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i want to publicly back kiara up on this, because i have my own story about lucy that for a long time i tried to make excuses for, until i saw promising young woman, and met more people who'd been hurt by a pattern of behaviour over years. but i am only speaking about myself here https://twitter.com/kiaradoesart/status/1355659316049502210
i want to be clear from the start: this is not me wanting to destroy lucy. i don't do this out of any kind of spite. i am doing this because i want people who've been hurt by powerful people in game dev feel less alone. and i want accountability. i felt complicit in my silence.
in 2019 i made a thread about my assault in 2016. when i talked about people dismissing me when i tried reaching out, lucy was one of those people. and the way she treated me in regards to the assault was a large part of how bad i got. others saw this. https://twitter.com/Wanderlustin/status/1166527226818383873?s=20
i would also like to add the caveat that almost all the conversations and context for these interactions between me and lucy happened in real life. the only conversation we had over messenger about it was me still trying to keep her liking me lots. w/o context it looks fine.
i don't know how much she saw herself as a mentor-ish person to me, but she pushed me into game dev. she got me involved in community work. she, whether it was intentional or not, took me under her wing. i looked up to her and her work a lot, she was important to me.
so she was one of the first people i reached out to about my assault. first, context: assault was when I was 21, severely struggling with undiagnosed neurological disorders, i was very bad at understanding other people's intentions, and was, in hindsight, very much being groomed.
there's more context on all of that in my thread, but i feel it is important to note that i was already on a train heading for Bad Town, so i reached out to lucy in the hopes she would understand and pull me free.
she did not. i will admit, a large part of it was me not knowing what the fuck had happened to me and already taking on the blame myself. HOWEVER, me mentioning i was blackout drunk and couldn't remember anything was probably a very good sign that it was not a consensual thing.
i can't quote anything verbatim, only the sense of the words she used. but the gist of the things she told me was stuff like "it takes two to tango" when i was terrified this meant i'd cheated on my bf (with no memory????). she basically called it childish, i was immature.
she very much viewed it all as me being a young stupid kid doing a young stupid thing and then feeling guilty, despite how fucked up this whole thing made me. i tried to get across what was happening to me, but she really just would not move past her initial idea.
the childish, immature thing was used against me a lot by a lot of people at the time. she would also point out that aiden had big mental problems and there was always this insinuation that i'd taken advantage of that. while i was in full breakdown mode.
and as aiden and lianne continued to harass and emotionally manipulate me, she would get frustrated at me not wanting to be near them. she saw them as good people (who she wanted to work with at the time) so i was clearly Wrong About Them
she would tell me that lianne was so anxious and scared of me even as lianne was constantly subtweeting me and getting aiden to manipulate me more. i was the mean one for subjecting lianne to my presence.
Sure, she would warn me if they were at a games event. But. BUT. she did not warn me she invited them to her birthday party. i only found out thanks to my then-bf (ethan, who supported me through all of this). i had a big panic attack from that reveal, lmao.
she had thought i was over the petty little fight by then because we'd both been at the same events, her excuse for not warning me. and she just wanted all her friends there so she could have a happy perfect birthday.
she told me there was no pressure, despite the utter guilt she piled onto me by insinuating she saw my harassment and assault as an immature thing that wasn't a real reason to ruin her day. Intentional? i dunno. but fucking awful.
she only later cut out aiden and lianne when they PERSONALLY did something to make her mad. THEN they were toxic and terrible and to be purged from the group. apparently what they'd done to me wasn't enough
i still think, to this day, she doesn't think she did anything wrong. i carry a very heavy trauma from this. aiden and lianne? eh, i've done a lot of therapy over that. lucy's handling of it after left deep deeeeeep scars that made me think i was a horrible person for a long time
to those like "why don't you talk to her about it?" yeah i tried talking to her about it at the time. do you, people who know her so well, REALLY think she reacts well to being confronted with her failures? she would turn it all on me. don't lie. i blocked her so she can't qrt me
she ghosted me a few years ago after being in contract talks because (i'm pretty sure) i was late on photos for play by play, which is extreeemely unprofessional. she has barely talked to me since. i don't know if she saw the initial aiden thread or not, but she never reached out
it would like to believe all of this was unintentional, but i've heard a lot of stories from a lot of people who've been driven to the edges of the nz games community. this is not an isolated incident. she has hurt a LOT of people and they've been scared into silence.
if kiara's story and mine are the first of this you're hearing, it means people don't trust you with their stories. if you look behind her, you see a trail of burned people. intentional or not, she needs to take accountability for what she does to people.
i will likely lose friends for this, and i understand that. it's safer to stay by lucy. but at this point i've lost so many because i became isolated, a shell of myself during and after 2016. maybe i'll never get to speak at an event again, and that would break my heart.
but this is what happens. there are more people like lucy who throw people aside without a second thought when they get what they want. they have hurt my friends, hurt people i consider family. if she, or any of them have hurt you, know you're not alone.
at the end of it, this is just my story. not being able to speak about this & feeling so alone has been suffocating. this trauma is a huge part of what drove me into crises during my bpII onset. so i hope she listens and learns. i'm not trying to ruin her. i just want to breathe
