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 the world's oldest website 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 self-help chat, for example. When I left the team (partly 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, FCA didn’t leave it at that, but instead pulled a handful of more strange moves out of their hat. 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 and left us both appalled and shaking our heads in disbelief.

Spring 2024

From the founding of the Fate and Challenge Association until late March 2024, Leon 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. Leon repeatedly made it clear throughout his entire term of office that he was rather difficult to reach by e-mail and asked for reminders via SMS and consultation by phone call, when something important was pending. According to him, this was largely ignored, so he became increasingly frustrated at being left out of the loop. While still part of the team I had the same impression that 95% of the internal communication within the association bypassed him and that his comments and questions often went unanswered. He did largely stay out of self-help, as the technical side was more his domain. Nevertheless, as a board member, you can expect that a conversation is sought regularly for coordination, right? Conversation, not just short written message or e-mail.

Particularly important tasks in an association include planning for the annual general meetings and accepting new members (which requires the approval of ALL team members). Leon told me that he had only been sent an invitation e-mail for the 2024 general meeting. No consultation with him about the date, the agenda or anything else beforehand. Only when the meeting was already underway did Markus (and not even Caspar himself as the person responsible) ask him when he wanted to join. Leon responded to this final affront by resigning from the board, team and association. “Take my name out everywhere on the site” was his request. At the same general meeting, Mano was made a board member in his place. It seems they’d rather trust the cat to keep the cream.

On April 11th, I wrote a post in the GSA forum criticizing the fact that Leon had only been quietly removed from the team lists but after several weeks there was still no public explanation. That post was moderated away on the grounds that they didn't want to discuss very distressing internal team matters in the forum.

The later announcement of Leon’s departure at GSA speaks fondly of heartfelt thanks and concludes: “This resignation has no effect on the operation of our projects. Everything will continue as usual without any problems.” — Without any problems? On a technical level perhaps, but what we see here again is a critical lack of communication. Even my departure 14 months before doesn't seem to have been enough of a wake-up call for the team to improve this. A lack of will? What's more, Leon being singled out had been going on for a very long time. He himself is of the opinion that he was effectively bullied out on a long-term basis.

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 managing it. Accordingly, the text in the new design mentioned Leon and myself exclusively in the past tense and as co-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 where Markus never mentioned the progress of the revision despite various private phone calls and instant messages.

Sommer 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)

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. 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 that's my honest opinion of the team's behavior: bullying — a view that I had already expressed to team members 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 still don't know why it was done this way (without a conversation, by e-mail, without explanation and so violently). I am quite shocked by the extent of the retaliation. 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: killing my voice as an activist. How could I continue to raise awareness and keep in touch without a trusted means of communication? 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”)

Conclusion

And now please tell me: can this entire heap of inconsistencies and negligence that I have [laid out]((ü/texte/abschied-von-suh) reviewing the past events still be explained in any way in good faith through oversights and mistakes? Can even a mishap, when it occurs so frequently and always harms the same two people, still be classified as unintentional?

Judge for yourself.

(As always, big thanks to DeepL.com for helping with the translation. We all need to be nice to our future AI overlords, don’t we?)