Email Exchange between VA and Political Secretary Steff Yorek

Email 1: Jared Hamil to [Redacted] - November 16, 2014 #

Note: this email looks like it was sent from Jared’s email, but copy-pasted from Steff. From: Jared Hamil (11/16/2014)
To: me

I understand that you are representing a survivor who may or may not wish to press forward a charge against a member of our organization.

We take charges of sexual violence and sexual harassment very seriously. I would like to apologize to you for the two week delay in reply to you on this issue. I was entrenched in a national campaign taking place in the Midwest and it distracted me from addressing this issue.

I and my colleague, another woman from the Twin Cities are the two people who will be working on this case. Further process questions can be addressed to me directly. Please email me at yosteff@gmail.com or phone me at 612-865-8234.

General Points on The Process:

Even before an official determination has been made in the case we use the terms survivor and alleged perpetrator or perpetrator throughout the investigation process. These terms do not imply a prejudgement of the outcome. We are committed to a process where all parties have the opportunity to be heard, where there is due process, where we can support survivors and hold perpetrators accountable.

Our process starts with the survivor’s statement about what happened.

We then ask the alleged perpetrator to provide an account of the situation and events.

Both statements are taken because sometimes the same event can be viewed differently and both interpretations are necessary to understand the situation.

If there are other people who have a perspective on the incident then I will listen to their accounts as well. We will do our best to gather relevant facts and information and will keep the information we gather private while we are undertaking the process.

Outcomes:

Sexual harassment and sexual assault exists on a continuum. For example, charges of verbal harassment are treated with a different set of remedies than charges of sexual harassment which can have a different set of remedies than charges of sexual assault.

Our goals are to support survivors, understand if there were organizational issues related to the charges and determine whether the organization should cut ties with the perpetrator or if the severity and level of the offense is such that it is appropriate give perpetrators an opportunity to transform themselves and unlearn sexist and oppressive behaviors.

These outcomes will be determined by the organization in consultation with the survivor.

We can travel to Florida next weekend, November 22/23rd to take the survivors statement. I am not able the travel Thanksgiving weekend or the weekend of December 6 but can travel December 13,14 or December 20,21.

Please let me know if the survivor chooses to participate in this process

You can assure the survivor that the alleged perpetrator has been told to stay away from her and will continue to do so.

Email 2: [Redacted] Response - November 23, 2014 #

Hi Jared,

I am unclear as to who I am supposed to contact now. Is it still you in addition to someone else? Is it just this other person? What is this person’s name?

Additionally, I have some further questions regarding the process you described. I am aware that the perpetrator in question has sexually assaulted another person previously and had sanctions placed against him which he did not follow. Is this going to factor into how this case is handled? I ask because no information was given regarding the process in relation to repeat offenders, despite the fact that I am certain FRSO is aware that this case falls within that category.

Also, the victim I am representing is not particularly enthusiastic about releasing a statement to FRSO, especially considering both the previous and current behaviors of its members. Is investigation into this issue contingent upon her releasing this statement? What does this statement need to consist of (how detailed does it actually have to be)? Also, how are claims regarding the organization’s handling of inquiries into this issue going to be handled? Is the total silence and subsequent ostracizing and hostility faced by people bringing this issue up going to be addressed by this investigation? And if the current victim decides to not release a statement, does that void any investigation going on into why concerns about an abuser potentially being a member of FRSO were not taken seriously from the start?

Email 3: Steff Yorek Response - November 23, 2014 #

From: Steff Yorek (11/23/2014)
To: me

[redacted name]

I am the person that you should be contacting regarding the matter for which you are the advocate. I believe my email and phone number was contained in the last message though perhaps my signature was cut off in the forward. My name is Steff Yorek and I live in Minneapolis. I will keep Jared informed about the status of the process but will not share details with him. He does not need to be included in the correspondence going forward.

In terms of process, I will come to Florida in person to to take the survivors first person statement from her. She can of course have an advocate there. I may ask a few clarifying questions but the principle aspect is for her to have an opportunity to tell her story. You can assure her that I will not share her statement with other members of the group except to an extent necessary to pursue the investigation. I will take her statement verbally and take limited notes which I will shred after the investigation is completed in order to preserve her privacy to the extent that she wants it preserved. Let me know when I should come, it make take a little back in forth to find a good date but I will strive to be as flexible as possible.

It would be very difficult to pursue and investigation without a specific complaint from the survivor with sufficient details for due process to occur.

The perpetrators history will be taken into account throughout the process and specifically in the sanctions phase.

Due to privacy concerns, at this time I am not able to discuss with you any previous incident including how the survivor may or may not have named it and the manner in which the sanctions were arrived at.

As far as compliance with the sanctions, If you have concrete information regarding the extent to which imposed sanctions were or were not complied with, please provide that information to me.

I am sorry if the survivor experienced a delay in getting a response. My understanding is that the day after hearing about the allegation second hand, Jared reached out to the individual who semi-publicly identified herself as a survivor at an SDS meeting. He did not get a response and reached out further through a third person which took a few days.

He was not familiar with internal organization process and it took a little time to get me brought in.

We take this situation seriously. I do not believe Facebook wall posts or Youtube videos are an appropriate discussion venue for something serious and I told comrades that and asked them not to engage in that way

Your other questions are related but also separate from the specific complaint. I would like to focus on the survivor for the moment and keep her at the center of the process. We can discuss your complaints about how individual comrades and/or the organization handled things in future correspondence.

Again my email is yosteff@gmail.com and my phone # is 612-865-8234.

Thanks

Steff

Email 4: [Redacted] Reply #

Hi Steff,

Yes, I got your e-mail. Sorry about the delay in response. I have told the victim that you are willing to come down here to take a statement from her and she is currently weighing her options and deciding what she is comfortable with, which is part of why there’s been such a delay. I will let you know as soon as she decides what she would like to do.

In the meantime, I did want to correct what I think is some misinformation in what you were given regarding any outreach received by the victim in this situation. You said that a day after hearing about the allegation secondhand that Jared reached out to the individual. To my knowledge, this is not true. Either the victim did not receive this message in whatever form of communication it was sent, or that outreach did not occur. The only communication the victim received from a FRSO member was the third party communication that you described. It was during that exchange that the victim requested that all correspondence occur through me and then I was not contacted for two weeks after that.

Additionally, the victim did not out herself at an SDS meeting. There was actually no discussion of her status as a survivor during the SDS meeting in question at all, and the notion didn’t even come up until a confrontation between Sol Marquez and the victim after the meeting was concluded. I was a witness to this confrontation, as was another member of the victim’s support team (who is also a member of SDS) as well as other members of FRSO. I’m not sure I would describe that as semi-public, and I certainly wouldn’t describe that as an invitation to use the victim’s name frivolously. I’ve actually been pretty perturbed with the fact that I know FRSO members have used the victim’s name in correspondence with non-FRSO members. Those non-FRSO members have used the idea that the survivor outed herself at an SDS meeting as justification for this usage, which I guess is an idea they got from the members using the victim’s name in such a disrespectful way. I want to make it very clear that this idea is entirely incorrect and should be addressed immediately. I do not have confirmation as to who shared the victim’s name with an outside FRSO member, but the number of people who know the victim’s name is very limited (at least it should be assuming FRSO members have followed feminist guidelines of victim anonymity), so I hope that there will be an inquiry into who did share the victim’s name and that this person will be corrected. I would like to be informed as to what action is being taken on that issue in the future.

I do have specific information regarding the perpetrator’s previous sanctions and the level to which they were followed that is extremely concerning. I’ve attached some screenshots of an e-mail exchange between the perpetrator and a former member of FRSO tasked with confronting the perpetrator’s non-compliance. As you can see in the e-mail, the former FRSO member was communicating to the perpetrator’s failure to comply with sanctions, to which the perpetrator actually responded by saying the sanctions themselves were unfair. This attitude shows the extreme lack of regard the perpetrator has (had? I’m not sure there’s even a facade of them being enforced anymore) for the sanctions.

Last but not least, I would like to know when and how the shameful behavior of FRSO members in relation to this issue is going to be addressed. I understand the need to keep the victim at the center of this discussion and as the victim’s advocate I would not want this discussion to be construed any other way. However, I also think it is absolutely essential for you and anyone else involved in this case to understand that the rape supportive actions of multiple members of your organization (both locally and nationally) have directly contributed to the victim’s hesitancy in releasing a statement to FRSO. If taking a statement is essential to FRSO’s process of addressing issues of patriarchal violence, then it must also be necessary to address the behavior of members that create an inhospitable environment for such an event to occur, don’t you think?

In fact, I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but the perpetrator or someone posing as him online has actually threatened legal action against anyone speaking out about this. I hope this is not something that FRSO will tolerate. Such threats make it impossible for the victim or anyone advocating on her behalf to feel comfortable coming forward, and as such is a blatant reinforcement of rape culture. I hope action will be taken to make sure that the victim and her support team will not be retaliated against in this way, and I look forward to receiving details on a plan to protect those speaking out from such retaliation.

Again, the victim is contemplating her options in moving forward at this time. I will let you know what about her decision as soon as she lets me know what it is. I imagine a lot of her decision will depend on what kind of protection she is going to be offered by the organization, as she certainly doesn’t have the resources to deal with a member of FRSO using the state to retaliate against her.

Thanks again for your action on this issue. I look forward to working with you to resolve this serious problem.

Email 5: Reminder to Steff #

Hi Steff,

I was just wondering if you received my e-mail and if you had been able to investigate any of the issues I brought up within it. Please let me know as soon as possible, especially since the perpetrator himself has been posting about this publicly now, which I imagine is a direct violation of the request you made to your comrades in FRSO.

Thanks.

Email 6: Steff Yorek Response #

Hi [redacted name]

I was a bit too quick on hitting send.

Has the survivor made a determination about whether she wishes to pursue a formal complaint with FRSO?

I am not aware of new postings but I will investigate.

I did look into your allegations that the survivor was not contacted by leadership in FRSO. In fact, Jared Hamil left a message on her phone or at least on the phone number he had for her the very next day. On subsequent phone calls the phone was not accepting messages. Once he got an email address from a person in another city he emailed and then you replied to that email.

There was some confusion on advocate protocol which resulted in the delay in contacting you. To be very honest, The barrage of public denunciations when in fact we were trying to contact the survivor did not make people eager to contact you.

Since I do not know what non-FRSO person knows the identity of the survivor I have no way to find out how that occurred or if someone from the organization is responsible.

I am eager to schedule a time to come and take the survivors statement as soon as possible.

Thanks

Email 7: Continued Response #

So someone just shared a comment you made about me with me.

I wanted to say that I think it was disingenuous. I have been very clear that I wanted to keep this situation survivor centered and I have been communicating regularly asking to set a time to come and take the statement and have been waiting to hear back and you post a comment in a public forum that implies that I am doing nothing and that I am not communicating.

I find this inappropriate.

Email 8: [Redacted] Response #

Hi Steff,

Are you really going to tell me you find my statement about you to be inappropriate while you haven’t even touched the fact that the perpetrator himself posted on that same public forum reiterating his threat to do after people bringing up that he is an abuser and digging for information about who is accusing him?

I’m sorry if you found my behavior inappropriate, but if my post is somehow more worth commenting on than that, I’m extremely worried about the priorities being set here. I never told you or anyone else that I would not speak about the status of these conversations publicly, and I certainly will not agree to that now or in the future.

Additionally, in the email I sent to you I made it pretty clear that some issues were going to have to be addressed before we could move forward. One of those things was the threats from the perpetrator that it now seems FRSO is more than willing to tolerate. I don’t know why you think any victim would be willing to come forward against an abuser who is threatening her friends. Perhaps you can explain that.

In my comment I only mentioned that you had not contacted me in over a week. That was true. I don’t know what about my last message indicated that a response was unnecessary. I had told you that the victim’s decision to give you a statement would likely be dependent upon your organization’s willingness to offer her and others protection, yet I received no word on the status of a plan to provide that.

Again I will reiterate that I am not interested in hashing out the appropriateness of my behavior with you or anyone in your organization until you or someone else addresses the inappropriate behavior of your members. So far any attempts to even bring that up have been ignored, so I’m not going to engage with your criticism of my behavior any further.

If you would like to tell me what your organization plans to do about the threats being made by the perpetrator, I would like to take that information to the victim I am representing. This is information she needs in order to make a decision about whether to trust this process and this organization with her story.

To address the other issues, the non-FRSO person who used the victim’s name in correspondence with me is Adele Cain. She’s actually good friends with Daniel Sullivan, which is where I suspect she got that information that she was not supposed to have.

As for my public denunciations, they occurred because of what appeared to be a total lack of response from your organization. The victim had told me that she received no communication until the correspondence with the third party. I hope you will not hold her myself accountable if Jared did not have her proper phone number or for some other malfunction in communication, because from our end it appeared to be silence.

Email 9: Steff Yorek Response - Long Investigation Details #

I can assure you that I am looking into the assertions you have made in your emails about the behavior of third parties toward yourself and the victims friends. Given your assertion that you feel free to post anything we correspond about publicly, I do not feel able to provide partial answers while I am looking into the myriad of situations raised but will provide answers once I have a complete understanding of each situation.

The victim should know that this is my approach in general. I am gathering facts and information and will not make judgements before the investigation is complete. This is why I am eager to come to Florida and take her statement. As I stated before, her statement will be kept confidential and not shared with members of FRSO except as required to conduct an investigation. As I stated before, we do use a due process model and so when I have her statement I will be interviewing the perpetrator about the incident(s) in question and any other people who may be helpful for me to talk to in order to complete the investigation.

I know that there are some schools of thought that argue the perpetrator does not need to know why they are being disciplined but that is not the model we work under. The victim’s statement is presumed to be truthful. Hearing what the perpetrator has to say regarding the situation can help the organization learn important lessons that can be applied in the future. There could also be a rare instance where the perpetrator could say, I wasn’t in town on the day in question and here is my plane ticket to prove it. The last aspect may not be applicable here, I am just using that example to explain the policy.

You said that the survivor being threatened. What is the nature of the threats and who is making them? Is this a reference to the allegations of libel being made against the victims friend from Canada or is this something else?

I have continued to ask people not to discuss this publicly. I saw that someone posted a statement about incident A that the perpetrator was disciplined for by the organization, presumably on his behalf. I was quite surprised to see that and I am looking into it.

I spoke with Daniel Sullivan about whether or not he revealed the survivors first name to Adele, he does not know her last name. He said he honestly doesn’t know if he disclosed the information. He spoke to Adele as a friend several times looking for her counsel and thinks it is possible that he slipped and used the victims name. He is not certain that he did but is also not certain that he did not. He did not do so intentionally and understands at this point that it is being made anonymously and that doing so was inappropriate.

Because [Former Tampa FRSO Cadre]’s facebook post stated that the disclosure had come at an SDS meeting I believe that Dan may have been under the same impression that I was, namely that the victim had publicly disclosed in the SDS meeting causing him to be less careful than he might otherwise have been. He was able to assure me that he has not had any other substantive discussions with other people on this topic and has not disclosed her name to anyone else if indeed he is responsible for the disclosure to Adele.

I am not sure what other things the victim would like to hear about, I want to assure her that I want to hear her story and get justice for her, I can come to Florida to do so

Steff

Email 10: [Redacted] Final Response #

Hi Steff,

The perpetrator is making threats against the victim’s support team. He is threatening to use legal means to suppress people speaking out about this. Specifically, he has threatened to sue myself and one other person for libel. I don’t know who you are referring to when you are talking about the victim’s friend from Canada. These threats are a pretty transparent attempt to gain access to information as to who his accuser is, which I hope you’ll agree is not information he should have.

He has made these threats twice now. Once on Youtube, and now again on Facebook during the same conversation in which you went into detail about the other instance in which he assaulted someone, which is a conversation you seem to be aware of.

I have spoken with the victim about these threats and she finds it impossible to move forward with the organization unless the organization addresses the fact that now the perpetrator is threatening her support team (in an effort to obtain information about who is accusing him no less). To be honest, his behavior in threatening people during what should be an ongoing investigation into his behavior should be enough to have him removed from the group in itself.

Please let me know what your organization plans to do to address the threats being made by the perpetrator. I will then take that information back to the victim and we will determine what she would like to do from there.

Email 11: Steff Yorek’s Tampa Proposal #

Hello [redacted name]

I want to start by saying that I will be in Tampa this coming weekend. I have some things already scheduled but would like to meet with yourself and the survivor while I am there. I can take a formal complaint at that time or something else.

After your last email I decided that I had to sift through all of the social media posts that the survivors “support team” has made on social media specifically facebook. I had been avoiding this hoping to take the survivors statement with fresh ears.

I am just going to be honest with you [VA]. I have never seen an advocate behave in this manner, and try to make the situation center upon themselves rather than upon the survivor in this way. I have acted as an advocate several times and…..well I think you look at what you have done with the knowledge that the advocate is the voice of the survivor. The clarity and truthfulness that you conduct yourself with is placed by others onto the survivor.

I do not want the survivor’s case jeopardized because of an inexperienced advocate. I will do everything in my power to ensure that she is not impacted and that no legal proceedings are brought against her. I believe the perpetrator is clear on that point and will not do so. As for her friends:

I don’t know who is an official member of the support team and who is not. After careful consideration, my evaluation is that statements have been made about the perpetrator on social media that are not true and and in some cases contradictory to what you have stated in individual correspondence. False statements are beyond the scope of providing support for the survivor and getting justice for her. The fact is [redacted], the behavior you have engaged in is contrary to the interests of any survivor.

The perpetrator will be disciplined for posting on social media when he was told not to do so. I saw you think he should be expelled on the basis of there being another charge with no need to know what the charge is. You understand of course that if he is no longer in the organization I have no ability to demand things from him. I have no special power over him besides what he gives to the organization voluntarily. It is the survivors interest and the interest of justice to keep him in the group through the end of a process rather than expel him.

The survivor should understand that the perpetrator is already certain who the accuser is based on a conversation they had last February, I believe it was related to a debt. Also I presume that he knows what he did.

I really do hope that the survivor will talk to me. From careful parsing of your words on social media I take it to be the case that she is no longer charging rape but instead charging abuse. Is that the case? I would really like to speak to her in order to understand what this situation is and how we can come to a resolution that will be helpful and healing for her.

Thanks
Steff

I am free all day Friday, though earlier is better and can make something happen on Saturday as well though earlier is better than later.

I hope to see you this week,
Steff