A Voice for Men’s “social media director” Janet Bloomfield is proving to be quite the innovator in the world of public relations. You may recall her cheeky approach to publicizing the recent AVFM conference, which involved awarding herself “whore points” for calling critics of AVFM “whores.”
Now she’s moved on to straight-up libel, making up fake quotes in order to make feminist writer Jessica Valenti look bad, and then bragging about it on her blog.
This whole sordid episode began several days ago when Valenti, on vacation, decided to send a message to “all the misogynist whiners in my feed today” in the form of a photo of her on a beach wearing a t-shirt saying “I bathe in male tears.”
The AVFM social media attack squad seized on this at once, with Bloomfield telling her followers, wrongly, that the picture had been posted in response to a question about male suicide. When Valenti corrected her on this point, Bloomfield offered a half-assed apology (“My bad”).
Then Bloomfield, demonstrating just how insincere her apology had been, decided to up the ante, concocting four “quotes” from thin air and attributing them to Valenti.
[EDIT: JB’s Twitter account was suspended, so here’s a screenshot of the tweets; I’ll keep the original links up in case she’s ever unsuspended, though that seems unlikely.]
https://twitter.com/JudgyBitch1/status/495366752168329216
https://twitter.com/JudgyBitch1/status/495367262187302913
https://twitter.com/JudgyBitch1/status/495367996337295360
https://twitter.com/JudgyBitch1/status/495374177013346304
Naturally, as you’ll see if you follow any of these Tweets back to their original context on Twitter, many of Bloomfield’s fans assumed that these quotes were real.
Needless to say, some responded to Bloomfield’s dirty tricks with all-too predictable harassment of her target:
https://twitter.com/JessicaValenti/status/495559012449267713
https://twitter.com/JessicaValenti/status/495559068841680896
After brazenly libeling Valenti, Bloomfield went on to boast about it on her blog. In a post with the smug title “Jessica Valenti is not having a good day,” she wrote:
Now, these fake quotes may have been “utterly plausible” only to those who are ignorant of Valenti’s work, but in the hothouse world of the Men’s Rights movement there are people who would probably believe that Valenti eats babies. As I noted, JB’s followers had no trouble believing them.
Later in the post Bloomfield added, with more than a hint of maliciousness:
It’s not clear how having made-up quotes attributed to you counts as “owning your shit,” but I guess I just don’t understand Bloomfield’s higher morality.
Needless to say, in the real world, deliberately publishing false information about someone in order to harm their reputation is libel.
When confronted with this on Twitter, Bloomfield offered some inventive excuses:
@JudgyBitch1 @JessicaValenti JB, "I didn't like her shirt so I lied about her maliciously to harm her" isn't an acceptable defense for libel
— David Futrelle (@DavidFutrelle) August 2, 2014
Later on she attempted to prove that her libelous fake Valenti quotes didn’t matter … by making up things about me:
https://twitter.com/JudgyBitch1/status/495684048237633536
As I noted,
@Alzael1 @virtuarat @JudgyBitch1 I'm pretty sure that "well, I lied about David Futrelle too" is not an acceptable libel defense either.
— David Futrelle (@DavidFutrelle) August 2, 2014
Of course, I’m no lawyer. I can only hope that some people who are lawyers are taking a good hard look at Bloomfield’s lies.
I would encourage you all to screenshot or otherwise archive Bloomfield’s self-incriminatory blog post, as well as her tweets, just in case she decides to talk to a lawyer and take them all down.
At this point, I think it’s probably safe to assume that anything and everything anyone from AVFM says should be taken not with a grain but with an entire shaker of salt.
“DonB, how does linking to a bibliography prove your point?”
It’s called data and evidence. Try it sometime.
Go read the fucking thread, cupcake. Your “point” has been addressed.
You just fail all the fucking time, don’t you?
Don, that wasn’t an ad hominem. Go away and learn something.
Damn. I skimmed right over this part.
Add “bigotry” and “social constructs” and “disparity” to the list of things DonB doesn’t understand.
Behold, Dunning Kruger man has arrived!
“You don’t science, do you, DonB?”
Ah, yes. I’m going to take some blogging ninny much more seriously than innumerable experts in the field.
“It doesn’t matter how many studies there are, if they are relying on a faulty instrument (the CTS), then the results are going to be flawed.”
It’s an instrument that one demonstrably, admittedly biased nitwit claims is false. This can only be considered faulty if you’re looking for your conclusion beforehand.
“You are also don’t appear to be able to read for comprehension, either.”
I could piss myself at the irony here.
Almost all of them.
Hmm. I don’t think DonB is going to last long here. I suspect that he’s either going to stomp out, or go into the kind of ranting rage that gets him thrown out.
Anybody care to take bets?
And JB, what were you doing in that screen cap? You look…rabid.
Depends. Do you know what irony is? Because you’re not showing much knowledge about anything else.
Hmm, it seems that all you’re doing is making baseless statements without actually refuting any of my arguments, and then accusing me of not being able to read what was never written (or simply replied with ad-hom).
Since I know that’s all you pathetic idiots are capable of, I’ll leave you alone.
“Behold, Dunning Kruger man has arrived!”
Enough blinding irony to give me a week’s worth of laughter.
Ah, before I go
“However, the CTS is one of the most widely criticized domestic violence measurement instruments due to its exclusion of context variables and motivational factors in understanding acts of violence. The National Institute of Justice cautions that the CTS may not be appropriate for IPV research “because it does not measure control, coercion, or the motives for conflict tactics.””
Good riddance children.
This may come as a shock to you but some random woman trolling the not very famous Jessica Valenti isn’t going to make the news cycle. No one outside of the AVfM-ruled section of the manosphere and those of us here who mock it cares about your clownish antics. Your performance art-like stint as the worst, least professional PR flack ever was weirdly fascinating, but you’ve grown tiresome and headachy.
The novelty of the sparsely attended AVfM pseudo-conference at the ol’ VFW hall is long gone and the anti-feminist hash tag campaign you glommed onto is both fading and over shadowed by kitties. Enjoy entertaining roughly 1700 people on twitter with your rage filled anti-feminist and/or anti-liberal Tumblr in Action-style delights.
How long are you going to fixate on David Futrelle? There’s a big, fascinating world out there full of interesting people for you to drunkenly harass. Move on lady.
Baseless statements? Well, it’s good you know what you arrived with.
Stick the flounce, chump.
Ooh, I put my money on “ranting rage.”
This one has a “bull in a china shop” vibe. Lots of angry flailing and smashing of plates, but in the end stupid as a box of rocks.
Hey, DonB, can you actually provide evidence that the CTS is reliable? ‘Cause Kimmel is pretty much summarizing the consensus in the field.
Sorry, my crap computer cut out.
As you can see via my last post, your theory has nothing to do with the *prevalence*. I’m not discussing severity.
Piss off!
DonB, that’s not what ad hom means. It was an insult, yes, but it wasn’t an ad hom.
You claimed that Nathan holds feminists to “no moral standard whatsoever”, a claim which you pulled from thin air (or your ass) since he said no such thing. Hence, making shit up. I’m not sure what literacy has to do with any of that.
More accurate translation: “how can I even argue with someone who thinks bigotry has nothing to do with social constructs?”
“A bunch of people wrote about this topic” is not the same as “I am right about this topic”.
I can also say (with a touch of moderate condescension) Linda seems to be young, and attending Pasadena City College (the pasadena.edu address is the tip-off).
Also there is a lack of context for the reference. It’s part of a syllabus, but what the subject is, or the point the professor was using it to make/its spur to discussion are, we don’t know.
Don, that flounce was awful. -2/10
I was just about to bet that he wouldn’t stick the flounce, but he unstuck it so fast I didn’t even have time to finish typing. Is that some kind of record?
Let’s see if he sticks to the flounce. And…did he just say that the CTS isn’t reliable, thus working against his own point, or did my eyes just glaze over ’cause I’m bored of the trolling?
It’s up there in the Bad Flounce HoF.
What happened here is that Don read the term “social construct” earlier in the thread, but was too lazy to go look up what it meant. That’s not how you expand your vocabulary, Don.
DonB:
So, a husband beating his wife so severely she has to go to the ER and a wife pushing her husband away when he has her pinned against a wall are both commiting domestic abuse in your view? Because that, in a nutshell, is the problem with CTS.
Are you saying those two acts are equivalent?
““A bunch of people wrote about this topic” is not the same as “I am right about this topic”.”
A bunch of qualified academics studied the topic and reached my conclusion, however, is a different story altogether.
BTW, after a 20 min google search, this is the only place that identifies “male tears” as satire…
“More accurate translation: “how can I even argue with someone who thinks bigotry has nothing to do with social constructs?””
Read the dictionary. That’s all that matters to you lot.
Bigoted: having or revealing an obstinate belief in the superiority of one’s own opinions and a prejudiced intolerance of the opinions of others.
Nope, nothing about social constructs in there.
“You claimed that Nathan holds feminists to “no moral standard whatsoever”, a claim which you pulled from thin air (or your ass) since he said no such thing. Hence, making shit up. I’m not sure what literacy has to do with any of that.”
He justifies what feminists do while relieving them of the moral standard he holds for others.