@JennaGuillaume Here is an attempt at an extremely (*extremely*) truncated version:
1. In August this year, ex-Borders buyer Sue Grimshaw was announced as an editor for Marie Force's publishing company. It was pointed out that her previous buying practices were shady, as was her Twitter history.
1. In August this year, ex-Borders buyer Sue Grimshaw was announced as an editor for Marie Force's publishing company. It was pointed out that her previous buying practices were shady, as was her Twitter history.
@JennaGuillaume 2. SG and that company parted ways, but she remained acquisitions editor for Glenfinnan, run by Suzan Tisdale, and ST jumped in with a video to talk about how SG totally wasn't racist, okay?
@JennaGuillaume For more detail on that whole aspect of the saga - Teach Me Tonight covered it at the time, including a transcript of the video. teachmetonight.blogspot.com/2019/08/racism…
@JennaGuillaume 3. Courtney Milan noted that the book of one of the other Glenfinnan editors, Kathryn Lynn Davis, was also pretty racist, and tweeted a thread to that effect, including screenshots. The book was from the late 1990s, but had been reissued in 2014.
@JennaGuillaume 4. Months pass.
5. Two days before Christmas, Alyssa Cole tweets that CM had been notified that RWA were censuring her on the basis of ethics complaints from ST and KLD. The complaints are pretty bananas (like, one compares CM to a neo-nazi?!), but still: they've been upheld.
5. Two days before Christmas, Alyssa Cole tweets that CM had been notified that RWA were censuring her on the basis of ethics complaints from ST and KLD. The complaints are pretty bananas (like, one compares CM to a neo-nazi?!), but still: they've been upheld.
@JennaGuillaume 6. #IStandWithCourtney trends and there's a huge social media furore, because she's basically been censured on charges of reverse racism.
@JennaGuillaume 7. Obviously everyone wants to know the details, and it emerges that the procedures followed were shady, to say the least. Like, a secret ethics committee was formed without the knowledge of the original ethics committee level shady.
@JennaGuillaume 8. There's clearly an emergency board meeting, because the next day, an announcement is made that CM's censure has been rescinded, pending legal opinion. But the shit has well and truly hit the fan by this point.
@JennaGuillaume 9. The resignations start coming. This includes more than half the board (9/16 so far, I think), and the president. This leaves the president-elect, Damon Suede, as the new president. There are numerous calls for his resignation, but it doesn't (or hasn't yet) come.
@JennaGuillaume 10. We have to side-step into another scandal here. Dreamspinner Press hasn't been paying its authors for a good chunk of time. RWA has previously come down hard on this (eg. Ellora's Cave), but has been curiously inactive on this case.
@JennaGuillaume 11. But who is a Dreamspinner author (and who, it seems, might still be getting paid)? Damon Suede. His husband pops up on Twitter saying that DS can't speak on the Dreamspinner case because he's recused, but that doesn't appear to be how recusal works.
@JennaGuillaume 12. RWA releases a statement in an unsigned Google document (although the general assumption seems to be that DS is the one pulling the strings, as the new President) which says a whole lot of... nothing.
@JennaGuillaume 13. It begins to become clear that not only were the procedures followed around the Milan/Tisdale/Davis ethics complaint *very* shady (despite RWA's avowals that they weren't), but multiple ethics complaints weren't even getting to the committee.
@JennaGuillaume 14. More stuff begins to emerge about Damon Suede, none of which paints him as, shall we say, the most reliable source? Eg. he claims to know who Chuck Tingle is. Chuck Tingle just tweeted and was like... yeah, nah.
@JennaGuillaume It's much, much, *much* more convoluted than this - I've probably left out a whooooole bunch of stuff - but I think that's the bones of it. And we're nowhere close to the end of it.
@JennaGuillaume Smart Bitches has a pretty good rundown: smartbitchestrashybooks.com/2019/12/wtaf-r…
@JennaGuillaume Also, I don't think my thread has even begun to capture just how much of this is about racism, given that Milan has been at the forefront of RWA and broader industry efforts towards diversity and inclusion.
@JennaGuillaume 15. A petition to recall Suede (and, AFAIK, originally also the exec director Carol Ritter, although it was edited because there's a different mechanism for that) is circulated. A while later, multiple people state that it has the numbers to trigger a recall election.
@JennaGuillaume 16. It's reported that RWA are trying to invalidate this petition on a technicality, which would leave Suede in office and in a position to nominate people to fill all the vacancies (ie. over half the board).
@JennaGuillaume 17. It becomes obvious that staff (under the direction of the exec director, one would guess?) are working overtime to remove people from the voting rolls, presumably to make sure the petition is either invalid or doesn't have the numbers.
@JennaGuillaume 18. It also becomes clear that some of the procedural irregularities were essentially retconned in an October meeting, presumably to cover earlier shenanigans (eg. Milan being asked to resign as head of the ethics committee in August, rather than recuse herself).
