Thank you, Shawn, for letting me and the editors at Athena Talks know about this situation.

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Hi Kel Campbell, I’m one of the editors at the publication you mentioned, Athena Talks, and I would like to sincerely apologize to you, on behalf of the team, for featuring Mark’s submission without understanding the problem and consequences of him plagiarising your content and using it to mock your words. Another editor from the team had requested Mark’s story, while I found yours and also requested yours (and this was done without me knowing that someone else has already requested Mark’s post), and this shows the inefficiency of our team in trying to find ways to build our publication content. This also shows that my team needs to come up with ways to have better content quality control and make sure that we do not repeat the mistake of publishing stories without understanding where they originally came from, what messages are they delivering, which audiences are they targeting, and whether they support our team’s mission.

After reading your post and seeing the very similarity between yours and Mark’s and all that’s wrong with his post, the first thing I did was to go back to Athena Talks to track down his post to remove it because I too, do not tolerate any acts of plagiarism, especially in this case, where it is used to attack the content and its message delivered by you. Please know that another editor from the team has already removed it.

Kel, I really would like to continue reading and featuring your content on the Athena Talks page, and I hope you forgive my team for this mistake. Thank you for being honest and upfront about this, this is a lesson for the team as well as Medium to reflect and learn from.