Today, after expelling our ambassador and severing relations for "out of character" concerns, the East Pacific posted a statement
alleging that we were aware that Katie was a pedophile and harbored her. This allegation is not only categorically false, but completely nonsensical.
As you know, we ourselves
banned Katie on January 2nd, after an incident where she admitted her attractions on December 30th. During the course of that investigation, we discovered that she had previously called herself a pedophile on December 17th. However, it was part of a 50-line wall of text in an opt-in channel dedicated to venting, and was not noticed by the community or reported to the ops team. Screenshots of those incidents, as well as a summary of the factors the moderation group deliberated on, are included in the announcement of her ban. We have also become aware of additional screenshots of Katie admitting her attractions at some point in 2017, but these did not factor into our decision because we only learned of their existence several hours after she was already banned.
To be clear, we were not aware of Katie's attractions until December 30th, and certainly not during the time she was an ambassador to The East Pacific, which would have been no later than June 2020 when she initially left Wintreath. An examination of Wintreath's now-archived consulate shows that her last post there was in November 2019.
This allegation doesn't even make common sense. Why would we hide what Katie openly admitted to on a public Discord, only to then ban her and publicly display our evidence, including the past incident that we missed? As an idea it's nothing short of bizarre, and as an allegation it's at best irresponsible and at worst dangerous and slanderous. The reason that we took several days to discuss the situation with Katie is that we believe that administrative decisions should be fair and just to everyone that they impact. This allegation is neither of those. It is OOC slander of the worst kind against not only me personally and to the ops and moderation groups that were involved with the decision, but against our entire community.
We formally call for the allegations and associated implication that Wintreath is not a safe community be retracted, and for The East Pacific make a public apology for this mishandling of serious OOC allegations. Something this egregious cannot be allowed to stand.
