When I first heard that she wrote an über long post on cyberbullying (after all October is Anti-Bullying month), I went and read it.
Several things that came from it-
1) Apparently she forgot she did the worst of the cyberbullying in her days of the Harry Potter fandom- stalking her critics. If you don’t believe me, go to her Wikipedia page regarding her plagiarism, her (former) friend, Heidi the lawyer, comes at her defense and gets Wiki to delete any mentions of plagiarism (that’s why her entry is locked from changes). Another incident of her friend Heidi coming in is the writer’s university message board. Every SINGLE time CC is criticized for plagiarism, she got her lawyer friend to threaten people into deleting any mention of CC and plagiarism.
2) Not only that, she had a LiveJournal (epicyclical) and she used to get people who used to bother her, she would find out the user’s IP number and got a phone number from the ISP the person was using and would call these people to tell them to knock it off. I’ve known at least two people who got this- 1) This one she bragged about in the HPFGU chatroom, she called the parents of a 13-year-old girl to tell her to stop posting on her livejournal. (This I’m not sure if it’s true or not, she really asserted that she CAN do that to ANYONE that bothered her) 2) When I was kicked out, my friends in the fandom and outside the fandom defended my character, one of my friends who lived on the Cape got a call from the police (THE POLICE) about her posting on Cassie’s LJ. She was shit-scared afterwards and stopped posting (and she didn’t even remotely threaten CC), fortunately the policeman sided with my friend because he felt CC was wasting his time.
3) This will be in two parts- somewhat of a story about how I got kicked out of the HP Fandom. I feel better about telling the truth about it, unlike CC. Here’s a little timeline-
October 2001- my boyfriend (now my husband) asked me a series of strange questions about a user, and a friend of mine, called John W. What his favourite restaurant was, what color he likes, etc. I’m not sure about the rest of the questions but I immediately told him what John’s favourite restaurant was (a dim-sum restaurant in NYC) and then afterwards, asked him why he asked all these questions about John. He admitted that he got into John’s Yahoo! Profile to look at the moderator message boards, I told him to give it back immediately and we didn’t talk about it for a while.
February 2002- the guilt was getting to me, I told my boyfriend that I wanted him to write an anonymous apology letter to one of the mods (Neil W.) and I helped him write it as Mafalda Hopkirk. I sent it to Neil without hiding my IP number (I didn’t know how the process worked) and he figured it out quickly that it was me through my IP number but didn’t tell the rest and told me to leave fandom quietly.
I got an IM from a male (another HP mod whose name escapes me), whose wife was Stacey, and we talked about the fandom, but never about the hacking. Then EVERYONE in the HP fandom stopped talking to me (I IMed AngieJ, siriusgeologist, Alicia/Sue (Boots527 in IM) and NO one talked to me until one of the Teenage Witches told me what was going on and that she had messages from Cassie and Simon. Both messages were very upsetting.
My IRL friends and my HP-fandom friends, who still sided with me, defended me on Livejournal and the HP messageboards. Cassie basically said to one, “Tell her that her parents should have aborted her.” I snuck into chat as Vivienne Stellaluna to see what they’re talking about and they completely PILED on me once they figured that the silent lurker was me. It was the worst kind of internet bullying I’ve experienced until….
4) I was doing fine (I finally left the fandom because *&(@ them), working on my university coursework and planning my course trip to Oxford. Then I got a call from my university police department at the end of April 2002 and a week before my exams (2 months after I got kicked out and nary a peep from those people between the first week of February-end of April). I went in and he said have you heard about HP4GU? I said yes, and started to tear up, is this about the hacking because I didn’t do it. and He said yes. I was sobbing uncontrollably and had to be walked home because I didn’t think THEY would stoop this low, trying to get me kicked out of my university and they planned on doing it around the time of my exams just to shake me.
I immediately got the best tech lawyer in Boston and saw all the documents the HP4GU people sent to BU- AngieJ/Cassandra Claire/the male mod sending them chat transcripts of me admitting to the hacking and I honestly said that I had talked to AngieJ and the Male Mod as recently as February but I’ve never admitted to hacking (several of my friends said that it wasn’t my ordinary chat behavior, including my mom) and frankly, I hadn’t talked to Cassie in PM for several months prior to February.
I brought ALL my documents- Cassie’s Livejournal entries condemning me (her behavior towards me, at the time, was atrocious and uncalled for) and other documentation, etc. And, ironically, it was these exact documents which completely cleared me of hacking because she basically wrote her intent in the comments section to get me kicked out of university as payback.
After I got cleared, I walked with my mom and my lawyer and stopped outside Pizzeria Uno in Kenmore Square. He said, “Before I go, you have a real case to sue this Claire person and HPFGU for harrassment.” I said, “I just want to be done with that.” I wanted to get on with my life, go to Oxford University, think about my degree, and think about where I wanted to go after university (my boyfriend and I were talking about moving in together once I finished and we talked about the pros and cons of living in the US versus the UK).
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Fast-forward to 2012, living in the UK for over six years, and as I like fantasy/sci-fi books I often see CC’s books about. I just want to pull my hair out every single goddamn time I see her books, that’s how much HP4GU and her bullying has affected me.
I don’t like internet bullying but I did follow NastyClare/TheClareWitchProject until their existence ceased to be. I read ONTD posts about Cassie all the time (because I’m interested in how her books are doing, how much media attention the movie is making). Also, the riveting “Cassandra Claire Plagiarism Debacle” posts and FandomWank posts. ALL of those blogs were ON point about CC’s behavior in the early days of the HP fandom. Everyone in the HP fandom in 2000-2002 knew what her real name was and what she looked like, including me and my husband, it was a MAJOR OPEN SECRET in the HP Fandom. Even back then, she complained of people trying to find out who she is even though she gave out what she did (entertainment reporter for Hollywood Life, her name, multiple photos of herself, where she lived in CA, where she moved to in NYC). For someone who claims she’s secretive about herself, she was pretty freer about who she was in the chatrooms/message boards.
To end a long post, simply put, she has amnesia about her OWN bullying in the HP fandom. She’s a hypocrite, a plagiarist and, above all, a major, early, cyberbully. Her woe-is-me post rings hollow for people like me, people she bullied. Her friends that now side with her weren’t her HPFGU/HP fandom friends because if she left that fandom, it’s probably EVERYONE in that fandom hate her because of her appalling behavior at the time. She hasn’t come to terms about how she became famous and what she did to go down the path of being famous. She can go %(&* herself and if her parents knew what she did in the past, they’d be deeply ashamed of her.
All of that said, I know where I’d stick her “cyberbully” post.
Source.
The hailed anti-bullying post by Clare that got her so much acclaim is here.
The people behind the anti-Clare blogs she had shut down claiming they were anti-semitic bullies offer their rebuttal here.
And, of course, the usual links (thanks
tryxkittie)Cassandra Claire and Plagiarism
The Abridged Fan History of Cassandra Claire
Memorable Wank from the Cassandra Claire/CC MiniBoss Squad Days
Cassandra Clare Fandom Wank Wiki
The Ms Scribe Story: Full and Abridged