A man is revealed by the way he responds when the receipts are handed to him. These Christian leaders should be ashamed. They should be modeling repentance to us. Instead, they put the shame on the victims. Well, I’m not going to stay a victim.

Steven Wedgeworth has posted an article claiming he has been doxed and deepfaked by a malicious group of people. I would be one of those malicious people, because I shared the Genevan Commons Screenshots website on my blog. And I did that because I have been harassed by this group for over 2 ½ years now. Waiting for someone in the group to speak out. Waiting after confronting people in the group. Waiting for the people I’ve told about it to do something. Waiting while my reputation was continuously slandered, my looks picked apart, while they go after anyone who hosts me or says something positive about my work, while they go after my own session, and plots increased to “stop my agenda.” I drove to speaking engagements in fear, knowing these men have joked around about showing up and have called ahead to warn churches to guard their families from my danger. Waiting. No more.

Wedgeworth claims that he first had grief for the women maligned when the GC activity was exposed. And he reflected on whether he had been complicit, wanted to examine his heart. But that didn’t last long, because a friend told him he was deepfaked, quoting, “[A] deepfake is something like an extension of a doctored photograph to include audio and especially video, which is only really possible using advanced machine-learning algorithms and fairly powerful computers.

He claims that pictures and quotes were doctored to make it look like he and Mark Jones were participating in ways and saying things they were not to manipulate people viewing the website. He continuously refers to the site as a discernment site. Discernment sites have negative reputations, so who is manipulating the reader here? And with this huge accusation, the alarm is set: The website is a total fake! Then the tone of his article switched gears into DARVO mode. Now he is the victim.

After saying his “deepfake” wasn’t in the ordinary kind, but uses the same methodology, Wedgeworth emphasizes the private nature of the 1,000 + members who were able to see me and multiple others be trashed on a regular basis. But he wasn’t really paying attention, he says, because he was a member of so many groups. I have empathized with this response, as it is valid for a number of people on the membership list. I’ve been there and done that. Many readers can empathize with being in that situation. He says he left the group when he recognized an “unhealthy ethos and tone was dominating the group.” Wow, what a downplay and minimizing of what was going on in Genevan Commons. I guess there’s less responsibility on him to rebuke and pursue apologies to the people maligned by this group if it’s merely an unhealthy ethos.

But is that all it was? And is this just something Wedgeworth noticed from the outside looking in all the sudden after not paying attention to this group, or was he a part of it? I’ve seen Wedgeworth’s participation in Genevan Commons. And it wasn’t appropriate. He wasn’t ignoring it either. He was in it. He was partaking. Back in the fall, someone from Genevan Commons sent me hundreds—LET THAT SINK IN—hundreds of screenshots of reviling behavior from this group, as this person felt I had a right to know. Imagine that. From morning to night the screenshots were flooding in with their verbal abuse. Do you know what the physiological effect of something like that is? And during this time, both Wedgeworth and Jones were participating pretty regularly, especially as they were all about setting up bad reviews for Rachel Miller’s book, Beyond Authority and Submission.

But no worries, DARVO to the rescue. Any screenshots of them are a result of malicious deepfake. First, he goes after the organization of the evidence:  “But this evidence is not organized in the way that it would have been in the actual Facebook group.” Well that is true. And very revealing of Wedgeworth. He’s missing it. Someone like me, or obviously the person who set up the Genevan Commons Screenshot website, does not view the posts as if we are a callous GC member. Whereas someone like me reads the comments and goes Whoa, this makes me sick, he wants to be like, “But wait a sec, that’s not how we started, that’s not what we want to emphasize.” He wants to decide how we view the posts. The Screenshot website views GC from the perspective of those who are SLANDERED. That is a very important point. So of course the slander and bad behavior is what is going to be emphasized. Because the slander is what hurts us. The site creator is not going to emphasize his post about Cornelius Van Til or natural theology or whatever, but how they hurt and abused people with their group.

See where he says this: “But in nearly every case, the problematic comment appears in the middle of a lengthy thread.” He is minimizing the problematic comment and wants us to look at the OTHER things. It wasn’t so bad. But again, it’s like saying, “Oh don’t look at that knife there, look instead at these gentle slaps and complex theological arguments we made elsewhere. Don’t look there, look HERE.” He is dictating how we should view the site from his perspective, the male perspective. He is shutting down the female perspective. No wonder they do not like my writing!

Nevermind that plenty of awful threads were started with an awful post that set the whole thing up. Nevermind

Then he moves to the problem he calls the data dump, saying, “In addition to the misleading framing of the evidence, there is no sincere attempt at interpretation.” Just because it’s not his interpretation doesn’t mean there is no interpretation. There is interpretation in intentionally highlighting the horrible comments. It interprets them with the definitions given, emphasizing their weight. Things weigh heavy because they are heavy. There isn’t a lot of commentary there, as the reader is able to see for themselves.

Then he moves on to what is left out. Again, here he is minimizing the weight of the slander.

What is a few hundred sexist and racist comments up against an unknown number of harmless comments? What is your problem, women? Why are you so sensitive?

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