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.
One thing that made married women non-people if not property on marriage was coverture. Whether its severity was down to Blackstone’s interpretation or not is moot, but it was a revolting system.
Most people didn’t have to worry about coverture very much.
When your only property is the clothes you stand up in and a darning mushroom to repair your one and only pair of stockings it’s not really relevant.
Holy cats, did I pick a time to go visit family and spend a while AFK. JB antics and a trollsplosion, yuck.
Redpoppy and Nathan (and any other new folks I might have missed), welcome!
emilygoddess – Seven years?! Hurray! 😀
I wish I had something relevant to say about the OP, but everyone else has covered it beautifully.
As you can see, this tactic is spreading. Observe the comment section of TheYoungTurks when they try to talk about sexual harassment at Comic Con. The purpose is obvious. Slander, distract, derail.
https://plus.google.com/b/110061526449203491920/109836180835422522314/posts/JFrYKjm32Ba
Let me just add a few observations about this whole disinformation campaign:
1. Janet Bloomfield appears to have, from her writings, a substance abuse problem.
2. Because it has affected her judgment she does not fully understand what she is doing to herself and her family with her apparent libels, malicious defamtion, and so on.
3. I have the impression that Elam is ready to disavow her.
Let me just say, I don’t plan to let Elam disavow her. She’s speaking what he wants said.
Where do you get off diagnosing someone with a substance abuse problem over the internet? Look, she’s a grade-A twit running amok, but we do not know her life.
I do get off, hellkell. I’ve looked at her vids and read her material. She’s barely got a voice left and her judgment and paranoia levels are classic. As David sats, there’s a meth kind of vibe here.
Srsly, unless her writings say “I have a substance abuse problem,” we have no way of knowing that.
Woah, woah, “meth kind of vibe”? I half remember someone mentioning that she discussed her drinking to some degree on her blog, but I don’t remember any of the specifics because I don’t care and TMI. I thought that’s what you were referring to, not a baseless “husky voice and scattered thinking equals meth head” theory. Uncool.
I just checked this entire comment thread and didn’t find a single reference to meth, from Dave or from anyone else. The word “method” shows up a lot though.
moscow nights: “Meth vibe?” No one here has ever said that. You’ve put me in a position of defending a person I think is reprehensible. Fuck off.
OK. I have a memory of David saying something like “meth-fueled” and I agree with that, but, but if I’m wrong please let me know. I don’t want to make any misstatement..
There’s sooooo much to criticize JB about without having to Internet diagnose a substance abuse problem.
And, yes, she is responsible for her actions.
moscow nights: why don’t you use this thing called Google?
I made a joke about her seeming like she was on meth when she was on the today show because she was so over the top and her voice was fried. She had a cold and I suspect the rest was fanaticism and lack of sleep.
Also, every shitty libelous that she’s saying is also being said by Elam, Esmay, and a whole little army of AVFM drones, so the idea that Elam’s going to disavow her for saying these things is silly.
@strivingally @Nathan
It’s all good – it was more that I felt weird and here is one of the places that I feel comfortable enough to say when I feel weird. 🙂
(Delay in replying was due to work things :P)
@Emilygoddess
Congratulations 🙂
Yannow, I wouldn’t give a shit if JB has a substance abuse problem or not, because it isn’t an excuse for her behaviour.
I’m putting Scorpio on moderation for claiming to be both male and female in different comments. I won’t let him and/or her post until I get some sort of plausible explanation for that which doesn’t sound like complete bullshit and (in an email) some sort of proof that he and’or she are a real person in the real world.
Good. Scorpio wasn’t anything particularly harmful but the boner updates and thread necroing were pretty tedious.
Who cares? There are Mammoths who’ve admitted to having substance abuse problems, and last I checked, they aren’t being jackasses on the Internet. Come on now.
Regarding the issue of libel, IANAL, but having listened to people who are lawyers talk about:
For a defamation suit to succeed, either the statements in question have to be libel per se or the plaintiff has to prove that they lead to damages. Bloomfield’s statements don’t seem to be libel per se (though, again, IANAL) so Valenti would have to prove damages. So, she’d have to demonstrate that there were some people who didn’t used to have a negative opinion of her, but did after reading Bloomfield’s statements.
As for Valenti being harassed because of what Bloomfield said, I don’t think that’s covered by defamation laws.
“Most people didn’t have to worry about coverture very much.
When your only property is the clothes you stand up in and a darning mushroom to repair your one and only pair of stockings it’s not really relevant.”
um, i’m low income, i have very little property to my name. and yet it would still be quite relevant to my life if i was legally a non-person subject to my husband’s whims and control… i must say i’m rather flummoxed at the idea that just as long as i don’t have a house i might want after divorce, subservience would be “irrelevant” to me.
This woman is awful. I made the mistake of including her in a twitter reply, suggesting that, yes, there is a place for a critique of feminism and that honest, informed debate helps the movement to grow. I mentioned to her that misrepresenting and lying does not help the cause of honest critique.
She responded to me with an “I bathe in feminist tears” photo, then bullied me: ” Okay sanctimonious nobody. Keep believing in yourself.” Apparently, being the “social media director” of a website censored here as a hate site is the work of a “somebody”. Or maybe the abuse, harassment and lies make her feel like a somebody?
I think there’s a place for male voices in their experience of oppression. Some of the ideas of this movement are valid. Nearly every time I try to engage with an MRM online with the sincerest intentions of dialogue, thinking, “”you know, maybe feminists and men’s right’s activists need to speak open-mindedly with one another” – I run into harassment and abuse from MRAs.
I like to think that I can engage with people not through the lens of ideology or my world view, but as a human being whose life has been made better by feminism (amongst other things). Almost every time I try to share that with one of these people, it’s like walking into a schoolyard of bullies. Stand up for feminism and you’ll be called all sorts of names.
This woman, Janet Bloomfield, is hopeless. Her only claim to twitter fame is that she’s an bitch to people. AVFM and most of the people on board play the same game – because they have few things of worth to say, they use harassment and abuse surely as part of their strategy towards mainstream popularity. I hope the remain nothing more than the present internet phenomenon they are. They are like a pack of adolescents that haven’t grown up.
Nancy: you can’t meet people halfway who are determined to scorch the earth and salt it afterwards.
Whenever I’ve engaged someone of the MRA/redpill mindset to attempt to find common ground, they escalate to venomous hositlity so quickly I don’t have a chance to say “hey, we agree on a lot of these problems, but we disagree on causes!”.
Merely the fact I’m in favour of feminism – a philosophy many of the MRAs don’t even understand, but that doesn’t stop them from hating it – is enough for me to be considered an enemy to be attacked, rather than a person to talk to.