It's been a while since I've written anything about it but the Delia Day story has been in the back of my mind. Yesterday I got the most intriguing email about my last DD post.

The theory she was confirming was that she was not the one writing as Delia Day, that Travis had been writing in her voice all along. In my mind this blows the idea that this was all consentual wide fucking open.

We're writing back and forth now about a possible interview so hopefully she will be able to share her side of what happened.

I have no reason to believe that this person is anyone other than she claims to be. So I'm going to assume that I'm corresponding with her and be thankful that she chose me. I like to believe it's because I've been writing about the story in a thoughtful, non-judgemental manner and have been doing my best to see it rationally from all sides.

I, for one, can't wait to hear what else she has to say.

I've been researching this weird situation off and on since March but haven't posted anything about it lately.
It's still one of my biggest traffic generators and I've even been targetted for copyright cease and desists for some archived stuff I'd really saved for my personal use then posted to share with folks. Dude, it was just an interview and I even credited the source...Ah well.

Firstly, if you don't know who delia day is please go read my exhaustive previous posts.

There's a rumor going around that she (or Susan Anton or Susan Fulilove) has remarried. That's all I know no names or anything. If you want to send me something anonymously please feel free to do so using my comment form on the left. Thank you.

Lately I've been contemplating the liklihood that Travis was behind the writing at the delia day website. I've been meaning to put the writing from his livejournal and her website side by side and really look at the word usage to see if my theories are correct.

And while the photos might have been staged with her looking docile maybe she had a lot less consent in the situation than a lot of people have previously believed.

Also Travis' consistent domination of mentally unstable women can't be denied. Maybe he really was just a sick manipulative fuck and the BDSM community is lucky to be rid of such a bad example?

I have nothing to back this up it's just my latest little theory.

Remember that post I did about the sex slave that killed her owner? Well just out of curiosity I checked back with the longest thread in the world to see what else has been discovered. I'm relieved to know I'm not the only one who finds this case intriguing.

There's now a website with a mailing list and a live journal where people post their research. It seems that a few folks have filed a 'freedom of information act' request with the county there.

I have a word document where I've been cutting and pasting information when I found out about it. It's a mess but if you're really curious about this story I've gathered a good amount of information about it.

Update: 1/10/05

I've removed the word document because apparently it has pissed some people off. The admin for the LJ group says that I had taken several pieces to "pad" my "non-lj" blog (I love the implication that non-lj blogs are somehow inferior that's so cute) when I had grabbed one anonymously posted email along with about a bagillion other sites' articles and references (gathered on my own since friggin March tyvm) and pasted them in a huge messy word doc for my personal use which I later uploaded to my site when a friend was asking where I was getting all my information.

At least I think the admin was referencing my site she never actually pointed to mine, left a comment here, or sent an email asking me to remove anything. But I was drummed out of the delia day lj group (bless my soul!) without any kind of notice or even a 'fuck you' so I'm going to assume I'm the culprit.

I finally noticed all of this today because I was cleaning out my backlogged bloglines subscriptions from the last two months and saw the posts from December fifth and sixth.

The Admin was right about my posting an item originally posted in a protected group (although really I'd been under the impression that it was a protected group because of the adult content not that anyone was going to be 'exposed' - because there were no names being divulged in the material from the lj group that I hadn't found referenced in many many other public articles) without asking anyone. I honestly never considered a hugely messy doc file compendium of articles, obituaries, thoughtful posts, and links, (including my own random thoughts typed in) would be considered 'publishing'.

Although I remember now pointing someone to it when they said they couldn't find any actual articles about it. Well, that's what the copying and pasting was for because news sites (particularly small town newspapers) are notorious for dumping small articles rather than archiving them properly.

But that really wasn't was the big brouhaha was about - it was the 'friends only' posts on LJ. I've already said what my rationalization for it was at the time and I admit now that I should at the very least have asked for permission before uploading the doc file. Honestly, since I referenced every paste with a link I didn't think I was doing anything that unconscionable. And again, I never intended to publish my doc file. This was a personal exploration with extremely vague talk about writing a fictional screenplay based on the story which I'd never really do anyway. At the most I was planning on writing a heavily-referenced wikipedia entry and these were my notes about gathering and organizing the sources for it.

I just wish that if the admin had been so upset about it she would've contacted me and asked me to take it down. Because I would have. But I imagine her argument would be that I hadn't given her the courtesy to ask permission so why should she give any to me. I can see her point. But honestly, this wasn't about padding my site (with a doc file? I don't fucking think so.) or driving traffic, or doing some kind of big expose. It was just a random doc file I'd been using to collect things I'd been running across.

Anyway, I didn't know that this was a problem until today and I'm taking it down now. I'll try to get just the links together sometime and just point people to the articles. If anyone cares about this story anymore.

I've been utterly fascinated with this story for the last 24 hours. (Link is safe for work it's just words) I can't stop thinking about it. It's the most sordid, frightening, depressing, intriguing thing I've ever read about online. Really. Let me see if I can sum this up briefly. I doubt I can.

*put on your grown up pants this is kind of intense*

Delia Day.com

This woman named Delia Day had an adult photography site (*nsfw*) chronicling her life as a slave for the last ten years through painfully graphic photographs with the most interesting compositions and hauntingly detached highly-detailed descriptive paragraphs. There was a pay area for the more intense photography - which I can't imagine because the free area was pretty damn shocking. I'd never been to her site before I read about this story. Never heard of Delia Day before.

She also had a live journal (sfw*). The last entry is dated December 1, 2003. It describes her owner doing something that makes me very uncomfortable and kind of nauseated but from the way she was writing about it sounds like it wasn't the first time. It was pretty small change compared to some of the photographs I'd seen in the free area.

Disclaimer

I don't want to go into the specific descriptive details too much and I don't intend to cast judgements on people involved in BDSM. I'm genuinely sorry if I come off that way. It's something I don't know a whole lot about but I very strongly believe things between consenting adults are their own business. From the outside all relationships have the potential to look unhealthy and messed up. But this story touches on several subjects I think about in my spare time and there are so many elements to this that are just fascinating to me. A lot of times I like to compare how I would react to a situation or how similar/dissimilar I am to a person and this comes off as judgemental. But I'm really not I promise it's just my own way of figuring myself out.

But there's a lot more to this story.

So after her journal entry things were quiet. Very unusual since she updated pretty much every day. Except for the last month. There had been comparatively few posts in the month of November. Some people said that her more recent posts sounded more depressed, more resigned than the earlier ones. Then her paysite went down. People were curious about what was going on especially the paying members.

In January another (sfw*) woman with livejournal who said she knew this couple in real life posted a link to this article (sfw*) about a woman who shot her husband on December 2, 2003 with a shotgun. In November Delia Day had described (sfw*) in great detail the huge shotgun her owner had bought and what it was like to have him teach her to shoot it.

Folks (*sfw) have been researching and comparing facts and intimations like crazy trying to confirm if this couple was, in fact, Delia Day and her owner. I think it's safe to say now that they are.

The reality

Travis Anton (sfw*) was shot in his small house in rural southern Mississippi/northern Louisiana on December 3, 2003. He was a creator of plugins for Photoshop and an early authority (sfw*) on graphics and their use of bandwidth. In the interviews (sfw*) and articles published in online graphic journals he comes off as intelligent and personable. In his livejournal (sfw*) he comes off as superior, intelligent, somewhat Machiavellian. In his wife/slave's journal he is a god with very innovative uses of household objects and a natural talent for carpentry.

Susan Anton was arrested but has not been charged and has since been released, the charges dropped under the auspices of self-defense. She was the one who called the police. From what I can tell she never denied shooting Travis. From others' descriptions and my readings Susan was depressed, mildly agoraphobic, narcoleptic, anorexic/bulemic, had an incredibly amazingly low sense of self-worth. No one knows where she is now. But according to all descriptions her dependence on Travis was absolute.

They had recently celebrated their tenth wedding anniversary by going to New Orleans and having a collar tattoo put on Susan.

Slavery

According to her own descriptions (sfw* but there's some bad language) Susan did not start out seeking a master. She just met some guy, started sleeping with him, and slowly gave him more and more control. Hell I've been in relationships like that just not to that extreme a degree. She seemed to like and trust him enough to give him that control. Based on his background Travis was somewhat of an authority (sfw*) on the psychological condition. Her story describes the fundamental breakdown of an ego at the hands of a truly manipulative charming character. This may or may not be true of course and at what point would one lose their ability to be rational when giving their consent in a situation like that? From what I understand that ability to be rational is paramount to the value of the consent in BDSM play. Again I need to point out I've only done a cursory study of this.

Susan never made a move without Travis' permission. He would shave her head and not let her grow her hair out. She had several piercings that were done in such a way that she was unable to have traditional sex without his assistance in removing the piercing accoutrements. She wasn't allowed outside without him or his permission. On just a random page I ran across there's a photograph of her having coffee - perfectly normal snapshot - and the paragraph beneath describes the way she was put in a collar and chained in the kitchen until she had cleaned the floor to his liking. She wasn't even unchained when she needed to pee she had to go in a bowl - the photographs of which are in the members area.

There are thousands and thousands of photographs taken over the last ten years. She seems happy, I mean, as happy as someone can be when pleasure comes from pain. Something I only vaguely understand really. Her descriptions of everything are detailed, detached, and resigned.

Her artistic digital photos (*nsfw*) are amazing. Truly well-done technically and artistically.

The Cleavers behind closed doors

There's a lot of debate about whether or not there were children in the house. His obituary lists three children. One child he had discussed (sfw*) in his livejournal is from a previous marriage. That child is severely handicapped and lives at his monther's house. Travis' other children are listed as living in the same town Susan and Travis were living in but no one knows if they actually lived with the couple. There's a lot of speculation going on about whether or not Susan has had children. In a brief usenet discussion (sfw*) about daily life Susan does indicate there's a regular household around their photographed lives but who knows what that means. If there were children there I think it must have been pretty difficult to keep them shielded from some of the extreme scenes going on. Although I have read posts about and by BDSM couples that live perfectly normal (whatever that is) lives and just keep the extreme kink completely seperate from the rest.

So who did it and why?

So after it all what exactly would have pushed her over the edge? She'd allowed herself to be put in such incredibly humiliating circumstances. Things I can't imagine. And not only allowed herself to be photographed but published it online, wrote eloquently about it, and even charged people to see it. After ten years of this creative torture and alleged pleasure from it what exactly would be the last straw?

There was some description of another woman named Ashley with whom Travis had been having sex and Susan had also been instructed to sleep with too. Some people think that's the other (sfw*) livejournal woman. Was there discord? Was this other woman becoming the new slave and Susan was jealous?

Did he instruct her to shoot him? Now that I would believe. She had made it infinitely clear over the years that she would do anything, ANYTHING that he told her to do. So maybe one day he told her to shoot him and she just..did.

Then there's the third party idea. Apparently the reason he'd bought that shotgun in November was due to a conflict with a neighbor. The irony of this conflict is he broke up a fight where the neighbor was beating up his girlfriend. I don't think it was through the girlfriend's consent but there's still a slightly twisted irony there nonetheless. But the neighbor was stalking the house or something so there's that possibility or the chance that there was some random wildcard person involved. Burglary, a man who Susan had previously had sex with while Anton watched - this seemed to happen fairly frequently, who knows.

The twists and turns in this story are just amazing though. There's so much to it and I'm not alone in being unable to look away. I'm very tempted to write a screenplay about it.

*
sfw=safe for work
nsfw=not safe for work