Does being vote-kicked actually flag your account? I'm legitimately not sure.
I have seen a lot of people being jerks in DF, with increasing frequency. I used to think it was WoW refugees, but an informal survey a few weeks ago suggested that there weren't as many of those as I thought (at least on the forums anyway). It's just people being mean, and that is quite frankly horrible. It's certainly not the norm here, and I've encountered far less toxicity here than in WoW, but that just makes the toxicity I encounter that much more abhorrent.
I've once or twice managed to enter into a philosophical discussion with such individuals, to attempt to correct them, but usually I just get ridiculed into silence until the end of the run.
That really sucks, OP. Hope you had some good runs after that to clear your head.