Mischief Management
Fan convention company
Mischief Management, LLC is a company that organizes fan conventions, including BroadwayCon, LeakyCon, GeekyCon, Con of Thrones, EnchantiCon, Obsessed Fest, and PodX.
In March 2026, they were heavily criticized for their mismanagement and poor production of Barbie Dream Fest in Fort Lauderdale. The company had previously faced criticism for its handling of Obsessed Fest in 2023 and RomanceCon in 2025.
On March 31, 2026, the audio-visual provider for Barbie Dream Fest sued Mischief Management for non-payment.
Background
In 2009, Melissa Anelli of the fan site "The Leaky Cauldron" produced a Harry Potter themed fan event using US$7,500 of her own money. In 2010, the crew who had run LeakyCon in 2009 coordinated with Hank and John Green to organize the inaugural VidCon under the name "Mischief Management Services".
In 2011, Anelli established Mischief Management, LLC as a convention production company with her business partner Stephanie Dornhelm.
Mischief Management was perceived as a connection between the wizard rock bands and the larger Harry Potter fandom for LeakyCon, the temporary GeekyCon, and VidCon.
Events
Some of the events that Mischief Management has been involved with over the years, listed in order of the inaugural convention for each event.
LeakyCon
LeakyCon ran from 2009 to 2024. Initially promoted as a charity event, the convention focused on the Harry Potter fandom but grew to encompass other fandoms, eventually leading to organizers splitting the convention so that LeakyCon could return to being solely a Harry Potter convention.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Mischief Management” as fan convention company. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as fan convention company. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6509334. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2026, 2023, 2025 and 2009.
Later summaries often reconcile disputed chronology or motive more neatly than the contemporary record permits. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
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Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Mischief Management” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.