Forum - View topicNEWS: Let Me Fix You Anime Delayed After Grooming Allegations of Buta Productions Co-Founder FAR
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Glordit
 Posts: 1186 |
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Not taking sides but going to twitter to tell the world something you should have told legal council in private, was not the smartest thing you could do.
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Shiawase_Rina
Posts: 88 |
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A classic case of a victim speaking out and then being threatened into taking everything back.
I hope Maryco will be able to overcome all of this as well as she can. I hate the thought of a proven groomer being able to sue for damages for crimes he himself commited. I know very little about defamation laws in Italy though. |
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Hellsoldier
 Posts: 1152 Location: Porto,Portugal,Europe,Earth,Sol |
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She retracted her accusation, but there is a body of evidence. In other words, retraction does not equal false accusation. I take false accusations seriously, but much like it takes a large amount of evidence to prove sexual abuse (as it should be), it should take large amounts of evidence to prove false charges. The consequence of not doing so is obvious: People will be afraid of making charges even if the crime is real. |
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loveliver
Posts: 210 |
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Maybe she retracted as she couldn't afford a legal attorney or she could be unjustifiably put in jail thanks to a bigoted judge and/or jury or potential outside forces that sway their opinions. There's always those very risks that stop victims from speaking out. We could only protest. |
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Utsuro no Hako
Posts: 1069 |
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Groomers are by nature manipulative, and their victims vulnerable. They don't even need to resort to threats. All they have to do is convince their victim that the amount of suffering they're going through is worse than what they actually did. "You destroyed my career. Now I'll never be able to achieve my dreams. I have nothing to live for." |
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Tempest
 I Run this place.ANN Publisher  Posts: 10539 Location: Do not message me for support. |
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Personally, I do not consider this a "false accusation." There was no suggestion from either party that the transcripts were fake, but rather that they were "out of context," "embellished," etc. The alleged victim said, "Involuntarily, I ended up embellishing, warping details of my narration as well as adding totally incorrect information," I assume that is referring to the narrative she added outside the transcripts. However The chat transcripts themselves were pretty damning; even if the chat transcripts are incomplete (ie: if there were others that she left out), the behaviour in them is not appropriate. The retraction is probably based on the legal threat. Unfortunately in Italian law, focus of a defamation claim is on the injury to reputation, regardless of whether the statement is true or false. The responsibility of the person claiming defamation is to show that the statement damaged their reputation; they do not have to prove that it is false. The person making the allegedly defamatory claims (ie: the speaker) needs to prove 1) Truth, 2) Public Interest, 3) Restraint in language (continenza). Unlike in the US, the person alleging defamation does not have to prove actual malice, it's the responsibility of the speaker to prove that there was no malice. Defamation is a criminal offense in Italy. 
Even if the alleged victim could have won in court, would it have been worth the burden for her ? The legal fees alone might have destroyed her. In Italy, legal threats are often used to great effect to shut down claims of sexual abuse, and other public criticism. SLAPPs are a problem, and there is no anti-SLAPP framework AFAIK. Although false accusations exist, retractions must be taken with a grain of salt. Last edited by Tempest on Thu May 07, 2026 12:54 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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OtomeGay
 Posts: 263 |
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The retraction very likely happened because of FAR's intent to sue Maryco. A 19 year old with a fraction of the money and power would have difficulty fighting back in court, but the screenshots are pretty damning evidence, that something happened, and Maryco didn't lie.
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Tempest
I Run this place. ANN Publisher Posts: 10539 Location: Do not message me for support. |
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You actually think that she retracted her accusation because of our reporting? That's imaginative.
We reached out to them immediately, and after a bit of back and forth (ie: due dilligence) we added their statement to our article. We needed to make sure that X account really represented the people it claimed to represent.
So contacting the company for their statement, and publishing the statement (seemingly written by FAR himself) is "platforming?" You've got a very, very, very broad definition of platforming, and I disagree with it. Publishing an alleged abusers reply to accusations is not platforming, it's proper.
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peyrin
Posts: 11 |
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I recognize that there are legal concerns with publishing a speculative claim that the statement about a lawsuit originated from FAR. However, I'm still concerned that sufficient due diligence was not performed before the article was published. Your original article, published on May 5, attributed the "we're suing" statement to the entirety of ButaPro. However, on May 3, there were already multiple visible Twitter posts from former ButaPro members confirming that everybody already left the studio: https://twitter.com/ryoyamada2001/status/2050953176627486854 https://twitter.com/Rarururu__/status/2050953894113513944 Given that the majority of this article is sourced from Twitter (e.g. you included tweets from Maryco, Blou, and Sakura Kurihara), I don't think it's a stretch to expect that a properly-researched article would have also found these tweets and conducted the proper due diligence to validate a very important claim (namely, that all members except FAR were no longer associated with ButaPro).
Even the current version of the article refers to Ponbleu as "a group that claims to represent former staff members of ButaPro" (emphasis mine). Again, I'm concerned that proper due diligence was not conducted to validate whether this claim is true. IMO, the resulting article implies that ButaPro's statement is more definitive, as it lacks the "claims" modifier, while the Ponbleu statement is presented as dubious and unverified. Whether intentional or not, this introduces a slant to the article, which I don't think is a mark of good, well-researched journalism. Having said all that, I do sympathize that this was a sensitive topic to write an article about, and I do appreciate you taking the time to read and respond to the feedback in this thread. |
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StellaStellaStella
Posts: 37 |
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I imagine people do this if they feel mob justice is more likely than seeing justice in the legal system. If this is true and the victim was threatened with legal action the damage of this being public has already been done. If it's false then the legal system would (hopefully) find it as such but in the public eye this kind of thing is hard to get rid of even if it ends up being true as people will still cling to perceiving someone as guilty regardless of any information that happens after. Sometimes it's the most tactical choice. There's also the proponent of people are very accustom to online spaces these days. The amount of time people see or experience a tragedy and their first thought is to make a Tiktok video about it to post is unfortunately quite common. Perhaps our generation is just old fashion. There was a time victims would do everything they could to keep their name out of the public eye and only be known as "John/Jane Doe" |
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Tempest
I Run this place. ANN Publisher Posts: 10539 Location: Do not message me for support. |
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This line of thinking bothers me. It's a fundamental misunderstanding IMHO. ButaPro isn't a collective; it's a company. Statements attributed to ButaPro reflect the company, and in no way should be interpreted as representing freelance contractors who were working for the Company. If I say publicly, "ANN's position is X," then that is ANN's position; it doesn't make it the position of any of ANN's employees or contractors. That said, there seems to be a different way to write this that meets my requirements for "no assumptions," but also doesn't attribute the statements to the company. I will recommend some changes to the article to the editors (I don't touch articles on ANN).
Ponbleu could not provide documentation to show that they represent a significant number of former staff (which is understandable). We could only confirm one former staffer (whom we believe was a contractor, not an employee) as involved. We gave them the benefit of the doubt; honestly, they barely qualified to be included, but we wanted to be supportive. "Claim" is much like "alleged." Without documented or established "proof," that is how we report things. It doesn't mean "we don't believe," it means "this isn't proven fact."
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peyrin
Posts: 11 |
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Sure, but do you not see how it's misleading to a layperson when you write "ButaPro's position is X" on an article about a major dispute within the company? Anecdotally, I know several people who read the article and incorrectly interpreted it as everybody affiliated with ButaPro siding with FAR against the victim.
I appreciate this, and I know the wording was already clarified slightly in a post-publication edit, but I hope we at least have consensus that the original phrasing created confusion. And if I may offer some feedback, I'd hope to see some changes in the editorial process to ensure that future articles, especially on sensitive topics, are properly reviewed before publication to avoid such misunderstandings. Also, (not that you're required to address everything, but since we're discussing) I still don't understand why the original article made no attempt to verify who was still affiliated with the company. Here is an example of another publication asking a follow-up question to definitively attribute the ButaPro statements to FAR himself: https://twitter.com/sarca_sc/status/2052691782509666354 IMO, if I received a confusing statement from a company, I would ask a follow-up question to try and clarify it, instead of directly publishing that statement as-is, which then leads to the average reader being confused or outright misled. Given the amount of discussion that this article has generated, I think it would help the community at large if we could get answers from the editorial team regarding the lack of proper research and context in the original article: 1) Did the editors contact the ButaPro-affiliated accounts (their tweets are linked in my previous post) to learn whether everybody had left the studio? If not, why was this major fact missing from the original article? 2) Did the editors try and get clarification on the first-person statement from ButaPro? If not, why was it deemed acceptable to publish a confusing statement without the proper context?
This is fair enough; given that there was an actual attempt to reach out and verify the facts, I think it's appropriate to use the wording you did. Thanks for the explanation. |
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ATastySub
Past ANN Contributor
 Posts: 843 |
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Are we seriously pretending a random twitter account with 100 followers and a *newgrounds page* counts as “another publication” that has any idea what journalistic standards are? Like even if we pretend it’s not your weird alt throwing a fit on there because no one else seems to misunderstand things just like you, it still remains one of the most absurd and pathetic attempts to “show how things are done.”
Edit: sorry I said 100 followers when their “publication” account has 300. Second edit: migraine brain mixed up numbers, fixed, thanks Atelier! Last edited by ATastySub on Sat May 09, 2026 11:49 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Atelier
 Posts: 45 |
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The account itself is following 45 people, they have 300 followers as far as I can tell, and if you're referring to the account of the user itself, they have 3k followers, you are mixing up followers and following. Which, by the way, is completely irrelevant anyway. What does follower count have anything to do with anything ? That's such a weird, irrelevant and snobbish point to make. As long as they are doing it right, their popularity shouldn't matter whatsoever. I also disagree with the point, that no one seemed to misunderstand things. I have seen people misunderstand it. The reason for my first comment on this article is literally because I saw a comment on Bluesky interpreting the article as members of Butapro suing the victim, not knowing that its a single person, the culprit himself. I can certainly say, that there were absolutely people that were unhappy with the way the article originally framed things. Also, just to make it clear despite the name, I'm not affiliated with that website in any way 
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ATastySub
Past ANN Contributor
Posts: 843 |
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The point is that a random person with a newgrounds page does not actually know what standards are. This reeks of the same kind of backlash of “ANN platforms Nazis” when there was an article calling out antisemitism. Someone not understanding the difference between including information, what editorializing is, and what sourcing actually is upset and didn’t accept Chris’s explanation. I’m actually fine if you disagree with Chris’s answers for a relevant point, but going “no he’s wrong,” isn’t one and displays a concerning lack of knowledge about their own operation/hobby project. It’s someone in a kiddy pool in their own yard thinking they know how an ocean works, and if they actually tried to apply what they’re claiming would drown because they believe they know better than a seasoned swimmer.
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