"Puzzling People" by Thomas Sheridan - a puzzling person

Guardian said:

Back to the topic at hand, June Sheridan just removed/concealed all the comments on her "CelticMoon Craft" website.

This is getting so sad. [...]

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Guardian said:

Gimpy said:

How does exposing Thomas for what he is translate into hurting June?

Don't beat yourself up over things you can't control.

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This is one of those situations where my emotions don't match the logic of a situation. I really hate it when that happens.

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I'll point out something obvious, in case it helps: You don't know if it happened on her own initiative.

Kniall said:

Go for it Guardian. TS wasn't working alone so I'm interested in seeing which other sharks he was swimming with.

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Me too, and the more I read, the more I'm convinced Sheridan is still on that forum. I strongly suspect Barbara Camwell has weaseled her way in too.

Regardless, folks need to be warned that Psychopathfree.com is by no means a "safe place"

Psalehesost said:

I'll point out something obvious, in case it helps: You don't know if it happened on her own initiative.

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This is true, and it does help. At the very least she's been colluding with him for years. She just removed the video from her website where she explained how she came to learn how to design and create the art work Thomas was taking sole credit for, since 2003, the year after she claims she developed the style.

She also removed all the comments where she talks about how much SHE loves making the crafts in question. Fortunately, I have copies of everything.

The fact that they're still lying about Laura and the group tells me something else is up. They KNOW we're telling the truth by this point, but they keep libeling Laura...especially "Smitten Kitten"

It's all gonna come out...it will just take more time.

researched extensively.

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If they've actually done this, then they KNOW they're spreading lies about Laura and this group. They're lying on purpose at this point, so I think I shall redefine their entire concept of "research extensively"

Hi Guardian (& all members) ,

I’m Peace from the PsychopathFree forum. I’ve just finished reading through this thread, and of course I have a lot to say.

First and foremost, please understand this falling out happened on Thursday. We are still trying to put together the pieces about Thomas, based on what we learned that day. We’ve always been aware of the SOTT article, but we were told by Thomas that it was a smear campaign. The past week has been extremely confusing as we work to unravel who was actually lying. Also understand that he was a close friend to us – we received gifts & kind words from him. For many of you, you lost trust in Thomas a long time ago. But for the rest of us, especially my Administration team, we are really confused.

Next up, there seems to be some frustration about my decision to stick to PMs in communicating what we learned, along with my “pursuing his dreams” announcement. We have a lot of members who trusted Thomas deeply and would be incredibly triggered to learn that he might not be the person he claimed to be. I don’t mind sharing the PM here, if you are interested in what we encountered, but I was very concerned about dumping a public announcement with the information, without first personally addressing every member based on their individual story. I still believe this to be the best way for our members, but I will share the message with you now:

Several of our administrators recently came forward with some very troubling information. They have met Thomas in person, and he was extremely inappropriate to them. He had temper tantrums, would not allow any disagreements, and took his "jokes" too far with them. It was downright harassment.

Whatever has happened to Thomas, we hope he's okay, but this is not behavior we can have around members - and we will not tolerate it around our fellow administrators.

Finally, Thomas simply deleted his Facebook without any personal messages or plans for us, so we were left in the dark on everything. Overall, it did not seem that he should have a place here any longer.

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I hope this helps, & I do hope you’ll respect that it was a very difficult decision to share such a personal & frightening story.

The last thing I’d like to address is our comments about Laura Knight. I don’t know much about her, but we were told some pretty nasty things. As I mentioned above, we are still working on understanding who the real liar was. Five days is not a lot of time to go from “trusted friend” to “enemy” (and vice versa). We’re removing our posts about Laura, including a link posted by a very suspicious member who we will be banning because we suspect him to be connected to Thomas. We’ve learned an important lesson about doing our own research, instead of accepting someone else’s truth as our own.

If you do choose to register at PF, I would ask that you be gentle with our members. They are a really kind & wonderful group of people who are still doing their best to rationalize this very irrational situation.

I’ll do my best to stay on this thread today to answer any questions.

Thanks,
Peace

Next up, there seems to be some frustration about my decision to stick to PMs in communicating what we learned, along with my “pursuing his dreams” announcement. We have a lot of members who trusted Thomas deeply and would be incredibly triggered to learn that he might not be the person he claimed to be.

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Do you understand, that abusers count on that, to continue to hurt people?

You won't be helping anyone by keeping the truth or the facts away from them.

If you do choose to register at PF, I would ask that you be gentle with our members. They are a really kind & wonderful group of people who are still doing their best to rationalize this very irrational situation.

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What?

Kind of difficult to want to go there at all, seeing as Guardian's been banned for life, for not doing anything at all save PM'ing someone, which seems to be the preferred 'non-triggering' option.

Hi Gimpy,

As I mentioned, every member has a backstory of their own & as a recovery forum, we cannot be triggering our members. If you'd like, I have no problem modifying the announcement to replace the "pursuing his dreams" bit with something that more closely indicates his poor behavior. Additionally, there are several posts linking to the SOTT article, allowing members to come to their own conclusions. As an Admin who has never met Thomas in my life, I don't feel it's my place to go any further into somehow diagnosing his behavior.

I believe Guardian was banned from the forums back when we were banning anyone from this site, because we thought we were being attacked. Again, this is all very new to us. Our bans are always permanent, and with everything going on, I'm sure it didn't occur to any of us to unban Guardian over the past few days. Say the word, and I'll be happy to lift the ban. She'll be held to the same standards as any other member, of course, and we hope she'll participate in threads beyond the Thomas post.

Thanks for responding,
Peace

As I mentioned, every member has a backstory of their own & as a recovery forum, we cannot be triggering our members.

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In what way would being honest about TS's behavior 'trigger' someone?

If he'd come to a forum where I felt a measure of healing, and proceeded to be a total creep, I'd want to know about it. If he used the same place to prey on other women? I'd be very angry, and I would want to find out the facts, the truth.

As an Admin who has never met Thomas in my life, I don't feel it's my place to go any further into somehow diagnosing his behavior.

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Aren't you an Admin that cares about maintaining a healthy online environment?

Say the word, and I'll be happy to lift the ban.

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A thorough reading of this thread should help you make these decisions.

Peace said:

I’m Peace from the PsychopathFree forum. I’ve just finished reading through this thread, and of course I have a lot to say.

First and foremost, please understand this falling out happened on Thursday. We are still trying to put together the pieces about Thomas, based on what we learned that day. We’ve always been aware of the SOTT article, but we were told by Thomas that it was a smear campaign.

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In this case all anyone had to do was look at the article we wrote, do their own research, and realise that what we were saying was based on hard data and a reasonable assessment of that data.

Peace said:

The past week has been extremely confusing as we work to unravel who was actually lying. Also understand that he was a close friend to us – we received gifts & kind words from him. For many of you, you lost trust in Thomas a long time ago. But for the rest of us, especially my Administration team, we are really confused.

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We didn't "lose trust" in him, we simply assessed the data and came to a fairly reasonable conclusion based on that data.

Peace said:

Next up, there seems to be some frustration about my decision to stick to PMs in communicating what we learned, along with my “pursuing his dreams” announcement. We have a lot of members who trusted Thomas deeply and would be incredibly triggered to learn that he might not be the person he claimed to be. I don’t mind sharing the PM here, if you are interested in what we encountered, but I was very concerned about dumping a public announcement with the information, without first personally addressing every member based on their individual story. I still believe this to be the best way for our members, but I will share the message with you now:

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Several of our administrators recently came forward with some very troubling information. They have met Thomas in person, and he was extremely inappropriate to them. He had temper tantrums, would not allow any disagreements, and took his "jokes" too far with them. It was downright harassment.

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This is not surprising, from our point of view, and really could have been expected by anyone who read the article we wrote and did their own research.

Peace said:

The last thing I’d like to address is our comments about Laura Knight. I don’t know much about her, but we were told some pretty nasty things. As I mentioned above, we are still working on understanding who the real liar was. Five days is not a lot of time to go from “trusted friend” to “enemy” (and vice versa). We’re removing our posts about Laura, including a link posted by a very suspicious member who we will be banning because we suspect him to be connected to Thomas.

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This is where doing your own research comes in again. The bottom line for us has always been that we do our own research and come to reasonable conclusions using our intelligence. It's a pity it's not a commonly practiced way of figuring out the truth of any given subject.

Peace said:

We’ve learned an important lesson about doing our own research, instead of accepting someone else’s truth as our own.

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That's a positive outcome then.

I would like, however, to make one thing very, very clear. We have not, do not and never will engage in "smear campaigns" against anyone. This forum has one thing, and one thing only, as its goal: the truth. And we do our very best to serve it always.

Hi Gimpy (Guardian, I just saw your post & will respond in a moment!)

Your reaction is identical to the feelings of most of our members, myself included. Triggers from betrayed trust are common among our survivors - this is why I wanted a chance to talk with every one individually. There is also an open dialogue for further discussion in a forum thread, so users can talk about it with each other as well.

As I wrote above, I'd be happy to re-work the announcement, or even post a new one. Perhaps we could mention the inappropriate behavior & begin reaching out to users over PMs immediately, in case some of them haven't already gotten a chance to contact us.

Thanks again,
Peace

Peace said:

I’ll do my best to stay on this thread today to answer any questions.

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Thanks for joining Peace. I was going to do try the same thing on your forum (answer questions) but I was banned. Of course I could re-register a sockpuppet, but I like being me.

What concerns me most at this point is that Laura is getting blamed for what I've done. I dug up the data on Thomas, NOTHING was taken out of context, and I provided screenshots and direct links to the original posts.

I DID NOT do this at Laura's behest, I just did a routine check before launching a promo for Thomas, and found the Usenet posts. I am not a "cult member" in fact, I only found this forum a little over two years ago while I was digging for information about another predator (Eric Pepin)

This is what I do Peace, confront and/or publicly expose predators, and I've been doing it for more than 30 years. By my count, I was posting predator alerts to BBS's about 10 years before Laura got her first computer, so saying she's behind a "smear campaign" is a actually double lie. It is impossible to "smear" someone with the truth, and I would be doing the exact same thing I'm doing right now (harvesting data about Sheridan) whether I was a member of this forum or not.

I belong to 20+ forums and boards that specifically deal with predation in some form or another, plus I own Pagan.com and have my own predator pages....so I'm really not short on places to post predator data ya know.

Peace, everything I've posted about Thomas came off of his (or his wife's) keyboard. There is no baseless libel, third party slander, etc., just his words (or his wife's) and I am responsible for finding the data....all by my little lonesome in this particular case.

Please understand, if Laura had asked me to do a deep dig on Sheridan, I would have...but she didn't. Thomas is just throwing up another smokescreen...which is what they do.

We have quite a mess here, and, as usual, it's caused by a 'path. I'm really glad you've joined and we can talk this out. I appreciate you removing the defaming material about Laura, and if you wish, we can give you links to all kinds of legal documents that show the various nasty claims about her are lies. I can do the same regarding the lies that have been posted about me. Neither Laura nor I have ever been convicted of a crime (or found libel in a civil suit) but both of us have been accused of everything from fraud to murder. That's what predators do when you expose them, lie.

Fortunately, we live in the data age, and the ONLY way to tell who's telling the truth and who's lying on the Internet is documentation, and even then, it has to be confirmed. Certainly not an easy task.

So, wanna swap .png's and .pdf's ?

Gimpy said:

Kind of difficult to want to go there at all, seeing as Guardian's been banned for life, for not doing anything at all save PM'ing someone,

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Actually I didn't PM him, I emailed him directly with a few copies of his Usenet posts I had questions about, but yeah, the point's the same. I tried to confront him privately BEFORE I posted anything publicly, and I didn't do anything on his forum at all, he was just afraid I was going to tell people the truth...which was a valid fear.

Perceval said:

I would like, however, to make one thing very, very clear. We have not, do not and never will engage in "smear campaigns" against anyone. This forum has one thing, and one thing only, as its goal: the truth.

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Which is EXACTLY why I stayed on this forum after I was finished harvesting the data about Pepin. :)

Yawl were doing the same kinda stuff I was doing, although in many cases, yawl did it better. There is only one loyalty, to the truth....whether you happen to like it or not.

Please understand something Peace, I was NOT happy to find Sheridan's vile Usenet posts, or anything else I've found since. When I sent some of the stuff I was finding to Laura and several other people in the field, I believe my first words were "Oh crap!" :(

I joined Psychopathfree shortly after it was created to offer my support..I even made a welcome graphic. Thomas had me fooled too, the only difference is that I did a deep dig BEFORE I got involved, because I know what good actors pathological people are. The ONLY way to spot a predator in advance is to dig into their past. Then you gotta separate the truth from the lies, pay attention to what they write (or do), not what's written about them.

In this case all anyone had to do was look at the article we wrote, do their own research, and realise that what we were saying was based on hard data and a reasonable assessment of that data.

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I don't know how else to explain this except cognitive dissonance. At least, that was the case for me. I read every single part of the SOTT article, and even came across a blog called "The Real Thomas Sheridan" with screenshots, but assured myself that it was all wrong. I wanted to believe in my friend.

Now that this is all over, I've been doing some of my own research as well, & verifying the IPs of some of his Google postings. You have all already done this, and now I'm playing catch up (as are the rest of the Admins - we have about 20 threads about Thomas's multiple identities now)

This is where doing your own research comes in again. The bottom line for us has always been that we do our own research and come to reasonable conclusions using our intelligence. It's a pity it's not a commonly practiced way of figuring out the truth of any given subject.

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Thanks for this, Guardian. we've re-opened your account on the forums and hope you'll post this.

I would like, however, to make one thing very, very clear. We have not, do not and never will engage in "smear campaigns" against anyone. This forum has one thing, and one thing only, as its goal: the truth. And we do our very best to serve it always.

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I understand this now, and I'm working unraveling the words "smear campaign" being hammered into my head over and over again. As are all of the Administrators - we're doing our best, given such little closure (& also a severe lack of sleep) :)

Thanks for joining Peace. I was going to do try the same thing on your forum (answer questions) but I was banned. Of course I could re-register a sockpuppet, but I like being me.

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We like you being you too - we've had enough sockpuppets for the week, one of who we believe was Thomas (or at least sent by him). Your account at PF has been restored and we look forward to your posts.

What concerns me most at this point is that Laura is getting blamed for what I've done. I dug up the data on Thomas, NOTHING was taken out of context, and I provided screenshots and direct links to the original posts.

I DID NOT do this at Laura's behest, I just did a routine check before launching a promo for Thomas, and found the Usenet posts. I am not a "cult member" in fact, I only found this forum a little over two years ago while I was digging for information about another predator (Eric Pepin)

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I actually noticed this when I was reading through the many pages of this thread. On Thomas's Facebook posts, it seemed that Laura was taking the blame for everything, when in fact her posts here seem to indicate nothing but patience & observation. Then again, I don't think anyone deserves "blame" from this, since it's his own words that got him in the end.

This is what I do Peace, confront and/or publicly expose predators, and I've been doing it for more than 30 years. By my count, I was posting predator alerts to BBS's about 10 years before Laura got her first computer, so saying she's behind a "smear campaign" is a actually double lie. It is impossible to "smear" someone with the truth, and I would be doing the exact same thing I'm doing right now (harvesting data about Sheridan) whether I was a member of this forum or not.

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That's pretty cool! I do some work in cyber-security, but I guess more on the technical level - not so much the investigative side. I've found I'm really quite terrible at picking out the trolls on our website, which is why I'm so grateful to have the other Admins on our group.

I belong to 20+ forums and boards that specifically deal with predation in some form or another, plus I own Pagan.com and have my own predator pages....so I'm really not short on places to post predator data ya know.

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You are really dedicated to your cause! At our forum, we have a signature option (similar to you guys) & you could link to your sites from there, so they're visible on all of your posts.

Peace, everything I've posted about Thomas came off of his (or his wife's) keyboard. There is no baseless libel, third party slander, etc., just his words (or his wife's) and I am responsible for finding the data....all by my little lonesome in this particular case.

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Everything I've posted about Thomas came off of his (or his wife's) keyboard

That sums it up perfectly. No one made him become Unki, or his 50 other personalities. The place where I try to have some compassion is to understand that he came from a sexually abusive childhood. Not that that excuses any of his behavior, especially considering the field he injected himself into, but it at least helps me personally find some peace in my heart for the friend I lost.

Please understand, if Laura had asked me to do a deep dig on Sheridan, I would have...but she didn't. Thomas is just throwing up another smokescreen...which is what they do.

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Thanks Guardian - this part is clear now (and clear from reading the whole thread)

We have quite a mess here, and, as usual, it's caused by a 'path. I'm really glad you've joined and we can talk this out. I appreciate you removing the defaming material about Laura, and if you wish, we can give you links to all kinds of legal documents that show the various nasty claims about her are lies. I can do the same regarding the lies that have been posted about me. Neither Laura nor I have ever been convicted of a crime (or found libel in a civil suit) but both of us have been accused of everything from fraud to murder. That's what predators do when you expose them, lie.

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I think those documents would really help us Admins get past our own cognitive dissonance - if the offer still stands, feel free to send me a PM anytime with that information. I'd love to read it & share it with the rest of my team.

And thanks for your kind welcome - I'm happy to be here too! I've always felt that people should talk with one another, especially when I seem to be misunderstanding what I'm actually arguing against.

Fortunately, we live in the data age, and the ONLY way to tell who's telling the truth and who's lying on the Internet is documentation, and even then, it has to be confirmed. Certainly not an easy task.

So, wanna swap .png's and .pdf's ?

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Sounds like a plan! I'm still new to this site, so I'm not quite sure how everything works - if you want to PM me on PsychopathFree, I'll be sure to get it :)

Thank you for your detailed & understanding comments,
Peace

I'm sorry, I think my response mashed together two posts from Perceval & Guardian. Hope it still makes sense