Date: June 6th, 2008 6:26 PM
Author: drab institution
Subject: Time to clear up the facts
My name is Patrick Hamm, and I am the person whose private life you have been so thoroughly analyzing in this forum. I first became aware of the discussion threads on autoadmit.com/xoxohth.com a few weeks ago and have been following them via Google Alert ever since. What you proudly term “XO detective work” – the feeding of my name into search engines like Google and Zaba – has produced a series of alleged facts about my person and involvement with Lena that, once misconstrued and taken out of context, allowed you to construct an image in which I violated Harvard’s rules on professional conduct and took advantage of a “young, mentally vulnerable woman”. The situation became somewhat of a nuisance when your crap started showing up near the top of Google searches for my name (accomplished via repeated thread bumping on autoadmit/xoxoth), but given the obscurity of these discussion boards and the small number of thread participants, I was ultimately not concerned. In late May, a user by the clever pseudonym of “Protagonist Hiro” (protagonisthiro@yahoo.com) started sending anonymous emails to my colleagues on Harvard’s graduate student council and two professors in my department (the director of graduate studies and the department chair, whose contact details had previously been posted in one of the discussion threads).
Protagonist Hiro then proceeded to send me the following two, thoughtfully crafted emails:
#1
Subject line: ethics, eh?
something tells me your yale education left you a little short, buddy. far as I know, fucking undergrads is grounds for getting your ass kicked out, and the evidence is on the internet. any comment?
#2
Subject line: undergrad pussy
so now we know how that chick keeps up her gpa. what's your excuse? forgot to check the ad board rules?
I responded with the following email, which has since been posted on NowPublic and autoadmit/xoxoth (and subsequently deconstructed by the– excuse my political incorrectness – alarmingly retarded user “Good Stuff! Keep atop of it!”):
Something tells me that you're the one who should be questioning the quality of your education (wherever you may have obtained it). If you had actually taken the time to read Harvard's regulations, you would have noticed that they are very specific on the implications of instructors getting romantically or sexually involved with current students (i.e. disciplinary investigation), but when it comes to relationships that take place outside the instructional context, they simply warn that such relationships may "lead to difficulties" without threatening any sort of formal action. I'm glad you prefaced your comment with "far as I know", since it seems that you really don't know too much at all. Also, assuming that you possess even a modicum of intelligence, you must realize that a graduate student dating an undergrad is hardly an uncommon sight at any university.
Which gets us to what you consider "evidence on the internet" – material that Lena deliberately posted on her blog, knowing full well that there's nothing illegal or even unethical about sleeping with me.
Then you also make the presumptuous claim that you now "know how that chick [Lena] keeps up her GPA". Lena and I didn't start going out until months after our last class together, and while I have no intention to divulge her academic record, I can assure you that her performance in my classes was far from stellar.
Now on to you. Bracketing the fact that you lack the balls to send me these messages from your personal email account, one has to wonder why you care enough about the lives of complete strangers to contact them with your moralizing crap. You can barely put together a complete sentence (yes, I realize this is an ad hominem attack), yet you feel entitled to ask me for an "excuse" for behavior that doesn't even concern you, and that, more importantly, you are in no position to understand or evaluate. I don't know you personally, so I can only speculate about your motivations for writing me, but here are some possible explanations that come to mind:
1. You know either me or Lena and hold some kind of personal grudge against one of us (in which case you're simply a pathetic coward for not confronting us directly).
2. You are bored and frustrated with your own (sex) life, and hence feel resentful or jealous toward others who seem to have more fun with theirs (in which case the sending of anonymous, implicitly threatening emails again makes you a pathetic coward).
3. You are pathologically opinionated and like to have a moral judgment on everything (in which case you may very well be a Harvard student).
Again, these are pure speculations on my part, but the bottom line remains: this is none of your fucking business, and you should probably consider getting a life. By the way, I'm not your buddy.
Patrick Hamm
Protagonist Hiro replied with another linguistic achievement:
Here in America, Patrick, you're not supposed to force sex on undergrads that you teach, get them fake ID's, get high with them, tell them what clothes to wear, need I go on?
You're 28. She's 20. And she's blogged plenty about her mental issues. You're abusing your power for easy sex . . . Ethics? My hairy fucking asshole.
[partial and out-of-context reproduction of Lena’s blog entry at http://sexandtheivy.com/2008/03/21/nights-and-mornings/]
My reply (not posted anywhere yet, as far as I can tell):
Your lesson on American ethics comes off as somewhat insincere, given that your preferred leisure activity seems to be the anonymous dissemination of defamatory allegations about total strangers.
I suppose I don't need to alert you to the fact that in your most recent email you chose to completely ignore my reply to your prior message, and move on to a different issue. (I take this to mean that you have nothing to say in defense of your unsubstantiated earlier claims.) As for your new accusations, you have established that there is an age difference between Lena and me, and that she has previously blogged about depression and mental health therapy. So far, so good. Then you go ahead and present what you consider evidence of me "abusing [my] power for easy sex" – a passage from one of Lena's blog entries (posted March 21), detailing an episode of sexual role-play involving Lena and me. In addition to taking said passage completely out of context, you fail to mention that the original entry was prefaced by the following disclaimer, which makes it perfectly clear that the activities described do not constitute sexual assault:
"Disclaimer: The following is completely consensual. It is not rape. I do not endorse rape. The guy in the following entry does not endorse rape. There is a difference between aggressive sex and sexual assault. I really do not think a disclaimer is necessary for this to be clear, but since so many commenters have expressed concern for my well-being, I thought I'd assure everyone that I'm not being abused on a regular basis."
In response to additional concerns on the part of readers, Lena furthermore posted the following entry on March 29:
"Look, guys. Quit equating aggressive sex with rape. I am used to having my bedroom conduct judged (even though no one is in any position to judge me), but I do not appreciate the implication that I'm encouraging anything but consensual intercourse.
The safe word is "elephant". If I had wanted him to stop, I would've used it."
Now maybe you simply didn't see the disclaimer and subsequent explicatory post; given the thoroughness with which you have otherwise "researched" your smear campaign, however, this seems exceedingly improbable. Maybe you did read the disclaimers but felt that they could not be trusted, given Lena's allegedly unstable mental health; even if the latter were the case (which it most certainly is not), as someone who clearly possesses no professional background in mental health, your allegations would amount to no more than the speculations of an unqualified layperson. This leaves one remaining explanation: complete ineptitude on your part, coupled with the specific intent to harm my reputation and career. This would explain why you decided to send emails to my professors and friends on the graduate student council, when doing so clearly amounts to libel. Limited intelligence and malicious intent would also illuminate why, if you actually gave a rat's ass about Lena's well-being, you didn't simply send her an email along the lines of: "I'm a concerned reader of your blog. Are you in an abusive relationship?" My earlier suspicion that you might be a Harvard student was premature at any rate.
With that, I would like to remind you again that my relationship with Lena is none of your business, and moreover urgently advise you to stop spreading defamatory information on the internet and among my professors and friends.
Patrick Hamm
Lena’s Tumblr entries (www.thechicktionary.com) of the past weeks – people here have clearly read them in detail – should make it perfectly and unmistakably clear that my involvement with Lena is in no way abusive. Now some of you might object to what Lena and I do in the bedroom and the fact that she chooses to blog about it. This is your prerogative. You may even go so far as to wish that I “burn in Hell after Lena kills [me] in a murder/suicide” (email from truth033003@aol.com on June 5). But this does not entitle you to take passages from Lena’s blog out of context, misinterpret and change them, ignore explicit disclaimers, fabricate facts and then allege power abuse and sexual assault.
The defamation of my name in obscure web forums is a somewhat annoying but ultimately benign affair (especially if conducted with such utter incompetence) – deliberately spreading false information that could harm my reputation and career is libel. Protagonist Hiro, for one, was not wise enough to conceal the sender’s IP address in his (I judge from the hairy ass reference that we’re dealing with a male) emails, and is presumably also unaware that a simple court order would force his ISP to release his identity. However, given the level of intellectual depth displayed in his emails, I suppose this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.
I’m sure at least one of you tools will now feel the urge to carry out another witty (read: moronic) line-by-line dissection of my post. I suggest you save yourselves the time and mental energy (your supply of the latter seems limited enough as it is) and leave me alone from now on.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=796367&forum_id=2#9865030)