Why I Left Transformation.com by Troy “Zooman” Cook

Part Two of Two

by Guest Blogger Troy “Zooman” Cook

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When you go out looking for the truth, there’s good odds you are going to find it. Chances are good it may not be what you expected. That doesn’t mean you don’t go looking. I learned that lesson 18 years ago when I hit rock bottom and asked the Lord for help. I had to face down some hard truths about who I’d become. It wasn’t easy, but it needed doing. You can’t run from things, you have to learn to face them.

It was mid July and I was getting more and more information that I didn’t like. Earlier that month, site Head Coach Grimes had been abruptly removed from the site. It was presented that he had decided to move on, but it struck folks kind of odd that his account had been totally deleted. All of his blogs were just gone. People were understandably upset and confused. If he left on good terms, why was his profile gone?

I’d made the decision to reach out to another former Transformation.com member, Michelle T. She’d abruptly left the site the previous year while she was a featured story. I’d asked her a few times before what happened. She refused to discuss it. I was heading to an Austin T.com meeting and decided to call her and ask again. After listening to me explain my concerns for a bit, she agreed to meet up with me to talk. Over lunch we shared our stories. (Read Why I Left Transformation.com by MichelleT here) I was shocked, but at the same time it fit in with other things I was hearing.

We left that meeting not really sure what was going to happen next. I knew one thing, I had to keep looking. As August went past I got more stories and more information. It seemed that Stoney hadn’t just been hitting on my friend. I spoke with several women who he’d approached. It felt like he was using the information from their assignments to target them. This was a pattern I’d seen before when I was going through AA.  In other cases he was approaching them as a Christian, using their faith to manipulate them into uncomfortable situations.

As a Christian and as a recovering alcoholic, both things upset me. In AA they made it clear that you were not supposed to engage in relationships with the people you were sponsoring. People are vulnerable when they are working through things and a sponsor is in a position to manipulate them.

I sent a message to the site voicing my concerns. I got a form letter back that didn’t answer anything. I was done. I wanted out. I started deleting my profile information. Only thing was, I couldn’t get my actual profile off. I didn’t want to be a shadow account. I wanted to be gone. I figured there was one sure way to get totally kicked off the site. Start a thread talking about what I thought was happening.

On September 12th I posted a thread on Bill Phillips’ web site Transformation.com. In that post I stated the reasons I was leaving the site. I felt if I mentioned some of the things that were happening on the site that my profile would be totally deleted, which is ultimately what I wanted.

I described how 2 years earlier Bill sent me an email via the site basically getting on me about a remark I jokingly made on a picture he had posted on his profile. That event left a bad taste in my mouth. I also discussed how I believed Coach Grimes was using the site and the 18 assignments to take advantage of women on the site, including a friend of mine based on discussions with her and several other women on the site.

I felt within a few hours I would be removed from the site like many of my friends had been removed over that two plus year period. After my post, I felt my profile would be deleted and possibly someone from the site would contact me to discuss my allegations.  To my great surprise, Bill or the powers that be decided to leave my post up. As a matter of fact, Bill was the second person to respond to my thread, offering an apology. He then said how I had reacted out of emotion with my other statements and would like to meet in person to address these accusations, apologize to the people I mentioned and discuss ways to prevent similar occurrences.

At that point in time I thought Bill didn’t know what I had found out about Coach Grimes. I wasn’t speaking from emotion, but from fact, and was hoping that several people would eventually come forward to validate what I was claiming. I did think though, that once the first person came forward to validate what I had to say, the thread would be deleted.

Well, people did validate my claims. The thread rapidly grew to twelve pages. I started to hope there would be some real change. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out what was going on. I’d been deleted, then undeleted and asked to come back on to answer Bill. What bugged me was how people were acting. I’d have folks telling me in private thank you. But they wouldn’t say it in public. There were other people who were supposed to be senior members of the community who just were ripping people for coming out and verifying what I’d said.  I was floored that a site that was created to help people change or transform their lives so they could regain their health and spiritual well being could post the statements they did. People were downright mean.

When the post first started generating responses, I had a lot of people email me via Facebook, personal email, my work email and text congratulating me and telling me I had done a noble thing. That it took a lot of courage for me to do that. I got messages that they knew stuff like this was going on and someone needed to speak up. But when the site was shut down for “maintenance” some of the same people starting asking me what was the point of my post and how was this helping others. When Bill’s profile disappeared a few days after that the messages got really ugly. I got messages from a several champions even telling me I needed to work more on these 18 assignments and I had no right to accuse Bill of anything and that these women knew what they were getting themselves into. Soon after that I was removed for good.

What happened to doing the right thing? What happened to getting rid of concealment? What happened?

I sit here and still wonder how it all got to this. From me getting involved in a vision that I believed was being led by a well respected fitness expert. His vision was to bring our country from worst to first in ten years in helping Americans regain and maintain their health. What do I do next?

I just keep doing what I’ve been doing only a little different.  I’m involved in a bunch of local area fitness activities including bike events and running charity races. I’ve found a new online community at BFLSpirit.com (TorchSpirit.com) which lets me keep reaching out to help people and doesn’t make people feel scared to speak up. Being the change isn’t about being some guru. It’s helping people find what works good for them, encouraging them, and supporting them.

Just like AA, that change happens one day at a time.

Why I Left Transformation.com by Troy “Zooman” Cook

Part One of Two

by Guest Blogger Troy “Zooman” Cook

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I think it was meeting Michelle T. for a face to face talk before an Austin Transformation.com meet up a couple of months ago that got me thinking. Like a lot of folks on the site, I’d been impressed and inspired by her transformation story. We had never really gotten a chance to talk much since we didn’t float through the same circles. After she left the site, I ran into her at a Texas area event and asked her why she’d left. She looked me in the eye and said, “I’m not going to talk about it.” So I left things alone.

This time was somehow different. This time I needed some answers to help me understand what I was seeing and hearing. I had received a text from a former Body-for-LIFE runner up who is a friend of mine. I was questioning things. This friend asked me if I was “still on that site” and I replied yes, but I was having my doubts. She went on to tell me some things about Bill and how he’d treated one his T.com champs during the Denver event in October of 2009. That got me thinking and worrying about other things that were going on behind the scenes with the site.

I decided to contact the T.com champion. We talked for a while and she shared with me what Bill had done and said to her in Denver. The way he treated her after she posted an assignment and then her resulting dismissal from the site. It was all very odd and bizarre, but again, it was like other stories I was hearing about Bill. I talked to Michelle about this and more and she shared with me her experiences on the site and what went on leading up to her departure from the site.

There was no discussion about what we’d do next, but I think we both knew from that point on we needed to speak out and be a voice that needed to heard on and off the site. It was from that point I stepped back and started recollecting my journey on T.com from where it started and to ultimately where it has gone.

I found the site through my friend Jonnae Taylor.  She was fighting a losing battle with leukemia. We were pen pals and she had written to tell me Bill Phillips had paid a visit to her home to grant her wish. It was from there that I looked up Transformation.com and was led to the site, more like actually drawn to it. It had a vision, a leader and a mission. It was a mission I thought I could lend a hand in. It was a vision I felt I would be doing some good work helping others and paying what I had learned through Body-for-LIFE forward.

Yet almost from the beginning odd things started to happen. Since I work shift work I could log on to the site at all times and correspond with people from different time zones and from all over the world. It was the late night things that I found odd. Things like Bill responding to a member’s question about whether heavy metal music was appropriate for her spouses’ profile or not, or correcting others for comments they had made in general, only to see Bill’s critical comments deleted by the next morning. It seemed like they were written on the spur of the moment, without thinking about how they might hurt people. And the way the comments were deleted, like he had some of his IT people following him and cleaning up after him. I moved past this and tried to never get involved, but had talked to several of the friends I had made on the site. When Bill posted hurtful and inappropriate things it was a general consensus that this was  once again ”Bill being Bill.”

Several of us got together and started an accountability group. It wasn’t anything official, just 20 – 30 of us and a thread where we all posted. Within a few months, several of those people were deleted for speaking their mind about Dianne Orwig’s profile being deleted. (Read Transforming Turmoil Into Triumph here.) The guy who started the thread was eventually deleted, then allowed to return. He left after he confided in me that he was being censored. He had questioned Bill about the site and the fact that T.com was actually a model plan of a marketing venue.

I put a lot of time, energy and money into the site, helping people with workouts, food choices, encouragement and even helping out financially where I could to make a difference in other’s lives. Later on, I was a leader of an accountability group. I was asked to do this after our team leader had taken a leave from the site.

I took my responsibility seriously. Members of the group were making great changes. I kept noticing that other groups were getting more recognition. I couldn’t understand why. After a few attempts of trying to get some recognition for our group, I felt that the group would have to make it on its own. It began to feel like it was a clique or a circle of whom you knew and who you didn’t offend as far as the group leaders were concerned.

Around this time, one of the site’s senior coaches, Stoney Grimes, made a fairly aggressive pass at a friend of mine. She was uncomfortable enough with what happened that she decided to leave the site. I tried several times to get someone to talk to about the incident. I was counseled to follow my heart on the matter, and told that it would do no good to bring this up to Bill directly or the online community. So I stayed quiet. But my frustration grew.

Several people in my group made some recognition-worthy changes. They didn’t get acknowledgement for their work. It felt like these individuals were denied any recognition due to the fact they were in my group and I’d made some waves.  The people that were recognized got money and a trip to the Make a Wish Denver 2009 Event. One of the people in my group bumped into Head Coach Stoney Grimes and he was totally impressed with the change she had made and made a few comments regarding her changes. After talking to a mutual friend of hers, I then told her what had happened with my friend and the reason I felt our mutual friend (being a member in my group) got no recognition. This was just another example of some of the things I had encountered.

I hung around one person in Denver almost continuously and he mentioned to me that Coach Grimes tensed up every time I got near him. I hadn’t noticed at first but after it was mentioned to me I saw what he was talking about. We also talked about how odd it was that during the meet and greet that afternoon in the area of the hotel that we would be having our seminars that Bill never made an appearance. I found out later on that afternoon, he was there, in a back area, watching from a distance. The only time I heard he would mingle with people was when it was set up more like a controlled photo shoot. I never really sought to go find out, but heard this from several people. It all seemed very odd to me that Bill would be so stand-offish during an event he created.

I guess after Denver I noticed a few more people leaving but nothing really seemed out of place. March 2010 rolled around and we all gathered in Dallas for another event. I had the pleasure after Dallas to open my home up to several members again and we spent most of the week hanging out, talking about the event and talking about future plans.

During this time I had several prominent people in my group delete their profiles. Each one of them stated that it was the 18 assignments that we were working on for each challenge we entered that led them to this decision. Some of the other reasons by various members in our group was that they didn’t feel the need to openly reveal things from their past that they had already dealt with. There was discussion that Coach Grimes would contact and discuss their most personal aspects of what they had revealed. He was telling them things that were not what had been discussed in other talks or threads. People were uncomfortable and started feeling that having that information in a public space was a bad idea. Anyone could find this information. Thing was, it seemed like it was required to have your information out there for everyone to see if they were to be counted in the challenges.

As I questioned my intention and the intentions of others, I began to wonder what had happened to certain individuals and started the process of finding out and asking questions. Nothing could have prepared me for what I was going to find.

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 Excerpt from Part 2 – to be posted Thursday, November 11

 When you go out looking for the truth, there’s good odds you are going to find it. Chances are good it may not be what you expected. That doesn’t mean you don’t go looking. I learned that lesson 18 years ago when I hit rock bottom and asked the Lord for help. I had to face down some hard truths about who I’d become. It wasn’t easy, but it needed doing. You can’t run from things, you have to learn to face them.