Features Editor Brigitte Phillips Gets the Chop!

It has finally happened, something I have been building up to for well over a year, I cut off all my hair. Well, not exactly all of it, but a significant chunk of it. My long hair has always been an integral part of my identity for as long as I can remember, and now it’s completely different to how it has ever been before. But this new look of mine isn’t in the aid of fashion or preference, I have donated approximately 10 inches of my hair to a charity that makes wigs for children who have lost their hair.

I first got the idea over a year and a half ago, when singer Jessie J donated her hair to The Little Princess Trust after cutting it live on Comic Relief. This nucleus of an idea was solidified during a craze that swept the internet after actress Shailene Woodley cut her hair for the role of Hazel Grace in The Fault In Our Stars. While I still have not seen the film, I thought that Shailene’s idea to donate her long her to charity was really admirable, and I decided to do the same.

This was a pretty big step for me, as I’ve always had a strong attachment to my trademark long hair. It’s been one of my only features that I’ve been consistently proud of over the years, and I have drawn a lot of my confidence from it. When things got hard, I could always hide behind it. If I were to have lost it when I was a child, it would have been devastating, and probably incredibly traumatic.

Now I’m 21, and while the emotional connection to my hair is just as strong, I have realised that there are some people out there who need my hair more than I do. This is why I decided to donate my hair to The Little Princess Trust. They give human hair wigs to children all over the UK that have lost their hair due to cancer treatment, alopecia, and other conditions. The Little Princess Trust tailor-make the wigs for each child, in order to minimalise trauma and leave the wig looking as similar as possible to the original hair.

The Little Princess Trust was launched in 2006 by Wendy and Simon Tarplee, who had lost their daughter Hannah to cancer just the year before. During Hannah’s battle with cancer, they realised how difficult it was to find high quality wigs for children, and only found a suitable supplier (which has now become one of the suppliers for the charity) after a long search. Due to the difficulty in obtaining a wig for Hannah, her parents set up the charity after her death, so that high quality children’s wigs could be more accessible in years to come.

If I were to have lost my hair when I was a child, it would have been devastating, and probably incredibly traumatic.

After researching the charity, I decided that it would be the perfect way for me to help children in desperate need of hair. However, I didn’t feel like giving my hair was quite enough, I also wanted to do some fundraising for the charity itself. As there is a great need for wigs at the Little Princess Trust, they often have to buy wigs from their suppliers in order to fulfil the demand. However, these wigs don’t come cheap, and can often cost as much as £350 each.

Being an impoverished student, I originally set my JustGiving target as £100, expecting that to be a very modest and achievable goal for Student Finance-starved pockets. What I didn’t anticipate was that my target would be smashed within 18 hours of the page going live. So I doubled my target to £200, which was met even quicker. For the next 2 months, I watched the money roll in, until I had raised almost £500. I was completely astonished and thankful for the generosity of my family and friends, but I still felt like I was able to do more. With just one week to go until the Big Chop, I upped my goal to a whopping £700, enough to buy two extra wigs on top of my hair donation. While the donations have slowly been trickling in, there is still a way to go.

In the meantime, in a bid to boost the charity funds, I organised a fundraiser to coincide with my 21st birthday, which would culminate in the Big Chop itself. What originally started as an intimate celebration of the charity and the anniversary of my birth spiralled out into a hairdressing bake sale with a live band and a make-shift photo booth! There goes my plans of having a quiet Thursday night in.

But through all this, I have still been battling with my childish emotional attachment to my hair. Despite the fact that I have been resolved on the chop for a very long time, as the date draws closer I become more and more aware of the decision I’m making. But ultimately, I always come around, and remember why I’m doing it; for the children who would have been just like me at that age, devastated at the loss of their favourite part of themselves, their confidence, their identity. They really need my hair more than I do.

I am still just £70 short of my target; if any of you would like to donate to this wonderful cause, please feel free to go to www.justgiving.com/Brigitte-Phillips, and contribute what you can!

Brigitte Phillips

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Sam Pepper Exposed

There’s something wicked in the state of YouTube. Those of you who have spent any time on the website on the past year or so will know the problem. Starting with Ed Blann (Eddplant) in Summer 2013, at least 5 prominent members of the British YouTube community have been outed as sexual and emotional abusers, with many pressuring fans and underage girls into performing sexual acts. With this many incidents of sexual abuse being revealed in the past 14 months, it is clear to see that it’s a serious problem in the online video community.

One of the most recent outings has been Sam Pepper, although his apparent disrespect for women has hardly been kept a secret, his past videos include “How To Get A Girlfriend Easy”, in which he handcuffed himself to unsuspecting women and told them that they are ‘[his] girlfriend now’ (even forcing one woman to kiss him in order for him to remove the handcuffs), and ‘How to Pick Up Girls With a Lasso’, which pretty much does what it says on the tin. Despite the women involved in these videos looking clearly distressed, comparatively little was done about it in the YouTube community until one of Sam’s more recent videos ‘Fake Hand Ass Pinch Prank’ was uploaded. This ‘prank’ featured Pepper wearing a fake arm to fool women he groped with his real hand into thinking the sexual harassment was being perpetrated by innocent passersby. Many of the women angrily confronted him with one woman telling him, ‘I don’t like that’. However, despite her protestations, he laughed and continued to grope her.

Understandably, the YouTube and wider internet community was in uproar when ‘Fake Hand Ass Pinch Prank’ was published, resulting in an open letter from prominent sex education YouTuber Laci Green. This open letter has now been cosigned by numerous heavyweights in the online video community, such as the vlogbrothers, Tyler Oakley, and Grace Helbig.

Following the open letter, Pepper went on to upload a ‘second part’ of his video series, in which women groped men, and a final video explaining that the previous two had merely been ‘social experiments’ that had been staged and scripted to highlight domestic violence. However, several women featured in the first video have since come forward on twitter and revealed that prior consent wasn’t obtained before filming.

While Sam Pepper’s videos grabbed media attention, his response to Laci Green’s open letter was kept under wraps.

While Pepper claimed that his emails had been hacked, it appears that this isn’t the first time that he has sent inappropriate messages to women. The Gryphon speaks to Emily* about her experience with Sam Pepper:

I was a fan of Sam at the time, it was 2012 and he’d just started a business selling his own hats. He put a status on his Facebook asking for girls to send pictures to his email address to be considered to model the hats on the website. The website already had photos of a girl wearing underwear and some of his hats.

I thought I’d email some photos, thinking nothing would come of it and, that there’d be dozens of professional models emailing him photos. He emailed back straight away, asking me to take photos in my underwear “like the girl on the website”. I assumed that that would be the brief the model would be given, and that he was talking on a professional level. I was in two minds about it, half-thinking that it could be professional, but part of me didn’t trust him. I told him that I didn’t trust him with underwear photos, and told him that I thought that he might post them to his Facebook and slut-shame me or something. He said “I won’t” and then asked for my skype. The part of me that was a fan of him was quite keen on talking to him on skype, but it just seemed dodgy. I told him I didn’t trust him with photos and he said “I won’t trust me. I want them DIRTY.”

He then proceeded to keep asking me for dirty photos. I said “I’m not gonna do it, obviously” and he said “fair enough. This could have been fun” Partly due to his fame, and partly due to the fact I was still his fan, I didn’t want the conversation to end there. So I asked him if he was doing any fan meet ups soon and if I could have a hug at one. He said “no hugs for you, you’ve not been nice.”

It made me feel pressured to send him dirty pictures, otherwise he wouldn’t like me; being a fan of his, I didn’t want that. I think famous people have power over their fans, they idolise them. I think he was using that power to his own advantage and not thinking about anybody else’s feelings, he got caught up in fame and his power.

I posted the screenshots to Facebook because I found the whole situation a bit unbelievable and laughable. Then I had three of my friends saying that he’d done the same thing to them, one where he’d asked for photos, one where he’d told her she was cute (she was underage), and one where the girl messaged me to warn me off him, because she’d had personal experience of physical relations with him, and she said he “uses girls” and that he only spoke to her when he wanted sex.

As of then, I’ve seen him in a different light to how I did before, I’ve been wary of him ever since. I watched his videos to observe his behaviour, not as entertainment. As soon as I saw the lasso videos, I felt uncomfortable and extremely sorry for the girls in the situation. Imagine feeling a rope around you completely unexpected? You’d feel like you were being kidnapped. I thought it was inappropriate, but since it was labeled as a prank and most people seemed to find it funny, I thought I was just being sensitive and kept my feelings to myself.

I think that that is part of the problem of the power famous people have. You feel as if you can’t say bad things about them. You follow them completely blindly. I’ve read what some of his supporters are saying on twitter. Like “oh Sam, I’d let you assault me” and I think that they’re so blinded by it all that they can’t think straight. Celebrities shouldn’t use their fame in this way, they shouldn’t use it to get people to do whatever they say, they should use it to change the world. People listen to their every word, they could make such a difference. But instead, he seems to use it to make girls do what he wants. I think that he’s lost sight of himself. He needs to look in the mirror and bring himself back to humanity, and think about other people’s feelings. I think that goes for any celebrity,they have followers. and should inspire them in a positive way, not use them and then throw them away once they’re done with them.

In my opinion, the way he’s trying to cover up it all is him panicking, hoping he can make things right for himself again. He knows he’s done something wrong. But he’s chose the wrong path and tried to get out of it by lying and acting like nothing has happened, pretending that he was in the right all along. I feel sorry for him, because he’s got himself into a difficult situation, and saying sorry is so incredibly hard, but it was the right thing to do, and I don’t think he was strong enough to come out with it. I don’t think he quite knows what it’s like to get hurt and used. I feel like I’d have so much more respect for him if he’d just said “Sorry.” And I hope that he gets the strength to do that, rethink his life choices, and move on.

I think that it’s important for people to not keep quiet about any opinion they have, I think if something makes you uncomfortable, you should voice your opinion, because there will be other people who think the same way as you that have also been too scared to say anything. And you can make a difference to the way things are if you’re strong enough to say what you feel. It’s a domino effect and I think that’s exactly what has happened with Sam. One person has had the strength to say he was being inappropriate, and other people have followed. And that’s why everybody is coming out with stories about him now. Power in numbers. Not because they all want fame or are attention-seeking. Because they were too scared to do so beforehand.

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9/11 Survivor: ‘I thought it was the end of the world, that’s what it felt like’

Thirteen years on, the events surrounding the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center still affect us today. The Gryphon spoke to Ian Robb, Leeds Graduate and 9/11 survivor, about his experience.

On the evening of the 10th September, Robb had a meal with colleagues in the city, but the dinner didn’t finish until fairly late. He fell asleep in the taxi home to New Jersey, and didn’t get home until 1.30am. ‘I set the alarm, it went off in the morning and I had slept right through it,’ said Ian Robb. ‘I was always very fussy about getting to the office early, I’d like to get there at around7.30am.’

After the late start, and a delayed train, Robb arrived at the World Trade Center over an hour later than usual. He narrowly missed catching an elevator to the 99th floor of the North Tower, where he worked at the time; this saved his life. ‘I waited for the next one and about six of us got into it, the doors closed and that’s when everything started to happen. There was a tremendous vibration, the whole lift was shaking wildly and there was a rushing of wind sound all around us.’

‘We were all pretty terrified,’ said Robb, ‘I thought it was the end of the world, that’s what it felt like. It stopped after what seemed like 10 minutes but was probably no more than 15 seconds. We were all down on the floor cowering at that point wondering what was going to happen next. We could hear things dropping onto the lift, and dust was coming in through the doors. After it stopped, we dusted ourselves off and could hear the alarm bells ringing, some of us thought there was something wrong with the lift.’ The passengers tried unsuccessfully to reach someone from the outside world. ‘We waited and waited, we kept yelling and banging on the door and pressing buttons but nothing happened at all.’

‘After an hour or so, the noise above was increasing. We could still hear all this rubble falling. As we were banging, rubble started falling from the top of the door and it seemed to be jamming the door mechanism, because we were able to get our fingers inbetween the doors and pull them apart. We were in the lobby again, we had no idea how we got there. We may have gone up or gone down, we’ll never know.’

The elevator passengers were told by security that there had been a terrorist attack, and that they had to evacuate the building immediately. ‘We had to run across the lobby to an escalator that took us up to the Plaza level. The plaza level was between the two towers, probably four or five storeys of marble and glass, quite a beautiful place. The windows were all red, I hadn’t realized that the red was blood. The outside was just a battlefield; bits of bodies, bits of everything lying around. We ran out of the building and heard this huge roar, I looked up it came from the fire on the top of the building where my office was.’

‘Then the South tower began to collapse. There was a dreadful rumble, dust and rubble falling everywhere so we ran. I was on my own, I didn’t know where everyone was at that point. I ran towards the ferry and jumped on just as it was leaving the dock. It pulled out into the river and I just watched this tower collapse behind us. Later I managed to watch it on television and think, “my goodness, that was where I was”’.

‘I lost a lot of friends and acquaintances, something like 360 people from the company that I was with, killed. Everybody above where the planes hit at around the 93rd floor was killed, including all the people who worked on my floor who were in the office that day. One of the fellows who I’d been out with for dinner the night before was also lost. I think about them still, I think about them rather than the incident, because they were very close friends and colleagues.

‘The next day, I managed to get a hold of people in the main office, which was in midtown Manhattan, and they thought I was lost. I got to the office and there was a whole list of people who were dead, and my name was on it.’

When asked about the biggest change in post-9/11 America, Ian Robb had this to say, ‘The most lasting change has been much tighter security, on planes in particular. The events since have increased animosity towards those who might be likely to be terrorist. Immediately afterwards there was a dreadful backlash against Muslims which really irritated me, but I suppose people were just lashing out. But in New York itself, oddly enough, it was a great city to be in the weeks afterwards. People’s attitudes towards one another were ones of helpfulness, graciousness.

We asked Robb who he thought was to blame for the rise in Islamophobia after 9/11, the media, politicians or the general public? ‘I think the answer is yes to all those. My personal view for what it’s worth, I think if America and probably the West as a whole has been a little more forceful about trying to engage some of the more fractious Islamic countries in dialogue, it might not have come to that’.

Despite all he went through, Ian doesn’t see life any differently after escaping death, ‘I’m a spiritual person but not a religious person. I put my escape down to good fortune, but I don’t think it’s changed at all. In fact, one of my immediate responses to the tragedy was one of determination not to be negatively affected. People say to me ‘oh you probably won’t go on a plane again’, I say I’ll go on a plane as soon as possible. I’ll go in a lift as soon as possible. I am not to let the terrorists think they’ve won.’

Abla Klaa and Brigitte Phillips

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