Janey Godley's Blog

You can guarantee a few things in my life, one is my ears will hurt and the other is I will get abused online.

So I woke up Saturday morning with the usual leaky sore itchy ears and spent the day dosed up with painkillers. There is nothing can be done about my ears, they keep being leaky and wet, and specialists don’t know what to do.

I went onto twitter and saw that Armando Iannucci the Scottish comedy writer had been given an OBE by The Queen (something am not really into) but anyway, he was taunted by Alistair Campbell (former press aide to Blair and who Iannucci based his character Malcolm Tucker on the TV show Thick of it) Campbell taunted Iannucci for accepting the ‘establishment’ and added those three little letters make a lot of difference to which Iannucci replied “WMD” referring to Campbell’s involvement in the illegal war over ‘weapons of mass destruction’ made me laugh my ass off.

Anyway I captured the hilarious online twitter spat and uploaded it to twitpic upon which many famous tweeters decided to reTweet and so my timeline went mental. You need to understand twitter to get that last paragraph, to think the words Re tweet weren’t even forming on our lips until at least 3 years ago now we say it daily. Or at least I do. So thanks to Peter Serinafowitz and Rob Delaney I have heaps of new people reading my tweets.

So, after I got swathes of new followers, I got some twitter people abuse me and call me fuckwit and gobshite etc and I embraced them. The thing about trolls (the name for anonymous people who abuse you on twitter) is that they like to think they can hurt from afar or at least from behind a screen.

It’s a bit like being at a huge super bowl crowd and someone sneaking up through the throngs of people and stabbing you in the groin with dirty needle on a long stick, watching your expression and running away before you can call them out.

I tend to block abusive people not because I am weak but I want to imagine I run back through the same crowd and gaffer tape their mouth and run back again to my own space.

The haters and trolls really take pleasure in hurting people as I have found out.

One troll who is related to a comic I know started writing to my daughter telling her she fantasised about my own childhood abuse...this shocked my daughter for a few moments then she laughed her head off as she imagined him with a long stick and a dirty needle...and then she felt sad he would want to hurt someone and begged me not to get angry at him.

I wasn’t angry- I was amazed nobody had said something like that before, as Ashley and I have both cracked very dark jokes about my past and we like to think that’s our way of coping. That poor bloke just pointed that out and I like to think of him as perceptive to a point, but then we blocked him as he did sound suicidal and that’s not my area.

Witnessing haters on other people really disturb me, for instance a wee chubby pre-teen boy uploaded a really cheesy video of him singing and dancing. Personally his parents should have stepped in and stopped him, thats my opinion.- maybe they were unaware he was uploading videos?

You see something that looks cute and cool to a 13yr old with no critical input can come back and bite you in the arse. Am glad YouTube wasn’t around when I was 13 as there would be a plethora of clips of me looking wistful singing weepy touching songs to photographs of Donny Osmond as I hang over damp rocks near the stream at my old home. (it was the 70s all music montages looked like that)

Anyway the wee chubby boy got millions of hits and thousands of hateful ‘kill yourself fatty’ responses. There is the flip side to this, maybe the wee boy enjoyed the attention and can cope with the haters after all Irish irritators Jedward taught us one thing, stupid people with no talent can make millions.

But I digress, I despise people being hurt by trolls online and yet, I will always strive never to have them charged by the police. Unless someone is psychically threatening my life I can cope with verbal abuse, I am a comedian, I fight for the right to say things onstage so therefore I have to accept the things people say to me offstage.

Follow me on twitter @janeygodley

Employees use Registered Charities Twitter account to Bully.

(I deleted this earlier but read again as there are further kinks to this story especially at the end)

Last week I got into a robust twitter debate with a woman from www.mckeeconsultants.co.uk who specialise in diversity and equality. Anyway the lady online persistently demand that as she is a feminist she was entitled to know on why I openly use the word ‘cunt’ online. I told her that I didn't need to explain myself to her nor anyone and refused to justify my language. I then expressed how ironic it was that a feminist was demanding a woman explain her words. I refused to explain my motives to her and will always do so, as I don’t believe I should have to explain my vocabulary to anyone.

My twitter profile says “The most outspoken female stand up in Britain” (Daily Telegraph). I cannot give you the timeline of McKee Consultant’s tweets as she deleted the entire argument (such was her commitment to her own words), though I do have a screengrab of them. In the middle of this twitter debate a person from the charity Sky Project in Kilmarnock (they recently asked me to be a patron to their kids charity) added to the debate by saying “You are a patron of our children’s charity. Would you say these words to our young people?”

I responded to Sky Project by saying something along the lines of “I don’t think coming online to question my motives is professional and I can always un-patron” I couldn’t understand why suddenly a charity I have been dealing with got into this twitter debate of the word ‘cunt’.

Firstly I felt Sky Project were questioning my ability to work with kids because I say ‘cunt’ (I have never put myself up as a child role model THEY asked me to be patron) and secondly why are they getting involved? Then I quickly realised that McKee Consultants and Sky Project are friends and contact each other regularly. Fine- I thought, she is sticking up for her pal McKee and now she has lost me as a patron. That’s what happens when you use a charity’s registered twitter feed to have a go at people, no big deal.

I opened my twitter a day later and there was a tweet from a children charity Hill House Care http://www.hillhousecare.org/ that said “Calling yourself a comedienne is an insult to all things funny, Call yourself a children’s role model? Hope not”

Now I was stunned, I genuinely don’t mind people calling me crap and unfunny, it happens a lot to be honest on twitter but for a registered charity to come online with this unprovoked attack annoyed me. Yet again it mentioned my ‘children’s role model’ (which I am not) and so a very short blast of past tweets revealed yet again that McKee Consultants, Sky Project and Hill House Care were all linked together and friends on and offline.

Then @hillhousecare1 deleted the offending tweet and sometime later spouted stuff about freedom of speech and then deleted that as well! (See a pattern emerging? Offensive tweets- delete-delete?) So there we have it, I got into a debate over the word cunt with a woman and her mates waded in under the guise of the charities they work for and had a go at me. My online friends all took exception to the tweets and many complained to Hill House Care and some of them were pretty verbal about a charity being used to slag me off.

So then Hill House Care and McKee consultants both claimed cyber bullying. (Sky Project who may have a more clever person working their social media apologised and backed off). To date Hill House Care has never apologised and both they and Mckee Consultants have deleted their tweets regarding me. Yes they did that old nugget of the passive/aggressive world of “we got into an argument, lost it and now claim aggression in our direction” how professional?

Again at this point I’d like to re-iterate that my anger is at the charities public accounts being used to insult me, not the insult itself. In terms of insults I’ve been called a lot worse… but never by an anonymous person hiding behind the guise of a children’s charity.

So the upshot is, I feel bullied by a children’s charity! I have written to Hill House Care and want their board of directors contact details as I believe the person reading my complaint might be the actual tweeter- so the best way to get to the bottom is to let the charity commission know that a charity is using its status to have a go at people.

By the way- Hill House Care claim on their website to be ‘Non Judgemental” and McKee Consutlants claim to promote “equality and diversity” I have NEVER claimed to be a child’s role model.

So after I posted this blog today I got an email from Mckee Consultants and apologising – which I accepted and I accepted the apology from The Sky project- as of yet I haven’t had an apology from the person who actually tweeted from Hill house care. The tweets all came from a mother, a sister and a daughter in the same family.

After I deleted the blog to let the dust settle on the issue I got an email from a journalist and school teacher called Douglas Bane who sent me an email titled “Scottish comedian forces children's charity to close because they said she wasn't funny”.

He went on to do a hatchet job on my character BUT went onto paint the women who wrote the tweets in such a naive, innocent way and it emerges I am the woman who is singlehandedly getting the charity shut down- in fact he makes it seem, it was always my sole intention- here is an excerpt of his email about me- the one he intends to get published.

"The attempt to smooth ruffled feathers came too late. By this time some of Janey’s followers had taken up the story and were spreading her “horrific personal abuse” version.

Unaware of the full story and unwilling to trawl through the archives, two board members of the second charity, resigned at the weekend. The Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations withdrew its support. Prospective funders have pulled out. As I said, Janey has influence"

Now I have never contacted anyone regards getting the funding cut and those who know me, know this would hurt my soul.

So I sent a statement to the journalist who strangely gave me the offer to change the end of the story and the headline to "Janey Godley steps in to save struggling children's charity"

So I spoke to the woman from The Sky Project who in fact is the least of all offenders in this weird story, she apologised last week after her slightly hurtful tweet and it turns out she knows Douglas Bane the journalist and in fact they used to be in a relationship together.

She asked him to ‘help’ and his way of helping was to threaten me with a rotten unbalanced article about me. He is also a physics teacher and works in education!

I feel his part in this was to put the ‘frighteners’ on me and hope that I would back down and delete my blog. Well Douglas you obviously don’t know me well enough and if anyone else in the press wants to pick up on this wee debacle of story do let me know. BTW I am still getting emails accusing me of trying to 'break people' instead of 'letting this go'. They somehow have become the victims and I am the bad witch.

Sometimes the word cunt doesn’t quite get across what I mean today.