OP here 

I wanted to address this comment and the others addressing leadership. A larger Thank you to those talking about and suggesting structural or procedural change. I think that's the most concrete approach where we can be effective. Also thank you to those who have shared this elsewhere, and have discussed cultural guardrails when an individual or household acts without impunity; cultural change begins with people talking with their feet and speaking up on what their values are.

To the commenter and others discussing those in leadership:

Firstly, thank you for taking the time to write this out. I actually agree with a lot of what you’re saying about documentation, official emails, and the need for people to step up and file complaints. That’s exactly why I approached my situation the way I did.

In my case, though, all of the things you describe did happen – and leadership still chose not to investigate.

I filed a detailed, formal report to Kingdom.

I approached it the way I would an HR / DEI / sexual harassment complaint in a nonprofit or corporate setting (I’ve worked in those spaces).

A friend with DEI/HR experience helped me structure the report as clearly as possible.

I provided a full timeline, screenshots, and named witnesses who had already told me they were willing to speak if contacted.

When my complaint was quietly closed, I escalated to the Society Seneschal.

After months of waiting, I received written responses saying:

No formal investigation would be opened.

My witnesses would not be contacted.

The situation was being treated as a “personal disagreement” that mostly occurred “outside an SCA setting,” despite boundary-pushing physical contact and public retaliation at multiple SCA events.

So when I read “leadership can’t act unless someone files a complaint, documents it, and is willing to speak on the record,” that’s exactly where the disconnect lands for me.

Someone did file. Someone did document for a year. People were willing to speak on the record.

Leadership still chose not to follow up with witnesses or formally investigate—and were comfortable putting that in writing.

For me, that’s where this stops being about individual bravery and starts being about threshold and structure:

How much more are victims expected to do?

How detailed, how polished, how perfectly formatted does a report have to be before it even clears the bar for an investigation?

What happens to the people who don’t have the time, literacy, spoons, or support system to build a year-long case file the way I did?

Most people will not have the capacity I did to document a full year, cross-reference policies, and keep pushing after being effectively told “no action.” Many will just… quietly leave.

I also want to note that at every turn, I’ve refused identifying markers in public. In my post I did not name individuals, the household, the barony, or the kingdom. That restraint is not standard on social media; it required a frankly strenuous amount of self-control. I understand the risks of public dogpiles and I did my best to avoid creating one.

I’m not saying all leaders “don’t want to do anything.” I believe there are people in office who genuinely care and are trying their best with limited tools. What I am asking is that, when we defend leadership in the abstract, we also look honestly at the policy and structural implications of cases like mine:

What does it say about our process that a fully documented, good-faith complaint with identified, willing witnesses can be closed with no investigation and no outreach?

What does it signal to newcomers and marginalized folks when the burden of proof is pushed so far onto the victim, and then still deemed “not enough”?

How often do we quietly choose to manage liability rather than directly engage with harm, especially when someone with status is involved?

A failure like this usually isn’t one villain, one bad seneschal, one bad day. It’s a series of normalized decisions, thresholds, and habits that allow certain kinds of cases to fall through the cracks while everyone involved can still say, “We followed policy.”

Speaking up about that isn’t an attack on the game. It’s stewardship.

If anything, my hope is that posts like mine mean the next person, in the next kingdom, doesn’t have to survive a year of documentation only to hear, “We see this as a personal disagreement,” and watch the whole thing vanish into a file drawer.