With the latest story to come out about the predatory Scott Allie, I thought about the original stories that came out in late 2015, and I remembered thinking that his remarks earlier that same year about gender representation seemed weird in retrospect.
In those remarks he made gaslighting noises about not filling quotas and how “we just want to make the best books”—and then said, “If I work to create other obstacles and hoops to place between me and my goal to further my personal political agenda, I am doing it wrong.” I found that remark troubling and frustrating at the time, and when the story of his abuses dropped that October I thought about not just that remark but about his comments in a different interview just two months earlier about his hiring practices.
For the most part, I put my energy into hiring at the bottom level, new people that we can really train and shape how they do their job, and then move people along that way.
That quote really struck me today, with the latest revelations very much being a story about predatory and abusive grooming. The clear sense today from people in comics who would know is that Allie’s behavior was no secret on the inside, and it’s important to recall that Dark Horse publisher Mike Richardson back in 2015 flatly stated: “Under no circumstance is any individual ‘harbored.’”
That seemed then, and certainly seems all the more likely today, to be just so much obvious, cynical, and simply ugly lying.
I’m not saying that anyone on the outside looking in should have seen Allie’s remarks about representation or hiring practices as indicative of his abuses; they just struck me in 2015 and again today as eye-widening, looking back at them.
Over my years in Joss Whedon fandom, especially during my involvement with a local Firefly group and a global charity event, I’d had repeated occasional dealings with Allie, and they always were perfectly cordial, something about which I feel terrible. Not because I was in any position to know, but because for the targets of abuse, watching their abusers blithely swim a sea of normalcy must just be salt in the wound.