Let me unpack that a little for you:

I have had a respectful and cordial relationship with Kathy for about a year, since my friend Alan and others mounted a satiric campaign against the “Shiny Happy People.” Some of that criticism was quite pointed, and I said to her then that I was of the glass is half-empty set and thought she saw it as half-full. Not much to base a friendship on, but we were courteous each with other, friendly.

On March 15 Kathy wrote to me, saying –
I know y’all are having a great time with the social commentary on meankids… but this is a new low:

I’ve had three death threat comments now in the last two weeks (throat slitting, mostly), and it’s not actually all that funny.

She was talking about a comment associated with a post on MeanKids, and conflating that with actual threats she had received on her own blog in comments there. I wrote back –

I share your concern. Early on I addressed the issue of what should be taboo there, and discovered that the bloggers wanted an anything goes environment. If you want that post deleted, I’ll see that it is pulled, but I would rather not. Like other obscenities, it will move off the screen soon enough.

Tell me if you can bear it, or if you would rather that I pulled it.

Kathy’s reply began as follows –

I don’t mind being a target of the mean kids, and it SHOULD be an anything goes environment, so I definitely don’t want it deleted.

I just hope you’re watching for consequences…

Kathy’s “meltdown” involved me and several other people who were not part of that post/comment thread. Reading her post, one could assume that I (and others) at MeanKids had threatened her. Recently in a phone conversation I suggested that maybe an apology from her would be nice, and we tentatively discussed authoring some kind of joint post. That hasn’t gone anywhere yet, but I still think it would clear the air.

I owned the MeanKids domain. That put me in the middle of Kathy’s concerns. I apologized to her for being part of it. She essentially accepted that apology, but it would take a close reading of a lot of posts and comments to unbundle the public side of my communication with her and to see that yes, she accepted my apology; and, no, she didn’t consider me a threat regardless of how her initial blogpost was structured.