Sincerily, i truely appreciate the efforts made by Mr Nick Fox regarding the 1984 Guess marciano jacket but if i understood correctly, he made a Reddit post about founding the winner and then deleted it?
How can you complain that people have tried contacting someone that was exposed on a website like Reddit? Especially when the subject is an incredibly rare and iconic piece of vintage screen used clothing that everyone (yes, VERY obsessives collectors) is curious about? In my opinion when you have a piece of information like that, it’s best to keep it to yourself or a very small circle…
It goes without saying, of course it’s completely stupid and irrational to contact a complete stranger out of nowhere and i totally understand how Nick must feel that it makes the community look gross but at the same time i can’t help but feel like that information and the winner’s name could had been kept more private.
Nothing was exposed on Reddit. People used what I posted on Reddit to reverse engineer the person’s identity and dox them.
Her information has since been traded in private chats and numerous people have reach out demanding she provide details about the jacket no normal person would know or remember, especially 18 years after the jacket was lost.
As a result, the winner has largely stopped answering anyone’s questions.
There is a right way and a wrong way to reach out to a stranger for something like this. And the people who berated, harassed, and interrogated her, trading her information like she was a prop to be collected, 100% did it the wrong way, and ruined it for the rest of us.
And since people can’t be trusted, I now can’t be as open with the information I do have, which is sad but necessary to protect the winner.
I’ve spent 9 years on this research project and a few people who lack decorum and social skills ruined it because they couldn’t wait a week for me to compile and release information and proof.
I never posted any information about her that wasn’t already published 38 years ago in Teen Beat.
Unfortunately my attempts to locate this person were not fruitful, so I needed to broaden my scope.
Without the Reddit post, I would have never made contact with the two people who helped me locate her, but that was done through DMs, no openly on Reddit.
I would have preferred to keep everything totally private until there was a resolution, but that might have meant a year or more of additional work to locate the winner without that outside help.
I have shared the image I have of the winner in the jacket with people I can trust as well as a highly reputable person in the prop collecting world to verify my findings.
For the time being, and without the winner’s consent, I don’t see a way of releasing it safely without making things worse for her.
She was extremely gracious with me, and I feel awful that people were so rude and spammy to her that she became hesitant to talk to anyone.