Hi! If you're here after listening to "Who Is the Bad Art Friend?" in The Daily today, here's context that might change your opinion of the central dispute

1/ Here is Dawn Dorland's explanation for why she contacted Sonya Larson about the Facebook group

gawker.com/media/all-the-… 2/ Here is Dawn Dorland's post from when she first created the private Facebook group about her kidney donation

https://twitter.com/kidneygate/status/1447261527535493120

um, that's not what happened, @summerbrennan

i emailed you because the vast majority of images in your Substack posts were taken directly from my account—images that had taken me time & effort to find, format & arrange into easily digestible threads

all i asked for was credit @summerbrennan in response, you lied about not taking the images, which baffled me

you write about how "the court documents started to make their way onto Twitter in the form of out-of-context screenshots"—implying that it was you doing the work of putting all in context

THREAD

For those curious, I mapped out the plagiarism at the center of this dispute. It’s extensive

1/ First, a side-by-side of Dorland’s original letter & Larson’s first published version

The overlaps are identified by color 2/ The version of the Larson letter in the prior tweet went online on Aug 3, 2016

It was the version Larson originally sold to Audible, via a distributor called Plympton

Six months earlier, she’d signed a contract w/ Plympton that included this clause

storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco…

whoa! i had completely missed this as well

https://twitter.com/roddycairns/status/1448537813838827520

curious about this too. the email from de leon is vague enough that it doesn't say whether she was part of the selection committee *that year*, though it certainly sounds like it

if there's any corroboration (or refutation) out there, lmk

https://twitter.com/lizzieskurnick/status/1448681357006233600

This is such a cool, detailed thread about all the unexpected (suddenly, there's a pandemic!) sometimes hilarious (peeing in a... what? And WHERE?) ins and outs of going through a non-directed kidney donation

(thanks tipster!)

https://twitter.com/rerbelding/status/1448416289731514381

What's awesome is that Dr. Erbelding was inspired to become a donor after reading Vox's Dylan Matthew's article about his own experience

I vividly remember reading the piece when it came out. It was the first I'd ever heard of altruistic kidney donations

vox.com/science-and-he…

A week into Bad Art Friend drama, and there’s still confusion over who got lawyers involved first

This morning, LitHub published an article that makes several false statements—and, frankly, some particularly egregious asides

lithub.com/dorland-v-lars… In short:
- Larson gets lawyer involved in June 2018
- Lawyer tries to pressure Dorland into handing over the emails she sent to the BBF
- Dorland refuses to negotiate with Larson's lawyer without representation. She hires her own legal counsel. AS ONE SHOULD in such a situation.

Imagine being a friend and work colleague of Sonya's, and a one-time instructor of Dawn's, and feeling like it's okay for you to publicly opine on this fiasco

wbur.org/cognoscenti/20… And then this dude has THE GALL to browbeat about "misogyny" and "the patriarchy"

https://twitter.com/stevealmondjoy/status/1447536745923424260

For those interested, here is Dawn and Sonya’s very first email exchange about the kidney story, in chronological order

1/ June 30, 2016: Dawn reaches out to Sonya, tries to ask about the kidney story as casually as possible 2/ July 2: Sonya confides to her friend and fellow Chunky Monkey Whitney Scharer that Dawn Dorland has found out about the kidney story

"Haven’t written back yet. 😁" says Sonya. "I must say that I feel my guilt wearing off, though"

diving in immediately

newyorker.com/books/page-tur… this irritated me to no end when i first read the original nytimes piece

now that i've read larson's prose, and know how bad it is, i find her snobbery about what counts as True Art even more ridiculous

thread on GrubStreet’s egregious dereliction of duty in failing to properly investigate Dawn Dorland’s extremely valid HR complaint against their employee, Sonya Larson

with screenshots taken from here: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco… In 2018, Dawn Dorland emailed Eve Bridburg, the executive director of GrubStreet, asking to initiate a formal HR complaint against Sonya Larson.

Some of the details here have not been mentioned before (eg, Larson telling Dorland not to write about race)