As I'm sure everyone knows by now, Sasho Windfeather has been selected to be the chairman of Further Confusion 2015. As many of you also know, in March of 2012, he was arrested for beating his boyfriend at the time, Scott J. Fox. If that same sounds familiar, that's because he earned some notoriety a few years ago when he rescued a fur named ThunderRoo, whose parents had thrown him out upon discovering he was gay and furry.

Anyway, the police report for Sasho's arrest can be found here: http://bit.ly/1aN7XPf

My feelings on this issue are certainly no secret, but in the interest of full disclosure, I'll start off by stating them here. Scott is a friend of mine. I was made aware of the ongoing abuse in his relationship with Sasho a couple months before the incident in the police report. Actually, it was during FC2012, and my housemates and I had offered to help him move out here, just to get him out of that situation. We'd even invited him to stay in our home until he could get himself established.

To put things simply, I don't respond positively to people beating the crap out of my friends, particularly when that friend is about half the weight of his attacker and has debilitating back problems. I don't need a trial to know what Sasho did, nor do I need a conviction to tell me it was wrong.

I'm also no stranger to domestic abuse. When I was a kid, my first stepdad would beat the crap out of my mom on a regular basis. We lived in a small town back then, and EVERYBODY knew what was going on. Bear in mind that domestic violence didn't get the attention then that it does now. It wasn't a buzzword you heard all the time, there were no hotlines, and no one wanted to get involved. It Was A Private Matter. So, they did nothing. The neighbors heard the screams at night, and they did nothing. They saw the bruises, and they did nothing.

Well, almost nothing; they did gossip. "It's such a shame," they'd say. Then there's my personal favorite, "He always seems like such a nice man. I wonder what she did to deserve it." Indeed, in public he was charming, polite, charismatic; they never knew the monster he became at home. But, the most damning comments of all were the "It's none of our business," or, "There's nothing we can do," and, "It's not our problem."

We've all seen the good that this fandom--this community--is capable of. This is a group of people who can be amazingly kind, compassionate, and generous. I've seen some of that since my mate's cancer diagnosis, and for that I am immensely grateful. So with that in mind, I simply can't comprehend why the AAE board would choose to ignore what Sasho has done. Despite having known about it for about a year and a half now, they've chosen to do nothing. It's none of their business, I suppose. Nothing they can do. Not their problem.

Over the past year and a half, I've spoken with a variety of people involved with FC and AAE at a variety of levels about this. This includes the new vice-chair and a member of the board, both of whom have been gracious and reasonable in discussing all this with me. Most of what all these people have told me makes sense, though some of it was contradictory- par for the course, I guess, but that's not the issue here.

What I've ultimately come to understand is this: There's really very little I can do. I'm not on the board, I don't have mountains of money, and I'm not popular or even particularly well-known. I'm just another one of the roughly 3500 people who attend FC.

Well, not anymore.

I cannot and will not support AAE's choice of Sasho as chairman of FC. What he has done reflects badly on this convention, on this community, and on this fandom, and I am embarrassed to even have a peripheral connection to him. So long as he is chairman, I will not attend, and neither the con nor AAE will get one penny from me.

Do I honestly think this will change anything? Probably not; I'm just one out of a few thousand, and I'm pretty sure that neither I nor my money will be missed.

But, at least I know I'm doing the right thing.

• Shadow Darius Wolf, Esq.