i think people are aware of that but they still believe the first thing they read, so they’ve accused mel of doing it to pengo lol

but yeah that’s something mel’s mom did to her all the time when she was a kid; just completely rewrite history to make it out like mel was actively out to get her.  over the course of years.  same thing pengo is doing in his callout.  that’s what gaslighting looks like, and it’s seriously fucked up; it’s not all this pissing and moaning about “wahh you told pengo he’s wrong because he’s actually wrong”

and it works!  because it’s surprisingly difficult to believe that other people, even complete strangers, aren’t telling us the truth.  even if it’s not deliberate.  we trust everyone to be genuine about their experiences.

people hear pengo first, assume he’s relaying events correctly, assume mel is thus a villain with a twirly moustache, and conclude that anything she does is not to be trusted.  but why?  there’s no good reason.  it’s really just two people telling different versions of events.  but you hear one first, you assume the speaker is pure and flawless by default, and that sticks harder than any amount of rock-solid evidence to the contrary.

(there are rather a lot of parallels here to whatever other inexplicable conspiracy theory you care to name, like anti-vaxxers.  they heard a thing from someone they felt they ought to trust, and they built up a framework of iffy other stuff around it, and now no amount of fact will contradict them.  and they try to distract the issue into other things like whether parents should have the right to decide to vaccinate their kids, because it lets them avoid examining whether they’re actually wrong, etc.)

UHH anyway sorry you have to deal with that crap damn.  we kinda lucked out having most of this happen online where it was logged, but as you can see, having a literal record of what actually happened doesn’t always help either!  so i hope you can just get outta there as soon as possible  :(