Want to work with me?

Join the next cohort of the Power in Pleasure course. Check out details and pre-enroll at dawnserra.com/pleasurecourse. My coaching practice has a few new spots available. If you could use support around the places where you feel most stuck, I’d love to support you. Details about my coaching practice are here: dawnserra.com/work-with-me .

In a Sex Gets Real first, this episode is Part One of a THREE part series featuring Eve Rickert, Samantha Manewitz, and Aida Manduley.

This episode is my conversation with Eve Rickert. In it, Eve shares her experience of being in a relationship with Franklin Veaux for five and a half years. She talks about what it was like in the beginning and what happened over the course of time.

A part of she shares reveals what it’s like to be on the receiving end of gaslighting and emotional abuse: the questioning of self, the isolation, thinking that you’re actually crazy. Eve shares about how difficult it was to begin untangling herself from the confusion of it all and what happened when she started speaking with other women Franklin had been in relationship with.

We explore and question who gets to tell the stories, who gets to have the redemption arc, and how we (collectively) are so terrible at asking about the people who were a part of that person’s redemption, how we ignore or invisibilize their voices and experiences.

We also talk about how being someone who caused harm doesn’t make you a bad person or a disposable person, and being a survivor of harm doesn’t mean you didn’t also cause harm. We desperately need more nuanced and messy understandings of relationship dynamics and behaviors, to move away from the good vs evil, pure vs villain narratives that force us into black-and-white categories. This also contributes to victim blaming and the “good survivor” story that so many survivors feel boxed in by.

Eve also speaks about being witnessed at Southwest Poly Love Fest and how important that was for her, but how it also made her question why she got to be witnessed in that way and some of the other people impacted by abuse don’t get that gift.

In the end, this conversation is really about examining problematic behaviors and the harm they can cause, engaging in accountability processes that are outside of our criminal “justice” system, and what we need to start asking ourselves about how we’re doing relationship.

The survivor pod resources mentioned in this episode include:

If you’ve been accused of consent violations or harm, this piece by Tamara Pincus is a good place to start.

Follow Sex Gets Real on Twitter and Facebook. It’s true. Oh! And Dawn is on Instagram.

About Eve Rickert:

Eve Rickert is the co-author of the books More Than Two: A Practical Guide to Ethical Polyamory and Black Iron, and the co-founder and publisher of Thorntree Press. Support Eve’s fundraiser for suicide prevention here.

[divider style=’left’]Listen and subscribe to Sex Gets Real

Hearing from you is the best

Contact form: Click here (and it’s anonymous)

Podcast Transcript

Dawn Serra: You’re listening to Sex Gets Real with Dawn Serra, that’s me. This is a place where we explore sex, bodies, and relationships, from a place of curiosity and inclusion. Tying the personal to the cultural where you’re just as likely to hear tender questions about shame and the complexities of love, as you are to hear experts challenging the dominant stories around pleasure, body politics and liberation. This is about the big and the small, about sex and everything surrounding it we don’t usually name. The funny, the awkward, the imperfect happen here in service to joy, connection, healing and creating healthier relationships with ourselves and each other. So welcome to Sex Gets Real. Don’t forget to hit subscribe.

Dawn Serra: Hey, you. Welcome to this very special episode of Sex Gets Real. So why is it special? For the first time in the show’s history, we are doing a three part series of conversations that all began when Eve Rickert, co-author of the book, More Than Two, which if you have looked into polyamory at any point or are a part of polyamory community then you probably know; reached out to me a couple of months ago and if you are a part of any polyamory circles or in the sex positive community, you may have heard that Eve and about a dozen other women maybe more at this point have come forward about some abusive behaviors and harm that they have experienced from Franklin Veaux.

Over the next three episodes, you’re going to hear my conversations with Eve Rickert about some of her experiences. Then with therapists and kink experts, Samantha Manewitz, who specializes in emotional abuse and gaslighting. She is a part of the survivor pod or another word for it would be a survivor team, that are working to support the people who were impacted by Franklin’s harmful behaviors and patterns. And then the third conversation will be with Aida Manduley, who is a person that I totally adore talking to about so many things. But this time, our conversation is about alternative justice processes and community accountability processes. Aida is a consultant in transformative justice processes that the survivor pod for this particular situation has hired.

Dawn Serra: A couple of the things that I am really hoping become revealed over the course of these three conversations are, one, I am learning many of these things right alongside you. So I hold that really preciously. Two, the importance of listening to the experiences of those impacted by someone’s harmful behavior. Badly what’s being revealed with Time’s up and Me Too is how many of us don’t believe an individual when they say this thing happened. We only start to believe it when multiple people come forward and cooperate each other’s stories. And that isn’t helping us change anything. So I really hope that part of what gets revealed as the importance of listening to people’s experiences and trusting them.

The third thing and I’m hoping gets revealed is why each and every one of us really needs to start asking more critical questions like who is telling the stories that we’re consuming, especially when those stories then become deeply influential in how we structure our lives or do relationship versus who becomes a character, whose narrative is controlled by the storyteller. And I think we also need to really ask what kinds of privilege and power does the story teller possess versus the characters in the story teller’s stories. I think we need to ask, is the story teller a cis white man? Because that’s important. Is that a queer woman of color? Is it a disabled trans person? How might their access to power and resources and the ways that they’re implicitly believed by those around them impact how believable we find them. And, of course, that’s not to say that the person telling the stories is wrong or a liar or an abuser, but it’s important to remember that one person’s experience may not reflect the experiences of those in relationship with that person. So if and when the people that are painted as characters speak up, it’s important again, that we listen. I want a name here that, because I have a podcast and you hear from me on the regular, you have heard my version of my relationship with Alex and with others, and the way they experience relationship with me is different. So we might be in the exact same experience, but the ways that we then feel about it and experience it can be very different. I want to just hold that. I have invited Alex to come on the show and asked if he wanted to be a more visible multiple times. In fact, I just asked him a couple of days ago and he says, no, that’s not where he wants to be at this time and he’s allowed to change his mind down the road. And so I just want a name that when I share about experiences with Alex, I’m sharing my experience of those experiences, which isn’t to say it’s the truth, it’s simply my experience.

The fourth thing that I hope gets revealed is celebrity culture and how easy it is for people to build themselves as experts, especially when they’re just sharing personal stories. I think it’s especially important when the people who are in a place where others are listening to them that we ask, are they prescribing ways of being or are they inviting questions and offering new perspectives that we then get to do our way. And I think that’s a really important thing. When we’re talking about celebrity culture, the seduction of taking someone whose story or book or podcast that we admire and making them into something that they’re not. Also really asking, are they telling us, “Here’s how to do a thing, here’s how to be in the world,” or are they saying, “Here’s how I’ve done things. Here’s what I’ve been asking. Here’s some other things that I’ve noticed,” and then how do you want to interact with that? That’s a very different way of taking up space.

Dawn Serra: I also hope that what’s revealed is how common gaslighting and emotional abuse are in our culture and in our relationships. And then finally, I really hope that we reveal different ways of dealing with harmful behaviors that don’t paint the person causing harm as a monster, that doesn’t see someone as disposable, and ways that we can circumvent the criminal justice system so that we have more options and more input into how our communities are formed and held accountable. I think far too many kink and sex positive and polyamory communities, will do something like ban a person from their spaces without addressing how the harm was allowed to happen in the first place. What were the conditions around that person that made that something that could happen and how can we address that? Or communities won’t believe someone coming forward about harm because it’s either too messy or it’s too complicated or it’s too scary. Or the people who are organizing are friends with the person, which then silence is the person that’s coming forward and saying, “I was harmed.”

I hope that these three weeks and three episodes reveal that there is a different way to start being in community and in relationship with each other. And I want to make it clear, this is not just about Franklin Veaux. It’s about examining power, which is deeply counter cultural because we are taught to trust power, not to question or expose it. The structures that contribute to our power, and it’s about critiquing the celebrity culture, especially in kink and polyamory spaces and sex positive spaces and how the problems we see there are reflective of the larger culture war inside of. I think we all need to ask, who has power? Who is making money? Prescribing answers and ways of being? Who is centering themselves? Who is keynoting at conferences? Who’s being believed and trusted, and again, centered?

I also want to share that there has been, as you will hear later in this introduction and also over the course of the next couple of weeks, there has been tremendous labor on the part of the survivor pod: to gather stories, to support survivors, to engage in dialogue with the community at large, to track everything that’s unfolding, to craft thoughtful and important messages and updates about the process that they’re engaging in. The process, as you’ll hear, Samantha Manewitz say, has already cost over $10,000 and a lot of the people that are participating in this are doing it from a place of community and volunteerism. And so in each episode you’re going to hear the people that I talk to ask for your financial support. Even a dollar helps in so many ways. So in the show notes for this episode and the other episodes, and if you go to dawnserra.com/ep261, you will find the link to the survivor pod paypal. If community accountability and alternative justice are important to you, this is a chance to help support that process in a direct way to ensure that more of these processes can happen down the road.

Dawn Serra: I also am going to share a couple of quotes from the survivor pods updates that they’ve published. It’s really important that you go read their updates for yourself. There’s some incredible work being put out into this conversation and this process, and whether this whole thing is personal for you or not, because you know Franklin or you know Eve or anyone else that’s speaking, there’s lot to be learned and what is unfolding about different ways that we can be in relationship with each other. So I’m going to share some of the things that the survivor pod has written and put out for all of us to read and sit with. I think that the amount of conversation and thought that they’ve put into this is far surpasses anything that I could just come up with on my own. Plus, I’m not directly part of this process. I’ve just had some conversations with people who are involved, so I’m going to let them speak for themselves.

From the survivor pods first update on February 11th they wrote, and I want to mention right at the beginning it says six women and I believe that that’s up to or past 12 now. So they say, “Six women have come forward with stories of experiences with Franklin that do not align with his public persona. His self described stories of his relationships or the values stated in his writing. These women include all three of his past nesting partners, as well as the women who have featured most prominently in his personal narratives. Their stories demonstrate a pervasive and long standing pattern of serious harm. They are specific and detailed. They are consistent with one another across decades and they are supported by written documentation and witness accounts. Evidence in support of the women’s accounts can also be found in Franklin’s own writing.

The women’s experiences indicate that Franklin has patterns of manipulation, gaslighting and lying, leverages multiple partners against one another, tests or ignores boundaries, pathologizes his partners’ normal emotions and weaponizes their mental illnesses, exploits women financially, uses women’s ideas and experiences in his work without permission or credit, grooms significantly younger, less experienced or vulnerable women, lacks awareness of power dynamics and consent, has involved women in group sex or other sexual activities that they experienced as coercive, and accepts no responsibility for the harm he causes by engaging in these behaviors; often blaming other women or the harmed women themselves for that harm.”

Dawn Serra: The survivor pot update includes some concrete steps that we can all take and I recommend checking those out. The post from February 11th goes on to say, “We ask for the support of our communities in this process. We ask for you to listen to the women, amplify their voices, protect their safety, and ask hard questions when you encounter narratives that appear to define or lay claim to their experiences or where their voice voices are missing. Many people throughout many polyamorous scenes, including every member of this group and some of the harmed women themselves, have played a role in amplifying Franklin’s narrative in expanding his reach. Moreover, Franklin is far from the only person with social capital to have wielded it in harmful ways, nor are his former partners, the only people to have experienced this particular kind of harm in polyamorous relationships. We have collective work to do in naming harm, healing from harm, and learning to do less harm to one another. We hope that this moment can be used to propel forward the hard conversations that will lead to collective healing, accountability, and transformation.”

What’s important to note about the survivor pod updates, and even my conversation with Even that you’ll hear, none of this is about saying, “Franklin’s a monster. Ban him from your spaces. Burn copies of his book. He’s a terrible person.” This is about naming specific behaviors, saying that they’re not okay, witnessing the harm that happened, and looking at the bigger conditions that contributed to the harm happening, especially harm that’s so far reaching over such an extended period of time of multiple decades. And then another piece from that first post at the close of it, the survivor pod offers, “Many people have tried many times over many years to explain to Franklin the harm he has caused and offer him a chance to change with no effect. He has cut off partners, friends, communities, and social groups as a result of having his harmful behaviors named. He has been offered and refused a community accountability process at least once. What we are doing here is not about reforming or changing Franklin or giving him a redemption arc. Our work is not focused on Franklin, nor does it rely on his participation. It’s about centering the women he has left damaged in his wake and creating some community change. Nevertheless, we and the women themselves believe strongly that no one is disposable and that a path to accountability separate from the processes of supporting the survivors should be open to Franklin.”

Dawn Serra: Then on March 25th, the survivor pod offered another update, access to some additional documents. I will link to that and some clarifications on concerns that people had come forward with after that initial statement. One important paragraph in the March 25th updates says, “Another point of confusion we have seen is the idea that we are attempting to initiate a restorative justice process or attempt to facilitate contact between Franklin and any of the survivors. This is not the case. As of this writing, none of the harmed parties desire any direct contact with Franklin, nor are we trying to restore some quote unquote pre-harm state, either in individual relationships or in our communities as a whole. Our desire is not only to identify the harm done, but to support the dismantling of the conditions that allowed it to go unchecked and unnamed for so long, as well as the systems and ideas that perpetuated it and allowed many others to experience similar harms. To do this, we’re using a transformative justice framework guided by consultation from Aida Manduley, a practitioner and educator in this field.

And then they close their March 25th update with, “Franklin has written at length on the idea of disruption, which he frames as primarily a positive force. We are disrupting. The status quo isn’t good enough. It’s not good enough to have communities that claim to be focused on quote unquote ethical relationships that are leaving behind trails of traumatized people. It’s not good enough to elevate spokespeople who tell us things that make us feel good while looking away from their actual effects on the people there in relationship and community with. We don’t know what comes next and we shouldn’t be the ones to decide. Too many other voices and ideas have been shut out of the conversations about polyamorous ethics for too long. We welcome critique, not just Franklin and his work ,and that of the other dominant voices in our scenes, but our own work and on our own ideas. We are doing what we can to help make space for these conversations to happen.”

Dawn Serra: The survivor pad has a tracking document full of lots of important posts and updates, interviews, supporting documents for their process and it’s totally worth checking out. Not only to learn more about how we can all do better, every single one of us. And I mean every single one of us can do better. But also because we need to see the care and the labor that’s unfolding as a part of this. When Eve reached out to me earlier this year or late last year, I really had to ask myself some questions. We started chatting before the survivor pod had published anything, before any of this was public. Eve provided me with her own experiences and we had a really long phone call, and she shared with permission some experiences and stories from some of the other women who had been in relationship with Franklin. And I had to ask myself, how can we have these conversations without turning it into an attack on Franklin? How do I create the space to hold the messy, messy complexity of conversations like these knowing they were going to bring up a lot of feelings? But I decided to move ahead imperfectly because we are going to see more and more of these kinds of collaborative processes happening and they’re important.

You’re going to hear my conversation with Aida in a couple of weeks that these processes are not new. They’re actually rather old. It’s just that a lot of us are new to them and so they can feel foreign or scary or intimidating. One of the other things that I’m really acutely aware of is that in listening to Eve’s story and listening to Samantha talk about emotional abuse and gaslighting, many of you who are listening might start realizing that you’re either in a relationship that is emotionally abusive or you might realize that some of your behaviors and the ways you do relationship are abusive and harmful. This is an invitation for all of us to listen, to feel into our feelings and to get curious about the places where we contract and constrict, to explore what would it mean to do relationships and community very differently. And my hope is that we can ask how can we start practicing more accountability in our own lives to help set the stage for how we show up in the world.

Dawn Serra: In a Reddit thread that the survivor pod started, someone said, “We need a new book to replace Franklin’s books.” And another person commented to that, “No new books, no new heroes. Read them all. Build a support network. Build your own ethical framework. Do not do it how any one person tells you how to do it. Figure it out from every possible source, cast down your heroes and be your own hero.”

I think that this is something important for us to hold to. First, new books are just always going to be coming because that’s how the publishing industry works. And that’s a good thing because as we all grow and learn, we need new stories, new texts, new perspectives to help us continue the conversation. But no one book and no one person should be the gatekeeper for how to be in relationship, for how to be successful, for how to be human. It’s about community. It’s about asking questions and seeking multiple sources of information and then learning to trust ourselves within that and developing really meaningful, deep, deeply accountable relationships with people we trust that we can also talk to and co create with. I also don’t want us to think the be your own hero thing is an invitation into this hyper individualism trap that we culturally have right now, to believe that you can and should do it all alone. That just further contributes to the problem. We have to be doing this together, with each other, and learning different ways of being in relationship. Both with ourselves and those around us.

I also just want to make a note, Patreon supporters, I’m not offering a new update for bonus content this week. There will be bonus content, but it’s really just another place to share all of the links and the resources from this particular process. Because I think that it’s really important that we spend some time reading through the updates, listening to the other podcast interviews and really diving into what’s being offered here. I think that would be more helpful than anything that I could possibly add right now. But we are going to be back with bonus episodes next week after Samantha’s chat. And Aida and I recorded a fun little bonus about transformative justice processes that you can get two weeks from now. So still head to Patreon. Just know that the content itself is really going to be about centering Eve and the other survivors and the survivor pods process. So here is my conversation, the first of three with Eve Rickert that we are going to be having for this series. Enjoy.

Dawn Serra: Welcome to Sex Gets Real, Eve. I am very much looking forward to having this conversation today and having it be a part of a much larger discussion with other folks. So welcome to the show.

Eve Rickert: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Dawn Serra: You’re so welcome. So you reached out to me a couple of months ago interested in having a place where we could have a conversation about some of the things that you have personally experienced and been going through. And as part of that conversation, we’ve also got Samantha Manewitz and Aida Manduley, who will be also talking about some of the pieces of what you’ve been going through. I would love to just start with, for people who are curious, can you talk a little bit about how you got here and here being a part of a survivor pod and being in these relationships with Samantha and Aida around restorative justice. What brought you to this place?

Eve Rickert: Well, first of all, I’m not part of the survivor pod. I’m part of the group of survivors and the pod exists to sort of support us, protect their safety, and also advocate for us and help to elevate our voices. So there does tend to be some confusion around that. But wow, how did I get here? So I was involved with Franklin Veaux for about five and a half years. We wrote the book, More Than Two, together. We founded a publishing company together that has published a number of books on polyamory and sexuality and… I mean, there were red flags and a lot of stress and conflict from the beginning. There was also a lot that was really, really amazing. And for a long time, we had this incredible creative relationship like nothing I’d ever experienced and it just felt like we clicked on a level I’ve not experienced with anyone.

In mid 2016, he moved in with me and told me that he wanted to be my life partner and we were planning this whole life together. At that time, I also began financially supporting him. And at that point, some of the things that had been points of conflict and stress for us became much, much worse. A lot of the things that had been really good in our relationship evaporated. And over the course of the next almost two years, I went progressively crazy. That’s actually what happened. I became more and more depressed. I started self harming. In the last year, year and a half, I had almost nonstop suicidal ideation. There were two times when I had pretty major mental health breakdowns. And all of this was connected to stuff going on in the relationship. But I thought it was me. I thought that I was just going crazy for no reason and that all of these things that were happening, I should just be able to handle, be stronger and more accommodating, why are these things such a big deal?

It was only in the last six or eight months that some people around me started saying, “Hey, he’s gaslighting you.” And pointing out the specific things that were happening that were gaslighting and a couple other people pointed out, “He’s triangulating. He’s telling you one thing and his partners another thing. He’s telling another thing in public.” I was becoming increasingly isolated from my metamour and from my polycule. Of course, he was telling me secrets about them, about his relationship with them. I felt like I was the only one he could trust, that isolated me from them. And, of course, now I realize he was probably telling that – doing the same thing with them as well, which is why they started acting more and more weird, weird around me.

Eve Rickert: At the very end, and this was shortly after I’d had the second of those crises, I realized as I was leaving work that I didn’t feel safe going home. And so I didn’t. I went to a friend’s house and I messaged Franklin I was staying with a friend. That night, I reached out to a woman who had been – well, she had been introduced to me as my metamour and I had believed for several years that she was my metamour. I found out in the course of talking to her that they had broken up nine years prior and that she had only ever just want it to be a friend and he continued to use this language partner about her because she was long distance and they only saw each other every couple of years.

It was very hard to tease out that there were these different narratives. But anyway, at the time I thought that she was still a metamour and I reached out to her and I said, “These stuff’s going on, and I was wondering if you could talk to me about your experience living with Franklin.” And because she had lived with him before and she said yes. So over the course of about a week, I started to learn that all of the things that had happened to me had happened to her. It seemed like it hadn’t gotten to the level of conflict that it had with me simply because she had ended things sooner and in a less dramatic way.They just sort of faded out rather than her leaving. But I also started to discover that there were a number of things that he lied about. I didn’t see it as lying at the time. I thought as like, “Oh, he saw this differently.” Over time, I’ve come to realize that, “No, a lot of this is just actually lying.”

I started reaching out to other women who he’d been with and I had been very involved in the publication as a game changer. I had edited it, I had published it. I had been steeped deeply, deeply in his stories for a very long time. So this process is kind of unraveling what the other women’s experience was. It was really important to me at the time because it was part of my getting my own grip on back on reality. And the more I talked to the other women, the more I realized, “Oh, this is a pattern. This has happened over and over through the years. These are the exact same behaviors that are having the same effect.” It’s not weird that I’m traumatized, other women have been traumatized.

Eve Rickert: I began, through therapy, understand what has happened to me is trauma. I was on this private journey of unfolding, I guess, the truth and the real history. And something that this woman I’d reached out to had talked about is this idea of – in our constructions – our world constructions, there’s certain people who are the main characters and everyone else is a supporting cast. And it really changes your view of the world depending on who you see as supporting casts and who you see as the main character. The thing that happens in Franklin’s relationships and in his polycule, and in all of this public narratives is he’s always the main character and everyone else is a supporting cast. And so I started really trying to flip that around and say, “Okay, what happens if the women are the main characters? What is their experience? How does the story look like?” And if you really put the women at the center, it becomes a very, very different story. There’s this Franklin story that’s just like a redemption arc and this process of learning and growing and becoming this more enlightened skilled poly person. And then you flip that around and you say, “What’s the story of the women?” And it’s the story of harm and trauma over and over again. I’m still, to be honest, coming to terms with them.

Back in… I’ll get to this. But I’ll just say that there’s still a lot that I know that I don’t know because I’m not ready to hear it. So in the meantime, I was not posting about this publicly. I did post a couple of things anonymously that I’ve since added my name to. But I was really struggling to write anything at all and it was very difficult for me to talk about the worst things that had happened in the relationship. It still is. And I have not been able to write about those things at all yet. But Franklin had begun doing what he has done with every other relationship, which was leading me into this narrative of his and making me into a character. In his story, I had abused him because I had had these random and explicable emotional outbursts.

Eve Rickert: He was also beginning to – well, not beginning to. I mean, he had been positioning himself as someone who was an authority and an expert about abuse and abusive relationships, and how you should feel with abuse even though he had never received training, never even read a book about it, never been involved in an intervention or anti violence work. But he had heard some stuff from a female partners about abuse and that was enough. And so I think it was just a matter of… I realized, I looked at how dominant his narratives about his past partners had become, how completely they had been erased, I looked at how everyone he has been seriously involved with has just vanished from the polyamory and sex positive scene, how his narratives and stories are constantly held up and centered, and how that’s really a product of misogyny and patriarchy.

I was like, “I could do what all the other women have done,” and it’s really, really tempting. I can walk away from this, I can cut myself off from all those circles, turn my back on it, let him do what he’s going to do and rebuild my life. I have a job, I have a home, I have friends who loves me. I don’t use the circles. I could move on. And I made a choice and I just thought that isn’t okay. This can’t continue. There were a lot of reasons for that. Part of it was personally not wanting to lose my story and be erased the way the other women had, part of it was wanting to confront my own previous complicity in erasing those other women’s stories. And part of it was just that these are communities that I care about and this is a pattern that’s really harmful and I felt like it needed to be addressed. And I also wanted to do what I could to protect other women. Because honestly, if I could stop one person, just one person, from going through what I went through, that would be worth it, you know?

So I started reaching out to people I knew who had experience with transformative justice and accountability work and talking about building a process. We all knew that we didn’t want to center Franklin in that we didn’t want it to be about him making amends or becoming a better person or growing or anything like that. But we also wanted to make sure that there was an avenue for that sort of tangential to what we were doing. That was, I think, part of everyone’s values of, “No one is disposable and people can learn and grow from harm.” So it wasn’t just about discarding him. But it was really about centering the women’s voices and their stories and saying, “Hey, these are women who have not been heard for 20 years, some of them, and who who has been remade into NPCs in this guy’s redemption arc. Let’s fix that, one, by actually hearing these stories and hearing these women and hearing how this fits into this overall picture. And, two, let’s address the real heart of this problem which is the fact that that we center men. We center men and their stories and allow women to become NPCs in their stories and in polycules and in communities quite a lot. So that’s where this got started in it all. It always was intended to be centering the women’s stories and the women’s experiences. And hopefully by the time this episode actually goes up, there will be more stories than mine on the record.

Eve Rickert: There has been sort of a backlog in that once the public statement went up, a lot more women wrote in. And so suddenly, there was the work not only of preparing the existing narratives for release, but also beginning to collect all of these other narratives. So there are now, my understanding is that there are about a dozen women who have reported similar behaviors and similar harms. They’re on a continuum of harm, not everyone experienced trauma. Not everyone was timed to the same degree, but everyone has experienced some or all of the listed behaviors.

I’ll mention Louisa’s involvement. I reached out to Louisa Leontiades last fall and originally what I asked her about was – Some of the women I talked to were extremely eloquent over the phone and tell very compelling stories and heartbreaking stories, but they were not writers. So their ability to write their story in a way that could be heard and witnessed and felt by other people was, I felt, limited by their writing or speaking ability. So I talked to Louisa and I said, “Hey, would you consider maybe interviewing these women and ghost writing some of these stories?” And she told me, “Well, I’m in a Master’s program and I don’t have time for anything except my thesis. But maybe this could be my thesis.” We talked about that and consulted with one of the experts we were working with and decided that her thesis was her master’s degree is in journalism. She talked with her advisers about that and they all decided that this could be on appropriate master’s thesis for her to do. I don’t think she or her advisory team really had any idea what she was getting herself into. But that was where it went from, “Could you interview a couple of women and write up their stories for release to this whole project of actually really documenting this pattern?” And as a journalist, she has taken really seriously the task of corroborating the stories. So, it’s not just testimonies. But she can also verify with chat logs and blog posts, and photographs and witness accounts to really sure that everything that’s… She’s protecting the women by making sure that everything is being released as really solidly backed up.

When I say that there’s a lot that I don’t know what I mean is that around the time that she started that work, I had been sort of on my own investigative path, you could call it. Although that wasn’t how I saw it. It was more just connecting and trying to understand and that I sort of handed that off to her at the time that she started the project. And since then, she’s uncovered a lot more and she and the pod have been very careful about sort of titrating information for me. So when I learn something new, making sure that I’m at a place where I can process it and then I have time to deal with it and integrated before I get another key piece of information. So for me, the whole picture is still in the process of being revealed. So that was long. Sorry.

Dawn Serra: No, don’t apologize. I appreciate the vulnerability and I think what’s really important for us all to hold is in a culture that prizes immediacy and solutions, the process of experiencing emotional abuse, of being gaslit, sometimes it takes us months or years to even start to think something might be wrong. And then if we’re going to be engaging in alternative justice practices, whether that’s transformative or restorative justice, these are also fairly lengthy processes. In some cases, maybe couple months. But in other cases that I’ve seen, it’s multiple years of really doing healing work and really grappling with ugly, messy, imperfect questions. I think one of the things that our traditional criminal justice system promises is if someone does something bad, then we’ll find out and then they go away, and case closed. We can all move on. But that’s not really how it works. It just contributes to more cycles of harm and abuse for all sides.

Eve Rickert: Yeah. And I think that’s really important, too, in the values that are driving the work of this pod, which, which are also my value, which is, we’re not just trying to find someone to punish. We’re not trying to find the bad person who deserves to be outcast, to suffer or whatever. It’s like, no. We need to be able to hold these experiences and these experiences should be witnessed. But it doesn’t mean that we’re trying to find the bad guy or impose some kind of sanction. The pod has ability to impose sanctions on Franklin or to impose a punishment, outside of the extent to which he may feel that the stories of his ex partners being heard is punishment. Plus, it just keeps the focus on him again, is he guilty or innocent? And it also doesn’t make space for the fact that he may have experienced harm. He has suffered, I may have inflicted harm. It doesn’t mean that I didn’t experience what I experienced.

Something that was really pointed to me, when he started making his accusations of abuse against me, they happened – First of all, it was when I started naming gaslighting to him. I absolutely at – for the last six months of the relationship, I absolutely did not ever believe that he was doing this on purpose. I just believe like, “Oh, if I can just show him, if I can explain it to him, he’ll stop. He doesn’t want to do this. He doesn’t want to hurt me in this way. He’s a good person. He just needs to have the right words used to explain how this is harmful and he’ll just stop.” Which is now I recognize that as part of the narrative of someone who was in an abusive relationship and I understand this now is a 20 year pattern that has been named to him- well, 30 years, that, you know, has been named to him multiple times and has not stopped. But I didn’t see it that way at the time. There was a point at which he finally said, he finally admitted that he’d been gaslighting me. But then immediately had to make it my fault.

So he started talking about how, “Well you have this terrible temper so I can’t tell you the truth because you don’t like to hear things that you don’t want to hear. And so I had to gaslight you because I didn’t feel safe telling you the truth.” They actually said that twice, “I had to gaslight you,” and this is sort of overlooking the fact that the lies he was telling me were specifically destabilizing lies. They were not lies that you would tell somebody to keep them happy. They were lies that would keep you off balance. But just the whole language of, “Well I had to gaslight you.” And then once that narrative had taken root that, his gas lighting had been a defensive mechanism then it was like, “I was his abuser and so I didn’t have a right to have boundaries.” I had to give him what he wanted. I had to keep supporting him. I had to go to couples counseling with him so that he could tell me all the ways that I had harmed him.

When I would try to say no and I would try to explain, “This is re traumatizing for me. I don’t want to see you face to face again.” It didn’t matter because I was his abuser. That whole binary language of – again, going back to identifying the the one person who did wrong or the person who did the most wrong, and then you can say that that person is a bad person and they don’t have a right to safety or boundaries or kindness. That is an abusive belief right there. That enables the abuse. We and the pod and the people involved in this process did not want that belief echoed in any way in any of the works that they did or the public communications or anything like that.

Dawn Serra: I think that’s a really, really important point that I see get pushed in a lot of ways. Especially in these online call out cultures that we’re seeing a lot right now around when someone does something harmful, which is inevitable, we’re all human, the level of harm will vary. But we will all say the wrong thing and do micro aggressions and all the things. But then there tends to be this rush of demands that happen and not allowing for any kind of rest or reflection or just signing off to take care of self. I think that that’s something that’s really important for us to name that even when someone causes harm, and maybe it’s really significant harm, maybe it’s deep, deep abuse. There’s still a human being who deserves safety to not be threatened or to experience violence. They still deserve the chance to rest and eat and sleep and tend to themselves so that they can show up and do the accountability work and really be able to hold big emotions. Because if we’re constantly pushing people and overextending them, then the likelihood that more harm is going to happen is very high.

Eve Rickert: Yeah. Or you’re going to get an apology that’s just really performative and meaningless because everybody’s trying to get back to the status quo as quickly as possible. And I remember, Aida gave a talk on alternative justice a year or two ago. I remember something from that about how even when people are participating willingly in an accountability process, it often can take them a year or more before they’re even able to really process an impact statement. Sometimes what’s part of these impact statements where people who have been harmed will write or will verbalize what happened to them and what the impact on them was. And then the person who committed that harm will be asked to read that and process it, and that it can take a year or more for those impacts statements to sink in and for the person who caused that harm to even really be able to offer an apology or to understand the harm that they did.

I think that there needs to be space left for that. Now that’s not to say that like – that can become avoidant. There has to be a point at which, if a person is going on with the status quo and I don’t know – if they’re still trying to speak or the same stuff they spoke or taught on before – they should be held accountable for that. There’s definitely a pressure for speed on both sides of things. I mean, I do think that if Franklin ever does any meaningful accountability that that will take a lot of time. I mean, there’s a lot of harm to grapple with and some very deep patterns. And on the survivors side, just the process of getting the stories ready to release is very time consuming, especially given that we do want to make sure that everything is airtight. I think it’s taking longer than anyone expected, really.

Regarding call out culture, I obviously I agree with most of your points and I also still believe that there is a place for call outs.

Dawn Serra: For sure.

Eve Rickert: But I think that we need to be really mindful of the way that we do it. And I think that in cases like this where a person has been offered multiple attempts to address harm privately and has refused them and where the harm has happened in a really public way; and the person is a public figure, especially public figure who has made relationships brand. All of this points to – This is also a case where a big part of the harm was gaslighting and triangulation That involves telling multiple stories to multiple people. And so really the only way around that is to get seen in public. But I think everyone was trying to be extremely mindful about the way that this was done and what was requested specifically so as to make use of what call outs can do well without reinforcing some of the nastier bits of what we call call out culture, which is really, when call out culture meets disposability culture.

Dawn Serra: Right I think that’s the important piece. I think that accountability, being able to have really uncomfortable conversations in public and saying, “This really hurt and I want other people who might’ve been hurt to be able to see that it’s okay to say, ‘Ouch, that hurt.’” I think you’re right. Those things are important, especially when it’s someone who is continuing to try and center themselves or continuing to profit off of speaking about things that may be contributing to harm. Being able to hold all of this is not only complicated, but there’s so many feelings that we need to learn how to be with better. Culturally, at a large cultural scale, wanting that rush to resolution not only creates more harm, but I think it also creates this good survivor narrative that so many of us who are survivors struggle with. “Yes, I’m still having effects from this multiple years later.” And it doesn’t just get quote unquote fixed for a lot of people. It’s a whole new paradigm and that takes time.

I appreciate the work that so many people who are doing alternative justice practices put in because it’s not fast. It’s not only time consuming, but it’s resource consuming. And it’s important because we don’t want to contribute to the violence of the criminal justice system and the prison industrial complex.

Eve Rickert: I think we really need to start building more capacity within our communities. I mean, right now, it’s good that these things are being discussed more and that we’re trying to bring together more of these kinds of processes and also it’s way too much work falling on way too few people.

Dawn Serra: Yes.

Eve Rickert: This is something that even before this I have been noticing and thinking about and Mia Mingus was in Vancouver a couple of months ago to give a talk on transformative justice. Just blew my mind, [the] stuff that she was talking about. But some key points that she made, one is that this work is intergenerational. We’re not going to fix it tomorrow or this year or in our lifetime. It’s incremental and ending violence is going the incremental and take generations. We don’t have to fix it all right now we just have to make things a tiny little bit better. But also that transformative justice can’t just be about the big interventions. It can’t just be about when harm has reached the point that, for example, this harm has reached and you have to do a big process. It has to be happening in small ways all the time in our communities. And that means we need to learn how to apologize. We need to learn how to resolve smaller conflicts, we need to learn how to come together in groups and work things out and learn how to coexist without splitting our groups and fracturing. That means building capacity throughout the community.

I think that something that I see still in our struggles to learn how to address harm and violence is, one, an over reliance on experts. I mean, we need experts, we need them to advise us, but we need to be the ones learning how to do the work. So, ideally the experts would be helping with capacity building and, two, an over reliance on policies. Whenever there’s an issue that I see come up, I see a group be like, “We need to make a policy.” Everybody wants a checklist. How can we define the harm and how can we decide who needs to be cast out and punished and what are the sanctions that we have, right? Policies and checklists are not going to fix this. It’s people. It’s people having deep investments in harm reduction and conflict resolution and in staying in community together and in healing over time and building those skills so that we can actually do this more.

Dawn Serra: Yes. I had Andy Izenson on the show about a year ago and we had this fantastic conversation about alternative justice and communities; one of the things that Andy said that I have been carrying so deep in me for the past year and just really thinking about is we have to redefine what we mean when we say community. That too many of us use the word community without really thinking about what community is. And Andy was inviting us to think about how can we create communities where the understanding is, “I know you will cause harm and I know I will cause harm. I will show up right and have your back and hold you accountable with love and kindness. Even if it’s really hard and uncomfortable and I know you’ll do the same for me” That does take work. It takes commitment. It takes feeling into really uncomfortable things and being able to be there for awhile. Those are things that most of us are really, really uncomfortable in and we get super agitated around that messy uncertainty.

So I really appreciate this building of capacity and having a deep investment. When more of us do that knowing it’s going to be uncomfortable and it might hurt, what’s possible on the other side of that is extraordinary.

Eve Rickert: Yeah. I heard that episode and actually that episode with the thing that made me decide that you were the person I wanted to reach out to.

Dawn Serra: One of the other things that I’d love to just touch on is when we were talking previously, you had mentioned some of the things that you’ve been really thinking about is some of your own accountability and what made you easy to gaslight or the words that you use. And one of the things that I talked to Samantha about was all of us are susceptible to being gas lit because we, especially right now, live in a political climate and in a culture where gaslighting is done from the highest levels of power and very normalized. I’d love to know as you think about some of the things that you noticed yourself doing, you touched on them a little bit when you were sharing your story. What are some of the things that you really been thinking about around things you’d like to grow into or do differently or things you noticed that you did that now you have to really sit with and unpack? What are some of the things that you’re chewing on as someone who experienced this harm for so long and really noticed a behavior change?

Eve Rickert: Yeah, great question. One of the things I touched on earlier was this whole keeping Franklin at the center thing and I did that to an extent. But I adopted that framing of everyone else being an NPC. What that meant was that… First of all, I took everything he said is true which hopefully you wouldn’t want to do that it was a partner. But when a partner is lying to you and you are getting signs that there are things that are not right – and what happened to me is that pretty early on, there were discrepancies between things that he would say and things that as partner would say, things he would say to me and things he would say in public. And I kept the frame focused on him, which meant that every single else started to go out of focus and get shaky. Because actually he was the one who was lying and these other people were telling the truth. By not looking at them, by not hearing them, by not centering them and their stories, and their experiences and showing curiosity for what they were experiencing – A total lack of curiosity on my part. Franklin was the only person who was really interesting to me. At first it contributed to conflict and isolation and then later, it was part of what made me go crazy because I mentioned the out-of-focus and the shaking frame and that got so bad that things just stop feeling real because the discrepancy between the stories I was being told in private and what I was experiencing everywhere else and what other people were saying was so great and I couldn’t square it. Yet I would not let go of that focus on him.

I would not allow myself to accept the possibility that he wasn’t telling the truth. It also led to some other behaviors that they make sense and I understand why I did them, but I also understand how they were really maladaptive and increase the harm that I experienced; which was if I was getting conflicting input from him and another person, I would experience cognitive dissonance from that and I would experience the other person as a threat. I would distance from that person. I would cut off from that person sometimes that included blocking on social media, which again was on isolating move for me because what it did was it cut me further and further off from the sources of information that I needed to get a grip on reality. But it didn’t feel that way at the time. It felt like they were a threat. There’s that scene in Labyrinth, the movie Labyrinth where Sarah goes into the maze room and she’s running around, and Jareth is singing to her and the end felt like that. It was like everything is all twisty and upside down. It doesn’t make sense and I am trying to make it make sense. There’s a moment when she comes to the end of a stairway and she jumped and it all falls apart around her. For me, that moment when I reached out to that other woman, the first night that I had left my home, that was that jump for me. That was a total leap of faith. I am going to reach outside this whole mess and try to get somebody else’s story and somebody else’s perspective. That was the moment where it all came tumbling down around me.

Eve Rickert: I think internalized misogyny played a big role in that. There was a reason why I was much more willing to believe a man than to believe that women were malicious or crazy or lying. So that’s definitely something that I have to sort of actively work on. I have recognized that I hold women to a higher standard than I hold men to. I allow men to fuck up a lot more than I allow women to fuck up and this holds true both in my personal and professional life. I have to be really careful and really conscious about that. So that’s another process that I’m undergoing.

I would say that recognizing – I think I mentioned this in our precall of that, sometimes I think I’m just talking about my own experience and telling my story. I think I often express a lot more confidence than I actually feel. And so people see that confidence and they see a certainty in my words that I don’t intend to be there, and in that certainty there is a certain amount of power. And so I think I’ve held power in telling my stories that I have not always recognized. That’s something and I think that that is probably true of Franklin as well though. I don’t know whether he recognizes it or not. I can’t say what his experience has been. But certainly, when people tell their stories, other people are more or less inclined to listen to them and to take those stories as representative of some kind of greater truth depending on what our sort of positional power is.

Eve Rickert: Last year, I finally read the book, The Gaslight Effect, which is the book that coined – I mean, I realized Gaslight was the name of a movie, but the person who actually turned that into a word that refers to a phenomenon in relationships was the woman who wrote the book The Gaslight Effect, and it was coined in this book. One of the things she talks about is she talks about the Gaslight Tango, which is that gaslighting is it involves two people. You have to actually participate in gaslighting in this gaslight tango to be gaslit. People can sometimes switch roles in the gaslight tango and gaslight each other. But one of the things that is essential in both people to participate in the gaslight tango is an inability to tolerate difference. An inability to say, “We see this thing differently and we’re okay with that, and we agree to disagree.” It’s like we experience that difference as a threat or we need to feel like we have some sort of agreed shared reality.

Now, of course, in an intimate partnership you do need to have some kind of agreed shared reality but there has to also be room for difference. And I think one of the things in my relationship with Franklin was that the first couple of years were so intense and we clicked on so many levels so well and seemed like we agreed on everything. When we didn’t agree, we would talk and talk and talk it out and then we would finally be able to see things to have the same understanding of something. I think that created some expectations in me about that everything could be worked out, that we just needed to talk everything out that, every problem could be solved. Also when there were experiences of radically different perceptions of things, it felt like a loss of intimacy because so much of the early intimacy, particularly when we were writing More Than Two was reliant on that feeling of being really solid on the same wavelength all the time. That intensity is something that other women have described as well with him.

I think that because it felt really, really jarring when we didn’t agree on things, and it seemed like we had been so good at coming to agreement before. I think I invested a lot in trying to square these different versions of reality because I was sure that there had to be one somewhere. I was sure that – And again it was like, now I recognize that actually there were a lot of cases where he wasn’t telling the truth and he was pretty invested in me not finding out the truth. So that was never, ever going to happen. I was never, ever going to have a story that really fit. But I wasn’t able to tolerate that.

Eve Rickert: I say being able to tolerate differences is something that is important in a healthy relationship. But the level of difference that I was being asked to tolerate in this relationship was not healthy. The healthy thing for me to do would’ve been to leave the relationship at any point. And this has been something that’s been really important to me in trying to process and parse his allegations of harm from me is understanding that at any given point, there was no choice that I could have made to change the outcome or stop what happened to me except to leave. The only thing I could have ever have done that would have made the situation better was leave. It wasn’t a matter of me needing to have healthier reactions to things except that the healthy reaction was to leave.

Dawn Serra: Yeah. I really appreciate this naming of the inability to tolerate difference. One of the things that I’ve mentioned so many times on the show, and I’m going to mention it again, because I think it’s so important is the Gottman research shows that relationship conflict 69% is unresolvable. So if we’re in relationship with human beings, and I think that includes friendships and working relationships, but being in relationship with another human being means that we’re going to keep circling around the same issues as long as we’re in relationship with each other. Because we’re fundamentally different. We’re fundamentally separate people. The healthy relationship dynamic is being able to say, “Oh, we’re having this thing again about the dishes. Look at us,” and then to reconnect without needing to resolve knowing it’s going to come back up again. And I think that speaks to this of being able to tolerate that, “We’re having this disagreement again or we’re seeing things differently again,” and still being able to connect around that difference, I think, is so important.

Also like you said, sometimes those differences become unhealthy. And those are times when we really need to evaluate the relationship. But I think just inviting people to really sit with that and how they do relationship and what their experiences with difference and how you manage them is important.

Eve Rickert: I mean it’s one more thing that has come up a lot, of course, is boundaries and my willingness to compromise my boundaries. Of course, it was much worse than this relationship than it had ever been because I had never been in a relationship with someone who was quite so willing to push and over ride boundaries. But I can see how those porous boundaries were always there. And, of course, someone who has these boundary pushing behaviors is going to look for people in relationships who have porous boundaries that can be pushed. So it’s really tricky because – One of the most hurtful things that I have seen online in response to this public discourse as well is we obviously just had shitty boundaries and it’s like, “Well, okay. Actually that’s true.” It did. But it doesn’t make me responsible for what happened. It’s not my fault. If I had better boundaries, obviously I would have left much sooner – probably never would’ve dated him because I wouldn’t have passed those little tests at the beginning that showed that I had porous enough boundaries to become involved with him, and I wouldn’t have suffered this harm. But he’s still responsible for what he did. It doesn’t make me responsible for him pushing and overriding my boundaries because I allowed it to happen.

I’m really struggling with that holding, how do I learn to hold my boundaries better after this experience of having them totally shattered, which now makes me not want to trust anyone at all ever versus understanding that what happened still wasn’t my fault? He’s still responsible for his choices and his actions. Especially, and this is where it becomes very helpful to know I’m not the only one.Even though I hate that has happened to other people.

Dawn Serra: Well, I want to talk about the witnessing piece as our close. One of the things I just want to tack onto that is I think as a survivor, one of the most profound things that someone ever, ever taught me, which was Cristien Storm from her book, Living in Liberation, which is all about boundaries was you can set the most beautiful, the most perfect, most firm boundary and still get hurt, still be harmed, still have people do bad things; you can be the most terrible at setting boundaries ever and be wishy washy and not communicate it well and have great things happen and have people respect what it is that you’re communicating.

I think we have this victim blaming narrative that if only we had done this better, bad things wouldn’t happen. But that’s not how the world works. Of course, it helps. It helps us to have better communication and to tend to ourselves and to be more resourced when we are able to communicate clearly. But it’s not our fault when someone chooses to still do something harmful.

Eve Rickert: Yeah, that’s very helpful.

Dawn Serra: So I’d love to close. I know of that at Southwest Love Fest, you held a witness circle with lots of stories sharing and witness statements, and I’m sure anyone who has experienced abuse or who is a survivor of trauma knows there’s so much power in finding out you’re not alone. You’re not the only. I love when I see memes on social media around the different ways that people deal with anxiety and realizing I’m not the only one who has this funny quirk in dealing with my anxiety. There’s something that’s just so humanizing and permission granting and also really validating around witnessing and being in group with others who can say, “Oh, yes. Me too.” What was that witness circle like? It sounds like part of what’s been so powerful for you has been centering the stories of these people who were seen as secondary characters and finding out we have similar experiences.

Eve Rickert: That was interesting because it wasn’t really what I had hoped for. It was planned very late. It was planned independently at the conference. I landed for the first night of the con when people were still arriving. So, a lot of people couldn’t make it because they had been traveling all day and then I scheduled it late so that people could attend. But then people were really tired and a bunch of people had to leave early. It was in my hotel room and it was very small. There was three survivors present either in person or digitally. We got through some of the stories. We did not get through all of the testimony I’d wanted to get through. I am so grateful to the people who showed up and were present and the people who showed up and tried to be present, especially because a lot of them were people I didn’t know, at the same time it was sort of that… And so it wasn’t quite that moment of being able to share my story and community and be witnessed that I had really hoped for for me and for the other woman. But it was still very valuable. I mean so valuable that those people showed up for us, valuable to hear their insights. I think even just seeing the looks on people’s faces when we told our stories because sometimes I start to think maybe maybe it wasn’t that bad, right? To hear me say something that I’ve completely normalized or hear one of the others women say something normalized because I know it now and see somebody else’s face like, “oh my god,” it’s like, “Okay, maybe this is…” . That was valuable.

There were a number of other survivors in the room of other abuse who were able to say, “I see this…” So having their seeing and their ability to help pinpoint the patterns and also say what they saw in me and in the other women was very helpful. And then it was the first time that the three of us had actually come together in a conversation. There has been lots and lots of one on one conversations but having three of us together talking together was really interesting because there were patterns that we were able to see that we hadn’t seen before. So that was – I kind of like to have that happen.

In my mind I have this vision of actually a room full of people who are in poly organizing and leadership and then all of the survivors are there and then we all tell our stories although it would take all day. I don’t think that we’ll ever be able to happen because logistically and distance and time involved. I will say that every time I tell my story and have it heard and see someone’s reactions is really helpful. And I think part of the thing that I have struggled with is, how did this do so much damage when it is so hard for me to name, still, what happened?

Eve Rickert: Something else that came up for me and that was the other people in the room who identified that they were also survivors. I was like, “Why don’t they get witness circles? Why do I get this? They should have this too. Who hurt them and can we…” And so I would like to somehow normalize this idea of creating spaces where people can tell these stories that name harm. And that to me is, again, part of the transformative justice piece is we’re so scared of naming harm and telling these stories. And I think part of why we’re scared is we are afraid of disposability, we are afraid that will be asked to do something or sanction someone or punish someone. Whereas so often, just being witnessed and being heard can be so important and so healing, and having your community say, “Yes, I see that. That happened.”

Dawn Serra: There’s so much more that I would love to explore with you but I do want to respect everyone’s time and, of course, your time and I know this is a part of a much bigger conversation. So this is just the beginning for everyone who’s tuning in. We’ve got two other conversations that are going to help create a really rich discussion for us. Eve, thank you so much for being here and for sharing your story and your self so courageously. I really appreciate it.

Eve Rickert: Thank you so much for having me and for giving me the space to talk.

Dawn Serra: Of course for people who want to stay in touch and learn more, what are some of the places that you’d love for people to visit and check out?

Eve Rickert: So it would be great if folks could contribute to the survivor pod Paypal pool. People are putting in huge amounts of labor and there are expenses involved. And just kicking in a few dollars to support, that would be great. I, also, am raising money for a separate thing, which is I’m participating in the American foundation for Suicide Prevention Overnight Walk in San Francisco in June. And so I’ve written an essay about that and why I’m participating in that, and it has to do with my own experiences with and brushes with suicide and suicidal ideation. I have a personal blog (BrighterthanSunflowers) which has a lot of old content on it. I’m not really keeping it very up to date now.

I would say that for folks who want to follow along with this whole process to visit the – there’s a tracking spreadsheet where the survivor pod is keeping a list of all of the public discourse about the situation and that sort of best place to go to get up to speed.

Dawn Serra: Well, I will have all of those links in the show notes and at dawnserra.com for this episode so that people can donate a couple bucks because having these transformative justice experiences is so important. And so if we can all throw in a couple of bucks, it makes a lot of bucks and that’s a great thing. So people can also follow along with the pod tracking and also contribute to your overnight walk.

Thank you again, Eve. I think this is going to get a lot of minds worrying and a lot of questions brewing and hopefully it’ll help us all to level up in our conversations around relationships and community. So thank you.

Eve Rickert: Thank you.

Dawn Serra: A huge thanks to The Vocal Few, the married duo behind the music featured in this week’s intro and outro. Find them at vocalfew.com Head to patreon.com/sgrpodcast to support the show and to get awesome weekly bonuses.

As you look towards the next week, I wonder, what will you do differently that rewrites an old story, revitalizes a stuck relationship or helps you to connect more deeply with your pleasure?

Share this: Twitter

Facebook

