svmadelyn
svmadelyn is a fandom veteran of at least 15 years who has been in various slash fandoms, including Stargate Atlantis, Smallville, and pro-hockey real-person fiction.
She is most notorious for her 8,000-word defense, now f-locked, of Chicago Blackhawks player Patrick Kane in December 2015. He had just had allegations of rape against him dropped, although per this nonny there is reason to think the prosecution may not have tried hard enough on purpose. Madelyn’s post included the following assertions and sundry details:
- Madelyn cyberstalked the accuser and her family and friends on social media, then doxxed her.
- The accusation is “not what the science says, what the evidence says, what the professionals say, or what my own instincts and experiences and years of observation are telling me.”
- Her “evidence” that the accuser is a liar includes such things as that her DNA was not in his bed (so saith Madelyn), she seemed “too happy” on social media, her friends also seemed too happy in their Instagram photos, and Kane took his sisters out for ice cream on the night of the rape.
- The accuser must have been hired by a rival team to destroy Kane’s reputation. Or maybe she was too drunk/high to know what was going on. Or maybe she was raped by someone else in the house at the time, in which case who cares?
- She’s watched all of District Attorney Frank Sedita’s interviews and read the transcripts, and she won’t argue with anyone who hasn’t. Note that, based on things such as witnesses at the bar in question, Sedita (unprofessionally) claimed the accuser was “untruthful.” Not only was he not there that night, but he has never spoken to Kane, who refused to cooperate with the investigation (and was somehow not forced into doing so).
- Kane’s mother Donna “looks like she’s aged about ten years in three months,” and his younger sister “has gotten attacked on Twitter by people calling her brother a rapist.”
- There were “conversations that should have happened” in fandom about rape culture in sports, but allegedly couldn’t happen “because unless you were defaulting to THIS GUY IS A MONSTER, you got screamed into silence” due to the “judgmental self-righteousness and witch-hunt atmosphere” in which “a narrative is being shoved down my throat.”
- Kane has “worked his ass off since he was a little kid to achieve the things he has in life,” and he’s “become the face of a lot of historical failures by the NHL…. He's being turned into a poster boy for all the way the NHL has repeatedly failed in their handling of certain issues,” while “there are NHL players out there who HAVE hurt women and aren’t receiving this level of attention.” Therefore, people who believe Kane was guilty are “actively setting this issue back, and I genuinely don’t understand why there’s people out there who don’t get that.”
- She’s angry that other hockey RPS fans “fle[d] to other pairings,” which was unfair because all pairings are affected by misogyny.
- Madelyn’s fantasy RPS scenario in which “Kaner’s innocence would be established because he was talking with Johnny [Toews] over Skype about their new kitten, so Johnny was his alibi. ‘Judge, there’s no way he would have had time, we were worried about our cat who had just come home.’ ‘Case! Dismissed!’”
- She was so upset over the whole thing that she cried three times while writing it and she couldn’t eat anything but cheese fries for four days.
- She supposedly “sat on” and edited her screed for weeks, though it remained incoherent and rambly. It started out at over 20,000 words.
After she began to get grief for it, she friends-locked the post, but nonnies quoted it at length.
Madelyn went up against hockey BNF Impertinence, whose Aug. 7 Tumblr post she linked in her LJ post. Imp confronted Madelyn in the latter’s comments, quoting an email Madelyn had sent her years ago regarding Imp’s openness about her own abuse:
I think…my gut tells me that you're a person who has been through the ringer and how you interact with people starts there - from a place of…maybe sharing things you don't necessarily need to be sharing (some things are private, and shouldn't be up for fodder for people who have shitty lives to throw back at you). I think you're trying to put as much of yourself out there as possible, but that also leaves you open for…a lot of things you honestly don't need to be dealing with, just because you're so open about some of your private issues.
Nonny: “From the quoted email, without knowing anything about svmadelyn beyond this post, she sounds like a totally fucking awful person. Like some kind of awful, passive-aggressive, verbally-incontinent, Kane-stanning Dolores Umbridge.”
The last several posts under Imp’s “kane” tag, especially this one, discuss this matter.
(In both this post’s thread and the next post’s thread, nonnies expressed surprise to find themselves rooting for Imp.)
Meme first discussed Madelyn’s post on Dec. 23, 2015. In addition to everything mentioned above, this thread also included discussion of past wankiness on her part, such as her terrible modding of the hockey RPF fic exchange and her blithe dismissal of plagiarism because she had once been “falsely” accused of same. (She was, to her credit, instrumental in revealing that another fan by the handle of svmaria had faked a miscarriage.)
According to one subthread in particular, back in ~2006, BNF Seperis pitched an anti-anonmeme fit on Madelyn’s behalf and threatened to pre-emptively ban from her LJ anyone who had ever defended the concept of anonmemes. Supposedly, Madelyn had been badmouthed on the short-lived SGA hatememe, but only because “she was rageprufrock's enabling cheerleader and needed to stop. Pru actually got a lot more smack talked about her, but nobody pitched tantrums on her behalf.” (Another nonny stated that they’re the one who complained about Madelyn then: “Best and most satisfying trolling I ever did.”)
One nonny noted that, at that writing (Dec. 23, 6:31 am UTC), all the comments that had so far appeared on Madelyn’s post were “positive and supportive” and wondered if she were deleting any critical ones. Per the nearly 300-comment discussion on Deke Dangle, the anonmeme for ice hockey RPF, indeed she was! Twelve hours later, meme reported that Madelyn had begun to let critical comments through and, unsurprisingly, she was writing snide replies to them.
One nonny criticized her on her journal for cyberstalking the accuser, then got told that because Madelyn was stalked before, “I know a thing or two about cyberstalking”; and that she wasn’t going to publish any comments without names attached to them, because “My ethical lines when it comes to anonymity on the internet are different than yours, it would appear.” Nonny: “Stalking? Ethical. Commenting anonymously? How dare you!” In reply to another angry comment she got, Madelyn said, “I see that stalking has become the new word for people to misuse, in place of rape apologist (or in addition to?), so let's address that.”
This nonny quotes Madelyn as saying that she decided to stalk the accuser because
nothing was getting reported in any useful way, and I wanted to try and learn as much as I could about the people involved. Sports bloggers were out of their depths, and well - I wasn't sure what the police department was going to wind up saying about all this, and I wasn't sure if I was going to trust it when they said it. […] I'll give you some percentages on how my conclusions were formed: 70% was the DNA findings. 25% was Sedita's interviews. 5% was the fact that my own reading of the various things I came across meshed with Sedita's take on this. […] By hyper-focusing in on something like this, the attention is diverted from the bigger and more valid/important issues. Saying someone's a cyber stalker or a rape apologist…the focus is then diverted from the rest of my 8,000 word post.
The most important thing here is that she knows she's justified in her decision to continue writing about Kane, and that she's the persecuted victim here. And that all the people that abandoned ship should know that now that the case isn't proceeding, it's totes okay to come back u guise! We can just forget about all that unpleasantness! Or perhaps write cute OTP fics about how it's the guys' ~love that saved Patrick from the EVUL LYING WHORE WOMAN!
Anyway, she's pretty much sealed her fate, and better hope that Kane/Toews stays an active ship for a looooong time, 'cause I doubt she'll ever manage to make many inroads in a new fandom. I know I'd run in the other direction if I saw her coming toward one of mine.
Finally, Madelyn will have you know that the lurkers support her in email.
Meme discussed her again in the next post. There was a separate, much smaller thread in which a nonny, who declined to give much detail for fear of being outed, wrote, “I thought my experience getting a manipulative email from svmadelyn upon displeasing her was relatively unique. Impertinence posting an email excerpt prompted me to discover (talking to others) that it's not at all.” In this smaller thread, nonnies discussed the victim-blaming ramifications of Madelyn’s email to Imp.
Meanwhile, back in the longer thread, meme revisited Madelyn’s assertion that other people are focusing on “all the wrong things” in her post. One nonny pointed out that while reading publicly available content is not stalking, Madelyn “reproduced what she read to build the case she wanted. Without the consent of those involved that's a serious invasion of privacy and also probably violates copyright laws of some kind, so no go.” And, apparently, she also retweeted something disparaging the accuser said about Kane “for the sole purpose of calling down the flying monkeys on her,” which “says A LOT about her to me.”
Huge-name fan Synecdochic (the creator of Dreamwidth) left //“a beautiful three comment long takedown”// in Madelyn’s comments, which Madelyn unscreened. Synecdochic’s wife is “a forensic DNA analyst (ie, the person who does the labwork to test evidence received by a crime lab for the presence of DNA and then do the statistical calculations in order to make conclusions about the results).”
In the context of this wank, nonnies had an in-depth discussion of when RPF fans go too far (there was another one here). OP of the first subthread said they wanted to sit Madelyn down “and explain to her in very small words that Patrick Kane is not her friend.” Turns out, someone had already written that article…. and Madelyn had complained about it in her screed, too.
Among other things, this thread also included the history between Madelyn and Impertinence, “presumed innocent” concern trolling of the sort only ever found in rape cases, and a discussion of cheese fries (whence the image on this page).
Further discussions of svmadelyn on meme:
- Dec. 28-29. Mostly about another hockey player named Kane (Evander) being accused of rape, the Synecdochic takedown, and a few other hockey RPF fans on Twitter defending PKane.
- Jan. 21-22, 2016. OP links to Imgur screencaps of a new rape allegation against Patrick Kane that was posted in Madelyn’s comments. (“Madelyn seems to have locked down all posts not related to the hockey exchange on her lj, her tumblr has been either renamed or deleted, and her twitter is extremely clean.”) Meanwhile, this new accusation was picked up by hockey fans at large (Reddit, etc.) and then by AOL. The screencapped comments were posted under an LJ sock, and that handle was obscured in the screencaps, but her account includes her first name, which she told to Kane. At the time of this thread, it did not seem that she was being harassed on social media. Between this situation and some skepticism/concern-trolling in this thread, mods decided to freeze it.
- Apr. 1: The wank was rehashed in a thread titled “fandom/general online drama and wank that you're still angry about.”
- Apr. 22: Another rehash.