Joe Perez Joins the "Protect Marc Gafni" Camp

It was only a matter of time before Gafni found another proxy voice for his campaign of martyrdom. Joe Perez is the most recent willing puppet. With Perez, he has the perfect accomplice - Perez has been hacking away at me ever since he came back online in his most recent incarnation (one of his first acts was to "review" my blog and complain that it is not integral enough for him).

And I'll bet Perez doesn't even realize he is being played by Gafni exactly because he has already been critical of me. If it weren't sad, it might be funny.

As is always the case, Gafni tries to obscure the message by smearing the messenger (for example, women who broke his sacred container, Vicki Polin, Luke Ford, any and all other detractors, and most recently John Dupuy).

John had the audacity to speak out, so Marc responds with so much love and nuance, so much righteousness, and also with a not-very-well-veiled threat:

I did not threaten John with a lawsuit or any other such threat. Simply not true. I said to John that I would be forced to reply in a way that shares the deep context of my relationship to John and the great disappointment that I have felt around John and his character which I have called him on directly many times. That would then unmask much of the conscious or unconscious motivation behind John's blog. I wrote a long blog post which does precisely this. I am no longer sure wether anything would be served by posting it. The blogosphere is really not the place for genuine loving conversation between friends.

Two of his favorite ploys are on display here - he said/he said games that can never be proven one way or the other, and threats of exposing personal issues from the past that may or may not be problematic.

So now the "smear Bill Harryman campaign" is in full swing. Joe's big piece of ammunition against me is to accuse me of intellectual property theft. I addressed this in the comments to one of the posts where he again leveled the same accusations, so here is my "defense":

I have never posted anyone's work on this blog without attributing author and source, with links. Often I have permission to do so, and equally often the authors are grateful for the additional exposure. I guess I still have not met the legal standard (or your ethical standard), so yes, I am guilty of "egregious intellectual property theft." If I have hurt anyone by posting their work here, I am deeply sorry. I have never meant to "steal" work, which is why I always include links to the original source. 

So there it is - both an admission of being guilty as charged and an apology to anyone who has been hurt by my actions. Wow, that wasn't so hard. Why can't other people do that?

He says that accusing Gafni of plagiarism (actually, it wasn't me - it was Rocky Anderson, one the owners of the stolen work, and whose "letter of support" from Gafni's last resurrection is still posted on Ganfi's site) is hypocrisy because I am an intellectual property pirate. He isn't accusing me of using other people's work, verbatim, and putting my name on it as though I had written it, so I think we are talking apples and oranges here.

Are these accusations supposed to discredit the letter from Tami Simon on the original post? Is this supposed to discredit the other woman Gafni was sleeping with (mentioned in Tami's letter), in addition to the senior student, Marcy (who wrote in his defense), while not publicly disclosing his separation from Mariana? Or is it supposed to discredit the message by discrediting the messenger?

More and more, as this wears on, I feel sorry for Mariana - she is a new mom with her first child and her world is collapsing around her. She willingly chose Gafni and in full-knowledge of his past, although she believed his retelling of the story with him as victim (always the victim), so she holds her own share in this situation.

And then there is Zion - babies sense the emotions of those around them - what is this doing to him and his future? How I know I have contributed to the suffering of Marc, Mariana, and Zion by telling truths that no one else was willing to tell. I am sad about that. Like each of Gafni's previous children, he will probably grow up without his father - and eventually with the knowledge that his father was a deeply wounded man.