Read on Twitter
Okay. One more Bouchercon thread for the day. You with me? Bored? Already asleep? Any and all answers are fine. I'm freestyling this. Let's talk 2016/17, harassment policy, and why it became hard to do.
The reason I wanted ON the board in the first place was to get a harassment policy written and implemented. This isn't too centre myself in the story, just to add context to why I talk about this. Erin Mitchell was the person who suggested I run for the board....
....partly because she had attempted to get a policy adopted before (Long Beach, I believe) and still talked about it needing to be done. So, cool, right? Allies on the board, commitment to the issue. This will be easy.
What happened next is, in large part, why the next six months of my life made me fucking ill, and also has a bearing on why even to this day the organisation keeps staying silent on such issues.
EM reported to the board that she had taken legal advice (no names disclosed or documents shown) saying that any policy, with or without 'enforcement', would make every member of the board PERSONALLY legally liable.
Thats a big thing to scare people with. Never mind that the LL in LLC stands for LIMITED LIABILITY or that Bouchercon had liability insurance covering the board members. People were now scared.
Never mind that those of us in favour could -and did- point to examples of organisations far far smaller than Bouchercon, with fewer resources, who had policies. And could point to policies both with and without 'enforcement' or 'teeth.'
Fundamentally, a lot of people were told, and told again and again and again, that they would be PERSONALLY LEGALLY LIABLE for the repercussions not only if Bouchercon asked a specific guy to stop being a dick, but also if Bouchercon politely said generally nobody should be dicks
Now, even putting morality aside, sticking to the legal arguments, this simply did not stack up against the potential liability if the worst case happened and it transpired Bouchercon had looked at the idea and decided not to adopt any policy at all.
And again, the company is an LLC with LIABILITY INSURANCE, so scaring people like that is just a shitty approach that I still don't understand the motives for, years later. And the company itself is worth over 100k, it can afford to lawyer up if one shitty author pushes back.
