Horizons "Elephant in the Room." · 9:38pm Dec 31st, 2017
I need to say something that I have been struggling with since August — something that, even after starting this post, has taken about 48 hours to write out. Something not easy, not pleasant, and this point, not particularly timely. But something very necessary to discuss.
This year at Bronycon, at least three women had their drinks spiked with date-rape drugs.
I say this as a direct witness. The incident I am aware of — and I dearly hope there were no others — occurred at a room party I attended.
I will not be naming any names. For the perpetrator, only because I do not know. For the victims ... because if #MeToo has taught us anything, one of its lessons is that opening up about sexual assault creates a rich environment for re-victimization (bystanders questioning their truthfulness, their choices that allegedly “contributed” to the assault, and their choice of when and whether to face the trauma of public disclosure).[1]
Similar fears have been the major driving force behind my paralysis. This was the victims’ story to tell … wasn’t it? If they chose to smooth it over in hopes of having a quieter and still enjoyable convention, was it my right to second-guess that? Would I be hurting them again if I spoke up?
Ultimately, the answer to that was the same then as it is now — this is bigger than that. This needs to be brought to light, so others can help identify the perpetrator and/or take steps to protect themselves in the future. But in the wake of the con, nagging doubts made it much easier to take the coward's path, and wait to see if someone else would be the first to break the silence.
So, after Bronycon, I completely shut up about it. Despite yearning to blog about the con's joys and discoveries, I went silent. I knew my conscience wouldn’t let me write about all the fantastic and memorable things that happened while sweeping this under the rug, or burying it as a footnote in my con report — but when I tried to push myself to write this post, there was always that inertia and that fear, and I sat and waited.
And then as the months dragged on, the inertia only grew. Not only would I have to justify my decision to speak up, I would also have to justify my delay, given that my silence about this incident might have given the would-be rapist a chance to strike again. [2]
Frankly, I have no justification for that, other than my fear. I’m sorry. I desperately hope that no further damage has been done. But at least I am making this effort, now, and I hope that counts for something.
What finally pushed me over the edge into actually writing this post wasa Twitter thread on weird convention experiences. I clicked on it expecting tales of funny and bizarre moments. What I got was about 50 percent straight-up anecdotes of sexual harassment and even assault.
That is not OK.
That’s not weird, that’s aproblem.
Conventions are community gatherings — places where all participants should feel welcome, and should be able to have fun. If incidents like unwanted touches, creeping, and straight-up grabbed breasts are normalized as merely “weird” instead of failures of the safety process, we are driving away half our community with signals that we don’t value their safety. Likewise, if we learn about something as drastic as an attempted rape and our response is to sweep it under the rug, we are directly contributing to making the fandom less safe.
Scary as confronting it is, silence is what allows the bad actors to flourish.
So.
This is what happened.
On Friday night of Bronycon, I was invited to a room party for the usual room party reasons: companionship and alcohol. Most convention room parties tend to have a specific core — a social niche getting together, a birthday to celebrate, or a thematic focus — and this was no exception. The hostesses had organize the evening into a structured drinking game/ritual based on the Norse tradition ofsumble, introduced to us as "boast, toast, and oath". Everyone in the room would gather into a single communal drinking circle, sharing various personal recollections and commitments over the course of three rounds. Each participant poured themselves a drink of their personal choice, which they would have to slowly drain over the course of the round; and there was also a collective drink that everyone around the circle shared by sipping from it when they told their individual story. [3]
The first round went without incident. There were about a dozen people in the room, all of whom were playing. One by one, we each took our turn and drank, going around the circle and toasting each contribution. Then there was a long break between rounds, in which a few people left, a few arrived, some stepped out briefly to take smoke breaks, and the room fell into a more typical party rhythm of small clusters of random chatter. We reconvened and this proceeded through a second round, and once again we went fully around the circle, then broke for between-round socialization.
During that second break, there was a significant influx of people coming in late, mostly from other parties being held elsewhere. A few participants started up deeper side conversations, and one of the new visitors (who had brought a bottle of excellently aged whiskey) began offering sips around. Finally, we pushed past the distractions and began organizing for round 3; many of the new folk moved on, and one or two joined the dwindling group that wanted to see the ritual through to the end. By the time round 3 started, if memory serves, we were down to about 10 people, three of whom were female — the two party hostesses and one guest.
We settled back into the rhythm of the ritual, when suddenly, the main hostess halted us mid-story and announced that she was feeling funny and believed she had been drugged.
There was some initial shock and disbelief, but several factors quickly added weight to her story. First, she had previously been a victim of date-rape drugs before, and was recognizing her symptoms from prior experience. Second, the other hostess — who hadn't drunk more than a sip or two of alcohol all night — shortly thereafter began vomiting, and the third woman complained of similar symptoms to the first. None of the males appeared affected.
The party immediately shut down for safety reasons — the hostesses wanted to be alone behind a locked door by the time the drugs fully kicked in. Several of us formed a posse to collectively escort the third woman back to her hotel room — and by the time we arrived, she was barely coherent.
Thank goodness, all of them safely slept off the dose, and in the morning I and several others of the attendees did our best to check in on them. I led an effort to collectively compile a list of the people in attendance, as complete as we could remember, and ultimately got that list to the hostess.
It is my understanding that the drugging was then reported to ConOps, but I am not privy to what happened from there — whether it was reported to the police or whether any attendees were contacted by security or law enforcement. (I left my contact information on that list, but nobody followed up with me.)
I can record this dispassionately now, in hindsight, but that night was a swirling tempest of emotions. Shock, disbelief, fear. We had spent the evening hearing about each other's passions and accomplishments and vulnerabilities, sharing laughs and tears — only to have our circle violated by a predator. To go from that emotional intimacy to staring around the room in fear, wondering whether one of us was participating as a pretext to arrange a rape ... and furthermore, to look at our companions' shocked stares and know that they were looking at us with that same inner question ... it's a lingering, bitter taste of awfulness that has stuck with me since.
I can hardly imagine how much worse it must have been for the women. The hostess was remarkably gracious and level-headed about it — "there were twenty people it could have been, and only one of them was responsible, so I still trust you 95 percent," she told me the next day — but to have lost an evening, woken up with a migraine, and be aware that without the vigilance on display that night they likely would have been raped? That's a special circle of hell which I wouldn't wish on anyone. [4]
The culprit, to my knowledge, has not been identified. However, based on discussion back at the convention, the evidence seems to point to a few conclusions about what happened.
It seems unlikely that the drug was distributed during the ritual itself. The three women were seated at very different parts of the circle (two across the room from each other), and everyone had poured themselves their own drink (including the nonalcoholic one). Nobody was making the rounds of the circle to handle multiple other people's drinks. There was a communal drink being passed around, but nearly everyone drank from it in turn order, and if that had been the spiked drink, several or all of the males would have been showing symptoms too.
Based on that and the timing, the drugging likely happened during the round 2/3 break, when the room broke up into smaller chats and people were individually mingling and moving around. That's also when a number of new faces flooded in who weren't involved in the ritual and thus weren't aware of the communal and lengthy nature of it. The more time the assailant spent with their victims after drugging them, the more chance they'd have of exposure; it would have fit their motives better to enter the room, deliver the doses, and try to leave with one of them as soon as possible. My personal suspicion is one of those people who entered and then left during the break, not all of whom we were able to see the name-badge of.
The woman who wasn't drinking alcohol might provide an additional clue. One of the few things she did try was a sip of the whiskey that was being offered around. Many date-rape drugs are put in alcohol to mask the flavor; that might have been a vector, and would have given the assailant a chance to mingle with all his victims. However, some date-rape drugs are colorless and odorless and might have been placed in her water, so a different delivery method can't be ruled out. Also, several of the men tried the whiskey as well, so there would have had to be some sleight-of-hand involved in dosing the women but not them.
What now?
To be honest, I'm not sure.
All I can say is to echo something mentioned in the thread that kicked this off: step one is being honest about what happened, and saying thatthis is not okay.
Step two ... depends on the reaction. I hope, dear gods I hope, this was an isolated incident. (If furry fandom survived achemical attack, we can survive a rapist.) But if it wasn't, the only way we can fix this is by confronting it in its full scope.
Iwillnote: This incident is certainly scary. Nothing I can say will make it non-scary, nor should it be. However, I don't think fleeing conventions in fear is the answer. This was the work of a sociopath, and if you're going to let your life choices be defined by avoiding sociopathy you also can'tstep into tall buildings,live near video gamers, or evenstep outside your door. Short of species-wide genetic tampering, we can't prevent human sociopathy.
However, wecan, and must, work to build environments in which sociopathy is more difficult and less rewarding.
In the meantime, there are concrete steps you can take to make cons safer for yourself and everyone, especially if you partake of alcohol there.
Safe drinking strategies are well-established, and should be well-known. In social drinking situations with strangers — and this isn't just conventions, but also situations like clubs, dances, block parties, etc —get drinks straight from the source and minimize adulteration opportunities. Buddy up with a trusted friend to watch each others' backs; leave drinks with each other if you have to step out or use the restroom. Have an on-site friend or roommate you can call for emergency backup if you start feeling funny. (Many conventions also have a FLARE or Con-Ops number on the back of your badge, so you can call for security in an emergency. If you run a convention, please consider this.) Finally, be that friend for your friends — it can be immensely frightening in the moment if something happens, and having backup is a big deal.
If you're throwing a party, have a sober person monitoring alcohol (and people's stuff); even if it's an open bar keep the sources centralized, discard drinks that have been sitting unattended, and babysit drinks for attendees that need to go to the bathroom or step away briefly. If someone's starting to look out of it (especially if their affect changes rapidly), check in with them repeatedly, and do your best to make sure that they leave your room with someone they know and trust.
Also, while we're on the subject, one more lesson from that Twitter thread ...
If you're at a convention and see creeping, nonconsensual touching, etc.:intervene. Conventions can promote safety with strong, prominent codes of conduct, but it's community standards which ultimately determine what behavior is discouraged and what gets a pass. If people look the other way as women get harassed, harassment will never go away.
I want a strong, vibrant fandom that is a safe and fun place for everyone willing to positively contribute.
We can do better on that note.
We have to.
I don't generally ask for signal boosts. However, as a public safety issue, please consider sharing this.
If I write a follow-up to this post, I'll edit to link it here. If others write their own follow-ups worth sharing, I will attempt to link/boost them myself as well.
Footnotes:
[1] As such, while I hope this post will make it easier to discuss this incident and others, I will be monitoring comments closely.Any comment naming a victim (of this event or others) will be summarily deleted— unless it is the victim themself speaking up or there is up-front evidence you have their prior written permission.[2] As an aside, if your reaction to (say) the Roy Moore victims coming forward was to question why someone would hold on to a sexual assault accusation for decades only to bring it out when it could do political damage? I’m not even a victim, and this has been sticking in my craw for five months. Imagine how much harder it would have been to say something if I faced major professional or social consequences for speaking up. If I, say, had an accuser who could blacklist me from the movie industry, or was prominent in the community, or was about to hold a major political office. The miracle is thatanyonehas the strength to open up about their trauma under those circumstances.
[3] I’ve got much more to say about the Bronycon sumble ritualin a post which is not this one. In particular, the oath I took, which is extremely relevant to here, and which I've been burning to discuss so I can take steps toward its complete fulfillment.
[4] Except for the sort of transcendent sociopath who is willing to drug multiple women for a chance at sex only they will remember.
