Laste update: Jun 20, 2018
Further down this post, there is a short list of some of the things Charles has done that are easy to point to. If these were isolated incidents, they could perhaps be written off, but it is my sincere opinion that these are very strongly indicative of the overall pattern that is Charles' behavior.

In the time that I've known him, I've probably spent a dozen hours (many with Ratheka, who has spent even more time on this) trying to have real, emotional-labor-intensive conversations with Charles about his antipatterns and how he could improve. After all that he has shown very little progress (though nonzero, at least) and I have decided that it is very much not worth dumping any more of my time and effort into trying to help him improve. He does not, in my experience, put forth a real good faith effort to improve: instead he says a lot of things that sound plausibly like he's willing to improve while actually putting all his effort into constructing narratives about how he is in the right. It is very, very hard to penetrate this shield of his.

He persistently, pervasively warps narrative to serve his goals while justifying his behavior, even when it is clearly negatively impacting those around him. And his drive to do so is much, much stronger (from what I have observed) than his drive to truly see his problems (even when pointed out to him very clearly) and especially stronger than his drive to change those problems.

There may be hope for him yet, but it will be slow coming, and I don't intend to be around for it. I think that as he currently is, he would continue to be a significant negative impact on my life and those around me, and in sharing this my goal is to protect more people in the broader community from his slow poisoning of his environments.

The following are as factually accurate and unexaggerated as I could manage.
For context: I have spent so much time around Charles because Charles used to live in the room next to Ratheka, who I became very close to in the last several months and spend a lot of time around.


Money: Charles was discovered to have been artificially inflating the cost of the internet bill on the Milvia House splitwise, resulting in him being paid more than he was paying for the bill. I do not know the exact details of how much he embezzled, nor how long it was occurring, but I will update this information as I ask those involved for more details. I was not personally involved in this situation.
Update: Charles admitted (in email in the period of this situation) to a total amount embezzled of $260.50, spread out over 5 months of internet bills.


Additionally, the CFAR Alumni Community Disputes Council was given this information when this happened a few months ago. They responded by instructing Charles that he must inform any members of any other rationalist house he moves into about his history of embezzlement.
Charles worked around this by forming a new group house, and choosing not to tell the new housemates about it until his hand was forced by me telling his new housemates about it. I believe this to be a clear violation of the spirit of the conditions he was given — and a sign of bad faith towards cooperating with the community.
The council is still processing the followup of this occurrence, I believe.


Boundaries: Twice in three days attempted to kiss me without permission, the second time breaking a very clear explicit boundary. Both times I pushed him away before he could actually kiss me. Both times I explained that this was not welcome. I said similar to: "kissing requires a really high level of intimacy for me, and you should definitely ask first". This was hedging away from rejecting him as hard as I wanted to, which I don't like, but I made my boundaries clear. I forgave the first time, but the second time happened almost exactly the same way. Neither situation had any positive body language from me that indicated this would be okay. Both were in similar situations where I was cuddling with Ratheka, who was at the time dating Charles, all three of us in a room (all of us being poly). A few days after the second attempt to kiss me, I set up a very clear boundary that I communicated very clearly to him, that he is not to touch me at all. For the next few months, he consistently applied a mild pressure to try to get back casual touch into our interactions, which was not welcome and I told him as much. It continued anyway.


Money: Ratheka and I wanted to go to Costco on 5/23 to use my membership to buy groceries. Charles offered to drive us so we could use his car, and we accepted. At checkout, I said that I would just pay with my card, and asked them to pay me back via venmo/whatever, to which they agreed. When we got home, Charles started going over the receipt to mark which items were his, did some math on the back, and concluded that he owed me $97. I marked which items were mine. I handed the receipt to Ratheka to confirm that the rest was hers. She noticed that charles had failed to mark several items as his, resulting in undercounting his portion by $66. He in fact owed me $163, and he brushed it off as a mistake.

The next day, I asked him over Discord to pay me the amount, with instructions on where to send it, and the exact amount. He did not respond to that message. Later that day, I saw him in person and told him about the message, and he acknowledged me, but still did not pay me back, and still had not responded to my message. Four days later, I asked him to pay me back again, and only then did he agree to pay me $100 of the amount, stating that he could get the rest to me on the next Friday 6/1 (another 4 days later) after getting his disability check.

From this I infer that one of two things must be true: He let me front him more money than he had available to spend without telling me of this fact, or without making sure that he had enough money to pay for what he'd put in his shopping cart. Or he is purposefully dragging out the repayment, possibly to avoid paying it at all. I have not yet found out if he will actually pay me back the rest of the amount or not, but will update this document when Friday comes.

Update: Charles did not pay me back on Friday 6/1, making an excuse that he would pay me back on Saturday 6/2. On saturday, Ratheka and Ryan went to visit him to talk to him about his patterns around this, at which point he did finally pay me back the rest of the amount owed, claiming he had been just about to do it. In the end it took him 11 days and many prods to pay me back for what should have been a same-day transaction.


Possessions: Charles has been observed on multiple occasions to have taken Ratheka's possessions out of her room for little reason beyond wanting them, only returning them upon confrontation. Most recently this included taking Ratheka's countertop water heater while both of them were moving out of Milvia House. This, and others, were discovered by finding them in Charles' room/asking if he had taken it, upon discovering they were gone.


Please contact phoenixjeliot@gmail.com for more detailed identifying information for Charles if you would like to know how to avoid him.