In part 4, I talked about how I exercised my right to cultivate my Facebook friend list so that I no longer had mutual friends with Alec Peters or Crysstal Hubbard, who at that point were both stalking and harassing me (I have cited many examples of this in my previous installments, but part 3 probably contains some of the best ones). I also mentioned that thankfully, I personally didn’t have very many people to remove, as I didn’t have many friends in common with them in the first place. My partner Dean, however, was not so lucky when he made the decision to cut ties with their mutual friends.

Dean had, after all, actually known Alec – something I can’t claim (so again, interesting that Alec and his rabid followers started harassing me in the first place).

Dean, however, had been friends with – and worked with – Alec, and they were also both longtime members of a Battlestar Galactica fan club called The Colonial Fleet. So while I had zero problems simply removing anyone from my Facebook “friends” list who was mutual friends with these people, Dean (for obvious reasons) jumped through a few more hoops, including posting about his decision and giving people a few days to see it, as well as sending direct messages to a handful of people he believed were close friends when he was worried they might not have seen his announcement due to the nonsense Facebook algorithm.

The thing is, whether they saw his post or received a message, the vast majority of Dean’s Facebook friends who were mutual friends with Alec and/or Crysstal unfriended them. Not that it matters who chose what, or how many did so, in our minds – the point was that people were given a simple choice: disconnect from the people who are harming us, or don’t, and we will disconnect from you. It is anyone’s – everyone’s – right, to decide how they cultivate their own social media connections…and that means it was my right, and Dean’s right, to say we would no longer associate, even on social media, with those who continue to associate with the people who were/are attempting to cause us harm with their threats and lies.

Again, though, as I mentioned at the end of part 4, Dean’s “unfriendening” (as we jokingly call it) opened a much larger can of worms than mine did…to the point where Alec not only complained about it on his own Facebook page, but also felt the need to bring what he felt was a “conflict” to the essentially-defunct* Colonial Fleet Facebook group.
*I say “essentially-defunct” due to the fact that the official Colonial Fleet had not been active in person or online for some time – I believe, at this point, since *at least* late 2018.

And just for posterity’s sake, here’s the post Alec linked to in that group – a post that merely served his apparent need to keep some Facebook “friends”:

Beyond the fact that, again, everyone has a right to cultivate their own Facebook “friends” list, the exchange that he and Dean then had on the Colonial Fleet Facebook group post before it was locked down tells more about the type of person Alec is than anything else, in my opinion:

I don’t want to make any presumptions, so I’ll simply ask: Why would someone respond to losing some Facebook friends by making a complaint in a basically-defunct Facebook group for a basically-defunct fan group? And what was the point of bringing his accusations about Dean’s supposed/assumed infidelity up in front of a bunch of people who, for the most part, had known Dean for years, if not more than a decade?

Either way, those accusations came into play again very soon. Because while the post that Alec made in that group was removed, soon after that Alec began sending Dean private messages.

Due to privacy laws, I am not going to share screenshots of that conversation in a public blog, but rest assured that we have proof of everything that was said. On that note, here is Dean’s take on those private messages:

“So while Alec was publicly trying to rally people to his cause, in private he told me ‘shut your mouth and leave me alone’ and then bragged about driving Jarrod into bankruptcy and threatened me with another lawsuit. Then he repeated the lies about my supposed infidelity, and now I am going to directly quote what he said to me next: ‘How do you even live with yourself? How are your kids going to feel when they grow up and learn that their father was cheating on their mother every Dragon Con?'”

– Dean Newbury

In Dean’s words, if this was an isolated incident, he wouldn’t have necessarily taken that last message as a threat to our family. But given the many, MANY, *repeated* threats that Dean had received over the previous years (especially considering AP followed through on one of his lawsuit threats!), and now what Dean perceived as a direct threat to ruin his relationship with his children, he decided to file a police report in order to document what had been happening.

Dean took the screenshots of these and many other messages (including ones that could only be interpreted as blackmail, as he was essentially told “shut up or you will get sued”) to the police. While the officer agreed with his assessment of the messages and the situation, he admitted that Alec had worded things in such a way that it did not meet the legal standard for prosecution.

That said, the officer told Dean to remove all avenues of communication, at which point Dean blocked Alec everywhere he could. But Alec apparently needed to get the last word in:

There’s yet another random amount of money being thrown out…but also, one does not need to LIE when there is actual PROOF.

I wish this was the end of this series, but sadly, it’s not. In the meantime, I have something far more fun to write about next 😉

Previous Installments:
Part 1: I’m Not a Star Trek Fan
Interlude: Proving My Point
Part 2: I’m Not an “Axanar Hater”
Part 3: I’m Not Perfect
Interlude 2: Too Little, Too Late?
Part 4: I’m Not Required to Ignore Attacks Against Me