Lifting The Veil

Florence Brun Tirakayos: The Trolls’ Achilles Heel

There is a running joke that every troll alias is Florence Brun Tirakayos. The reason for this is she has the following noticeable traits (which coincidentally plenty of aliases share):

Quirky speech (French is her first language), concern trolling, moral reprimanding, odd grammar and use of capitals/punctuation/spacing. Hold any lengthy conversation or (un)civil debate with Florence and you will also see that she has the tendency to play mind games with her participants. She typically starts off “normal” at first, and then resorts to whatever tactic she thinks will elicit a response. She is capable of jumping all over the place with tone and seems to do so gleefully (as anyone would expect from a true internet troll who toys with people).

Since those descriptions and troll aliases often coincide, and because there is at least an ounce of truth to every joke, could this make Florence a good candidate for the troll of Candace Rice? In the previous post we named Bambi Chapman as the most likely culprit, with Liz Paparella and Heidi Faith also candidates. But check out this post Flo made on Fed Up [was referenced in the previous post].

This is very “Candace”. Very telling who “liked” Florence’s blind vengeance too. Melissa reveals that she doesn’t troll with this name, so it doesn’t matter to her.

Still, even with these traits in common, it seemed more likely that Candace was Bambi. Yet, Flo also was willing to punish anyone involved in making our Master Troll List. The one thing you can count on with Florence is inconsistency of her behavior and a hate for certain types of birth. This is part of why it is so easy to assume she’s behind certain schemes. So many conflicting messages, so hard to know what to trust when the motive and clues point to a few different people.

You can see more examples of Florence’s behavior below.  Despite her obvious flaws, she’s in similar company.

We just watched other alias “Jennifer Ralph” (search our site for more on her) gush over The Skeptical Mother’s appearance, which is something Heidi has done before and is very in her character to continue. Since Heidi has a history of trolling on Fed Up (search Kallie Bloom), this falls right in line with that.

“Jennifer Ralph” did provide the opportunity for Florence and Aleah to come in and strut with feathers fanned to show that Sammy wasn’t worth much next to them. Even if Jennifer Ralph is Heidi, what she started still served Florence. It would be easy to guess that it was Flo who sockpuppeted to fluff her own ego.

About the other commentors

It was very noticeable how Aleah trumpets about accomplishments and brains. Our guess is that she feels she has these in abundance and that people she dislikes do not. She mentions how you can “buy good looks, honey”. Well, it’s funny you should mention that…  (Search for Aleah; sexism)

Anj’s weird comment, about not having met Sammy… yet? This was during a time they were all trying to scare and intimidate her. They didn’t have a coffee date scheduled or anything. It only comes off as threatening.

Due to the conversation above, we’ve added Vanity, Envy, and Pride to our Categories list. Trolls will pick anyone apart and obsess over superficial things, and somehow it always comes back to their own insecurities and shortcomings. Trolls hurt people because they have something to prove, and that something is that they are better than somebody.

Back to Florence:

At this point we fully suspected Florence to be behind the Veil counter activities, and that Candace and Cindy were her aliases.

[UPDATE– an anonymous source told us that Cindy DiFrancisco was more likely behind the harassing.]

Florence talks. A lot. That gives us plenty of opportunity to recognize her unique voice much clearer, and her personality shows through more with every word. Then, there’s this.

This picture was removed from Lifting the Veil’s FB page. It was done so successfully because the person making the complaint was the owner of the comment. Nevermind that the owner was on a public forum using people’s full names to harass and intimidate! Our version was at least the censored version to protect the victims of bullying. Still, since we know the complaint came from Florence and since the only trolls bothering us lately have been Candace, Cindy, and the anti-LTV blogs/page, it seemed the one common denominator in all this (Florence).

What you need to know about Flo
Florence is a weak spot for the trolls. She doesn’t let things go where they would. She has too many numerous personas and even the other trolls aren’t sure when they can trust her or not. When her sockpuppet aliases get insulted, she feels personally insulted too. She craves belonging. She feels left out of a lot of the Raptor games and jokes. She looks up to several of them, namely Aleah, immediately copying things they say such as nicknames for enemies (ex: Sammoo and Lizzie, for TSM and ISOTPB).

Florence’s whole motto would be: Notice me. Everything she does within and for her groups is for recognition or to be noticed. Think of her as like the nagging little sister who constantly talks or tugs on your clothes to get attention. If she doesn’t get the desired result, she might dress up as somebody else as a disguise and start blowing things up in the backyard. She is constantly running her mouth and not able to keep things secretive (even if they would benefit her group). In some ways her behavior is unpredictable, unreliable. She is a liability for them.

If you see a troll being sloppy or out of control and they are attempting to be anonymous, consider that it might be Florence.

About Candace: She (“Candace”, “Cindy”) also shares info with us such as how Aleah and Sara Rose are really hurting by our project and are only pretending to not care, and that Sara Savel is the one to blame for sleuthing TSM’s info and passing it around. She shared screenshots from private messages from the trolls showing how they were scared of our project. She pointed us to new names we were not aware of and allowed us to connect aliases we previously thought were separate people.  “Candace” has actually been a pretty helpful informant.