When Scammers Pretend to Be Victims

Davina Campbell’s DARVO Tactic and Narrative Theft

This is where the story begins: with evidence, not emotion.

The screenshot speaks for itself. Davina Campbell of Digital Davina Designs, publicly presenting herself as the victim after taking full payment for work never delivered. The person who caused harm rewriting the story to claim it instead

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I paid Davina in full for a website that was never completed. She disappeared for weeks, then for almost a year, and returned online to announce she was “taking time off for her mental health.” There was no message to existing clients like me, no update, no refund. Yet at the same time, she was openly soliciting new projects.

When I finally asked for accountability almost a year later, she promised a refund, but only if I removed documentation. When I refused to erase proof, she took to Threads with a new script: I was the unstable one. She suggested I was “attacking a small business.” She told her followers, “I know she’s not well.”

Read that again.

“I know she’s not well.”

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That phrase carried centuries of weight. It was the same language used to dismiss Black women’s testimony in courtrooms, to justify forced institutionalization, to pathologize our clarity as madness. Davina knew exactly what she was doing. She wasn’t describing my mental state. She was deploying ableism as a credibility weapon.

And it worked.

In the comments under her post, a mental health professional, Dr. Jordan, replied: “I’m so sorry this happened to you,” with a heart emoji.

A psychiatry professional. Offering sympathy to Davina. Without asking for evidence. Without questioning the narrative. The same clinical authority that determines who gets believed in diagnostic assessments was now being used to validate a performance.

That response did more than comfort Davina. It told her audience: a medical professional believes her, so you should too. It transformed her deflection into diagnosis, her avoidance into victimhood. The very profession tasked with reducing mental health stigma was reinforcing it, positioning my demand for a refund as evidence of instability.

Only one commenter, @jaythepharaoh, named what was happening:

“What does their mental state have to do with this situation? Why is there a need to give that specific detail? Are you implying because they have ‘mental health issues’ one should take your word? Your attempt to weaponize someone’s mental health is disturbing and informing. The claim you make on their mental health issues doesn’t justify or absolve your lack of accountability.”

That comment remained unanswered. Because it was unanswerable.

The deflection wasn’t subtle. It was structural. Davina invoked mental health language to secure trust, then used mental health stigma to discredit accountability. Her supporters participated in that harm by treating her emotional distress as more credible than documented facts.

This is how ableism operates in digital spaces: through insinuation, through professional validation, through the careful framing of distress as evidence. The person with power positions themselves as fragile. The person seeking accountability becomes the aggressor. And the audience, trained to center emotional comfort over material harm, follows the script.

I hesitated to speak publicly because I know the optics. I am a dark-skinned Black woman. She is biracial. The moment I name the harm, the power dynamic shifts.

Her proximity to Blackness offers her credibility, while my demand for accountability reads as aggression. Add her suggestion that I’m “not well,” and suddenly I’m every stereotype: the angry Black woman, the difficult client, the unstable accuser.

That is how proximity operates as protection. It allows people to borrow the language of community—shared struggle, mental health, sisterhood—to build trust, then weaponize those same narratives to avoid consequence. The performance feels so familiar that questioning it feels like betrayal.

But this is the documentation. This is a community issue: people performing care, solidarity, and shared identity to secure trust and resources, then twisting narratives when accountability arrives. It’s the same pattern I wrote about in Community Is Not Transactional, where language of belonging becomes a tool for exploitation.

What Davina did wasn’t unique. It was calculated. She understood that online audiences treat emotional vulnerability as moral authority. She knew that a mental health professional’s sympathy would carry more weight than my receipts. She knew that suggesting I was “unwell” would make people doubt my competence, even when the evidence was undeniable.

And she was almost right.

Because the internet rewards fragility over fact. It privileges the person who performs distress over the person who presents documentation. And when the person deflecting happens to have proximity to marginalized identity, that protection becomes nearly impenetrable.

This essay exposes the excuse-making, the pattern of wrongdoing, and the accountability avoidance used by Digital Davina Designs, so others aren’t harmed by the same tactics. But it also exposes something larger: how ableism hides in empathy language, how professional authority can validate exploitation, and how audiences trained on social justice discourse can still perpetuate the very harm they claim to resist.

The story doesn’t start with my anger. It starts with my payment. With a signed contract. With months of silence. With a website that was never finished.

What happened after is what this essay documents: how someone reframes theft as sensitivity, how a community protects performance over people, and how ableism becomes the shield that makes accountability impossible.

How Proximity Performance Extracts Trust Without Earning It

There’s a pattern that needs naming, and it operates most effectively in spaces built on care.

People perform proximity to community, culture, and shared struggle to bypass accountability. They mimic the language of justice, using identity markers as keys to unlock trust. The performance feels so familiar that questioning it feels like betrayal.

This isn’t connection. It’s strategy.

For Black neurodivergent women navigating professional spaces, it’s a tactic that extracts labor, money, and emotional energy while leaving us to absorb the harm. And we’re targeted specifically because we’ve been socialized to extend care without question, to protect others’ emotions before our own safety.

We know how quickly calling out harm gets reframed as cruelty. So we give more time. More patience. More benefit of the doubt. Until the pattern reveals itself too late.

Across creative, justice-aligned, and digital industries, this pattern repeats with remarkable consistency. I call it proximity performance, and it follows a predictable script:

It begins with familiar language. “I care about accessibility, inclusion, mental health, and community.” It sounds safe because it mirrors the vocabulary of shared struggle. It signals belonging. But that language can just as easily serve as camouflage for extraction.

People like Davina learn to speak in the dialect of care. They perform identity through hashtags, disclosures, and vulnerability posts that mimic solidarity while masking transactional intent. They talk about burnout, ADHD, autism, trauma, chronic illness—not primarily to create understanding, but to pre-empt accountability.

The disclosure becomes the insurance policy.

When someone speaks your language of care, questioning them feels like betrayal. That’s the trap. Proximity becomes the entry point to trust, and trust becomes the shield that protects misconduct.

How Digital Davina Designs Exploited Community Language and Trust

How Neurodivergence Language Becomes a Hook

When I first hired Davina Campbell of Digital Davina Designs, her language mirrored my own. She spoke about accessibility, inclusion, neurodivergence, and ethical design with fluency. She said she wanted to create websites for “people who get it”—for disabled and neurodivergent clients who had been burned by traditional agencies.

It sounded like alignment. It sounded like safety.

She disclosed her mental health struggles, her experience with burnout, her commitment to working with clients who understood what it meant to build sustainably. She mentioned moving to Costa Rica to lower her living costs and maintain flexibility while running her business. She framed low prices as accessibility, not as a warning sign about capacity.

That combination—shared language, shared identity, and performed humility—was persuasive. I knew how exclusionary this industry can be for disabled people, especially for Black women navigating creative work. Supporting another neurodivergent woman of color felt not only logical but ethical.

So paying her upfront wasn’t a question. She had already planted the seeds: she told me she’d been underpaid by clients before and wanted assurance that this collaboration would be grounded in trust. Her reasoning resonated. I also know what it feels like to have my labor questioned or delayed because people assume disability equals unreliability.

What I didn’t see then is how proximity language functions as marketing strategy. How the performance of shared struggle can be used to soften boundaries and expedite trust.

Davina wasn’t pitching a portfolio. She was pitching familiarity. And in industries like design, where many of us seek culturally competent collaborators, that kind of familiarity reads as integrity.

At first, the process looked promising. She sent early design drafts, asked for brand assets, talked about SEO and accessibility features. But as weeks passed, updates grew sporadic. Deliverables came without structure or timelines. Whenever deadlines slipped, there was a new reason: illness, exhaustion, personal crisis.

Each disclosure deepened the emotional connection while quietly eroding accountability.

I recognized the pattern only later: when performance replaces professionalism, every check-in feels like confrontation. You stop asking for progress because you don’t want to seem harsh. You start absorbing their guilt as proof of your own impatience.

That’s how exploitation hides in community language. It reframes delayed work as trauma response. It blurs the line between empathy and labor. It turns boundaries into evidence of coldness.

When I referred other clients to Davina, they reported identical experiences. She told them she struggled with communication, that stress and mental health made it hard to respond, that she needed understanding and patience. One client asked for a simple timeline update. The response came days later: an apology wrapped in crisis language, followed by more silence.

This wasn’t overwhelm. It was pattern.

By the time I realized how much emotional labor I had absorbed, months had passed. Davina had begun publicly posting about working with me—tagging my name on Instagram, expressing admiration for my work, framing our collaboration as a shared mission. It felt affirming at first. But that admiration soon became a tool. The praise created a sense of closeness that made it harder to recognize the imbalance forming beneath it.

Then she disappeared.

No updates. No deliverables. No communication. Until I finally sent a LinkedIn message months later. In her reply, she admitted she had delivered only “as much as she could,” not as outlined in the contract.

That phrasing mattered. It shifted the standard from professional obligation to personal capacity. But she never once disclosed her inability to complete the work during the project. The result wasn’t miscommunication. It was negligence.

Meanwhile, she posted publicly about taking time off for her mental health—without notifying existing clients—while still advertising for new ones.

That’s when I understood this wasn’t burnout. It was strategy.

Her silence wasn’t collapse. It was calculation. She only reacted when there was a risk the situation would become public, rushing to control the narrative before accountability could reach her. But in doing so, she exposed the very pattern she was trying to hide: I was far from the only one. She saw the number of mutuals we had and tried to get ahead of this documentation.

The pattern was complete: Use identity language to secure trust. Take payment. Delay indefinitely using crisis disclosures. Disappear when questioned. Reframe accountability as attack when exposure threatens.

What Full Payment Bought: Half-Finished Templates and Broken Timelines

By the time the project collapsed, the evidence was undeniable.

By the time the project collapsed, the evidence was undeniable.

I had paid Digital Davina Designs in full. Signed a contract. Outlined clear deliverables. In return, I received half-finished drafts, incomplete integrations, and a trail of broken timelines.

The website was missing the most basic components of accessibility and professionalism. No functioning SEO metadata. No alt text. No alignment with the color palette we agreed on. The copy was generic, the design flat, the structure templated.

For someone claiming to champion neurodiversity-informed design, it was a contradiction in every sense.

Each deadline was met with vague reassurance. “I’m almost done.” “Just waiting for inspiration.” “I’ve been sick but will deliver soon.” None of those statements translated into progress. The communication shifted from collaboration to avoidance. Questions were deflected or met with emotional disclosures about exhaustion, anxiety, and the weight of other clients’ demands.

I found myself doing project management that wasn’t mine to do: coordinating between Davina and my web developer, chasing updates, clarifying technical tasks that should have been her responsibility. External experts I later consulted confirmed what I already suspected—the work lacked both structural depth and originality. One designer summarized it bluntly:

“This is a plug-and-play template with your name dropped in. No customization, no brand logic, no user flow. She didn’t even finish the basics.”

What made this experience heavier was knowing I had referred other clients to her. I had believed the language of community and accessibility was evidence of integrity. Instead, my recommendation tied my own professional reputation—a Black autistic woman constantly asked to prove credibility—to someone who had none.

Throughout this, I maintained patience. I communicated clearly, allowed delays, disclosed my own access needs as an autistic client: predictable communication, transparent updates, adherence to agreed timelines. These weren’t arbitrary expectations. They were accommodations. Yet even those were ignored.

When I finally requested either completion or refund, the silence that followed said everything. There was no accountability, no resolution. Just silence.

Other clients I had referred also sought resolution. Some received refunds, but not before Davina was rude and dismissive. Others, like me, were met with conditional offers: “I’ll refund when you take down the post.” That’s not restitution. That’s coercion.

The receipts tell a simple story: contract breached, work unfinished, trust exploited. But what followed revealed the deeper pattern—the psychology of how exploiters deflect by rebranding exposure as attack.

When Mental Health Disclosure Becomes a Weapon

After months of silence, Davina resurfaced. Not to finish the work. Not to issue a refund. But to rewrite the story using her own disclosures of mental health.

On Threads and LinkedIn, she positioned herself as the one under attack: a small neurodivergent business owner being “bullied” by a client with a platform. The same person who had disclosed financial instability and mental health struggles to secure my empathy was now using that same language to paint herself as my victim.

She had spent months performing vulnerability. Now she was performing violation.

In private messages and meetings, she shared extensive personal history: family struggles, past exploitation, the toll of running a business while managing disability. I listened because that’s what we do when someone discloses harm. We make space. We extend patience.

But when I asked for what I’d paid for, she mirrored the exact behaviors she’d once said she’d survived.

She reframed my documented requests as harassment. She called my clarity “aggressive.” She suggested I was mentally unstable. And then, when none of that worked, she threatened to contact the police.

The same person who had described being controlled was now reaching for control. The same person who had invoked trauma was now inflicting it. The same person who had disclosed neurodivergence was now weaponizing ableist stereotypes against another neurodivergent woman.

This is textbook DARVO: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender.

First, deny the breach. “I delivered the work.” The contract says otherwise. Then, attack the whistleblower. “She’s unstable and harassing me.” I have timestamped communication showing professional requests. Finally, reverse roles. “I’m the vulnerable one being harmed.” She kept the money. I kept the receipts.

The irony cuts deeper when you know what she disclosed to me privately. She told me about being disbelieved, about people using her emotional responses as evidence she was “too much,” about how exhausting it was to perform competence while managing invisible disability. Even her own neurodivergent diagnosis—and remember the umbrella is large.

Yet here she was, doing the same thing to me.

Suggesting that my autism made me unreasonable. That my directness was proof of instability. That my demand for a refund after a year of patience was evidence of aggression.

She had borrowed the language of neurodivergent solidarity to gain my trust, then deployed ableist stereotypes to discredit my accountability.

Every element of her defense contradicted written evidence: emails, transcripts, call notes documenting her acknowledging unfinished work and promising refunds. Yet she conditioned repayment on my silence: “I’ll refund when the post is taken down.”

That’s not a boundary. That’s coercion.

The pattern revealed itself completely: mental health disclosure as marketing strategy, then mental health stigma as deflection tactic. The same vulnerability that secured trust became the weapon that silenced accountability.

For those of us who live with disability and neurodivergence, this isn’t unfamiliar. We see it constantly. People using our shared language to build credibility, then turning that language into armor when confronted with consequences.

It’s internalized ableism rebranded as empathy. And if you follow my writing you will remember the essay I wrote about people who claim empath status and high empathy tend to be the worst manipulators.

When Davina suggested I was “not well” for requesting a refund, she knew exactly what she was activating. The historical legacy of Black women’s testimony being dismissed as madness. The clinical tradition of pathologizing our clarity as anger. The social reflex to prioritize emotional comfort over material harm. Exactly how she is treated when she discloses her own mental illness throughout her life.

And it almost worked.

Because audiences trained on therapeutic language confuse distress with truth. Because mental health professionals validated her narrative without requesting evidence. Because the internet rewards the person who performs fragility, not the person who presents facts.

But documentation doesn’t lie.

I hold payment confirmations. Contract agreements. Timestamped requests. Her own written acknowledgment of the debt. Screenshots of her soliciting new clients while ghosting existing ones. Messages where she admits the work was incomplete, followed by public posts claiming full delivery.

She reframed exposure as “harassment.” Refund refusal as “boundaries.” Accountability as “attack.”

That’s not misunderstanding. It’s manipulation dressed in the language of mental health advocacy.

How Exploitation Hides Behind Empathy and Burnout Narratives

The Four-Step Pattern That Keeps Repeating

By this point, the structure was visible. This wasn’t an isolated experience. It was a repeatable pattern, one that functions identically across creative industries, justice-aligned spaces, and neurodivergent communities.

Here’s how it works:

Step 1: Perform closeness. Use the language of community and shared struggle to build emotional trust. Disclose vulnerability strategically. Mirror the client’s values and vocabulary. Make it feel like partnership, not transaction.

Step 2: Secure benefit without earning it. Request payment upfront by citing past exploitation. Frame full payment as a matter of trust. Use identity proximity to bypass standard professional protections like contracts with clear milestones or escrow arrangements.

Step 3: Fail to deliver, citing crisis. Delay indefinitely. Offer vague reassurances. When pressed, deploy crisis language: burnout, mental health struggles, communication difficulties. Make every request for an update feel like cruelty. Train the client to absorb guilt for having needs.

Step 4: Reframe accountability as attack. When consequences arrive, flip the script. Cast yourself as the vulnerable one. Suggest the client is unstable, aggressive, or vindictive. Use the same identity markers that secured trust as shields against scrutiny. Make documentation look like harassment.

This is the empathy economy at work. Identity and emotional language can be leveraged to gain trust without ever having to earn it. It functions best in justice-adjacent spaces where people assume shared politics equal shared ethics.

Empathy without boundaries becomes currency. Solidarity without structure becomes shelter for exploitation.

When I first wrote Community Is Not Transactional, I meant that community cannot survive if it depends on extraction. This experience proved the inverse: exploitation thrives when people are too afraid to distinguish sincerity from strategy.

For Black neurodivergent women, this cycle is particularly costly. We are taught to interpret others’ pain as responsibility, to accommodate even when our own needs are unmet. The people who exploit us understand this conditioning. They count on it. They know that silence feels safer than confrontation, especially when the person harming you shares an identity or cause.

This pattern doesn’t only harm individuals. It devalues the language of care itself, turning empathy into performance and accountability into taboo. The cost isn’t just financial. It’s psychological and communal.

Why Black Neurodivergent Women Become Targets

The reason this pattern repeats is not accidental. It’s structural. Black neurodivergent women exist at the intersection of two deeply conditioned expectations: to nurture and to prove.

We are taught that our worth is tied to reliability and empathy, that questioning someone else’s story—especially a marginalized one—makes us cruel. That conditioning is what exploiters rely on.

Our reputations depend on credibility and composure. Our tone is scrutinized even in moments of justified anger. When we speak directly, we’re labeled aggressive. When we stay quiet, we’re complicit. And when we demand accountability from someone who performs shared identity, we become the problem.

Davina understood this. She knew that positioning herself as a vulnerable biracial woman would shield her from public critique and redirect sympathy. It’s a script deeply tied to colonial and gendered hierarchies: biracial proximity to whiteness becomes emotional protection, while dark-skinned assertiveness becomes threat.

Every time this happens, it reinforces an old equation: Black women’s composure as currency, and our silence as the cost of belonging. The burden multiplies for those of us who are autistic or ADHD, because our directness is constantly misread as aggression or instability.

That’s how exploitation hides in plain sight—by banking on the audience’s discomfort with Black women’s clarity.

But documentation breaks that pattern. Evidence interrupts projection. Receipts turn accusation into record.

For me, this isn’t just about one designer in Manchester who took my money and vanished. It’s about how digital culture rewards performance over proof, and how those of us who live by ethics of care are expected to absorb deceit in silence to protect the illusion of community.

When I name the behavior, I’m not betraying the community. I’m protecting it.

Lightskin Privilege and Biracial Power Dynamics

When Davina Campbell realized her tactics were no longer working, the performance shifted. The same woman who had invoked shared vulnerability and sisterhood began to reach for the very tools of dominance she claimed to reject.

She became the one who made threats, stating she would contact the police. That moment revealed everything.

In our private messages, she had described parental trauma within controlling, volatile, and emotionally unpredictable environments. She spoke of how those behaviors had shaped her anxiety and her lifelong need to be believed. But in our interaction, she mirrored the same behavior she once said she survived: reframing calm, documented accountability as aggression, then invoking institutional power as protection.

I hold full transcripts of Davina’s disclosures and threats from our interactions in Sweden. These records are legally valid as both parties participated in the conversations. Out of respect, I am not sharing the complete transcripts publicly; however, followers with access to the relational hub can review the details, which are crucial for those in the care field to understand how these dynamics operate.

That is how whiteness operates behaviorally, not biologically. It isn’t about complexion—it’s about reflex. The reflex to reach for state protection when discomfort arises. The reflex to center fragility over fact. The reflex to equate tone with threat, especially when the other person is dark-skinned, autistic, and uncompromising in her clarity.

It’s a centuries-old choreography: proximity to Blackness when it feels safe, distance when it becomes inconvenient. In activist spaces, it looks like allyship until critique. In professional spaces, it looks like shared struggle until accountability. Then suddenly, whiteness re-enters the room not as race, but as behavior.

The police threat wasn’t abstract for me or for many Black women. Especially for those of us visibly dark-skinned, the invocation of law enforcement carries historical weight. It’s a reminder of who is believed and who is punished for being visible.

The emotional betrayal wasn’t just about money—it was about watching someone replicate the very power they claimed to resist and which harmed them. To use the language of care to gain access, then the posture of fragility to avoid consequence. It was watching performance collapse into inheritance.

The police threat wasn’t casual. It was calculated. Davina knew that suggesting law enforcement involvement would activate a specific fear, one particular to dark-skinned Black women in Europe. Sweden has its own history of racial profiling, disproportionate force, and institutional distrust of Black testimony. She knew I would understand the subtext: I can make you the problem. I can summon the state.

What makes this particularly instructive is that she made this threat while claiming to be overwhelmed, burnt out, and too vulnerable to complete a website. Somehow, she had energy to threaten police involvement, but not to send a refund or finish contracted work.

That tells you everything about where her capacity actually lived.

This is what lightskin privilege wielded by a biracial person looks like when left unexamined: the ability to occupy both sides of the power dynamic at will. To borrow the credibility of Blackness when convenient, then retreat into the insulation of whiteness when challenged. It’s an old script, rehearsed across generations, and it remains effective because audiences still mistake emotional fragility for moral innocence.

Davina’s pivot from “safe collaboration” to potential police involvement wasn’t an overreaction. She was reclaiming control through a system built to protect her, not me. And that’s the quiet violence of racialized professionalism: even in digital disputes, whiteness can still summon authority with a single implication.

Her behavior made one truth impossible to ignore. Proximity does not dismantle power—it often re-performs it.

Unlike Davina though, I understand the legal differences between threats, bullying, and a legitimate request for a refund after a breach of contract. We do not reside in the same country, which means the standards and consequences are not equal. She faces more to answer for than I do.

My legal background allows me to distinguish what constitutes harassment versus exercising my rights, and my actions have always been in line with Swedish contract law and ethical client advocacy.

When the Private Confession Contradicts the Public Defense

The clearest evidence of narrative distortion came after I published my Trustpilot review.

In private messages, Davina Campbell had already acknowledged that the website was unfinished and offered a refund once posts were taken down. She acknowledged that I paid in full BEFORE delivery in LinkedIn messages.

The clearest evidence of narrative distortion came after I published my Trustpilot review. In private messages, Davina Campbell had already acknowledged that the website was unfinished and offered a refund once posts were taken down. She acknowledged that I paid in full in linkedin messages.

Yet in her public Trustpilot response, she pivoted, claiming I had paid after delivery and that the project was “completed in full.”

That reversal isn’t just inconsistency; it reveals dysregulation so complete she couldn’t keep her story straight. The private messages and public posts contradict each other line by line. In one, she admits the work is incomplete; in the other, she rewrites history to protect her image.

This is also why she scrambled to create some subpar Canva designs on integrity—because she believes the person who speaks first wins. She is banking on being believed whilst showing no proof or evidence or communication trail since she ghosted.

This contradiction underscores what happens when accountability meets self-preservation. The truth becomes fluid, shaped to whatever audience feels safest at the moment. It’s a textbook case of cognitive dissonance: the same person acknowledging harm in private while denying it in public, hoping the audience won’t compare the two.

Documentation ends speculation. Her own words make the record undeniable.

Why Care Without Consequence Isn’t Community

Accountability requires follow-through, not just language.

Accountability requires follow-through, not just language.

Care means nothing without restitution. Integrity means nothing without proof. Community means nothing if it protects harm.

I sent Davina Campbell clear, professional communication outlining my concerns, my refund request, and my willingness to resolve matters privately. I gave every opportunity for repair. Her response was continued silence, punctuated by deflection posts about “integrity” and “dignity over drama.”

In my final message, I wrote:

“If I, as an intermittently non-speaking, Black, disabled queer woman can communicate and uphold contracts despite trauma, so can you.”

That wasn’t cruelty. It was a statement of equality. Accountability is not discrimination. It’s the foundation of trust.

Disability and mental health challenges are real. They shape capacity, communication, and energy in ways that deserve accommodation. But they do not erase professional responsibility. They do not excuse taking payment for work never delivered. They do not justify weaponizing vulnerability to silence the people you’ve harmed.

When people use vulnerability to avoid consequence, they damage the very communities they claim to represent. They reinforce the stereotypes that harm us all: that neurodivergent people can’t be reliable, that emotional sensitivity excuses negligence, that Black women demanding standards are dangerous.

True accountability requires three things:

Number one: Restitution. Return what was taken or repair what was broken.

Number two: Transparency. Admit what happened without rebranding harm as misunderstanding.

Number three: Cultural honesty. Stop using shared identity as protection from scrutiny.

Anything less is performance.

This essay isn’t about vengeance. It’s about how exploitation hides behind empathy, how manipulation borrows the language of community, and how people confuse care with consequence until harm becomes cyclical.

For those of us who live at intersections of racialization, disability, and creative labor, discernment is survival. We cannot afford to mistake performance for solidarity or proximity for integrity.

Because at its core, accountability isn’t punishment. It’s closure.

And closure, unlike silence, cannot be faked.

Documentation as Disruption: Why Silence Protects Exploitation

This story isn’t only about one designer in Manchester. It’s about how exploitation survives through silence, especially when the person causing harm performs shared identity.

This story isn’t only about one designer in Manchester. It’s about how exploitation survives through silence, especially when the person causing harm performs shared identity.

The language of community has become currency, and silence is its counterfeit. We are told that to protect each other, we must tolerate everything. But care without consequence isn’t community. It’s complicity.

When I spoke about what happened with Digital Davina Designs, I knew what it might cost me. Every Black woman who has ever named harm within so-called safe spaces knows that backlash isn’t hypothetical. We are expected to absorb deceit quietly to preserve the illusion of solidarity.

But silence protects exploitation, not people. Documentation protects future clients.

This essay is a record, not revenge. It’s a public trace of a pattern I’ve seen across activism, consulting, and creative industries: people using the vocabulary of justice to shield unethical behavior. The performance always begins the same way—care, empathy, vulnerability—and ends with gaslighting, coercion, and selective amnesia.

To the women who have been through similar situations—who were called difficult for asking for refunds, manipulative for setting boundaries, or cruel for naming facts—you are not alone. You are not divisive for demanding accountability. You are protecting others from walking into harm disguised as help.

For those of us who build communities while living with racialization, disability, and chronic exhaustion, discernment is our protection. We do not owe blind loyalty to people who exploit shared language. Integrity requires documentation, not deference.

Proximity is not proof of integrity. Shared identity is not shared ethics. And no one deserves protection at the expense of truth.

If you’re considering working with Digital Davina Designs (digitaldavina.com, Manchester, UK), ask the questions I didn’t:

* Do they have verifiable client references?

* What refund policies exist if work isn’t delivered?

* Are they registered as a legitimate business? (No registration was found when searched.)

* If a business claims they can’t afford to refund you in full after you paid them in full upfront, and instead offers installments (first two payments, then four), then fails to follow through on even that—would you trust them with your project and your money?

* What systems exist for accountability beyond their word?

And if you’ve been harmed by someone who uses community language to silence critique, speak. Not because it’s easy, but because silence keeps the pattern alive.

This is what integrity looks like in practice: telling the truth even when it’s uncomfortable, naming harm even when it’s familiar, and refusing to let empathy become a weapon.

Community means care, but it must also mean consequence. Without both, all we’re doing is enabling harm with better vocabulary.

If you’ve had similar experiences with Digital Davina Designs or other service providers who use identity performance to avoid accountability, your story matters. Documentation protects future clients. Silence protects exploitation.

For those considering working with Digital Davina Designs or wanting to verify claims, here is the business information as documented at the time of publication.

Digital Davina Designs Business Information

* Website: digitaldavina.com

* Owner: Davina Campbell

* Location: First Floor, Swan Buildings, M4 5JW, Manchester, United Kingdom

* Email: [email protected]

* LinkedIn: Digital Davina Designs

* Instagram: @digitaldavina

* Certifications Listed: Driving Organizational Accountability for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (Feb 2023); Adaptive Project Leadership (Oct 2022) — The irony speaks for itself.

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Explore More from The Lovette Jallow Perspective

You can find more of my essays exploring:

* Neurodivergence, autism, and navigating public life as a Black woman

* Building true inclusion beyond checkbox diversity

* Reclaiming voice and agency across personal, political, and historical landscapes

* Racism in Sweden and systemic injustice

Each essay connects real-world experience with structural analysis—equipping individuals and institutions to think deeper, act smarter, and build sustainable change.

Who is Lovette Jallow?

Lovette Jallow is one of Scandinavia’s most influential voices on systemic racism, intersectional justice, and human rights. She is a nine-time award-winning author, keynote speaker, lecturer, and humanitarian specializing in:

* Neurodiversity and workplace inclusion

* Structural policy reform

* Anti-racism education and systemic change

As one of the few Black, queer, autistic, ADHD, and Muslim women working at the intersection of human rights, structural accountability, and corporate transformation, Lovette offers a uniquely authoritative perspective rooted in lived experience and professional expertise.

Her work bridges theory, research, and action—guiding institutions to move beyond performative diversity efforts and toward sustainable structural change.

Lovette has worked across Sweden, The Gambia, Libya, and Lebanon—tackling institutional racism, legal discrimination, and refugee protection. Her expertise has been sought by outlets like The New York Times and by leading humanitarian organizations addressing racial justice, policy reform, and intersectional equity.

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