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Tim Roberts vs. the Cumberbatch Fandom: a long post

As you all probably have noticed already, a story about how a theatre worker named Tim Roberts got fired/quit for tweeting about Benedict Cumberbatch fans is spreading through the internet. I’ve noticed that some people seem to be taking his side, considering the fact that he has been fired/forced to quit to be an overreaction, or as he would like us to believe, a gross infringement of his free speech rights.

For a clarification, he wasn’t fired, or forced to quit. When faced with a private investigation from his employers, he decided to quit. Why do that if you have done nothing wrong? I’ll leave it out to you to decide.

But why did all this happened? As I’ve been told, he has deleted most of the “offensive” tweets about it, but according to him, this is the reason of all of his misfortunes:

He insists on pointing that this tweet, and only this tweet, is the only reason he got into trouble, and he says so several times on his timeline. If you didn’t know better, you would totally believe this guy’s story and considered it a gross miscarriage of justice, am I right? After all, that tweet is just an observation, that doesn’t contain any foul language. Just a criticism of the way some people behave during live theatre.

Except, dear old Tim isn’t being truthful. That’s not the tweet that got him into trouble. That’s not the reason his employers decided to do a review of his behaviour on social media. And that’s not the reason he decided it was best for him to quit before being investigated either. Dear Tim, being so completely tone-deaf about how incredibly gross, hateful and misogynistic his words are, has deleted some tweets, but the ones that are still on his timeline, will give you an idea of what kind of person he is, and why people got so riled up with his comments:

I am not going to insult your intelligence and point out the obvious. But let me tell you that he’s not the first person to get canned because of hateful speech (Remember Justine?).

Mr. Roberts seems to regard his current predicament as a great injustice, and as a sign that his freedom of speech has been thwarted. But the thing is, freedom of speech does not mean that you can spread hate and nobody has the right to challenge you. Freedom of speech means that you can say whatever you want (as he has rightly done), but it does not protect you from the consequences of your words. It does not mean that anybody who disagrees with you is a bully. And it certainly does not mean that your employers are weaklings that bow under the pressure of the public opinion. As Tim’s employers, the Really Useful Theatre company can be held accountable about the way he and all the people who work with them express themselves on social media. Tim’s words and unjustified attacks on female fans reflect very poorly on RUT, so it’s completely understandable that they would want to get to the bottom of the issue and sever ties with him immediately.

I’ve seen that Tim is not only orchestrating a campaign to tell his very biased side of the story by rewriting history on his Twitter, but he is also contacting members of the press. The Independent has fallen for his excuses, as you can see on their article. Tim has also contacted via his account the Evening Standard, the BBC programme Victoria LIVE, and The Sun, as you can see:

He’s also receiving the help of other like-minded individuals, but the way they are going about it is probably not helping that much Tim’s cause:

I will end up this very long post (sorry, I wanted to get this out of my chest and move on, this man is not worth my time) by pointing out that he is claiming he’s being bullied and threatened. And, he chose this to exemplify his claims:

Does that person sound like a troll to you? or a bully? Because to me it looks like Tim likes to dish on people, but when said people fight back, he cannot take it and starts crying about being the victim of bullies.

About Amanda, I think she simply does not know the whole story. If you go by what Tim says in his timeline, he is a completely innocent victim of evil Cumberfans, just like Amanda and Ben’s wife (according to him, that is). I hope she decides to take a closer look to his timeline and realizes who this guy really is.

ETA:

Thank you to all the people who is sending me links and screencaps to the original tweets that were deleted. The internet never forgets, Tim!