Won’t someone please think of the Brindleys?
JKR demolished the dreadful sycophantic Times article about poor persecuted Sandy Brindley yesterday, but I just want to add a kick or two of my own, because that’s how I roll.
After years on the wrong end of online campaigns hashtagged #BrindleyMustGo and as the subject of criticism from very prominent online warriors, Brindley, 50, has had enough. She says that she does not expect to be in her post by this time next year.
You probably think the Times goes on to say why there are campaigns saying Brindley must go along with criticism from “very prominent online warriors” (a slightly deceptive way to describe JK Rowling). If you think that, you’re wrong. The Times never bothers to say clearly what the criticism is about.
Her job, as head of a national body with 17 member centres, means she works with survivors, “making a change for the better in the world”. It is, she says, “wonderful in so many ways” but the flipside is the “real vulnerability” that comes from her public position.
Yes it’s just because of her public position. It’s the publicness that’s the problem, you see, not what she did and continues to do.
The closest the Times gets to saying why Brindley has been getting hostile attention is:
She is at pains to stress that she will not be leaving her post because of the furore surrounding Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, where Mridul Wadhwa, a trans woman and activist, quit this month amid allegations that she harassed staff with gender-critical views. A review found that the chief executive had not grasped “the limits on her role’s authority”.
If you don’t already know all about it, that’s a very opaque account. Where who quit? Quit what? Who is this Wadhwa person? Why was she harassing staff? Who’s the chief executive and whose role’s authority did the chief executive not grasp? A reader not already up on the subject would derive no information from that evasive paragraph. What furore? What’s it about? Who is Wadhwa? What was he doing there? Remind us who the chief executive is?
There’s a lot more of the same. It’s annoying.
Would I love to know the deals made and the favours called in or requested to make this “story” happen.
And apparently not one word that Wadhwa also harassed rape survivors, the demographic he was hired to protect.
Did you mean to repeat the third and fourth blockquotes?
Er, no. Sorry.
Was the harassment meted out by Wadhwa, and by others at Wadhwa’s direction, not proved by the official proceedings? “Amid allegations” seems overly evasive, opaque and weaselly, given the nature of the judgment against Wadhwa and the ERCC.