Hello, dear friends of the Skepchick community. As you’ve probably noticed, the past two years or so have been pretty quiet on here — just little old me, posting my YouTube video transcripts. At its height, Skepchick had dozens of writers across several different sister sites blogging about science, and critical thinking, and progressive values as they pertain to women, LGBTQI, parents, teens, and those in several non-English-speaking countries.

I was really proud of our team, but depression and anxiety and unavoidable life changes sneaked up on me. It’s a bit ironic, because I made it through the worst of the death threats and rape threats I got on a regular basis during “Elevatorgate.” Elevatorgate turned to Gamergate, which turned to #MeToo and now Comicsgate, and I suppose it just all caught up to me. The torrent of hate was no longer focused on me, and so I just sort of curled up and took a nap. I stopped managing the website, and views dropped off, and one by one the writers took my lead and stopped, too.

I’ve long had it in the back of my head that I should relaunch, but depression, anxiety, and life found a way to stop me (or allow me to stop myself). Then, a few months back, a lawyer emailed me threatening to sue me over something one of my writers wrote ages ago. I realized I needed to do something, as I was spending thousands of dollars on server space and now I was preparing to spend many more thousands of dollars on a legal case, all for a website I’d been ignoring for years. I decided I would shut everything down.

Then I talked to some very kind lawyers, who told me the person threatening me was a troll who makes his living scaring bloggers into paying him off in the hopes they won’t go to court. They gave me information on how to go about fighting him, and I thought, “Oh yeah, this is what I love doing.” I love fighting bullies. I love exposing scam artists. And I love providing a platform for other writers and activists to do the same.

So instead of shutting Skepchick down, I decided to relaunch. I contacted our writers and many of them were excited to come back on. You can see the full list of them (thus far) here. You’ll once again see our daily Quickies, and you’ll be able to read voices other than mine.

We’ll also be hopping back on social media, so if you’d like you can keep in touch with us on these platforms:

Twitter

Facebook

Discord

Reddit

And once we’re up and running, we’ll be taking a look at relaunching some of the sister sites, as well.

So that’s it! It feels good to be back. Thanks for waiting.

(Oh, and yes, a post about the troll lawyer is coming soon.)