Hi, folks, I’ve heard Cenk say that he got a message from various members about something and I was wondering what’s a guaranteed way to reach him. I want to send him a 7 page letter I’ve been writing the last few days about abuse at my alma mater I’ve been going through. I plan to donate, so it’ll be worth his time, but I wanted to synch the two.
Thanks in advance.
Just out of curiosity, what’s the TLDR version?
You can tag @cenkuygur here, but if you want it private maybe [email protected] could forward it to him.
Dear Cenk and Ana,
Last year, I told you I’d been gas lit by institutions. As an out-of-work performer with social anxiety, I relied on my alma mater’s community center’s Fitness and Wellness Center, to socialize. I trust Canada’s most famous university’s students, academics, and low level staff, but the 100K+ -earning professional managers ended my faith in it by violating my rights.
One of the smartest women I’d ever met worked there; she stalked me for months before I talked to her. We’d hit it off for a month and then she’d avoid me like she hated me; when I kept things professional, she’d stalk me more, interrupt my conversations with other women, and reinitiate closeness before repeating the cycle. She seemed to care, as when we ran into each other on the subway, conversing happily. She asked about my “Mad Men” script. I doubted my abilities. Her favorite work was John Milton’s “Paradise Lost”. She said he struggled for years to do anything of worth, “and suddenly at, like, 70, he does this amazing… thing! You’re a writer!” No one had ever said anything so beautiful to me; within weeks, she was ignoring me.
In 2016, seeing her depressed for weeks led me to risk turning her off to save her life by revealing I’d sought therapy so she’d consider it; she was kind, then avoided me the rest of the day. 11 months later, in June 2017, I felt bad for refusing her advances the day before, so I confronted her to know if we had a future. Inspired by “Cheers” and “Moonlighting”, I said, “I think, on some unconscious level, you have feelings for me and that makes you uncomfortable and you take it out on me!” Rather than admit to mutual feelings, she said she had none and called Campus Police.
Days later, her gym manager boss said she’d accused me of sexual harassment and threatened to expel me if I talked to her. Yet, next month, when no male staff were watching, she went back to stalking me, moving close when I’d move away, hitting on me, trying to talk to me; thrice, in August 2017, she’d stop 2 feet in front of me on the step machine and stare into my face pleadingly; I shut my eyes. Surveillance cameras captured this, but I didn’t know until notices advertised them in 2020.
My hardcore feminist psychologist assured me I hadn’t sexually harassed her, warned she was dangerous, that I’d defied her unspoken terms by talking about our relationship, and that her flirtations weren’t due to attraction, but her own ego. She was annoyed that I’d apologized to her so much. “You’ve apologized enough. Stop apologizing to her.” Yet she insisted trying to clear my name now would be read as hostile. “If you go in like this, no one’s going to believe you. They’re going to believe her!” I tried to put it in my past.
Part 2
More disturbing was that staff and alumni with whom I’d been on good terms acted strangely from then on. They began stalking me, creepily watching my interactions with staff, often avoiding eye contact, and ignoring greetings and repair requests; women who were friendly when not surveilled were intimidated into not talking to me; one shivered out of fear and many whispered or greeted me in a low voice. Male staff and alumni would ask in an intimidating manner, “How are you?”, but never follow up when I responded friendlily. Once, when one janitor asked this, and I said I didn’t feel well, he stopped mopping, 20 feet away, and erupted, “Why the hell not!?” Less tactful, he once stalked me in the upper gym by mopping up near me the entire time; when I went down to stretch alone, so did he to dust a nearby decorative oar for the duration; when I looked at him suspiciously, he giggled uncomfortably “just dusting!”; another time, while I was looking at my phone, he paced back and forth to mop the same stretch of hallway. New, less experienced staff would ask formulaic questions, but be unable to deviate. One would ask, “How was your workout?” robotically, and then wouldn’t respond when I’d ask about him.
By late 2017, #metoo was taking over. While mostly good, I was a casualty of its exploitation, as my psychologist of 10 years, who’d helped so much, spent the next 2 calling me paranoid, was hostile at my frustration with her disbelief, and implied I was predatory for seemingly inventing reasons to not move on. I knew if I ran now and switched gyms, I’d always be running. If I didn’t prove what was happening, she’d always hold it against me – as if to say, “Remember, you can’t trust your judgment.” When I pointed out the woman stalked me after the incident, disproving she’d ever feared me, my psychologist said it was fine, since I wasn’t in physical danger. She excused the boss threatening me and reporting me to “the sexual violence office,” too. I had only to see where I went wrong, culminating in her hissing, “You think you’re the victim?!” It was her alma mater, too, and I think she unconsciously didn’t want a system she favored to be scrutinized if my story got out that a woman had exploited it. In July 2017, inspired by James Comie, I began documenting my relationship with the woman and everything that would happen in memos; it was heart-wrenching. Claiming fear for my mental health, my psychologist suggested I stop and give her my files for safe keeping. She made me doubt my very sanity.
Part 3
Yet, in December, 2017, she said I could contact the Sexual Violence Prevention and Support Center. The SVPSC director was kind and explained by phone I had no protections as a former student, and that she wasn’t required to answer me, but she said she didn’t see the incident as serious; she couldn’t even recall it, but said she’d have advised the manager to engage me in “an open, educational process” to realize where I went wrong. That’s all I wanted. We emailed back and forth, as I told her what I was seeing and begged for help. After meeting for an hour in November 2018, she was sure the manager had neither the right nor desire to do what he was doing and said she felt I was paranoid.
When I asked about the incident 6 months later, the manager refused to say of what I’d been accused “out of respect for” my stalker; said he was “very happy with [my] behavior;” threatened me angrily, “I keep telling you to leave it in the past, so leave it in the past!”; assured me I had no risk of running into her since she’d left to get a PhD in another city, and wouldn’t be back for 5 years; claimed my slate was clean and that no orders were given to not talk to me; and feigned offense at the thought he’d conduct such a conspiracy, saying he was busy with an attempted suicide. My stalker returned 2 months later under the euphemistic claim to the SVPC that she didn’t work there, but still does shifts.
In December 2018, I told a high level gym staffer the woman acted like two different people and stalked me after the incident. He took me down the hall to privately confess, “She likes to tease guys. She’s intense and kinda manipulative.” That’s when it started to make sense – her changing behavior depending on who was around; her boss sighing after the incident, “This has happened with her before;” the familiarity of men she swatted away; despite sexually suggestive cues, her never committing verbally for plausible deniability. Rather than change her behavior, she merely disguised it. My informant didn’t understand why she’d been able to keep her job. He said the second-in-command knew, which I misunderstood him to mean he was upset, too. He agreed to be identified as a high level informant to clear my name with the SVPSC, and implied I should have no reason to fear since “some guy was caught masturbating in the pool, but he still comes in here.” When I told my psychologist this, she proudly brought up the logical fallacy of how he’d talk to me if staff couldn’t talk to me. I foolishly referred to the woman’s reputation to the second-in-command, which led him to intimidate my informant into silence, a form of witness tampering.
Part 4
Over 2.75 years, I’d begged higher ups for a fair trial and investigation, offering to take a lie detector. They ignored me. The alumni association vowed to get me answers by Friday in 2019, but has ignored phone calls and emails since; even a student conducting a survey of grads who listened to my story in horror, believed criminality took place against me, and was sure his boss would help was unsuccessful. In 2019, the SVPSC referred me to someone at HR it assured me was independent of the center and had many clients; I later found out this untrue and she was the HR director working solely for the center; I’d like to believe this was a mistake, but it looks like it was a trick. The HR director said she “knew the facts” and that staff weren’t given instructions about me. So, to prove to her, the SVPSC, my psychologist, and myself that I wasn’t insane, I got the manager on audio, in an area accessible to the public that secretly had a surveillance camera. He encouraged staff to discriminate against me by saying he hated me, mocked me with male staff, and described their conspiracy against me, involving “the community leaders”. He defamed me, saying “she was, like, ‘you need to leave me alone’” when she never did; I asked her consent to speak to her, and she ended it by repeatedly asking, “Are you okay?” When the HR director found out I’d collected evidence – rather than investigate him, based on my memos that recounted his abuse, listed staff witnesses of my stalker’s behavior, and my informant – she insisted the manager “did nothing wrong”, and permanently revoked my membership. She’d only say I could appeal to the community center’s warden – basically its CEO.
In March 2022, I called Campus Police to find out my stalker’s charges and report my abuse. A kind officer referred me to a staff sergeant so disinterested he had to be emailed twice by her and a third time by me in 3 weeks. Meanwhile, a lowly constable who believed my story insisted I email the warden. The staff sergeant got on board with the center before talking to me. He gas lighted me, saying I sounded paranoid, interrupting any reference to my recording as a crime, was outraged I called my stalker a sexual predator, and urged I drop the matter, offering to have a coffee with me as friends. If I wanted the report, he said I could file a Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA) request; twice he said he’d follow up with how to do that, but didn’t. When I emailed the Campus Police director a week later to complain about his abuse, including not telling me how to file a FIPPA request, and demand a new investigator, he only told me how to file the request. No one would investigate the staff sergeant or my story.
Part 5
My FIPPA request to my university’s FIPP office yielded a 1 page Campus Police report. I thought to ask for any documents relating to me at the Fitness Center from 2017 on, and it found 361 pages. Despite the FIPPA prioritizing my right to my personal information and that exclusions be limited and specific, the office refused to disclose any of it. It cited fear of serious physical harm not just to those involved, but to law enforcement, despite the fact I’d threatened no one, had no history of violence, and been a model citizen. It also claimed the documents were employees’ personal, private information. Ontario’s appeal process assigned a mediator who found it excluded 7 pages from the report. When they agreed, their revised letter said I’d have pay again to file; my mediator said I didn’t have to, and felt I had a right to some of these documents. The office got the page count at the Fitness Center wrong, too. My mediator asked if I wouldn’t mind excluding from my request all emails I sent or had been sent, which the office ridiculously said were dangerous to give me. Yet how could it be dangerous to give me what I already had? I argued this breached the Act’s absurd result principle and showed bad faith.
The higher up adjudicator didn’t agree and fully sided with the university 2 years after my filing. Her order’s errors proved she hadn’t read the hundreds of pages of memos, emails or listened to the audio I submitted. She’d gotten basic facts about what I wrote wrong. She mischaracterized the university in her summary as wholly justified and not acting in bad faith. Yet, in the body, she concluded that the office’s claim to personal, private information was largely baseless, since the records were confined to their professional conduct, which was all I wanted. Yet she approved their denying access since my being “very unhappy there” somehow meant I posed a serious physical threat of harm. She refused to exercise her major investigative powers. All I could do was write a letter requesting she reconsider her order.
Part 6
Realizing how deceitful university authorities were being not just at the Fitness Center, but the rest of the community center, Campus Police, the Alumni Association, and the FIPP office, I filed a second request for records related to me from 2017 to the present outside the scope of my first request. I also asked for surveillance footage from the summer of 2017 that’d show my stalker’s behavior, and records of her family’s donations to the university, since she boasted of her family’s history there, and I saw her father donated to our college. Rather do a search, the office said my request was made in bad faith out of frivolity or to cause vexation, and that fulfilling it would overwhelm its operations. They then used that request to add that my first request was itself proof I was a serious threat of physical harm. They even cited the wrong FIPPA clause – so arrogant that the privacy commissioner’d rubberstamp their denial of my rights.
When I called the constable back, he seemed afraid to take my case, but emphasized that nothing in the report suggested I was a danger to anyone. He still insisted I email the warden, and, if that failed, the president of the university. So, in September 2022, I emailed the warden, summarizing the abuse I’d suffered, demanding an investigation. Rather than answer me, as the HR director implied he would, he announced his resignation 3 weeks later. He boasted experience in human rights law and cynically achieving benchmarks in creating diversity at the center. Lest you think, he was retiring, he appointed an interim warden, meaning he didn’t expect to retire and was doing so in mid-October, not at the start of term. Moreover, he wasn’t “leaving the university” to relax, but to become president and CEO of a multi-million dollar funeral home company that owns plots of land. I’m sure I scared him. Moreover, the manager and his second-in-command who threatened me – both of whom worked at the gym for over a decade – suddenly weren’t anymore. The center regularly interviews various staff every year or so, yet their names are no longer searchable; there’s no announcement wishing them well in leaving their jobs, so it wasn’t on good terms; they were fired. My only gripe is the now former manager is still pulling in over 100k as a track coach at the university.
A new adjudicator is handling my second set of requests, but I doubt she won’t approve the office’s lies, too. If I have to surrender, I wanted someone out there who actually cares – far more than my family that never asks me about this – to know what happened to me and what has surely happened to others. This institutional failure has disillusioned me as to Canada’s legal system.
Part 7
In one of our last sessions in 2019, I told my psychologist that, however much I tried, I was never going to be the perfect feminist, but thought she’d made me a better person in understanding women. She said she’d never tried to change me. I asked why she insisted I buy the feminist tome “Our Bodies, Ourselves”, and she said it was to help me get dates. She simplistically said problems I thought I had with her were really my transferring my issues with my parents, but that was an excuse to not examine her abusive behavior; I’d argue she often engaged in counter-transference with me.
She promised we could talk about what to do if I needed her to testify to what went on at the center. Yet, when I summoned the courage to show her proof of what happened to me, she ignored my emails. Only the Ontario College of Psychologists intervening forced her to answer. When I relayed their insistence I had a right to her notes, she promised to have them done soon, but threatened to charge me. I waited over a year and a half, before asking again for notes from only 2014-2019, saying I was entering adjudication over a second set of records, after the university withheld 359 pages about me at the Fitness Center, and that the manager and warden had been fired. She finally sent them, but they were just 60 pages of notes she’d type after each session, so why did it take her so long to give me what she could reprint? This person who could be punishingly self-righteous and was my moral guide against whom I measured much of my growth, in the end, lacked integrity. My one consolation is that I sensed she was “going Joe Biden” in her 70s from late 2017 onward. I comfort myself with the view that the old her would’ve been proud of my fighting to clear my name, but never trying to paint all women with the same brush as I have every right my stalker, a serial sexual predator with no honor.
As either a spouse of a therapist or someone in therapy, you and Ana comprehend the gravity of my psychologist’s betrayal, placing her ideology ahead of her patient’s mental health by abusively invalidating my feelings. As shy as I was in pursuing relationships, I’d grown even more reticent thanks to this experience. Since #metoo’s start, I want to thank you both for questioning the cheap use of feminism by some to justify blanket attacks on men, when many of us try our best to respect women. At the same time, you’ve eased our defensiveness, so that we’re free to be more sensitive to our blind spots.
Part 8
And it’s not all bad news. Last year, I got to act as part of the main cast in a TV show, my first paid job since university. My favorite band, The Cure, released their first album in 16 years and another one of my favorites, Pulp, announce plans to record their first new album in 21 years. So, life’s looking up, and TYT was a huge part of that. When this year began and you needed funds, I began saving so I could donate 1,000 USD; I have to do it via Paypal because it’s beyond my credit card limit and my father would freak out if he know I was doing this. My family financially supports me, so I live well, but giving this much hurts, but not as much as losing you two. I love you!
Thank you! Just sent it.
Damn, that’s a lot! I sincerely hope you find the answers you need. Not for nothing, I’d think long and hard before sending a thousand bucks, though, you know?
Wow. You actually read it? That’s so sweet of you. I became emotionally attached to TYT because I was socially isolated, particularly since the pandemic, and they helped me kinda cope with what was going on. So, I’m super grateful and then there’s all the political stuff I’m so proud of them for doing – in forcing Biden out, not lying about Kamala, etc. I don’t have much, but my parents subsidize me. They’d be pissed if they knew I donated that much, but I’d be really sad if TYT collapsed, so it was worth it to me. Thank you for caring!
I completely get what you’re saying. You never need to thank me for caring, that’s what we’re here for. I hope you have a great New Year’s Eve and Day. 
Have you thought about reaching out to legal aid organizations or advocacy groups focused on institutional accountability? They may provide valuable resources to support your case.