Exorcising Emily Rose

In June 2015, Travis tweeted rather pointed comments about having fans banned from conventions for having negative opinions of him/his character. He’d tagged Misha in, tagged J2 in, something of that nature: I don’t remember being that invested, besides shaking my head at the whole mess, because I’m generally ambivalent about Cole. However, my friends spent some time in public and private conversations with Travis explaining why that was a hot button with our side of fandom, citing what happened to me at ChiCon. Suddenly, mid-conversation with my friends in DMs, he began speaking as if he was ANOTHER person, a HACKER! Who hah hah, totally had them going! They were incredulous, and posted screencaps of it. So the ‘hacker’ posted Travis’s phone number, which became part of the PROOF that it was a hacker, not himself (mind you, J2M had all posted phone numbers by this time, to burner phones, to engage the fans).

Travis made this big production out of having been hacked. I was publicly skeptical, and he sent his OTW (Original T-Wadesters) PROOF that he was hacked (pictures of a police report he filled out and snapped pics of), and told them to contact all of us who were questioning the truth of that statement to PROVE to them that we were spreading misinformation. Meanwhile, he began remarking that posting DMs was illegal, trying to push people into removing the screencaps of the DMs with ‘his hacker.’

Shortly thereafter, Travis began DMing me personally: he was insistent about needing to talk to me on the phone, so he could PROVE that he would NEVER make that kind of comment. He name dropped everyone he could think of, to try and get me to agree.

I gave in and created a Google Voice account so that he wouldn’t have my number, and called at the time he told me to. He told me he was at a funeral for his cousin, but happy to leave to talk to me on the phone (not necessarily related to this story, but it sure struck me as odd, especially as I offered to call back at a more convenient time). The phone call was essentially 45 minutes of him telling me how great he is while namedropping, but it was more than that. He tried to go for a hard sale. See, his claim is that Clif had HIM banned from cons, for an offhand remark he made at a convention. He went on to claim that Clif banning him from cons (he wasn’t scheduled for more that I was aware of) cost him the opportunity to buy his first house, and he was so frustrated that Clif didn’t just talk to him about it, and explain what he did. And so he would NEVER get someone else banned from cons. The gist was that since Clif banned HIM from cons, and ME from a con, then clearly we needed to stick together.

During the call, I told Travis that while I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on the hacking thing, I found his behavior of militarizing his fandom disconcerting. He made noises like he understood that, but he’s just so upset by how people behave, and “he’s a Marine,” as an excuse for how he feels compelled to confront.

I did not leave that call with the impression that he would be changing, but I had friends who were closer to TAW, and who encouraged me to give him another chance. I generally wrote him off and was content to ignore him, if he wasn’t threatening fans.

His behavior continued over several other situations; he would make a bad social media decision (such as claiming he understood systemic racism after the South Carolina church shooting because he was bullied by fans in the SPN fandom, that simple exercise was the answer to mental health issues, or declaring in a fandom interview about his behavior that we all ‘needed to come together, you know, like they did after the Towers fell on 9/11’), and fans would recoil and indicate that he wasn’t something he should say, and he would either claim it was someone else manning his account (a fan, two single moms he hired, a social media company, a hacker, etc.) or that the fans were being hateful.

Then he purportedly sexually harassed a girl at a convention. I don't know the truth of this or not, but I know that SHE was not the one to make it public. She reached out to Creation, he found out from Creation, and then he started a smear campaign against her. He began harassing her, sent his followers and his family after her. Like before with the police report, he snapped pictures of letters PROVING that there was actually a CONSPIRACY to get him kicked out of conventions, with her at the center of it, and sent that out as PROOF to fans, who were then to lecture the fandom (sent to me via other fans by DM, and also sent to SPNAB by TAW himself).

When the fandom didn’t lionize him and dismiss her, Travis began screencapping and reporting the girl and her friends to SPN Antibullying, because someone told him the community had a track record of getting accounts shut down. 

When we did not immediately act in his favor, he began speaking in the third person and reported her again.  Now calling himself (on his blue checkmark account) "SMM," playing his own Social Media Manager, he continued to attempt to target the girl who’d accused Travis of inappropriate behavior.

When we did not immediately respond, he/they found an old article that showed that I was a moderator there, and began addressing SPNAB as ME. I requested that he not use a community account as a personal inbox to bypass my blocking him. His “Social Media Manager” made a new account and began DMing. He/They began claiming that I was hateful towards him, that I supported her, etc. He came up with a list of people who he's blocked for 'hate' that I follow (many of them just… fans. Fans who disliked Cole, or doubted Travis’s story, or expressed sympathy for the girl), and said that the people I follow reflect on me, and so my involvement invalidated the whole community.  He/They continually reported her for things that are not reportable (one of her friends made a meme, use of nicknames he disapproved of, etc). Examples of the tweets sent below (blurred names myself, caps were sent as reports to encourage us to issue a block/report alert).

Suffice to say, these are not tagged hate, they are not threats, and they do not include hate speech. They do not fall under the mission of SPN Antibullying (if we policed snark, no one in this fandom would be allowed to speak). I recused myself from dealing with Travis as SPNAB, but he/they persisted in addressing me, so I invited him/his SMM to discuss it with me off of the SPN Antibullying list and stop attempting to use the DMs of the comm as my inbox. I questioned the validity of yet another entity running Travis’s account, giving him an excuse to write off anything inappropriate he’d tweet as being someone else’s doing, they became offended and unprofessional. They maintained that as they ‘handle security’ for celebrities they cannot/will not give their names, and directed us instead to Travis’s agent. When I got a domained email address as I asked for their manager and information about their ‘business,’ I found that it was a domain registered the day I began asking for information, and updated to add an email just before it was DMed to me.

I did not drop that information publicly at that time; I disengaged and blocked both his SMM and Travis again. He began making public subtweets and private claims about me, and sending his OTW to watch me.

Recently, William Shatner was told that I was a hater, and that SPNAntibullying was run by me, and he publicly posted his reprobation. Travis opportunistically jumped in agreeing and demanding an apology. I publicly posted that, while I think Shatner’s being misled, I was wary of Travis all on his own and had documentation to back my wariness going back all the way to the transcript and recording of our initial phone call. SPNAntibullying apologized that they were unable to help them, but he felt -I- owed him an apology.

He/They wanted an apology for claiming his SMM weren’t SMM (this is coming FROM the SocMedMgmt ‘company’ Twitter in DMs) and that I didn’t tweet his panel at HousCon and instead was hateful, by not calling out everyone who responded to me saying I was nervous that in his zeal to call people who he’d talked to on the phone or heard about from his OTW up onto the stage and make them part of his stage show, that he’d hear I was there.

Additionally Travis/His “SMM” were displeased that I had a recording. So, I unblocked his “social media manager” again and contacted them, asking them to please leave me out of it. I pointed out that I have from June 2015 through now worth of thorough documentation of his behaviors to justify my wariness, but all I wanted was for him to leave me alone. (I also explained that as I live in a one-party state, recording the call was entirely legal, and as he prefers to hop to deniable forms of communication so he can rewrite the narrative, I felt safer having that conversation at hand to refer to).

I blocked again.  Instead of moving on, he (his blue checkmark account, again) contacted SPN Antibullying the next week with pictures of a package that he purportedly sent me full of letters and pictures and notes about my seven year old daughter, that I purportedly ripped apart and sent back, as proof of my ‘behavior.’ I NEVER gave him my address.

He immediately followed that up with screencaps of a fan who said she didn’t want to go to the SPN Family movie premier with him there, because she was afraid she’d do something unladylike. He claimed they were “felony terroristic threats” and that my refusal to act on them proved that I was just as bad. 

At this point, we began conversing on the SPNAB account, because he insisted on addressing it as me, and I was trying to figure out what was going on with the letters. I was, to put it mildly, peeved. 

I proved I never sent that back to him: I pointed out the Return To Sender/Undeliverable on it and demanded to know why he was trying to find out my home address. He claimed (signing as Travis, to differentiate himself from SMM) that it arrived back at his office that way after he sent it to me out of the goodness of his heart despite my behavior. He further maintained that there’s NOTHING wrong with trying to find out someone’s home address in order to continue contact after they’ve disengaged and blocked you. 

The address, while NOTHING like my own address, was a home in my city previously owned by a family with the surname Rose. So he WAS trying to find my address, and keeping tabs on me/my family well enough to talk about my daughter. And then he tore the package to pieces and claimed I did it. If you look at the images, you’ll see fairly clearly there’s no way it arrived that way: pictures of various sizes are ripped in half, the largest one torn in thirds, but the hand-written and signed letters from Travis to me, about my family, are intact. [EDIT TO ADD: The return address for Travis shown below is publicly posted on his website. This is not me doxing his address in return.]

And he DEFENDED trying to find the home where my children live, and then implied that only my ‘hate and anger’ towards him made that seem inappropriate or wrong.

I’m not sharing all of this in an attempt to get people to engage with Travis about this: please don’t. I am sharing this because I realize that he has called, DMed, texted, people who follow me and told them that they have to unfollow me. He’s presented the staged image above as proof of my ‘hate,’ and he’s misrepresented the situation to say that I refused to assist him in dealing with virulent hate, instead of him reporting fans for tweets that in no way violate the terms of service of Twitter, nor fall under the mission of  the SPN Antibullying account. 

He’s making FB and Instagram posts about the hate in fandom, and how it is only hate that has people posting their stories of interaction with him. He is presenting himself as the victim, and fans as the aggressor.

I think at this point, it’s important people recognize that this is not necessarily the case. I’ve seen other DMs. I’ve been forwarded other accounts, conversations with him, things he’s done. This is by far not the whole of it, but those aren’t my stories to tell.