Two things are blowing my mind right now. One is auto class, and the other is... well, I'm going to call your attention to this entry, specifically the part about hearing the Big Name Pagan telling haunted house stories. Because a mere month and a half after that....I found out that the BNP has been busted for having a stash of kiddie porn, and admitted it was his. Yeah. And after that, all kinds of "That dude skeezed all over me when I was 12 years old at a festival and nobody believed me" stories are coming out, and since he's finally been arrested for something, I gather this frees his ex-wife up from the restraining order forbidding her to talk about him, and now she and her kid are talking all over the Internet about how he abused them. I don't really feel comfortable linking all over the place about it (especially given the location where I am writing this--I have some "waiting on someone to do something else" free time going on today), but you can find that shit if you want to Google.

For the record: I don't know the guy, never spoke to him, have been to two presentations of his at the request of someone else. I've mentioned the second one briefly, but the first one was....on fairy tales or something? at my first con. Like the other one, I got dragged to it by someone else, a friend of mine at the time who was a fan of his. She did mention at the time that some kind of major drama had gone down with his ex-wife, but I never heard much about it. I don't remember that much about the presentation itself other than I wasn't particularly into it, mostly because of the presenter himself.

My impression of the dude? I cannot say I liked him. He does not strike me as being an attractive fellow, and the photos of him going around online about this tend to have him giving a icy gimlet stare that's just as unpleasant in person as it is in a photograph. I did not like his voice, which at best sounded incredibly rusty. I haven't heard the guy sing and don't want to, but I suspected he probably sounded like Bob Dylan. I found him abrasive and off-putting even in "friendly" mode during presentations. I had the impression that this was the sort of dude who had A Temper. Not "a temper," I mean "A Temper," like "don't piss him off at your peril because it's gonna be ugly." I concluded after the first presentation that he wasn't the sort of dude I would have wanted to associate with or hang around, and I didn't get his ah, popular appeal.

I did not know squat about his personal life until the second presentation, in which he was there with a girlfriend who is probably around her mid-20's, I'm guessing. I almost always really am creeped out by old man/drastically younger woman relationships, so that triggered my usual "ugh, really, you don't want to date someone who's your equal?" sort of thoughts and put me off him even further. I was trying to be reasonable about it mentally because his girlfriend didn't strike me as being particularly naive or easily victimized. I keep thinking of her and feeling sorry for her now, though. I did find the presentation to be pretty good despite my usual "ugh" feelings on the dude, but overall I still didn't like him or feel terribly comfortable being in his range. But since the first friend was a fan of his, I didn't really say anything about it. I don't know how Merry feels about the dude, but I didn't say anything recently either.

To be fair, the fellow never gave me the hairy eyeball or came on to me at any point in time, even though at the second presentation due to a space crunch I was pretty much sitting right under the dude's nose. I was uncomfortable sitting that close to him, but he wasn't specifically creeping on ME personally. Maybe he was showing restraint in front of the girlfriend, or maybe I looked like I was with my mommy, or maybe I'm just not his type. It's probably the latter one!

I'm not gonna claim I had particular psychic feelings about the dude being a bad egg, but he did give me a not-good vibe. I would not have thought kiddie porn was his particular thing--more like, "barely legal," perhaps. However, finding out he is an abuser....does not shock and surprise me. Guys with A Temper tend to end up being abusive, and that's probably why they give me the heebie-jeebies. But it does make you wonder that in a community where supposedly more people are tuned into their radar, this guy has been around for decades and nothing's really been done about him until now. It sounds like his Big Name Status did the same thing as it did elsewhere: discouraging people who did have bad experiences with him. I never had a bad experience with him to report other than "I don't really like this dude, for no particular reason that I can cite," but what about the other people?

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