My take, in particular, from the story was that the author was cornered, back-pedalling furiously and lashing out at the other comments taunting her. That I hold to - not that she wasn't a fool. I get the impression that you think I'm saying that one side was right and one side was wrong, but what I'm actually saying is that both sides looked pretty equally stupid. Even that small snippet you posted was a pretty good indication of where that thread was going. I just think that in this case, it's the author who's ended up actually damaging herself - mainly through her own poor judgement, while everyone else could just feel sated after another feeding frenzy.
The whole press thing a bit later seems no less disastrous than the review saga in the first place. I think it was probably about this time, when she'd let her sense of victimisation misconstrue what was happening to her and she realised that what she had imagined hadn't really been, that she just wanted the whole thing to go away as soon as possible. Fat chance of that now.
But in those positions, people sometimes over-dramatise what they see. I think she probably did feel threatened, but wasn't actually threatened by anyone. Much like you see Victoria's "blender" remark as a vicious threat, when I see it as a childish insult, variations of which I encountered floating around school yards in the 80s without much threat attached to it at all.
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