I cannot impress upon you how little most normal people in Southend knew of or gave a crap about Jack Monroe until recently
She’s never done any of the regular volunteering stuff blah blah that she claims; she was never a local character or popular/someone you’d say hello to in the shops. She’s just always been a little anon nobody locally, despite all those cringey efforts not to be (poetry and open mic nights I’m looking at you), some attention-seeking antics, and scribbling a few columns for the local paper a decade ago.
For people who have been involved with her at some point, they know she’s a liar, they know she uses people - but then she moves on or gets iced out of a group, so they put her out of their minds. And so she stays a nobody.
Don’t get me wrong, plenty of locals are aware of her ‘celebrity’ status but just sort of don’t give a
tit, on the whole. She’s not one of our “Southend boy/girl done good” type celebrities where everyone’s a tiny bit prouder of Southend because that person/group comes from Southend.
And so, she’s just not been on most people’s radar until recently. But the fraud stuff, the crazy lies (40 tramadol is mega lols for anyone who’s ever taken a tramadol, which is plenty of us), the Twitter meltdowns, etc. has got people paying a bit more attention and interest even if it’s the watching a car crash type of interest. And so people are now talking amongst themselves about her, gossiping about how much money she’s grifted off well-meaning gullible internet people, how she managed to get a media platform for her lies for so long. Tattle has all the receipts, Molly did a digest of these threads, the info is all here on the internet including in Jack’s own words. She can’t wriggle out of it, people are finally taking an interest in her
In my own wider circle I know there are now three regular lurkers here from Southend (
) - and this is despite me maintaining a strict RL boundary that I will not raise it in conversation with anyone except my mum and dad!
I don’t believe D&E have known either the extent of what she’s been doing all this time, or what to do those times when she has obviously gone off the rails a bit more than usual. She’s a grown adult after all, and the tricky family relationships stuff is, well, tricky, especially when there’s a kid involved. And when you’ve lived for so long with a dysfunctional person in your life, you maybe accept their dysfunction as
normal in a way that outsiders wouldn’t. So I think they’ve just sort of let her get on with her things, to keep the peace, and that’s been fine because nobody has given a crap about Jack Monroe. But now people are talking, I would assume that D&E are waking up to the scale of what she’s been doing, and I think they would understand why it’s bad. I suppose we’ll see.