“My Life Belongs to Me”: Reading the Polyamory Narratives of Franklin Veaux Against the Relationship Testimony of Two of His Ex-Nesting Partners Kali Tal Follow Jun 11, 2019 · 49 min read

If F feels pain, it is a real thing with a real cause and a real solution. If one of his partner’s feels pain, then that pain is judged relative to how it affects him. If it does not affect him, then it may be considered real and addressable. To the extent that it negatively affects him though, that pain is interpreted anywhere from self induced (anxiety, depression, irrationality) to downright villainous (jealousy, manipulation, control). And I think what makes this particularly devastating is that the entire supporting cast engages in enforcing this interpretation. And what’s interesting to me, is that everyone who is part of the supporting cast has this bent lens through which their own experience of reality is interpreted that has everything to do with the central character, who in this case is F, and almost nothing to do with the real thing that they are experiencing. (Amber, email to Eve, April 9, 2018)[1] Franklin has good taste in women, at least. (It’s too bad he leaves so many of us damaged.) It’s like we’re in a club. We should make membership cards. (Eve, email to Amber, April 6, 2018)

Franklin Veaux co-authored More Than Two[2] (MT2), a book about polyamorous relationships that many people admire, and also wrote a memoir called The Game Changer[3] (GC). He has long offered advice to the public about how to conduct ethical polyamorous relationships, has toured to promote his books, and often gives interviews. Several of his past partners have lately accused him of causing them harm and trauma, including three ex-live-in (nesting) partners: they have testified to their experiences orally and in writing. His ex-nesting-partner Eve Rickert, his co-author on MT2 (who is, for reasons I will detail below, often given less credit for her work than she deserves), was the first to tell her story publicly. Despite extolling Eve’s [4] virtues for years, after the breakup Franklin began to publicly and repeatedly describe her as his “abusive ex” without naming her, though her identity was clear to most people who knew Franklin or even knew about him. [5] Eve began to publish essays, at first anonymously, that described her experiences with Franklin. She also began talking about her relationship with Franklin to some of his other ex-partners, including “Amber”, the titular character of GC. A disturbing pattern emerged in these stories: the polyamory expert who talked the talk consistently failed to walk the walk.

Eve was in contact with Louisa Leontiades, who has written a series of books[6] about her own polyamorous relationships and who considered herself a friend to both Eve and Franklin. Louisa was initially reluctant to believe Eve’s stories, since she was also invested in Franklin’s narratives, but after talking to others and reading the extensive documentation Eve provided, she was convinced [7]. When Eve formed a “pod” to start a transformative justice process, she asked Louisa to interview some of the women and collect their stories. Louisa, who had recently returned to school to earn a Master’s in journalism, began to collect and curate testimony from people who had experienced harm in their relationships with Franklin. Louisa’s goal was to find out if the complaints documented a consistent pattern, and to provide those who testified with a platform for their stories, since Franklin had long dominated the narrative space. Louisa plans to write her Master’s thesis on the topic. Louisa collected testimonies and documentation ranging from LiveJournal entries dated decades ago, to recent email correspondences, to current phone interviews. In this piece, I discuss some of the documents I’ve been given permission to read and write about, some of the posts that surround them, and material Franklin has co-written or written — in particular, MT2 and The Game Changer, since several of the women who have testified were depicted in these books.

Much of the public discussion about the testimonies and documents Louisa has been assembling has focused on whether the women’s testimony is “believable” or not, and, if believable, whether Franklin’s actions constitute “abuse.” Many people in the polyamorous community have chosen sides. The usual arguments have surfaced: denial and minimizing on Franklin’s part, along with claims that a woman (Eve or Louisa) is leading a witch hunt; those who accept the ex-partner testimonies usually point to the number of women who have come forward, the consistency of their testimony and the risks they were willing to take to testify. But I’d like to enter the discussion from another direction, because we have access to other materials as revealing as the testimony. The stories these women tell about their relationships with Franklin can be evaluated in light of Franklin’s own words, in the books that he has written and his other writings, published mainly online.

The patterns his ex-partners describe are visible in these works — both in the stories he told and the way he told them. This article explores these patterns and serves as a corrective to attempts to isolate the women who have testified to relationship harm or abuse, to psychologize them, or to mask denial with claims to “objective” scholarship that undermines their testimony. Literary approaches like mine are disciplined rather than “scientific,” and can illuminate patterns and throw light on covert or even unconscious strategies that other forms of inquiry often miss. They do not reveal the internal lives and truths of subjects, and they cannot verify the truth of particular claims, but they can tell us quite a lot about how writers describe and organize their worlds.

In this inquiry, when I talk about “Franklin,” “Eve,” and “Amber,” I am usually talking about their characters in various texts: how they narrate themselves, each other, their relationships, and their environments. Sometimes I refer to the “real-life” Franklin, Eve, or Amber (e.g., when I say that Franklin posted on Quora, or Eve wrote a diary entry). But I am clear, throughout, that I have no access to the internal lives of any of these people, nor do I need it to show that Franklin’s own work mirrors the patterns in the narratives that some of his ex-partners (in this essay, Eve and Amber) have shared.

There is much debate over the best way to approach personal narratives and how to frame them. A range of experts, working in different disciplines, have tried to answer the question, but it is far from settled. This is why, when choosing a method of analysis, we still have argue its worth. Recently, Elisabeth (Eli) Sheff, [8] a member of Franklin’s pod, published a blog post critiquing Louisa’s interviewing technique and analytic methods. Eli, a court-appointed special advocate and sociologist, described her post as a “sociological analysis,” which I found curious. Since sociology investigates structural questions about society, groups, social relationships, and power structures, and Eli’s article did not situate the testimonies in their social context, I think it is better described as an “off-the-cuff ethnography.” In qualitative social science, professional interview-based ethnography usually relies on transcripts of interviews that are read and re-read until scholars can identify the main topics/ideas embodied in each section (sometimes in each sentence). Once we identify the topics, we sort them into categories, and then summarize the categories. If we’re doing academic ethnography, we usually need enough transcripts to reach “saturation” (which means that new transcripts do not give us new categories), and we rely on more than one coder, so that our interpretations are less likely to be affected by our biases. More coders are better, especially if they code independently and then come together to compare their results. Differences are discussed and usually resolved through consensus, but Eli did her work alone, on a very thin sample. Though I have published ethnographic peer-reviewed papers, I don’t think it’s a good method to use in this case, which is why I have instead chosen to take a feminist (not “the” feminist) approach that centers the survivors and to apply literary critical methods in narratology to a close reading of Franklin’s GC and Eve’s and Franklin’s MT2: I think that Franklin’s own work encodes the patterns of harm that his ex-partners describe.

In the interests of feminist scholarship, I acknowledge my own subjective position. I’ve known the virtual Franklin (Tacit on both LiveJournal and OKCupid) for a long time —about 15 years. We corresponded, occasionally intensely, in the LiveJournal/OK Cupid days, and for a short time I edited and commented on an early draft of what would become More Than Two (none of this remains in the published version, so I claim no contribution). Back then, I found Franklin’s advice on relationship freedom and honesty compelling, at least theoretically, because I’d had a long string of overlapping relationships — some of which worked out well, and some of which didn’t. When they didn’t, the root cause was usually dishonesty in the form of cheating behavior (occasionally mine, but usually my partner’s). I had reached a point where I realized lies are unethical because they strip people of their agency by manipulating their ability to make decisions based on good data. I was attracted to his work because the polyamorous relationships that Franklin promoted were based on honesty rather than lies. But I didn’t agree with Franklin about everything. For example, he shared with me a discussion he’d had with a woman who defended monogamy, and while I didn’t share her view that monogamy was inherently “better,” I also didn’t think some of Franklin’s responses were either fair or reasonable, and I said so.

I enjoyed my discussions with Franklin, and we had no conflicts during this time, or before or after. We flirted mildly, but we lived far apart, and neither of us expressed any interest in interacting beyond the virtual intellectual realm. Our work on his draft tapered off at around the time that Amber (his nesting girlfriend and the pivotal character of GC) decided to leave for graduate school. Franklin and I fell out of all but occasional touch but remained on friendly terms, and it was Franklin who introduced me to Eve and Louisa when I took a train to Munich on a whim a couple of years ago to meet him face-to-face for the first time, during the MT2 European book tour. We all spent a pleasant evening together after the reading, in company with another friend. When we parted, we fell back into occasional communication. I did stay in touch with Louisa, with whom I had several long academic and personal conversations about scholarship on sexual abuse, and who I began to consider a friend. My contact with Eve was limited to Facebook posts, much like my continuing casual contact with Franklin.

I first heard about Eve’s experience of relationship abuse from Louisa, and then I spoke directly to Eve about it via email and Skype. I was allowed to read Eve’s and Amber’s long correspondence early on, and I went over it thoroughly, many times. My reading revealed a pattern of relationship abuse that gradually surfaced over the course of the correspondence, though both women were hesitant to name it. In their correspondence, Amber and Eve continually expressed concern about Franklin’s welfare and prospects, and consistently gave him the benefit of the doubt, even when faced with strong evidence that he had harmed them.

I mean, it seems like he knows the harm he does sometimes, or that he’s taking responsibility, but I really think that this is just part of his toolkit of managing things he doesn’t like. Like, the toolkit consists of compassion, claiming some responsibility, stonewalling, gaslighting, avoiding, etc. If he really truly believed that *he* was doing harm, and not just that his partner was experiencing harm in his vicinity, I think he would actually change his behavior. (Amber, email to Eve, July 14, 2018) So for what it’s worth, it actually means a lot to me that you basically seem to agree with me that he’s acting/manipulating largely unconsciously. (Eve, email to Amber, August 1, 2018)

The belief that Franklin was unintentionally causing them serious harm, and that, if only he realized it, he would change, was consistent with his ex-partners’ choice of a transformative justice approach, which invites those who do harm to participate in a process of constructive self-reform, without driving them from the community. Partners of abusive men are often reluctant to acknowledge either the extent of harm, or the likelihood of intent. Patriarchy encourages women to invest in the narrative of a good man who does bad things, and to see themselves as the lifeline and savior of men who would otherwise be out of control. The alternative is often being cast in the role of victim, with an attendant loss of agency. Either choice can threaten women’s agency:

So when I say “No no, he’s not like that,” it sounds like the “Well you just really don’t know him like I do” way that victims defend their abusers. But it also feels like another, subtle way of silencing me. Like, I am telling you what my experience was, and you are still not trusting me, and not trusting my analysis of the situation, and that fucking sucks. So I end up in these centring conversations where I’m actually sort of defending him, but I’m really just trying to defend my perceptions and judgements. (Eve, email to Amber, August 1, 2018)

The women who have come forward with testimony and who drafted the documents I draw on are asserting their right to occupy narrative space that Franklin has so far dominated. I approach their narratives from the perspective of a trauma studies scholar, since that is my field. [9] I’ve spent much of my professional career interviewing trauma survivors (Holocaust survivors, rape and incest survivors, and combat veterans) and reading and analyzing their stories, both oral and written. I specialize in qualitative research in survivor communities, including difficult-to-interview communities where the lines between perpetrators and victims are blurred (e.g., combat veterans). I sometimes coach students in qualitative methods and advise on qualitative study set-up. [10] I brought this experience (and these methodological biases) to bear on my analysis, with the goal of illuminating Eve’s and Amber’s private stories, and contrasting them with Franklin’s public narrative of his relationships to see where they parallel and where they diverge.

In this essay, I focus on a long correspondence between Amber and Eve, on some of Eve’s own notes and journal entries, on Eve’s and Franklin’s MT2, and on Franklin’s book, GC. The abuse that Franklin’s ex-partners describe surfaces like invisible writing in these texts when the flame of testimony is held beneath their pages. Hierarchies are encoded in texts just like they are encoded into social relations. Readers are often not conscious that their interpretations are affected by the structure of a book, and writers aren’t always conscious of the structures they’ve chosen, but literary critics are trained to notice and analyze the effect of structure on readers. We’re like geologists: we can read the history by looking at the layers under the surface. The structure of MT2, with its inset personal stories that mainly describe flawed female subjects, and its pattern of critiquing female behavior in the text while not acknowledging female authority, produces a landscape in which Franklin’s male voice dominates and echoes, giving the reader the impression Franklin is the narrator-expert. Franklin’s self-absorption and sexism is encoded in all his texts, like DNA.

If Eli had coded GC alongside the three transcripts she wrote about [11] , the structural aspects of Franklin’s “game” might have been clearer to her, and the irony of the book’s title would have emerged: there is nothing “game changing” about any of the women in Franklin’s universe. Metaphors matter, and designating certain woman as “game changers” (while other women are what? non-player characters?) is troubling, prima facie. Games are what Pick-Up Artists (PUA) play; games have score-cards: you win or you lose. Designating some women as “game changers” and others as… not… creates a hierarchy of importance, just as in the primary and secondary relationships that Franklin decries. If a woman is the game changer, this also relieves Franklin of responsibility for change. Franklin’s relationship universe in GC is like a pinball machine where he’s the ball: when some appealing new woman pops up, she can send him spinning off in a new, “game changing” direction… but it’s just Franklin’s trajectory and not the game that changes.

Eve and Amber both make clear that Franklin’s nesting partners can count on being replaced, and then rewritten:

Until a few weeks ago, his narrative of our relationship has been how amazing and wonderful it is. He has said I’m a “fuck yes!” He is now rapidly rewriting the narrative to make me into a crazy, unpredictable, controlling bitch with an explosive temper. (Eve, journal entry, March 15, 2018) Like, he has to be the one to say “why do all of the women I nest with go crazy in the same way, and express the same problems over and over again, and why don’t I believe them?” Like, the problem has been laid out for him, multiple times. The information is there. He is the only one who can look at it. The level of misery in Franklin’s relationships is NOT NORMAL, and he is the common denominator. (Amber, email to Eve, March 14, 2018)

When he describes his two idealized “game changers,” Franklin is unstinting in his praise. He describes both partners as inspiring muses and helpmeets who support him, both personally and in his work. The benefits of these relationships were clear for Franklin, but I was struck by the contrast between his passionate declarations of gratitude and the lived experiences of the women he depicted:

And finally, Amber, my game changer, my giraffe, who inspired me to reach beyond fear and become the best person I could possibly be. I would not be who I am without her, and I will always be forever in her debt. (GC, https://tinyurl.com/y3aurbg8) I remember being struck by Amber’s intelligence, but even more, I was awed by her wisdom and her self-knowledge. Most of all, she seemed to be perhaps the most profoundly compassionate person I had ever met. Even in the midst of her separation, I was struck by her sympathy for her husband’s experiences.(GC, https://bit.ly/2Iu6svq) Like, if you really center me in my relationship with Franklin, it was just… a shitty relationship that set my growth as a person back. Like, if you really take him out of it, if it’s really not about him, then that’s all it was to me. It has taken me a long time to even consider or experience or remember that relationship from my perspective, and not just as some catalyst for Franklin’s story. (Amber, email to Eve, March 14, 2018)

Becoming a hero in one of Franklin’s stories might be flattering, but it came with a cost: one was no longer the main character of one’s own story.

In 2014, my partner and co-creator Eve Rickert and I published a book on polyamory called More Than Two. In that book, I talked for the first time about some of the experiences that led me to the values I hold about ethical relationships. She encouraged me to write this book to talk more about the path that led me to where I am today, and to show others they are not alone on that path. Her unflagging support throughout the entire writing process made this book possible. In a literal sense, it would not exist without her. (GC, https://tinyurl.com/y3mtd3zh) There’s something he likes to do when we’re speaking together. He’ll say “And then I met EVE” in this dramatic voice, and it was always to tell the story of some big impact I had on his life, and it always felt…so flattering. And while it seemed like it was telling a story about me, it was really just his story, with me as a catalyst. And what about the “And then I met FRANKLIN” stories? How would those begin, and how would they end? What’s the before and after for each of us in these stories? (Eve, email to Amber, March 15, 2018)

Instead of offering a bold new take on relationships, the kind of polyamory Franklin promoted turned out to be an old form of oppression in a new dress. Amber took care to describe the structural nature of the problem: patriarchy’s habit of “using up women.” In her narrative, Franklin’s journey towards becoming a polyamory guru was patriarchal business as usual.

Essentially, polyamory in this case was just one of the specific tools for kind of a generic ‘using up of women,’ (and in particular, preying on women who are young enough to not have been burned yet, and smart enough to think they can manage and fix themselves or the situation for way too long). I think many many women, polyamorous and not, could relate to this. (Amber, email to Eve, July 12, 2018)

There are other warning signs that Franklin’s professed commitment to egalitarian polyamorous relationships may serve as cover for other traditional patriarchal attitudes. For example, Franklin has lately been claiming to be the subject of attacks by PUA and incels, and has discussed this on his Facebook page. During that discussion, I saw parallels between his approach to “getting women” and PUA strategies. Picking up the most women is a game you can win, and so is accruing girlfriends. The repetition of the phrase “five girlfriends” — a theme in Franklin’s social media posts and other writing — evokes the image of a winning poker hand. This “whoever has the most girlfriends wins” refrain was echoed by several other men in the comments: Franklin must be doing something right (“better” than incels) because the score is Franklin, 5; Incel, 0. There is, however, some cause to think Franklin’s “score” was inflated:

For 10 years I have been uncomfortable with him calling me a partner. For 10 years I have not reciprocated, or given affirmative consent. There are a number of reasons why I didn’t correct him, having to do with all the reasons why women contort themselves around their own discomfort in order to be accommodating in these types of situations. I had always assumed it was harmless because he hadn’t set expectations, I assumed he was just using language differently, but I realize now that he did have certain expectations to have access to my thoughts and feelings, and now suddenly I am very very disturbed by the whole thing. (Amber, email to Eve, March 19, 2018) Last fall when we did the fourth printing of More Than Two, I asked him if he still wanted his bio to say “he shares his life with five partners.” His response was “Sure, why not?” (Which like…what? But I went along with it, because I guess I figured it was his job to decide how to describe his own relationships.) (Eve, email to Amber, April 9, 2018)

I prefer to engage in a different form of score-keeping. For example, in MT2, Franklin and Eve are listed as equal co-authors, and both have said repeatedly and in public that they made equal contributions to the book. But structurally, Eve is clearly subordinated. MT2 contains two types of writing: the first is the main text that flows through the chapters (the instructional text), and the second is a series of personal stories contained in inset boxes, illustrating points in the main text.

Franklin’s authority is located in the main text, which is rife with examples of him doling out sage advice to rapt audiences or otherwise dispensing Solomonic wisdom. Despite his own protestations in the book and elsewhere, he’s constantly portrayed as an expert and not a learner. His presentation as an expert is not interrupted until he shares a story about Ruby, but this story is immediately followed by a penetrating insight that appears to forever resolve all his problems with jealousy. Then MT2 goes right back to mentioning his expertise almost every time he is named, except in brief discussions of his lack of agency in his relationship with Celeste, his poor treatment of Bella (which is also shown as ultimately Celeste’s responsibility), and a few other minor incidents. On the rare occasions Franklin does tell a personal story, it almost never portrays him as vulnerable. In contrast, the personal stories told by Eve and other women in MT2 show that they have made mistakes, learned, and grown (or failed to grow) from their experiences. Franklin is almost never featured that way — he is positioned as the expert, and “his” stories usually detail other people’s failings or describe his accomplishments. In MT2, Eve is Exhibit A, over and over again, admitting flaws and facing problems, while Franklin remains largely outside this process, explaining and passing judgment. This power differential strips Eve of agency, while degrading her position as an authority on her own life — a central component of gaslighting.

MT2 emphasizes Franklin’s expertise at Eve’s expense. Franklin’s name is mentioned 166 times in MT2 (over 60% of mentions): 141 times in the main text (85%) and 25 times (15%) under FRANKLIN’S STORY headers. [12] When his name appears in the text of the book, it’s accompanied by constant repetition of phrases like, “Franklin has received scores/hundreds/thousands of emails…” “Franklin calls this…” “Franklin’s most controversial blog post…” and other sorts of authoritative speech. Eve’s name, which rarely appears next to claims of authority, is mentioned 99 times (less than 40% of mentions): 73 times (74%) in the main text and 26 times (26%) in EVE’S STORY headers. When Eve’s name is mentioned in the text, she is mainly posited as an example. In MT2, Eve is frequently personalized and the object of scrutiny, while Franklin is promoted as an objective authority, a role model, and the conduit for knowledge. Eve appears in the main text far more often as a subject to be discussed; Franklin is almost always represented as the qualified expert. Even though both Eve and Franklin have said that she wrote as much or more of the main text as Franklin did (referring to herself in the third person) the structure of MT2 creates the impression in the reader that Franklin is doing the talking and not Eve — which may account for the audience’s perception that she is a lesser co-author.

The more I looked at the male characters in MT2, the more it became evident that men were weirdly absent from the book, as was any discussion of gender roles (and especially gender imbalances) in relationships. So many of the negative stories in MT2 are about women damaging other women, or damaging men because of their jealousies and insecurities. In general, women get the blame for problems, and men tend to be described as proximate causes. In one of the few stories in which a guy behaves badly (Meadow & her husband), MT2’s intent was not to point out that Meadow’s husband was treating her badly, but to emphasize Franklin’s victory in an unspoken competition: Meadow’s husband was jealous because Meadow liked being with Franklin so much. This competition is a defining aspect of Franklin’s textual worlds: he writes himself as the alpha male center (in the sheep’s clothing of a sensitive feminist guy), surrounded by orbiting women who might be incidentally attached to other guys, but who are only important because of their attachment to him.

It’s almost like the world is divided into potentially fuckable and…everyone else. It’s such a fucking stereotype. But F talks such a good game about feminism, it’s really hard to see. (Eve, email to Amber, April 6, 2018)

In GC, attachment to Franklin is the only authentic attachment: women’s relationships and interactions are important only as far as they relate to him. The Franklin who is depicted in the testimonies of his ex-partners looks for and finds women who will center him: he grooms them and then exploits them until they can’t take it anymore. He demonizes them or idealizes them. And then he still exploits them, after they’ve gone, by appropriating their stories and using them as bait to catch (and object lessons to discipline) other women he will eventually put through the same process. His work can’t even pass the Bechdel test: women don’t exist for him unless he intersects with them sexually, and he cannot seem to imagine women’s relationships with each other except as competitions for his attention.

It does seem like F has a hard time connecting with, or staying connected to, anyone who isn’t a current or potential future partner. (Eve, email to Amber, April 6, 2018)

In GC, male characters are described as mentally healthy, but most female characters (except the game-changer) are not. Men are benign, autonomous, well-adjusted people — their involvement with women is a part, but not the central pillar, of their lives. The men in GC are not insecure, but they can be motivated to do unhealthy things to please the insecure women around them. Franklin’s men have little interior life. He does not psychologize men’s relationship choices like he does those of women. His men are basically happy; when they are unhappy, their distress is attributable to a woman’s behavior. His male characters never reflect on their privilege, and they take for granted a level of freedom and autonomy that women can rarely match:

In fact, I learned some important lessons: that my happiness doesn’t depend on what other people think of me, that my life belongs to me, and that it’s up to me to decide how to live it. (GC, https://bit.ly/2F16El7) I lived, and still live, almost entirely in the moment. It doesn’t matter that the world is without purpose or meaning, because it has hot chocolate and sunsets and waterfalls and the smell of a lover and the sound of rain on the roof when we’re safe and warm in bed, and those things are awesome. It doesn’t matter that the universe is vast and uncaring, because we have love and tenderness and compassion and random acts of kindness, and those things are also awesome. So even if tomorrow we might get hit by a bus on the way to the grocery store, today, right now, we have each other, and each moment we exist is really all we ever have anyway. (GC, https://bit.ly/2WnFXwJ)

His ex-partners, however, see this freedom and autonomy as an illusion upheld by their unacknowledged and unappreciated labor, and see Franklin as supported by a community of women:

And honestly, as far as I can tell, those two fundamental core problems, which is really just the one problem of not taking responsibility, have not changed. I have watched the women in his life do so.much.labor for him. And I have seen him experience these amazing things, and realize many of his dreams, and have all of these exciting and intense romantic experiences, and what I see is a bunch of women just bearing the labor of the neglect, and disappointment, and the processing, and the scheduling, and all of the domestic world building you have to do so that Franklin can just be Franklin. And so for me, that child like wonder and glee that he has… well, it’s just not that beautiful thing that I thought it was. It’s a way of being that comes at the cost of the time and energy of the women in his life, time and energy that could be used for literally anything else. And I don’t like it. (Amber, email to Eve, March 13, 2018) And like, no, I did not kick you out because I was insecure. I kicked you out because I was tired of washing your fucking dishes and laundry. (Eve, email to Amber and two other exes, May 21, 2018)

Both Amber and Eve emphasize Franklin’s financial dependence upon them, and the heavy price they paid to sustain his desired lifestyle:

After he left [Celeste], and it was pretty much the two of us, we were living on my credit cards because he would.not.get.a.job. I was working full time and trying with all my heart to go to school and every morning I looked on Craigslist for jobs for him, and I sent them to him, and he did.not.apply. And he would deflect when I asked him about it. His business was faltering, and the company he was associated with was waiting for investment money, and we waited for months, and he would not take action to make our situation better. I felt like I was holding both of our lives together, and I would sit and cry in my car over my lunch break. (Amber, email to Eve, March 13, 2018) I was supporting him financially, cleaning up after him, coordinating the household tasks like laundry and shopping even when he participated, managing our social life, managing the relationship between him and [Peter] and our other housemates, and keeping all the businesses running. He was supposed to do a job, and was supposed to be making financial contributions… but he mostly wasn’t. Every now and then he’d contribute money or work, and then he’d feel like he was doing his fair share, so if I complained he’d sort of imply that I wasn’t appreciative enough of what he was doing, and how he was trying. And then every couple of months he’d take off to Portland, and he’d always promise to work while he was there, but of course he never really did — which was understandable since that was all the time he and Vera had, and I kind figured I had to just suck it up, but it was also shitty because I just had to keep working and running things, and I was never able to take that kind of time off. (Eve, email to Amber, April 16, 2018)

Franklin depicts himself at the center of a universe that revolves around him, in which his relationships with women are primarily premised on their fuckability-to-hassle ratio. Despite his preoccupation with the psychology of his women characters (“what do women want?”), Franklin provides only the shallowest explanations for their thoughts and actions. As Eve noted in a later reflection, Franklin “…treats the things that upset me as these mysterious, unpredictable things (‘bitches be crazy’) instead of things he can understand and incorporate into his worldview and future behaviour.” [Eve, journal entry, March 11,2018]. In MT2, women’s problems are also reduced to a set of unreasonable insecurities and fears, which they could overcome if they “chose” to do so:

Franklin has talked to many people who say things like “I’m just an insecure person,” as if feeling insecure is something they’re born with. In reality, it is something you can control. “Insecure” is something you can, if you want to, choose not to be. We are big believers in the affirmative power of choice, and we believe that people are often insecure because they make choices, dozens of times a day, that confirm and reinforce their own insecurity. (MT2, https://bit.ly/2I2ZEG5)

Failure to make the correct “choice” turns women into abusers. In GC, for example, Celeste’s jealousy causes her to disregard the humanity of Franklin’s other partners, and this leads her to victimize Elaine. Throughout GC, pain is the emotion that characterizes women’s lives, whether they suffer it or inflict it.

When the zero hour came, I would stand up to leave. She would walk me to the door, we would hug briefly, and she would turn away quickly so I didn’t have to see her cry. I would drive home, my heart aching, remembering the look on her face. (GC, https://bit.ly/2MBnhtM) Even through all her pain, Bella never challenged the rules. In our hierarchy of needs, hers didn’t matter. From the start, our relationship was built on a Hobson’s choice: these are the terms, take them or leave them. They were easy to take at first, before her heart was engaged. By the time she fell in love, she had already agreed to rules that gave her no say. (GC, https://bit.ly/2K5Du8w)

His partners also see pain as a constant in Franklin’s relationships, but they point to a different source. For them, women’s pain is not a mysterious product of their own unreasonable decision to be jealous, but a product of Franklin’s inability (or refusal) to understand the harm he is doing the women in his life.

… Franklin has an unhealthy ‘tolerance’ for emotional pain in his partners. When someone you care about is deeply in pain, it is the very nature of intimacy that you will also experience empathic pain and you will be driven to act to stop that pain. If that pain is directly related to you and your actions — or if it is somehow within your power to otherwise ease that pain and you cannot or will not (which are both reasonable choices) make the changes or take the action that you need to alleviate that pain, then I really believe for any healthy person that this mutual pain must at some point drive you to leave the relationship. I think this is the natural and healthy course. Franklin will essentially stay for ever with a partner who is suicidally miserable. How is that? Why is that? And how do his partners bend around that reality? …. I believe that the way that Franklin is able to tolerate his partner’s pain over long periods of time is that he never, fundamentally believes it is coming from him. No matter how bad it is, actually, especially when it is so bad that you, as his partner become hysterical, ‘irrational’ or otherwise crazy, he will continue to see it as essentially something that is coming from you. And, this being the case, he will be a kind and calm and loving friend, helping you through this thing that you alone are experiencing. In this way, do you see how the very construct of the relationship will gaslight anyone who is emotionally invested in him and then suffers for it? Because you will always be steered towards believing that the pain is ultimately coming from you, when you know, you *know* that it wasn’t there until he did that thing, or didn’t do that thing, or did that series of things. But because he is now being the kind and loving friend that is helping you through this, it is very difficult to stand strong enough to call him on his actions. (Amber, email to Eve, March 13, 2018) So yeah…I guess what I’m getting at is that when we talk about predators, we need to get away from thinking of mustache-twirling villains making evil plans, and think about predators as creatures whose entire way of being in the world, whether learned or innate, just naturally involves a lot of harm to other creatures as an inevitable consequence. (Eve, email to Amber, July 14, 2018)

The conflict in GC is a product of Franklin’s attempts to be free (polyamorous), and Celeste-the-character’s attempts to rein him in. Celeste’s discomfort with polyamory is posed as the problem; her character has a zero-sum approach to relationships, and she is consumed with unwarranted jealousy. To live a fully polyamorous life, Franklin must extricate himself from the trap his marriage has created for him. The heavily idealized Amber is his beacon of freedom. The narrative suggests that, once Franklin leaves Celeste for Amber (symbolically leaving the slavery of monogamy for the freedom of polyamory), the future promises smooth sailing on the sea of polyamorous self-discovery. But this did not turn out to be the case for Franklin-the-real, since his personal history continued with a series of new “game changers,” and a string of ex-nesting partners and lovers who no longer want contact with him. The reality is strongly at odds with his public persona.

Doling out relationship advice on Quora, Franklin wrote:

My own policy is that I don’t date people who are on bad terms with all their exes. If you don’t have friendly interactions with at least one ex, I won’t date you…. I am friends with many of my exes. Not all of them, but many. Yes, there is a reason we broke up. There is also a reason we were together in the first place. I date amazing people. They don’t stop being amazing just because we’re not together any more. (Franklin on Quora, January 16, 2017, https://www.quora.com/Should-you-keep-your-ex-in-your-life/answer/Franklin-Veaux)

But Eve’s calculations, based on Franklin’s own descriptions of his relationship history to her and her conversations with some of his exes, throw Franklin’s claims into question:

Total is 18, of which he’s friendly with 3 and has no contact with 13. Has contact with 0/4 nesting partners[13]. For last 13 relationships it’s always a story where he was victimized. (Eve’s consolidated notes from Spring 2018)

Franklin’s bar here is low (“at least one ex”) and easy to meet if you move through many relationships, but a 1:6 “friendliness” ratio is disturbing for a man who has become the face of the “ethical” polyamory movement, and could be explained by his tendency to play partners off each other in order to maintain control over them:

[Elaine] said something to me that has stuck with me. She said that [Franklin] creates a “narcissistic symphony” of women around him. Like, there are these roles he needs filled, parts we need to play. There’s the nesting partner, and the vacation partner(s). But there’s also the fan, and the woman he’s lining up as the next one if things don’t work out with someone he’s with. (Eve, email to Amber, July 12, 2018) It’s like one day you [Eve] were someone he was interested in, and the next you were a big R life changing, non-negotiable relationship, and there was at no point any discussion with [Vera] about how this might affect her or their relationship. But if she tried to affect things at all, it meant she was jealous and controlling. (Amber, email to Eve, April 20, 2018)

In GC, women’s stories are histories of their jealousies, and interactions between women become tense or hostile because they are too possessive. Jealousy belongs to women, and men are free from responsibility for creating or cultivating it.

Celeste didn’t like Blossom one bit, and the feeling was mutual. After that painfully awkward first meeting, Celeste took me aside and said, “Her? Really?” (GC, https://bit.ly/2I4OKj5)

But the view from the other side is quite different:

In a lot of ways, Franklin has made me a container for his negative or ambivalent feelings about his other partners, which has helped drive a wedge between me and the rest of the polycule. (Eve, email to Amber, March 13, 2018)

When his partners and ex-partners began talking to each other instead of allowing Franklin to mediate their communications, Franklin’s game became visible:

He said that [Amber] had written him “a really nasty email” and said that I had told her that F felt entitled to her mind and her body, and that he was telling people they were still in a sexual relationship, and that she never wanted to speak to him again. He said “I don’t know if that is what you intended for her to hear but that is what she heard.” And I said that I hadn’t told her those things, that she’d written that in response to his text to [Vera] about her “breaking up” with him, and he just kept coming back to all these things [Amber] said I said, that I knew I hadn’t said… And I asked [Amber] to forward me the email, and she did, and of course she didn’t say any of those things at all, and her email wasn’t “nasty,” there was no attack, it was just her calmly setting the boundary that she was not his partner and did not want to be referred to as such, and she didn’t centre him at all, and so of course he saw that as nasty.” And she didn’t even name me, or say anything about talking to me, but just responded very specifically to things he had said. (Eve, email to Amber and two other exes, May 21, 2018) So you can see these ways that he keeps us separate from each other, which keeps us from sharing our stories, or supporting each other, or calling him on his shit. And also, often, blaming each other, and fighting each other, and there’s all this conflict going on around him, and somehow it’s never quite his fault. (Eve, email to Amber, March 13, 2018)

MT2 repeatedly underlines the importance of taking personal responsibility for feelings of jealousy, but it never tackles the question of whether or not men can deliberately evoke jealousy in their partners, and then use it as a tool for manipulation or coercion. GC also sidesteps this question with its portrayal of jealousy as an inherent, almost entirely feminine failure of character that women must learn to overcome. But in the relationship narratives, both Eve and Amber note Franklin’s tendency to use jealousy to control the relationship. Eve speaks explicitly about the disjunct between the narrative she and Franklin created about jealousy in MT2 and the role jealousy played in their relationship life:

I went up to see him and asked him why he hadn’t texted me [after agreeing to check in after spending time with another partner]. He didn’t really have an answer. I got wobbly and ended up crying and he held and comforted me, but somehow we made it about me being jealous — like it was this random feeling I just had, and he was being the good partner by comforting and caring for me. Somehow the fact that he’d said he’d do something and hadn’t, and had completely bailed on the attention he’d agreed to give me after spending intimate time with another partner, and had left me alone at the conference for hours, into the evening, without checking in…none of those seemed like actual legitimate reasons to be hurt. No, it was [just] jealousy. This was the narrative we co-created together; I was so used by this time to being treated this way and thinking something was wrong with me for being upset about it. (Eve’s consolidated notes from Spring 2018) He started doing this weird thing where he would schedule things or not show up for really important things, and when [name deleted would] ask “why didn’t you at least tell me what you were planning?” he’d say that he didn’t tell her because he knew she would respond badly. Like, what? (Amber, email to Eve, March 14, 2018) I’m sure you have noticed this, but Franklin has two kinds of partners. He has a nesting partner, and there is usually just one… because Franklin sucks at having two nesting partners). And then he has a whole bunch of other ‘partners’ and those relationships are very very confusing because they barely look like relationships. When you want to be a ‘real’ partner to him, and you are one of these ‘satellites,’ it is incredibly painful. When he is transitioning you to a ‘real’ partner from a satellite, it is Franklin at his best, because you really feel like he is on your side against an outside threat (even though he was the source of the pain to begin with. I think we have both been through this with him)…. If you are happy and comfortable being a satellite with Franklin… you have an entirely different experience with him, that is mostly around having a ‘vacation boyfriend’ who has no expectations from you. This is a dream relationship for some solo-poly people. And his nesting partners look like controlling bitches who are always trying to harsh your buzz… (Amber, email to Eve, April 7, 2018)

Just as Franklin considers women responsible for their own jealousy, he assumes little responsibility for other relationship problems in GC. For him, relationship problems are indicators that his partners need to fix themselves. His behaviour is rarely at issue, except insofar as he allows himself to be caged in an unsuitable relationship, but he depicts his partners as insecure, anxious, mentally ill, controlling, and/or abusive. Franklin consistently collapses the wide range of women’s complex emotions into a small subset that he repeatedly details: jealousy, insecurity, anger. This simplification allows Franklin-the-author to center Franklin-the-character, who is repeatedly victimized by women who behave badly:

Life with a partner who believes you always have one foot out the door becomes corrosive to the soul. Because Celeste never fully trusted me, I never fully trusted myself. She believed that, without strict controls on my behavior, I would become the kid in the proverbial candy store, gorging myself heedlessly on new relationships. She believed I was not capable of compassion, so I came to believe that, too. She believed I would not treat her well if I had no restrictions. Eventually, so did I. (GC, https://bit.ly/2WAtScz)

Evidence that Franklin is capable of compassion is lacking in both MT2 and GC, where the reader is more likely to be treated to lectures on personal responsibility and catalogs of the flaws in women’s personalities. Franklin’s flaws, insofar as he admits them, are mainly portrayed as the products of Celeste’s bad behavior and his reactions to their toxic relationship. This deflection of blame is characteristic of gaslighting, where some abusers justify their behavior by claiming the victim has inherent flaws that “make” them behave in a particular way. Eve’s narrative suggests that Franklin’s consistent refusal of responsibility for his partners’ pain throughout both GC and MT2 can be interpreted as a passive-aggressive strategy of coercive control:

… I think there’s this Catch-22 that his nesting partners end up in. When F is completely passive and never exercises his agency, it allows him to always frame his partners as controlling, even abusive, when someone is unhappy. But if you step back and try to let him make his own choices, well…it’s just a disaster, a horrible, traumatizing disaster, and somehow it will be your own fault anyway. The only winning strategy is not to play. (Eve, email to Amber, April 25, 2018) F said something to the effect of… that over the last couple of months he has realized that he has given up a lot, and a lot of himself, to be in a relationship with me. That he has sacrificed his core beliefs and values, and that he was “bullied and browbeaten” into agreeing to things he didn’t believe and “confessing to crimes [he] didn’t commit,” and that he is committed to never being in that kind of situation or letting that happen to him again. (Eve, email to Amber and two other exes, May 21, 2018) When he messaged with [Amber]… he had told her he was being “held hostage,” that I controlled his finances and he was trapped with our businesses etc., that he could not leave. (Eve, journal entry, May 28, 2018)

In GC, this passivity comes out in the navel-gazing and deflection his character mistakes for self-reflection, and in his sophomoric philosophizing. Though Franklin self-presents as an objective and analytical narrator, he can only interpret others’ behavior based on his interior model of “how people work.” The model is fitted to the data, rather than derived from it, which gives Franklin’s character tunnel vision. In Amber’s narrative, Franklin holds tight to his model even after she shows, time and again, that it is inaccurate and damaging to her.

I have lost literally hundreds of hours of my life having the same fucking conversations with him about his other ambiguous relationships with people who also didn’t seem to be acting like they were in a relationship with him). It is awful and scary and creepy that he created this whole mythology about who I was to him, and it is even more awful and scary and creepy that he used that mythology to generate a whole bunch of feelings of expectation and entitlement, that has now turned into hurt and betrayal, directed towards me. This is the fucking core of why women aren’t safe in the world. (Amber, email to Eve, April 7, 2018)

Since the younger Franklin of GC is perpetually bewildered by the women in his life, who make no sense to him, we can read MT2 as the manual he is determined to write so he can stay out of trouble. Throughout both GC and MT2, his analysis of human behavior is mechanistic (press this button, then that happens) rather than complex, again evoking the mechanistic games of the PUA. Mechanistic approaches appeal to those who feel they cannot control their world; it is comforting to believe that given the right lever and a good place to stand, one can move the world, others, or oneself in predictable directions. A self-proclaimed expert who promotes the idea that his control mechanism will solve common problems can attract insecure followers who are also looking to exert control. If belief in the mechanism is strong enough, and the expert is charismatic enough, people can be convinced of just about anything. His ex-partners depict Franklin as an expert manipulator of women’s weaknesses and a recruiter to the Cult of Franklin.

I also feel, a little, like I was groomed before I ever met F. I had followed his writing for about three years before we met, and basically my entire Theory of Polyamory was based in his work. I now see the way the framing of his writing, as basically every relationship problem and poly problem being something you can fix by becoming more secure yourself, is a total setup for the later gaslighting, where you’re led to see everything as an internal problem that only you can solve. (Eve, email to Amber, April 20, 2018) [Franklin] is 12 years my senior. I started dating him when I was 24-ish, in a period of incredible instability (F would call it ‘transition’), so the type of bond I formed with him, was very child like and worship-y, and this was re-inforced by the intermittent nature of our relationship while he was with [Celeste] (the sense of ‘safety/security’ I had with him was never quite reachable, and this kept the illusion alive), but then it kind of dissolved once it was (for all intents and purposes) just he and I. (Amber, email to Eve, April 15, 2018)

When an inadequate mechanism fails a believer, the expert is unlikely to re-evaluate his model, especially if it is central to his self-concept; he is much more likely to cast blame on the now-questioning believer and double-down on the claim that the mechanism works, if only the believer would just use it correctly. In abusive relationships, this is a form of gaslighting:

My friend pointed out that controlling my reality and perceptions was pretty much the ultimate form of power and control. And I guess the entitlement to control reality is pretty much the ultimate kind of entitlement. (Eve, email to Amber, March 14, 2018)

One of the benefits of being considered an expert and providing a group of followers with an appealing control mechanism is that you have followers whom you can dispense to attack challengers.

Franklin’s perspective often informs the work of others, whether or not they are aware they are being led in this fashion. This has been evident in the reactions of segments of the polyamorous community to his ex-partners’ efforts to bring their narratives to the fore. To illustrate this problem, I return here to Eli’s “objective” article about Franklin’s partners’ testimony. Given my training, I am hyper-aware of framing (the contexts in which stories are told). I am not sure Eli thought much about what it meant to frame her discussion of the three survivor testimonies between harsh critiques of Louisa’s approach and methods, but this tactic centered Louisa as Eli’s target, and sidelined Elaine’s, Celeste’s and Amber’s testimony, which Eli deployed as evidence Louisa’s work was inadequate and ethically compromised — an argument that I do not think holds water, and that Louisa has already addressed in detail. [14] I question the ethics of first dismissing the chosen advocate of women who have testified to harm, and then appropriating those testimonies without their consent. Displacing Louisa, who collected and was invited to discuss the testimonies, is a power move. But why choose this course?

The structure of Eli’s essay trivializes and minimizes the harms that Franklin’s ex-partners describe. Though she, for example, acknowledges “strong and consistent themes that warrant serious attention,” she diminishes the impact of her charge by writing, “some of Franklin’s ex’s accuse him…” where she might more accurately have said, “three of Franklin’s ex-partners, including two long-term nesting partners, describe, in remarkably similar terms, the ways Franklin emotionally harmed them.” Her summary of Franklin’s “source of power” is equally troubling, where she uses psychological jargon to obfuscate rather than illuminate:

Franklin’s source of power over these women appears to be his ability to use personal charisma to get them to fall in love with him so that they feel like they cannot be without him, and then he uses that against them to make them do what he wants. Franklin’s primary tools of control are manipulative communication and moodiness or with-holding of affection/approval. (Eli, https://elisabethsheff.com/2019/05/29/sociological-analysis-of-three-veaux-survivor-narratives/)

Instead of saying, “Franklin appears to use lies and emotional manipulation to persuade the women who love him to bend to his will,” Eli creates a narrative in which Franklin is Svengali and his ex-partners are weak-minded, emotionally needy puppets. She does not conclude they were led to make bad decisions because they were presented with manipulated evidence or coerced — she makes them victims of their own love and their dependent personalities. Eli doubles down on this antifeminist argument by claiming that Louisa has twisted and influenced the testimony of Franklin’s ex-partners by asking “leading questions,” ignoring evidence that Franklin’s ex-partners had definite opinions, submitted their own documents, read and commented on the testimonies Louisa transcribed, supplemented them, and suggested amendments. Nowhere does she address the struggle for agency and recognition as equal persons that the testimony emphasizes.

Demonizing Louisa and turning the women who testified into pawns distracts the reader from the testimonies and the women who wrote them, casts doubt on their authority and validity, and robs them of their main purpose, which is to point out that Franklin, self-proclaimed nice guy and polyamory guru, is a hypocrite who harms women, benefits from their pain, and colonizes their histories. Eli’s narrative of distraction can only work to Franklin’s benefit, which is why he frequently deploys the strategy himself, for example, in a series of (since deleted) public posts[15] in which he claimed that his “abusive ex” (Eve) was the mastermind behind all the complaints that his other ex-partners made, and that she was turning the rest of them against him. These are really not the kind of “explanations” we want within spitting distance of survivor testimonies.

By reducing women’s agency to a kind of Pavlovian response to giving and withholding affection and an essential weakness of character, Eli sidesteps the structural aspects of Franklin’s modus operandi. For example, she fails to mention the pattern of triangulation that Franklin’s ex-partners consistently describe: the shiny new girlfriend is fed stories about a damaged and needy current nesting partner and actively encouraged to take Franklin’s side. When the shine wears off the new partner, Franklin finds another mark and again describes his current nesting partner as damaged and problematic, in a cycle that is hard to distinguish from the “serial monogamy” patterns Franklin has spent years condemning. (Again, this is “the game.”) On the sidelines of the game, in Franklin’s cheering section, is a polyamorous community (also operating within a patriarchal structure) that accepts his descriptions of his partners, ex-partners, and relationships as accurate, and even uses them as models for their own polyamorous relationships. The women who stand up to Franklin are pitted against this community — all the people who have invested in him and the lifestyle and methods he promotes.

Eli never examines the context in which Franklin’s ex-partners have gained what small power they now have: these women have worked together to confirm the reality of each other’s experiences. But they can sustain this effort only if they have the support of other community members who serve as a bulwark against attacks and attempts by Franklin and his supporters to delegitimize them and shut them down. With her article, Eli steps in as a Franklin supporter who accepts and asserts, without offering supporting evidence or argument, that Eve is the “real” abuser. She issues a brisk recommendation that Eve be banished from her own support pod to protect Franklin from revictimization.

Because Franklin feels that Eve has abused him and other partners, he does not feel safe in a process that includes her or people with whom she shares financial ties. While he interprets this process as driven by Eve or people with whom she holds influence, Franklin will not be able to refocus from being her victim to being their aggressor. In order for Franklin to lose this identified strategy of being the victim, the process must be disengaged from someone he feels has victimized him. One possible way to do this would be to pare down each pod and excuse anyone with financial ties with Eve (which would include me as I have published with Thorntree Press). (Eli, https://elisabethsheff.com/2019/05/29/sociological-analysis-of-three-veaux-survivor-narratives/)

Though Eli emphasized her “objectivity” in her post, and in her responses to critiques (e.g., her claim, in Louisa’s Facebook comments feed [16] , that her “analysis is much more balanced and factual than [Louisa’s] interpretations” [17] ), her recommendation is starkly partisan, given the number of testimonies collected to document Franklin’s behavior and absent documentation of Eve’s abuse beyond Franklin’s assertion. She also ignores the testimony that throws into question the stories Franklin has been telling about women:

I think Franklin must have had a very different experience — which seems in retrospect to be a hero’s journey where he bravely stopped letting [Celeste] control him, and then apologized to me for [Celeste] controlling him, and was a *good guy,* and I forgave him and everything was ok. And I feel like he has put a lot of effort into reinforcing that story. But it’s not *my* story. For me, it was a shitty, disrespectful and neglectful relationship with a lot of trauma that I have never really processed, and mostly been trying to outrun for years. I think this is the actual reason why I was so reticent about adding anything to The Game Changer. Like, it was fine for him to tell his story, but it just wasn’t my story at all. (Amber, email to Eve, April 17, 2018) One of the things that has been so disorienting and terrifying for me is how quickly his positive regard for me just turned around on a dime as soon as I started challenging his narrative. Always before, when that would happen, I would retreat and apologize and try to get back in his good graces. But when I started finally holding my ground, he just…he didn’t come back. He went to that place he goes — do you know what I’m talking about? — and he never came back. I think this is what [Celeste] experienced, too. Like even in his version of the story, he only finally asked her for a divorce when she really challenged his self-construction. And I’ve read her blog, and she described many of the things I am experiencing now: the rapid, dizzying deterioration of his respect and just kindness toward her, becoming scared of him (it’s interesting that in the end, both she and I left the house because we were afraid of him), the very, very rapid dissolution of all friendly contact between them…I had thought that, given the almost mythical stature you have always seemed to have in his mind, you might somehow have been immune to that, you might be able to challenge his narrative without suffering those consequences. I am not so sure about that now. (Eve, email to Amber, April 7, 2018)

Eli is not the only member of Franklin’s pod to go on the attack. The winner in the “Embarrassing Male Allies” category has to be Stan, a self-proclaimed “independent” supporter (“not just a hardware engineering badass — also, a feminist”), whose toxic male bluster includes knowing “a fuckton about governance” and “sexual harassment.” His new-sheriff swagger is marked by hyperbole and contempt for the project Franklin’s pod was allegedly formed to advance:

I am not part of the loosey-goosey modern social justice collectivism movement seeking to create “alternative justice” formats. I don’t deal in the court of public opinion. I act. Decisively. With finality when needed. Old school. “Strike down upon thee” shit. (https://www.quora.com/What-progress-has-Franklin-Veaux-made-with-his-accountability-pod-following-the-Polyamorys-metoo-allegations)[18]

Like Eli, he claims to be the voice of objectivity and truth: “I also deal in fact. Not allegation. Not rumor. Not gossip. Not social media rumblings.” He’s, by God, gonna clean up this town:

I’ve read all the published information, including rumor and innuendo, and have discussed this with the other members of the pod. There’s a lot of smoke, and a lot of facts which create causal linkages that strongly imply there’s more going on here than meets the eye, that there may be motive at work which colors strongly the process.

Stan grudgingly acknowledges the “non-zero probability” that the stories about Franklin are true, and that Franklin may have been hiding behind a do-right public persona, but his main concern (and apparent presumption) is that the women who have described harm are conducting a smear campaign (echoing the narrative in Franklin’s deleted posts). To circumvent this, he claims that “we — the pod” will establish “a system to independently solicit and investigate claims made against Franklin… conducted in a way that ensures the anonymity of the claimant to Franklin so that there is no room for potential reprisal, yet also provides communication pathways between the pod (and other investigators as needed) and the claimant.” This process will (somehow) “hold those with claims against him accountable to not make false claims.”

Stan ends his Quora post with a rally-the-troops call for good men everywhere to stand up to bad women:

Why? Because Franklin may in point of fact be exactly who he was previously believed to be. And it’s critical, in seeking justice for offenses, to remember that the goal of justice is to protect the innocent — whether that is the person making a claim, or the accused.

And, as if his prose wasn’t quite a deep enough shade of purple, Stan finishes with this flourish: “Astute observers of human nature will note that it’s one tiny step from “J’accuse!” to Robespierre, and the Reign of Terror…. Not on my watch.” Details on how, exactly, Franklin’s pod will protect Liberty, Equality, and… Fraternity are apparently forthcoming.

With friends like Stan, I doubt Franklin needs enemies. But the difference between Eli’s more understated position and Stan’s is only a matter of degree. First, both doubt the authenticity of the collected testimonies, on no basis other than that… they doubt them. Both rally around Franklin to protect him from women with ill intent. Both spend time working to discredit and undermine the transformative justice structure that justifies the existence of their “pod.” Instead, they use the formal structure of the pod to maintain existing power structures, while also positioning Franklin, who continues to have a platform in polyamorous communities, as a victim.

Even if Eve was an abuser (as she claims Franklin is), in transformative justice, both perpetrator(s) and victim(s) of harm are essential to the community-based process of changing abusive behavior and making restitution for it within a supportive yet firm community dedicated to reconciliation and justice. I have reservations about transformative justice, because members of structurally oppressed groups (e.g., women) cannot force structurally powerful abusers (e.g., men) to change. Few abusers are willing to humble themselves and put in the effort to change, and to — let’s be clear about this — give up the benefits of being an abuser, though they are often quite willing to exploit the transformative justice process as long as they feel they can benefit by doing so. Though, theoretically, transformative justice can be achieved by a community even if the perpetrator refuses to participate, few communities aren’t, at root, committed to the structural inequalities that sustain abuse, so perps are often let off the hook. Like Eli, I don’t take a transformative justice perspective. But unlike Eli, I know better than to disrupt the process by making recommendations that undermine a project that survivors support, which is why you’ll find no recommendations here.

Instead, I’ve given you a portrait of a writer who made himself the main character in the stories of the women whose voices he appropriated. He stripped his female characters of agency and turned them into puppets for an audience already primed to see women as either idealized “game changers” or damaged goods. In this process, his ex-partners suggest, the models Franklin created were more real to him than the women themselves. The reality he saw was so different from that of his partners that they might as well have been in different universes. The attachment Franklin has to his models is so deep, his ex-partners explain, that when they violate his expectations, punishment and gaslighting swiftly follow.

When partners step outside their assigned role, domestic abusers often see this as a threat to their control and react violently. Emotional abusers are more likely to respond with words or body language that signals anger, coldness, or withdrawal. In either case, abusers are likely to blame the victim for “forcing” them to abuse. Abuse often abates or ceases when the victim retreats back into their idealized role. In this scenario, the abuser generally feels like the victim.

… I had tried to name some really major harm, and he basically said, “It’s obvious you don’t trust me, and we can’t have a relationship without trust, so I guess it’s over.” That immediately put me on the footing of desperately trying to reconcile with him. It also taught me that there were certain things you Just Don’t Say in the relationship, which meant I actually had to learn to do a lot of the deflecting on my own, because calling him on what was happening came with an implicit relationship threat. (Eve, email to Amber, March 15, 2018)

Many men have difficulty accepting women’s anger, no matter how it is expressed. Anger is one of the few emotions allowed to men by patriarchal culture, perhaps because it is essential to securing their power. Maybe this is why women’s anger often triggers an abuser, no matter how mildly it is expressed. Franklin has publicly and repeatedly referred to Eve’s “anger problem,” but she describes the problem very differently:

…there is no expression of anger that is acceptable to Franklin. I believe this is linked to what [Amber] said about him being unable to take responsibility, and that he never perceives his partners’ distress as coming from him. When I am angry, he starts from the premise that it is not justified, and therefore I am wronging him simply by being angry. The mode of expression is really an afterthought, because it is the feeling of anger itself that he deems unacceptable. I have actually asked him, on multiple occasions, what expressions of anger he is okay with; he has never had an answer. (Eve journal entry, March 15, 2018)

Anger is a form of agency, an assertion of subjectivity and a claim to rights. In an abusive relationship, the anger of the victim can threaten the abuser’s carefully curated construct and challenge his image of himself as a good man. Even simple assertiveness, without anger, can trigger this response, which is why, given Franklin’s investment in the malleable nature of the women he represents in his work, and his consistent misrepresentation of their reality, I doubt his characterization of Eve as an abuser.

Like any memoirist, Franklin tells other people’s stories along with his own, formulating them to suit his particular agendas, which may include promoting a lifestyle he believes in, showing himself to best advantage, enhancing his reputation, making money, and finding new relationship partners. None of these pursuits is inherently unethical. What determines the ethical nature of the endeavor is the honesty of his representations of self, the accuracy of his representations of others, the level of consent he receives from his subjects, and what he does with the rewards he reaps. In my reading of GC and MT2, Franklin’s own storytelling patterns are compatible with the narratives of relationship harm and abuse written by his ex-partners.