Janet “JudgyBitch” Bloomfield may not have mastered the fine art of public relations in the real world, but amongst those who live in imaginary worlds of their own making she is something of a PR genius.
Bloomfield, A Voice for Men’s “Director of Social Media,” was recently booted from Twitter (again) for “targeted abuse” — evidently her harassment of feminist writer Jessica Valenti, which included making up inflammatory fake quotations and attributing them to her.
Bloomfield, who once claimed (apparently at least semi-seriously) that a previous Twitter suspension was punishment for her posting a picture of a wedding cake, has responded with a petulant note to Twitter and a similarly petulant open letter to the world, insisting that she’s an innocent woman who’s been railroaded by an evil feminist cabal.
She is, of course, full of it, but she’s picked up support from several online publications popular with the reality-challenged: Alex Jones’ loopy conspiracy megasite Infowars.com, GamerGate propaganda hub The Ralph Retort, and right-wing garbage site The Gateway Pundit. She’s got her Twitter followers in a tizzy, and they are filling up my Twitter timeline with their usual brand of nonsense.
Bloomfield claims, in a Facebook posting that’s been uncritically reposted by her supporters in the imaginary-world media, that she’s a blameless victim of a “harassment campaign” inspired by, well, me.
No, really. Here’s what she wrote, apparently with a straight face:
My most recent suspension is the result of me tweeting the actual words of Guardian journalist Jessica Valenti back to her. Prompted by @davidfutrelle, a harassment campaign to report me for spam/abuse was undertaken by users who appear to be under the impression that I made up the Valenti quotes and falsely attributed them to her. This is not true.
It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to make this claim, given that Bloomfield has not only made up numerous false and inflammatory quotes she claimed were written by Valenti, but has also gone on to publicly gloat that her falsehoods were causing Valenti distress. The fake quotes were merely one egregious episode in an months-long campaign of targeted abuse directed at Valenti.
Here’s a screenshot of four fake Valenti quotes that Bloomfield tweeted last August. (I have helpfully labeled the ones that are fake; see here for details.)
More recently, Bloomfield Tweeted yet another fake Valenti quote that has been making the rounds in Men’s Rights circles for months. (The red scrawls on the screenshot are mine.)
See here for more details.
Though none of these quotes sound even remotely like anything that Valenti would ever say, many of Bloomfield’s followers had no trouble believing they were real, and in both instances the fake quotes inspired harassment and abuse directed at Valenti.
Back in August, Bloomfield seemed proud as punch that her fake quotes were causing difficulties for Valenti. In a posting on her blog (which I’ve archived here), Bloomfield gleefully wrote:
And she added, for good measure:
It’s not clear to me how Valenti having to deal with harassment caused by Bloomfield libeling her is an example of Valenti “having to own her shit,” given that the shit in question is not actually hers.
Bloomfield also pulled a similar stunt with a screenshot of an obviously fake Tweet ostensibly from GamerGate boogeywoman Anita Sarkeesian; it, too, inspired harassment against Bloomfield’s target.
Bloomfield has helped to inspire and direct campaigns of harassment against other women as well, including one school teacher she accused, with absolutely no evidence, of trying to shut down AVFM’s conference with death threats. She has also repeatedly libeled me. In all of these cases she used Twitter essentially as an amplifier of hate.
These tactics are pretty much the definition of “targeted abuse.” And “targeted abuse” is what Twitter gave as the reason for her most recent suspension, according to a screenshot that Bloomfield has herself posted on her blog.
But Bloomfield is attempting to convince the world that she’s been suspended for quoting Valenti accurately. In her posts on her suspension, she refers to one instance in which she did indeed quote Valenti more or less accurately – as if that somehow makes up for her fake quotes.
I’m no lawyer, but I’m pretty sure that Bloomfield announcing that not everything she’s said about Valenti is a malicious lie wouldn’t be much of a defense against a libel case.
But, of course, amongst her reality-challenged fans, Bloomfield’s spin has carried the day. Indeed, the headline on the Infowars post detailing Bloomfield’s imaginary victimization declares baldly that:
It seems rather telling that the theInfowars “reporter” who wrote that post touts his Bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing from Nottingham Trent University in his Infowars bio. In this case, though, he merely repeated and amplified Bloomfield’s own fictions.
Speaking of which, Bloomfield also claims that “[m]y account has never tweeted abuse.” This is also patent bullshit.
Her peculiar wording may be a way to elide the fact that she used the official Twitter account for A Voice for Men’s conference last summer to call a bunch of people “whores.”
But the fact is she used her now-suspended @JudgyBitch1 Twitter account to post stuff much worse than this. In addition to abusive tweets directed at Valenti (like this salacious one), she also told one rape survivor [TRIGGER WARNING]
Bloomfield’s attempts to portray herself as the innocent victim of a witchhunt are especially ironic, given how carefully she’s cultivated her “mean girl” image. She attacks feminists – mostly women – with the malicious glee of a born bully, and mocks those who point out her lies and cruelty, using this picture as the profile pic for one of her Twitter accounts.
On her blog, which is often worse than her Twitter account ever was, she blamed the underage victims of Jimmy Savile’s sexual predations for exploiting him, and declared the 16-year-old victim of gang rape in Steubenville a “dumb whore.”
The woman who calls herself “Judgy Bitch” now finds herself being judged for her vindictive, bullying behavior, and doesn’t much like it.
NOTE: If anyone has screenshots of other abusive tweets from JB that I have missed, please email me with them or post them in the comments below; I may want to add more to the post or use them for a followup post.
Eye of Argon is funny, but it doesn’t come close to matching the glorious radiance that is Vampire Hunter D #4: Tale of the Dead Town, a book that publishers found worthy of printing in at least two languages, and which features beauty so intense it stops a tank in its tracks and a flying pirate town.
I doubt JB’s book includes a flying pirate town.
I feel like JBs book is going to be more “what if Hunger Games had been written by a misogynistic weirdo who hates all other women?”
Impeccable timing, getting into dystopian fiction just as it is being universally acknowledged as done to death.
Maybe she’ll throw some zombies in there too.
@cassandrakitty:
I don’t know if you followed the blog link, but part of the post is a “visual representation” of what the book’s narrative is going to be like. Included in the list are Hunger Games, Blade Runner, and Gattica.
Yeah.
@katz:
I will aid you in this honerable endeavor, should she finish. I’m practically contemplating setting up one of those “X reads awful novel of the day.” I just don’t know whether I have the writing chops to critique or the consitution for bad fic.
At first it seemed like the protagonist would be a girl but, no. So she’s writing from the perspective of the villian? It takes a lot of skill to do that and have it work. The characters has to be three dimensional and have sympathetic aspects. Nobody wants to read the perspective of a mustache twirling cartoon villain. Or whatever the female equivalent of mustache twirling is. Dyed armpit hair twirling? That’s pretty villainous from a manosphere perspective.
Thus Spake Zarakirbywarp:
Abject misunderstanding of science and science history aside, shouldn’t this be a good thing if MRAs are your target audience? Seems like about 90% of them are objectivists, libertarians, and social darwinists of various stripes, who insist the world would be a utopian meritocracy if we just stopped giving handouts to the “moochers.”
Maybe by “only the strongest survive” she means that teenagers compete in weightlifting events and the bottom 50% are culled at the end.
freemage:
This! This sums it up. It’s very tempting to wonder “what the hell’s wrong with her wiring” – that’s the default reaction, almost, to think someone making so little sense, so remote from reality, must have something wrong with them, not that they are like that because they choose to be.
Judgy’s not too good on the old Darwinian theory. She wrote a post about how men take to their beds when they get the flu because our ancient ancestors needed men in good nick for building, hunting and fighting. Women – being less valuable – could just carry on regardless while ill.
As though evolution works at a group level, for the good of the tribe. Like some hippy force of nature…
flying pirate town
flying pirate town
FLYING PIRATE TOWN
Thus Spake Zarabodycrimes:
But evolution does work at the group level. This is a crucial distinction that is often lost on MRAs, “human biodiversity proponents” (e.g. modern “scientific racists”) and other BioTruthers: Individuals don’t evolve, populations do. Naive adaptationist thinking like “men evolved to be X, women evolved to be Y” is an indicator of an extremely shallow understanding of evolution.
Wasn’t Darwin mad that his name was invoked to justify cruel economic and social policies? I seem to recall reading that somewhere.
weirwoodtreehugger:
Well, you’d hardly expect JB’s habit of inventing quotes and ideologies to stop with the living.
I always figured that women are better at working through discomfort partially because we’re used to carrying on while we have our periods/PMS and feel crappy. I also think it’s socialization. Women are taught to put others first and themselves last.
This is all my unscientific speculation though. I have no idea if there has been research on this. Just anecdotally it seems like guys make a bigger deal out of colds and flu than women do.
I think it’s because we’re inclined to overemphasise people’s behaviour as an extension of their innermost “essence” or something. Most of us are a kind of balance between our inner selves and our social roles – child/ parent/ sibling/ partner/ neighbour/ teacher/ student/ friend/ colleague with some specific roles in particular situations. A competent English teacher is likely to be a cack-handed student when first attending a rock-climbing class.
And there’s one set of social roles that are more or less optional — the bully and the bystander both make choices about their behaviour, a victim has much less scope. Some people are bullies at home and model citizens elsewhere. Sometimes a bully is a victim in relation to particular people.
JB’s made her choice. She’s decided to be a bully. The thing that is shocking about that is her choice of targets and her choices about methods. She could have been like a couple of prim and proper relatives of mine, relentlessly ladylike and wellspoken, but absolutely venomous when talking about or to other people. Half the time, people didn’t even realise what they were doing. No one could ever say that about JB.
Some research anyway.
http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/4090272.htm
Most VHD books are stuffed with rape, but Tale of the Dead Town is unique in that there are zero rapes in it. The plot is also regularly interrupted by events that the author seems to have pulled by rolling a 100-sided die and comparing it to a “random event” chart, but that only makes it more entertaining, not less.
PoM, that sounds like a writing method that would improve the sort of stuff A Voice for Men’s Possibly Still Unnamed Publishing House for Men Who Don’t Write Good wants to churn out. 😀
I’m just happy to think of a flying town with the likes of Hook and Barbossa in it.
I have no doubts that the d100-chart method would improve whatever JB is trying to shit out.
Freemage
I’m sorry you’re right one shouldn’t have to be forced to forgive people if they don’t want to.
Samantha
I’m sorry I hope didn’t make you feel uncomfortable I’m just glad that you are surrounded by loving people.
Well said, freemage. The forgiveness, in the case of my mother, that was most important to me was me forgiving myself for having ever believed what she told me about myself. I do agree that forgiveness can sometimes actually be a cover for denial.
It is actually easier to forgive some of my moms evil then it has ever been to forgive the evil that men do, such as rape. But that is just me.
I’m imagining a town that flies around and attacks other towns for their public works, green spaces, monuments, and holiday decorations, plus anything else that catches their fancy. Like the ornamental red brickwork between gutter and sidewalk my hometown installed a few years ago.
And what does this town bombard recalcitrant donor towns with? Why, ordinance, of course.
“Lowin Sorrow”
Projection?