Yeah, bit of a dramatic title, I know. But not inaccurate.
A while ago I posted in the "WTF Moments of RP" thread about a particular problem member I had to deal with on my site. You can find the post here if you'd like to read it, but I'll do my best to summarize for those who don't want to wander too much.
In the post, I talk about a problem member who is - quite frankly - absolutely disgusting. He is a textbook narcissist, somebody who is fully under the impression that the entire world revolves around him and him alone. In the time that he was on our site, he has exhibited the following traits:
He has sexually harassed two of our female members, aggressively (and passive-aggressively) badgering them to do 18+ threads with his character despite their repeated and pronounced disinterest. In each case, when he was talked to about the problem or things happened in-character to get in the way of that, he'd either throw a childish meltdown or would become utterly despondent and act pathetic and depressed in order to gain sympathy. He was warned to stop.
He has - on multiple occasions - shown behaviour and shared opinions that were sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, transmisogynistic, and just generally spiteful and uncalled for. He has exhibited zero respect or tolerance for boundaries, and at one point adamantly insisted on telling fat jokes in the cbox despite several members asking him not to: his justification being "it's from a stand-up comedy routine and the comic that tells the joke is fat". He was banned for this. In fact, now that I look back, every ban we gave him ultimately came from this one facet of him. First for the fat jokes, second for brazen transphobic remarks, and then finally - and permanently - when he declared that women who don't have a traditionally feminine figure are lesser than "real women".
All throughout this, we were trying to be nice and generous and give him the benefit of the doubt. We gave him second chances, we gave him time to think about his actions, think about why he was getting banned, and what he could do to stop that from happening in the future and be, you know, a better person. ...Obviously that was stupid of us, because he didn't. All he got out of it was that we were 'too sensitive' and 'overreacting' and he 'wasn't allowed to speak the truth/his mind'. He became incredibly bitter about this, and at the end of the day his last words on the site before his ban were griping over how we were going to get pissy and ban him again.
Immediately after his final ban, he went to another, unaffiliated site, under the impression that we shared staff. He then started to vocally demand to speak to the staff - except for me, I'll get to that in a moment - and get his ban repealed. The members and the staff of that site told him repeatedly that the people he was looking for were not on the site, and yet he continued to ask until finally one of the admins shut him up.
A few days after his final ban, he came back in the early morning under a sockpuppet account. He then started insulting the site and our staff team before 'dramatically' revealing himself and delivering an ultimatum in an outright cartoonishly over-the-top way. Either we apologize to him and repeal his ban, or he would 'destroy the site' with his 'programmer friends' because 'we don't deserve to run a forum' and would report us to jcink for having 18+ content. (We're jcink premium. We're literally paying jcink to have 18+ content.) We missed this event. Thankfully, our regular members - bless their hearts - responded to this very maturely and kept things well under control. Naturally, we banned him again as soon as we got on and his deadline to the site's destruction went by without event.
A day later, and he's back on the other site from before. He's acting depressed and victimizing himself on there, like he used to do when he was called out on his behaviour. Obviously, these people have no interest in dealing with the spillover of our site's drama, and we're not too pleased with it either. Eventually, one of us has to go over there and very calmly explain to him that the two sites are not related to eachother, and that he needs to stop harassing third parties and let things go.
Then he started trying to rejoin the site with sockpuppets. Several blatant, almost insultingly obvious sockpuppets. We would catch these very easily, I think the longest one lasted was half an hour, tops. We would ban them all, explaining that we knew it was him and that he needed to stop. Eventually, he did. But at that point the damage was done and we were all scrambling for our IP trackers the moment we had a guest for like, a month afterwards.
He sent an email to one of our staff, the one who had to go out on a limb and talk him down on the other site. It was basically a long, dramatic pity attempt, like the ones he used to do. In it, he blamed his mental illness for his behaviour and tried to explain that he couldn't be held at fault for the things he did or said because he was mentally ill. I want to take the time to note that this was the first time he had ever brought anything like this up, and we have several members suffering from many different kinds of mental illness, and none of them would ever, ever use it as a means to divert responsibility for the things they do or say. We sent him a reply, calmly and professionally explaining to him what he did, why it was wrong, why we weren't accepting it, and why he had no place at our site. Ever. This was several months ago now.
He never apologized for any of this. Ever. Made excuses or shifted blame, maybe, but never apologized.
Throughout all of this, this member has... well, let's not mince words. He hates me, and is under the impression that I'm the only thing in the way of him still being on the site. This is completely untrue, he would've been banned anyways. But in hindsight I think I can see why he'd think I have it out for him:
I was the most vocal about his sexual harassment and the one who ultimately put their foot down and told him that it was over, or he was gone.
The comments he made that led to his second ban were said directly to me, and were particularly insulting to me personally because I myself am trans. I made it very clear to him that I was unhappy about this and that he was being banned again, for a longer period of time. What he doesn't realize is that I actively chose to give him his final chance, permanently banning him was on the table, and the rest of staff was perfectly fine with me taking that choice. I didn't. I regret it immensely, but I didn't. Not to mention, the other admins would have banned him for his comments just as readily as I did.
I was the one who banned him the last time. Bear in mind that his final ban was a unanimous decision, I just happened to be the one to tell him that he was no longer welcome on the site and enter the command.
After this, he would actively avoid me. He'd call me out specifically when trash talking us and when he would demand staff, he would make a point to say that he doesn't include me in that. I honestly didn't much care. The others explained to him that I didn't act alone, that our decisions were made as a collective whole and that there was no personal grudge or vendetta involved. He wouldn't hear any of it.
So... it's been several months now and we were all pretty convinced that this was put to bed. We had noticed a couple months ago that he had moved onto the other forum mentioned above, and was... honestly completely unchanged and sexually harassing people on that site instead. We left it alone, we had warned the staff about him way back when this was actually an active topic for us, how they approached his behaviour was not our problem.
But then a couple nights ago, someone dropped in on our cbox. They introduced themselves as a moderator and programmer for a list of sites, and then proceeded to explain that they heard one of their 'friends' was a member on our site that had been banned. By me. She then proceeded to directly call me out for a completely fabricated version of what actually happened, personally attacking my age, telling me I need to 'go back to tumblr', that I'm not mature enough to staff a forum, and just generally putting me on blast for discriminating against the mentally ill and blowing up on them over their opinions regarding a children's television show. I was asleep for all of this, but another admin was there for it and refuted... basically everything before banning the guest. We debated what to do about it later, but decided to leave it alone for now because... well, we really don't want to engage in cross-site drama. That's just... stupid.
My biggest concern is for our site's reputation. Apparently this person is still out there, and without first-hand accounts to prove him wrong, he's getting people to believe his version of events and assassinate my character. I take care of our advertising and networking with affiliates and such, so my name is going to pop up on a lot of sites. If I'm being attacked and my reputation is being smeared, that's going to negatively effect my advertising network - and as a result, the lifeblood of our site as a whole. This is what distresses me about this; I can deal with people talking shit about me on the internet otherwise, it's not a big deal.
What do you guys do about harassment and people on other sites attacking your character? Is this something you've had to deal with before? Have you ever been singled out for harassment like this before?