mormonstories wrote: ↑Thu May 13, 2021 2:00 pm
1) I’m not saying I didn’t have the most power or influence. I’m only saying that Rosebud was a founding board member. And she did have more power and influence than a mere employee. And she was a board member before she became an employee. And she was a board member while she was an employee. So all I’m saying is that she had more power and responsibility than a simple employee.
2) Rosebud made multiple personal promises to me from the very start and throughout to “go away” if our relationship ever got to the point where it was hurting me or the Open Stories Foundation. This was a personal agreement we had made, which she agreed to prior to joining the board or coming on as an employee.
Oh, dear God, will someone please get J-D a shovel?? He seems intent on digging himself into a deeper hole.
If it's true that Rosebud was an Open Stories Foundation board member (which should be easy to independently verify), that changes the whole equation. The CEO of a non-profit is an employee in charge of day-to-day operations, but the CEO answers to the board of directors. (Some CEOs also have a seat on the board, but typically in an ex officio capacity.) Ultimately, the CEO serves at the board's pleasure.
In other words, J-D wasn't Rosebud's boss. Rosebud was his boss.
That doesn't change the gender dynamics or the fact that J-D would obviously have more power and influence as the public face of Mormon Stories, but it obliterates the framing of this as workplace sexual harassment based on who was subordinate to whom on the organizational chart.
If she was on the board of directors, then J-D was Rosebud's subordinate, not the other way around. What ultimately put Rosebud in the one-down position is that she clearly still wanted J-D, romantically and sexually, after he no longer wanted her. (I feel for her. Haven't we all been there with an ex-lover? It hurts like hell.)
However, it's as ridiculous to interpret the "go away promise" as an "agreement" between them, as it is to interpret Rosebud's "two option" letter as blackmail. Her "two option" email is too grandiose to even be taken seriously, and J-D's problem isn't that he was a pervy monster, but that he was astonishingly naïve.
The "go away promise" is referenced throughout the hundreds of text messages in Rosebud's document dump. Dizzy with infatuation, they both make promises to fall on their own swords before ever allowing any harm to come to the other. Ah....c'est l'amour!
To frame such melodramatic pillow talk as J-D twisting Rosebud's arm to leave Open Stories whenever J-D decided he had tired of her, is as ludicrous as believing Rosebud will someday peddle a bestseller on the talk show circuit. It's an even bigger stretch to think that, when Rosebud encouraged him to go back to his wife and family, and he swooned in reply that this "only makes me want you more," that J-D was getting off on Rosebud's unwillingness to be with him.
Unwillingness?? She's been chasing his bacon non-stop since the first Obama administration!
The shocker is that, after pages upon pages of nutty messages between the two of them, J-D somehow still believed she would keep her gallant "promise" to leave his life forever before ever allowing any harm to come to him. He makes similarly theatrical promises to her in those text messages. What do you expect? They were twitterpated.
It would be age-appropriate, and maybe even charming, if they were 14-year-olds instead of grown-ass adults, both of them parents many times over, with spouses at home whose feelings neither one of them ever seemed to consider. (I was revolted by the intimate sexual details that J-D shared with Rosebud about his wife, which Rosebud then posts to the Internet! TEN YEARS LATER!)
To paint J-D as a manipulative pervert gives him far too much credit for conniving, when he was actually behaving like a teenager in the throes of his first crush, rather than the middle-aged husband and father that he actually is.
And then there's Rosebud. Every public move she has made in the last decade makes me genuinely concerned for her mental health. Not only that she's nurtured this obsession with J-D for such an unfathomably long time, while blaming him for problems in her life that he plainly has nothing to do with. Not only that she nurtures grandiose fantasies, like bringing down the franchise industry. Not even that she describes cutting her own flesh to alleviate emotional distress (!
!). I don't doubt that her anguish is entirely real. So, will somebody please get this woman the help that she needs instead of feeding her delusions??
The elephant in the room here is that she's upped the ante every time she dredges this thing back up. First, she just wanted access to the work projects she'd been locked out of. Then she claimed workplace sexual harassment, enabled by a conspiracy of her fellow board members. Then she claimed the relationship with J-D was never consensual at all because his machinations rendered her unable to consent. Then she claimed J-D had a sexual fetish about getting caught in flagrante delicto. Then she claimed that J-D made a sexual recording of her against her will. Now, she's claiming he barged into her bedroom uninvited and sexually assaulted her.
Mark my words: When this current bid to destroy J-D fails yet again, she's either going to claim that he's threatening her with release of the sex tape (that we have no evidence even exists), and/or that he straight-up raped her, rewriting their mutual denial of intercourse as J-D telling lies, and that she was so traumatized she had blocked it out and believed it didn't happen. For 10 years. (Hey, you can't prove that
didn't happen!)
Her allegations aren't credible, and J-D's attempts to defend himself turn into own goals. But the really sickening part (beyond the effect this must keep having on, y'know, their actual families) is that the people who claim to care so much about Rosebud seem to be using her to further their agenda of hating J-D, rather than getting her some qualified mental health care.
