Culture & Community, News & Opinion
by pixelatedHarmony
Editor's Note: This journalistic report is a slightly sanitized version of the "omnibus report" given to the SCP Wiki Staff in an attempt to finally push the case against AdminBright into action. It was also the document given to DrCimmerian that is featured in his recent video on the subject. The information herein was compiled by Harmony with the assistance of myself. No one person or even two people can be said to have felled AdminBright. It is the culmination of years of effort, with multiple contributors over several years that we cannot all thank individually. We would like to specifically thank here unnamed members of the SCP Wiki staff, who listened when not many would be willing to. You know who you are, were pivotal to this effort, and should forever be proud of making the community safer, and helping to restore trust and honor to your peers. We are publishing this report in the interest of transparency and public knowledge. While the SCP Wiki's Anti-Harassment Team tends to err on the side of conservatism with respect to detailed information in their actions and under the guise of protecting those involved — sometimes honestly, sometimes not — we strongly believe that this is a significant enough issue to share the facts fully with the community. Particular snippets have been removed to protect innocent individuals, or those individuals not yet addressed themselves in a similar fashion as AdminBright. Finally, please see the legal notice at the end of this document. Thank you, Lack of Lepers, aka scpcrnp, aka ieatcrepes |
This report was submitted to the SCP Foundation Wiki’s ethics committee pursuant to its request for a full accounting of information regarding the endemic culture of sexual misconduct present in the power-user caste of the SCP Wiki. It is primarily focused on the most prolific known perpetrator. This person is most commonly known online as DrBright, Bright, TheDuckman, CapnDuckman, and TheArgentOne.
This man was a long-time Administrator of the SCP Wiki who served in that capacity for most of the SCP Wiki’s existence. The evidence here underscores how he was able to continue operating for as long as he did in spite of never bothering to hide his activities; in some cases going out of his way to promote himself as a “horny old man” or “creepy uncle”.
A brief glossary of terms — #site19, #site12, and #site67 are all chat channels used by the SCP Wiki in the years before most community interactions occurred on Discord. They are the public general chat, a publicly accessible nsfw chat, and the private SCP staff chat rooms, respectively.
There is nothing wrong with writing about touchy subjects, but many themes found in the former administrator's writing is in hindsight a red flag. In SCP-001:O5, there is a passage about “[the] breeding pits, girls as young as eight, chained to the walls, forced to be nothing more than...“.
There is also the infamous now-deleted story Doctor, Doctor, Doctor where his character Dr. Bright’s soul inhabits a 13 year old girl’s body and was described in a sexually charged manner with emphasis on the underage girl’s breast size. These themes appear repeatedly in his writing and to make an exhaustive list of it would take up a disproportionate amount of space in this report.
The last piece of fiction to consider is the Self-Insert in which ends with his own real-life self, inside the fiction of the SCP Wiki, furiously masturbating while begging not to be downvoted.
Moving on, there is the actual documented abusive behavior. There is a consistent theme to these reports of his behavior, such as the solicitation of nudes and pressuring of SCP Wiki community members to provide sexually gratifying images and text communications with him. This anonymous accounting of abuse is typical of such experiences victims had with him:
It wasn’t just contacting people on an individual basis, because there was also a consistent pattern of using official SCP staff institutions to solicit nudes the SCP Tumblr community. Due to the way Tumblr is set up, his personal account here was also the account which he used directly in managing the official SCP tumblr. This is him using that account to solicit nudes from the SCP community at large on his 37th birthday.
When there was any push-back, more often than not the reaction from this former administrator was to start complaining about his publicly posting NSFW content without proper tagging on his Tumblr blog, as can be seen here in a screenshot from his blog and logs from the #site12 IRC channel:
When called out on his behavior his reaction would invariably consist of downplaying it and pretending it was just a joke or that other people were taking his behavior too seriously. Given his senior leadership role within the SCP Staff there were too many people inside the system willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. The following logs show that his behavior was normalized to the point where quote bot sourced from September 5th 2014 joking about how he was upset a 14 year old girl didn’t provide nudes when applying to the SCP Wiki. The former administrator excused this when it raised eyebrows by attributing it to his “weird sense of humor” on April 23rd 2017 in #site67, the SCP Staff’s private official chatroom:
Tumblr was also not the only place where nudes were solicited from. The following screenshot shows solicitation of nudes via his Facebook account. Note the SCP logo profile pic. Similarly to his Tumblr, this was the account used to do official staff business. Modern_Erasmus was the other person in the screenshot, his response was to pressure the former administrator to resign behind the scenes to minimize any public relations impact disclosure of the misconduct could cause.
One of the most recurring public instances of inappropriate behavior was the co-mingling of kinky personal life and his public duties as an SCP Wiki Administrator. In every possible space where this crossover could occur it was extant, such as this advertising his speaking at BDSM conventions in the same breath as his SCP Administrator role.
It was not limited to off-site advertising as the cross-pollination of kink and official business went both ways. This screenshot shows the former administrator modifying the application page to solicit nudes and modifying the Join the Site page of the SCP Wiki to note applications were not being processed as "Bright is off getting drunk and teaching BDSM at Penguicon."
He and other staff members had a history of downplaying his requesting nudes on-site, as demonstrated in these June 2018 logs from #site19 (during the crisis which led to the formation of the RPC Authority):
The following #site67 conversation from September 1st, 2017 is a perfect encapsulation of how Bright's behavior had been completely normalized during his many years leading the SCP Wiki community:
The culture surrounding Bright repeatedly enabled him by failing to notice or act upon obvious red flags. This can be demonstrated by what happens when blatantly inappropriate behavior has easily foreseeable consequences. The predictable consequence, as seen in #site19 in January 2013 when soliciting nudes from everyone applying to the SCP Wiki is no big deal:
The former administrator had many friends inside the SCP staff system who were adamant enablers of his toxic behavior. Many of them in turn were allowed to abuse power in their own way. It was not just sexual abuse which the former administrator was involved in. This post on Tumblr takes pride in the act of doxxing minors, along with involvement by ████████████, ████████████, and ████████, who were all SCP Wiki staff members at the time.
There are numerous examples of the former administrator behaving inappropriately in public spaces. This screenshot depicts the former administrator (age 37+) and SpookyBee (age 19) talking about age and consent in #site12:
The former administrator laments not having enough friends to send him nudes in #site12. This is a known tactic of his to bait people into offering him nudes:
There are numerous other anecdotes of inappropriate behavior from #site12. It is not inappropriate because the former administrator was in a position of power over these young people and used that power to gratify himself at their expense. There are an overwhelming quantity of anecdotes from #site12, of which a sampling is provided here:
It is unfortunate that the SCP staff did not have more people willing to speak up like Quikngruvn (#site19) or Rimple (#site12). These renunciations of abuse show that even in their time, there is no excusing the former administrator's inappropriate behavior.
There is a demonstrable conflict of interest when it comes to the power dynamic between these parties which should have been obvious to all observers even at the time. Some do not directly involve Bright, but are included for contextualizing the culture which allowed him to operate without significant push-back or opposition due to it being normalized within elite circles of the SCP community.
SCP staff at every level of power could plainly see what was happening but hardly anyone lifted a finger to stop him. Staff members at the highest echelons of power adamantly defended him both publicly and privately.
Look at the difference between how the former administrator, GabrielJade, and Eskobar (all staff members prior to their bad behavior being uncovered) were discussed on 05 versus how a generic user who did the same sort of stuff was treated, there is a clear double standard:
Becoming a 'former' administrator by “voluntarily retiring" to save face a month and 18 days after refusing to divest his kink life from his SCP life.
This man, this abuser, was enabled to be awful due to a culture of abuse fostered within staff, by people enabling, ignoring, and participating in the same things he did. This lack of accountability means that those who enabled abuse are still in positions to allow it happening again unless those who can do the right thing.
Ⓒ HB
Ⓒ Confic Magazine
Cover based on a design suggested by Ilomoch
Legal notice: This report may not be reproduced or excerpted without the written, express consent of the author and/or Confic Magazine LLC, except by Fair Use.
The chat log snippets here come from Harmony's personal Mibbit account's stored history, and are released with permission. Others were donated by individuals within various IRC chatrooms over several years. The chatroom spaces herein, including #site67, are defined in accordance with US law as legally public. There are no confidentiality or privileged protections available in internet forum services such as IRC, though they may personally regard it as against their own Terms of Service. IRC and all chats within are legally defined as a public places.This has been fleshed out with Fourth Amendment considerations at hand, the conclusion that "there are virtually no expectations of privacy in the true chatroom". Likewise, it has been established in Supreme Judicial Courts that “rights disappear once somebody composes a text message and hits Send.”