Employees use Registered Charities Twitter account to Bully.
(I deleted this earlier but read again as there are further kinks to this story especially at the end)
Last week I got into a robust twitter debate with a woman from
http://www.mckeeconsultants.co.uk/ who specialise in diversity and equality. Anyway the lady online persistently demand that as she is a feminist she was entitled to know on why I openly use the word ‘cunt’ online. I told her that I didn't need to explain myself to her nor anyone and refused to justify my language. I then expressed how ironic it was that a feminist was demanding a woman explain her words. I refused to explain my motives to her and will always do so, as I don’t believe I should have to explain my vocabulary to anyone.
My twitter profile says “The most outspoken female stand up in Britain” (Daily Telegraph). I cannot give you the timeline of McKee Consultant’s tweets as she deleted the entire argument (such was her commitment to her own words), though I do have a screengrab of them. In the middle of this twitter debate a person from the charity Sky Project in Kilmarnock (they recently asked me to be a patron to their kids charity) added to the debate by saying “You are a patron of our children’s charity. Would you say these words to our young people?”
I responded to Sky Project by saying something along the lines of “I don’t think coming online to question my motives is professional and I can always un-patron” I couldn’t understand why suddenly a charity I have been dealing with got into this twitter debate of the word ‘cunt’.
Firstly I felt Sky Project were questioning my ability to work with kids because I say ‘cunt’ (I have never put myself up as a child role model THEY asked me to be patron) and secondly why are they getting involved? Then I quickly realised that McKee Consultants and Sky Project are friends and contact each other regularly. Fine- I thought, she is sticking up for her pal McKee and now she has lost me as a patron. That’s what happens when you use a charity’s registered twitter feed to have a go at people, no big deal.
I opened my twitter a day later and there was a tweet from a children charity Hill House Care http://www.hillhousecare.org/ that said “Calling yourself a comedienne is an insult to all things funny, Call yourself a children’s role model? Hope not”
Now I was stunned, I genuinely don’t mind people calling me crap and unfunny, it happens a lot to be honest on twitter but for a registered charity to come online with this unprovoked attack annoyed me. Yet again it mentioned my ‘children’s role model’ (which I am not) and so a very short blast of past tweets revealed yet again that McKee Consultants, Sky Project and Hill House Care were all linked together and friends on and offline.
Then @hillhousecare1 deleted the offending tweet and sometime later spouted stuff about freedom of speech and then deleted that as well! (See a pattern emerging? Offensive tweets- delete-delete?) So there we have it, I got into a debate over the word cunt with a woman and her mates waded in under the guise of the charities they work for and had a go at me. My online friends all took exception to the tweets and many complained to Hill House Care and some of them were pretty verbal about a charity being used to slag me off.
So then Hill House Care and McKee consultants both claimed cyber bullying. (Sky Project who may have a more clever person working their social media apologised and backed off). To date Hill House Care has never apologised and both they and Mckee Consultants have deleted their tweets regarding me. Yes they did that old nugget of the passive/aggressive world of “we got into an argument, lost it and now claim aggression in our direction” how professional?
Again at this point I’d like to re-iterate that my anger is at the charities public accounts being used to insult me, not the insult itself. In terms of insults I’ve been called a lot worse… but never by an anonymous person hiding behind the guise of a children’s charity.
So the upshot is, I feel bullied by a children’s charity! I have written to Hill House Care and want their board of directors contact details as I believe the person reading my complaint might be the actual tweeter- so the best way to get to the bottom is to let the charity commission know that a charity is using its status to have a go at people.
By the way- Hill House Care claim on their website to be ‘Non Judgemental” and McKee Consutlants claim to promote “equality and diversity” I have NEVER claimed to be a child’s role model.
So after I posted this blog today I got an email from Mckee Consultants and apologising – which I accepted and I accepted the apology from The Sky project- as of yet I haven’t had an apology from the person who actually tweeted from Hill house care. The tweets all came from a mother, a sister and a daughter in the same family.
After I deleted the blog to let the dust settle on the issue I got an email from a journalist and school teacher called Douglas Bane who sent me an email titled “Scottish comedian forces children's charity to close because they said she wasn't funny”.
He went on to do a hatchet job on my character BUT went onto paint the women who wrote the tweets in such a naive, innocent way and it emerges I am the woman who is singlehandedly getting the charity shut down- in fact he makes it seem, it was always my sole intention- here is an excerpt of his email about me- the one he intends to get published.
"The attempt to smooth ruffled feathers came too late. By this time some of Janey’s followers had taken up the story and were spreading her “horrific personal abuse” version.
Unaware of the full story and unwilling to trawl through the archives, two board members of the second charity, resigned at the weekend. The Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations withdrew its support. Prospective funders have pulled out. As I said, Janey has influence"
Now I have never contacted anyone regards getting the funding cut and those who know me, know this would hurt my soul.
So I sent a statement to the journalist who strangely gave me the offer to change the end of the story and the headline to "Janey Godley steps in to save struggling children's charity"
So I spoke to the woman from The Sky Project who in fact is the least of all offenders in this weird story, she apologised last week after her slightly hurtful tweet and it turns out she knows Douglas Bane the journalist and in fact they used to be in a relationship together.
She asked him to ‘help’ and his way of helping was to threaten me with a rotten unbalanced article about me. He is also a physics teacher and works in education!
I feel his part in this was to put the ‘frighteners’ on me and hope that I would back down and delete my blog. Well Douglas you obviously don’t know me well enough and if anyone else in the press wants to pick up on this wee debacle of story do let me know. BTW I am still getting emails accusing me of trying to 'break people' instead of 'letting this go'. They somehow have become the victims and I am the bad witch.
Sometimes the word cunt doesn’t quite get across what I mean today.
