Someone has asked me why did I “accept” Carl Weinstein’s “apology” for his verbal abuse of me during the June 26th Board Meeting, and then file a Code of Conduct Violation against him on July 3rd? If you have not yet reviewed the case, the details are in this file:  [1] coc_3jul08_public.pdf

For my answer, I ask members to review the attached article titled: “When An Apology Is Not An Apology“. [2] Fauxpology.pdf

Here is an extract of the article for your convenience: “…the criteria a statement has to fulfill in order to qualify as an apology, and in layman’s terms, we can say that it requires two parts: 1) regret (the “I’m sorry” or “I apologize” part), and 2) responsibility (some explicit statement that you were the one who did the thing that’s being apologized for). The statement “I’m sorry that I borrowed your jacket without asking,” for example, meets both of those criteria. There are several other conditions which will disqualify a statement as an apology if they’re not also met (for example, if you don’t actually regret the thing you’re apologizing for, and are only saying you do in order to curry favor with the apology’s recipient), …” “…basic form is pretty darn basic: regret, and responsibility. They’ve both gotta be there, or else it’s not an apology. Often, people will use a rhetorical trick in which they make a statement that has a lot of the superficial trappings of an apology, but without one or both of those basic criteria of form. I call these statements “fauxpologies.” One classic type of fauxpology is to say something like: “I’m sorry that you’re upset about me borrowing your jacket without asking.” This fulfills the regret criterion, but not the responsibility criterion, since the speaker is expressing regret not for an action, but for someone else’s emotion.”

In other words, Carl’s statement was not a sincere apology, it was a “fauxpology“. After reviewing the words and tone of his statement from the recording, you can clearly hear that he did not intend to sincerely express regret for his repeated attacks on me, nor did he intend to accept any responsibility for his gross failure to respectfully behave as a board officer.

Most importantly, Carl did NOT retract calling me a liar during the Board Meeting (which he had done repeatedly.) In my opinion, after thinking about it for a couple of hours, he realized he had made a public spectacle out of himself, and he hoped others might miss the deception in his trained, HR-manager-styled fauxpology.

Normally I am a generous person who tries to be quick to forgive honest mistakes. But, Carl Weinstein has insulted me in the past, and I recognized his technique of only offering “fauxpologies“. He has a history of publicly insulting me and privately fauxpologizing using the classic, ” if I offended you…” In this case, his and Roz Berman’s repeated, calculated, and outrageous behavior used against me on June 26th were so obvious, so intentioned, and so serious that they could not be ignored.

If you would like to listen to the sound bytes click:
1. [3] Recorded segment of Kay Frank’s Public Comments and Board Officer Harassments
2. [4] Recorded segment of Carl Weinstein’s fauxpology

With regards to all of the above, you can understand why I am requesting a public hearing and asking for sanctions to be levied against such flagrant board member misbehavior. Too much has been tolerated for far too long!