For the record, here is the truth of what happened. I've never hidden any of this, but I'd like to get it put together in one place so that people can read it and understand what happened and who I am.
To tell this story, you have to go back all the way to 2015. It was at this time that I first adopted the persona of "Faith McClosky" I did so in online forums because it felt natural, it was a way for me to interact outside of my struggles with social anxiety. I have dealt with this anxiety my entire life and did not seek treatment because I was ashamed and felt broken. To understand what it was like, I would ask you to think of a time when you've ever written or roleplayed a character. You try to get into that character's head. Now dial that up by about ten times the intensity and you will begin to understand what it was like for me to live as "Faith McClosky".
I struggle with a form of dissociative identity disorder, to the point that when I went online or picked up a phone or anything of that nature, I became Faith. Faith was real to me, very real. I would take on her mannerisms when I was in this state of living as Faith. This was not a scam or a catfishing attempt or anything of the sort, it was a flaw in my mental health that I had not yet come to grips with.
I lived my online life as Faith for years, and then one day my path crossed with Mr. Blaine Lee Pardoe. I was reading some BattleTech and found him inserting his references to the Confederacy into his work to be disturbing, and so I asked him about it, seeking to understand why he was doing what he was doing. His response was to brush me off, label me as a "Shitty Fanfic writer" and block me on social media.
Things progressed to the point where the quality of his writing began to slip as he fell deeper into the pitfalls of right-wing ideology. He was a prominent writer in the Battletech universe and a figure that loomed large, and as his viewpoint and interaction with the fans became more deranged, I became a prominent voice in the chorus calling for corrective action to be taken, lest we see our franchise flounder under the hands of an unhinged insurrectionist.
It was also about this time that I began to take my writing more seriously than fanfiction. I was writing stories and trying to get published, all of this under the online life of Faith. I began to interact with many writers and people behind the scenes in the Battletech community, and it was invigorating to be embraced by them. One of these people was author Craig Reed. We met on the Battletech forums and began a relationship that became one of student and mentor, with Craig helping me along in my writing.
Then one night, while I had a little too much to drink, I made some offhand comments to Craig over the internet. Little did I know that he would take these comments and go behind my back, taking them to Blaine and igniting Blaine's campaign of harassment against me. A judge found one of these comments actionable enough to grant Blaine a Protective Order in the State of Virginia. The bar is pretty low if you ask me, but your mileage may vary. Regardless, this was the beginning of my spiral into losing the online identity of Faith. When Blaine went Nuclear, it wrecked my world and I was terrified. He sent private investigators to search through all of my life online in an attempt to bring me down, all because I was standing up to him publicly.
I will say this for Blaine, he got his public relations ducks in a row, and he has been milking it ever since. His private detectives uncovered a misdemeanor conviction for terroristic threats in my past, and he ran hog wild with that, not bothering to look into the facts of the case itself.
Allow me to describe the facts of that conviction, as it is a matter of public record. In June of 2020, in the midst of the COVID pandemic, I was fired from my job as a manager at Walmart. I was fired for interfering with an investigation into one worker's claim of sexual harassment against another. I reached out to people to try to mend fences where I should have left Human Resources to do it's investigation, and ultimately HR deemed that my contacting the parties in this investigation was interference in their case, and I was summarily terminated. I was devastated. My mental health began to spiral out of control. All of my anxiety and mental health issues came to a head when I got blackout drunk and threatened to take a firearm into my former place of work and kill myself to show them how badly they had hurt me. This action was deemed a terroristic threat of performative violence by the DA, and I was in no condition to contest it. What I did was wrong, I owned up to it, and have paid my debt to society. I scared a lot of people with my actions, and I've worked to slowly earn their forgiveness.
So now you all know my history as a "crazed criminal". It was this, and the comments made to Craig Reed in confidence that led Blaine to wage his war of destruction upon my reputation and mental health. Maybe he saw the quality of his work falling off as others did, as he spiraled into alt-right lunacy, but he found in me a convenient scapegoat for all of his shortcomings. All of his actions attacking fans, writing insurrectionist fetish porn and the like, were catching up to him, and he needed some way to spin the narrative to his favor. Me, in my state of mental chaos, provided the perfect opportunity to lay the blame for all of his failures onto someone other than himself.
He has since waged a coordinated smear campaign against me, twisting the facts of my life and our interactions to create a boogeyman that allowed him to blame someone for his ultimate cancellation when it came. At no point did I lead a campaign to get him canceled or his books removed, as has been falsely spread throughout the community. All I did was point out his bad actions, actions for which he ultimately was held responsible with the decision by CGL to not work with him moving forward. A decision that was in no part based on any "campaign" by me or anyone else. Blaine canceled himself, let's be clear.
This is who I am, a person struggling with mental health issues (And yes, thankfully I now have a great care team and support network) and gender identity questions while being attacked publicly and used as a scapegoat for other people's shortcomings. I am not a crazed online stalker. I did not send death threats to Blaine. All of these things are lies, exaggerations, and distortions.
I would also like to point out that at one point, I had completely left Blaine behind for a period of over a year, had no thoughts about him, didn't mention him or bring him up in any way, I just was trying to avoid it. But it was Blaine who dragged me back into court to extend his Protective Order that dragged me all back into this chaos and mess. And it is Blaine and his supporters who continue to attack me for reasons I have yet to comprehend. Let me be clear: I am no threat to Blaine. I wish him no ill will. I'm a forty-something anxiety-ridden writer trying to find his place in the world and the community and come to grips with the state of my own mental health.
Make no mistake, Blaine knows all of this. He is not afraid of me, he is merely using this protective order as a means of grift to support his own writing career since his "cancellation" from Battletech, and his fans on the right wing of the community are lapping it up. Power to him for devising such a strategy and implementing it so well.
What do I want moving forward? I want to be left alone. I want to be able to continue my mental health recovery plan. I want to be able to write and tell my own stories and have people read and enjoy them. I wish Blaine the best of luck in his Land and Sea endeavors, and in his alt-right insurrectionist writing career. I want him to leave me alone and keep to his own side, keep his minions off of me, and allow me to live in peace.
I realize this is a long ramble, but I felt it necessary to get the facts out there on the record for everyone genuinely interested to read and understand. I am, at this point, an open book. I encourage anyone with questions to contact me online through their favorite means of communication and if they have any questions, I will do my best to try to answer them. This is part of my Pride journey, to begin taking back the narrative and be proud of who I am, in spite of all of my flaws. I hope you all will take this to heart and that it will allow me to exist in a better state moving forward.
