Anyone familiar with the Pioneer Woman recognizes that her style of damage control relies heavily on the theory of see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil. Years ago when guest blogger Mrs. G wrote a controversial home-school post raising the ire of the fundamentalist community, Ree threw her under the proverbial bus and deleted the offending entry. The Pioneer Woman never explained, apologized or remotely alerted her loyal readers what had happened. One minute Mrs. G was there, the next she wasn’t.  More importantly, the keepin’ it real little ol’ ranch wife had saved the day preserving her brand’s “idyllic, pastoral” contrivance.

Last week, in a similar incident, the Pioneer Woman again came under attack for posting plagiarized content on her blog. Emelie Sanders, the fifteen year-old daughter of Heather Sanders, Ree’s web designer and frequent home-school contributor, posted this  Valentine tutorial  on how to blatantly copy an Etsy artist’s work. (Update:  Ree Drummond successfully petitioned Google to remove the cached link to her plagiarized post.  Thanks to “anon.” for sending us this .pdf  Ree Drummond’s Etsy Plagiarism )  Not until she was caught red-handed did the teenager or perhaps her Mother, edit the post adding links crediting the Etsy artist. By then, it was waaaaay too late.

For hours, the Pioneer Woman’s tedious blog was inundated with negative comments calling out the post as nothing more than thievery and expressing disappointment in Ree Drummond’s moderation.  In an ironic twist, the crisis arose during the funeral for Thatcher Drummond’s father which the Pioneer Woman attended. With priorities firmly in place, the mourning Ree Drummond didn’t skip a beat.

Like any good Pioneer Woman, Ree tackled the situation with grace and integrity, deleting all negative comments in real-time from the comfort of her church pew.  All the while, she remained in constant contact with her publicists, the Sanders family and presumably a gaggle of attorneys. The question begs, why was the Pioneer Woman humping her iPhone during the eulogy for her husband’s uncle?

As the funeral service wrapped, the Pioneer Woman predictably went beyond the pale and chose the path of least resistance. Taking swift, decisive action, the grief-stricken Ree deleted Emelie Sanders’ pilfered post saving the day for her website and maintaining the censored, conflict-free pioneer woman illusion.  In Ree’s simple-minded world, all the ugliness had never happened.

This time however Ree’s hare-brained decision caught her blind sided. Thinking she’d outsmarted everyone and covered her tracks, the Pioneer Woman forgot the adage, what’s posted on the internet, stays on the internet. Within moments, saavy internet surfers located the cached link for the post Ree thought she had deleted.  When the link went viral,  the Pioneer Woman’s tail-between-the-legs maneuver was exposed.  In a matter of hours, Ree managed to not only piss-off the Etsy community, but she completely destroyed what little veracity she had with her own followers.

To date, the Pioneer Woman has never acknowledged the incident much less offered a public retraction. As the webmaster of the Pioneer Woman site, the buck stops with Ree on content.  Why she allowed a fifteen year-old unfettered access to her site will never be known.  If Twitter is to be believed, Ree privately paid off apologized to the Etsy artist but the injured party  isn’t divulging the terms of the settlement. As it turns out,  the person most central to this entire scandal, the Etsy artist,  is pretty much an ass himself.  Soon after the little ol’ ranch wife smoothed the artist’s ruffled feathers, he took to Twitter and defended Ree claiming the poor Pioneer Woman had been dealing with a family funeral.  Proving once again, Ree’s theatrics and lack of respect for a deceased family member had trumped any common decency to do the right thing.

Recommended Reading:  Pie Near Woman’s Plagiarizing Etsy