Annoying e-mail

[redbird]

So, on alt.poly someone asked whether the women on the group had gotten email from the resident misogynist troll, Orlando Fiol, I think with the goal of seeing whether zie could come up with any correlation between those who had heard from him and those who hadn't. His pattern appears to be to send a relatively innocuous email to a woman, then push for more intimate correspondence, and eventually blow up and call the woman in question a bitch when she either says explicitly that she doesn't want to have sex with him, or tells him that she doesn't want to spend as much time on the correspondence as he is asking for. On-group, he behaves as though he believes that poly women will have sex with anyone, and therefore it is discrimination when a woman turns him down. This is one reason why I and many other people, not all female, have him kill-filed.

I posted, saying that I'd gotten one message from him, asking an innocuous question, and that I had not answered the email, but posted the information to the newsgroup, because I didn't want to correspond with Orlando, but am generally happy to talk about chocolate. That got me an almost immediate emailed response, demanding to know what my beef with him is, given that he has not come on to me or devalued my intellect. He actually asked "Why am I apparently unworthy of corresponding with you?" This fits his pattern: someone who doesn't want to be his friend, for whatever reason, is accused of thinking s/he's better than he is. (If I offered someone friendship, and was turned down in a way that felt condescending, I would not be inclined to pursue them, because I'd expect that even if I could convince them to spend time with me, they would continue to be rude and condescending.)

I have followed up to myself on alt.poly, explaining why I do not want to correspond with him, and telling him that I will consider any further email from him as harassment. I don't know whether this will make any difference; he has a history of ignoring "do not send me email" requests, demanding to know why he shouldn't send email, and claiming that his right to an explanation trumps other people's right to be left alone.

My post (minus headers and the quoted previous post) says

OK: For the record. My beef with Mr. Fiol is that he has harassed many of my friends, and that he is either incapable of, or unwilling to, consider women as independent people who have desires and agendas that may not fit his. I do not choose to correspond with people, of any gender, who harass my friends. I do not choose to correspond with people who behave as though they have the right to sex with someone, regardless of that person's desires.

Orlando, I know you're reading this. Do not email me again. If you do, I will consider it harassment, and will contact your ISP.

[I had thought about posting this friends-locked so I didn't need to worry about copyright issues, and quoting his entire email, but it is more important to me to make this public, and name the idiots (for those of my friends who aren't on alt.poly), so I've paraphrased instead.]

Comments

[timprov.livejournal.com]

it is discrimination when a woman turns him down

Have we so lost the original meaning of the word that this isn't entirely obvious?

[roadnotes.livejournal.com]

Okay. That's impressive, in an "I own every woman I desire, or might desire" fucked-up sort of way.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Abstractly, I suppose it's polite to explain why one has said "I do not wish to exchange communication/(e)mail with you", but I think it's also a mark of politeness or civility to accept such a statement without expecting (much less demanding) further explication. But then, there really isn't much of a filter on the InterNet to establish standards of civitlity ... or of sanity, for that matter. *sigh*

[jenett]

Way back - not terribly long after he started showing up, I think, while I was still posting there regularly, I got email. He pushed a little about the "Not interested in email interaction" but wasn't nearly as bad about it as he's apparently been since then. (Or maybe I just stopped replying: honestly, can't remember which: it really was years ago.)

[boxofdelights]

Years ago I got one "let's be friends" email from him, tone mostly self-pitying. I thought should reply kindly, but I could see I was going to have to be careful not to encourage him to latch on to me, so I set it aside to reply to after I'd had time to think about it.

Less than a day later he emailed again, reproaching me for not having answered yet, and announcing that, in order not to waste any more time, he would "get things started" by telling me about himself, which went on for several pages. I realized that my anti-social laziness had saved me big trouble, and didn't reply to that one either.

Just a few days later Piglet described Orlando's tactics to alt.poly, and I realized just how big the trouble I had dodged!

Procrastination FTW.

[also-huey.livejournal.com]

Orlando, I know you're reading this. Do not email me again. If you do, I will consider it harassment, and will contact your ISP.

You don't, though, and he at least has plausible deniability that he didn't see it. Unless he has an established pattern of dickitude with his ISP abuse desk, this will boil down to "he said, she said", and the ISP will have to give him the benefit of the doubt.

I'm not a lawyer, but when I get creepy stalker emails (and I just got one recently) I respond to them, one time and one time only, with essentially that statement. And I have yet to have one of them email me twice. If someone _did_ email me twice, the second near-identical response would be CCed to their abuse@.

Re: Annoying e-mail

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

i wish alt.poly would stop engaging with orlando. i mean, we all know what he is; he's gone on like this for years now. it's time to let it go, IMO.

ignoring his email years ago has worked well for me. he sent a follow-up reproaching me for not answering his first attempt right away, and i ignored that one too. i haven't heard back since. he wants the attention; don't give it to him.

[pyrzqxgl.livejournal.com]

He's been in my killfile for a long time, and as far as I've noticed I've never gotten email from him, though I don't post much, and have a somewhat-gender-ambiguous name. However, I didn't want to post that data to alt.polyamory -- although I've seen some wonderful pieces of writing in response to some of the things he's pulled, in general I would just as soon not contribute to having the newsgroup filled up with even more Orlando-related messages.

[liv]

That's not only nasty, but unbelievably stupid. That kind of behaviour in a community like a small Usenet group where you have stable identity is completely self-defeating. Obviously people are going to remember and tell eachother that he's a misogynist creep, obviously he is going to destroy his own reputation so that nobody wants to correspond with him. I suspect he might even be sincere, because if he were doing this kind of thing deliberately to hurt people he would move on to new pastures where his past reputation wouldn't work against him. Having that tenuous a grasp on reality doesn't make his behaviour excusable, of course. Sorry you have to deal with that.