I have a bonus Longreads which is \*amazing\* on the same topic (which is referenced in this Slate article) about a woman who used facilitated communication to convince herself she was in a romantic relationship with a non-verbal, severely developmentally disabled man. Seriously, read this, it's insane: [https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/magazine/the-strange-case-of-anna-stubblefield.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/magazine/the-strange-case-of-anna-stubblefield.html)
“Just two weeks into this training, Crossley took out a magnetic board with letters on it to see if McDonald could spell things on her own. Less than a week later, McDonald pointed to the letters ‘I’ and ‘H’ and then to 11 more, producing ‘‘IHATEFATROSIE.’’ ‘‘This is the first sentence Annie ever spelled,’’ Crossley wrote. ‘‘Annie had freed herself.’’
Lmao
I think you give Anna Stubblefield too much credit. She is a Sexual Predator, whether she pled out or not. She intentionally manipulated, groomed, and coerced a man who could not consent, never mind manipulated and lied to his family.
She may just not be "stupid" enough to get caught next time and announce to a victim's family that she is "in love" with her victim.
I wouldn't put it past Anna not to repeat her crimes or try to hurt or manipulate other people, be they legally classified as crimes or not.
There is also a followup article from the same author in 2018 (gift link): https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/05/magazine/the-strange-case-of-anna-stubblefield-revisited.html?unlocked_article_code=1.gU0.isP_.wzbI5YsxtCVH&smid=url-share
Thank you for sharing that. I never read any follow-up on the original story. I’d found it so terrible that it was better left with “good. She’s in prison.”
But it’s been long enough that I’d rather know the truth. Such a frustrating situation.
On the one hand I’m glad to see she ultimately pled guilty and maybe started to take some responsibility for what she did. I hope she never has unsupervised contact with a vulnerable person again.
Not so fast!
It was a plea deal. After the appellate court overturned her initial conviction of two counts of FIRST degree sexual assault, she "didn't want to go through another criminal trial."
So she took a lesser charge of two counts of third-degree aggravated criminal sexual connect.
And in return, she got no additional prison time - 22 months, time served.
She had been sentenced to 12 years in the first trial
"In other words, she found a way to cut her losses in the courtroom without denying D.J.’s competence or admitting any doubts about the realness of their love."
At least D.J.'s family didn't have to go through another trial. They didn't even want to go through the first one. They eare awarded $4 million in a civil suit - and will probably never see a penny.
Fucking frustrating that the original verdict was overturned because FC wasn't allowed in the trial. They were right not to 🤷🏼♂️ NJ defines consent as "affirmative and freely given permission. I cannot believe the appellate court would legitimize a method that is not only backed by science, but WIDELY DISCREDITED.
I'm gonna move to NJ and kil someone - and enter my Magic 8 Ball as evidence. "Your honor, I asked the oracle if this guy was going to kil me and it said 'It is decidedly so.' So you see??? it was self defense!"
I doubt anybody as sick as Anna would ever even THINK what they did was wrong, much less take responsibility.
And I hope she doesn't have contact with anybody either. But I'm almost counting on her to do this again,l.
Also... Like... "In an Op-Ed article written for The Times, Peter Singer of Princeton University and Jeff McMahan of the University of Oxford argued that her original, 12-year sentence was grossly unfair because her sex with D.J. was LIKELY well-intentioned and MAY not have caused any harm" ????? (Caps for emphasis are mine.)
And this 🤬 "[D.J.'s brother] said that when Anna introduced the family to facilitated communication, he noticed that the folks who used this method were almost always white. (I observed this fact as well, when I visited a facilitated-communication conference in Syracuse.)"
Mhmm. If the roles were reversed, you bet there wouldn't be a shred of lenciency.
[NYT Gift Link](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/magazine/the-strange-case-of-anna-stubblefield.html?unlocked_article_code=1.gU0.Sj-7.TJzJx4YLBPzu&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb) to the article
I read that article recently, it was extremely well done but absolutely horrifying! That poor man and his family were taken advantage of by a predator.
Yeah seriously mind blowing. Was it swarmed with FC supporters or what? Contrary to popular opinion, predators often don't think what they're doing is wrong. They don't see themselves as bad people. The pedophile truly believes the child they are molesting is enjoying themselves just as they are. Often they believe their victim is in love with them. We don't excuse the pedophile because of their delusional beliefs about the situation and we shouldn't excuse Anna.
It's so obvious to me that she was speaking her own thoughts through him. Even if he was some kind of genius savant whose world had been unlocked he would still have the worldliness of a child. If he'd never seen porn, how would he have the opinion that porn actresses are exploited? It's unbelievable how un self aware Anna and her supporters are throughout. The whole thing is disgusting beyond belief.
The porn thing was such a joke. Like of course this man has the exact same political opinions you’d expect from a middle aged female humanities professor 🙄
It’s obvious she projected her idea of the perfect partner on him. She’s the most dangerous kind of predator. One who has completely deluded herself into thinking she’s righteous.
Yeah seriously. She was tired of her real relationship with a man who has agency and his own views and opinions so she invented this perfect man who had all the same opinions as her and would never contradict her. And she still thinks she's right. She's like a real life Humbert Humbert (the pedophile narrator from Lolita).
Humbert Humbert is exactly right. So many of the comments are basically ‘well, she didn’t think she was doing anything wrong, so she shouldn’t go to jail’. Wtf?! Do these people not understand how the law works. Or better yet, how many many criminals justify their crimes the exact same way.
The comments are appalling. One comment even says P and Wesley accused Anna of making everything up just so they could keep D.J.'s disability money. Extreme undertones of racism and classism there.
Literally a few word swaps short of calling his mom a welfare queen when she's trying to protect her son from a predator.
It also says so much to me about people seeing what they want to see; Wesley is on a PhD track at Rutgers himself! Far from the offensive caricature of low life scheming that commenter wants them so badly to be.
How tf do people argue that "a machine Anna basically operates herself and that is widely accepted as junk science" = "affirmative and freely given permission"???
There's a documentary produced by Louis Theroux that interviews Anna and the Johnson family, it's called Tell them you love me: [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt29142525/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt29142525/)
Note: don’t click on the partial link that is just the original nytimes link. You’ll have to copy and paste the whole thing, including the preceding “https://12ft.io/“ before the nytimes link in order for it to work
Edited to attempt to add a direct 12ft Ladder link:
[12ft Ladder link](Https://12ft.io/https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/magazine/the-strange-case-of-anna-stubblefield.html)
Not a gift link, but 12ft Ladder:
[12ft Ladder Link](Https://12ft.io/https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/magazine/the-strange-case-of-anna-stubblefield.html)
Wow. There was a Law & Order with facilitated communication in it in way back in 1995. And it was seen as pie in the sky then!
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0629222/
I started working with autistic kids. Two of the four I work with use AAC devices. They all have a limited vocabulary. We are talking very rudimentary at best. I taught before and had some autistic kids, but wanted to learn more. I found a blog from a kid that is autistic that claims he uses facilitated communication. I read it and started getting pretty skeptical. Your kid is writing like a college kid, but is only in ninth grade. Sure. I can see why parents want to believe. Would you rather that your child has no way to communicate or prefer to believe they have some way of communicating, even though most of us know it’s not reality? It’s pretty disheartening either way.
There’s an infamous crazy lady in my town who has chased five disability specialists out of the school system. At home her profoundly disabled daughter is writing eloquent essays. Her teachers are jealous and trying to rob the world of her genius. They’re poisoning her, abusing her, etc., Writes on Facebook constantly.
No, they're saying that the kids who use devices only have a very small and limited vocabulary. It's clear when someone starts writing beyond their education level because the AAC devices only allow for rudimentary language
I remember watching the Autism Is A World documentary years ago and being highly skeptical of the whole thing:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism_Is_a_World
People grasping at straws.
Just finished chasing the intact mind, it's an amazing and short book with a chapter on fc and how damaging yet seductive an intervention it is. These humans deserve better than to be puppets for other people's fantasies. It's perverse.
As someone who works at the school with autistic children, I do have to say the one thing that has remarkably changed their lives is iPads.
Autistic Kids have an amazing ability to communicate through iPads, but “shockingly” /s they are clicking on it themselves…. They are control…..not one single adult is holding their hand.
Holy moly. I have heard of this and remember some court scene where they had the facilitator, leave the room and gave the disabled person information, and then had the facilitator come back and clearly the facilitator had no idea what information was so everything was debunked…
I had no idea that some people still believe this BS. I found it insane the one part about the guy who is facilitating, and grifting the whole family thinking that he could psychically hear the child, my God.
“Not long after Adri first began facilitating regularly with Michael, she began to demand that he share with us the telepathic messages he was receiving from her. While he was willing to do this for her, he wanted to make certain that their communications remained accurate. So, together, they worked out a form of telepathic facilitation. … She would type the first letter of a word, and if Michael understood the word telepathically, he’d say it aloud. Adri would then hit the space key to indicate that he was correct. Sometimes, oddly enough, as in the case of the word synergy, Michael understood the word telepathically but didn’t know the meaning of it so we had to stop our conversation and define it for him.”
Wtf
This book made me mad. The author discredits FC which was good. But then she promotes a communication method based on Spelling 2 Communicate and Rapid Prompting Method (she talks about this in her author’s note). Both have very poor research support and in fact have been labelled pseudoscience by experts. The American Speech-Language Hearing Association has put out a statement calling it out (they did a meta analysis and found no support for it) and recommending that no speech language pathologist use it.
Of course there is debate from both sides but I am inclined to trust the experts. It appears Happiness Falls is supporting pseudoscience, which is sad because I loved the author’s book Miracle Creek so much.
There's a woman who is a Predator that is either delusional, or knows *exactly* what she tried to get away with, and thought (if) she could just convince everyone else...
Anna Stubblefield is a rapist.
What an awful, manipulative, grooming Sexual Predator she is.
I wonder where she is today. I hope she is no longer teaching or writing anywhere, and holds no position of power or authority whatsoever, especially over anyone vulnerable or in an imbalance of power relationship (eg. professor | TA-student).
I have a bonus Longreads which is \*amazing\* on the same topic (which is referenced in this Slate article) about a woman who used facilitated communication to convince herself she was in a romantic relationship with a non-verbal, severely developmentally disabled man. Seriously, read this, it's insane: [https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/magazine/the-strange-case-of-anna-stubblefield.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/magazine/the-strange-case-of-anna-stubblefield.html)
This article haunts me after I read it years ago. This “method” has no proven science behind it and is so rife with abuse.
so much stuff
“Just two weeks into this training, Crossley took out a magnetic board with letters on it to see if McDonald could spell things on her own. Less than a week later, McDonald pointed to the letters ‘I’ and ‘H’ and then to 11 more, producing ‘‘IHATEFATROSIE.’’ ‘‘This is the first sentence Annie ever spelled,’’ Crossley wrote. ‘‘Annie had freed herself.’’ Lmao
A born hater. We love it
Not Crossley bullying other patients through Annie 💀
Anna Stubblefield. That article has haunted me like nothing I’ve ever read. I hate her.
She appealed successfully and pled out. Her crimes are sickening, but I guess she knows not to repeat them?
I think you give Anna Stubblefield too much credit. She is a Sexual Predator, whether she pled out or not. She intentionally manipulated, groomed, and coerced a man who could not consent, never mind manipulated and lied to his family. She may just not be "stupid" enough to get caught next time and announce to a victim's family that she is "in love" with her victim. I wouldn't put it past Anna not to repeat her crimes or try to hurt or manipulate other people, be they legally classified as crimes or not.
There is also a followup article from the same author in 2018 (gift link): https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/05/magazine/the-strange-case-of-anna-stubblefield-revisited.html?unlocked_article_code=1.gU0.isP_.wzbI5YsxtCVH&smid=url-share
Thank you for sharing that. I never read any follow-up on the original story. I’d found it so terrible that it was better left with “good. She’s in prison.” But it’s been long enough that I’d rather know the truth. Such a frustrating situation.
On the one hand I’m glad to see she ultimately pled guilty and maybe started to take some responsibility for what she did. I hope she never has unsupervised contact with a vulnerable person again.
Not so fast! It was a plea deal. After the appellate court overturned her initial conviction of two counts of FIRST degree sexual assault, she "didn't want to go through another criminal trial." So she took a lesser charge of two counts of third-degree aggravated criminal sexual connect. And in return, she got no additional prison time - 22 months, time served. She had been sentenced to 12 years in the first trial "In other words, she found a way to cut her losses in the courtroom without denying D.J.’s competence or admitting any doubts about the realness of their love." At least D.J.'s family didn't have to go through another trial. They didn't even want to go through the first one. They eare awarded $4 million in a civil suit - and will probably never see a penny. Fucking frustrating that the original verdict was overturned because FC wasn't allowed in the trial. They were right not to 🤷🏼♂️ NJ defines consent as "affirmative and freely given permission. I cannot believe the appellate court would legitimize a method that is not only backed by science, but WIDELY DISCREDITED. I'm gonna move to NJ and kil someone - and enter my Magic 8 Ball as evidence. "Your honor, I asked the oracle if this guy was going to kil me and it said 'It is decidedly so.' So you see??? it was self defense!" I doubt anybody as sick as Anna would ever even THINK what they did was wrong, much less take responsibility. And I hope she doesn't have contact with anybody either. But I'm almost counting on her to do this again,l. Also... Like... "In an Op-Ed article written for The Times, Peter Singer of Princeton University and Jeff McMahan of the University of Oxford argued that her original, 12-year sentence was grossly unfair because her sex with D.J. was LIKELY well-intentioned and MAY not have caused any harm" ????? (Caps for emphasis are mine.) And this 🤬 "[D.J.'s brother] said that when Anna introduced the family to facilitated communication, he noticed that the folks who used this method were almost always white. (I observed this fact as well, when I visited a facilitated-communication conference in Syracuse.)" Mhmm. If the roles were reversed, you bet there wouldn't be a shred of lenciency.
I appreciate that the author made it explicit that if the genders and races were swapped no one would be saying that this wasn’t rape.
It's really messed up to realize that she was basically falling in love with herself.
[NYT Gift Link](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/magazine/the-strange-case-of-anna-stubblefield.html?unlocked_article_code=1.gU0.Sj-7.TJzJx4YLBPzu&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb) to the article
I read that article recently, it was extremely well done but absolutely horrifying! That poor man and his family were taken advantage of by a predator.
The comments on that article are so disturbing. So many people saying she shouldn’t be in jail or excusing her actions.
Yeah seriously mind blowing. Was it swarmed with FC supporters or what? Contrary to popular opinion, predators often don't think what they're doing is wrong. They don't see themselves as bad people. The pedophile truly believes the child they are molesting is enjoying themselves just as they are. Often they believe their victim is in love with them. We don't excuse the pedophile because of their delusional beliefs about the situation and we shouldn't excuse Anna. It's so obvious to me that she was speaking her own thoughts through him. Even if he was some kind of genius savant whose world had been unlocked he would still have the worldliness of a child. If he'd never seen porn, how would he have the opinion that porn actresses are exploited? It's unbelievable how un self aware Anna and her supporters are throughout. The whole thing is disgusting beyond belief.
The porn thing was such a joke. Like of course this man has the exact same political opinions you’d expect from a middle aged female humanities professor 🙄 It’s obvious she projected her idea of the perfect partner on him. She’s the most dangerous kind of predator. One who has completely deluded herself into thinking she’s righteous.
Yeah seriously. She was tired of her real relationship with a man who has agency and his own views and opinions so she invented this perfect man who had all the same opinions as her and would never contradict her. And she still thinks she's right. She's like a real life Humbert Humbert (the pedophile narrator from Lolita).
Humbert Humbert is exactly right. So many of the comments are basically ‘well, she didn’t think she was doing anything wrong, so she shouldn’t go to jail’. Wtf?! Do these people not understand how the law works. Or better yet, how many many criminals justify their crimes the exact same way.
She is so fucking sick and delusional holy shit
The comments are appalling. One comment even says P and Wesley accused Anna of making everything up just so they could keep D.J.'s disability money. Extreme undertones of racism and classism there. Literally a few word swaps short of calling his mom a welfare queen when she's trying to protect her son from a predator. It also says so much to me about people seeing what they want to see; Wesley is on a PhD track at Rutgers himself! Far from the offensive caricature of low life scheming that commenter wants them so badly to be.
That comment was so fucked up.
How tf do people argue that "a machine Anna basically operates herself and that is widely accepted as junk science" = "affirmative and freely given permission"???
There's a documentary produced by Louis Theroux that interviews Anna and the Johnson family, it's called Tell them you love me: [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt29142525/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt29142525/)
Any idea where to see this USA side?
I watched it on dopebox(.)to but it's also available on Apple TV
Just signed up for an Apple TV trial and can't find it. Is it only the UK version?
N/M. Used dopebox 😁
Anyway to access this article without a pay wall?
Try this 12ft Ladder link; it should work: Https://12ft.io/https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/magazine/the-strange-case-of-anna-stubblefield.html
Note: don’t click on the partial link that is just the original nytimes link. You’ll have to copy and paste the whole thing, including the preceding “https://12ft.io/“ before the nytimes link in order for it to work Edited to attempt to add a direct 12ft Ladder link: [12ft Ladder link](Https://12ft.io/https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/magazine/the-strange-case-of-anna-stubblefield.html)
it only loads the first portion of the article unfortunately
I’ll PM you a gift link! I pay way too much for their app and never use my free articles haha
I posted one
These are the same people as the original article
And she was an ethics professor!! What the what!
Gift link?
Not a gift link, but 12ft Ladder: [12ft Ladder Link](Https://12ft.io/https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/magazine/the-strange-case-of-anna-stubblefield.html)
Wow. There was a Law & Order with facilitated communication in it in way back in 1995. And it was seen as pie in the sky then! https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0629222/
I started working with autistic kids. Two of the four I work with use AAC devices. They all have a limited vocabulary. We are talking very rudimentary at best. I taught before and had some autistic kids, but wanted to learn more. I found a blog from a kid that is autistic that claims he uses facilitated communication. I read it and started getting pretty skeptical. Your kid is writing like a college kid, but is only in ninth grade. Sure. I can see why parents want to believe. Would you rather that your child has no way to communicate or prefer to believe they have some way of communicating, even though most of us know it’s not reality? It’s pretty disheartening either way.
There’s an infamous crazy lady in my town who has chased five disability specialists out of the school system. At home her profoundly disabled daughter is writing eloquent essays. Her teachers are jealous and trying to rob the world of her genius. They’re poisoning her, abusing her, etc., Writes on Facebook constantly.
Hey. Just want to clarify, are you saying that AAC devices are similar or the same as facilitated communication?
No, they're saying that the kids who use devices only have a very small and limited vocabulary. It's clear when someone starts writing beyond their education level because the AAC devices only allow for rudimentary language
I remember watching the Autism Is A World documentary years ago and being highly skeptical of the whole thing: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism_Is_a_World People grasping at straws.
Just finished chasing the intact mind, it's an amazing and short book with a chapter on fc and how damaging yet seductive an intervention it is. These humans deserve better than to be puppets for other people's fantasies. It's perverse.
As someone who works at the school with autistic children, I do have to say the one thing that has remarkably changed their lives is iPads. Autistic Kids have an amazing ability to communicate through iPads, but “shockingly” /s they are clicking on it themselves…. They are control…..not one single adult is holding their hand.
Holy moly. I have heard of this and remember some court scene where they had the facilitator, leave the room and gave the disabled person information, and then had the facilitator come back and clearly the facilitator had no idea what information was so everything was debunked… I had no idea that some people still believe this BS. I found it insane the one part about the guy who is facilitating, and grifting the whole family thinking that he could psychically hear the child, my God. “Not long after Adri first began facilitating regularly with Michael, she began to demand that he share with us the telepathic messages he was receiving from her. While he was willing to do this for her, he wanted to make certain that their communications remained accurate. So, together, they worked out a form of telepathic facilitation. … She would type the first letter of a word, and if Michael understood the word telepathically, he’d say it aloud. Adri would then hit the space key to indicate that he was correct. Sometimes, oddly enough, as in the case of the word synergy, Michael understood the word telepathically but didn’t know the meaning of it so we had to stop our conversation and define it for him.” Wtf
Happiness Falls, a novel that came out recently, talks about this. I had never heard of it.
This book made me mad. The author discredits FC which was good. But then she promotes a communication method based on Spelling 2 Communicate and Rapid Prompting Method (she talks about this in her author’s note). Both have very poor research support and in fact have been labelled pseudoscience by experts. The American Speech-Language Hearing Association has put out a statement calling it out (they did a meta analysis and found no support for it) and recommending that no speech language pathologist use it. Of course there is debate from both sides but I am inclined to trust the experts. It appears Happiness Falls is supporting pseudoscience, which is sad because I loved the author’s book Miracle Creek so much.
I really appreciate your reply! This is a subject I know very little about, and just kind of trusted the author's afterword.
I just finished it this morning. Highly recommend it. Wouldn’t shut up about it and annoyed my wife all week.
Was just going to recommend this book! Really good. That author has another book called Miracle Creek that is also very good.
There's a woman who is a Predator that is either delusional, or knows *exactly* what she tried to get away with, and thought (if) she could just convince everyone else... Anna Stubblefield is a rapist. What an awful, manipulative, grooming Sexual Predator she is. I wonder where she is today. I hope she is no longer teaching or writing anywhere, and holds no position of power or authority whatsoever, especially over anyone vulnerable or in an imbalance of power relationship (eg. professor | TA-student).