Almost seven years have passed since I published an investigative report on SFF writer Benjanun Sriduangkaew, a/k/a/ the rage-blogger Requires Hate, and her years-long track record of engaging in abusive, harassing behavior toward other science fiction, fantasy, and gaming writers and fans online. The report was titled “A Report of Harm Done by One Individual Under Many Names,” and came out on November 6, 2014 on laurajmixon.com, my former author website. That report has since become known as “the Mixon Report.”
The report and the events surrounding it still come up at times in online discourse, and I’ve had people reach out to me, asking for a link to the full version. Unfortunately, the version I published on laurajmixon.com is no longer online, and the most recent web-archived version lacks the critically-important Appendix B, which contained a description of methodology and many evidentiary links. It also lacks the post’s 440 user comments. In the weeks after the report went up, WordPress repeatedly choked on Appendix B’s table sizes, complex formatting, and large number of links. Each time, it rendered the entire report inaccessible, forcing me to repost and reformat the entire report over and over. This was all occurring during the initial period after its release, when many people in the community were trying to access it.
I was never able to resolve the technical issues, so eventually I posted an abridged version instead, with a PDF of the full version available on request. In 2017, laurajmixon.com fell into a web-hosting oubliette—the result of a verification foul-up during a handoff between two hosting services. I lost control of the domain. The official version of the report disappeared down the rabbit hole of bygone bits and botheration.
I think it’s important for people to have access to an official public record of the full report so they can form their own opinions, based on its content. Therefore, I’ve attached below a PDF copy of the report, which includes Appendix B and a link to the web-archived comments. I’ve made a couple of minor edits to the main text and reformatted the tables to improve consistency of terminology and increase readability. Also attached is a separate document containing a brief overview of events leading up to the writing of the report, created recently by some of the report’s contributors.
(Requires Hate Report – Nov, 2014) (Requires Hate Redux – 2021 team write-up)
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A final note. As I mentioned above, while the report has become known as “The Mixon Report,” it’s not about me. It’s about the community. It’s about trying to help keep people safe in their online spaces, during a tumultuous, deeply divided time, when trust between white and BIPOC fans, writers, and publishers was at a nadir, and white supremacist, racist, homophobic, misogynistic, and transphobic trolling and baiting was on the rise (see GamerGate and the Sad and Rabid Puppies Hugo hijackings, et seq.).
The investigation and preparation of the report was a massive, unpaid effort made by many. I estimate I spent about 300 hours on the effort, all told: including investigating claims; interviewing potential targets; organizing links, screencaps, and other evidence; analyzing data; writing the report; and moderating user comments. But more importantly, an international team of 30 or more SFF writers, fans, and editors gathered around me as I began to collect people’s stories, and made their own substantial contributions to the project.
Without the efforts of those individuals, scattered across the globe—a multi-racial, multi-gender, multi-orientation group; initially most of them strangers to each other, who stepped up to do extensive outreach among their own peers; investigate and validate claims; shape analytical criteria; review and comment on multiple drafts; and wrestle with numerous extremely painful, difficult questions about how best to proceed along the way (not to mention the courage of the dozens more who were willing to share their stories of trauma and distress)—the report could not have been written.
That Hugo the SFF community awarded the report may have my name on it, and it may sit on my shelf, but it has never belonged to me. It belongs to all those who donated their time, their courage, and lived experiences to the report. And it belongs to all those who took a chance on me and rallied around the work we did together, in a difficult and divided time. You know who you are, and I haven’t forgotten you.
