…Promptly Breaks Off Communications with Cries of ‘Fake news!’
Shortly after Fairfax Cinema opened its doors, a company representative agreed to talk with this website: “I'd be more than happy to have a discussion with you when I get back [to the U.S.] in mid-January,” wrote Fairfax Cinema’s Daniel Gross in December. There has been no follow up, and it is not clear why Fairfax Cinema changed course. There are indications they may be falling back on a familiar playbook: fabricating outrage as a pretext for shutting down communications, and willfully misrepresenting critics in an effort to discredit.
Fairfax Cinema opened on Christmas as the rebranded successor to Cinefamily. The surrounding controversy led Sammy Harkham to post an “open letter to the community” at the Fairfax website, addressing the Harkham brothers’ roles in Cinefamily’s governance, oversight, and downfall. He and Dan are “trying to make right with the community,” he writes. He promises “full transparency… with the public.”
Harkham’s letter does not provide a credible explanation of the 18 months of Harkham inaction—between the 2016 conclusion that “serious action had to be taken” and the abrupt shuttering of Cinefamily in 2017. It does not provide any explanation for the years of Harkham inaction following the 2013 warning to the board. It does not address Cinefamily’s outstanding debts, nor the secret report allegedly clearing the board of responsibility for abuse and harassment. It articulates no accountability tools moving forward for the public to have confidence in Fairfax Cinema as an employer.
Rather than address concerns of substance, Fairfax appears to have taken an approach based on censorship, misinformation, and deception.
Though Fairfax Cinema has stopped responding to this website’s direct outreach, they have publicly replied to a Yelp review (after first attempting to have the review removed). As they have in the past, Fairfax carefully parses its statements about its Cinefamily connection, and makes vague but emphatic complaints about this website’s “manufactured facts” and “red herrings,” citing no specifics.
Around the same time, a new anonymous Twitter account appeared, echoing the Harkhams’ critiques of this website—and going farther. This anonymous account alleged ties between the Cinefamily Accountability website and Hadrian Belove, and alleged that the author of this website has “threatened to dox” people. (Neither claim is true.) This hearkens back to an incident in 2018 when Cinefamily-slash-Fairfax staffer Erin Hensley created pretextual outrage and attempted to get this website’s author fired from his day job.
No evidence yet suggests this new account to be a Harkham “sock puppet” account, but one expert contacted by this site called the Twitter account “definitely an alt [alternative account] designed to mess with” Cinefamily Accountability. (We do not link to this account as experts discourage giving fake accounts oxygen.)