Yesterday got…weird. My plans to spend a quiet lazy Saturday in the campus library, mind-mapping the structure for my MSc dissertation, were gone before I’d ever rolled out of bed.
In addition to having more pings than I could scroll through, my bleary eyes went straight to DMs from the friends that matter:
Oh god, what’s he done now, I wondered.
Apparently, “he” published a blog post on the official WordPress blog, not his personal blog, announcing to the world that he had cancelled my WordPress.org account.
Which I haven’t logged into since February 2020 – almost a full five years ago – which was when I retired from WP and all open source involvement, specifically because of the primary and secondary harassment that he threw onto me.
And which I haven’t even thought of logging into since then, because I have not been a member of the WP project, or any OSS project, since then.
Five full years. Zero involvement.
A global blog post.
Now the kicker here, folks, was the context. The blog post was about a proposed fork of WordPress which hasn’t actually been proposed, but facts don’t matter here. He was implying that forks are in the planning and that I am part of the team planning them.
This “team”, in his ayahuasca-addled mind, apparently includes Morten and Sé Reed. I haven’t seen Morten since Berlin 2019 and am not really in contact with him anymore – nothing personal, we just work in very different worlds now – and I’ve never met Sé nor had anything to do with her, aside from occasionally tweet-applauding her bravery in standing up to the world’s most spoilt playground toddler.
Naturally, I responded, in the way that divorced women in their late forties who are no longer putting up with anyone’s shit tend to do:
And then the media picked up on it.
Here’s Techdirt.
Here’s Slashdot.
Here’s El Reg.
Here’s a point Morten raised in Slashdot:
There are weird days, and then there are days where someone’s frothing-at-the-mouth paranoia gets you dragged into the news weird days. https://t.co/u3rZ0GvaqU
— Heather Burns (@WebDevLaw) January 11, 2025
Needless to say, I never made it to the library yesterday.
You know what?
This is tiresome, folks. It was tiresome when I was a part of the community. It was tiresome when Matt was building dramas on my back. It was tiresome when his fanboys joined right in. It was tiresome when my personal friends and meetup communities starting being harassed by Josepha and her community team of “Mean Girls” about me and my presence at anything.
But still getting it five years later?
So I can’t believe that I have to say this: but
no, I am not planning a fork of WordPress.
no, I am not conspiring to plan a fork of WordPress.
no, I am not in contact, never mind conspiratorial cahoots, with any of the other people cited in the blog post.
no, I am not a member of or contributor to the WordPress project, in any way, nor have I been for just days short of five years now,
and yesterday was the perfect demonstration of why.
Because let’s face it folks, if I wanted to spend my Saturdays having frothing-at-the-mouth paranoia thrown at me by an semi-incontinent substance addict with mutually obsessive mother issues, I’d have stayed married.
And there’s the big reveal, folks. That is the origin story of Matt’s antipathy towards me. At some point, early in 2018, before the personal harassment against me started but was well underway for others – inclusive of this exact kind of behaviour, all the bloody time – one day I looked square at him and thought: “aha. I know what you are.”
And he knew I knew.
From there, he unleashed all hell on me. And, seven years after that, he is still going.
That is how that particular pathology works. I. would. know.
As it is, seven years after it began for me and a decade or more after it began for others, yesterday was a sad but perfect example – the kind many current and ex-community members have been trying to tell the world about for years – of the stochastic harassment which characterises the only form of leadership that 43% of the open internet has ever known.
These are people who make shit up based on whatever paranoia is flitting through their brains at any given moment, misuse the public stages and the resources their leadership positions allow them, fling those accusations in public, then wait for the community to jump in and amplify those attacks into a massive and hateful and nasty pile-on.
If that pile-on results, as it did for me in 2018-2019 in the aftermath of his weird obsession with me, with real viable physical threats which meant I had to stay on the other end of Berlin for my own safety at WCEU 2019, they sit there, with a smug little smile. Mission accomplished.
As it is, yesterday all it resulted in was yet another lost Saturday.
For nothing.
Update, Sunday night:
Someone with a solid head on his shoulders, whom I professionally respect, messaged me in response to this post to suggest that Matt may well have a legitimate kink about me and Morten as the ones who got away – not only as the ones who dared to challenge him, but as the ones who are thriving outside the WordPress ecosystem, doing just fine without him.
As in, him being the unhinged ex who can’t stand to see us happy without him.
Hence devoting a blog post to banning us, five years after we walked away: you can’t leave me. It’s me who has to ban you!
It would almost be funny, if the structural integrity of forty-some percentage of the sites on the global open internet were not in the balance.
Closing reflections, 26 January 2025
Comments on this post are closing, though I’ll be keeping pingbacks open. With this episode finally dying down – temporarily, because it’s only ever a matter of not if but when he kicks off again – I wanted to share my reflections on the past fortnight. It’s good to have time and space to reflect now; those things were not available to me when I was an active member of the WP community.
First and foremost, I want to thank everyone who got in touch privately with kind words of support. Especially the long message that nearly had me crying happy tears in public. (Damn it, don’t do that!) Just for that, I’m going to try to visit you again at some point this year.
During the weekend that this all exploded, a lawyer pal got in touch saying he’d seen the story through the tech media (good god) and was wondering if I was OK and needed support. I had to reply that I was fine and that this was normal drama and par for the course for anyone who had fallen into Matt’s sights. I suppose that alone should be pause for reflection: outside the WP bubble, what passes for “normal” inside it, the general public finds legitimately shocking. One of the things that led me to leave the WP bubble, five years ago, was finally understanding how that drama is all the public sees and all the public knows. They don’t see your work, they don’t see your team, they don’t see the graft you put in. All they know is the American tech celebrity making everything about himself. I hope this incident has caused other contributors to arrive at the same conclusion that I did, five years ago. It is not possible to do the work you want to do in this world, or make the contributions you want to make to the open web, with that albatross hanging around your neck.
As the incident died down, I remembered something.
What I remembered was the first thing anyone ever said to me, about Matt, well before the drama; in fact, well before I had done anything to draw attention to myself. It was 2016, when I was just really a local WordCamp speaker and community organiser, and had done two sleep-inducing WCEU talks on topical legal compliance issues. Well before the privacy work, well before the discussions of governance, well before the drama. Nor would I have been capable of anything else back then, because at the time I was trapped in an emotionally abusive marriage to an alcoholic which had shredded my spirit so badly that I was more or less a walking ghost.
Which was why it was all the more bizarre that someone – employed by Automattic at the time – said this to me about Matt, and this was their direct quote:
“He’s fucking terrified of you.”
Why? At that point, I literally had not done anything.
If the glassy-eyed mouse that was 2016 me terrified a grown adult Texan male, something much weirder was going on there.
Which brings me to the final reflection which occurred to me as this latest drama died down.
If (as my lawyer pal noted) I’ve been strangely calm about this whole thing, it’s because it’s not the first time it happened, but not from Matt.
Back in 2009, I went through a remarkably similar ordeal from another man, in this case one whom I’ve never even met, who was also a high-profile tech CEO, who also found me so triggering that he went on the public warpath.
Like Matt, he wrote a batshit blog post about me; like Matt has done in the past, he got his employees to harass me too (and that guy also personally resorted to sock puppet threats); like Matt has done in the past, he triggered a massive and nasty public pile-on, inclusive of all the degrading misogyny you can imagine; and like Matt has done in the past, he and the people around him harassed the people around me, like a bunch of mafia thugs. (At that time with that other guy, this meant my web design clients, whom he sent threatening messages to, ordering them to dump me as their service provider.)
Like Matt, that tech CEO was also known for having established a cult-like atmosphere around him; like Matt, he was well protected by a sycophantic board and a cowardly leadership team; like Matt, he flaunted his wealth and status at every opportunity; like Matt, he wanted to be seen in the best places with the best people; like Matt, he tried to throw his post-economic wealth around, packaged as philanthropic benevolence, every time his behaviour began to catch up with him; and like Matt, he was the subject of countless whispers, warnings, quiet conversations, off-record discussions, public Reddit forums, WhatsApp group chats, and even formal meetings in the places where it mattered, all centred around that gut feeling – anchored in countless personal experiences – that something, about that guy, is very, very wrong.
I’d invite that celebrity tech CEO to comment here to account for his behaviour, but he can’t. Why? He’s currently serving a 15 year sentence in one of Manchester’s finest prisons on three convictions of rape and sexual assault.
Am I making any accusation or allegation about Matt here? Absolutely not.
What I am saying is that there is only one other person I have ever encountered, in my life, who conducted himself like this towards me;
and I turned out to be the smoke hinting at a much larger fire.
Again, I am not making any accusation or allegation about Matt here.
But the question here is not why am I drawing direct comparisons between his behaviour and that of a convicted, predatory, incarcerated rapist.
The question is: why has he chosen to conduct himself exactly like one.
Back in 2009, the vile misogynistic pile-on against me, aided and abetted by that guy’s team of enablers, taught that other guy how far he could go and how much he could get away with. We now know that his sexual predation accelerated, from that point forward, to an almost feral level, in plain sight.
That rapist could have been stopped, right then, if anyone had viewed his attack on me as a massive warning sign rather than a bit of trolling lolz.
I repeat:
That rapist could have been stopped.
I would encourage those people who are still devoted to the WordPress project but are keeping their heads down for the sake of their mortgages, as well as those cowards and sycophants in Matt’s personal orbit, all of whom have already let him get away with far too much, to reflect very carefully not just on the behaviours which they, personally, are enabling now, but on the completely innocent people whom they are lining up to be targeted, attacked, and hurt in the future.
Somehow.
Deeply.
That is how this works.
That is always how this works.
Over and out.
Thank you for sharing this. 😔
I am sorry for the pain and distress being inflicted upon you by these weird, sad people for whom time does not flow with reality and sanity is clearly a hill too steep to conquer. And I truly hope you found that good looking guy.
[…] lo publicaba en su cuenta de Bluesky, al mismo tiempo que Heather publicaba en su blog una respuesta a la acción de Mullenweg acusándolo de acoso. En el caso de […]
[…] expressed his thoughts on his Bluesky account, while Heather responded to Mullenweg’s actions on her blog, where she accused him of harassment. Sé […]
[…] Heathre Burns writes “Another day of stochastic harassment for old time’s sake”. (Source: Heather Burns) […]
[…] Heather Burns […]
Very well written blog post, but I’m sorry it had to be about this particular topic. Matt has really gone off the rails. Hopefully he leaves you alone now.
I mean, normally a woman my age is flattered to learn that a man is obsessed with her day and night and has apparently been for years, but if we weren’t on different continents this would definitely be restraining order territory.
[…] account canceled, posting that she hadn’t logged into WordPress.org since February 2020. In a blog post laden with colorful language, she further criticized Mullenweg, accusing him of harassing her at […]
There’s a bit of nonsense in this Repository pingback – I was never a member of the governance project (I think I sat in two Zoom meetings and played no other role, which still managed to give Matt a shit fit). As for 2019 at WordCamp, all the direct and stochastic harassment was before that and leading up to it, but not at the conference itself. Some of it was public (including WCEU 2018 and the later 2018 SOTW I wasn’t even at), much of it was not. Berlin was where it got to the point where I had to be so cautious about my safety, because of the direct harassment as well as the pile-ons and threats from others that the direct harassment caused (and which the leadership team was perfectly fine with), that I tried not to be alone anywhere in the conference venue in broad daylight nevermind anywhere else.
Funnily enough, in one of the few moments at Berlin where I was alone and unprotected (looking at a swag table!), the former unelected executive director slithered up to me, hissed her fangs at me, and slithered away. My god, I really had them rattled.
Food for thought, I hope this year’s WCEU organisers are looking into how they’re going to protect attendees’ safety from someone with a documented track record of harassment who is currently as emotionally stable as a Jenga tower and who just happens to be the project DFL.
(Edit: they’ve now corrected the article, with thanks.)
Sorry that you’re having to go through this mate. The whole situation is embarrassing and simply unacceptable.
It’s been a while since we’ve hung out (read: drank/ate everything in sight) at a WC/meetup, but I’m glad that (parking this matter to one side!) you’re in a good place.
Oh, the old gang is still getting together from time to time to drink/eat everything in sight. We just don’t have several days of unpaid labour for an American corporation on top of it. Say hi if you ever spot us being merry and mirthful in the usual haunts. We just appear.
[…] official blog post which specifically mentioned a former WordPress contributor, Heather Burns, and driving a ton of harassment her way. A dude in Matt’s position definitely knows what will happen when he does […]
Yes, I do remember you, Brian – and thank you for this.
Wishing you the very best and a safe harbour from this abuse.
Matt’s conduct is now being mentioned in the same breath as that of Neil Gaiman and I’d like you all to reflect upon that. Deeply.
Software tends to be the child of those that create it, but in open source the village raises the child.
People attached to projects, on the other hand, are not.
Good for you. Live with grace. And thank you for what you did and tried to do years ago.
[…] Another day of stochastic harassment for old time’s sake (Heather Burns) […]
A very good tech journo informs me that he contacted Automattic’s press office to ask them why their CEO used the company asset of the corporate blog to post false allegations about me and others, which (through that blog) were then published in the dashboards of forty-something percent of sites on the open web. Automattic’s press office completely blanked him on the question, presumably to keep their jobs.