We’re All In A Cult I Guess
Except I am very much not, thank you
I do not think I can even begin to adequately explain how surreal it is to watch a baseless rumor circulate about yourself. Nor how strange it is to decide that saying nothing is the best option, for fear that talking about it would make it bigger, which it undoubtedly will now.
Streisand Effect, and all that.
But I’m ready to talk about it. I’m ready to not be alone.
At first I tried to respond. Everything I said seemed to make it worse so I stopped saying anything. Every joke I ever made became the most serious utterance in the universe, apparently. In the months since, the reverse has happened: now it’s my silence that speaks volumes. To be a writer and have a Gordian knot created for you by other people, one in which you are unable to write about your own life and must watch others write it for you—it is a deep and throbbing sort of pain, one I feel acutely.
Here’s the short version, and the only version I can tell right now: sometime last year, a rumor started about me. It evolved, starting with suggestions that I was associated with fascism and nazism, to me being in a cult, then eventually to me being a sex cult recruiter. It came in the form of infographics and memes, slideshows about me, TikTok videos, a separate website, multiple Instagram accounts that shared screenshots of Wikipedia articles about fascists from long ago with the relevant “links” to me (like being Jewish, or one slide just highlighted “gay”) pointed out for all curious readers.
For whatever reason, of all these strange stories, the one that stuck (ie. finally got social media traction after months of throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what got views) is that I am a recruiter for NXVIM, a sex cult that is indeed a real and terrifying thing. I hate to have to clarify but I’m fucking tired of a rumor getting in the way of my life, so here you go: I—Shelby Lorman, cartoonist and author, creator of “awardsforgoodboys” the Instagram page and illustrated book, writer of this very newsletter Please Clap—am not and have never been involved in any sort of sex cult, sex cult recruiting, nazism or fascism. So if you’ve been “helpfully” commenting to others that I am, please know you are wrong, you have been led astray, and that you are contributing to the consistent erosion of my wellbeing.
The irony of being accused of recruiting for a cult while being on the receiving end of internet abuse and speculation that is patently cult-like is not lost on me. It is beyond surreal to watch people regurgitate things about me being in a sex cult without thinking simply because they heard someone with an excess of posts say it. If you have enough muddled information, enough highlights, enough content, it’s easy to assume it’s real. Well, someone is doing quite a lot of sleuthing here. Must point to something real! Why else would they do it?
I ask myself this a lot.
There are a few things that make this situation unique, though I think this type of harassment is endemic to the internet, and especially (ironically) in spaces that “care about shit.” This was my fundamental error in creating a cartoon world that lampooned low standards—when people decided they didn’t like me anymore, it wasn’t an easy break. It was “you’re a hypocrite, you’re a terrible person.” Well to be frank, I am not a great person, and have never suggested as much. But I can tell you this: I’m not in a cult. I don’t even know how I’d do that and I’m pretty sure all the NXIVM people are in jail. I am very well-connected, in part from being from LA and in part from being a niche internet celebrity, and from years writing and meeting people in NYC. But if being well-connected is the basis for unhinged rumors about my recruiting people into a sex cult, boy do I have news for you. Wait until I tell you how many well-connected Jews there are in the media! You won’t believe your ears!
I thought if I simply let it happen to me it would go away, that people would realize it was nothing but a story. But I knew how rumors functioned within the ecosystem of the internet (and how algorithms fuel disinformation) and could only watch as strangers amassed clicks and likes for telling a story about me. Putting on makeup and setting the lighting and adding the captions—all of this production for spreading rumors about me.
I know, intellectually, how misinformation works, how a few people or a single person can spawn an entire web of lies based on connecting supposed dots that simply aren’t there. I know how social media companies don’t give a single shit about truth provided they’re still capitalizing on our eyeballs in the attention economy. I knew very well how information online becomes fodder for self-appointed detectives, especially those who think they are sleuthing in the service of some greater good. Sometimes this is real, or real enough, but so often it points in an extremely strange direction, which leads to things like obsessive bullying of the targets they feel will actually respond. You probably won’t ever get an apology from Joe Rogan for spreading disinformation to millions of listeners so we might as well bully the Monterey Bay Aquarium into apologizing for tweeting that a sea otter was “chonky.”
I’ve read Jon Ronson, and to be honest didn’t find So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed very convincing at the time I read it. But now, oh wow. I see it now. It’s not simply the underlying desire to be doing good, to stand up for people. It’s the town square phenomenon: when the first tomato is launched, it’s game time. I accepted that even well-meaning people can believe ridiculous things about people they don’t know. Something I have myself of course done, as we all have. I know all too well the inadvertent (or obvious) schadenfreude of watching someone successful (perhaps inexplicably so) be brought to their knees, be humbled. I could make sense of the phenomenon in a million ways, but it didn’t stop the fact that it was happening to me.
When I denied these things, as they first started popping up and I was still on Twitter (mistake), the response seemed to be that if I had to deny them in the first place, there must be some truth to it. What? Someone had made this up about me, and then in denying it, I was making it more real? And why me, why now? With all the other very real predators and horrors in the world? I am not an angel, but I am not a monster—I am a niche cartoonist who doesn’t even post anymore. I think if you read any of my things, even if you vehemently hate them, it’s obvious quite quickly that I am not a nazi or fascist. I write almost entirely about how we communicate and love in the digital age. I wrote a book about dating, the thesis of which is quite literally “we’re all messy.” I write about internet trends, unpacking why we behave in the way we do.
If we want to get into the deep splintering of unity because of neoliberalism and the uncomfortable reality that identity becomes currency, especially online, then let’s label myself: I’m a daughter, many people’s worst ex, a socialist Jew with a myriad of health problems and a penchant for oversharing. I am a Sagittarius with a tendency towards bluntness, I never wanted to be an “influencer” and think it’s hilarious that I inadvertently became one.
I knew, or thought I did, how easy it is to share things that aren’t true, especially if they’re packaged well. Packaged Well on the internet usually means 1) with a slideshow of some sort, or 2) with so much information, convoluted already, draped further with confusing and vaguely progressive-sounding language, all to create the effect that if you, reader, don’t understand, it is a moral failing. Your moral failing. That is, incidentally, also the basis for how many actual cults think about things.
No one wants to be on the wrong side of history, and when history unfolds at warpspeed it’s easier to err on the side of caution. You better share this new bit of data that’s going around, just to be safe, just to let people know you’re paying attention, even—especially—if you don’t totally understand. If you wanted to check the source, if you weren’t totally clear, well. That’s on you for not believing, that’s on you for not being able to penetrate what are often impenetrable statements, ones that sound true enough on the surface but underneath, mean nothing. Or worse, are actually quite sinister. To question it is to be thoroughly bullied by the already-existing believers, to be thrust into the town square with tomatoes aimed at you. To question is to be dogpiled on in the comments, to have your inbox flooded with abuse, to see your pushback swiftly deleted by the page admin as though it didn’t even exist. Even posing clarifying questions can be a quick path to being ostracized, isolated. Better just stay put and be quiet.
I already felt lonely online, far before the rumors started, far before I watched a story about me spiral out of control. Far before then I stopped using the Instagram page. I wrote about this, wrote about how uncomfortable I felt with that sort of influence. I don’t understand why, now, a rumor persists. Is it to undermine the presence I once had? To create something about me to battle against, now that I am no longer present? To keep a shadow of my supposed wrongdoing covering all the great work I made? Is it to resolutely demand people never put me on a pedestal, the very thing I satirized, by inventing something so awful that no one feels okay sharing my work ever again? I don’t know.
Don’t get me wrong, I wanted the followers, at least in the beginning. It felt great, it was addictive, it was constant dopamine. It felt like a hundred doors opening all the time. I shared freely and obsessively, chattering away into the void.
No one said
You’ll really regret posting so much about a dude that will mercilessly break your heart, someday.
No one said
Strangers are going to remember things about you and your relationships that you might not even remember or know. They will slide into your DMs to ask you about a wound still festering, they will think because you have a large following that everything about your life is content, and if they don’t have an answer offered to them on a plate they will not hesitate to dig for it.
No one said that
There’s a difference between feeling heard and shouting into an echo chamber, can you still tell?
Or warned with each part of yourself you draw, each half-truth you will into the universe, you are giving away a part of yourself you won’t be able to get back, people will think they know you because you make relatable things, people will forget you are good at making relatable things and that’s why you got popular in the first place, the walls between artist and audience will dissolve, you will be overwhelmed, overtaken by the needs of a mob.
No one warned me people would feign friendship with me to gain proximity, to get a post out of me. That I would find myself wondering if I was doing the same. No one warned me how duplicitous and cruel this internet corner was. No one warned me that people would unfollow if I didn’t promote their book, that they would suddenly be back when they wrote another one. No one warned me people might pretend to know me better than they did in order to sell their own personal brand, whatever it was they were actually selling.
Each time new strangers came into my orbit I felt I had to redefine myself, morph, sway. I undulated with the internet and my viewers, and like most very online people, adapted in real-time to the world around us—or, the very small world as delineated by our feeds. No grass, no flowers, no scent of outside: just infographics, signposts about how to be, about what our pain really meant, about how to love ourselves, about who to hate today.
It had felt, and was at times, deeply communal and healing. But it wasn’t community, and I was naive to ever think so. It wasn't a community, not because the people there weren’t great people, but because a social media page cannot hold a community. Because even the people I thought I grew to know remained absolute strangers. A social media page cannot be safe for everyone, it cannot be tailored to every experience—and so over and over again I watched as people who “got big” for talking about definitely relatable but deeply personal and specific experiences were told they were failing an audience who was infinitely hungry to be seen in the right ways, to have more. It resonated, but it also felt like being treated like a gum-ball machine, one in which strangers passing through could venture a suggestion—often demand it—and eagerly wait to see their prize.
These people don’t know me, I tell myself, of the people who could believe something so sinister about me. I racked my brain for what about my public presentation of self could have led them to believe something like this. I knew I was messy, knew I could be mean, impulsive, reactive. I didn’t ever think everyone would, or should, like me or what I made. I hated most of what I made and found my existing self-loathing made a lot of the internet feel like a breeze. But I didn’t know how to cope with something so horrible being believed about me. How could they? I felt it was my fault. What did I do to deserve this? It must have been something.
When I’m not overwhelmed and saddened by the fact that people could believe something like this, I have to laugh. It’s sometimes a little bit funny. Because what the fuck? How did I get here? I made a bunch of drawings which got niche popular and then stopped posting on Instagram because social media broke my brain and made me very sad, because trying to communicate to hundreds of thousands of people at once made me very confused, very miserable, very sick. I thought the story about me being a recruiter for NXIVM was so bananas that no one would believe it. But I watched it sustain itself, never directly, but people would tell me, they would ask if I knew that this rumor was circulating, they would think they were helping but it only made me more and more unwell.
I learned, far before now, that people love drama that doesn’t have to do with them. People love anything that looks like gossip, that can be treated as such. I knew all too well how strangers would feel entitled to all of your life if you provided even a sliver of it to the public. My own google searches prompt “ex boyfriend” and “disability” next to my name, a hint at what prying eyes had tried to find out about me beyond what I willingly shared. Boundaries are nebulous online, to say the least, and even more blurred by “fame” and what it means to be a person who suddenly other people watch for no other reason than their metrics—expecting entertainment, expecting answers.
But gossip that spreads with the faux-gravitas of helping other people appeals to those who are otherwise, I suspect, quite rational. It slips into the sweet spot, seems vitally urgent and potentially even life-saving. How quickly a lie spreads when those repeating it think they are doing a service to common good, sliding into your DMs to tell you that hey, I heard this thing about this person you follow, you might want to unfollow. No one has time to really check, you do a cursory glance, you decide it’s true or not based on how much you already like or dislike that person. You unfollow just to be safe, you don’t want any more DMs. It’s easier to just believe than do research, easier to share than to pause. It spreads, it spreads.
I cannot stop a rumor. I cannot change anyone’s mind about me. It’s both surreal and healing to accept that, and to speak to it. To accept that for some people, nothing I say about myself will convince them of who I am. To think that even the people who “stan” me don’t know who I am, how they get it wrong too. Everyone, it seems, has something to say about who I am, though to all of them I am a complete stranger, simply a vaguely three-dimensional compilation of the posts I’ve made (which is a brand I created, not a portal to my soul and deepest desires).
There’s nothing I can say, really, that will make the experience go away. And for the record, watching a rumor spread about you being a sex cult recruiter in the midst of a global pandemic and seeing social media tags arrive about why random people are unfollowing you, how grateful they are now to know the truth, is not something I would recommend to anyone. It sucks. It sucks to have this seep into my real, offline life: a stranger in a coffee shop apologizes for what was “going on, you know the whole sex cult thing.” A friend I haven’t spoken to in years approaches me at a friend's wedding just to confirm it’s not true. A person I am seeing tells his ex who he’s dating, she asks “isn’t she a cult leader or something?”
I’ll be doing better for weeks and then something, anything, will remind me that there are people in the world who earnestly believe a vile rumor about me and I will break down, become catatonic, too scared to leave the house. I will break down in a private space that doesn’t feel private anymore, because nothing does. I worry I am being watched, feel a paranoia that I know is not suited to this situation creeping in and cannot help but feel it. I have watched my friends and family be dragged into the story, anyone who ever followed me or so much as liked a post, everyone subject to scrutiny just because they potentially know me. I felt terrible guilt, I felt if it was just about me it would be okay, I could handle it, I guess I signed up for this when I courted internet attention because I wanted my cartoons to be seen.
When all this was starting, I frankly said the experience of being baselessly accused of extremely serious shit and watching people believe it sometimes made me not want to be alive. I was sent, by someone well-meaning, a slideshow that was made about me in response.
In a bright white font on top of a pastel gradient read something like “just a reminder Shelby Lorman is a part of a cult and using suicide as a manipulation tactic” above a slideshow about how this is done. I’d never felt so alone in my life. I have never wanted to die so much in my life.
I can’t stop thinking about the process of making that. Louder for people in the back, amiright? This behavior is horrifying. It can kill people. It makes me so unbearably sad, not just for myself, but for everyone who could be led to act so cruelly, and what this reflects about our current landscape both online and off.
Of many bitter ironies at work here, one I feel deeply is how I once ran to the internet for a sense of belonging. How being sort of a loner, being sick, being much more socially fluent with a keyboard than my voice, made the internet and the people I met there feel like my people, my home. The page I created, while not a community, was a home in many ways. For me and I suspect others. I can’t even open the page now without feeling like I am going to vomit, or in many cases actually vomiting. (It’s great!)
I mourn that I (like many others) took to the internet to feel seen, feel heard, and instead often found ourselves wondering (perhaps explicitly, perhaps unconsciously) why it makes us feel so angry, so alienated, so confused. Why it mandates urgency in the strangest directions, how it compels us to prove that we care in the correct ways, how vehemently we all tell ourselves that the stranglehold social media has on us is one we could slip out of at any time, if we wanted. How embarrassing it is to recognize that even scrolling past something innocuous can lodge in our ribcages and unsettle our days. How utterly unprofound to realize the yoke of social media is not something you can slip so easily.
It has felt both claustrophobic and like standing on the edge of a yawning abyss to watch all of this happening to myself. To see how a very false rumor that started in virtual space has crept into my life online and off. It has felt like a game of telephone gone horribly wrong and though I look for the correct wire to snip, to simply end the gossip, to say you’ve got it all confused, it—like much of the social mores of the internet—is invisible.
So I’ve stopped trying—to end it, to stand up for myself constantly in a public forum, to word the right tweet in the right way so people believe me. I am exhausted. But I’m no longer alone, in writing this, which feels like an important next step. I don’t know where to go from here, honestly.
I know that I want to keep writing things, that I will keep writing things. Part of that means rewriting my own story: I must consistently remind myself I am not who people think I am, not who people invent, not a figment of gossip, not a distant and unfeeling brand. I am not a projection, fantasy, or nightmare. I am just a person. I have to try to rewrite the impulse to figure out why this would happen, or why to me, or why this rumor, or why now. Instead I will try, as ever, to simply move forward. To hold the pain it has caused me but not let it rule me, to reframe the internet spaces that once felt safe as what they are—nebulous, highly contrived chaos realms, which only cause me (and everything, in my opinion) much pain. I will try to honor that I started sharing my work online years ago with one purpose: to make people laugh. And that even if you hate me, or still think I’m a sex cult recruiter, unfortunately I’m very fucking funny. That I owe it to myself and the people that do support me (I am unbelievably humbled that there are many!) to create the things I am best at creating.
I yearn to be able to make jokes again, to make people laugh and think, to not be so daunted by lies—to get to the other side of these toxic rumors in one piece. I will get there, I know I will.
Thank you for reading, see you around (in your inbox, not on social media, for obvious reason.)
With love and gratitude,
Shelby (and Clem)