The date on this post will seem strange, but that's because I backdated it to stash it here at the ass-end of my blog where anyone would have to really go looking for it to find it. (otherwise it would have lingered like a bad smell on the front page until my sporadic posting eventually scrolled it off) So here we go.
A full disclaimer about my work with Matt McFarland:
In case it needs to be said, let me get it out of the way: I knew Matt for a long time, had thought of him as a friend and thought I knew him well, and had no clue what he was really like deep down. He hired me for a pair of books and at no point before or during my time working on those did I suspect anything. I believe his victims and my heart goes out to them.
The first sexual assault allegations against Matt became public in late October 2017, a little over a week before my final draft on Tormented was due. He was immediately removed from the book, which I didn't know right away because I'd accidentally been left off the mass email informing the writers. Because I don't hang out on certain corners of the internet (including RPG.net) and am bad at networking in general, I actually didn't find out why until January or February 2018 (all I knew prior to that was 'personal circumstances'). As soon as I learned of the initial allegations, I broke off contact (not that there was much to break off, to be fair). I didn't say anything publicly because it was months later, it seemed like I was the last person to find out, and I figured there wasn't anything else that needed said.
Between October and January/February, I'd remained in touch with him because I was a high-level backer on the Kickstarter for a Chill supplement. That haunts me a little bit because:
- The allegations happened while the KS was going on, and had I learned of them right away I would have pulled my pledge. Even if I had given Matt the benefit of the doubt -- I'd known him long enough that to be honest I can't rule out the possibility -- I'd have at least reduced the pledge considerably, so as to at least avoid the issue with #3, below.
- He might have made it up in time if I had dropped out, who knows, but the KS in question barely funded by less than the amount of my pledge (even reducing the pledge would have taken it under), so I'm always going to wonder.
- Most importantly, my pledge level meant that I got the chance to write up a character, with artwork drawn from a photo of me to depict them. I figured 'heck with it' and wrote up a version of myself as the character, which means that my name and my image are in the fucking book and I'm reasonably sure I've got no legal recourse to get it removed (though I might nicely ask the people currently managing the property and hope for the best).
So yeah. The day after the backer copy arrived in the mail, I took it up to a used bookstore and sold it. Didn't even take the shrinkwrap off.
I'm being overly detailed and thorough here because there are people on social media who will basically say 'you stood next to someone at a convention, therefore you must have been complicit in every bad thing they did.' So out of paranoia, I'm being as transparent as possible here and I don't want anyone to think my brief contact with Matt during those few months is anything resembling approval or endorsement of him or his actions. I had no clue, and I had no reason to assume anything had happened until someone off-handedly mentioned it months later.
