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.

The reason she will be pawning then rather than selling will be so she can spin a story and rattle her money box so she can ‘get them back’

she can then keep the rings but in a couple of week rattle it again saying she needs a little bit more to buy them back. Then the rings reappear and all she has done is rattle her tin and got money for something that probably wasn’t even pawned

She hasn’t actually received a diagnosis.

Yes, this. I heard a R4 programme a couple of years ago that was eye-opening. A teen who did make-up tutorials was making so much money while doing her A levels that she was debating not going to university - and she was only doing it part-time at that point. She’d been offered goodness knows how much in various deals if she really committed to it.

I really haven’t ever thought much about JM but have always felt a bit . Have occasionally glanced at the threads on here, but I've now just spent a chunk of time reading up on Tattle. Well….it seems pretty persuasive to me.

I think it’s awful how she pretends to be poor to make money. She’s not particularly convincing to anyone who has actually been poor (boiling soap to make shower gel, selling lightbulbs etc) but it seems some people who can’t afford it are giving her money.

I find it offensive and I don’t want to see her on tv or in print. Get someone genuinely in poverty to give their perspective. Not a middle class grifter drowning out the voices of those she claims to represent.

She gets fuel poverty in a way that everyone sneering at "if you're sick of spaghetti hoops wash the sauce off" doesn't.

She bloody doesn’t if she can’t work out a lightbulb is 0.2p an hour to run and so dramatically taking them all out of your house will save basically nothing at all. It also sends out a terrible signal where people then think this lights must be very expensive if she’s having to do that (what with her knowing all about fuel
poverty and all) and will end up scaring themselves and sitting in the dark for no reason.

She lives for drama and attention, I think.

Which wouldn't;t bother me except vulnerable people get sucked in to her schemes.

One thing she is amazing at is managing social media & harnessing attention cleverly.

She has managed to avoid addressing any specific issues brought up about her.

She limits replies (we follow each other, as I connected with her many years ago when I was in a very difficult situation & trusted her account of her own situation, but I don't comment or reply any longer) and therefore her Twitter feed reads like a sea of support & love for her against the 'haters'. The recent furore allowed her to paint a picture of her as a hard-working campaigner being attacked, and how she was rising above it. It was really remarkable.

Exactly this.

the running spaghetti hoops dish is a joke.

however if the focus wasn’t about bootstrapping but a how to make as much variety as you can from food bank staples then it would be a lot better received by many, otherwise the recipe as she pitches it wastes food and costs more than alternatives.

She is a middle class ex journalist using her skills to graft while playing on a lie of poverty porn

I have two inherited family engagement rings. I'd beg complete strangers for money or food before I sold them because the sentimental value is so much more than the financial value.
I don't know much detail about Jack's life, I don't really pay much attention to her.
What I do know is the British public seem to enjoy applauding someone for a short while, then circling them like vultures ready to pull them down.

Absolutely. She was also claiming to turn off fridge etc and not have enough to eat over a decade ago pre fuel price rises. She has very wealthy parents (it would appear they’re multi millionaire buy to let landlords) and a supportive co parent (in fact it’s not clear she is the rp for her son).

I don’t think she gets poverty at all. Her stories are bizarre to anyone who has actually lived in poverty. They’re for middle class guardian readers.

@AtomicBlondeRose the ONS are currently working on it, no date for completion. Criticism is easy; doing is more difficult.

It’s overblown melodrama and I think you missed some points eg the ‘not having shampoo for two years’. That’s obviously utter crap, isn’t it? Shampoo is pennies. And the bit about boiling up soap for hours to make shower gel because she can’t afford shower gel? A) it would cost more to boil up the soap then some cheap shower gel; and B) why the bloody hell didn’t she just use the soap in the shower???

Those stories sound ridiculous. BUT, more than that, a few weeks before posting that, she was tweeting about being in a position to afford to buy a house for £500, 000!,! (Despite having allegedly spent the last two years without shampoo 🙄)

The Twitter thread by AwfulMolly (I think) gave numerous examples of JM’s own tweets contradicting herself about her situation. Sometimes it’s trivial things like not having a toaster and then being pictured with a toaster in the background, but sometimes it’s things that contradict her whole homeless/poverty spiel. Not good, is it, really?

And she will sue you if you call her Melissa.

On the whole I think she is an unwell woman whose mental instability is magnified by her use of social media.

Her initial book was quite good and she shone a light on important issues. However, she’s not someone suited to life in the public eye (few of us are) and I wish she’d see that rather than (probably well meant) performative gestures.

Like most people have to pay the bills and avoid the “exasperation on an irregular income”.
I think that poster meant ‘exacerbated’ not ‘exasperated’ by.

The issue is, she had lied. She's a proven liar.

She claims she doesn't have a toaster and yet there's a photo of a toaster in her kitchen.

She says she doesn't have a TV but forgot she blasted the delivery driver on Twitter for leaving her TV on the doorstep.

The boiling up soap thing as she hasn't used shampoo for 2 years is ridiculous. It would cost more due to the energy usage than just using a bar of soap in the shower. It also doesn't fit with the fact she got a new hairstyle recently and Tweeted about the products she used.

She claims dire poverty but then goes to Italy, or buys an expensive dog, or gets a tattoo.

She's posting on social media so much she forgets what she's said and trips herself up with the inconsistencies. She posts something really inappropriate (like the blasting of Tom Kerridge) then goes and mass deletes her tweets.

For what it's worth, I do think she's troubled and obviously has issues. Stepping away from social media would be in her best interest because she's clearly unwell. But if you've misrepresented your situation and people are donating to you in good faith believing you're in dire poverty then really, you're conning them. That is what makes people angry and where the "hate" is coming from.

I get the sentimental value but if you had literally nothing in the cupboard and your kids needed feeding you wouldn't sell the rings?

I’ve never looked a patron page before but have just looked at hers…

the most basic level of membership costs £3.50, with other levels ranging all the way up to £44! It says there are 808 people signed up…so even if they’re all paying the lowest level of membership she’s still raking in almost 3 grand a month just from that…is that right!?

Well even if she did have, it would be yet another example of using a diagnosis/disorder as a reason for horrible behaviour, as if its excused

On the soap thing, this is very odd, I use soap to wash my hair, I just wash my hair with it, you dont need to boil it down, just rub it all over your hair.

The smart price thing wasn’t true. There was never any removal of the range.

the price index doesn’t seem to be true either. The page has been removed.

I feel like she is a fantasist and in her mind is some kind of great poverty warrior but in reality it’s all just pretend.
Poor people don’t boil soap to make shower gel, because it costs money to boil soap and it’s cheaper to go and buy a very cheap bottle of shower gel(30p) or just to use a bar of soap as it is or if you can’t do that just use plain water.

I think people that donate to her aren’t those who are struggling, it’s people who want to feel good that they are doing some good to help ‘the poor’ when in reality they’d be better donating to their local food bank.

@TheWayTheLightFalls I concur. I was a follower of Jack's for a while, but she comes across as a narcissistic whiner these days, everything is someone else's fault, and I feel she's completely incapable of reviewing her own behaviours and responses - which is one the 'side effects' of social media. Like you say, the most 'charitable' interpretation is that she should probably step back from the twitter spotlight for a while.

Finally, people are seeking this woman for what she is. Insert your own adjective.

I dont want to be obsessed with the soap thing, but as per another poster's information on a thread here recently, I wanted to use up my little slivers of soap, all I did was put it in a pyrex jug, pour boiling water over the top of it and just stirred it round, then poured it into an empty handwash container

So Im going to keep doing that to use up my little soap bits. Soap bars are much more environmentally friendly than liquid handwash or shower gel

Anyway, back to this person, I also dont really feel she is 'clearly mentally unwell', I just think she is a con artist with a high opinion of herself and completely self absorbed. You dont have to be autistic or mentally ill to be like that

She says she hasn’t bought shampoo for 2 years but has been to expensive salons for haircuts. It’s such bullshit.
She was also posting pics about ‘embracing the grey’ a while ago, but now her hair looks a very consistent non-grey brown.

She’s now saying she gave those rings to a ‘friend’ weeks ago to pawn, so that’s why she didn’t have the money when she wrote the beg blog. She can’t sell the Emin print because someone gave it to her (when they didn’t want it).

Her ex left 2 years ago and seems to have the most ridiculous and restrictive rental agreement in history. You’d think she’d have contacts at Shelter to help her out.

It’s like a child lying to cover their tracks ‘you don’t know her she goes to another school’…..