#MeToo and Fandom Heartbreaks
Moving on and moving past with Legendary Women
This is probably the hardest piece I’ve ever had to write, but I want to be as honest and as clear as I can.
When things first started to come to the surface last November about Allison Mack and her alleged involvement with NXVIM, we had fully intended to start rebranding and distancing Legendary Women, Inc. from an initial effort that was borne out of a love of Chloe Sullivan and Smallville. Severe family illness and hospitalizations delayed this plan. After Keith Raniere’s arrest and extradition, we’re moving forward with this process over the next two months and have already started working on renaming and new logo and branding.
First, I want to be perfectly clear that Legendary Women, Inc. was first incorporated as a business in the state of Alabama in 2010, and was then dissolved and reincorporated in the state of Maryland in 2012. It currently has been dissolved as a business in Maryland over the last six months.
We started initially when a group of fans formed a board and came together with a goal to help promote women in the media we liked, characters we could get behind, and shine light on charity movements that needed more support. From there, other ideas like contests and creative support were brought forth. We’ve also been around for close to eight years in different incarnations and have had volunteers and board members pass through and new ones join us.
Currently, only three members of our entire organization came together initially because of fandom and most of our staff have no connection to Smallville in any way. Moreover, while this was a project and organization that grew from motivated fans, it’s always focused on lifting up women in general and was never about Allison Mack, Chloe Sullivan, or them specifically.
Recently, we’ve also changed and adapted with growing more political in tone after elections and working to help encourage people to speak out (in the States especially) and contact their leaders when issues they cared about needed to be addressed.
We’ve never officially had any connection to Ms. Mack at all.
Second, I want to say that even though we never have been connected at any level, we’re horrified by what’s been allegedly happening with NXVIM. I’ve read the court filings myself, and it sickens me, and I can say with every ounce of honesty and dedication I have that I want everyone involved in this cult and the abuse of these poor women who serve as Raniere’s “sex slaves” to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law and hope they will be. Moreover, here at LW, we desperately hope that the women still at NXVIM leave too and eventually go home to their waiting families and to therapy. Or, hopefully, that eventually the FBI can free them.
Third, the thing that really hurts is that once upon a time the inspiration for what became Legendary Women, Inc. was Chloe Sullivan and fans being truly inspired by a character (and still liking a character separate from the terrible human who played her) who offered them a working woman role model, a generous heart, and a heroine to root for. I don’t know a single woman from fandom who doesn’t feel deeply betrayed and upset from having made the foolish mistake of ascribing the virtues of the character to the actress as well. Worse, I know of fans who were lured into the influence of NXVIM due to liking Mack’s work and being courted over Twitter and in person by Mack, herself. There are at least two people from fandom I know through friends of friends who were there in NXVIM but were at least lucky enough to leave before the sex slavery and branding started.
But so much of what Mack has done over at least the last decade all seems designed to lure in fans as well as struggling actresses who wanted lessons through the group The Source that Mack is credited with creating alongside Raniere in the court documents.
It all feels like a big trap.
For the majority of the last year, we’ve thought of #MeToo as men like Weinstein preying on women. We’ve sometimes remembered that the abuse can also happen to men like Terry Crews or Brendan Fraser or that men like Kevin Spacey have used their power to assault men and teenage boys both. I think that it’s important to remember in light of what Ms. Mack has allegedly done that women can hurt others sexually too, that it can sometimes be too easy, especially in the bubbles of fandom, to be lured in first by a character and then by the power differential that comes from interacting with an actress or celebrity. From the court documents so far and from what the news has been able to confirm, it appears that Allison Mack has perpetuated things that are as horrific for the NXVIM survivors as any other sexual abuse crimes out there, and, again, I hope she has her reckoning in a court of law and then in prison.
I think the hardest things for me to deal with, which is still a small drop in the bucket compared to the nightmares women like India Oxenberg are still living at NXVIM, is how betrayed and duped I feel. How utterly stupid. The actress isn’t the character. There are dark impulses sometimes hidden behind the Hollywood (or in this case Vancouver) glamour, and fans can be manipulated badly and in compromising sexual ways sometimes as well. #MeToo happens in fandom, and it’s happened here among Smallville fans.
And it hurts.
It’s caused me and so many desolate, scarred fandom friends more insomnia-filled nights than I’d like to admit. It hurts when people in power, when a celebrity, abuses that trust and uses their privilege to harm others. And, yeah, it hurts feeling stupid and feeling like you’ve wasted so much time. It’s even harder to feel that, by viewing someone on a pedestal, you might have inadvertently helped spread their influence. It’s irrational and it makes no sense, but I have a friend who used to help run Allison Mack fan site stuff, just unofficially as many people through fandoms do, who has felt the same way at times. There’s that gnawing, insane guilt that somehow if you only had known or could have stopped it or even had an inkling of everything that was happening…
You could have done something. Anything.
All of it is just devastating.
So where do we go from here? By summer, LW will fully relaunch as a new organization. We will continue to highlight the fictional women role models you love, talk about real women you should be aware of, highlight charities in need, and also work to help amplify the voices and marches you need to be aware of in the Resistance age. We are also looking toward ways to be more active in raising money for domestic abuse shelters and for groups that work to fight human trafficking as well as ways to help boost the signal about women and girls who have gone missing throughout the United States. As we grow, we’ll hope you’ll be there with us.
Until then, we all need time to be upset, be angry, be sad…be whatever we’re feeling and to hope and work for justice for the victims of NXVIM
The images used above are not all the sole property of Legendary Women, Inc. We do not take credit for them and we do not profit from their use.
