Convention Punishes Victim of Harassment
Perhaps “disgrace” is the theme of today’s column, because I have no other way to describe what PenguiCon recently did to Patrick S. Tomlinson.
PenguiCon is a long-running convention in the Ann Arbor, Michigan, area. The convention was held in late April and had originally invited Tomlinson to be a presenter. However, as Tomlinson described in the must-read essay “
PenguiCon 2024 Postmortem Or How Not To Handle Cyberstalking,” the convention disinvited him shortly before it started.
As people in the genre already know,
Tomlinson has been harassed for years by a group of online trolls, resulting in the author being called the "
most swatted man in America." This harassment has easily crossed into terrorism with the trolls making bomb threats against a number of public venues in various states,
including a Patti LaBelle concert in Milwaukee where Tomlinson lives.
One thing the trolls do is impersonate Tomlinson and harass other people using his name.
According to Tomlinson, this appears to be what happened at PenguiCon, with both convention staffers and guests of honor receiving threatening messages supposedly from him through both fake social media accounts and other means.
A post on the PenguiCon website backs up part of this, with one convention staffer admitting they mishandled the “safety concerns" of one of the guests of honor who withdrew.
In his post, Tomlinson describes trying to work all this out with PenguiCon before going public. However, the response from PenguiCon staff was to blame him for threats of physical violence against their guests. Threats which are, again, being made by the people harassing Tomlinson.
A few days after posting about all this,
Tomlinson also shared a thread about literary agent Leslie Varney, who had posted a
public letter she wrote to PenguiCon urging the convention to not allow Tomlinson to attend. As
Tomlinson stated last year, Varney has evidently joined in the ongoing harassment against him.
According to a public letter Varney posted in June 2023, it appears the trolls harassing Tomlinson impersonated him and convinced her they were him.
In the letter Varney wrote to PenguiCon, she said one of her goals with getting the convention to not allow Tomlinson to attend was to use "your decision as a precedent" to convince the 2025 Worldcon in Seattle to do the same.
As Tomlinson said in his post:
“To any con runners reading this, I cannot stress this next bit enough. DO. NOT. DO. THIS. Excluding the targets of criminal stalking and harassment harms only the victims and helps only the criminals. No one is protected by this decision. No one is made “safe.” Not only does it reward and validate criminal behavior by achieving their strategic goals, it encourages escalation and expansion, endangering attendees and presenters at the next convention on the calendar, your own convention the following year, and every convention thereafter because you’ve taught them to escalate until they get what they want.”
I agree. If the trolls doing this to Tomlinson succeed, this tactic will be normalized and used against other authors and convention guests.
And people in the genre need to know these trolls love having others do their dirty work for them. An example of this took place on May 15, when the trolls posted a fake Craigslist ad that convinced
random people to steal handmade chairs from Tomlinson’s backyard. Thankfully, once these people realized they’d been duped, they returned the chairs.
And make no mistake, the harassment of Tomlinson continues full steam. The other night one of the trolls
drove down the alley behind Tomlinson’s house and threw a can of paint at his car. On the can were Nazi symbols along with a picture of a gun held to his face.
indeed, Dr. Wolfe, indeed. I'm so sorry, Dawn.
"Listen, Nikky, I know we've been living in hell for over half a decade, your mother's retirement fund is gone, the hovel's getting SWATTed every other day, my writing career is in shambles, we're forced to rent out half of the house on Airbnb, a meme about spooks farting in your cunt has reached worldwide recognition and we've both become one of the biggest targets of mockery and ridicule on the entire Internet, but I've finally figured how to make it all go away. That's right, Nikky, I've finally figured out how to fix everything. Trust me, it's the perfect plan. All the atalker childs will be enjoying prison and we'll be rich and famous, for the right reasons this time. It's all gonna be over soon, I promise, but I can't do it without you. I need your help, Nikky. I love you, honey. Will you help me?"
