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This article has uncovered in me a previously unknown moral failing: apparently I cannot forgive someone if I don’t like them. That’s on me! Team No One forever, because I just cannot get over how much I hate them both. They’re two people who have never heard of de-escalation, since there are so many points in the story where all of this could’ve been avoided if one of them was just honest.

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Oct 14, 2021Liked by Ilana Wiles

I fully agree with what you wrote - whether likeable or not, Dawn was the one wronged here and I do not fault her for pursuing some outcomes for the bad behavior by Sonya. I don't personally have the energy for that kind of revenge, but maybe if I felt wronged enough I would - maybe there is some threshold after which you just can't turn away and let it go. Now I hope that Sonya (and her famous author friends) are feeling enough heat and discomfort to learn a lesson. My 6 year old probably has a better grasp of fairness and kindness than the people on that group chat...

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Oct 14, 2021Liked by Ilana Wiles

You’ve finally converted me Ilana. I didn’t like Sonya, I liked Dawn, but I couldn’t see how Dawn was right and I was a reluctant Sonya supporter. But put all together like this and it’s hard to stand behind Sonyas argument anymore

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Not many people would donate a kidney under any circumstances. You have to be a special kind of person to consider this. I don’t think recognition was the motivation but if she was looking for a little recognition afterwards from her “friend”, I think she is deserving. If Sonya ever needed any organ I doubt she would mock the donor for any reason , that’s if anyone wanted to give her anything.

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I am a “so cringe” type of person. And I’ve been in several situations (not even all that long ago) where I’ve found out that “friends” were talking about me behind my back. It is very easy to:

A. Project your own beliefs onto someone else’s motives, claiming it can only be for this reason (aka white savior) because you can’t imagine another. My (pre-med) daughter wants to donate an organ. She wants to do this with no knowledge of who would receive it. (We talked her out of it for now, as she concentrates on applying for med school.) So, would she have white savior complex if the recipient is not white? Would she be accused of doing it for reasons other than her immensely kind heart?

B. Allow your feelings for a person to color your perception of their deeds. If it had been anyone else in that writer circle, they would have lauded this altruistic act. But because she is an “annoying” type of person, people found her PR to be embarrassing, therefore she was doing it for attention or validation. And to that, like Ilana alluded to, charities and donors don’t care. Just like a company donates “portions of proceeds” to a charity in order to promote or sell a product, even if Dawn did this for love or acceptance, the donor doesn’t care. The donor is living and was so thankful for a living donation that his wife did the same thing. It’s not a savior complex to want to do good and maybe have that good acknowledged by people you thought you were close to.

Here’s where I disagree. I don’t consider this “revenge”. I think Dawn truly sees this as “justice”. It’s just not right that Sonya did this. She has dug in because it’s the right thing to do. She is also protecting the right to her words. She isn’t wrong that if she just let this all go away, but wanted to publish her letter one day, there’s a chance she could get accused of plagiarizing Sonya. If she doesn’t fight it now, she loses any future rights to her own words and story.

This is not about 2 shitty people bickering about something stupid. This is about a person that people consistently find annoying who did what she thought was right (the donation, talking about it, suing, all of it) and and a mean girl who did something she knew was morally murky at best but initially prevailed because she’s more popular. Without Dawn’s commitment to protecting her own words, she never would have known that her “friends” were talking about her and that Sonya very much copied the letter and resisted changing the words for a long time. Sonya lost the right to tell this story, IMO, but Dawn lost much more. She will never fully trust a friendship again. She will always wonder if they are making fun of her behind her back. Humanity needs to stop victimizing the popular people and vilifying good people who might just be annoying.

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I’m going to be fully honest, I only read what you wrote, never the nyt article. I don’t think I will read it either. Personally, I am team no one. It sounds like two icky people, making icky situations, ickier.

It’s awesome that Dawn donated her Kidney, it’s awesome she wanted to create a ripple effect, it’s sad she needed validation from her kind of friends, but that is life. We seek love and acceptance. It just is.

It’s icky that Sonya felt the need to ridicule someone, to create talks about her behind her back, and then to get more people to continue the spiral of meanness. Such is life as well. There are icky people all over. Dawn could of let it go as you said, but chose not to. Sonya could have at any point not wrote mean things about Dawn but chose not to. She could have owned up and apologized for plagiarism but chose not to. There is no side to take in my opinion. Just two icky situations where two people are being icky, and in the place that makes things sort of icky, the ickiest: the internet. At the end of the day for me this was just an entertaining gossip story. This is a Dawn and Sonya problem that didn’t need the internet but got the internet. Personally while this is a big problem (plagiarism) it’s a big problem to only Dawn and for me, it’s simply gossip to read during my coffee break. Albeit, entertaining, as the youths would say, asf. 🙃 I always enjoy your work Ilana because you are so thorough and try to do what is in my opinion, what journalists should do. Which is to show all of the facts and remain unbiased. ♥️♥️

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I’m going to side with the mean girls on this one. I found Dawn to be “So Cringe” in this story. I’ve known women like her that crave validation and attention much like Christians that go to Africa to help the starving children just for the Facebook photos and notation on their LinkedIn profile. I’m all for feeding the hungry, but once you post online, you are only feeding your ego.

Now on to Larson, doesn’t life imitate art and vise versa? Dawn was worthy of her attention to write a story on, a story so captivating it was published. I believe Dawn to be jealous that a story based on her was published when nothing she did ever was. Aren’t we all mean girls in some form? Team Larson over here and no apologies about it.

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You totally nailed it Ilana. And as a side note, ‘eff’ Noa Santos forever.

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This is the article I needed to see to put an end to my mini obsession. You hit all the points I thought and more. Unless there is still untold transgressions by Dawn against Sonya I don’t see why Sonya would do this. And I agree a small FB group of who she considered close and interested is very different than going on and on about it in large format. Thank you for this examination of the whole thing. And yes it’s crazy that I’m obsessed as a non-writer 🤨

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From what you told I am team Dawn all the day. As a writer you know full well when you are using an inspiration or copying, so, even it was "inspirational" she could change a lot of things of the story because she is... AN AUTHOR.

I am not capable of going this far to get my "I'm right" moment, but, everyone has that one point of jouissance that we can't let go.

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The point you made that sums up the whole thing succinctly for me is that Dawn didn’t do anything to Sonya. Were Dawn’s actions cringey? Sure, but she never did anything to deliberately hurt Sonya. Whereas Sonya went so far as to lift her letter almost word for word from Facebook and named the character Dawn originally. And then, she denied it all. While she may not have considered Dawn a friend, it was clear by inviting her to a private Facebook group that Dawn considered her one, and she exploited that invitation and was deliberately mean and profited off of it! If she wasn’t interested in knowing more about Dawn’s kidney donation she could have easily declined the invitation to the Facebook group in the first place.

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Thank you for writing about this! I admit I was originally team Sonja, but after realizing I completely misunderstood the initial email/Facebook group interaction, I'm fully on Team Dawn. The NYT article is VERY misleading, to the point that I wonder if the author was trying to make Dawn as unlikeable as possible. I even went back to read it again to confirm I didn't misread it the first time. Here is the appropriate paragraph:

"But just after the surgery, when she checked Facebook, Dorland noticed some people she’d invited into the group hadn’t seemed to react to any of her posts. On July 20, she wrote an email to one of them: a writer named Sonya Larson."

Reading this paragraph with no other outside information, I thought it was VERY weird for Dawn to email her friends in her Facebook group post asking if they had seen her post and why they hadn't commented. To me, this screamed "I'm only doing this for likes and validation." I therefore developed an unreasonable picture of Dawn, who I thought was only doing something for validation, got upset when people made fun of her for it, and tried to ruin someone else's career out of jealousy.

Not having ever run a Facebook group, I didn't know Dawn could see that Sonja was visiting her group regularly and was trying to figure out why she wasn't engaging. This completely changes the reason/meaning of the original email from Dawn. After learning this and reading your points, I went back and reread the article and I came away with a completely different view than when I read it originally.

It's clear to me now how much Sonja was gaslighting Dawn and that Sonja clearly used Dawn's letter as the basis for her story while claiming otherwise. Yikes.

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I think there's an angle that could have been Team Sonya had she fessed up that the story was inspired by Dawn and never published the early version that lifted language verbatim. As it stands I'm reluctantly Team Dawn and while it's the 'unacceptable' answer I'm somewhat Team no one lol. There are no winners and I think they both behaved in strange ways which makes me thing no matter what is uncovered there are parts of the story we'll never fully know.

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Loved your take! I’ve had a few conversations with friends this last week about the article, we’ve all landed (almost reluctantly) on team Dawn.

I also found this Twitter thread really interesting. Not a commentator I usually agree with, but I think that idea of class and the fact that Dawn pulled herself out of an impoverish background is an angle the New York Times missed.

https://twitter.com/pmatzko/status/1448075901028143110?s=21

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Team Dawn. Either way you look at it, Journalism 101 is never plagiarize. Sonya barely changing Dawn's post goes against all journalist codes of conduct and ethics!

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They both suck, and plagiarism is incredibly wrong. However, as a POC, I am deeply uncomfortable with how Dawn keeps going after Sonya. I also find it interesting that the racial element has not been discussed too much. I think this piece explains it better than I could - https://medium.com/@isabelwho/dear-white-people-reading-who-is-the-bad-art-friend-2d047dffbf58

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