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INTEREST: Victims Speak Out After Canada's Anime Revolution Con Allows Serial Harasser, Convicted Se

So, given the tone of the article, the solution that the authors would find satisfactory would be for anime conventions to prohibit "serial harassers" and convicted sex offenders from attending their events?

Thank you for everyone coming to the event! I apologize that I was unable to post the following statement in a more timely manner.

My name is Can Ngo and I am the President of Anime Revolution. Over the past few days, we have had an incredible amount of libel and slander thrown at us. Claims of us knowingly admitting in convicted pedophiles or ignoring "evidence".

These claims are simply untrue. We are not strangers to this type of treatment and apparently all cons go through these types of things, but this year, I am making the decision to lock certain threads (I will explain later why).

This is a volunteer run organization. We run it as an incorporated company (not a non-profit) but "profit" is not something easily made by any company (however, there seems to be this growing idea that I'm some sort of overlord profitting off the hard work of others). Our books will tell you (if you care) that we were in the red for our first 3years. In that time, I chose to just continue to eat that financial loss because I loved the people I worked with and the things we were doing.

In recent years, we were able to break even and actually put sizeable deposits toward our venue and guests so that we could better plan the event (my stress levels were very thankful for this).

My real job is being a new father and being an assistant at my wife's nursery school in Japan.

Anyhow, the point I'm trying to make is that myself and everyone on the team are doing this because we all love anime. When I interviewed the volunteer staff (blue shirts) and volunteers (pink shirts), I never included that part of their responsibility would be to have to endure all this cyber bullying.

It saddens me to say this but the recent posts and online cyber bullying has led to a suicide attempt. I'm sickened by it and I'm sorry to everyone that has been affected in anyway by it. For this reason, I am locking those threads. Please understand that I'm not trying to diminish the hurt or pain that the victims had to endure. I do however want to stop the violence.

To all the volunteer staff and volunteers in AR, I am so sorry you had to endure all of this. You all deserve so much better. Your hard work and willingness to stay silent instead of inciting an online flame war is amazing. Your decision to continue volunteering despite all this unfounded hate is inspiring. I will never be able to thank you enough.

To the concerned, even if these allegations against us were true, the Convention Centre (a government owned building), with their phenomenal staff and the VPD (who were at the event) would never allow such a thing to happen.

Finally, to the critics that are making these claims that we don't care or that we don't take this seriously, here is my personal cellphone number: {XXXXXXXXXX}.

I will answer any and all of your concerns and dispel any of the rumours you may have about the team and the safety of the con.

Thank you,
Can.

On that note, I feel it’s worth appreciating that Can’s statements to ANN come after extensive time refining and editing his thoughts.

Also worth noting is that the “suicide attempt” mentioned allegedly came from Alex McMullen after all of this news broke. .

SomeGuy1138 wrote:

On that note, I feel it’s worth appreciating that Can’s statements to ANN come after extensive time refining and editing his thoughts.

That's not actually accurate. Ngo gave ANN his statement on August 13.

SomeGuy1138 wrote:

Also worth noting is that the “suicide attempt” mentioned allegedly came from Alex McMullen after all of this news broke. .

That's also a rumor, similar to Ngo's claim that Bram was in the hospital and so he was not present at the convention on Saturday. ANN couldn't substantiate it.

So, given the tone of the article, the solution that the authors would find satisfactory would be for anime conventions to prohibit "serial harassers" and convicted sex offenders from attending their events?

Somewhat unrelated but I have heard from my local anime community (also in Western Canada) that AniRevo is also under fire for denying entry to a service dog at this year's event and for apparently misleading Artist Alley vendors regarding the amount of table space they paid for. There is now an organized boycott movement on Facebook with 400 members based on this multi faceted disaster.

I think it would have been great for Anime News Network to have reached out to SFU / SFU Anime as well, as Kleiman has been banned from SFU Anime's annual Summer Festival, as well as all SFU campuses for over a year now.

CorneredAngel wrote:

So, given the tone of the article, the solution that the authors would find satisfactory would be for anime conventions to prohibit "serial harassers" and convicted sex offenders from attending their events?

Or at least, if they've banned someone from a con before for creeper behaviour, keep his ban instead of randomly overturning it without consulting people.