Why would the SFWA do this?
The SFWA loaned (or gave) Pat $100k+ to fight the lolsuit. They are an alleged charity, but this is not one of their permitted charity purposes. They have an exception to help people out with medical bills, but not with "someone called me fat on the internet" lawsuits. Plus, he'd only been a member for a couple of months at the time he filed suit, so they could reasonably limit their financial assistance to him. Giving their friends money for dumb shit is not a charity purpose, and could lose them their charity status, and potentially earn the folk involved some jail time for misuse of charity funds.
When Quasi filed suit against the SFWA to determine exactly how much they paid Pat, they spent about $12k fighting to keep that info secret. That's something like 24,000 member's annual dues, spent on bullshit.
The reality is the SFWA should have had a signed contract between Pat and themselves detailing the arrangement, and sending a copy through to Quasi would take minutes at most. A search of their executive's emails for relevant terms and email addresses would take maybe an hour. Call it $200 worth of labor, total.
Instead, they spent $8k by their reckoning ($12k by mine) explaining to the court that checking their records for a written loan contract - a debt that legally should be accounted for in their books - was too hard.
If I'm right, and Pat goes to a debtor's hearing, then that all comes out in public and various staff of theirs go to jail, and the SFWA lose their charity status as they're apparently being run for their good friend Pat's benefit.
The alternative is that they burn a few more thousand member's dues paying Pat's debt, and get to shove the whole affair under the rug for another year.