I was so naive really. I thought I had worked hard and done a good job and that everyone was pleased but thought that maybe someone at Gage was saying things and wrote to the manager to ask about it. That’s funny now because of how they really are but at the time I thought they wouldn’t want to be known for harming another artist.That is really quite funny to me now.
It just got worse and when people at my old school started to say that I was doing something odd (when I thought I was working hard) but wouldn’t say what they had heard, I started writing to the board at Gage also (again naively thinking they would want to do what was right).
All those questioning, sometimes frustrated, sometimes irate emails were given to another independent contractor there with a well known grudge against me to use to make a claim of harassment when their name never appeared on any of the emails sent or anywhere in them.
All of this began as these things always do in corrupt corporate settings when I said I had been stolen from. And, again as these things always go, revenge has been the name of the game ever since.
What exactly can I do? How powerful am I?
Who wants a favor from me?
I simply exist and since I have been labeled an enemy by these greedy, corporate pigs they have been trying to un-exist me. It’s that simple.
That is Gage.
A week after I announced I would open a classroom Gage sent me a letter saying they would sue me if I used any email addresses which I had acquired while working for them.
The first time I was seen on Gage property after announcing I would open a classroom I received a letter from an attorney saying that I would be arrested if they ever saw me in their parking lot or building again.
This was weeks after I had worked for them. I had left with a full schedule of sold-out classes and my new classes were selling out. Nothing had changed except the “non-profit” was suddenly acting like a very cut throat corporation.
They were acting how I had been told by many other artists in Seattle they had been treated by them.
Every piece of promotional material for my classroom was forbidden in the gage building and if any was found, I was told by my students, it was immediately thrown away.
They tried to drag me into court because an email account I stopped using was hacked and they received junk mail from a jewelry company in Hong Kong and said it was harassment.
These are the people who have said for many years that people should, must, avoid me for their own safety.
No one has ever been more harmed by them than I have and even though I have been hurt a lot in the past, no one has ever hurt me, and my wife, more than Gage Academy of Art.
