#scpbad

I hope it’s okay to submit this to you. Staff ignored it as expected so it’s welcome to be public. I don’t expect you to post it but posting it is also okay, either way is fine. The reason I am giving it to you is that you are one of the people already fully aware that Kaktus is a very rude person, and I feel like the ‘big picture’ of the SCP community and his place in it may make more sense to you if you see this. Thank you for your time regardless.

This was submitted by a user who wishes to remain anonymous. This is not by the author of this blog.

Hi, I hope it’s ok for me to send a huge wall of text like this, because it’s the shortest I could manage. I’m putting my username in the required submission settings, but I want to remain anonymous in this post. I alluded to what I’m about to describe here in an ask I sent to this blog… about a week ago, I think. The timeline for this experience is approximately November 2018 - June 2019.

In late October of 2018, some things happened between me and another SCP author that scared the shit out of me and made me worry that I would need to leave the SCP community, possibly even delete all traces of my existence off the internet. I don’t want to talk about them here, but my distress was obvious to a few people on Discord, and it was during this time that a wiki author and j-staff member named Uncle Nicolini reached out to me to see if I was ok, despite the fact that we didn’t know each other well. We started talking to each other pretty regularly. We were both very depressed people who’d been through some traumatic experiences, so we were able to relate over that.

After about three weeks, it turned out that he had developed a very strong crush on me. I will admit that I did flirt with him back on a few occasions. At the time I was an openly sexual person. Here’s where the issues started: I am aromantic and bisexual, but the aromantic part is what really matters here. Uncle Nicolini is not. Despite the fact that we had only been talking to each other seriously for a few weeks, he became very angry that I could not feel attracted to him romantically. It got to the point that he threatened to kill himself because I would not be his girlfriend, and tried to manipulate me into believing that my sexual orientation was wrong. I vaguely recall him expressing the idea that women owed him something because of his semi-recent negative experience with a former girlfriend. I was absolutely horrified. At the time, I was barely 19 and he was 24. I tried telling some other people that I still trusted about what was happening, but the response I would get usually wasn’t much better than something like “Oh no, that sucks.”

Eventually I confronted him by text messages (I had his number and I hoped it would make him take me more seriously). I told him straight up what I thought of his behavior, and the response I got was… not very good. The tone I got from his responses was that I was wrong for getting angry at a depressed person, along with an entirely unrelevant excuse as to why I was not allowed to express any form of “passive-aggressiveness” towards him. Eventually we came to an agreement and decided to stay friends, but the apology he gave me was very backhanded and ultimately it felt like I was the one who was being a mean bitch. I genuinely tried to move past it, but over the next few months I couldn’t help but think back to what had happened and I felt like the incident was always haunting all of our interactions. To Nico’s credit - for a few months after this happened, I feel that he did genuinely try to help me with my trauma and be a good friend, which is why I have been extremely hesitant to talk about this publicly. I would not be writing this had I not very recently come to a conclusion about some of his other behavior towards me, which I’ll be talking about later.

Eventually, another major conflict happened between us. In late December through all of January, I was involved in some major drama in the SCP community (related to what I vaguely referenced at the beginning of this post) that resulted in both me and the unnamed author being permanently banned from the SCP Wiki. Though I should have been satisfied, especially after a month of hardship that I feared would go nowhere, I felt as though my experiences had been invalidated by the SCP Wiki admin team, and I was stuck in a situation where although I wanted to still be a part of the SCP community, there were now several barriers to me doing so, not to mention the way that my reputation was permanently affected. For the next two months I was a very aggressive ball of negativity, and I didn’t notice how much I was bothering some people around me. A bunch of people made it clear (though politely, out of respect for my situation) that they wanted nothing more to do with me. Uncle Nicolini was the one who took it upon himself to show me why my negativity was so damaging, and before I continue, I want to be clear that I think he was right. However, and I understand that it may be problematic that I cite these during a situation where I was the one in the wrong - there were two things about this situation that were incredibly troubling to me. The first is that during the argument, I also brought up Nico’s past sexual harassment of me and how months later I was still very upset about it, even though I tried my best not to let it show. His initial response to me bringing it up was something like “I thought I already apologized for that.” He did eventually give me a real apology after some probing, not the half-assed line he had given me in November to shut me up, but it made it clear to me that he did not understand how he had affected me, or perhaps did not care.

Simultaneously - and I’m going to do my absolute best to explain my argument here - I also believe that this encounter was when I first noticed a pattern of gaslighting from Nico that would become more obvious over time, though I would not be able to put it into words until now. During our encounter, Nico also told me that he thought I was “emotionally manipulative, but not intentionally.” Something like that. It was not at all a light accusation. And yet, by the end, he was back to saying that he greatly wanted to continue to be my friend for a long time. I accept the possibility that he was wishing the best for me and genuinely wanted me to see that my behavior was bad so I could be a better person, and was using the argument as a test to see whether or not I could self-reflect. What I don’t find a coincidence is that I feel this exact situation happened multiple times over the course of our friendship, even in situations that were much lower stakes. I notice a pattern in which Nico would find something to make me feel bad about, turn it into a big deal, and then shortly after go back to saying that he greatly wanted to be my friend and hoped I would always be his friend. I have come to the conclusion that this was likely controlling behavior on the part of Nico. I’m unsure what his exact motivations behind it could have been, but I think my concern is legitimate.

Connected to this observation - I recall one time, when I was becoming involved with a similar but non-SCP writing site after I had given up on returning to the SCP fandom, an instance in which I believe that Nicolini intentionally tried to start drama between me and a friend. I became aware of the fact that he had been showing a server of other people our private DMs, or possibly just my private thoughts, without my permission to former friends who were hesitant to support the community I was becoming involved with due to the fact that it contained a mix of people from both the SCP Wiki and RPC authority. I am not entirely sure what his motivations behind this could have been, because even after everything that had happened I still openly supported the SCP community, but I fear that he was purposefully trying to make people distrustful of me behind my back. Why he would do this, I’m not entirely sure. When I expressed concern over what he was doing, because it made a friend of mine upset for a short time, my feelings were largely shrugged off.

I also noticed, over time (because I did keep trying to be his friend), a worrying pattern of aggression from Nico towards other people. I observed that he had a pattern of getting into fights during opportunities where he knew that he either could not get in trouble for it or that his anger was directed at someone who was generally unpopular with the crowd he hung out with. He seemed to partly acknowledge that he had anger issues, but would often blame it on an excuse like “my antidepressants make me aggressive” or “I’m stressed out because of the work I do for the SCP Wiki.” While these explanations are understandable to an extent, they ultimately do not fully excuse hateful behavior towards an individual, and I worry that they indicate that Uncle Nicolini still has issues with owning up to his own bad/abusive behavior when he needs to.

At one point I ended up speaking to a confidant in private about my some of my experiences with Uncle Nicolini, because I was wondering if I should block him like my gut was telling me to, even though I felt like I should suck up my concerns and try to maintain our friendship. He told me not to put pressure on myself and take some more time to think. Eventually, though, a certain event forced me to admit that I was deeply uncomfortable with Nico’s past and present behavior, this feeling would not go away, he had an increasing habit of dismissing my concerns, and for my own mental health it was better that I find a way to get away from him somehow. I understand that this method is not ideal, and it may be seen as leading him on, but over time I tried to talk to him less and less, and when he did reach out to me, I would say everything that I thought he wanted me to say, and I finally blocked him on every platform I could think of when I thought the coast was clear at the start of July. I don’t regret doing so.

Before anyone asks, yes, I did report him to SCP staff. I told them about the sexual harassment I had experienced from him because I figured it was all that was actionable. I didn’t push the issue that much, because sometimes it’s just…. exhausting laying so much of your private life bare after repeat scary experiences in a community that was supposed to be fun. Either they didn’t believe me or thought he was too valuable to lose, because about a month after I reported him he was promoted to moderator, and only one person vaguely referenced his behavior in the promotion thread.