ELE is funded by someone with a lot of money and lawyers on hand. This makes it (...) difficult to post the full story here.
As long as the "full story" consists of true facts or information presented as your own, personal opinion, it should be safe for you to post the information that you have. If no proof can be provided and damages can be claimed, you might have something to worry about. Since, by design, it seems that these events operate at a loss, I think the event organizers would have an even more difficult time proving that what you posted caused any calculable/determinable damage.
You could safely say something to the effect of, "Complimentary airfare has been provided to some of the guests to attend some of these events, but I think there are some nefarious reasons behind that because I'm fairly certain that some of those guests were minors. I also have been told by one of these minors that specific event organizers had made sexual advances toward them once they got there," as long as the statements are true. Obviously, if you haven't been in direct communications with one of these alleged minors, you'd have to leave out the second sentence or re-word it.
(...) as "Elliot" is just a mascot, not a person, not a person inside the suit, the organization became even more suspicious.
Allow me to play "angel's advocate" here, and provide a hypothetical reason for the "mascot public face" which has no nefarious origins. During the beginning brainstorming for these events, the organizers/benefactors determined that it was going to require a lot of time, effort, input, skill-sets and yes, money to provide these events to the community - as something fun for community members to attend. None of them wanted to actually take any credit for their part in it, though, because the events are about the community, not about the people providing them. The easiest way to do that was to create a "Mickey Mouse", if you will; a public face that could have an e-mail address or central communications point whereby credit could be directed to where it was due without actually playing favor to any single person. In addition, it would just be fun to give the events an overall theme.
AnthroCon is an example of how this scenario happens to the contrary and here's how: A sizable staff and board of directors make decisions for, runs, and organizes AnthroCon, however... Whenever most people think about "whose con it is", Sam Conway (Kage) comes to mind. Don't get me wrong. I know that Sam puts a lot of time, effort, and work into making AnthroCon what it is. There's no way he would be able to pull it off on his own, though, and a lot of times, people still don't really recognize that, or, even if they do, he's still put in the forefront and the rest of the staff are often downplayed. Perhaps the ELE organizers wanted to avoid that from the beginning.
The issue of plane tickets for minors is a really, really minor thing in comparison to the shit that's going on. Really life wrecking shit.
If there truly is "life-wrecking shit" going on, wouldn't it be better to put that information out in the open so as to provide a warning to potential future victims of having their lives wrecked? You could avoid libel charges if you preface your facts with, "It's possible that this is untrue because it is third party information, but this is what I've heard has happened, so take it with a grain of salt and I'm urging anyone to exercise caution..." Use the word "supposedly" and "allegedly" all over the place. This entire thread seems to be nothing but rumormill so far, so what's one more rumor to add to the fray?
To me, the whole idea of using the events to attract minors for sexual exploitation is pretty absurd and ridiculous for the simple reason that there are nearly an infinite number other methods to accomplish that heinous purpose and they don't involve something so widely advertised, open to public scrutiny, and expensive.
