Cassandra Clare addresses hate blogs, takes stand against bullying

Cassandra Clare is one of the thousands of people who have been the victim of cyberbullying.

October is National Bullying Prevention Month and several blogs, including myself, Mundie Moms,  TMI Institute and TMI News en espanol, have touched on the issue of bullying.

Cassie wrote a fantastic and very brave post where she addressed those hate blogs and cyberbullying. It is such an inspiring post and I encourage everyone to read it.

Here’s an excerpt:

I just want you to know — and I say this, knowing how thrilled it will make the hate bloggers to hear this, but I am saying it anyway because you need to know it — of course, this stuff hurts me too. 

These sort of attacks are so shocking/upsetting because they break the social contract we have come to expect decent people to adhere to: that people don’t attack your personal relationships, that they don’t sneer not just at your friends but at the idea that you might have friends, that they don’t attack the way you look or your family or your ethnicity/religion. The thing is, to the hate bloggers, and to the kind of people who send anonymous hateful messages, the object of their hate isn’t a person. To them, I am not a human being. My family are not real people. They have spent a great deal of time trying to convince themselves and others that my friends are not my friends. That Maureen Johnson and Scott Westerfeld and Libba Bray and Sarah Rees Brennan, who came to my wedding, hate me. That Holly Black, who was my bridesmaid, hates me. That John Green, who I also have known for years and who, when my first book hit the New York Times Bestseller list, gave me a hug and said: “That’s how you show haters,” not only “is only polite to me at conventions because he has to be”, but would applaud one of their hate blogs, a blog that calls me “greedy little bitch” and urges people to burn my books. There is a lot of contention that my friends, specifically Maureen and Holly and Sarah, “have hitched their wagon to [me], most likely in hopes of more sales/exposure.” The problem with that is that I’ve known all those people since before I was published. When I met Holly, I was broke, and could not afford sheets, and she was a bestselling author with a movie coming out. To have befriended me in the hopes of PROFIT would make her … PSYCHIC. Also Sarah, who I met at a New Year’s Eve party in 2002, when she was nineteen, and neither of us were professional writers or even planning to be professional writers, apparently can see the future. As for Maureen, I met her before City of Bones ever came out, in Scott Westerfeld’s apartment at a party. How any of these people knew I would ever be a bestseller years before I had a book out is, I guess, one of those mysteries for the ages. (Also I should probably not have mentioned that I ever hugged John, since the hate bloggers likes to portray me as “overly handsy” with my guy friends and will probably find some entertaingly bezonkers way to spin that, but it boils down to calling me a slut, basically, which is pretty much the staple word in the vocabulary of gendered attack language.)

 They believe my friends are my friends only because they don’t know “the truth about me.” Meanwhile, my friends (the ones they think aren’t really my friends) are exactly the people monitoring their hate blog to see if they start posting threats, or maps to my house, and keeping track of things like racially motivated insults, so that there is a record. Of course my friends know about them and everything they say about me. Who else do I have to go to about these things but my friends? 

I highly encourage you to head over to Cassie’s Tumblr to read more

Notice: Any rude or hateful comments will be deleted from the site. This is a fan site for fans of the series to come together and share their love of ‘The Shadowhunter Chronicles’ not bash Cassandra Clare, her series or her fans.