what methods we had developed and why. That’s why we couldn’t offer the new team members direction, explain the established processes and contexts to them, or communicate how we envisioned our collaboration. For example, I was once left speechless when, after years of working together, a GSA moderator seriously asked me what Fate and Challenge was and did, and why this website should matter to him at all. (Fate and Challenge (FCA) is the operator and foundation of the GSA forum as well as its good reputation: without FCA, there is no forum.) To me, that was as absurd as if someone had worked part-time at the engine plant for years and thought his company was called “Engine Plant,” while “Volkswagen” was written in big letters on the building. To him, that was… normal. We had failed to lay the foundation properly.

A more professional approach from the start and a better understanding of human nature might well have mitigated many of the problems I’m criticizing here. But could they have eliminated them entirely? If NewMan, Leon, and I had set much stricter guidelines for teamwork, would a forum have even come together in 2016/17? I don’t know.

Leon and I also feel that personal relationships both within and outside the team had a very unprofessional impact on our collaboration. There were far too many personal connections and agendas among us. For example, the fact that we all so readily invited Mascha was, in hindsight, a serious mistake. And unfortunately, my long-distance relationship with forum member Liv also contributed significantly to the discord within the team. None of us was initially able to properly interpret and curb the absurdity with which she sought to influence me and the team’s processes. I would say today: she was actually right about half of her assessments, actions, and demands, but I should have protected the team from the other half—which I failed to do because of my own rose-tinted glasses. It cost me a lot of energy and nerves.

Conclusion

This is the third and final planned part of this review. (Click here for Part 1 and Part 2) Following the revisions made at FCA’s urging, hopefully much of this is now clearer and more thoughtfully presented. You are now invited to form your own opinion about everything that was going on behind the “happy facade” and remained unsaid. (Why we’re addressing this publicly at all is covered in Point 1 of “An Attempt at Mutual Understanding IV”) Feel free to tell Leon and me: How do you view the communication problems, the inconsistencies, and the long-standing issues we’ve experienced and are trying to process? Do you find them normal or understandable? Somehow balanced, since we’re all imperfect? Is this primarily our own fault, or can it be explained in good faith on FCA’s part as mere oversights and understandable reactions?

Judge for yourselves.

For Leon and me, at any rate, one thing is certain: an inadvertence that occurs frequently and “coincidentally” affects the same two people over and over again for years, can no longer be classified as unintentional.

(As always, big thanks to DeepL.com for helping with the translation.)