This shit happens at some random convention every few years and it always comes back to unhinged fans being terrible, which has been such a thing for so long that Stephen King wrote a book about it forty years ago. At some point you gotta acknowledge that the format is a huge part of the problem

“The reader community” is a cursed phrase and indicative of an event that was custom-built for obsessives with boundary issues.

That's like the entire premise of those kinds of small niche fandom cons. When I was in college there was constantly Tumblr drama about people behaving insanely towards the cast during the paid photo ops and stuff, to the degree that certain cast members were like nope we're done with this now