Unbelievable. At least Bonnie Conway has revealed what kind of person she is: a bully.
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I reported her to USEF and got a response from Teresa Roper. They are trying to tie her to USEF or an affiliate organization. I looked her up on Horseshowtime, a show website used by some of the shows out here, both recognized and not, and found results from a county show and a TB show six years ago. I searched the current membership roster of the county organization (GSDHJA) to no avail.
Teresa Roper suggested that I report her to Facebook.
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I reported the post to Facebook last night.
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I think that Hillary Ridland responded in a much more effective way than either FB or USEF could. Instead of lowering herself to a FB style spitting match, she responded to Ms Conway and mildly and politely offered to speak with her privately and in person! A calm, polite, generous response on FB. Shocking.
If HR is strong enough to make her report to SafeSport, and strong enough to publicly out herself as a claimant, as she demonstrably is, I doubt that she will be much bothered by the likes of Ms Conway.
If Ms Conway thinks she is defending or honoring RG, several posters pointed out that her post does the opposite by attempting to further victimize his victim.
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a search of USEF members doesn’t result in any “Bonnie Conway”… It doesn’t mean she isn’t there under another name, but probably not. I suspect fb is the only option (as toothless as that option is).
But hey, at least a few more people on this planet have seen the true measure of her character. I sincerely hope that whatever the future holds for her, that at some point she is reminded that many people have now “met” the real Bonnie Conway.
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Would someone take a look at Hillary’s FB thread? Kristin Hardin has posted there and in part says “Rob…confessed his mistakes to me in writing. But I didn’t kill him either, he wrote it down I sent it in…we all make choices.”
Does this mean that the some of the evidence against Rob was his own?
If so, can we stop blaming the survivors now?
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I saw that, too. The hard core are never, ever going to believe the women.
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There’s a Bonnie Conway that has a USDF number. Does not appear to be an active member.
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Weeks ago, one of the officials (Safe Sport, USEF; I’m not sure which), issued one of those carefully worded releases in an attempt to respond to the outrage without disclosing details.
The release stated that there was no dispute about the facts of the incidents. Instead the primary issue facing SafeSport was the extent to which the date of the incidents should be factored in in terms of the severity of the sanction.
The mob keeps saying it’s just “he said/she said” and “just allegations”, but that appears to be willful misdirection. It looks to me that Gage, to his credit, may have admitted what he did.
SafeSport does not have a statute of limitations wrt sexual misconduct with minors. Some people think it should, wish it did, but it doesn’t.
You’re absolutely right that the shaming of reporter/victims is even more illogical and misplaced if it is the case that there was zero dispute, even from Gage himself, that it happened. Safe Sport apparently didn’t need to adjudicate the validity of the claims, but just had to decide it would abide by the “no statute of limitations” provision.
Perhaps it will become more clear to the mob that the attempt to keep the details confidential was providing protection to the accused as well as the accusers. If they had not been screaming for all the details, bashing Safe Sport as a witch hunt, and shaming victims, they could have kept, in their own minds, their image of RG as slightly flawed (in a relationship with a 17 year old, when he was 23, or 28 or 32) but a mostly innocent victim of a shift in the culture. Harder to maintain their illusions as the details come out. The details they demanded to know.
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He was NOT an innocent victim due to a cultural shift. The acts that were reported were illegal then just as they are now.
Can people stop white washing this? I get it. It sucks to realize WHO a person is. I’ve been through it. I by no means minimize it because the person was a friend and mentor.
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@Denali, Yankee was not claiming RG was a mostly innocent victim of a shift in culture! Not at all! Yankee is saying that is what Gage’s defenders, (including OwnTooMany) want to believe and keep parroting in the face of evidence to the contrary.
The irony is that those defenders wanted details, and that the details they demanded may actually be more damning than exonerating.
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I expect plenty of people will be arguing publicly in defense of Epstein. If you’re rich enough and famous enough, there will always be people willing to lie for you, defend you in spite of mountains of evidence against you, and even do some of the dirty work for you.
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After reading @FiSk123 's very informative posts on the evidence it takes to support a lifetime suspension that was NOT rooted in a criminal conviction, that isn’t too surprising. It seems to come down to victim statement(s) plus either corroboration in the form of witnesses and/or the defendant’s own words/texts/etc.
As to your last question, doubtful
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With all due respect Denali, did you read my post?
I was characterizing the FB mob which is spreading misinformation, bashing Safe Sport as a witch hunt and bullying victims as a group of people who knew RG personally and desperately want to cling to their ILLUSION or false belief that he was the mostly innocent victim of a cultural shift when all he did was have a relationship with a 17 year old.
I never had that illusion; I assumed that Safe Sport would not have issued a lifetime ban unless they had good evidence that he had done some ugly stuff.
The point of my post was to say that the effect of the Safe Sport bashing, victim shaming, and demanding of details by the FB mob is that details that should have been kept confidential have come out and that as a result it is now impossible for the FB mob to keep **their** ILLUSIONS about RG. I was wondering if they are smart enough to realize that in their misguided and nasty attempt to defend their friend, they have done the opposite by removing veil of confidentiality and yanking out the ugly details.
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@YankeeDuchess your post was clarified to me and I apologize for misreading. Hence why I deleted it.
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“We” are not blaming survivors. Those people who are blaming survivors are impervious to evidence or logic, so there is little point in asking them to change. They won’t.
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I have to say that I was floored by her response. The rest of us can aspire to show half as much grace under duress.
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[QUOTE=OwnTooMany
Organizations like SafeSport tend to attract people committed to the cause. People “committed to the cause” often lose perspective (or never had any to begin with) even when the cause is a great cause (like preventing child abuse). They will believe any “fact” or any hearsay that supports their position. This has a name in psychology and related fields: confirmation bias. It is a natural human tendency. They will ignore information that does not align with their beliefs as it is also natural to avoid cognitive dissonance (another useful concept to understand from psychology). Unfortunately, such people often staff the organizations in universities that are called things like “The Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response.” In many universities, sex assault hearings are kangaroo courts. The details of this have been coming out over the last few years.
If you look at the totality of comments in this thread (now more than 70 pages), you clearly see people that do not really give a damn about a fair process that takes into account well established principles of justice or the context of the situation and they accept and repeat as fact things that are unreliable (like posts on the internet). Of course, there are people as extreme on the other side. They don’t seem to care anything about what may have happened, just that they knew and liked the accused.
[/QUOTE]
This is just about the worst of your posts… and that is saying something.
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Yep really something of confirmation bias when they expected under 100 reports and got over 800.
By the above logic about bias shouldn’t they be trying hard to have less sanctions?
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