I had a similar experience a few years ago. I started a new topic and immediately I had some guy marking it for deletion. In the talk page he made various claims, almost all of them nonsensical, apparently with goal of getting me to go away. Eventually, after some fairly harsh replies, he went away, and the pages stand to this day.

But it worked, I gave up soon after and haven't contributed since.

It's like the existing editors want to keep WP all to themselves and don't appreciate "outsiders" interfering. The irony is I'd been contributing since 2002 off an on, but that made no difference.