Over the previous several months, the Disciplinary Team has received a litany of complaints about FlyPurgatorio, primarily regarding behaviour with users and other staff members. After a thorough review of the reports, incidents, and context, the Disciplinary Team has determined that Fly has showcased a pattern of explosive, unacceptable behaviour to other staff members consisting of verbal abuse, manipulation, and borderline-harassment, disproportionately affecting female members of staff.
By consensus of active, non-recused administrators and a majority of the Disciplinary team, we have elected to begin demotion proceedings per the Site Charter. We are recommending a full demotion from all staff positions.
This thread is open to all opstaff and higher.
Nona Incident - 2024.05.02
On May 2nd, 2024, FlyPurgatorio was involved in a public verbal altercation in a public chat with since-banned user NonaAcharontia over the latter requesting answers from people who downvoted their tale about why they did so and how it could have been improved. The discussion began with some tension, as Nona aired their grievances that downvotes without explanation seriously hampered the ability of new authors to improve.
Fly abruptly escalated the discussion with an extremely aggressive post, captured in part below; the entirety of the message was later edited by Fly to remove some of the more egregious insults and abuse, as he later apologized both publically and to Nona.
This escalation was immediately reported to crit staff by several users, and an internal discussion ensued. This was complicated by the fact that Nona had also been the subject of punitive action for his abuse of crit staff, particularly Fly, Dagon, and Ori, the Discord Crit leadership at the time — though part of his complaint was that his mentor relationship with Fly had devolved into unhelpful verbal abuse from Fly, such as the example attached above. At least two crit staffers voiced a concern that Fly was developing a habit of needless aggression towards users.
Nona’s specific relationship with Fly was also subject to scrutiny; Fly had been the crit officer of Queerious and Nona’s crit flights, in a supervisory role helping them mentor new critters. Over the course of the flight, Fly’s behaviour towards Nona and Queerious grew increasingly erratic and controlling, eventually resulting in a complete breakdown of the flight as Nona left the flight in protest of Fly’s treatment of him — the same authoritative, aggressive attitude Fly later displayed to him in in the incident in 19cord. Fly disengaged entirely from the flight, informing Queerious she would be running the rest of the flight and mentoring all the involved critters herself.
In the end, Fly chose to undergo a self-imposed, voluntary, one-week 'vacation' from crit staff duties. Following internal deliberation, Discord Crit staff additionally chose to give Fly a 3 day critban and the requirement to complete a personal flight before leading another critique flight. The matter was treated as an internal team issue, and not forward to Disciplinary Team.
N.b. Nona was later subject to a Disciplinary ban.
During the week of June 17-23, Fly was involved in two different Disciplinary incidents. They were about different topics but shared a common trait — Fly’s suddenly aggressive, explosive behaviour to other staffers when challenged on opinions.
Ari & Discord - 2024.06.17
On June 16th, Fish^12, then a member of critique staff, received a weeklong ban from Official Discord Server (i.e. 19cord) for violations of the main server rules. This kickstarted a discussion about whether Discord Team had the right to unilaterally ban members of the Discord Crit team from 19cord for server rules violations.
Deer College, a subset of critique channels inside 19cord, are under the jurisdiction of the Discord Crit team, who deal with rule violations specifically in those channels — Discord Mods have moderative power over the entire server but have agreed not to use them in the critique channels, which effectively operate as an enclave of the site. The particulars of this arrangement are still subject to some disagreement, but the contention of Crit Team was that moderators banning Fish from the server as a whole was improper because it would prevent Fish^12 from doing their job as a member of the team.
The most active parties in this discussion were Ari and ROUNDERHOUSE, in their capacities as Captain and Vice Captain of Discord Team arguing that moderating the server as a whole was inside our job description, and Dagon, OriTiefling, and Fly, arguing that Discord Team having the power to effectively remove a member from their team was a loophole that should not be exploited. This discussion grew fairly heated, but eventually was broken for the night.
That night, on June 19th, Fly proceeded to engage Ari in a long conversation in her DMs that eventually proceeded into mistrustful and unsubstantiated accusations that Discord Mod Team (and particularly that ROUNDERHOUSE) wanted to coup the Discord Crit Team.
The conversation dragged on intermittently for several hours over the evening, parallel to a conversation Dagon and Ari were having as captains. While Dagon and Ari’s conversation was essentially civil and friendly, hoping to achieve a mutually-acceptable arrangement between Discord and Crit, Fly’s conversation with Ari devolved into accusations of power plays and abuse. Despite Ari’s repeated requests to stop DMing her and to let her and Dagon sort it out, Fly continued this behaviour in her DMs intermittently for six hours.
The central throughline of the conversation was that Fly did not trust several members of the Discord Team not to weaponize their moderation powers, and felt that Ari as captain was not doing enough to prevent that possibility from occurring. The overall tenor of the conversation was an aggressive us-vs-them; even as Dagon and Ari were attempting to figure out how best to let the teams cooperate, Fly was aggressively hounding Ari and deepening wedges of distrust between them.
Eventually, Ari cut off the conversation.
Wrathcon - 2024.06.19
On June 18th, 2024, Wrathcon was announced. The contest was almost immediately subject to controversy — both because of its timing and theming (it overlapped with Pridefest and the contest page initially jokingly featured the words “PRIDE IS DEAD”), and because of its premise (many users took issue with a contest where all losing entries were permanently deleted). This controversy was discussed the night of the contest, stretching into the morning of the 19th, when Fly entered staffchat irate and aggressive. They engaged in an argument with ROUNDERHOUSE, primarily over a visual mockup using contest page art elements he had posted several hours ago as a possible look for a potential front-page contest banner.
Fly took issue with the contest premise as a whole, and felt the banner was emblematic of staff’s disregard for PRIDEfest. This was an opinion a number of staff members shared, and is not an issue in and of itself. However, Fly’s contribution to the conversation that night began with aggression and continually escalated at anyone around.
This eventually resulted in HarryBlank ordering that personal issues be resolved elsewhere and to keep the conversation on-topic of the contest and potential solutions. Fly took offense and accused Harry of ‘tone-policing’ him and accusing him of being emotional, suggesting he take the event as a learning moment. HarryBlank reiterated the order, effectively ending the incident.
Following these two incidents occurring back-to-back, Dagon and Ari filed a joint complaint to the Disciplinary team regarding Fly’s recent behavior. Both acknowledged they would call Fly a friend, but that his behaviour in recent months had progressed to aggression and badgering when things didn’t go his way. Dagon admitted that he ran Crit team as a flat structure and encouraged his team members to disagree with him, but said that recently Fly’s actions had progressed from disagreement to informing him he was running his team incorrectly and undermining him (as in the case with Ari).
As the complaint issuers, Ari and Dagon recused themselves from the discussion. Disciplinary discussed and floated the idea of a censure but the idea lost steam, partly because Dagon clarified he would be enforcing a 3-day break from Crit Staff duties as a punishment regardless of what Disc decided upon. Dagon attested that he felt a 3-day break would hammer the lesson into Fly, and the matter was considered closed with an acknowledgement that Disc failed to act in a timely fashion.
Dagon & Aster
Dagon attested that while he had been on vacation in June 2024, he made the decision as head of Discord Crit to leave Aster in charge. Dagon communicated her new position to the rest of the team and intentionally avoided responding to staff inquiries over the course of his vacation. All Discord Crit decisions were deferred to AstersQuill.
As Dagon later attested, Fly’s response to this was to steadily ignore the deferral of duties onto AstersQuill. He continued to message Dagon over the course of his vacation asking for input, suggestions, and counsel on Discord Crit decisions and matters that were now Asters’ domain. In most cases, he did not receive a response.
Members of Critique Staff who wished to stay anonymous offered additional substantiation. They stated undermining came in the form of aggressive pushing of policy initiatives and challenges to Aster’s decisions; when questioned or rebuffed, Fly reacted with outbursts accusing her and other members of manipulation or of generally not behaving as a friend. He routinely offered advice that deepened the wedges of mistrust between the Discord Mod Team and Critique Teams that Ari and Dagon were attempting to mend, with commentary on Mod Team’s runaway authority. This behaviour eventually progressed to messaging Dagon directly to second-guess her decisions. Dagon admitted that a part of why he neglected to respond to the messages was that he felt any engagement would cause Fly’s manipulative behaviour to intensify.
When confronted on the matter by Dagon, he had an explosive reaction that devolved into an argument, expressing distress over what he perceived as being shut out of the decisionmaking process on Discord Crit, but was assured this was not the case by Dagon.
Queerious
On 2025.01.25, a conversation occurred in staffchat regarding the ongoing proposals related to the Bright situation. Queerious had proposed making RACI charts, a sort of organizational tool to keep track of which staff members are involved on a specific matter and to what degree, for the ongoing policy conversation about what to do with Bright’s work, as the information on the various proposals was very scattered and hard to keep track of. She did not suggest anything related to Bright’s works themselves, just on how best to keep track of the information.
Fly quoted the post and expressed displeasure, stating that it was an unworkable way to set things up and concentrated power in the hands of adcap, cutting off staff from input. Queerious expressed confusion and clarified this was strictly an organizational tool to ensure staff weren’t unnecessarily repeating work. Fly continued to insist this split discussion would harm the proposals and damage the ability of the policymakers to present a finished product, and effectively made it so that whoever wrote the chart controlled what would happen to his proposal.
Despite repeatedly being told by Queerious that the RACI chart was *not* a be-all-end-all dictation of how the proposals would take shape and simply a way to formally keep track of who was involved with what and would be updated to reflect any changes, Fly continued to voice these opinions until Ari stepped in and admonished him for being defensive. Fly rebuffed the accusation, but the conversation (publically) ended there.
Privately, Queerious lodged a complaint with Administrators, as she felt Fly was reactive overaggressively in a pattern of hostility and dismissal that had become a constant in their interactions. She mentioned that she felt Fly was continually aggressive to her and becomes extremely hostile when she involves herself in staff matters in a way he feels ‘pushes him out’. Admins discussed the complaint and felt Fly was, in effect, bullying anyone else out of attempting to contribute to the Bright situation., and agreed he needed to spoken to formally. One administrator matter-of-factly suggested that the individual who does the talking-to should be someone Fly is not a direct subordinate of, as he becomes defensive when admonished, and not a woman, as Fly tends to dismiss criticism from women.
This statement provoked incredulity amongst assembled admins, that this was a phenomenon so casually known but that Fly was still on staff. Administrators briefly discussed a vote of no confidence but decided to send the case to Disciplinary primarily because of general disapproval of administrators using the VoNC (a tool primarily meant for operational staff), but also to gather evidence that would shed any light on whether the accusation of sexism held water and get input from a wider range of staff.
In the ensuing conversation, multiple female members of staff gave accounts reflecting how, in their conversations with Fly, they felt consistently condescended to, belittled, harassed, or verbally badgered well past requesting the conversation to come to close.
Queerious, in her complaint, contended that this was a long-term pattern of behaviour over the past few months of their interactions together; she offered the screenshots as evidence of one exemplary, representative incident.
Screenshot accounts presented to Disc further substantiated the claims, leading a unanimous approval (barring recused members) for Disciplinary demotion per the terms of the charter.
Throughout my experiences with Fly, I have never felt like he was intentionally malicious; however, I cannot deny that I have experienced a pattern of behavior that made me uncomfortable. I was close friends with Fly, when I first joined the Discord, but over the past year, our interactions have gotten more difficult, frustrating, and alienating to the point of only having a working staff relationship with Fly - even then, due to friction within our staff teams, interactions are awkward, stilted, and often spiral out into a larger problem.
Throughout all of my experiences with him, I felt like Fly was undermining me, being condescending to me, or otherwise talking down to me. I experienced many instances of being lectured in private regarding my behavior, being told that I was overstepping as staff, and being publicly contradicted — even when I was in the right. When Fly used language that abusers often do, and I called it out in a very vulnerable moment for me, and he turned that back against me as 'me calling him an abuser', I realized just how unhealthy those interactions had been for me, and began distancing myself further. Despite never feeling targeted for a specific reason, I cannot deny that Fly has demonstrated a pattern of condescension, impulsive actions and harshness in his language, nor can I say that I feel comfortable when interacting with him, knowing that at any moment, he could take issue with something and make me feel like I had been in the wrong. (Queerious)
Conclusion
The overall image formed, by testimony, by evidence, and by investigation of the half-dozen incidents listed here and several smaller ones in private was that Fly’s behaviour over the past year had shifted dramatically and taken a turn for the worse. His interactions with other staff close staff members became dominated by accusations that he was being pushed out of the decisionmaking process, including on Crit Staff and on the Bright situation. He came to excessively employ leaning on his relationships and friendships on staff to attempt to force people to listen to him and take a leadership role, frequently undercutting the actual team leads. Most problematically, when these tactics failed, Fly’s first response was highly reactive anger and verbal abuse towards whomever had not firmly and definitively repudiated him — which ended up largely being the female members of staff.
Given the context of this thread, the team feels it necessary to voice that we do not make assumptions regarding motive or intent in this case. The interpretations taken are strictly focused on the actions taken by the staff member, which we feel form an unacceptable pattern of behaviour of aggression, hostility, verbal harassment, and manipulation that, intentionally or not, came to focus largely on female members of staff in authority positions.
During the various incidents collated in this thread, Fly had friends who are administrators and friends who were members of disciplinary team. Consistently, these people immediately recused themselves from judgement beyond offering context and evidence in the interest of not biasing the case, and the resulting lack of bodies on the Disc team meant that Fly consistently exited situations where he flagrantly broke staff and user expectations with no formal punishment beyond a few days of unofficial censure — a punishment that consistently failed to alter his behaviour. While the Disciplinary team accepts this was an internal team failing, we feel that the nature of the problem has ballooned to the point where censure is no longer a practical solution.
We are recommending full demotion from all staff positions.
Resignation while these Disciplinary proceedings are ongoing will be recorded as leaving staff in poor standing.
Disclaimer
For several months, FlyPurgatorio has been in the process of compiling a policy proposal with a definitive, complete answer on what to do with Bright’s works. This is a topic which has seen considerable controversy in the past, and there was some concern in the course of the investigation hat Disciplinary action could potentially be seen as reprisal, but that suppressing Disciplinary proceedings over concerns of public relations concerns would be both unjust and would permit a past case of staff abuse to justify an ongoing case of staff abuse.
In that interest, the Disciplinary Team would like to state in the strongest possible terms that this Disciplinary thread has absolutely no connection or relation to the matter of Bright’s works or the proposals on it The complaints investigated here span across months and center on a persistent pattern of abusive interpersonal behavior. Part of his abusive behavior was excessive defensiveness towards any action he perceived as "pushing him out", which effectively resulted in no one else being able to assist with or offer help regarding policy work concerning Bright's works. Offers to do so, as in Queerious' case, resulted in unprovoked hostility and aggression.
While Admin Team does not know how this thread will proceed and cannot definitively say what will happen to Fly’s proposal, we want to express our commitment to finding an acceptable solution to the problem, and will make every effort to ensure the efforts and thoughts put into this policy proposal are reflected in any such solution.
FlyPurgatorio has the right to respond to this thread and any posts within it, and their position and powers as site staff is considered in abeyance for policy votes until discussion ends.
This thread is open to all Operational Staff and above per section B.3 of the charter:
Once a post has been made on O5, it may be responded to by both the peers of the user and all members of the disciplinary team.
Please keep responses on-topic and limited to this particular case. This discussion will remain open for one week.