5:17am July 16, 2014

➸ Donna Williams: Diagnosis

Information on Donna Williams diagnosis of autism.

I talked earlier about the stalking that Donna Williams endured and the attempts to discredit her. On this page, she has written a huge amount of diagnostic information, but has also written about the stalking. If you want to know what cyberbullying can look like when done to an autistic person to try to discredit our diagnosis, this page contains an excellent description of it.

I once did what Donna did, and put up huge amounts of diagnostic information on the web, including my diagnostic papers from childhood showing repeated diagnoses of PDDNOS/atypical autism, later changed to autistic disorder by the same doctor who had originally diagnosed PDDNOS. And the papers also contained descriptions of me that are highly typical of autistic people. Alas, I found that all this did was fuel the stalkers more. Donna’s choice to put her medical information online in detail is her own choice, but be aware that it does not always solve the problem, and may in fact make the problem worse. Sometimes bullies will even goad you to post your diagnostic papers, so that they can get more private information with which to stalk you. So be very careful what you post online. It’s your choice, but choices have consequences. I have since taken down all my diagnostic papers because all they did was give bullies more private information about me, which they then proceeded to use against me. And I think they actually used it to try and track down the doctors who had diagnosed me, etc.

The ironic thing is that I have more documentation of my autism diagnosis than most autistic people do: I was not diagnosed just once, but the diagnosis was reconfirmed many times over the years, including by an independent government psychologist who had no special agenda to find me truly autistic. (He’s the one who did the IQ test where I tested 85, but like Donna when she scored below 70, my pattern of scores on the IQ test was one that only an autistic person would get – it included specific strengths as well as specific weaknesses that are both common in autistic people. Some of those patterns were not yet written about in scientific papers at the time, but were later written about by the time I was able to print them out and show CNN how closely my IQ subscores correlated with standard autistic IQ subscores.)

So if even I could post literally over a dozen pages of data showing that I was diagnosed as autistic, and people still doubted me (and then used the information in those pages to further stalk and harass and invade my privacy), then I don’t think there is such a thing as someone whose diagnostic papers will stop the bullying and harassment. Often the demand to “see your papers” is simply an attempt to get you to disclose private medical information that can be then used to invade your privacy further. I would strongly advise against doing so.

Donna doesn’t show her papers, but she includes quotes from them from time to time. That may be the way to do it, if you have to do it at all. She’s written up her entire medical history, which is interesting in its own right because she seems to share a fair amount of conditions that I either have or run in my family.

But anyway… be careful if anyone demands you put out your personal information. And if you want to read about the impact of cyberstalking in order to libel and slander autistic people, definitely read the above page. It’s not as detailed as an old page that she’s long since took down, but it gets the idea across plenty. One thing that I find interesting is that the “evidence” against her included several people who barely even knew her or spent time around her.

When bullies from my college tried to claim they knew I wasn’t autistic, they did something similar: They exaggerated their relationships to me and the time they spent around me. For instance, one woman claimed to have lived with me for an extensive period of time. In reality, she lived with my family for a few months while I lived in an institution three hours away. But that doesn’t sound anywhere near as impressive, so she embellished the truth. Another stalker had a picture taken by my mother, with his arm around me, when he visited me in the mental institution where I was diagnosed with autism. Privately in front of my lawyer he admits that it was taken in a mental institution, but publicly he claims that he was my boyfriend in college, and that the picture was taken in college. He has also in the past tried to claim that my boyfriend and I broke up halfway through the year, using a story that sounds suspiciously like his own breakup with his girlfriend (who had to get a restraining order on him). My actual college boyfriend’s name was Karl. Anyone not named Karl was not my college boyfriend.

In one case, a woman interviewed to prove Donna wasn’t autistic, claimed to have been her teacher for a specific year. Even though Donna had never met this teacher, and had class photos showing she was in a different teacher’s class. That teacher, after 25 years had passed, simply misremembered Donna as another student and was all too eager to claim Donna was ‘normal’. Because that student wasn’t Donna.

So it seems that one tactic that people use in defamation of this kind, is to pretend to have a closer relationship with the victim than they actually have. Even if they did have a somewhat close relationship, they will probably lie to make it even closer. And people with little to no relationship at all, will claim to have had a close relationship. One person who slandered Donna had only met her once over coffee. Once. And some of the people who have been talked into denouncing me are people who didn’t even have classes with me, or who did have a class with me but never interacted with me outside the (highly structured0 classroom setting. The same man who claimed to have been my college boyfriend, claimed to have met me at an academic summer camp that he never attended in his life – I was able to give CNN’s fact-checkers the name of the actual academic summer camp that he attended, and they were shocked that he had told such a bald-faced and easily verifiable lie. But lying was actually something he was well-known for – as in one of the main character traits he was known for even among his friends and main social circle.

There were really only two people who knew me closely at that time. One of them is too scared by the bullies to speak up, even after all these years, and has made me promise never to mention their name. The other has sometimes been willing to speak up on my behalf, but hasn’t had his chance yet. He reports amazement with how obsessed these two people are with discrediting me and ruining my life, even though I literally haven’t seen them in 20 years, and never knew them that well. I still believe it has to do with the fact that they believed they owned me, that I was a toy to them, and when you own a human toy, sie is not supposed to walk away.

One of the funnier things one of my stalkers said about me – and the funny thing to me is the amount of times she repeated the same phrase – was “she decided she was a butch lesbian”. That’s typical of the way she talked of me – dismissive of anything about my identity. But the only actual evidence she has for this idea is that I came out as a lesbian, and that I used to shave my head a lot. But this stalker seemed to think it was very important to tell CNN, repeatedly, that I’d “decided I was a butch lesbian”, which somehow was supposed to discredit me further in their eyes.

(For the record, I did come out as lesbian and continue to identify that way despite it not being the most accurate word. There are no accurate words so I take what I can get. I am not and never will be butch. Butch is a gender. I’m genderless.)

Anyway, I really wanted to show people this because it’s been a long time since she’s had any information up on her website about the stalking and harassment campaign she went through, and it should be a cautionary tale for any autistic person who gets too prominent. Because when you become even marginally famous that’s when your enemies come out and start trying to mess up your life. And because the autistic community itself has a tendency to fuel these things with gossip about who’s “really” autistic and who’s not, and that just helps the bullies make their task easier. (There are also groups of autistic bullies that do pretty much nothing except find vulnerable autistic people and target them for this kind of harassment. Often they will specifically target autistic people who are (or are perceived as) women, LGBTQ, or have a psych history, I’ve noticed.)

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