Today I unmask a menacing, hypocritical bully who fancies himself a media kingpin. Alphonse Ouimet, creator of the Tea Makers blog about the CBC, is actually David Séguin, who for more than two years has lived in Manhattan and worked as a Web developer for the New York Times. Here’s his picture, long since available on my Flickr:
One must stand up to bullies. One must protect the innocent. Through his stewardship of the Tea Makers, which allows, via unmoderated comments and his own intentional postings, a range of personal attacks more familiar from /b/, Séguin has shown a blithe disregard for the harm felt by victims.
He displays this disregard because, after surviving no end of travails himself, nothing bothers him. He’s been left with no empathy for other people.
Bullies insidiously persuade victims to perpetuate the punishment
I feel like a fool for having enabled Dave Séguin’s cruelty and misanthropy. Dealing with him is like dealing with a drunken neighbour upstairs, or a drunken brother.
I should have known better once he began rewriting other people’s postings, only to republish my own posts after I deleted them. (When he deleted the entire Truth annex of the Tea Makers a few weeks ago, including a post with over 1,000 comments, not a word was said, for Séguin is not the only hypocrite implicated in the Tea Makers. Meanwhile, I restored my posts.)
I should have outed him the minute he left the country. He’s never coming back. (He told me he’s applied for U.S. citizenship.) He only returns to Toronto so he can reapply for his TN visa on the way back “home,” and of course to hold Blogging Summits where people like me can be slandered.
I promised to keep Dave’s identity secret, even though at least a dozen people inside the CBC, including one vice-president, have known it for years. But he was never a source and I never promised I would protect his identity as such.
It’s one thing to relentlessly attack CBC celebrities. It’s another to expose the misdeeds of petits fonctionnaires inside the CBC. It is yet another thing to attack former and present contributors to the Tea Makers, myself included. But one thing that can’t be permitted at all, even once and even for a day, is an attack on an innocent noncombatant – in this case, a hapless civilian employee of the CBC whom the Tea Makers chose to mock this week.
This pitiful victim was subjected to 75 hateful, injurious, defamatory, or simply permitted comments issued by Anonymous Cowards.
While Séguin, who does not even watch CBC Television because he cannot, has taken time out of his busy Manhattan workday on many occasions to issue drive-by vilifications of me, today he claimed it was “sad” when a Tea Makers post has to be “taken down.” The damage had long since been done, and besides, nobody else gets that treatment.
A promise long since broken by the man to whom made is null and void. A promise superseded by events will not prevent me from limiting the damage Dave Séguin and his mob so very much enjoy doing.
Don’t cry for me, Fake Evita
The Tea Makers will continue until a defamation lawsuit finally shuts it down. (Notices can be filed at the Times’s offices. You can use my lawyer.) Séguin will surely thrive in his new life as a no-longer-pseudonymous “insider” who hasn’t been thus for years. (Again: He doesn’t even live in the country!)
This kind of whistleblowing leads not to opprobrium and employee termination but to profiles in the newspaper and, soon enough, to book contracts. It happened to Joe Klein and it happened to Dan Lyons, always the example to follow in the Tea Makers context.
Shed no tears, then, for David Séguin of midtown Manhattan. The incestuous elite of Canadian publishing – all in Toronto and the last CBC audience to go – will jump at the chance to publish an exposé of a rival incestuous elite. Dave Séguin comes out ahead no matter how you cut it.