A few questions for Kyle Payne

Hi Kyle.

I have a few questions for you, and I'd appreciate you answering them here.

1. Why have you not posted Nikki's and my comments that we sent months ago, in response to your post A Different Kind of Pain? Or, if you have, where are they?

2. Pertaining to the incident:
Did you turn yourself in to your superior (in your capacity as RA), to other adminstration at the college where you worked, or to the police?

3. (Relating to the above) If not, how did it come to pass that this whole matter was discovered and uncovered? I think there's stuff floating around on the web about this, and I'd rather hear about this directly from you: what happened that led the police to confiscate your computer and camera, I mean after the time the photos and short video were taken? How did the police know that you had committed a crime, or series of them?

4. How much time transpired between you taking the images and the police (or whoever) taking away your computer and camera? Did you upload the images of the victim into your computer?

5. Before the incident discussed in your recent blogpost with update (08.09.08 and 08.02.08) have you ever taken a photograph, digital or not, video or still, of a woman in any state of undress, without her knowledge or permission?

6. How do you plan to make yourself publicly accountable if you are only privately collecting responses from feminists? Have there been requests, to date, for a public online discussion or forum in which you and your questioners can interact? If not, why have you not initiated this?

7. What argument or reasoning can you give for why a woman or women should feel safe around you if the woman or women is/are asleep, drunk, on drugs, or in any state of consciousness or unconsciousness? You acknowledge quite clearly in your statement that this impulse just came over you in a bewildering and confusing way. Doesn't that make you more dangerous, not less? Explain how women are safer now that this story--the press's version and your own telling of it--made it to the public sphere?

8. You state that your intent in speaking about your past was to put the incident in context as a profeminist, yet you don't adequately explain how your white, male, and heterosexual entitlements factor into what you did, except to say that you own what you did. Why is the childhood abuse you suffered more relevant to disclose than a detailed list of your entitlements? (And, which of these entitlements are still in place?)

9. On your blog you wrote:

I write this letter in the interest of dropping barriers, sharing openly and honestly a story that is very difficult to talk about, in hopes that doing so may bring peace, understanding, and hope to the lives of others.

In what ways have you dropped barriers, aside from sharing the story? You seem pretty inaccessible generally, and fully in control of this process. I believe hope is found in concrete action, action that is radically different than behaviors that have harmed other people, if we're talking on the social level.

10. What are you doing that is radically different from your harmful actions, to make yourself more directly accountable to feminists and profeminists outside and inside the blogosphere? How can we know this won't happen again?

I look forward to seeing your answers here.

Julian