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hyperionheights · 22 days ago

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Why I cut ties with @fovrirresky / Sophie Kirkeby

Now that the shock has worn off and I’ve had time to reflect, I think it’s time to actually talk about this. I am also sharing this publicly as I realize suddenly releasing a statement disavowing a former friend and frequent collaborator left many people in the dark. The “don’t bring her up to me or vice versa” was a very rash decision that came from hurt and panic, and I fear that it allowed for certain parties to further obfuscate certain facts.

I am telling my story not as a moral crusade, but for personal closure and to give context for my own erratic behavior these past four months. In addition, I am posting this publicly as she has also been suggesting former mutual friends who cut her off have been manipulated by me/ ghostwriting their texts, and I’d like to clear their names from this as well.

TL;DR: Throughout my time living with her she has exaggerated and decontextualized others’ behaviors in order to avoid putting herself in uncomfortable situations. This includes but is not limited to racially motivated actions, manufacturing conversations that never happened, or claiming that something did happen rather than clarifying that she feared it would happen. This had been a pattern of behavior throughout our friendship, but I finally was on the receiving end of it. She accused me of something illegal and dangerous when she wanted to end our friendship, instead of simply saying “I don’t want to be friends anymore.” In the fallout of these accusations, she has taken to accusing me of manipulating others against her and intentionally misgendering me.

Full story under the cut includes racism, misgendering, and just a lot of petty lying and stuff.

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Anyway. @ forvirresky (Sophie Kirkeby, henceforth referred to as Sophie) was my roommate and close friend for nearly five years. As we were both art students with adjacent interests, she quickly became integrated into my social media posts, and eventually my friend groups. Like, we’ve vacationed together, slept over at each other’s houses, shared clothes, etc.

For those of you who have known/followed me for awhile, in early 2020 I filed a police report against my father for domestic violence/child abuse, which has spawned a series of other legal battles. When I told stories regarding my home life, family, and just cultural norms of when your family is from the global south, I thought I was sharing a piece of my life with a friend from a different cultural background (white, affluent, from a rural community). I now know that many of these things I shared in confidence were being received with an air of judgement, my experiences were taken as testament to her family’s preconceived notion of how “uncivilized city folk are”, and I was very much treated as a charity case for their white saviorism. Sophie is one of the few people who knows the horrific details of my home life and mental health history, and has used it to disingenuously portray me in a negative light.

One day in March I woke up to find that I’m blocked on Discord. Eventually it became apparent that I’ve been blocked everywhere (even places like Spotify and Letterboxd). At this point I’m panicking and wondering what I did because we had literally been talking like usual 12 hours prior.

I checked my DMs again to see a message from her mom a few hours prior saying “I hope you’re doing well” . I tell my mom about this, and she takes to Facebook only to find that we’re both blocked by her mom too. After two hours of playing telephone with a mutual friend, I was told “Sophie is going no contact due to behavior, there will be a note left on the desk”. I spent the day panicking as I’d been given no insight into what I had done, and did not know what I’d return to at the apartment the following day. This led to a several hours-long anxiety attack that manifested physical symptoms and left me bedridden.

Little did I know this was the precursor to a lot of bullshit!!

Highlights:

When I say “she blocked me everywhere”, I mean everywhere but her art instagram account. This is because she still wished to benefit from my promotional poster and posts looking for volunteers to help with her thesis film.

After she had enough people for her film, I was kicked off of the project entirely without notice.

I came back to school to find that half of the apartment was cleared out (and some mutual items, like seasonings and the rice cooker, taken :/) , with a two page signed letter left on her side of the room.

I was accused of “nearly throwing a deadly glass bottle at her head”, and vaguely alluded to other instances of ‘abusive behavior’ but failed to cite exact incidents.

Two paragraphs later she changed the bottle allegation from my “nearly” throwing one, to my “pretending to” have done so, but still claims she feared for her safety.

I did not throw or nearly throw any bottle at anyone and I have significant physical and emotional trauma from being bludgeoned in the head with a blunt object (also this is a crime). We were on a video call with friends at the time, and I have evidence to back up my claim.

Armchair diagnosed me as “a sociopath”, citing that her best friend’s mom is a psychologist.

Neither party is qualified to comment on my psychiatric diagnoses, as Sophie is an animator, and I have my own psychologist and psychiatrist.

In addition to blocking me, she also took the time to only block the other Black people within our friend group/group chat, claiming that they also posed a threat to her due to their allegiance to me.

This is obviously not true, as she was talking to these people as if nothing was wrong in the days before.

In the hours following her blocking me, she contacted a mutual friend and asked for them to record what I was saying/doing during my anxiety episode, so that she could show it to her friends [as a joke].

The friend in question obviously did not do this. Sophie has since denied ever asking for this but we have screenshots of this interaction.

After the fallout from this saga, she attempted to manipulate a mutual friend into being more sympathetic to her actions in this scenario because they were “subject to the most harshness” from me, and insisted that if I had talked to them first, I would have manipulated them into blocking her. I have reason to believe other parties were also told variations of this, with details omitted/changed based on what would resonate the most.

In the weeks leading up to this incident, she failed to file any paperwork I asked of her as treasurer for a student organization, then quit without warning on the day she blocked me everywhere. Her replacement was not adequately trained before her departure, and it led to a lot of financial difficulties for the remainder of the school year.

^ Current org treasurer has corroborated my account, but Sophie denies this claim herself.

Since all of this transpired, I have been told by mutual friends that she has been intentionally misgendering me when I’m referenced in conversation.

Basically, I use he/they with close friends but in academic/professional life people she/her me. Do I like it? No. Am I going to fight in this political climate? No. It is hurtful though for someone who knows my preferences to intentionally refer to me as a girl though.

To justify this situation to outside parties, she has taken my words and actions out of context to portray me as a violent and irrational person; implying that I am so unstable and manipulative that she could not have a conversation with me stating that she didn’t want to be friends anymore, or I would’ve “told everyone not to speak to her anymore.”

In reality, many of the anecdotes she’s given of my “irrationality” were my dealing with the fallout of: my ongoing DV case, recovering from a psychiatric ward stay, the death of my grandfather, an SA, dealing with an administrative harassment/intimidation case, etc.

This letter was not a “last resort”, but the first option for someone who did not wish to have a difficult conversation or have someone be upset with them and instead went nuclear.

When she was confronted by mutual friends regarding all of this behavior via email, she accused me of ghostwriting their statements.

I did not write the emails. I also never read her responses. Because their relationships with her, while affected by me, ultimately aren’t my business/jurisdiction.

Overall, this situation has created a lot of unnecessary stress in both my academic and personal life. While I will not stoop as low as her to claim that she has ‘made me a worse person’, I will not lie that this has caused a great deal of heartbreak seeing as this was someone I considered one of my best friends. I do not let people into my life easily due to my home life (and the many personality flaws it has spawned in me lol), and this has shattered much of the trust I’ve spent these past five years working to build up in therapy.

I hope anyone who was told something fucked up has the opportunity to read this, and please reach out if I’ve harmed you! I’d much rather be judged on things I did do and can control than the words of someone who does not wish me well.

I am admittedly a very messy and negative person, and have much to work on with being a more considerate and aware person. However, the way she has characterized me has been so disturbing and damaging that it has left my entire household in shock, especially considering our own experiences with abuse.

There is so much more to this story that I’d like to share for context, but ultimately would be inappropriate to disclose publicly. Irls and mutuals can reach out though.

And in the case of this being screenshotted and sent to Sophie (because I now know how your cohorts get down)—

Sophie. You are not a poor country girl who just happens to find herself frequently victimized by her peers.

You are a grown adult whose father works as an engineer for Elon Musk, and makes enough to afford a large house so your mother can be a stay at home mom and clean up all of your messes. Because of this, you have never faced any meaningful consequence to your actions save for junior year, where you failed out of your thesis film despite being given multiple passes and extensions, because you simply didn’t want to take your professor’s criticism.

I hope that you grow out of this, work to live with benign discomfort, and learn to grow a spine and handle conflicts in a more mature manner, rather than going nuclear. If not for yourself, then for anyone who has to work with you in the future. I am not going to pretend I wish you well, so stop pretending to be the bigger person in this scenario.

Someone cutting you off after reading that letter you wrote does not mean I manipulated them— it means they came to their own conclusions on the situation. I don’t have to send anyone after you, because you have already shown your character and I have evidence to back up all of my claims. I hope you keep me and my family’s name out of your mouth, and stop using my struggles and trauma as funny conversational anecdotes to compensate for your uncomplex life.

#deeply horrendous behavior

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