9:32pm April 16, 2015

Misquotes

Someone mentioned having read about me in Wired magazine many years ago. I just wanted to make clear a couple things about that article.

The reporter lost his tape recorder, or it broke, or something, on the way home from interviewing me. Because of this, he had to do most of the article from memory. Which is, according to another reporter I talked to, a reporter’s worst nightmare, whether it’s losing your notes or your tape recordings.

I believe that this is one reason there were two serious errors in the article. However, when I pointed out the errors, he told me “Nobody will care, they’ll understand.” He was wrong.

The two errors were something that happens to me very often.

I’m highly echolalic even now, and I often quote people directly to get my point across. When I do so, I am always diligent about giving credit to the person who actually said or made whatever I am quoting.

In that article, there were two big errors.

In one case, I quoted D. J. Savarese. When asked whether autistic people should be “treated”, he said, “Yes, treated, with respect.” I was extremely clear that this quote came from D. J. Savarese. But when he remembered me saying it, he apparently didn’t remember that. And he also didn’t think D.J. would care, after I told him his mistake.

D.J. did care. Fortunately, having been in the media himself, he did not blame me for the mistakes of a reporter. But other people have, and did. Other people think I was trying to plagiarize him. I wasn’t. I didn’t. I gave him credit several times during the interview to drive home the point that I was quoting someone, not coming up with the words myself.

There was another more ambiguous situation in the article where I was playing a video on my laptop or something, and it wasn’t my video, but the reporter didn’t acknowledge that it wasn’t my video. I won’t name the creator of the video because he is an accomplice of my stalker and a long-time bully of many members of the autistic community (yet claims to be our victim, of course). But I did (at that point we hadn’t had a public falling-out, even though I knew one was coming because of how he behaved around me) credit him when showing the video. And the way it was written was ambiguous and made it sound like maybe it was my video, and he was not credited. I was afraid to credit him in public because I was afraid to name him in public at that point, so I just hoped he’d understand, but instead he took it as an opportunity to show how I was supposedly victimizing him.

In general, if you see anything “quoting” me from any media source, check with me about whether it’s actually what I said. Because frequently the quotes are from someone else, or else made up entirely. (And in the case of one media source, they actually seemed to be quoting other autistic people and attributing the quotes to me without my ever having said them myself. Like at one point they asked me why I made the In My Language video, and I told them about Ashley X. They didn’t like that answer, so they said that I wrote it in order to… I forget the exact words, but they were an almost direct quote of Sue Rubin about a movie she had made about herself. “To bring people into my world of autism” or something along those lines. They had interviewed her recently.)

I’m glad, though, that anything I did in the media had a positive effect, because everything I did in the media has always been a sacrifice. People sometimes think I like ‘the attention’, but nothing could be further from the truth. If I had my way I would live a secluded life near a few friends, possibly in a redwood forest, with nobody paying attention to me at all beyond that required by friendship and family. But that’s not a life I can lead and still do the things I want to do ethically. So sometimes I have to bite the bullet and get interviewed, in the hopes that something of my message will survive the process, which often doesn’t happen.

Notes: