Jack Monroe again

[scabbers44]

Has anyone seen the recent tweet about her pawning/selling three diamond engagement rings? Aibu to think if you are pleading poverty and asking the general public to donate money one week and then showing off pictures of three massive diamonds you own the next, it's never going to go down well? Especially when you are already being challenged on lying and grifting?

For a long time I thought JM was nothing but a force of a good but I can't understand how she can be so tone deaf. It can't be deliberate but equally how can she not realise how it looks to produce three huge rings just a week after claiming she's so skint she needs handouts.

Apologies if there's already a thread on this.

Is she raising lots of money?

I can't say I've looked too deeply but if you look at her website front page, she's got a donate - to herself, and a tipjar - to herself, and a shop - non-working but presumably for herself. And her Twitter bio just goes to her own website, so it doesn't seem like she's sending people to donate to the Trussell Trust or something.

I mean, if I had a platform based on fighting poverty , I'd have a page on my website with links to charities I advocate for.

A few days ago she was responding to comments on Twitter saying that she has saucepans / spoons etc specifically for photography purposes, as distinct to actually cooking with them.
That's fair enough given her profession but again, does not align with the extreme poverty line.

She was kindly offering spare props to people on Twitter, send me your address etc.

(I think she genuinely means this, but is unable to see the cognitive dissonance between the positions)

Auction

You get more that way than selling to a jeweller. And absolutely not Ebay

She is raising lots of money.. raising lots of money for herself by pretending to be poor.

Is she raising lots of money?

I can't say I've looked too deeply but if you look at her website front page, she's got a donate - to herself, and a tipjar - to herself, and a shop - non-working but presumably for herself.

She has appealed for food banks in the past. The money went to buy copies of her books to donate to the food banks.

Lots of people do appeals for food banks...

Re the books. Do you remember the outrage about Body shop reps "donating" creams to nurses? Imho this is quite the same.

Yes, her followers paid Jack directly, ostensibly for extra copies of the books to go to food banks. (Whether the money actually went there is another question...) Jack later framed this as herself having donated many copies of her books to food banks. You're not donating if someone else is paying for it! And it would have been far more transparent (and in line with Charity Commission guidelines) if the money for books had been donated to a separate Paypal or an actual charity rather than Jack's own. But I don't think she likes transparency for some reason.

Just seems odd not to have an ongoing visible link with causes/charities you support if you're this amazing poverty campaigner.

Her website would be the obvious place to have a page saying "I'm patron of / work with such and such a charity or these are causes/ campaigns/ petitions I support, and would love if you take a look at" and links to them. Instead her "donate" page goes to her.

It seems quite self-aggrandizing to have people buy her books to donate to them to foodbanks.

The books going to foodbank were £10.99 I think, not at cost. And where was the authors profit going to. I don’t see anything altruistic going on.

Her favourite reason for people to give her money is free access to her recipes. Do others charge online for recipes?

Yes, and I was just looking at her fundraiser page, she said "I'm not in this to make money - the royalties for an author are laughably piteous, 7-10% of the RRP - so this isn't about flogging books." But she was still presumably making that much off the sales, so does seem somewhat about flogging books.

Were the sales through affiliate links?

Also, no I don't believe most charge. I don't think I encountered someone charging. There of course are recipes which are in books, not on their pages, but I assume that is the same like this case? Ottolenghi doesn't charge either😁

I think my problem with Jack Monroe is that she puts herself front and centre of anything she's supposed to be highlighting, food poverty, fuel poverty and budget cooking. Everything has to revolve around her and how hard done by she is.

From what I gather she comes from a good family background, very well placed to embrace her in extended family after she gave up her lucrative job, but she chose not to tell them and then adopted the poverty persona that became her usp. Inevitably this, and all the inconsistencies in her stories, often trip her up.

I don't believe for one moment that she's wealthy, but the main point is that she's not as wealthy as she wants to be or thinks she should be, especially given the lifestyle she became used to with two of her previous fiancees and her latest partner.

I'm not aware of anyone charging for recipes posted on websites, but usually cooks or chefs like Nigella, Jamie Oliver et al, write books, sell loads, get tv series off the back of them, or vice versa and pick up brand partnerships and their own ranges of popular goods or food. They engage professionally via social media accounts and their websites for free and the whole thing keeps going around and around. By contrast Jack is unprofessional, her recipes often seem not to work, tv appearances are ill prepared and chaotic and so everything becomes very hard work and doesn't sustain the brand as well as it could.

It seems like she is being called upon as a poorly or non paid 'talking head' so she feels that she's famous and her value is far more than it really is, so she's constantly aggrieved.

I THINK it was her website - so she used to suggest buying one for yourself and one for the foodbank.

Yes, good point, she asked people to give £10.99 for the book (the RRP) even though they were available cheaper elsewhere, as they weren't new out.

As a pp said it’s the lack of transparency that’s the problem. She recently had some T-shirts printed for sale and said proceeds would go to the Trussell Trust, without okay-ing this with them first. So the money just went in her account. Eventually she posted proof that she’d transferred the money to TT but it took a lot of prompting. Then with the legal action she was going to take, she asked for donations rather than create a crowdfunder. Who knows how much people donated or what that money is being used for as I don’t think any legal action is going ahead. It just gets murky.

On the Trussell Trust merch issue, it went from donations to TT then an appeal via Twitter for suggestions of smaller orgs and services for the remainder of funds raised. The wording on the Teemill site was subsequently changed to read ‘supporting local charities’ or similar with no TT branding or even mention.
since then there has been nothing at all about the other organisations except for a vague tweet around arranging payments then rather snippy tweets about how the services involved preferred to stay anonymous because of the abuse Jack gets (which neither makes sense nor seems plausible considering most would want to capitalise on an opportunity to share with jacks ‘twice the size of the pyramid stage’ following).

I am certain this isn’t the way the charities commission would want fundraising to be carried out. Like previous endeavours, it has been arranged in a shady way always involving a personal bank account as opposed to formal means.

This thread will 100% get deleted
It just will.

Why would it get deleted?

I don't think so @InChocolateWeTrust ... There was a thread about her the other day that reached 1000 posts without being deleted

Have you ever seen anyone else raise money for a charity and not use a charity platform of some kind (justgiving etc)?

There is zero transparency on the teemill page. They say: "If you have the charity’s permission you can use their PayPal address to set up your store. Or you can manually transfer royalties to the charity when you’ve been paid. You can manually add links to a fundraising page to your store,"

No charity PayPal address, no links to a fundraising page. Just a header saying 100% of the profits will be donated. But no one knows how much that is except for Jack.

I don’t get the family tbh. Dad has an MBE, is involved with local hood causes and seems to be prominent in the local community as force for good as well as a regular contributor to the local paper on issues like tree pollarding, mum helped to run centres for the underprivileged as well as church groups and mum and dad were featured as foster carer award winners and adopted a couple of children. It’s like Shrodinger’s family - loving, supportive, in contact, 5 mins away but yet willingly letting Jack live in poverty. Make it make sense!

It’s like Shrodinger’s family - loving, supportive, in contact, 5 mins away but yet willingly letting Jack live in poverty. Make it make sense!

Jack has said that her family have always been very supportive, visited every week when she had the baby and would have helped when she was on the dole, she just didn't tell them.

Jack's definition of extreme poverty is different from other people's.

Martin Lewis sold his website for £27 million a few years ago.

But, he does give, generally, good advice, and he does campaign vigorously.

He never asks for money, and in fact spends a lot of time advising people not to spend money on anything with his name on, as they are scams

He's consistent, doesn't plead poverty, doesn't keep begging for money, and doesn't keep changing his story. Unlike JM.

Martin Lewis sold his website for £27 million a few years ago.* But, he does give, generally, good advice, and he does campaign vigorously*.

Appreciate it may have been a typo but it was £87 million allegedly. Not that the extra 60 mill probably matters too much when you have 30...

I think Martin Lewis has done a great job, although I find him a little egotistical at times. In fairness, he's earned the right to celebrate what he's achieved.

I'm new to JM but I still don't really understand why she didn't try to sublet a room to reduce the rental cost.

I'm new to JM but I still don't really understand why she didn't try to sublet a room to reduce the rental cost

Maybe because she didn't actually need to? I think she could afford the rent just fine but she's obsessed with owning her own home and has a middle class view that someone like her shouldn't actually be paying rent, she should be paying a mortgage or maybe should just own a house outright. Her landlord grandfather left an estate of roughly £1.8 million and I think she feels entitled to a slice of that without actually doing anything for it.