Some Complaints I Made & What They Taught Me

Behind the Scenes of Kate Clanchy's battle with the Society of Authors

This guest post is written by the author and teacher Kate Clanchy. As most readers will know, in 2021, Kate and her Orwell Prize winning book, Some Kids I Taught & What They Taught Me, became caught in a social media maelstrom that made the mainstream news and culminated in Kate’s publishing contract being terminated. Much of that maelstrom is already in the public domain and won’t be rehashed here. Instead, Kate details for the first time what went on behind the scenes with the one institution that should have had her back during all this – the Society of Authors. 

As with the Rachel Rooney saga, the SOA does not cover itself in glory…  

Some Complaints I Made & What They Taught Me

By Kate Clanchy

2 Days in August 2021

This story starts in the evening of the 10^th of August 2021 with a direct message to me on twitter from Joanne Harris, then Chair of the Management Committee of the SOA. I didn’t know her at all. Without preamble, she set out a series of instructions.  There was, she stated, ‘a wave of opportunistic trolls, spreading chaos, and …..sowing racist hatred and misogyny’ on social media and I should take responsibility for this:

I would suggest that you word a very short, direct and simple apology to the three main women in this conversation, saying just this: a) you’re sorry for what has happened to them as a consequence of your words, b) that you now realise the harm that you inadvertently caused, and c) that you hope to do better in future. Then maybe lock your account for a week and step away from Twitter….. step away, and practise self-care.’

I declined. I had several reasons. One was that my publishers, Picador, were insisting on total control of all my communications, and I had only that morning been told my books might be pulped if I disobeyed. But I was also not at all sure there really was ‘a wave of trolls’ caused by any action of mine. I worried that if I apologised, I would also be admitting responsibility.   

The next day, the 11^th, Joanne Harris messaged me again, this time to offer me ‘SOA mental health resources’ and to tell me to ‘stay away from Twitter’, which was puzzling, as I wasn’t tweeting. An hour later, it made a little more sense. A Guardian article appeared with an interview from Harris and matching statement from the SOA. The statement and article drew in turn from an email sent by Joanne Harris and Nicola Solomon to the SOA Management Committee on the 10^th. Email, statement, article and interview all repeated Harris’s inference of the night before: Sir Philip Pullman and I had caused racist abuse. The SOA statement and the Guardian article were linked to a thread of tweets from Sunny Singh (below) which mentioned ‘writers who cause harm to minoritised people, cause harm to even children’ and used my name as an obscenity, Cl*nchy.  If had been persuaded to apologise the previous evening, that would have corroborated this story.  I felt manipulated and bullied.

On the 30^th of August, Joanne Harris wrote a blog about why privileged white women should apologise and advertised it on twitter under a version of my book title:  ‘Some Mistakes And What They Taught Me’.

I messaged Joanne Harris to ask her to take the tweet down. She refused and told me there was no connection to my book title. I wrote

At this point, I complained to Nicola Solomon, CEO of the Society of Authors, about Joanne Harris’ behaviour. I did it because I was concerned about what Harris might do next. I was worried I might die.

Nicola Solomon’s first reaction was that the SOA could not speak to me because they were not ‘mental health professionals’. Eventually, however, she offered herself as investigator of my complaint, with her report to be adjudicated by members of the Management Committee under the chairmanship of Joanne Harris. I couldn’t see how people so close to the matter could evaluate it properly, so I asked for a more independent person or team, pointing out that the SOA is unusually rich in qualified friends. I was refused, and in the end, because I couldn’t see how we would get to fairness, I withdrew the complaint.

Private Detectives

Over the next year, I often returned to those extraordinary days in August 2021 and tried to work out what had happened. Had there really been a wave of racist abuse in defence of my book?  Was a section of the Christian American alt right deeply invested in British book twitter and the famous atheist Philip Pullman? If so, why?

These weren’t questions I could solve for myself, so I hired a forensic social media investigator. I asked for a record of all the public domain – I stress that there was no investigation into any private messages – tweets made by my three critics and myself at that time and all the replies to us. Then I asked for a ‘court standard’ record of any racist abuse that could be found. The investigators found one thread. I was already familiar with it, because it had been made into a gif at the time. It was indeed from alt-right Christian activists and it was indeed horrible – but it was a reaction to a single retweet, had been placed two days before Philip Pullman’s ‘Taliban’ tweet, and contained no references to me or my book. Much as I deplored it, I wasn’t responsible for it or connected to it. Nor could the investigators find anything around the period of the 9^th, 10^th and 11^th of August to corroborate Joanne Harris’s description of ‘waves of trolls spreading chaos’. Rather, there was much warm support in the replies of my three accusers.

I did not doubt that my accusers were in good faith: rather I thought that the heightened atmosphere of the time had caused people to have exaggerated perceptions. I was concerned, though, by the actions of the SOA. They had a responsibility to calm, not fan, such fears and also to do careful due diligence on all public statements. I thought the whole matter deserved some reconsideration.

The Allotment Committee:

I was by now a member of the SOA. I studied its regulations carefully, but I couldn’t see how to start an investigation. If the SOA had been a charity, I could have written to the trustees; if it had been a PLC, I could have written to the board: but the SOA is neither. It’s one of a small number of ‘special register companies’ and has a constitution, despite thousands of members and millions of pounds held in trust, more like an allotment association than a business. The Management Committee acts as both managers and trustees, overseeing their own decisions. The Council, (now Fellows) have no power, not even to communicate and meet among themselves. However it was to the Council I wrote in the end, asking them to support my request for an outside, disinterested person or committee to look into my story. The letter is here

An Alarming Discovery

My letter to the Council was very sympathetically received. I was sent numerous kind and thoughtful responses from Council members, and many also wrote to Nicola Solomon to ask for an outside investigation. Sir Philip was emboldened to write to the Council for the first time explaining his reasons for resigning. In response to this, Nicola Solomon promptly sent to the Council a report she had made about the original scandal. As it contained a great deal of material about me, several Council members equally promptly sent it on.

I was thunderstruck by this document. It wasn’t just the many prejudicial, evidence-free judgements about me, but the dates it had been researched and written, September to October 2021, and its sole author, Nicola Solomon. Nicola Solomon had been working closely with Joanne Harris on this damming report about me at the very same time as she was insisting on being the sole investigator of my complaint against Joanne Harris. Not only that, but she had taken the report to a meeting chaired by Harris.  

I made two formal complaints about this in early September, one against Nicola Solomon for offering to investigate when she had a conflict of interest, one against Joanne Harris and Nicola Solomon for creating, circulating and holding such a biased report.

The 8 Month Complaints

The SOA complaints procedure suggested that processing should take three weeks.  Mine took eight months. The tale of why is tangled, not least with other people. First, there was the attack on Salman Rushdie in August 2022 and the subsequent row about Joanne Harris’s tweets, then two motions were proposed for the SOA Annual General Meeting in November, one on free speech, one asking Joanne Harris to resign.

I had nothing to do with either of these motions – but I think that Joanne Harris and the SOA believed I did. Perhaps this justified, in the minds of staff, their decision to hide my complaints from the Management Committee for two months instead of passing them forward for investigation. In the hiding process, they wound up a particular Committee member, who I shall call Rex, against me.

During this time Joanne Harris, provoked by the AGM resolutions, went, it seems fair to say, a little rogue, charging about twitter freely mixing her personal opinions with SOA business. LoobyLou has covered much of it in previous posts.  

In October, Joanne Harris started calling LoobyLou ‘Kate’ online. If I had been LoobyLou then this would have been doxxing. As I’m not LoobyLou, then implying I was using a false identity was potentially defamatory as well as plain offensive. After pleading with Joanne Harris to stop, I sent in a complaint. In reply, Nicola Solomon told me that the complaints process was closed for review, and I should try again later.  

Keeping my complaints secret like this of course had advantages for Nicola Solomon. It meant she wasn’t recused from meetings that touched on them. She was able to help appoint the subcommittee – including the tightly-wound Rex– that was going to consider them. It meant she and Joanne Harris could get ahead with their own responses. Most important of all, it meant she could conduct a meeting with the Council about Sir Philip’s letter explaining his resignation.  

Only when all that was done, in November 2022, did a staff member write to me to tell me that the process had begun. They sent, though, a very confusing letter so I wrote back with a few basic queries: What complaints did they mean? Shouldn’t we talk about streamlining the complaints after such a long delay? Shouldn’t we talk? I didn’t expect the subcommittee to be friendly, just professional.

It certainly didn’t occur to me that my query would immediately be handed to the subject of the complaints. But as soon as the staff member received my email, they shared it with Nicola Solomon, and 30 minutes later Solomon herself wrote to the subcommittee, clearly very much in charge. She didn’t pass my letter on. Instead, she misrepresented it.

 'Please don't start work on Kate Clanchy's complaints for now….she has indicated that she would like to amend the complaints. We will write further when we know more.

Rex was quick to reply.

She can withdraw that complaint or write a new one. If she writes a new one, it should go to the bottom of the pile …

Nicola Solomon responded to him with relish.

That’s exactly what we are going to say to Kate Clanchy- if she wants to reformulate she needs to formally withdraw all current complaints and resubmit- at which time we will tell her whether they can be considered within our process.

At this point a second subcommittee member, Tim Tate, intervened and reminded everyone of the ordinary proprieties. Throughout this process Tate was focussed on fairness and protocol, but he was up against people who seemed to want the opposite.

Over the following 10 days, Nicola Solomon continued to intervene with communications. My query was withheld for several days, allowing her misinterpretation to continue to cause anxiety. When I wrote again trying to clarify my complaints, this letter was also withheld. Nicola Solomon suggested that staff roll all my concerns into a single reply. The result, as was clearly intended, was baffling. When I asked to speak on the phone to clarify I was denied. I was bewildered and infuriated, and I imagine the subcommittee were too.

The most provocative move, though, came when I resubmitted my LoobyLou complaint, as asked. Nicola Solomon took charge of it and, bypassing all normal protocol, dispatched it within half an hour to the subcommittee with the statement ‘Kate Clanchy has made a third complaint’. Understandably, this increased ire. Patiently, Tim Tate pointed out that this was a ‘shortcut’ and sent the complaint back to the Managing Committee.

In reaction to all this stress, the third subcommittee member resigned and the process of choosing a new member began. This was a week before the AGM: Tim Tate later described it as a time of ‘bullying and chaos’. There seemed to be a lack of protocol: for example Joanne Harris objected to one candidate on the grounds that they hadn’t gossiped with her. Before being on the investigative subcommittee, the person should, Harris wrote, have ‘tried to find out from me what had really happened’.  

On the 18^th of November, directly after the AGM, the Management Committee met to decide the issue of the third committee member. Tim Tate, who had worked so very hard for fairness, was voted out, and Rex, who had loudly sided against me, was kept in. My LoobyLou complaint, meanwhile, seems to have simply been thrown away.

A Giant Marrow

That evening Tim Tate resigned and made a – polite and limited – version of why public. His blog suggested that complainants should make Subject Access Requests, which I did, and which is where much of the information in this article comes from. In March 2023, I sent a complaint about everything I’ve outlined above – including the lost LobbyLou complaint, and the interference with letters – to the Management Committee. This complaint was put in the charge of Rex who presented a version of it to the Management Committee. Then the Committee, with the aplomb of an allotment association announcing that all rival entries to the Giant Marrow Competition had been reclassified as large courgettes, agreed that mine was a new variety of complaint, one that ‘constituted a questioning of procedures rather than a specific complaint’. That meant they would ‘include them in our ongoing review of the complaints procedure’ rather than investigate anything. This new sort of complaint, they decided, was one that didn’t have a right of appeal.

Reasonable Onlookers

I finally received the reports on my September 2022 complaints in April 2023. During the entire eight months no one had asked me any questions, so the slowness did not come from me. Some delays were probably caused by the addition of ‘Maxwellisation’, a process whereby Nicola Solomon and Joanne Harris were allowed to read and adjust the draft reports of their complaints, but most, I should think, by the fact that a volunteer amateur committee could not, in practical terms, assess these very serious complaints about the CEO and Chair. They didn’t have the distance, the authority, or the knowledge. In the end they had to call in external lawyers.

The lawyers’ marks are all over my final reports: stilted, defensive documents, invoking ‘reasonable onlookers’. These onlookers, might, they concede, conclude that ‘The Society of Authors’ statement of 11 August 2021 could appear to constitute an endorsement of (Sunny) Singh’s wider views and to imply criticism of (me)’ and that ‘Joanne Harris had formed a negative opinion of your book by the time of the meeting of 9th September 2021’ and that ‘preparatory materials for this meeting may have given a negative impression to those without any prior knowledge of your book’. In these circumstances, they agreed it was ‘problematic’ that Joanne Harris had insisted on chairing that meeting. They did not apologise but said they would try to be fairer in future.

On the question of whether Nicola Solomon, in the midst of all this ‘problematic’ negativity, should have insisted on being the sole investigator of my complaint against Joanne Harris, the report says only:

‘Nicola Solomon was aware that you had made a complaint of bullying against Joanne Harris. However, at the time of the Management Committee meeting of 9th September 2021, that matter was not under active investigation as Nicola was awaiting your statement and full details of your complaint.’

But on the 9^th of September 2021 Nicola Solomon hadn’t asked me for any information. I’d been waiting a week for her reply, not the other way around.

In the end..

I didn’t appeal the reports, though I did take some legal advice. I had to think about what I could possibly gain, and where an appeal might take me. I would certainly never get any of the things I really wanted which were, for the record,

1 To be listened to and to listen.

2 To arrive at a truthful account of those hectic two days in August 2021

3 An apology for Sir Philip Pullman.

All more complaints could achieve, I finally decided, was more distress to the many well-meaning, hard-working people inside the SOA.

So I have written all this down instead. If you have got this far, then you must be deeply interested in the procedures of the Society of Authors, and I hope your interest can help them. The SOA is not, in the end, an allotment committee and should not be run like one. It needs, I’d say, independent trustees and the capacity to investigate itself. All companies do. With both Nicola Solomon and Joanne Harris retiring, perhaps we can hope for better.

Self-Care

For myself, I am, as Joanne Harris urged me, practising self-care. In particular, I’m working on not developing post-traumatic embitterment disorder. This is hard work because it involves forgiving people, or at least attempting to understand them. For Joanne Harris, I find it most helpful to return to this tweet, issued on the morning of the 8th of August, just before she fully immersed herself in a month-long maelstrom of condemnation.

The kindest way I have found to understand Joanne Harris’s subsequent behaviour is that she became over-involved in a story she was telling. When she asked me to apologise, she was in a sense asking me to join in, to be part of her story. I was Bad Teddy, but she was also giving me a script to read in genuine hopes of my being allowed back on the mantelpiece. It’s true that in this process, Harris forgot I was a human being, but a lot of people made the same mistake around that time. It’s an easy thing to do when you spend a lot of time on twitter.  

Finally: 

The article above draws only on data which belongs to me, either because it is in the public domain, I have written it myself, or it has been sent to me as part of a subject access request. It is not confidential: I agreed to confidentiality with the SOA only while my complaints were being processed. I’ve put the piece on LoobyLou’s substack because this is where the interested might gather.

Also, though I have never met her in person, Looby is now my friend, a happy result of the day when Joanne Harris lumped us together on twitter. Looby and I reiterate, however, that we are not the same person and have different views and careers. I am now aware of Looby’s true identity but have promised to keep it, together with those of her colleagues Andy Pandy and Teddy, strictly confidential.

😊 Kate Clanchy MBE November 2023

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