[3/3] Part of a larger story that starts here.

In Illinois, to prove defamation, a person needs evidence to show that:

• The defendant made a false statement about the plaintiff,
• The false statement was made to a third party,
• The defendant was at least negligent in making the false statement, and
• The plaintiff was damaged by the false statement.

All factors that Mars's PSA accomplishes, in writing, as he is on record contradicting it. Smear campaigns, by definition seek to discredit a public figure/celebrity, or person of importance by making false or dubious accusations. Mars is not a notable public figure, but he certainly claimed to be a victim of a smear campaign in his PSA, only putting his ego on display.

Truthfully, Mars did not realize that him helping me move did not mean that I owed him sex every which way he wanted it at every visit. It was Mars who acted entitled to my body. I was the one who brought up to him how he didn't hang out with me as a friend anymore and we just had sex when he came over to "keep an eye" on me.

He repeatedly made special requests that I cook him my culture's curry, a labor-intensive dish (to the point where I got fed up and fed him jar curry). He had me spending on him and felt entitled to scrutinize the fact that I could afford to spend on him while being frugal for myself. He saw me get a henna design tattooed on my neck and immediately asked me to design him one so he could get one permanently tattooed.

He lost no opportunity to tell the judge that, since he had helped me move, he was a good friend who cared. Something three random college bros would have done for a pizza and a pack of beer. The difference is that I went to him as a friend during a crisis and he offered his help, encouraging me to lean on him.

While Mars boastingly makes the claim that I was obsessed with him, he is one of many relationships for me. According to what Mars told me, I am only his second relationship of any kind. He and I were friends for a little over a year, and the honest truth is that if I hadn't been in the worst headspace of my life, Mars would never have had the chance of being anything more than a friend to me.

Compared to people I have previously chosen for relationships and hook ups, and the people I have chosen after him, Mars is out of place. He knows this, because he brought up the fact that he appeared to be an outlier among my choices more than once. I do not say this to be cruel, but to point out that he did not fit who I usually select as a partner because I was reeling at the separation from my wife and chasing intimacy.

He had a chance with me because I was desperate for human connection during my separation and he was right there. To me, this summer leading into September was nothing but a bad breakdown of my mental health.

Mars somehow managed to turn the most difficult time in my relationship into a saga all about himself. We would spend the entire day together and he would wait until I had sat down to eat dinner or was working to launch into how he wasn't getting enough or wasn't getting what he wanted, and I would retort with "yes, because it is all about you" hoping that at 26, he would have some self-awareness.

Remember that Mars did all of this during an active mental health crisis for me that he was aware of as an actively involved part of my safety plan. He had admitted to me in text that he could be causing me more harm.

Dealing with his constant misgendering was exhausting. He referred to me as a man in every situation, placed me in an exclusively top role, and only ever used he/him pronouns for me despite me correcting him, whereas I use he/him pronouns here because that is what he explicitly told me he prefers.

It was because of his frequent habit of mishandling my identity that I told him openly and honestly that maybe he should opt for dating a man or even find a traditional stone top if he wanted adherence to a strict binary gender role in his relationships.

I did tell him that if he was just using me while claiming he was incapable of love, I'd hate him for lying and using me for his gratification. He then publicly insinuated I was biphobic. I cannot begin to tell you how much of a disservice this does to the Bisexual community, behavior like his is the reason why bi people have such a hard time proving the existence of biphobia and why many lesbians have such a hard time believing them.

It was exhausting having to explain to him that what pronouns someone uses does not equal their gender and that sex, gender, and orientation are three separate categories for many queer people.

He even went as far as to correct my wife when she did not use he/him to describe me after I told him, on more than one occasion, that my wife and only my wife has my explicit permission to refer to me as she/her because that is a more intimate way for her to describe me.

This is not her “misgendering” me when she has my explicit permission and is the only one allowed to use certain pronouns for me. Though I am transmasculine, and not a trans man, it seemed to bother Mars if anyone didn't consider me a man by his definition.

Mars didn't realize that entering into whatever the situationship with me was, to him might have registered as MLM “boyfriend” but to me registered as a same-sex relationship with gender-fuckery added in (t4t).

Thinking back, this is sometimes funny because his severe reaction of being as petty as he possibly could, to refusing to accept that I could possibly be done with him - clicked in my brain as “baby's first big wlw heartbreak” for Mars in particular because of the “you’re not breaking up with me, I’m breaking up with you” mentality. Reminding me of my time as a baby gay in high school, or my early 20s. Why this kolaveri, da?

My reaction to not letting him pull bullshit and deciding to deck him that night was my brain identifying him correctly, as he lives life passing as a man and has taken legal steps so that he can be legally categorized as such. I treated his disrespect accordingly.

He wanted to get away entirely free of any accountability for his manipulative and self-centered behavior and thought that he could lure my wife unchecked. I hope the fact that I dragged him is at least gender-affirming for Mars.

His behavior with me sexually was damaging, not just from my perspective, but according to third parties I barely know, including a sex worker who has long been in the BDSM scene who reiterated that he should not have left scars without explicit, active consent.

He objectifies others while claiming he hates being objectified, divulging to my wife and I about a couple he went dancing with, and how he was slyly scheming and hoping to be brought into their relationship while this couple did not know his intentions.

Ask him to play the voicemail messages I left him, since he mentioned them in his PSA. He shouldn't have a problem doing this, as he's already violated my right to privacy over and over again. One of them is me telling him to come outside and restate all of the bullshit he had been sending me over Snap to my face, another is begging him not to discard me so close to a day I thought I wouldn't make it past, and another is from the night I attempted to take my life. I didn't know if he was getting my messages.

Now, I know that he did receive them and he chose to let someone he called a friend attempt to end their life. At the very least, I would have called EMS for someone I claimed to have ever cared about. I am glad that I am still here.

I had already made the decision to move on and more forward with my life and had told Mars that I was done with him. He did not want to accept or respect my decision just as he did not want to accept when I refused to hug him and didn't speak to him for 13 hours.

While under the constraints of the EOP, I did my best to joke it off with friends and coworkers, who all laughed about the situation. Not at me, but because they knew my true stance and that I didn't want anything more to do with Mars. To them, it didn't seem like he wanted to let things go at all, it seemed like he was desperate for acknowledgement and my attention.

I spent my spare time visiting friends in other states trying to catch a break.

On White Privilege and the Harm It Causes

It would have been better for Mars and Cale to withdraw their petitions when the judge offered them more than one opportunity to do so. It is much worse to claim abuse and then have it be revealed that you lied and exaggerated. Their desire to be seen as right also lost them the opportunity to settle outside of court in what could have been a mutual agreement between parties that would still need to be legally adhered to.

But they weren't seeking conflict resolution which would have required accountability on their part and would have been in the best interest of everyone involved. They were vindictive, seeking revenge that far outweighed reason. Besides, the final court hearing was three months after my last contact of any kind with him.

The steps he and Cale collectively took together escalated conflict, facilitated further harm, and denied any and all accountability on their part. Key components of White Supremacy culture and naming it is vital.

It is important to note that after my wife refused to help Mars, Cale in particular attempted to have the cops sent to my wife's apartment in her petition while we were separated and not seeing each other so that the cops could harass my wife, a queer Chicana, for my whereabouts. My wife and I are both second-generation immigrants, and her community is currently facing the highest threat of deportation.

Both of us had already been profiled by the police during a traffic stop just a few months prior, which I had shared with Mars as having been traumatizing for us.

Cale also listed a small business I no longer frequent that is run by a queer community member who has since taken personal accountability for their own choices, something she and Mars fail to do even to this day. Every marginalized person that she knew to be associated with me at any point, and their safe spaces, were fair game in her eyes.

Cale attempted to submit to the court as evidence a screenshot of my Instagram account which exposed the usernames of multiple other people of color following me, two of which are in her own friend circle, and another is a prominent activist in Peoria.

Cale made no effort to redact their information despite spiraling over her own public information being viewable in my document. She did to others what she did not want done to her. The difference being that the information that she provided will forever be on record and stored in a legal database. 

It was Cale's roommate Sara Ryniec, who I'd never met in my life, who immediately called the cops, claiming that she felt unsafe and threatened as I calmly tried to return an item that belonged to Mars. She offered the cops additional information she got from Cale that they could use to profile me. I use her full name here only because it was Sara who asked Cale for my full legal deadname to provide to the cops.

Sara was also the one to state to Mars on the day of the hearing that she's "not going to put her own safety at risk just because she doesn't agree with a system." As made apparent, she's still going to go to the police against a brown person she has never met before if another white person tells her to.

White people claiming to feel unsafe is one root of the problem in America and how ICE is able to get away with murdering as many people of color as they have before finally turning the gun on white people. The system is what puts the safety of marginalized people at risk. 

Mars was quick to seek the safety he believed the police could provide him, when he previously marched beside me holding a "no cops" sign and spent time sitting in my apartment passionately telling me how he agrees the police should be abolished. Purely performative activism and demonstrably not the stance he holds.

To me, this is the exact behavior that constitutes being a poser.

Mars had also secretly kept a record of my FOID number and pictures he did not have consent to keep or share, from when my therapist asked him to hold onto the card while he was acting as part of my care plan.

This information is otherwise private and not found publicly. He provided this information to Cale to supply in her EOP request, which resulted in my right to bear arms being revoked in Illinois when people of color across the country are currently being urged to arm themselves for their own protection.

Leaving no legal way for me to keep my wife and I safe under a growing threat of racist attacks and deportation, which itself was a significant factor in my decision to not file my own petition against Mars the night he became abusive while staying in my apartment.

Though my FOID being suspended would not prevent me from literally obtaining or possessing a firearm, it would prevent me from legally owning or purchasing one in Illinois. If I had acquired a firearm after the suspension, it would prevent there from being a record of me owning one in IL as federal law prohibits a central database linking guns to owners, and it would have had to be unregistered.

If I had a firearm before my FOID was suspended, it would require me to hand over my firearms to the police or risk being charged.

While Mars and Cale had their OPs dismissed, getting the suspension lifted would require me to appeal to the police and plead for my constitutional right to be reinstated. As I had already gotten rid of my FOID prior to the suspension, I did not have to surrender it. Otherwise, law enforcement can petition a circuit court judge to issue a warrant to search and seize your FOID card and your firearms.

Not complying with the surrender/transfer requirements is treated as a Class A misdemeanor under Illinois law. Up to 1 year in jail, and/or fines and can lead to unlawful possession charges. This is what Mars consented to by filing his petition and providing my FOID information to Cale. I was lucky that law enforcement did not petition for a search and seize.

Keeping and sharing pictures of my FOID is also not the only time that Mars has kept images of my property or me, as he had snapped a photo of me sleeping before without my consent and sent it to me, and I included it in my first write up.

He did this, despite asking me if I was taking a picture of him one day in my bed when he heard the shutter sound from me screenshotting documents on my phone. I wouldn't be surprised if he's taken other photos or videos of me, either.

In fact, it would be on brand for Mars to have recorded me in some form on his porch that night in September. It is standard behavior for people with abusive tendencies to film or photograph a reaction caused by months of their own behavior, in order to attack the character of the person they mistreated. It's a big factor in reactive abuse cases.

I say this because, outside of taking pictures of me sleeping without my consent, it did seem like he could have been recording me at one point that night on his porch. When he noticed me taking out my phone to capture the phone pointed at me, he placed his phone out of view. Was he? Who knows, but he'd already done it once before, and in the video that I have, it sure seems like it.

As mentioned previously, one thing Mars made sure that he did do in his petition for an EOP where he claimed to be friends with my wife, was willfully misrepresent my race as white in a "fill in the blank" free-text box. I'm mixed Dravidian, and a second-generation immigrant, having been raised partially in my father's native country.

Mars, on the other hand, is both legally white and white passing. He has only claimed to be indigenous in recent years, telling me privately that he was raised in a strictly white, Evangelical household.

When I asked him about his heritage, he told me he wasn't sure what tribe he was descended from or if he really even did have an ancestor. Someone with distant far-off ancestry but no meaningful connection to First Nation community who exhibits privilege is at times referred to as a "descendian" by indigenous people.

Like with many white families, there was a family rumor Mars relied on of a potential long distant relative. Historically, many of these claims were the result of a colonizer ancestor either raping or marrying a Black woman. In fact, "Indian Princess" or a rumor of a woman being indigenous in many white families was also due to the claim being used in the South as somewhat derogatory terms for any light-skinned mixed-race women.

This claim is passed down in families by people who were unaware of its original meaning. The name Mars told me he found listed on the Dawes Roll, didn't trace back to his family, and the majority of his entire family tree is documented online and exclusively white, dating back to the 1500s in Europe. Still, I didn't question his claim until he started using his white privilege while systematically trying to erase my own identity entirely on legal paperwork.

After labeling me as white, he has leaned heavily into his newfound ‘indigenous’ identity on social media, especially in light of being called out. Given his history of lying, I urge other people of color to have caution.

This was not an unintentional or purely ignorant act, either. At one point during the summer, I had a conversation with Mars about how South Asian identity has historically been erased in America, and I shared with him that when my father first immigrated to America, there was not one standard category widely used to document South Asian people. I emphasized to Mars how this erasure was damaging to my community and the harm it caused my siblings and I growing up.

Legally, we did not exist in many spaces. This is similar to how many Latine people who are not white are simply categorized as white on paper.

However, apart from being able to classify as Asian, there has been a specific category for South Asian/Asian Indian people offered for quite some time now, even if the paper form had not given him a "fill in the blank" option.

There are many white people who, like Mars, claim indigenous ancestry from a family rumor and somehow it tends to result in a white person claiming a further oppressed status in order to avoid accountability and be labeled an authority. These people never seem to put in the deeper work of unpacking and unlearning a colonial mindset.

While I'm not debating blood quantum, and neither should you, regardless of the presence (or lack thereof) of distant ancestry, it doesn't negate him intentionally erasing the racial identity of another person of color or being raised in an exclusively white household and upholding the privilege and values that come with that.

Mars also brought with him to court an elderly white woman for support. When I looked into this woman, I found that she is a proud “back the blue” Trump supporter and member of the evangelical church Mars previously attended.

She told him that if I "had another psychotic breakdown" he could come to her, and she would help him gather resources against me. He replied that he would just have to go through everything all over again. That's true. He would.

There is a very slim chance I could be mistaken on her identity, having recognized her from his mutual social media connections, but he certainly brought his chosen family with him.

For all that he claims to be, Mars lives life as a white-passing and seemingly cis man. He can change his outfit and be left alone, but I cannot shed my brown skin.

Healing in the Aftermath

Mars made one of the hardest moments in my life even harder. He caused physical, mental, and financial harm to brown queer people. The judge made a point to mention how his actions hurt my wife as well. My wife ended up publicly calling Mars out herself in her own Instagram stories.

Unfortunately, there will always be people who look like me who place priority in orbiting white queer spaces, educating white people, and centering white voices. He will, at the very least, always have their support. 

He is surrounded by a sea of people who hate being asked to be anything other than neutral who will uphold his behavior so they can remain comfortable. Their private, personal choice in who they allow in their social circle remains one area where their political values won't reach.

When are men in general, especially white-passing men, held accountable? Ignoring it until it dies down so he never has to take accountability is the socially acceptable option in the West and is exactly what I expected. He's very ordinary in his inability to take accountability. 

To quote Mars in his PSA, you 100% should check your sources. When Mars badmouths people he was glazing just a few months prior, pay attention.

I am not the first person he has mistreated and then claimed abused him. If you're reading this and thinking “well, he hasn't acted that way since or acted that way with me!” It has been barely two months since the hearing, and patterns of abuse take years to surface.

People who mistreat others are selective; they pick and choose. The most loved people have been outed for being absolutely nasty individuals on the down low and everyone claimed they were lovely. Consider that I have previously written for myself, been asked to write for others, and have not yet been wrong. 

This publication might actually accomplish its goal of getting Mars to not treat anyone else the way he has me and others ever again. That's the entire point of holding someone in the community accountable.

Everyone will fuck up at times in community; we aren't a collection of perfect people. Holding someone accountable is not asking for perfection or upholding purity politics, it is asking for repair, acknowledgement, and reparations when harm has been caused, especially when caused by people who hold privilege.

It is okay to mess up; it is not okay to pretend like you have no responsibility to the harm you caused. If you can cause harm by publicly manipulating a narrative and abusing your privilege, you can publicly own up to it and apologize as well.

Attempting to achieve growth and privately make change is for your own good but does nothing to acknowledge or alleviate the harm caused to another person. It's important to ask what you have done to repair the harm you caused to the other person, and anyone caught in the fire by your actions. Time passing is not an excuse, nor is it a sign of personally taking accountability.

It is not easy to admit to being caught up by another person's antics. While I am usually adept at pattern-spotting these days, my mental health had been deteriorating and then crashed, and I wasn't able to analyze like I usually would. At this point, I am not mad at Mars, I'm simply indifferent.

I also admittedly have a tendency to shut off my brain with people I like and trust and I understandably don't want to be on guard and hypervigilant 24/7. I want to feel safe, and I want the people who call themselves my friends to be honest with me.

Since the hearing, my wife and I have sat down together and unpacked the events of the last six months. Eventually deciding once and for all to give things another try and start marriage counseling. We had invested five years in getting to know each other and grow with the other. We intend to repair like we had wanted to before Mars lured her out to trash me, and like I told Mars I intended to do before his verbally abusive episode in my bed.

The stress from this entire ordeal triggered a new development in my chronic illness, seizures that ultimately led to hospitalization.

Since obtaining my certifications, I have opted to take up contract and part-time work while I focus on my second master's as the stress of this summer leading into mid-December left me significantly drained, and continuing work full time while my mental health recovers has been challenging.

My wife and I will be the ones recovering and rebuilding community, and we will.

We always do.

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