Many also developed an online relationship with him based on a completely false persona.Īlso, one of biggest issues that arose from this, was faking liver cancer in order to get donations. Now let me be clear, I’m ok with people choosing to adopt pen names or to keep certain facts about their life private, but many tidbits of information he volunteered were complete and absolute lies. Now, I’m certainly all for authors having their own private lives and adopting a pen name, should they chose but why readers are feeling betrayed is that many of the so called “facts” about Santino volunteered were fake. There’s so much on Twitter, that I honestly can’t get too much into where the lies about this situation start and the truth begins, but there’s been so much corroboration from multiple sources that it’s clear that there’s some truth to what these multiple victims are claiming.

Upon reading the dozens of corroborative stories, and viewing a number of screenshots in support of these allegations, we have terminated our relationship with the author. We have spent the last two days focused on the allegations against Santino Hassell of misrepresenting, gaslighting, lying, insulting, and emotionally manipulating members of the queer romance community. Here’s a key quote from the beginning of the statement: Let’s start with the statement from Riptide Publishing Santino Hassell currently has no tweets listed on his account or on his Facebook, and has now apparently been dropped by two publishers. As a result when I logged into Twitter today to find a plethora of news about Santino Hassell, I needed to follow paths and dig down a bit to find the crux of what was going on. Over the past week, I’ve largely been absent online, true I posted a Top Ten Tuesday, but that was written last weekend and only posted on the allotted day. Usually I don’t pay attention to drama, but felt I had to put in my two cents about this case, because there’s a lot more than “drama” going on here.

It will also outline my own action with regards to these revelations.

In fact, I dislike immensely people who think they have the right to police others by filling a person’s space/page with vitriol because they decided to continue supporting an author, despite having all the facts about the author’s conduct.Īll this post is meant to be is the facts as I know them, and as I am aware of them now. I’m writing this post mainly so that those of you not in the know can become in the know.Īlso, for the record, I am not one of those people who is going to go out and attack you if you don’t follow suit with what I’m doing.

First and first santino hassell