Stop trusting Lou Antonelli to mend his ways

Lou Antonelli is the perfect example of why you should be wary about accepting apologies from serial abusers. Because doing so enables them in their abuse.

Lou Antonelli is one of the lesser Pups, a minor science fiction writer who’s been busy cheerleading the rightwing campaign to take over the Hugo Awards. He’s also been busy harassing people who have the temerity to disagree with him or oppose him, specialising in a less direct form of swatting, by threatening to out them to their employers, or get the police involved. He’s been getting away with it for seemingly years, mainly due to SFF fandom’s well established tendency to forgive easily. this time however Antonelli was still apologising for attempting to sic the cops on David Gerrold with various people praising him for this apology when he was caught sending his fans out to harass Carrie Cuinn. A more on the nose version of the abuse-apologise-abuse cycle of professional bullies like Antonelli is hard to imagine.

What tripped up Antonelli this time is not just that he was caught trying to get David Gerrold in trouble, but that this was David Gerrold, a well respected, well established elder statesman within SFF and fandom. Usually he picks fights with much less high profile people, random fans, authors just starting out, those who can’t hurt him or his career. He only apologises when he’s forced to, when he can’t get away with it, then as here uses this apology as a whitewash as well as a weapon to attack his next victim with.

But he’s not the sole person to blame for this. If Antonelli is the abuser, fandom is his enabler. What makes Antonelli cabable of repeating this pattern again and again is that his victims, like Gerrold, are too quick to forgive and forget. This isn’t to fault him for this, it’s an inbuild instinct of civilised people who haven’t been exposed to repeat harassment, but fandom as a whole needs to learn not to do this and learn to pay attention to when Antonelli (or others like him) does it to lower profile victims.

Not a problem unique to us of course, but made worse by the fannish phobia for social exclusion. People are willing to forgive a serial harasser like Antonelli because excluding him from fandom would be a worse crime. As long as you’re part of the incrowd, you can do a whole lot of damage before you’re finally chucked out. This is incidently the real reason why Antonelli is treated differently from Benjanun Sriduangkaew/Requires Hate: she was always an outsider. Race and gender play their inevitable roles in this as well of course, but at the heart of the difference still is the simple fact that Antonelli is part of fandom and Sriduangkaew …isn’t.

We need to change this. We cannot let people like Antonelli get away with harassment over and over again just because they have the instinct to occasionally apologise in time. Just because we haven’t been harassed personally shouldn’t be a reason to not pay attention and know when to forgive and when not to.