Two Star
Chronicling the Cyberstalking and Targeted Harassment that Shaun Rose Continues to Commit Against Independent Filmmakers Such as Myself, Even Since Being Proven as the Perpetrator in 'One Star'
The following piece is a continuation of ‘One Star’—which, if you haven’t read, you probably should, as I’m not going to recap it here.
I was going to have this just be another update added to the bottom of the ‘One Star’ piece, but that piece has already had so many updates, and has become quite long and exhaustive. So, I’ve done a sequel of sorts—consider ‘Two Star’ to be ‘One Star: Part II’.
Wait—Shaun’s Still Doing This?
Yes, Shaun Rose is still doing this. It was my hope that after me having thoroughly outed him publicly for what he’s done, he might call it quits and retire from his 5-year long harassment campaign, but he has not. It doesn’t seem that he ever will—this has become his life now, his only discernible internet pastime. Why he doesn’t just get back to making movies, his alleged passion, I have no idea. Why his family and friends have not intervened and suggested he seek professional help in getting to the bottom of this unhealthy compulsion of his, I don’t know either. All I know is that, if this behavior of his does not cease after the publishing of the piece you are reading right now, I will be pursuing legal action against him. I’m sick of this shit.
It’s possible that the reason he continues to terrorize people is that, even though ‘One Star’ did get in front of a lot of eyes, it was not so penetrative culturally that anyone who would fall for his lies, or for a fake account of his, would be saved from doing so because they’d already know about him and what he does. A Netflix documentary it was not—he is still able to operate under relative obscurity. Though the ‘One Star’ piece does come up if you Google ‘shaun rose filmmaker’, it’s buried on the first page, and no one would know what incriminating evidence lies just behind the link just from reading the excerpt of it that comes up:
A Reddit thread specifically discussing his heinous actions comes up on that same first page, but unless you were poring over every Google result, you might of course miss it (plus, who would even be specifically googling Shaun Rose anyway?):
I don’t know what the answer is as far as getting the word out, and getting him to stop, other than to just keep on documenting his harassment and sharing that information with you all when necessary (and as I said earlier, pursuing legal action against him). I’m not an SEO expert, and I’m also not some big famous person. The sad reality of the world is that, often times, even when bad people are exposed for doing bad shit, they can just go on keeping on doing bad shit, because not enough people know about it, even in their own circle. Short of contacting every single YouTube filmmaker to warn them, and tracking down every single person that Shaun knows and sending them the damning proof, what could ever really be done? And I’m not about to go through all that trouble. But I do want to live a life free of harassment from Shaun Rose. That’s all anyone wants, and all anyone deserves—but that ain’t the world we live in yet.
Chapter Seven: The Continued Adventures of ‘James Frederick’
You will remember the ‘James Frederick’ Instagram account as the one that I matched the IP address of to Shaun Rose, indisputably proving that he is the perpetrator, which he addressed by posting a picture of some other guy, as though that is somehow ‘proof’ that he is not Shaun Rose. (Maybe I’m biased, but I’ll take my court-admissible IP proof over that any day—and you of course should too.)
After that, he steered clear of me and stuck to just picking on lesser-known YouTube filmmakers for a while. These are people who have just a couple hundred views on their films despite them being up for years, or who created a film on a lark as part of Joel Haver’s annual ‘Make a Movie Instead of Watching the Oscars’ challenge:
Out of principle, I won’t be posting the content of these reviews here, as they were of course not written in good faith, and I do not want to draw further attention to anything so absurdly negative and completely unnecessary. (Look the reviews up for yourself if you really need to see.)
A lot of these filmmakers are just starting out on their filmmaking journey, meaning that any roughness around the edges of their work is a completely necessary part of their natural growing process as artists. That Shaun would deliberately seek out and ridicule these films is unconscionable.
These films also have often not even been released to the public at large in any real way—many of them don’t even have IMDb or Letterboxd pages. They are admitted attempts, with flaws that the filmmakers themselves are surely aware of. The triumph of these works lies in that they were completed, not left unfinished or abandoned, and that they will be learned from. You’d have to be a spiteful and jealous person not to recognize this—in other words, you’d have to be Shaun Rose.
He clearly sees the sin of these films as being that they are films released on YouTube that are not his own. That is how all his attacks and bizarre fixations on other filmmakers begins—he sees being a filmmaker who releases on YouTube as his own personal unique thing that he does, refusing to accept that it’s a larger trend in filmmaking that he is simply a part of. That is why he always seeks to rip his ‘competition’ apart (and through fake names and dummy accounts, so that his own twisted motivation might not be immediately recognizable to an outside observer).
What’s particularly appalling too about Shaun going after these films is that they often suffer from much the same issues as his own work does. He uses attacking the work of others as an outlet for the inadequacy that he must feel deep down about his own admittedly lackluster cinematic contributions. Knowing that he is on par with these people must drive him mad—he’s been making films for well over decade and yet his work is just as good, or bad, as kids 20 years younger than him that have barely touched a camera before. So, he takes to trashing them, posing as fake people in order to do so, in hopes that that the lack of fake people trashing his own work will make his work seem better.
Like a criminal who cannot help but return to the scene of the crime though, he of course came back to trashing me, and Joel Haver:
I’m sure you are all curious to see what his review of my documentary ‘One Star’ is like. Here it is:
He of course doesn’t mention that the documentary, and the Substack piece, is about him and what he’s done to people. An uninitiated person stumbling upon the ‘James Frederick’ Instagram page would have no idea that that’s what this movie is about. Maybe that’s my fault for not instead titling the movie something like ‘Shaun Rose is a Piece of Shit, and James Frederick is a Fake Name of His’—that might cause more skepticism from people when they see that a ‘James Frederick’ reviewed it.
I don’t need to get into the Joel Haver review—it’s just more garbage. You’re basically now up to date with what he’s continued to do as ‘James Frederick’. My exposure and indisputable proof of Shaun Rose being ‘James Frederick’ has clearly done literally nothing to hinder what he does on that account. If you find the harassment that he engages in on that account to be unacceptable, I would highly suggest reporting both the account and the offending posts to Instagram for it to be possibly taken down. I would do so myself, but ‘James Frederick’ of course has me, and other people he attacks, blocked on there, in order to stop us from doing so. Only a concerned public that does not consist of his specific targets for harassment have the power to shut him down.
Chapter Eight: In Which Shaun is a Black Guy Now, Apparently
This one’s a doozy.
While Shaun continues to operate his ‘James Frederick’ account on Instagram, he has also returned to the platform where he once did quite a lot of damage, Letterboxd—but now as a black man.
His account on there is ‘BWrightSun’, which boasts a profile picture of Spike Lee, and which mentions that he’s a black man in his reviews:
‘But Cody’, you might say, ‘how do you know this is Shaun Rose? What would cause you to think that? This is obviously just some black guy who’s a fan of Spike Lee’.
Well, let’s take a look at some of the movies that ‘BWrightSun’ has reviewed. Here’s a movie he enjoyed, compared to a movie that Shaun’s old dummy account ‘TWillard’ liked:
And here’s what ‘BWrightSun’ and ‘TWillard’ thinks about Larry Clarks’s ‘Ken Park’:
And here’s what ‘BWrightSun’ thinks the Charli Rogers film ‘Ammonite’ deserves as compared to what ‘TWillard’ thinks—a film that only 12 people have seen on Letterboxd, and which is impossible to find on the internet without Charli Rogers sending you a direct link to it, which is what they sent to ‘James Frederick’, who is Shaun Rose:
And here’s what ‘BWrightSun’ has to say about Shaun Rose’s movies:
And here’s how ‘BWrightSun’ feels about the film Black Dog, which was directed by Nicholas Adamson, who you will remember as my partner in the sting operation of sorts that we successfully conducted to get the IP addresses of both Shaun Rose and ‘James Frederick’ and match them:
Hm—I wonder why ‘BWrightSun’ might dislike that film by that filmmaker so much? (Or why he even knows it exists—it has 1,500 views on YouTube, and has been logged on Letterboxd just 30 times.)
Now let’s come to something I find quite offensive. If you’ll remember, Shaun Rose been particular harsh on YouTube filmmaker Jennifer Bauman, including spamming her with low ratings on Letterboxd:
He would also leave her absurdly low ratings as ‘James Frederick’ on Letterboxd, even personally attacking her as ‘James Frederick’ for her daring to defend her own work, and her own face:
Let’s see how ‘BWrightSun’ feels about Jennifer Bauman’s work, and let’s compare that to how ‘James Frederick’ feels:
If you’ll notice, Shaun gives it the same compliment on both dummy accounts, but like the manipulative prick that he is, he gives it three stars as ‘BWrightSun’.
It’s impossible to know how Shaun Rose truthfully feels about the movies he trashes through his myriad dummy accounts. Based on this Jennifer Bauman example (and more to come below) I would guess that he doesn’t actually hate the movies themselves so much as he hates that they exist—as in his eyes, they are competition. He would prefer a world where he were the only YouTube filmmaker around, while everyone else who wants to make their own films just sits at home and twiddles their thumbs, it never occurring to them to follow their dreams too.
Now that we know how Shaun as make believe black man ‘BWrightSun’ feels about Jennifer Bauman’s work, let’s see what he thinks of works by other filmmakers he’s traditionally trashed, such as Joel Haver and Dan Lotz:
Almost half of those are downright positive reviews. And the negative ones, though sometimes vague (‘This is dumb’, ‘Still bad’, ‘This was too much for me’) aren’t that insulting or beyond the pale. It very much seems that, in his own way, Shaun Rose as imaginary black dude ‘BWrightSun’ wants to get on our good side—or at least try and throw us off his Rose-y scent. (I am so proud of this pun, you have no idea.)
Even his reviews of my films are a bit different than usual, as you can see below:
More than half of those, non-existent black dude ‘BWrightSun’ enjoys. Diplomatic negative reviews too.
A ‘BWrightSun’ review I found particularly interesting was a review of my film Invisible Shark, which he praises for a specific reason pertaining to his imaginary blackness:
I disagree that ‘nobody else involves them at a low budget level’. There are plenty of low budget movies out there with entire black casts, even. It’s strange that a black person so interested in low-budget film would have no knowledge of that, or have ever logged any of them on Letterboxd whatsoever. It’s not strange though, of course, for the whitest motherfucker anyone has ever seen in their goddamn life, Shaun Rose, posing as a black man.
At this point, I should point out that this is not actually the first time that Shaun Rose has posed as a black man for dummy account, negative review purposes. Here’s ‘B Wright’ as ‘B Lark’, complaining about the writing and portrayal of a black character in Invisible Shark (the same film he praised for having black actors):
I don’t even need to point out how disingenuous is, as the same white person (Shaun Rose) is making opposite points about the same goddamn movie, on two separate accounts, as two separate black people. (And, of course, doing the classic Shaun Rose thing of ‘I saw it through a friend!’ to cover up for the fact that there is no rational reason how he could have seen the movie unless he were Shaun Rose.)
A quick digression. As clarification for anyone who hasn’t seen this movie by the way, I should say that the character he’s referring to is special needs, and the actor is not, and it’s a phenomenal portrayal. Some of the best acting I’ve personally ever witnessed—and I’m not the only one who feels that way. A mother of a special needs child told me after she saw the movie that it was the most accurate depiction of a special needs person by a non-special needs actor that she had ever seen in her life. It reminded her of her own son. That’s the highest praise possible.
Back to Shaun Rose though. The fact that he has now faked being two different black people lends credence to the theory that he and possibly his accomplice Michael Haywood were the ones behind the trolling I experienced in the comment section of the FilmThreat review of Mute Date that sparked this whole everything so long ago. Several of those fake commenters were made-up black people, and/or were speaking in a badly-approximated ‘black’ way, or had a ‘black’ name:
The point of the trolling back then was blatantly clear—to take over the comments sections and mess with me. The point of ‘BWrightSun’ was unclear though—that is, until it came time for it to review my film about Shaun Rose, ‘One Star’:
As you can see ‘Two Star’ wasn’t just a clever name for this sequel of mine—it is his new modus operandi. Negative reviews, but not so hugely negative that they rock the boat too much.
It is clear too that it was worth it for Shaun Rose to leave some positive reviews for me, Dan Lotz, and Joel Haver, so long as he got to leave a negative review for One Star, the movie that sticks in his personal craw. And his goal with that review was clearly to suggest some sort of movie focusing on ‘both sides of the conflict’, as though this is some sort of dispute with two sides, and not a one-sided affair by a demented harasser.
I am told that harassers often attempt this type of thing when cornered with evidence against them. Rather than copping to their own indefensible behavior and pattern of abuse (five long years, in Shaun Rose’s case) and deciding to finally making things right, they try and weasel out of responsibility by saying that there are ‘two sides to every story’, as though this has ever been any sort of back-and-forth, tit-for-tat. A revisionist history is created, if only in their mind, that this was ever two sides clashing and not just a single person with a sick hobby of trying their best to harm the lives and artistic careers of people who have never harmed them in any way whatsoever.
Every bit of hurt that Shaun Rose no doubt feels has come solely from me shining a flashlight on the harm he has done and letting the world know about it. Yes, I may take some cheap shots against him in these posts once in a while for levity (that fucking neck beard, good lord) but I am allowed that, after all I’ve been through. The point is that he is the perpetrator, and he cannot and should not be trusted.
I leave you with the most recently example of Shaun Rose fuckery as faux black ‘BWrightSun’. My latest feature-length film, Stock Shark, was released recently. Without spoiling anything, in this film, a character (not played by me) says the N-word, and the F-word. The film is about this character’s own immaturity and arrogance—the character is essentially an adolescent who feels imprisoned in some way, and who just wants to do and say things that they’re not allowed to do.
As I was working on this film, I knew that the use of these words might be controversial. I even knew that Shaun Rose as his black puppet ‘BWrightSun’ (we might as well just call him ‘BWrightShaun’ at this point) would likely seize upon this and try and use it against me. I did it anyway, because they were the right words for the character to use. For me to censor or neuter the character in any way would have felt dishonest—it would not have been the film that I wanted to make, and it would not have been able to make the same necessary points about language.
My characters are everything to me, and those words are what this character needed to be able to say, so they’re in there. Just like so many white filmmakers before me, the N-word is in there, despite my whiteness. I do not believe that there is any sin in this in and of itself. The only sin is in either bobbling volatile elements, such as controversial words, in the creation of art (I believe the words were used brilliantly here) or in self-censoring in advance because you’re too scared of what people might think. Others may disagree, but I think that the film is great, and that the word usage makes sense in the context of the film. (An example of word usage that I don’t think makes sense is the N-word stuff by Tarantino’s character in Pulp Fiction—the worst section of the film, a section that just does not land at all, a section that absolutely gets in the way of the film being a perfect movie.)
Without further ado, here’s fugazi black man ‘BWrightSun’ on my film Stock Shark:
The reason why his reviews don’t show up for the public anymore is because Letterboxd has shadowbanned the ‘BWrightSun’ account for being yet another Shaun Rose dummy account. They have been helping me deal with this prick for well over a year now, and have taken down more accounts of his than I can shake a stick at. They’re sick of what he brings to the platform. Were I not to be posting these screenshots of his ratings and reviews as ‘BWrightSun’ in this piece, no one would be able to see them without going to his profile directly, or specifically following him. That is his first warning to stop what he is doing. If he keeps going, his account will be banned outright, like so many accounts of his have been before.
I have been more than fair with Shaun Rose. Letterboxd has been more than fair with Shaun Rose. It is absolutely fair to take a firm position against someone like him.
True to his word, Shaun Rose has posted his fake black review of Stock Shark on IMDB (and we get to learn the first name of ‘BWrightSun’—Byron!)
It currently sits as the only review of the film on there, because the film just came out. Anyone going on the site will see that piece of utter bullshit, not knowing that it was written by a psychotic and vindictive white man. It currently has two thumbs up from other dummy accounts of Shaun Rose. And, the ‘Byron’ account was created 10 months ago, meaning that Shaun Rose has been using this dummy account to spam 1-star ratings on IMDb since long before he ever created a Letterboxd persona for it:
I have reported the review to IMDb, along with corroborating evidence, but it may not be taken down, who knows—IMDb is of course completely hit or miss with this sort of thing.
I have no problem with any actual black person (or any actual white person!) taking issue with anything about my work. No film is for everybody. No audience member is capable of understanding everything in a film and why it’s there. All I can do as an artist is create what I feel is best, and defend it as best as I can if necessary.
All I can do as a person who continues to be harassed by Shaun Rose is to keep documenting the instances, keep reporting on it, and hope that the word spreads so much that he stops. As I stated earlier, I will be pursuing legal action against him if he does not stop after he sees this piece.
Shaun, since I know you are reading this, this is your last chance to back off before things escalate. I have concrete evidence of you doing this for five years now, and it has harmed my reputation, and the reputation of my films, and your spammed 1-star reviews and ratings have cost me thousands of dollars in streaming revenue due to my films being kicked off of platforms as a result of your one-man dummy account campaigns. Keep going with this behavior and it will be a very costly mistake for you. I will make sure of it.
As always, thank you all for reading, and I will update this piece as needed with any new information or developments.
2/21/24 Update:
In response to this piece, and my threat of legal action against Shaun Rose if he does not cease his cyberstalking and targeted harassment, he has deleted his remaining fake accounts, ‘bwrightsun’ on Letterboxd and ‘j_fred_movie_reviews’ on Instagram. I hope that this is truly the end of his harassment campaign.
3/7/24 Update:
It turns out Shaun is back. Though he is currently steering clear of me, his ‘j_fred_bad_movie_reviews’ account on Instagram has been un-disabled, either by him, or by Instagram—it is unclear now whether they took him down temporarily, or if he did. I had assumed that he took himself down, as he was the one who self-immolated his ‘bwrightsun’ account after her was outed as posing as a black man in order to give credence to his disparagement of the films he would choose to disparage. But now, who knows. Everything that comes out of his mouth is horseshit, so what he’s saying about ‘the mods’ could be a lie.
I would encourage anyone sick of his harassment on Instagram to report it to Instagram. Those who have not been blocked by him on there are the only people who can do that, so if you can see his profile without having to log out in order to do so, you’re one of the only people who can help put an end to this. I and several other filmmakers that he has historically targeted are of course blocked by him. All I can do is continue to archive, and report on, his horrible behavior.
Shaun, as you are no doubt reading this, my threat of legal action against you should you resume your harassment of me still stands. I am a tenacious individual who refuses to be bullied by you. You’ve seen what I can do with a Substack—you do not want to see what I can do in a courtroom against you, with five years of proof of targeted harassment by you against me.