Richard White, the former site owner and moderator of the now infamous Don’t Start Me Off! claimed in Friday’s Guardian that “we never try to hurt people’s feelings.”
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In his sniveling non-apology to Professor Mary Beard, who has recently been the victim of the DSMO hate mongers, White also stated: “We do not go out to be offensive”.
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He then implied that the only reason Beard had seen the vile comments about her was because she’d obviously gone on to the Internet specifically to look for them.
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According to White, the trolls at DSMO were never actually trolls in the true Internety sense of the word because they never went after anyone off the site. They didn’t for instance harass anyone on Twitter or Facebook; they all stayed safely within the confines of the DSMO comment threads.
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Well, as I’m sure you’ll understand when you see the nearly two years worth of abuse and harassment I’m about to detail here, I read that Guardian interview with White with a mounting sense of disbelief.
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In the piece I posted back in April 2011 – An Occupational Hazard? – in which I detailed the abuse I’d received on that site, I said:
“Of course I realise that by posting this piece I’m no doubt giving them enough ammunition to start the whole sick cycle off again, but so be it.”
And I was right: that’s exactly what they did.
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In the comment thread under the original piece someone claiming to head the moderating team at DSMO posted what looked very much like an apology: “Firstly I wish to apologise to Cath if some of the comments did offend her” he said, “I, for one, will try to watch out for the comments that upset Cath so much, but such is the nature of some people on the internet I feel we can only do our small part to stop the maliciously intent.”
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And yet two months later, in June 2011, just when I thought things were starting to die down over DSMOgate, here’s the comment that Richard ‘Ricardo’ White, the site owner remember, tried to post to this blog:
“Hi Cath
I just thought that I’d clarify that the semi-apology on this page didn’t come from me. I think maybe you thought it did.
For the avoidance of doubt, I wouldn’t apologise to you if I were tied to a chair and about to be beaten to death by a gaggle of your acolytes, armed to the teeth with heavy duty dildos.
You see, you’re in the criticism business and we all know you just love to dish it out. I’m in that business too and as any primary school child knows, if you dish it out, you have to be prepared to take it too. You seem to be unfamiliar with this concept.
I’ve been on the receiving end more times than you could imagine. Rightly so, too. Unlike you, I don’t expect never to be challenged. Does this bother me? I can honestly say, not one iota.
Your brand of hilarious left-wing nincompoopery is absolutely ripe for ridicule. You love to portray yourself as the victim, but you’re nothing of the sort. You and your fellow arch ‘Liberals’ are in truth the least liberal people on earth. You ruthlessly defend your own opinions and will not accept any criticism or suggestion that you may be wrong. Is this the free society you long for? Is freedom in Cathland purely selective? It would seem so. I imagine that, to you, Joseph Stalin was just a cuddly, misunderstood champion of the poor.
So here it is, Cath. I don’t give a shit if you’re offended. As long as you’re dishing it out, you’re going to be taking it too, whether you like it, or not. Now, polish those shoes, straighten that blazer and tie and get ready for assembly.”
And here are some more comments Richard White has tried to post to this blog since: these ones are from October 2011:
The two Cath Elliott pages on DSMO were taken down pretty quickly once the site owners realised how much bad publicity they were getting over them. However, in June 2011, after I’d made reference in a Comment is Free piece to the Internet hate I’d been experiencing, they set up another page about me – The DSMO Tucker Jenkins thread. Here’s a pdf of the cached page that I managed to grab when they took the site down the other day: if you want to read the whole thing you need to start from the bottom of the page and read up.
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And here are some of the comments about me from that page and from other pages across the site:
Occasionally people would complain that the Cath Elliott pages had been removed. Here’s the moderator’s response to one of those complaints – the moderator of the site that let’s remember again “never set out to hurt anyone”
They knew I was keeping an eye on the thread because in my contribution to Helen Lewis’s New Statesman piece about online misogyny – “You should have your tongue ripped out”: the reality of sexist abuse online – I made the mistake of quoting one of the comments from the DSMO Tucker Jenkins thread. So, they knew I was reading the comments, they knew I was now aware I was being referred to on the site as Tucker, and rather than take any of that down they instead took great pleasure in the hurt they knew they’d be causing.
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During the nearly two years this has been going on I’ve had the occasional Tweet from Richard White: Tweets that have come totally out of the blue and as you can see have been unrelated to anything I’ve been tweeting about:
And it hasn’t just come from White. Here’s an exchange I had in August last year with @StephenBreen4, who posted on DSMO as ‘ebeneezer‘:
And here’s White’s response when Breen went onto the Tucker Jenkins thread to report back on my sweary response:
Sorry, what was it White said to the Guardian reporter about trolling?
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The only decent thing the DSMOers have done for me in the last two years is not take the piss when my mum died. Yes seriously, I’m actually grateful to them for that. Imagine losing one of the most important people in your life, going through all the emotions that comes with grief, and at the same time having to worry that you’re going to click on to the Internet and find some bastard having a ‘joke’ about it.
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To sum up then, Richard White is lying in the Guardian when he claims that he never set out to hurt anyone. And he’s lying when he says that it was self-contained, that everyone operated within the site and no-one from it ever trolled anyone.
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Oh and finally, I’ve got a message for Richard ‘Ricardo’ White: all those comments you made about me deleting your contributions to my blog because I’m allegedly some kind of anti-free-speech fascist? As you can see, I never deleted anything, I just didn’t publish them until now. Because if there’s one thing I have learned from being a ‘leftie trade union cuntard’ or whatever the expression was, it’s if you ever find yourself the victim of harassment, make sure to keep all the evidence.
Too Much To Say For Myself 
Hi Cath
Reading this makes me feel physically sick. It is horrible to be the subject of vicious trolling. Stay strong. (And keep in mind the harassment laws too, if this level of personal abuse continues.)
J x
Oh and finally, I’ve got a message for Richard ‘Ricardo’ White: all those comments you made about me deleting your contributions to my blog because I’m allegedly some kind of anti-free-speech fascist?///
Ah yes. The classic defence of the nasty, spiteful troll. If nationalism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, “free speech” is the last refuge of the online psychopath.
It makes me so angry when victims are accused of “playing the victim”; it’s just another way of silencing them. Which is pretty ironic, considering the perpetrators love freedom of speech so much. Anyway, it’s incredibly brave of you to post this. Never let them silence you.
I’ve been following this affair since I read about the Mary Beard incident. I remember these sods well, and laughed out loud when I saw them floundering like pigeons in the Gulf oil spill over the whole affair. They most certainly are grossly hypocritical – aside from emptying abuse over you and others outside their website, they also take great pride in marauding other websites, as evidenced by many threads in which they ‘reported back’, as it were.
They also most certainly can NOT handle the tables being even slightly turned. My personal dealings with them have been minimal, but I quite vividly remember one incident.
I visited their ‘website’ with the intention of winding them up, just because it’s nice to give back. After they leveled their usual anatomically impossible similes at me, they then proceeded to post what they believed to be personal information about me, including my name, location and family members (all wrong, I might add). In retaliation, I did the same to one of the members, who then contacted me privately via email demanding an apology for making ‘veiled threats’ against his family. His email was very much a veiled threat, and to accuse me of ‘taking it too far’ is just so funny it’s not, given that he makes a hobby of seeking out people he doesn’t like in order to upset them.
In hindsight, I shouldn’t have been sodding it up on their ‘website’ in the first place, but their reaction to my behaviour is quite indicative of how highly strung they can be when they’re not the ones hoisting the rope. Good to see you being strong in the face of it all.
Proves that no woman is safe from misogynists who hate women because they are women not men.
Also proves these misogynists consider all women to be males’ dehumanised sexual service stations not autonomous human beings.
These misogynists constantly use misogynistic sexualised denigrating insults against women, because that is the only language these men can manage to write.
Free speech has never been about mens’ pseudo right to subject women to sexual harasment; intimidation and threats of male sexual violence. Free speech has always meant women and men having the right to challenge the government. There are laws against slander and libel which means we do not have free speech – apart from the male misogynists of course!
Just FYI – I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a lawyer (or the police) about this, but it looks to me based on what you’ve posted here that you could get an injunction against that pleasant Richard White chap under the Protection from Harassment Act. Abusing a person in a public forum generally isn’t illegal, but bombarding them with personal messages over a long period of time is. You shouldn’t have to put up with it any more than Mary Beard does.
So glad this has at all come to light.
The posters behind it should all be held to account for their diabolical bullying.
They disgust me beyond belief.
All those slurred and slandered by them should stand up and help expose these “keyboard warriors” for the racist, homophobic cowards they truly are.
I’ve emailed Belvoir Lettings, as a landlord, and let them know that I won’t be using them in any professional capacity any time soon unless they take action with regard to their representative. I do hope the foul Mr White has an interesting conversation with his regional manager tomorrow morning.
This guy’s an arse, no doubt, but we’re on the left, you know? Socialists have been subject in the past to actual, real persecution. Not nasty words, but prisons, concentration camps and firing squads. How worked up can we really get about some tosser on the internet.
What does this White person look like? Any photos anywhere?
Pictures of White available on the Cookd and Bombd forum here:
http://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=31634.msg1823602#msg1823602
DSMO is still going, just underground and having to move around a lot because of paranoia and interlopers. It’s impossible to get away from for some of us as Richard White and Jeffrey Harrison assembled a list of contributors emails. I don’t want my daughter to suffer just becase I thought Josie Long was rubbish, so some of us are sending in saved pages of the new sites to the TV journalists who have been sniffing around, under the proviso our identities are concealed onscreen and left out of any screen captures.
That site is a cesspit of morons!
I do know of two forums that were trolled by them, in one case it was the killer blow to that former, in the other case the forum did survive but was effectively closed done for a week whilst the damage done by th DSMO isiots was rectified.