Epic Mormonism Live on Rosebud Accusations

[Dr Exiled]

I think we need to ignore this crap show until JBrosebud puts the underwhelming cards on the table.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

I'm putting jpatterson on ignore until he answers the questions put to him in good faith.

- Doc

[drumdude]

Then answer the damn question - What is the end game?

To bother you. It's clearly working.

Troll confirmed.

[SaturdaysVoyeur]

Lem.

Rosebud has never disputed the accuracy of her 8-9-12 text messages to John Dehlin.

In nine years!

That’s because they are accurate.

And she knows it.

When she alleged in her NH complaint that on 8-9-12 John Dehlin was pressuring her to make their relationship sexual against her will, that was a lie.

As proven by the text messages she herself sent John Dehlin on that very same day showing the exact opposite of what she alleged.

She made her NH complaint under penalty of perjury.

Which means she is not just a liar, she perjured herself and committed a fraud upon the court.

Rosebud has given us every reason to doubt what she says.

Oh, that's such a....lawyer-ly....way to put it.... And I think that gets up people's noses because impeaching the credibility of an alleged victim is particularly damaging to the mostly-women who do experience sexual violence. It's part of how the entire culture perpetuates making women feel that they are to blame if they're sexually assaulted.

(I'm not saying you're doing that, consiglieri! I'm just pointing out why I think that gets some push back, and it probably always should get some push back. It's what any good defense attorney would do, but it's also the problem with investigating and litigating these situations, because no single detail can be used to reliably determine what happened, and that contributes to why women so often don't come forward about sexual violence, knowing perfectly well that something in their story is inevitably not going to add up and whatever it is will be used to portray her as lying.)

So....getting back to the voyeuristic gossip....

Esme asked up-thread if Rosebud hadn't in fact said that she told J-D not to come to her room in the first place.

I'd heard that allegation previously, so when I listened to Rosebud's interview, I paid attention to that part. I'm not going to go back and re-listen, so this is from memory, but I noticed that whenever the interviewer pressed her for instances of when and how she told J-D to stop or to not do something, Rosebud reframed it each time as, "He would turn a 'no' into a 'yes.'"

This is consistent with her overall point (at least in the current iteration of this story, which I think any honest person has to admit has changed drastically in its annual retellings) that it wasn't so much that J-D continued despite her protests, but that he had manipulated her in such a way as to render her unable to consent within the context of the relationship. I think that's pretty close to a direct quote from how she describes it.

As to HOW he manipulated her in such a way that she was incapable of consenting, but in such a way that she didn't see it that way until quite some time afterwards, was never clear to me from her interview, or from anything else she's released. Even if he did manipulate her, how did it create a situation that structurally rendered her incapable of consenting? Usually, we think of structural inability to consent as pertaining to intoxication, cognitive disability, or to children. I'm not saying it couldn't happen to a competent, sober adult, but I didn't gain any insight from Rosebud as to HOW it happened in her relationship with J-D.

There was also nothing in her document dump that shed any light on that. There's page after page of verbal smoochies and declarations of undying love, but, even if I squint, Rosebud never seems to indicate any sort of discomfort or ambivalence about the relationship. Indeed, she seems pretty enthusiastic about the whole affair. If J-D was turning her no's into yeses, how did that occur only in person, but never in all these volumes of written communication?

It's not just, "Look, we have proof Rosebud LIED on August 9!" Yeah, it kinda looks like she did, but that's not really the point. You could pick details out of any sexual assault victim's story and make her look like a liar (and that's a problem because it's used to discredit women all the time). It's the totality of Rosebud's story that doesn't add up; it's not any one particular detail.

It doesn't help that, when pressed to recount specific incidents, her recall switches from linear to flashes of memory: "I see him sitting on a bench," "I have a picture in my mind of him standing at the end of my bed." That may very well be how her memory works, but that doesn't make it any easier to piece together what exactly it was about the relationship that made her incapable of consenting to sexual activity.

I think (or at least I hope) we would all agree that it's possible, especially for a sexually inexperienced person, to realize only in retrospect that what happened to her was sexual assault. ("Well, sure, I said no, but I didn't kick and scream, so it couldn't have been rape," or "I wanted to do it all those other times, so I guess it's my own fault that I didn't want to do it this one time," etc.) Are we all on the same page that this happens and that it's incredibly confusing and emotionally damaging? Because that's the framework Rosebud is talking about. I just don't see any evidence that's what happened.

Her biggest supporters keep talking about grooming, but the examples they give require interpreting statements with extravagantly malicious subtext. Case in point: She tells him he should go back to his wife and J-D replies that saying such a thing only make him want her more.

Taken in context (i.e., they both spend a lot of time sighing over their infatuation as a romantic tragedy of Shakespearean proportions), it's insane to read that as Rosebud attempting to deflect his advances and J-D being aroused by her lack of desire for him. It's really obviously NOT that, and every supposed example of "grooming" is the same way. Sure, I guess he was "gaining her trust" and "paying special attention to her," but how is that any different than what people do in the early stages of a romance? How do we get from there to Rosebud being structurally rendered unable to consent?

It may not come across, but I have a lot of sympathy for Rosebud. I think if I were her, what would really stick in my craw is that thousands of people who have no idea any of this happened think J-D is just the bee's knees. It would probably make me seethe to hear him criticize Joseph Smith's infidelity to an audience that's totally unaware J-D was also unfaithful to his wife. I think I would probably feel used and discarded, like he never really meant any of it <----and this right here is what I think she's trying to construct post-hoc as manipulation, in the sense that she wouldn't have done any of it if she'd known she was just the sidepiece.

I'm not so sure Rosebud is the "Scorned Other Woman" so much as she's the "Other Woman Who Believed He Was Going To Leave His Wife For Her." She had already chosen J-D over her husband (it keeps getting glossed over that Rosebud was also married and was also being unfaithful), while J-D had not already chosen her and ultimately reconciled with his wife.

Shakespearean tragedy, indeed. But sexual violence? Mmmm....not so much.

[consiglieri]

My take on it is Rosebud did much more than consent until it became advantageous to her to not have consented.

That’s when JD suddenly became a post hoc manipulative Svengali and sexual predator.

[Fifth Columnist]

The US EEOC defines sexual harassment as: "unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical harassment of a sexual nature" that is "so frequent or severe that it creates a hostile or offensive work environment or when it results in an adverse employment decision (such as the victim being fired or demoted)." See https://www.eeoc.gov/sexual-harassment

The first thing Rosebud needs to show is that the sexual advances were "unwelcome." There is no contemporaneous evidence they were unwelcome. And, given the voluminous amount of contemporaneous evidence, there really should be. If Rosebud cannot show this, then she cannot establish sexual harassment.

The other thing the contemporaneous evidence shows is that after JD told Rosebud he wanted to end the affair, Rosebud continued making sexual advances, which seem to qualify as being unwelcome. However, I'm not sure they rise to the level of "a hostile or offensive work environment" such that JD can establish sexual harassment against Rosebud.

It does seem, however, that the person with the best claim for sexual harassment, based on the contemporaneous evidence, is JD.

[Kishkumen]

I am glad to see SaturdaysVoyeur joining the conversation. It’s a great post and something that adds needed perspective. One thing I will say in response is that she made a statement under oath that was flatly contradicted by the evidence and thus false simply is perjury. Perjury is much worse than garden variety dishonesty. I would hope that victims of sex crimes would prefer to see people discouraged from abusing the system such that they would perjure themselves to attack an enemy and thus undermine the credibility of legitimate victims.

The other difference of opinion I have is on the whole Joseph Smith thing. Comparing one affair with Joseph Smith marrying over thirty women and lying about it much of the time, first and foremost to Emma, is on a whole other level of betrayal. I could personally do without all of these gratuitous comparisons to Joseph Smith, and I doubt I’m alone in that. Not that SV is really to blame here; SV is hardly the first person in this conversation to make the comparison. I never find it compelling.

[The Stig]

Then answer the damn question - What is the end game?

To bother you. It's clearly working.

Aaaannnnnd, your credibility takes another hit. Good job.

[SaturdaysVoyeur]

My take on it is Rosebud did much more than consent until it became advantageous to her to not have consented.

That’s when John Dehlin suddenly became a post hoc manipulative Svengali and sexual predator.

Maybe. I guess the interview changed how I look at that. I no longer see either of them as being manipulative or vindictive, per se. Now that I think about it, the idea that Rosebud set this all up to get something out of J-D seems as ridiculous as the idea that he set this all up to get something out of her.

Their exchanges are cringey because they were about 20 years too old to be acting like that, but I see no reason to doubt that their infatuation with each other was real. That it probably felt like love at the time, all the more intoxicating by the sweet pain of wanting someone you can't be with. It's heady stuff. Like getting drunk on champagne.

To me, the interview revealed Rosebud as less of a bunny boiler and more as someone emotionally vulnerable due to a broken heart and some mental illness. She describes cutting herself, folks. That's serious. People don't just self-harm one time because they had a crappy boyfriend. It's a symptom of a serious, potentially lethal problem. How much longer does this woman need to publicly cry for help before she gets it?

If she's trying to leverage some advantage out of this, it doesn't seem to be accomplishing anything except attracting people to her who are using her for their own needs and agendas and coaxing her to fill in the missing pieces of her broken heart (Why didn't he choose me? Did he ever really love me? Why didn't he at least let me keep doing the work I loved?) with nonsense about grooming and structural sexual assault that rendered her unable to have ever consented with him.

Rosebud has no friends who are pushing this. Any real friend would get her out of the public eye now and get her some help. Even if they do believe she was a victim. Especially if they believe she was a victim!

So, no, I guess I've changed my mind about what you presented in that podcast episode. I still think it was a well-done episode. I've just changed my mind as to the accuracy of your thesis. I thought even when it aired that the "blackmail email" was way too grandiose to be blackmail. Now I see that it's of a piece with the way she speaks in the interview and in her written communications with J-D. That's just how she expresses herself.

I no longer think she's intentionally trying to leverage anything using dishonesty, because I think she is telling the truth as she sees it, combined with a heavy dose of how these frenemies are making her broken heart make sense for her. J-D didn't help her make sense of it. She went to the board, and they didn't help make sense of it. The lawyers and the NH Commission didn't help her make sense of it. She came to these forums, and that didn't help her make any sense of it.

But Kawku and Kate Kelly and James Patterson are giving her a narrative framework that makes it all make sense. Even though they're feeding her poison and telling her it's lemonade, which is doubly true if, in fact, J-D did somehow take advantage of or assault her sexually.

And the hell of it is, those three may honestly believe the poison is lemonade. What a cluster....

[master_dc]

What do you mean by "selectively edited"? Don't you have them? I think we are all exhausted from innuendo. Are you saying he changed the words in the text exchange that he submitted to the complaint in NH?

Why would you assume I have the text messages?

Changing words is not the same as selectively editing. Let me explain for like the 5th time.

John admits in an Aug 10 email that he and Rosebud were mutually "faux sexting" on Aug 9.

Yet, the Aug 9 texts that John released via consig show only Rosebud doing so. It's also fairly obvious there's a lot of context that is missing based on where John Dehlin chose to snippet the messages.

I'm speculating that he selectively edited out any damaging text messages from Rosebud to him (or vice versa) and sent that along as his response to the NH charges, and sent them along to consig to bolster his accusation that Rosebud was the one sexually harassing him.

Ok, so your argument is JD is only releasing partial texts. It is convenient that the messages you sink and speculate exist and are damning are not part of the the massive dump you showed the world…

Any lawyers out there. Is there any penalty if JD did leave out pertinent details that would change the tone/meaning if the evidence he provided to NH?

I am still waiting to learn what the big “financial” scandal in the 2018 paperwork as well. The fact that he uses income from the podcast, as long as he pays the proper taxes in it it, is a non-issue…

The way this scandal is going, it might boast JD’s standing in the exmo community.

JP - in all seriousness. When you re-release the documents. Provide the trove, but more importantly craft the story that the data tells. You have to tell the story that fits your narrative and is supported by your documentation. That interview is not the story, it is a story, but it is not the story. We are a bunch of dummies. Lead us on the path of why we should care about this issue. Very few here are JD fanboys. You obviously have a captive audience. Don’t get defensive with the people that are giving this story you want to see the light of day. Many here won’t agree with you. Ok. Just give a coherent story that is not blown to pieces but he evidence at hand. Rosebud has obviously experienced some major trauma in her life. She claims she wants it all to go away, though I’m not buying it. Tell the story that needs to be told and let it rest. We still do not really know what it is.