Epic Mormonism Live on Rosebud Accusations

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

Dis 4 Rosebud. From Reddit:

You can give yourself closure. Closing the door on the relationship and moving forward

There is a fundamental belief about break ups that many people have and it’s that that you need two people for closure.
Now whilst it would be nice if we could meet up with our exes and get that closure so many of us seek, the fact of the matter is that you are far more likely to leave with more questions than answers, which could effectively set you back.

Exes very rarely meet our expectation of what we think closure is about and quite frankly, unless they’re down and out, crawling around your feet begging for another chance, and you get the opportunity to walk out with a flounce, there is no type of meeting that is likely to leave you satisfied…and not wanting.

What it all boils down to is how much do you want your own happiness? Do you want to be shackled to the past wondering what if and obsessing over little details of your relationship? Or, do you want to let go, embrace what lies ahead of you and close the door on this chapter of your life?

To break up properly, you must close the door and move forward.

One of the trappings that many of us can fall into is breaking up, acting like we’re moving forward, but secretly putting ourselves on hold ‘just in case’ your ex sees the error of their ways and comes racing back.

So what unfolds is a person going through the motions of life with the door of their past relationship slightly ajar so that should they make contact and try to rekindle things, they are there waiting.

But of course, if you’re putting yourself on a hold (albeit on the quiet) for your ex, you’re not much good to yourself or your current relationships –

It’s like putting your ex on layaway hoping that they’ll give you an option to buy when you have the ‘right’ cash to scoop them.
What if there is no right time? What if they don’t change? What if they go off and gets on with their life? What if they come back and disappoints you further? What if you are sidelining yourself and opportunities by pining your secret hopes on them?
If you don’t close the door and let go, you will actually become emotionally unavailable and create commitment issues for your future relationships.

Just like when you wanted your relationship to work with your ex, the same rules apply to you.

Relationships are the sum of both people and require both of you to put both feet in. If you are secretly leaving the door ajar for an ex, you are only putting one foot in to any other relationship you may have.

More importantly, you’re not committing to acting in your own best, positive, interests.

So what is closure?

It’s about recognising and accepting what has happened and removing your emotional investment out of that person and situation and focusing on yourself and the other things that matter in your life. Don’t put yourself through the turmoil of confronting your ex because you’re expending energy that is better spent elsewhere. Your ex doesn’t give you closure, YOU do. Closure is permission to move on, but you can ultimately grant that to yourself.

That’s right – YOU need to give YOU permission to move on much like YOU need to forgive yourself and others so that you can let go of anything negative that is holding you back.

YOU are in the driving seat so if you don’t let go, you don’t forgive, and you don’t move on, the only person who is responsible for the fact that you are trapped in a cycle of not being able to let go of the break up…is…you.

You don’t need them. They are surplus to requirements!

Accept that you are never going to have all of the answers and that in essence, sh*t happens, and give yourself permission to move on and get on with your life. More importantly, get on with enjoying your life.

When we’re in a bad relationship or recovering from a difficult break-up, It’s like holding in your breath around these asslowns that effectively steal our wind because…well we let them!

Breathe out! Thank goodness you are alive, that you’re out of your relationship, and commit to giving yourself a better experience and loving yourself irrespective of what happens around you.

Don’t dwell. We can be overthinkers and like to see more than what is actually there. Sometimes, it is what it is.
You are going to have a few bumps and scrapes along the way but when you are taking care of yourself, you recognise bad relationships and the assclowns that come with them for what they are, so you can opt out much quicker. It also means that when you’re in a good relationship, you recognise it as such and you nurture it as opposed to sabotaging it or punishing him for the mistakes of your exes.

There is no power in holding on to negative emotion, secretly pining for your ex or holding out for them, or allowing your experiences to permeate the current and your future.

Forgive you. Love you. Trust you. Embrace you. Enjoy you. Don’t be afraid.

That doesn’t mean you race out the door and saddle up with the first person that you meet but it does mean that you commit to you.

It is important to “act out of love for yourself”.

This is how you learn to trust yourself and your interactions.

If you being involved with someone means that you have to be devalued, miserable, have low self-esteem, anxious, afraid, or whatever that negative emotion is, you are not acting in your best interests.

If loving them means that you can’t love you, you must always opt out and love you. Trust me, you’ll thank yourself for it in the long run.

Close the door and don’t linger at the door like in the movies, wondering if they are on the other side. Close the door and walk away.

It is as simple as getting up right now and getting on with your life. Put away the mementos, rearrange your furniture, return anything that belongs to them and close down those ideas about them possibly coming back. Whenever you break, you must treat it like it’s permanent.

What will be, will be, but you won’t ‘be’ anything if you’re not ‘being’ someone.

Permission to close the door on your relationship and move on – Granted.

[Moksha]

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

Oh, that's such a....lawyer-ly....way to put it...

When we stick to a lawyerly understanding we can avoid all the innuendo, dubious claims, and misplaced sentiments that could influence the Discuss Mormonism jury which will be deciding the fate of John Dehlin, Rosebud, and the Open Stories Foundation. This is such a weighty matter that we need to avoid all hints at being floppy-headed and put our shoulders to the wheel.

[SaturdaysVoyeur]

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.

Well, thank you. That makes me feel slightly less dirty about my participation here. (I mean, why are we here? It's kind of gross when you think about it. Aren't we just getting off on other people's pain? Not just Rosebud's and J-D's, but their (ex)spouses and the half dozen children between them, who really never needed to be confronted with their parents' mistakes and sexuality in such a public way.)

Re: perjury: Perjury is knowingly stating something relevant under oath that you don't believe to be true. Emphases intentional. I no longer believe that either one of them did that. I think they both believed their sworn statements to be true.

And we really don't know if there's any missing context to the messages that J-D submitted. It's possible, even if he didn't believe that there were any additional messages that would change the context. In any case, I don't think perjury could be proven from the information available.

Re: Joseph Smith: I agree with you. I wasn't actually comparing Joseph Smith and J-D. I was trying to put myself in Rosebud's shoes and imagine how it might look to her. I don't really think Rosebud lost everything and J-D walked away unscathed either, but I can imagine how it might look and feel that way to her.

There's just no way to elevate the sleaziness of our fascination with this unless we at least try to have some empathy. I'm trying to dial some of this down from 11 to a normal human decibel. It's much more likely that both of them are just normal screwed-up human beings than scheming monsters.

[Esme]

On whether JD was her superior: on paper, it doesn't seem so. But what if he was functionally acting as her manager anyway?

In the Aug 10 email, he says

I need to not have to manage you, or other things outside of the bare bones, self-sustaining essentials (like MS and DanW's MM).

And

I don't have time to manage you - and it makes no sense for you to manage things without my support.

I sounds like something he was already doing and now he can't do it/doesn't have time for it anymore.

[Esme]

SaturdaysVoyeur brings up some good points and questions re: consent.

It is not uncommon for victims to not realize they were victimized until much later.

It’s not uncommon for people who were marital/date raped to not recognize it as rape at the time. Because in their minds, rape is something a stranger does to you in an alley, not something that someone who loves you and is close to you does.

Just because someone appears to change their story, doesn’t mean they are a liar. It might mean they have recognized something that they didn’t have a name for before.

Also, there is such a thing as sexual coercion, where the victim gives consent even though he/she doesn’t want to.

Examples:

She says “yes” to sex because she knows how angry he will be if she says “no.”

Or she says “yes” because she’s afraid she’s going to lose her job.

Or, the perpetrator continues to badger, beg, plead, pressure, until the victim finally gives up and gives in.

Of what Rosebud has said, it sounds like the last could be what she means when she says, "He would turn a 'no' into a 'yes.'"

Of the examples I’ve given it’s not uncommon for the victim to then think, “I consented to that because I said yes.”

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?

If “turning no’s into yeses” is a reference to physical interactions, it makes sense why they only occur in person and wouldn’t show up in the texts.

[SaturdaysVoyeur]

On whether John Dehlin was her superior: on paper, it doesn't seem so. But what if he was functionally acting as her manager anyway?

In the Aug 10 email, he says

I need to not have to manage you, or other things outside of the bare bones, self-sustaining essentials (like MS and DanW's MM).

And

I don't have time to manage you - and it makes no sense for you to manage things without my support.

I sounds like something he was already doing and now he can't do it/doesn't have time for it anymore.

Well, the CEO does manage the day-to-day operations of the entire company. In a small outfit, where everybody has personal relationships with everybody else, the distinctions get squishy, but I don't think it matters under federal labor law. Your "supervisor" is the person who can hire, fire, transfer, or discipline you.

But we all know there's soft power in every workplace no matter what the organizational chart says, and J-D inarguably had more soft power than Rosebud. For one thing, he's a man (in a culture where people grow up learning that men have the power to act for God on earth). He's the public face of Open Stories Foundation's main product. He enjoys a certain level of celebrity, albeit among a very small group of people, but within their social circles, his celebrity would have been hugely amplified. Mormon Stories was, and is, successful and he still seems to be pretty popular.

The question is: Did he use that soft power to sexually coerce or assault her?

The "I just can't manage you" bit is pretty damn cold, coming on the heels of month after month of, "Ermahgerd! I am so in love with you and I will just die without you!" Clearly, the bloom was off the rose by that point.

Honestly, I took the "I just can't manage you," to mean, "You're too demanding of me as a lover and I can't manage your feelings anymore." Which is even harsher, but it's not rapey.

I think the workplace sexual harassment argument is dead in the water, unless he was otherwise sexually violent towards her, which would probably constitute a "hostile work environment" by definition. But they got romantically involved before she was hired; the board hired her into a position that outranked him within the organization; and he had no authority to make her employment contingent on having Mormon-non-sex with him.

I'm sure he had influence with the board (she probably had some too), but orchestrating to have her fired would have been difficult without giving the only people who could fire her some sort of reason why. Which is sort of what he did do when he came clean about the relationship, but rather than moving to get rid of her, they sought a way to keep her employed there.

I think the theories that this was insincere, or that the whole board conspired to get rid of her are kind of tin-hat. If the whole board hated Rosebud that much, her work life probably would have sucked pretty bad long before then. Plus, the board sought legal advice, so we'd have to believe that the whole board AND the lawyer they hired all lined up against her. Just....'cause.

The board catches a lot of flak on here for handling the situation terribly, but I don't think their proposed solution was half-bad. By switching them both to 1099 contractors, he would no longer have control over the operations of the entire company, which would have allowed Circling the Wagons to be separated from J-D and turned over to Rosebud while still keeping it under the rubric of the Open Stories Foundation.

It's illegal to just switch a W-2 employee to a 1099 (your job either fits the criteria of an employee or of an independent contractor; misclassification is a crime). It's also illegal to turn a paid employee's position into an unpaid volunteer. So the resignation looks like just a formality to rework their job duties into properly 1099 positions and keep them both onboard, while at a hanky-panky-safe distance away from each other at all times.

It sounds like the board did all they could to avoid getting rid of her.

[Kishkumen]

Well, thank you. That makes me feel slightly less dirty about my participation here. (I mean, why are we here? It's kind of gross when you think about it. Aren't we just getting off on other people's pain? Not just Rosebud's and J-D's, but their (ex)spouses and the half dozen children between them, who really never needed to be confronted with their parents' mistakes and sexuality in such a public way.)

I am sorry you feel dragged in. Those of us who have been discussing Mormonism together here and on the old board for over a decade felt dragged into Rosebud’s drama when she showed up and started making vague accusations against Dehlin. At first we were sympathetic. Over time, when her pattern of accusing and not backing up her accusations became more familiar, we started to challenge her claims. Now she has sent James Patterson, someone else who volunteered at Open Stories Foundation and also really dislikes John. We were tired of it long ago. Honestly, after having left so many threads in disgust, or refusing to pay attention any longer, I can’t believe I opened a Rosebud thread.

It must be because a major topic on the board is Mormon apologetics, and Kwaku El’s help was enlisted by Rosebud.

Re: perjury: Perjury is knowingly stating something relevant under oath that you don't believe to be true. Emphases intentional. I no longer believe that either one of them did that. I think they both believed their sworn statements to be true.

And we really don't know if there's any missing context to the messages that J-D submitted. It's possible, even if he didn't believe that there were any additional messages that would change the context. In any case, I don't think perjury could be proven from the information available.

Ah, OK. Well, I confess that I see Rosebud’s threat of October 17 as evidence of a very intentional campaign to accuse John Dehlin of sexual harassment after she said, in a text, that he had not done so. The overall tenor of your comments is very reasonable, but in this case I believe a pattern of intentional deception can be established. I don’t think Rosebud is a monster, but then I don’t think it takes a monster to lie about sexual harassment to get payback against an enemy because I have seen this happen before. It is sad and very unfortunate, but it does happen.

Re: Joseph Smith: I agree with you. I wasn't actually comparing Joseph Smith and J-D. I was trying to put myself in Rosebud's shoes and imagine how it might look to her. I don't really think Rosebud lost everything and J-D walked away unscathed either, but I can imagine how it might look and feel that way to her.

Ah. OK. Cool. I understand that this phenomenon you described is part of the process of converting away from Mormonism. It is almost impossible not to make these unfavorable comparisons when the material is so ripe for exploitation and feelings are raw.

There's just no way to elevate the sleaziness of our fascination with this unless we at least try to have some empathy. I'm trying to dial some of this down from 11 to a normal human decibel. It's much more likely that both of them are just normal screwed-up human beings than scheming monsters.

Agreed wholeheartedly. Buried in this thread and on older threads are those posts wherein I express my confidence in Rosebud as a human being and wish her well. I feel I have seen Rosebud as more than Dehlin’s accuser. She is a decent human being with good intentions and a desire to help others. Sometimes I get short with her allies and defenders, but this does not change my appreciation for her flawed humanity and goodness.

I thank you for also seeing those things and sharing them here. It would be wrong to ignore and neglect the person behind the persona and accusation. It is regrettable that these conflicts occur, as are the many other conflicts regrettable. I am reminded of Mike Norton, another flawed and troubled person who is at once a victim and a transgressive troublemaker. I often gave him a hard time here, but I never hated him. Some people live out their suffering and struggle in a very public way.

[Kishkumen]

Hang on.

John's star witness, his ace in the hole...can't even get her facts straight?

Natasha's version of events is that Rosebud went to Joanna to report John for sexual harassment, then the board was informed and they said "Hey wait a minute, let's investigate!" She claims it was only AFTER the Option1/Option2 email was sent that the board so wisely decided to get lawyers involved.

Except there's a clear email thread amongst the board here:https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uhgaMQ ... sp=sharing that shows Rosebud was fired by Johna and Joanna before the full board was even notified there was any sort of affair!

Natasha needs to get her story straight, because it doesn't match up with the evidence, which shows:

John told Rosebud to leave Open Stories Foundation because "I'm in love with you." Then he locked her out of Open Stories Foundation properties. Then he went to Joanna. The two of them then hired a lawyer to pressure Rosebud to resign. When she wouldn't, they fired her. THEN Joanna told the board "oh, by the way John and Rosebud aren't getting along anymore so she's gone and we're shutting down all of Rosebud's work." and the board freaked out because they had no idea what was going on, again AFTER Rosebud had already been fired.

If this is the best John this is just sad. Natasha, you need better memory pills.

Wow. Didn't you say almost exactly the same thing before? And we responded to it?

Looks like you have no room to criticize Natasha for her memory.

[Moksha]

Didn't you say almost exactly the same thing before? And we responded to it?

We've only got 13 pages to go before this thread hits 200. Surely there must be others to give a fresh opinion. Where are Kemara and Sista Soul? It would be fun to see a collaborative effort between FAIR and Ordain Women. Come on troops, take one for the Gipper.

[SaturdaysVoyeur]

SaturdaysVoyeur brings up some good points and questions re: consent.

It is not uncommon for victims to not realize they were victimized until much later.

It’s not uncommon for people who were marital/date raped to not recognize it as rape at the time. Because in their minds, rape is something a stranger does to you in an alley, not something that someone who loves you and is close to you does.

Just because someone appears to change their story, doesn’t mean they are a liar. It might mean they have recognized something that they didn’t have a name for before.

Also, there is such a thing as sexual coercion, where the victim gives consent even though he/she doesn’t want to.

Examples:

She says “yes” to sex because she knows how angry he will be if she says “no.”

Or she says “yes” because she’s afraid she’s going to lose her job.

Or, the perpetrator continues to badger, beg, plead, pressure, until the victim finally gives up and gives in.

Of what Rosebud has said, it sounds like the last could be what she means when she says, "He would turn a 'no' into a 'yes.'"

Of the examples I’ve given it’s not uncommon for the victim to then think, “I consented to that because I said yes.”

I'm just reposting this whole post of yours again because everyone needs to read this. I agree 1000% and these are huge aspects of sexual violence that are still just barely being acknowledged or understood.

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?

If “turning no’s into yeses” is a reference to physical interactions, it makes sense why they only occur in person and wouldn’t show up in the texts.

That's an excellent point. It's not hard to imagine a long-distance relationship where one of the parties is thoroughly enjoying the flirtatious conversations from afar, but feels more conflicted about physical intimacy on the occasions that they're actually together in person.

Except...that's not how Rosebud describes the situation... In the interview, she keeps bringing it back to how J-D manipulated her in such a way that she was unable to give consent within that relationship. Each time the interviewer circles in on the details of an instance where J-D knew, or should have known, that she didn't want him to do something and he did it anyway, Rosebud was quite consistent in explaining that that's not how it was; he didn't override her refusals, but she realizes now that she was unable to give or withdraw consent due to J-D's machinations. Do you have any idea what she's specifically referring to? Because I honestly don't.

I don't think she ever used the term "structural inability to consent," but that's what she's describing. Take a domestic violence situation, for example. Not that in every single sexual encounter the victim would necessarily fear for her safety if she said no. She might even enjoy their sex life at various times. But a pattern of ongoing physical and emotional abuse in a relationship could easily create a structural incapacity to make a free choice as to whether or not she wants to have sex.

But that's the thing: It's a pattern. In the domestic violence scenario, you might see it bleed over into other areas of their lives. Maybe the victim always asks her partner for permission to go out with friends. Maybe she's learned various appeasement tactics to diffuse the violence (keep the house clean, make a nice dinner, talk in a soft voice, avoid asserting her own needs, etc.) Sad to say, I am pulling all of these from the relationships of women I've actually known....

But if there's any of that bleed-over in the J-D/Rosebud relationship, I couldn't find it in all the hundreds of pages of texts she released. She seems unequivocally happy, excited, head-over-heels in love with him.

And even by her own account, there are points where we should be able to see something amiss, keeping in mind we're talking about the whole structure of the relationship here, not isolated incidents. For example, when she's flown to Salt Lake City to introduce Michael Quinn. She says she didn't believe J-D, that he didn't need her to do that, and he was really flying her in to seduce her. So she makes him promise that there will be no fooling around. But they go to the park, he gives her a backrub, he pleads to go back to her hotel, and they have the best Mormon-non-sex of her life.

Ok, so far, I can see that as at least potentially borderline. There is a gray area around persuading someone who is amenable to being persuaded (e.g., I'm not in the mood, but my partner gets me in the mood), versus persuading someone who really does not want to be (e.g., she's fearful he will harm her in some way, or it's just easier to give in than listen to him whinge about it until she does).

There's an even murkier gray area when it's persuasion to give in to temptation against the person's better judgment (e.g., they know they're wildly attracted to each other and that it's a terrible idea to act on that attraction, so they promise not to act on it, but then he persuades her). I think that's a fair summary of how she describes that encounter, except that, actually, she doesn't mention those promises being mutual, only that she extracted a promise from J-D as though the entire responsibility for both of their actions rests solely on him.

A throwback to Mormonism, perhaps, where the priesthood holder is responsible for everything. But it's a red flag. She's already viewing whether or not they have a sexual encounter as entirely in his hands, but long before he could have done anything to seize that control. It's as though she sees herself as not having any responsibility over whether she even wants to be sexual with him.

I have a really hard time calling that scenario sexual assault. Giving in to persuasion that your head knows is a bad idea, but that your heart and your hormones are clamoring for....that's not rape. You can change your mind to give consent just like you can change your mind to withdraw it. Pinky-swearing that they won't, but then both giving in to their attraction, makes it no longer fair to hold J-D to a promise that both of them were struggling mightily to keep in the first place. I strongly sense that they were both crossing their fingers when that promise was made.

And after that: No negative mention of any of this stuff in their written communications. No expressions of dismay or discomfort or ambivalence or distrust or sadness or fear. Nothing. They seem nothing but over-the-moon for each other. They take pleasure in just saying each other's full names. (A lot. Like, seriously, it gets kind of nauseating. If I ever hear J-D's middle name again, I think I might have a reflexive gag reaction.)

If somebody makes a serious promise, especially about sex (like, "Yes, I promise that I will not lay a hand on you"), and then they break that promise, that's a serious violation of my boundaries. That affects my ability to trust that person on a fundamental level. Considering that their relationship took place primarily in writing, and considering that she's saying that he manipulated her to the extent that the very foundation of their relationship was such that she literally could not consent....then, yeah, I would expect to see something in their written exchanges that would suggest what it was about the relationship that made consent impossible.

Do you see it? I hope I've demonstrated that I'm not a rape apologist. I'm aware of these gray areas and of the many misconceptions about sexual assault that lead to victim-blaming. Where is the evidence, ANY evidence, that she was being groomed or that the structure of their relationship was such that she felt she could not say no to him? We have hundreds of pages of their communication, selected by Rosebud, who would presumably have been sure include anything that helped support what she's saying.

All I can make of it is that the manipulation she's referring to is that she never would have participated at all if she'd known he was going to ultimately choose to stay with his wife, and so therefore, Rosebud consented under a sort of false pretense. But getting dumped isn't getting raped. It hurts and it sucks, but it doesn't render the whole prior sexual relationship non-consensual.