#santino hassell
Ais (of In the Company of Shadows fame) has made a statement regarding what she knew and didn’t know about Santino Hassell on her tumblrandpatreon.
In summary, she has always thought Sonny was an individual, and only knew Mike and Alicia as Sonny’s housemates/friends. She has never met Sonny in person. The statement is a short one and links to a PDF file with a much longer and detailed explanation of her relationship with Sonny. In the longer statement, she also talks about Noah and what she remembers of him.
After the last post, we are back to our usual programming. It’s short and sweet today.
Summary: More apologies. Berkley Romance dumps Sonny. We go from calls to boycott to calls to retract your work from Riptide or else. Xen X Cole appears to be an excellent human being.
Berkley Romance severs(x) their connection with Sonny. So far, there is no mention of what they plan to do with the books they have already published.
Then Eddie Witt posts this. For those of you keeping score, I think this is the “social experiment” square on the bingo card. Megan Erickson makes another apology(x). It appears she has learned from her past mistake, somewhat. (Badapology bingo for anyone interested in playing along.)
A separate GR thread has been established for the Sarah Lyons and Riptide aspects of this mess. Rachel Haimowitz (the publisher at Riptide) makes a non-apology(x) (we’re not even sure the word apology applies here), and Xen calls her out. Riptide then goes dark.
Santino Hassell makes yet another apology(x) (and deletes their first one). Missing is any mention of the bullying, false cancer claims, catfishing, etc. They apologise for “messing up” and being an asshole and that all the lies were the result of….actually it’s very hard to know.
Those “bad” and “good” author lists people were making? We now have demands that authors either leave(x) Riptide or be labelled(x) as part of the problem. Some people point(x) out the issues(x) with that tactic(x).
If nothing else, we hope people reading this will leave the understanding that Xen X Cole is an articulate motherfucker and basically wins the internet.
God willing, this will be the last of the daily updates. Things are dying down a bit, old friendships are being reignited and it’s more or less reactions rather than new reveals. We can probably all agree that any more dramatic reveal would probably be the end of us all.
Summary:Some more half-hearted apologies and some very well written apologies. Bloggers delete review of Sonny’s books. Amazon will be doing refunds however this will financially impact Riptide.
Edit 12/03: We have been told that Eddie of gayforbooks is not the same as Eddie Witt, and any suggestion of this has been removed. In addition, as Sakura’s gender has not be specified, we have opted to use a gender neutral term “they” instead of “she”.
Miller-Callihan (whom you might remember as Sonny’s agent) tweeted this(x). Something of a non-apology to be sure. At this point we can say many of Sonny’s most ardent defenders are not covering themselves in glory here. As Ellie Reads points out, “If your apology is all about your hurt at being conned by SH and your grief over losing a friend, it’s useless to the real victims in this situation.” A good twitter thread about why this matters with screencaps hinting at the degree of smearing that went on behind the scene.
Apologiesandstatementswithoutusing the phrases “if I hurt anyone” or a focus on their own pain. This includes Amy Jo Cousin.
Blogsareremovingtheirreviews of Sonny’s books. Riptide clarifies exactly how much a publisher really knows about the authors and what the signing process entails. Amazon is also doing refunds for purchases of Sonny’s book, though that will coming out of Riptide’s pocket, which Riptide hopes to recover from the last few royalty checks.
Sakura deactivates the sweetsakuradoll twitter (the account remains as an archive), but not without a last fuck you to Sonny. They admit to being an author who remained anon to avoid overshadowing the others involved, and did not wish to profit from this.
Roan Parrish makes a statement that says….very little, but this sentence “i’m pretty uncomfortable raising my own feelings in the context of others’ pain” is promising. Eddie Witt says this which starts off promising and then gets blamey at the end. (Eddie is LA Witt’s husband so not exactly unbiased).
We wanted to end with this post by Harper Miller, which is a neat think piece on the entire situation.
