When the story broke about Kristi of The Story Siren being a plagiarist, we all watched – completely dumbfounded – as she made non-apologies and refused to accept responsibility for her actions. Here’s what I wanted to see happen:

Dear Beautifully Invisible and Grit and Glamour,

I’m sorry I plagiarized your posts. I did it intentionally and then made it worse by lying about it/trying to cover it up. I apologize deeply and sincerely for what I did. I hope you can forgive me someday.

Signed,

Kristi

What happened instead? She apologized without actually owning her actions. She continually made things worse by retracting and changing her statements. And she never once, not in all this time, reached out to her victims to either apologize directly or to ask her scary rabid fangirls to stop harassing her victims.

That was bad enough. But then she did one better. She launched a Week of Awareness on her site, where she asked authors, librarians and readers to talk about plagiarism (Link to Smart Bitches site where you can find info. I’m not linking to TSS direct, sorry). I am..deeply disturbed by the tone of the posts going up over there this week. A lot of what I’m reading is “Plagiarism isn’t that bad” or “This isn’t really plagiarism”. W.T.F. No wait, I think this deserves a full What.The.Fuck. I’m sickened and saddened by her behavior and that of the authors/guest posters on her website. Like Lauren Baratz-Logsted, author of The Bro-Magnet, a book I really enjoyed but will no longer recommend to my friends.

Thinking about this today, and feeling sad and disturbed, I tweeted about what I like to call “The MM Apology” (MM being my husband).

Tweets start from bottom up

If you’d like more information about Kristi’s non-apologies, you can read Beautifully Invisible’s The Art of the (Non) Apology.

I probably would have left it at that, and not written this post, but then Kristi did something amusing and I felt the need to share. She blocked me on Twitter.

*insert sad face here* That’s right, folks, I can no longer see Kristi’s tweets and she will no longer get my @replies to her. Please wait while I take a minute to compose myself and dry my tears.

…

Ok, we’re back.

Apparently I’m not the only one she blocked, either.

That’s right. She actually blocked one of the people she plagiarized from. I think we need to say it again.

What.The.Fuck.

I gotta tell you, I’m not feeling the love.

Stay classy, Kristi.