The Worst People You Have Never Met, or, What I Learned During A Four Year Academic Study of Online Harassment In The Dungeons & Dragons Community
57 min read13 hours ago
“I have come to terms with the fact that this scene has a problem with caring more about attacking others for perceived slights than helping victims and doing good. I have participated in it repeatedly and refused to take responsibility for the harm it caused. Me removing myself from the scene is my way of taking responsibility both for myself and the others I have harmed/assisted in doing harm…I am done interacting with a scene that vindicates certain harm when done in a self-perceived righteousness but condemns harm that they consider immoral.”-Game designer Maria Fanning’s farewell message to the RPG industry, January 2021
This is an article I found I had to write in the middle of my research for an academic study, and it is the kind of article where you need to state your credentials up front. I have a research-based degree from Oxford University’s Centre for Evidence-Based Social Intervention, I got my MSW at Smith College School for Social Work, and I have a doctorate from the University of Birmingham in the department of Social Work, Sociology, and Criminology. You can look up the papers I have published online. For the purposes of this article, the category “credentials” also unfortunately needs to include the fact that I am a queer woman and a multiple-assault survivor. So trigger warning.
For the last year I was afraid to publish this article, for fear of retaliation. But cancer and a few other things that have happened to me have combined to make me say fuck it, and I am going ahead. When you hear the audio clips below from the interviews I conducted I suspect you will understand why.
You are going to hear people with careers and reputations in their industry —including people who did not ask to be anonymized — basically admit on tape that they harassed people for years and admit they did it for no real reason.
I am a psychotherapist and social research scientist who has worked in maximum security prisons with violent offenders and with at-risk youth, I have interviewed, studied, and interacted with a very wide variety of multiple-felons close-up for years, and right now I am studying Dungeons and Dragons drama and what studying it tells me about people frightens me more than any of that work ever has.
How did I end up here? How did I become the kind of person who hears someone say “I’m a fucking troll” and then gets on a plane to go meet them?
Well, after several months studying incel culture online I decided I needed a break to do something less depressing, something with lower stakes — or at least a lower chance of being stalked and murdered in my bed. During the pandemic I became interested in harassment in other online spaces and found a world just about the right size to study on a small scale: pen-and-paper roleplaying games. You know, like Dungeons and Dragons.
Every quote you are about to read and every interview clip you are about to hear is from them, the harassers — a community of artists, game designers and fans describing itself.
Here is the gist, and please stick with me because it will matter later:
Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax created Dungeons and Dragons in 1974. The box contained three booklets, and started a revolution of sorts; it created a place for outcasts to be themselves, to find like-minded people to share in a hobby that, no matter how many people tune in to Stranger Things or get into the whole retro idea of it, is basically niche. It is a closed society in a way. And not always welcoming to outsiders. These (mostly) boys, teenagers, and eventually men, played with as many people as they could find. In the back of game stores and in basements, and eventually, inevitably, they ran out of friends in their immediate locale to play with. But then, like a miracle, the Internet happened. So they contacted each other. The Internet did precisely what it was designed and imagined to do: it brought people together, allowed them to find one another, helped them to build a community. That community became increasingly diverse and interconnected, brought in many more people who were not white straight men, and produced many other games which take cues from the D&D model but are all different in a thousand ways. There is now a thriving and diverse scene foll of folks making and discussing table-top role-playing games (“TTRPGs” or just “RPGs” for short). Which is good, right? In theory.
What I found out about how fandoms work— at least when they are at their worst — was strange and alarming enough, and relevant enough to larger issues about how we handle relationships and information in 2024, to convince me that rather than just seeking out typos and making graphs until I was able to publish a study that sits quietly in university databases with my other papers, I should stop and put together an article for the general public.
I know to a near-certainty that one of the reactions to this article will be that it is all made-up and I know that if it is countered with “What about the audio clips?” the speaker will simply disappear, wait, and say it again later somewhere else.
I sat on the phone with trolls, harassers, and their victims for hours, listened to weeping confessions, and on sometimes traveled thousands of miles to see them in person. And, to be frank, after four years of research and over sixty hours of interviews with people who attack fellow creators and fans over D&D and its cousins, it was all still so hard to grasp in any kind of holistic way or explain to friends and colleagues what I was seeing that I needed to write something just to organise my thoughts.
Ringing The Bell
Having just escaped the world of incel culture I was not much interested in the kind of people that write shitty messages on Twitter because a new Star Wars character is black. At first glance that kind of harasser seemed both relatively well-understood by my field and boring. I was more interested in those who, at least on paper, were like the people around me every day and who were what the industry claimed to want to be — creative artists, writers, progressives, feminists, LGBTQ+ folk. I know why right-wingers want to hurt diverse groups of creative people, I do not have a handle on why diverse groups of creative people hurt each other. And I desperately wanted to.
As someone who has, in the past, extensively interviewed serial predators and murderers, I do not say lightly that what I found was genuinely despair-inducing in a way I never expected. In many ways the felons I spoke to in prison were easier to understand and less unnerving to interview.
The author of the quote at the top of this article is from Maria Fanning, who worked on the niche-hit queer fantasy game Thirsty Sword Lesbians and describes herself as “An Irish trans girl who loves using her enjoyment of fanfiction and RPGs to make the games/hacks she wants to see in the world!”. It is far from atypical.
In addition to harassers, I interviewed victims, bystanders and experts on the industry. However, I found that I needed almost none of what the innocent said to explain the broader situation because the harassers themselves were remarkably honest in explaining their own behavior.
If you are not familiar with this world and reading about it for the first time I will start with this observation: do you see all the audio clips embedded in this article? They are clips of interviews I did with harassers. That is my voice you hear talking to them. After researching this world within an inch of its life, I know to a near-certainty that one of the reactions to this article will be that it is all made-up and I know that if it is countered with “What about the audio clips?” the speaker will simply disappear, wait, and say it again later somewhere else. I also know the person who does this will as likely as not have an award-winning career in the game industry and a network of online friends who think that none of that behavior is weird or even especially wrong.
In addition to harassers, I interviewed victims, bystanders and experts on the industry. However, I found that I needed almost none of what the innocent said to explain the broader situation because the harassers themselves were remarkably honest in explaining their own behavior. Every interview quote and clip you are about to hear is from them, the harassers — a community of toxic artists, game designers and fans describing itself.
Here’s one from one of the few who asked to be anonymised, who I will call “A”:
Transcribed —
A: “It’s so easy and, like, you know; it feels good. Like, the horrible thing that people don’t like to admit is that fuckin’ being justified and getting stuck in, it feels good. You know, like, it’s like you’re some sort of, like, you’re charged with some sort of, uh, duty to, like, remove the bad person or whatever. And like, you know, anyone who says that doesn’t feel good’s fucking lying.”
Me: “Yeah.”
A: “Or they’ve got something else on their mind. Like, it’s the same reason like, you know, young men like fighting or whatever, like, it feels good to get stuck in. And, like, if you’re doing it, and you’ve — you’re justified, so many dudes are just waiting for that, you know?”
When I interviewed Brian Yaksha, an RPG writer and harasser whose credits include contributions to D&D’s close competitor Pathfinder, as well as content for the Swedish doom-metal inspired game Mork Borg and indie fantasy favorite Dolmenwood, he described his experiences in a members-only online space for RPG insiders thusly:
“There’s a lot of vitriol in this goddamn room to the point that like, if I were a much heavier person, like there’s a lot of fucking industrial blackmail material from it, because most of these people all they do in there is shit-talk other people I’ve worked with. And it’s just like, I mean, y’know, a toxic environment, I definitely contributed to that.”
And then he hastens to add “Though never to the level of their shit.”
Another RPG professional with a history of harassment, Fiona Maeve Geist, who has worked as editor and writer on projects including the million-dollar-Kickstarter sci-fi horror RPG Mothership and psychedelic indie fantasy RPG Troika says of her younger colleagues:
“Look, most of these people are used to fucking hate-mobbing. Like, I’m not trying to say it’s right. I’m just saying if you’re under the age of 25, your primary experience of the Internet has been akin to a schoolyard fight in which someone rings a bell and says, like, if you’re a leftist get over here. And if you’re interpolated by that you run over there.”
Another harasser, “B”, who works in the same cluster of companies as Geist, relates it to the problems common to marginalised communities:
“…conflict is common because, um, right, like, on some level, and we all don’t like admitting to this, a lot of our ideological conflicts are over resources. And we don’t like talking about that because really, the reason that a lot of us think that certain people are bad is that they make money that we think should be in our pocket. It’s not the most noble reason.”
The harassers can be shockingly candid about bullying colleagues to keep them in line. Geist recounts an argument she had with a former friend and employee at Lamentations of the Flame Princess (LotFP), an experimentally-inclined game company that was the first to publish several influential indie designers and artists —
“I basically say like, ‘Look, in three years I’m going to buy James’s [LotFP’s owner] fucking estate off of him for pennies on the dollar in bankruptcy court simply as a way to spite him and you’re going to be wondering why the fuck you’ve supported him right now.’ Which I will also admit, reads as a threat because to a degree it was intended as one.“
The admission is remarkably naked, especially considering by the point she told me this Geist was working full-time for the competition.
Patrick Stuart, game designer, poet, and creative consultant on Mork Borg, whose acclaimed Veins of the Earth was published by LotFP, describes his situation simply in a tweet from the summer of 2020: “Cancel or be Cancelled is the only law”.
I wanted to understand the process by which people with what someone like myself can only interpret as good intentions came around to the idea that they had to harass their own colleagues in order to survive.
Lesson One: Trust No-One
The first problem here is that if the most influential voices in tabletop RPGs are to be believed then, well…the most influential voices in tabletop RPGs are all charlatans or harassers who cannot be believed. This causes what researchers in the social sciences call “epistemological issues”.
To get to the higher levels of the industry — where Dungeons and Dragons, the Star Wars and Marvel licensed tabletop RPGs and other household names live — you have to get through the “indie” levels of the industry, which is made up of isolated up-and-coming creators and acronymic sub-scenes like the OSR (“Old School Renaissance”), PBTA (“Powered By the Apocalypse”), and FKR (Free Kriegspiel Revolution) etc. Navigating that is not easy.
“Yeah, people jump on to mobs way too easy, they repeat stuff they know isn’t true [sigh] yeah, people do all of that.”
To further complicate things, the harassers are all a circular firing squad. That is, they are all constantly accusing each other of harassment and worse. Here are just a few examples, to put it in focus (deep breath):
While in A’s interview he says only that Patrick Stuart is “a bit of a prick”, Stuart says Olivia Hill (formerly at the company that did popular ’90s goth horror game Vampire: The Masquerade) “sounds insane”, while when Olivia Hill’s girlfriend (and employee) Francita Soto claimed Hill was an abuser and that Hill’s game-designer wife Filamena Young was as well, Robert Bohl (author of punk-teen simulator RPG Misspent Youth) sympathised with Soto saying he had secretly had issues with Hill for years, Shoe Skogen (former moderator of the largest and most influential OSR Discord forum) accuses Hill of sketchy sexual behavior in role-play chat and sending mentally-ill people to harass her, while Skogen’s ex-, Emmy Allen, also known as “Cavegirl” and “Emily Allen” (author of the game Dungeon Bitches), claims Skogen abused her (Cavegirl ) during their relationship— though Skogen and Cavegirl have never physically met, Skogen in turn says Erika Muse (currently a moderator at the OSR Discord that Skogen used to moderate) outed Cavegirl as trans, while Fiona Maeve Geist (who is also trans) claims that Cavegirl falsely accused her, Geist, of outing Cavegirl as trans, while Brian Yaksha concurs in his interview that Cavegirl is a “a piece of work” and “racist”, Yaksha also says Chris McDowall (founder of the OSR Discord forum, as well as author of indie games Into the Odd and Electric Bastionland) is an “egotistical jackass”, and further says that two of early indie darling PH Lee’s games (Bliss Stage and Hot Guy’s Making Out) promote child abuse, but Ash Kreider (author of Our Traveling Home “A Ghibli-inspired fantasy tabletop RPG about queer romance, found family, and finding healing through belonging”), in their interview (in addition to attacking two creators behind the ten million dollar Avatar: Legends Kickstarter respectively as “soulless and toxic” and a “tenderqueer” who made a name for herself by being “nice” but not “kind”), claims PH Lee’s enemies used “GamerGate-level harassment tactics” against Lee including contacting mutuals on Twitter and asking them to unfollow Lee, which, however, is a tactic PH Lee’s ally Whitney Beltrán (who formerly worked on official D&D’s recent Ravenloft supplement with her partner Ajit George and who, last I checked was working on an official triple-A Dungeons and Dragons video game) definitely did to yet another designer.
Morally, politically, even emotionally, these game designers have almost everything in common, but there are no spaces in the RPG community with rules that encourage them to talk to each other like healthy adults or with social norms that suggest they should.
“We’re all determined to be the left that eats itself,” says Kreider.
For a look at the level of distrust and animosity involved, you can hear Kreider and then Brian Yaksha on the situation around PH Lee:
So you see the problem.
Morally, politically, even emotionally, these two game designers have almost everything in common, but there are no spaces in the RPG community with rules that encourage them to talk to each other like healthy adults or with social norms that suggest they should. Both see the stakes as too high to back down and both got attention and retweets from attacking other designers.
Learning The Rules
Acrimony and accusation have touched every corner of the industry from near-homeless designers making “poem games” that they sell for a dollar on sites like itch.io to the most powerful people in the industry — I learned early, for instance, not to get anyone started on Adam Koebel, the once wildly-popular and equally-disgraced queer D&D streamer and co-author of indie D&D alternative Dungeon World, or Luke Crane, designer of the influential narrative-focused fantasy game Burning Wheel who lost his job as head of games at Kickstarter for supporting Koebel.
Remember when I said this problem went all the way to the top of the industry? Mike Mearls — former Senior Manager and then Franchise Director on Dungeons & Dragons — appears to be both perpetrator and victim.
I tried to learn the rules of this place. I tried to learn the language and the culture. It was nearly impossible. It gave me a headache and made no sense at all. Words do not even have the same definitions there. But I did, eventually, get through.
Reading, and understanding, a Reddit feed was once almost painful for me. They are filled with back-and-forth and insults and people calling each other names and then disappearing because their feelings get hurt. These people were like a new species to me, sensitive to the point of paralysis, but still managing to write in all caps. It is as though they do not realise that they are typing, that they can stop, and breathe, and contain themselves before launching into a diatribe. And in order to keep track of the whole mess I had to create a wall, with names and affiliations and splinter groups and weird connections that only became apparent after more research than I have done since my dissertation.
In short, the whole thing is a clusterfuck, and a tangled mess that started keeping me up nights and overtook most of my waking hours with despondent musings on the death of civilisation.
The Case Study
Late into the wee hours, desktop-deep in coffee and open tabs, despairing of making this world explicable I knew one thing — what I needed was a case study.
I needed them to admit they harassed someone, verifiably and severely — and I needed them to talk about why. I needed someone to say, explicitly “We harassed this person,” and use those words. I needed someone they would admit to piling onto when the bell rang in the schoolyard.
And luckily, there is exactly such a guy.
A handful of the smear’s enablers politely apologised, but most got angry that they had been noticed.
Fittingly, it was the guy who asked them to stop doing it.
His name is Zak Smith and he is the only person I will quote here who, after four years of research, I have not been able to find harassing anyone.
Around ten years ago, something absolutely verifiable happened: Ash Kreider, the “finding healing through belonging” game designer, and PH Lee, the one who wrote the games allegedly promoting pedophilia, got together and falsely accused a third game designer of the crime of threatening to rape his critics. An impressive cross-section of the cream of the indie RPG scene passed this false accusation around, adding a little “+1” to it as it made the social media rounds.
Then it was revealed — by one of their erstwhile friends within that scene (John Stavropoulos, creator of the X-Card, a tool to avoid upsetting content in games) — that Lee and Kreider’s claim was not true. Most agreed their victim was a nasty piece of work, but he had not verifiably threatened anyone.
Then an OSR game designer named Zak Smith made a post warning his followers about all the designers who had thoughtlessly given the false accusation a bump. Smith did not much like the original victim of the smear, either, but said that the community had to draw the line somewhere when it came to trashing colleagues and fabricating criminal allegations was probably a good place to draw it. A handful of the smear’s accidental enablers politely apologised, but most got angry that they had been noticed.
Everyone from Jeopardy-champion-turned-Twitter-warrior Arthur Chu and Matt Mercer — dungeon master on the epically-successful live D&D show Critical Role— had all harassed this one guy.
Shoe Skogen (the former OSR discord mod), explained the situation, her voice wavering:
“The assertion Zak had was that if you have not personally taken time out of your day to thoroughly investigate whether or not this accusation is true and you ‘plus’ a post about it you are 100% morally on the hook for supporting a false accusation!”
Me: “Well, I think actually there’s something to that, I mean, supporting…”
Skogen: “Yeah there’s something to it but to the extent that he took it? Like, to a — like, yeah, yeah, people jump on to mobs way too easy, they repeat stuff they know isn’t true [sigh] yeah, people do all of that.”
I asked B (whose edgy, frequently sexualized trans-lesbian games are diametrically opposed to wholesomeness merchants like the avowedly asexual Kreider) why Smith was the only major figure in her scene willing to point out the problem here:
“Like, you know, there’s — there’s the thing where, like, it — it’s an Anita Sarkeesian problem, (referring to the pop-feminist video game critic, a major target of GamerGate) where like, I have critiques of Anita Sarkeesian. But, like, I’ve absolutely never voiced them in public because criticizing Anita Sarkeesian is a hobby industry for fascists.”
Smith, however, was not a fascist (he was one of the first people taken to county lockup by the LAPD during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 — there is live video and a police citation) he used to be friendly with half the names in this article so far, and half of the names you will see in any list of contemporary RPG authors from the time he was active. He played games with them, wrote articles they compulsively shared, put together collaborative projects with them, and in more than one case, got them their first jobs in the RPG industry. In return, they destroyed him.
Every single other game designer and industry personality mentioned in this article so far along with hundreds of others — including the heads of the industry’s largest convention and of D&D itself, to Jeopardy-champion-turned-Twitter-warrior Arthur Chu and Matt Mercer — dungeon master on the epically-successful live D&D show Critical Role — had all harassed this one guy.
I had found my case study.
D&D and Gen Con — The Dogpile Elite
Remember when I said this problem went all the way to the top of the industry? Mike Mearls — longtime Senior Manager and then Franchise Director on Dungeons & Dragons — appears to be both perpetrator and victim.
On the “victim” side, harassers active on the influential pre-4chan troll board Something Awful, including Freyja Erlings, co-author of the Hardwired Island cyberpunk RPG and the aforementioned forum moderator Erika Muse promoted a conspiracy theory that Mearls had by accident or design passed on privileged information to Smith which Smith then used to attack critics. Records show Mearls did not, and that Zak never did anything to suggest he had any privileged information. Nevertheless the conspiracy theory was wildly popular and, indeed, may be responsible for the previously voluble Mearls going radio-silent on his popular Twitter account years ago and then, later, being moved by toy giant Hasbro from D&D to its sister game, Magic: The Gathering until finally being let go altogether early this year.
When I say the issue of harassment is pervasive, consider that not even the single most successful businessman in the history of the industry had the sense to check with a lawyer before spouting off at a colleague online.
“Look, the whole point of those groups on Something Awful was to troll people we didn’t like,” says one game designer and former member of the Something Awful boards, continuing:
“We all knew that Zak hadn’t done anything, really, except he made the mistake of shining a light on goons [Something Awful’s slang for its own members] being immature. Claiming he was a cryptoconservative or whatever was just a way of punishing him for that. None of the main posters — Erika Muse, Kai Tave, ProfessorCirno, PixelScum, Freyja Erlings — none of them believed what they said. We were flabbergasted when this stuff that was obviously made up on the board went viral and people who weren’t goons started repeating it. Trolling Zak was the most popular thing anyone on tradgames ever did, so they kept going. When they made up the whole Zak and Mike Mearls conspiracy I thought ‘Oh surely people won’t believe that’ but they did! It was wild! They still believe it today!”
On the “perpetrator” side, Mearls and the rest of D&D officialdom joined a social media dogpile on Smith in 2019. The company removed Smith’s consultant credit from their 5th Edition Players’ Handbook in reaction to a false accusation, and Mearls published a Facebook statement supporting it. You heard that right: the longtime head of D&D joined with the same trolls who in years past had invented conspiracy theories attacking him in passing around false accusations.
On December 11, 2020 Mike Mearls sat in a video call with Smith, lawyers and a King County Judge to determine whether he would go on trial for his role in the hate-mobbing of Zak Smith — a man whose book Mearls once blurbed. After a pair of short arguments, a judge seemingly alone in a courtroom wearing a covid mask granted a motion to dismiss. The judge had not ruled on the truth or falsity of Mearls’ claims, merely that Mearls’ Facebook post (which did not mention Smith by name) had been just on this side of too vague — the former most powerful person on the D&D team was off the hook for harassment.
It is striking that, legally and morally, the most powerful men in the RPG industry are guilty of the same offense we associate with anonymous 15-year-olds on 4chan — dogpiling a stranger because peer pressure told them to.
The very next day, Smith began the process of suing over a much-less ambiguous attack about the same claims by another industry tentpole — multi-millionaire Peter Adkison, founder of Wizards of the Coast, the company that owns the Dungeons and Dragons brand (and now a subsidiary of Hasbro), and current head of Gen Con, the biggest convention in the industry — for defamation, among other things.
Again there was another attempt by the defendant to prevent the case from going to trial, again it succeeded, but this time Smith could afford to take it to the State of Washington Court of Appeals and he won. The case was sent back to the same judge, who dismissed the case again, and Smith appealed again. The higher court has not ruled, but if the appeal is successful, the case will not go back the same judge — this has been going on so long she retired in the meantime. If Smith wins, it will be his fourth successful defamation suit against a gamer over the exact same allegations.
Aside from its high profile, in many ways this case is no different than any other — Adkison was a game designer himself, and long claimed to be a fan of Smith’s work. When I say the issue of harassment is pervasive, consider that not even the single most successful businessman in the history of the industry had the sense to check with a lawyer before spouting off at a colleague online.
Even for a sixty-year-old titan of the industry — when the bell rings, you come running.
Emails revealed in the court documents reveal the smoking gun — Adkison made the decision to harass Smith about 40 minutes after being asked to by one of Adkison’s friends at Evil Hat Productions— the same company that produced Thirsty Sword Lesbians and the popular indie game system Fate. Adkison admits he based his decision not on anything he dug up on Smith, but on the fact that another friend in the industry — one Smith had never interacted with — had himself decided to go after him. “Anyone offensive enough to get this sort of reaction from Steve Wieck (given how radical he’s been in the past),” Adkison wrote in a February 13, 2019 email to a colleague, “probably has it coming”. Even for a sixty-year-old titan of the industry — when the bell rings, you come running.
This is the central mystery: everyone knows they did it, they admit they found no reason to, and they have no remorse.
It is striking that, legally and morally, the most powerful and respected men in the industry are guilty of the same offense we associate with anonymous 15-year-olds on 4chan — dogpiling a stranger because peer pressure told them to. Within-the-industry-household-names like Vincent Baker, Robin Laws, John Harper and Monte Cook did the same thing as trolls known only from screen-names like “SecretGamerGrrl” and “Nuns With Guns”: they heard false second-hand claims, accepted them without question — or pretended to — and spread them to the public in the form of stern warnings, smug jokes, contrite or self-congratulatory essays and private urgings to businesses and friends. This is more-or-less totally illegal everywhere.
Online harassment can include many things —threats, bannings, strangers evading blocks to spew obscenities— but the top of the pyramid is misinformation. Spread a claim that you fabricated or were too negligent to check accusing your enemy of sufficiently vile behavior and your friends and followers will do all the other things for you. So whatever else Smith can sue for, he can always sue for defamation.
After protracted legal action in New Zealand, Cam Banks — husband, father, and game designer behind one of the licensed Marvel superhero games — was forced to post a public apology on every kind of social media he had for harassing Smith which ended with the humiliating detail “…I am admitting this because Mr Smith sued me. After 2 years I’ve found no proof he did anything wrong, online or off. I have paid Mr Smith a cash settlement.”
Rather than shock or embarrassment that their mild-mannered, middle-aged friend had been caught joining an online mob, the responses from friends and fellow game designers on Banks’ Facebook contain nothing but sympathy for Banks. This is the central mystery: everyone knows they did it, they admit they found no reason to, and they have no remorse.
A woman in my line of work cannot really act like it is a mystery; people often take up a position not because of evidence but because that position is the most comfortable. And right now, claiming the victim of all this harassment deserved it is still the most comfortable one — claim otherwise and you could lose friends, customers, opportunities, and all the other benefits of community.
“We tried as an industry to harass him out of it for years,” admitted indie designer Brandon Leon Gambetta in a tweet about Smith from Sept 27, 2021, but adds “It didn’t work.”
Or at least it didn’t until his wife joined the mob.
A Detour
My nice, tidy case study about online harassment now has to take an unwelcome swerve into real-life. Forgive me if I get a little emotional.
Since lying about Zak Smith is something of a cottage industry now, before I go any further, a few basics:
- He has successfully sued his harassers for defamation three times in three countries, and has shown no sign of slowing down.
- He has never lost a case. One case (Mearls’) was dismissed because the attack was judged too vague, not because the underlying attack on Smith was judged to be true.
- The case which ended with the harasser admitting “After 2 years I’ve found no proof he did anything wrong, online or off” was the most recent one.
- The man who had to admit that had access to as much of the evidence from all the other cases as he cared to ask for.
- There has never been a single screen shot, text, email, recording or other document meaningfully used as evidence of Smith’s guilt.
- Whatever else happens, legally, in the future, the only evidence used against Smith so far has been people claiming he did something wrong; people who do not agree with each other on key details, got caught lying under oath, and had histories of mental illness long before meeting Zak.
To fully understand the context, we have to talk about who Smith is. Though he is no celebrity, there are many ways to tumble down an Internet rabbit hole and end up at Zak Smith, game designer and…many other things.
If you, for example, go to buy a copy of the doorstop-sized experimental novel Gravity’s Rainbow you may find there is an illustrated version by some artist guy named Zak Smith. If you click on his name and found out the basics from his art gallery’s website (artist, porn actor under the name “Zak Sabbath”, polyamorous, went to Yale, looks like he listens to The Misfits) you may then find the websites, with the links and the blogs and the statements, and the nightmares. I found the article “Zak Loves Mandy’ in Vice (honestly it made me cringe a little, it was so saccharine, and I was sort of annoyed by the whole thing). I looked up his ex-porn actress wife Mandy Morbid and read her initial post about her alleged abuse at his hands after ten years of marriage, and all the comments on it. I followed the narrative, and withheld judgement until I was done, and satisfied with my conclusions.
Why would someone lie about this? Why would someone willingly invite the judgement and attention of others on such a sensitive and painful topic?
If we are to believe accusations of abuse simply because someone made them, we would have to conclude that literally everyone in the tabletop RPG scene is an abuser, very much including all of the women. For any realistic view of the situation, we have to do better than that.
So I read as much as I could stand and then I went for a run because it made me so angry. Because there is nothing I can think of that fills me with more impotent rage than a fellow woman lying about abuse. And not just lying about it, but weaponizing her allegations to actively destroy someone. It is an affront to everything I believe in and everything feminism stands for. It makes it easier for people to dismiss truthful claims (of which an estimated 92–98 percent of all allegations are — or, at least allegations to the police — which her statement was not), and it changes the focus of the entire issue. Instead of supporting and fighting for women who are victims or survivors, we end up talking about one woman who made it all up.
“Opportunity costs” is what we call them in my field. Basically, if you spend time and energy on one thing, it is to the detriment of another. And in this case, any and all time wasted on false allegations is time taken away from truthful ones. And then, to add insult to injury, there is the fact that a false claim creates another victim. And frankly I do not want to spend more time listening to and fighting for the rights of men. I am quite sure that we have heard enough from men on women’s issues already. Even beginning a conversation about false allegations gets my hackles up. It always, always, feels like exactly the wrong thing to be talking about. But just because it so rarely happens does not mean it should be ignored. Nor should we just blithely accept and support the oft-repeated suggestion that when men are falsely accused, they ought to fall on their swords and accept blame as a means of supporting the #metoo movement and the victims of sexual assault. That this suggestion is completely absurd and against basically every ideal our society is built upon seems to go unnoticed, and unremarked upon.
…she further went on to accuse Smith of secret crimes so vast they would literally establish new world records
Every other expert in the field that I have talked to concurs with my conclusion — upon close examination, Nagy’s claims look absurd, like nothing else they have seen in medical or criminal history. It is just that no-one did that close examination.
I could not believe it. Rather I did not want to believe it: That people were this gullible. This easily swayed. But then I remembered that of course they are. The story Mandy tells does not simply lack the ring of truth, it lacks any substantive evidence or reason to assume its validity. There just is nothing I could find, anywhere, that supports it. And I tried. I tried like hell to find something, anything, that would lead me to believe her. Because I really did not want her to be a liar. Because I never like it when the woman is the bad guy. We get enough negative press as it is, we have enough problems getting people to listen to us and believe us and we sure as hell do not need even one more example for misogynists to point to as proof that women are usually making it all up. So if I had any bias, really, it was to believe Mandy. And I could not. As hard as I tried (and you should not have to try that hard to believe a factual account), I could not get there.
I was furious and for reasons I could not sort out until later, I felt personally invested. I remembered every time I had to go through it all with yet another therapist or cop or boyfriend or parent, and how indescribably awful it was. It never gets easier. It never goes away. And to pretend to that kind of pain, to fake it, to steal it in order to serve a selfish and cruel need, is entirely unacceptable. And doing so demonstrates such a lack of understanding and compassion as to verge on monstrous.
She also claims it all happened under the eye of the bevy of hipster feminist women who, despite sharing rooms, beds and leases with Smith and Nagy for years, never noticed and who have all lined up to support Smith emotionally, financially, and legally during 5 years of the hell that has ensued.
The allegations Ms Amanda Nagy (Mandy Morbid) put forth (with help from the only friends she could convince to rewrite their histories with Zak to look like they might be abuse) in her Facebook post of February 10, 2019, are temperate when compared to the statements which followed made both in and out of court. We begin with a story of emotional manipulation. One that devolves, or evolves, into a claim that she was herself so entirely in Smith’s thrall that the whole of her personality, from the clothes she wore to the sex scenes she filmed to the girls she slept with, were entirely not of her own volition. The former punk-rock wife of Mr Zak Sabbath, who slept underneath a wall with a giant pentagram on it that she made herself from Christmas lights, now repeatedly claims to want to be a nun. And also claims that she is not religious. She claims he forced her to get the mohawk that proudly took center stage in every selfie she ever posted (at least one of her hairdressers testified against her).
She has essentially gone on to claim that no records of anything she said or did during her decade-long relationship were reflective of her own wants, desires or personality in life circumstances that, I can say as a psychotherapist, fit none of the conditions that would make this kind of claim plausible and then she further went on to accuse Smith of secret crimes so vast they would literally establish new world records. She also claims it all happened under the eye of the bevy of hipster feminist women who, despite sharing rooms, beds and leases with Smith and Nagy for years, never noticed and who have all lined up to support Smith emotionally, financially, and legally during five years of the hell that has ensued.
Quite verifiably, Nagy has perjured herself in court on multiple occasions. After she admitted it, her lawyer quit. Among other things, she has testified that she was present at events where she was provably not even in the country. Again under oath, Nagy supported claims against Smith by their former mutual girlfriend and then admitted she could not remember the sex at all, claimed she never had sex with her own girlfriend (something none of her other lovers deem plausible) and testified that, contrary to her own previous sworn statement, she actually supported the claims because it sounded like something Smith would do.
It challenges the imagination to picture what Nagy could do to become a less credible witness.
Her closest friends at the time have claimed it was Nagy who abused Smith — even the ones who were not there when she punched him in the eye. The extensive video footage available of the couple doing everything from taking vacation, having sex to, of course, playing D&D, tells a story matching the tales told by Smith’s many real-world defenders, not Nagy’s. Seemingly in order to help sell her story to gamers, Nagy claimed that Smith authored one of her old Tumblr posts defending him — only to admit multiple times, including under oath, that this is false.
Victims get things wrong, but not this wrong. It challenges the imagination to picture what Nagy could do to become a less credible witness.
Which leads me to the question everyone asks: Why would someone lie about this? Why would someone willingly invite the judgement and attention of others on such a sensitive and painful topic? Why would anyone, ever, want to go through the horror and trauma that so often accompanies the divulgence of sexual assault? I cannot think of a single woman of my acquaintance, myself included, who has been the victim of sexual assault who would not trade anything in the world to be able to forget it even for a day. And then you get sucked into this weird place where she could not possibly be lying and the proof she is not lying is that she is saying anything at all.
False allegations are an extremely small percentage of all rape claims to the police — but we literally have no data at all on false claims about exes on Facebook or what gets shared between friends when one has had one too many drinks.
When I asked Chris McDowall (he of Electric Bastionland) how he justified harassing Smith despite all of the evidence this is exactly what he said — he could not think of any reason a woman would make this up.
But I am a psychotherapist, so I know about Cluster B Personality disorders — and I know about borderline personality disorder, which Mandy Morbid repeatedly claimed to have for at least a decade before she began saying her husband was “gaslighting” her by agreeing with her.
Amanda Nagy, aka Mandy Morbid has continued to deny having ever been diagnosed with borderline despite the existence of multiple emails where she tells her friends she has borderline, a handwritten note from her own private journal where she literally says the exact words that she has been diagnosed with borderline and a note from one of her therapists saying she has been diagnosed with borderline. That is one of the most borderline-sounding things a person can do.
For borderlines, sometimes, saying something does make it true. In order for a borderline personality to exist, to maintain itself, it needs to believe the reality it has built. To not do so would be catastrophic. A borderline does not lie for personal gain, necessarily. Rather they often lie to create a world that fits with their own internal feelings. In the more serious cases, if someone leaves them or a relationship ends, it is because that person is, in every conceivable way, bad. There is simply no room for any other explanation.
In very simple terms, there is no grey, just black and white. No middle ground. And keep in mind that this disorder is characterised by impulsivity, instability and extremism. The borderline personality exists between extremes of idealization and devaluation, and often, though not always of course, it serves their needs to be perpetually in the victim role. Because at the core of the disorder is a deep and abiding fear of being abandoned or left. And it is difficult to leave a victim. If you do, you are clearly the bad guy. Also, and very importantly, they have a deep need for attention. And not for the reasons you might think. They want help, really. To be rescued and saved and made whole. So if a woman lies about sexual assault and it turns out that woman has a verifiable diagnosis of BPD? I am not surprised, or not as surprised as I might have been. This might seem harsh or unfair, but that by no means makes it any less true.
I have never met Mandy. Never spoken to her. Never texted or gotten an email or had contact with her in any way (though I have tried). And she certainly has never been my patient. I will not say one way or another whether she is indeed borderline. To do so would be irresponsible, to say the least. What I will say is that she verifiably said she was, that she verifiably underwent a treatment — Dialectical Behavior Therapy — only prescribed for borderlines, that her presentation and (also verifiable and documented) actions certainly fit within the scope of the disorder, that close members of the family that raised her said she had been diagnosed with it, and I can say that more than one therapist diagnosed her with it. And whether she does or not, the point is: as a therapist I cannot claim I do not know of any reason a woman who appears at first to be completely rational might lie about rape or assault.
It is not a mere ‘counter narrative’ to plead ‘not guilty’ in court. It is absolutely within an individual’s rights and what is often done when people are, in fact, not guilty.
But why this specific lie? And just how frequently does this happen? There is, unsurprisingly, a vast body of literature dedicated to this topic, and it ranges from near hysterical men claiming that women do it all the time, to near hysterical women claiming it never ever happens at all. Sadly, much of the information regarding false allegations is either complete drivel or sensationalised nonsense, so I will stick to academic theory and actual evidence, which states that, as noted, false allegations are an extremely small percentage of all rape claims to the police — but we literally have no data at all on false claims about exes on Facebook or what gets shared between friends when one has had one too many drinks. Feminist scholars of great repute acknowledge that women do on very rare occasions make false allegations, and their counterparts agree that the likelihood is very small. There exists in some circles an awareness and an understanding of this phenomenon that is rational and measured, and does not get swayed by the emotions and tensions ever present in any discussion of sexual assault or trauma. But even so, we can extrapolate that the motivations are the same.
The best source on false allegations— a 1994 article by EJ Kanin — states that these motivations are likely to be revenge, the production of an alibi, or to garner sympathy. These three possibilities have remained at the core of any discussion, academic or otherwise, about this topic. So despite some issues with Kanin’s general perspective, it is broadly understood that he was right about this. And in this case, the case of Zak and Mandy, she gets two out of three. At least by my count. So for all the women who cry out, in horror and with frantic accusations of sexism, that no woman would ever possibly make up such a thing, and refuse to acknowledge there is even a remote possibility of a false statement in this area, in fact the truth is relatively simple, and proven; it is a reality that brings me no joy to accept. But to believe there is anything that someone somewhere will not lie about is naïve to the point of idiocy.
The other element that drove me practically to the point of breaking things was this narrative running through the Twitter feeds and postings about how Smith should not, apparently, make any effort to refute the charges leveled against him. And that his doing so was clear indication of guilt. For example, Fiona Maeve Geist wrote, early in the days of Smith’s cancellation: “The fact that he wishes to establish a counter narrative to wholly dismiss all claims of his abuse and violation is disheartening.”
Now I am not sure, but I believe that when someone, anyone, stands accused of a crime, he or she has the right to claim innocence of that crime. That is why you are asked in court, ‘how do you plead’? Because there are two options.
In Polygon…the allegations were spread and commented on without skepticism — and without investigation.
It is not a mere ‘counter narrative’ to plead ‘not guilty’ in court. It is absolutely within an individual’s rights and what is often done when people are, in fact, not guilty. The law appears to agree — Justice Sally Gomery (now elevated to the Ontario Court of Appeal) ruled “Given the impact of the Facebook post on Smith, this lawsuit is not a disproportionate response. Since Nagy has not filed a criminal complaint against him and Smith has not been able to obtain a retraction, it is difficult to see how he would otherwise re-establish his personal and professional reputation.”
Despite Smith’s profile in the worlds of porn, mainstream publishing, and contemporary art — where most of his income came from — at first, no-one in these fields or close to the couple seemed to take Nagy’s claims very seriously. That is, until the gamers spread them all over the Internet— aided by an article by Charlie L. Hall in Polygon (a rare swerve for the organ — which mostly covers video games) where the allegations were commented on without skepticism. And without investigation.
At that point even staunch supporters considered it dangerous to even be photographed with Smith. He lost everything — when I wrote the first draft of this article he was on food stamps and had been served with eviction papers.
“Afraid of Proof”
Shoe Skogen has a teardop-shaped face, little button eyes, takes up very little space and is one of the most dangerous people I have ever spoken to. She was instrumental — central, even — to the dogpiling, harassment and cancellation of Zak Smith.
In our first conversation, Shoe Skogen said to me her biggest weakness was that she was easily convinced. Gullible, she said. “I’m very easy to manipulate.” She stated she was a follower, she trusted quickly. Loved quickly. Gave too much, she said.
Skogen decided to represent a man as a sexual predator to the entire Googling world because she did not like his tone.
She was one of the few people who had any face-to-face contact with Mandy (though only via video calls), and they called each other friends. Close friends. Smith even helped Skogen with her games. When Nagy and Smith split up, Skogen naturally kept in contact with her — and when Nagy began to claim Smith was abusive, Skogen immediately began plotting to cancel him.
This was — she admits repeatedly — not because she was sure the accusations were true, but because Skogen had grown to dislike Zak’s style. Shoe, who admits she cries at the drop of a hat if anyone disagrees with her, did not like that sometimes asking people to tell the truth hurt their feelings. Zak was always accusing people of lying or being lazy about the truth. The fact they actually were did not matter to Shoe.
Smith’s rules for comments on his blog and own Discord forum were (and are) as follows: No misinformation gets published here if we can help it. Everyone’s questions must be answered. Conversations must be finished. Every discussion must reach a conclusion, and issues should not be brought up without the intention of resolving them whether by proving through the use of facts and logic your own point or by ceding that you have been misinformed or incorrect. One side or the other (or both) must be demonstrated to be wrong or at least less-supported. If you get something wrong you apologise. Everyone follows these rules or they don’t get to be here. Then, and only then, can a conversation, a discussion, an issue be considered completed. Smith believes this is the way — the only way, it turns out — to cut through the endless reiteration of the same arguments and denunciations, year after year, that consume the RPG community.
Skogen hated this way of thinking — or, more precisely, she hated its effect on Skogen’s flakey friends. They just wanted to act like the rest of the Internet — casually accusing each other of being terrible every day, not proving it, and then pretending it never happened. Many gamers online agreed.
When Smith and Nagy were together they and the women in the circle of porn-star gamers that Smith wrote about in his blog had all been harassed for years, including death and rape threats. They had always had their defenders, including Skogen, but when Mandy’s defection gave Skogen the opportunity to switch sides she took it.
“I think for a lot of people they are kind of pre-emptively dealing with the guilt if it turned out if they were wrong.”
“So, you know, it’s like — I didn’t investigate, I didn’t seek sources,” Skogen admits. When Mandy made her claims, Shoe just immediately proceeded to rally the troops, none of whom investigated either (Smith and several witnesses made a point of making their contact information available to anyone who wanted to check their stories or see documents, gamers did not contact them).
I want to repeat this because Skogen admitted it over and over and to this day sees nothing wrong with it: Skogen decided to represent a man as a sexual predator to the entire Googling world because she did not like his tone.
Other people who had never had any negative interactions with Smith, Harasser A for instance, went on the attack. A actively worked with friends in a group of RPG gossips called the MBC (“Mongrel Banquet Club) to cancel Zak, the group included Skogen, Emmy Allen, illustrator Scrap Princess, as well as Luke Gearing and Jarret Crader — authors of several products for indie-sci-fi-horror game Mothership and the aforementioned Troika— and many others: “I was ready to fucking go,” said A ”I wanted to attack him like a dog almost.”
She also worked with the other moderators and the forum’s owner to change the rules to allow lying.
I asked how they did it.
A: “We spent a lot of time crafting the kind of, uh, some of those messages that everyone posted on twitter and everyone posted on Google +, like there was a hashtag ‘abuse is not a game’ or something?”
Me: “Yeah?”
A: “That was workshopped in the MBC”
Smith was not only swiftly removed from online spaces and smeared in every public forum the trolls could get their hands on, but new accusations and grudges emerged out of the woodwork every day for weeks. Everyone, it seems, had always secretly had a problem with Zak. I asked A about this abrupt about-face “I think for a lot of people they are kind of pre-emptively dealing with the guilt if it turned out if they were wrong.”
As for Skogen:
“I became Amanda’s — Mandy’s — buffer. And I became an ally. And her advocate, yes, yes. And I you know, gathered money for her. I, um, you know, did all the social online stuff for her.”
In fact, according to Shoe, Mandy considered recanting a few times, but Shoe personally convinced her not to — while simultaneously grabbing up all the nerd-influence possible in the corner of gaming where Smith had once held sway. Shoe took over a moderator position on the large and influential OSR Discord forum, declared herself “Crown Monarch of the OSR” as a way of symbolically replacing the influential Smith. She used her personal connection to Nagy to help make the smear an item of faith with everyone in the server ” …and rewrite the rules and put in a new, kinder, more inclusive, more intersectional culture.” She also worked with the other moderators and the forum’s owner to change the rules to allow lying.
When a user on tabletop’s most popular platform falsely accused Smith of harassing them via comment the moderators of /rpg responded by literally making a rule that asking for evidence was now against the rules.
Wait, is that right? With Smith gone they took the opportunity to allow lying again?
I put the question to the forum’s then-owner, Chris McDowall, who audibly stumbles over his words when he admits “I guess, to the letter of the law, yes, we, we removed the rule that said no lying’” .
Skogen admits this didn’t work out as planned.
“If someone wanted to falsely accuse someone else of being abusive and get 100% off the hook, this would be the perfect time and place to do it,” admits Skogen. In another interview, she goes on:
Skogen: “Here’s where I make you really frustrated, because of Zak, everyone in his orbit is afraid of it now, because…”
Me: “Afraid of what?”
Skogen: “Proof. The burden of proof.”
Me: “How can you be afraid of proof? It’s just proof…”
Skogen: “I don’t — I can’t make it make sense to you I can only tell you what I’ve observed from being in the middle of it. Because of Zak used that for so long and because he used that very intelligently and because, remember, these are all straight white boys that got had, so…”
I continued to express exasperation, she repled:
“Yeah, but I’m like, I can’t make it make sense for you, it doesn’t make sense to me either but everybody is just really emotionally fucked up about the demand for proof because Zak said ‘There’s no proof’.”
Women who went out of their way to prove who they were were, posting photos of themselves holding signs and signing legally-binding statements saying Nagy was not telling the truth about incidents they personally witnessed, were accused of being mere “character witnesses” or sock puppets.
Frustrating as this attitude toward facts is, it is now consistent across online RPG platforms. When an anonymous user on tabletop’s most popular platform, the subReddit r/RPG, falsely accused Smith of harassing them via comment (we know it is false because anyone can scroll back to the argument in question) the moderators of /rpg responded by literally making a rule that asking for evidence was now against the rules.
When all of the women who had been closest to Smith and Nagy — including Michelle Ford, the girlfriend Nagy and Smith had shared a one-room studio and a bed with for years — began to defend Smith, the gamers online brutally shut them down. Interviews with them and posts they made were actively suppressed. Women who went out of their way to prove who they were were, posting photos of themselves holding signs and signing legally-binding statements saying Nagy was not telling the truth about incidents they personally witnessed, were accused of being mere “character witnesses” or sock puppets (fake support accounts). It seemed women were only to be believed when they were saying what gamers wanted to hear.
…a mutual friend asked just what Smith had ever done to spark Bohl’s ire. Bohl could not say.
It is fair to say that in the past the need for proof has frequently been weaponised against women in cases of their real-life experiences of sexual assault, but the mob’s own complaints against Zak were — as he frequently pointed out — about a decade of grudges stemming from his alleged comments on the Internet, so the lack of any screenshot or link to any wrongdoing by Smith is jarring.
There Is No “Why”
In general, the gamers attitude toward the verifiable is strange. As shockingly honest as they can be about their own motives and methods of harassment, they are shockingly dishonest — or at least reckless — when it comes to the nuts and bolts of what anyone might have done to deserve this.
Even relatively low-stakes claims, like that Smith does not always follow the rules he articulated, cannot be substantiated. No-one has any examples nor could my team find any. Long before Nagy’s accusations indie designer Robert Bohl would repeatedly unleash obscenity-laced tirades against Smith online — after these were circulated, a mutual friend asked just what Smith had ever done to spark Bohl’s ire. Bohl could not say. The same goes for former Smith fan and game scenester Noah Stevens, who I interviewed myself. Years of screaming online and he could not remember what Smith ever did to set him off.
Say what you want about the violent offenders I interviewed during my days working in the prison system — they at least had reasons.
In our second interview, I asked Brian for these receipts. He admitted he had none.
More often in these interviews, harassers justified their behavior with manufactured “facts” about Smith that records prove instantly wrong — they claim he had inherited wealth when he was actually on food stamps, facing eviction, running his lawsuits on donations, and went to undergraduate school on a scholarship and graduate school on a loan. They claim that he erased most of his Twitter or all of his Discord forum when they are both easy to find with a cursory search. They claim that in Smith’s published response to the allegations against him he does not deny them when he clearly does with the same hyper-specificity with which he appears to approach everything. They claim that his friend and defender — porn actress Charlotte Stokely — still does porn with accused abuser James Deen when Stokely has done nothing but lesbian porn since before Deen’s own cancellation years ago.
Brian Yaksha is probably the worst in terms of inaccuracies-per-minute, and his story is illustrative of most dust-ups Zak has had on the Internet over the years: Yaksha has repeatedly claimed, including in our first interview, that he knew there were “receipts” of Zak abusing French Canadian artist and game designer Evlyn Moreau via email. In our second interview, I asked Brian for these receipts. He admitted he had none:
“All of this is extremely situational evidence at best, it’s all hearsay…I’m not going to go to any power that be and use this as the smoking gun to stop this person because it won’t hold any water.”
It turns out there is a smoking gun, but it points the other way — because before I ever talked to Brian, I read the email conversation where Zak and Evlyn cease to be friends that Evlyn Moreau claimed was abusive and…it is just a normal conversation. Or at least a normal conversation with Zak— there are no slurs, no hatespeech, no violating boundaries, just Moreau defending a friend’s right to spread information Moreau admits is false and Smith asking her to stop doing that, back and forth, over a handful of boring email exchanges (Zak: “Drunk driving is a crime even if nobody died that day. Spreading misinformation must always be stopped whether or not it caused harm.”). Evlyn Moreau had lied about abuse.
Stepping Away From The Live Grenade
Especially curious is the case of Patrick Stuart, a brooding, stoop-shouldered Brit who, after hours of interviews, is extraordinarily straightforward in stating to me that his conflict with Zak was in fact due to Stuart’s own inability to handle conflict. Stuart, Smith’s co-author on Maze of the Blue Medusa (a game supplement Stuart told me was “the best thing I have ever done”) has made extreme efforts to distance himself from Smith and claims his prior relationship with Smith was the worst thing to have happened to him ever.
His split from his victim stands as a watershed moment in the story, as his dissolution of their friendship occurred long before Nagy’s Facebook post and falls into the category of betrayal, rather than simply lazy, vicious, or opportunist.
Only 6 months after saying “[D]o not trust what I say. Look and seek for yourself. But, if someone makes an accusation of a moral crime. Please simply ask for proof”, Stuart began harassing Smith by…making claims without proof.
Stuart had, prior to September of 2017, come to Smith’s defence on a number of occasions; he had, despite being personally deeply anxious and avoidant of conflict, felt “genuinely bad … for him (Smith) because of the lies people were telling about him online.” And fought for the truth about his then-Internet-friend and collaborator in a post he put on his on blog in 2014. In fact, Stuart stated there that if Smith gets into an argument or is unpleasant to a person, it will be based only on “what you say, and only that”. In 2017, Stuart again rose to defend his friend and colleague, putting together a comprehensive timeline documenting the history of ‘The Zak Wars’, which began in 2008 and stand as a verifiable record of what can only be characterised as a coordinated and ongoing campaign of harassment and hate directed very clearly towards Smith.
This timeline has been repeatedly linked as evidence in arguments by harassers who have clearly not read it and assume it is a record of Zak’s supposed crimes because they do not realize Stuart and Smith were friends when it was compiled.
Ironically, in 2017, only 6 months after saying “[D]o not trust what I say. Look and seek for yourself. But, if someone makes an accusation of a moral crime. Please simply ask for proof”, Stuart began harassing Smith by…making claims without proof. It started with a minor argument between Smith and another harasser, a friend of Stuart’s — one where Stuart and the friend eventually both admitted Zak was basically right — which situation frustrated Stuart, caused him anxiety, and which he admittedly used as an excuse to sever ties with Smith.
Stuart disclosed to me that his real problem with Smith is essentially what, again, amounts to tone. Again. Tone on the Internet.
Though he labelled Smith as dishonest in various ways in multiple public forums, in our interviews Stuart now frankly admits “If you boil it down, the worst you can say is he’s been abrasive” and “I don’t think I ever caught him in a lie”.
Researchers will tell you this is a sadly familiar fate for targets of harassment: the harassment creates problems for the target, the target attempts to deal with them — which inevitably causes conflict, friends and coworkers distance themselves from the target because they do not want to deal with that conflict and often end up resenting the target for being a target.
Stuart disclosed to me that his real problem with Smith is essentially what, again, amounts to tone. Again. Tone on the Internet. For those who considered themselves fans, or aligned with Smith, Stuart’s condemnation probably carried as much, or perhaps more, weight than Nagy’s. His judgement gave the part of the game world who liked Smith’s work permission to join the mob that his fans and colleagues had previously pushed against.
Unlike Skogen, Yaksha or Stuart, Olivia Hill — the woman who used to work for the Vampire game and then was accused of abuse herself during the time where I interviewed her — belongs to the group of gamers who never liked Smith.
The start of their argument was predictable and is all well-recorded— Hill’s wife said something that was not true and Zak, very politely and patiently at first, asked her to stop. This escalated remarkably quickly to Hill and her wife making preposterous claims about Smith’s online behavior to the rapturous applause of an indie scene that apparently could not get enough of any attack on this raucous pornography-affiliated upstart.
You guessed it: after doing the research, none of Olivia’s claims are true. Olivia claims Smith printed this or that in his book — I check and he did not, Olivia claims someone was harassed by Smith’s followers following a message Smith left — I check and they (Cory Bernhardt, though Olivia did not even know their name) were not harassed and do not even claim they were, it goes on and on. Olivia’s casus belli is nothing — at best a projection of her own fears.
I ask Olivia, for example, about her frequent, frequently-repeated, and very explicit claim that Smith threatened her children.
Me: “Do you think that was his intent?
Hill: “Um, I, so, I don’t think so because he, I, he never really said that.”
One quirk of the creators that harassed Smith before his wife began to was the use of Hitler-style “big lies” portraying him as exactly the opposite of who he was, especially politically. Considering that all the gamers I interviewed that were familiar with Smith first-hand immediately rolled their eyes at the suggestion that Zak had a conservative — or even moderate — bone in his body, these early, pre-Mandy accusations were shockingly effective and Smith’s rigidity about fact-finding likely stems from watching waves of gamers fall for them or just doing fuck-all about them.
In fact, in the before-times, many of Smith’s former defenders claimed that one reason their half of the scene embraced him for so long is that so many of these attacks were unfair and frankly made-up, such as when Rob Donoghue, co-founder of Evil Hat, helped circulate an article claiming Smith — a Jewish guy — was part of an antisemitic conspiracy. This was possibly in retaliation for Smith constantly (and accurately) pointing out that the putatively woke Evil Hat paid its writers less than minimum wage and far less than smaller companies who followed the profit-sharing models Smith and his publishers popularised. Donoghue was eventually publicly embarrassed enough to apologise.
…harassers could identify every toxic social tendency that lead them to join a hate mob, but admitting to what they did would put them too close to their political enemies.
Smith’s first legal victory was against another such accuser, Paul Matijevic, aka “Ettin”, a moderator on Something Awful who invented Bizarro-world accusations about Smith’s relationship to the queer community that went viral — despite the fact that the only reason most of Matijevic’s readers knew who Smith was was because he ran a D&D group consisting almost exclusively of queer women.
A lot of Zak’s strongest supporters were (and still are) trans women largely because their interactions with him made them the first to realise that these smear campaigns were just that. Even queer designers who cancelled him agree on that, from dyed-in-the-wool enemies like Olivia Hill and Kreider, to friend-turned-enemy Fiona Geist. Geist remarked on Smith’s plan to leave the industry and turn his upcoming game Demon City, over to Geist and other trans contributors:
“Zak pretty openly stated that he wanted me, Mabel and Bardaree to replace him. He wanted us to do Demon City Two. He wanted like basically to give us money and say ‘Write whatever the fuck you want and bring it to me, whenever you think it’s good, you know, and I’ll edit it, and I’ll do art for it, and I’ll tell you what to fix in it.’ But like, basically, you know, he wanted to be the back end for three trans women.”
In other words, Smith was planning to do what the hardest left part of the scene keeps urging all straight white cismen with platforms to do: raise up marginalised voices, get out of the way, and give them your money. Ironically, if they had not plastered Nagy’s accusations all over the Internet later that year the industry may have never heard from Smith again.
All of this begs the question of why almost no-one saw this for what it was: just another in an endless series of attempts to get rid of the guy who asked questions, only this one enabled by a disgruntled ex-.
Others were so constantly reckless with the truth that I would find them manufacturing clearly skewed misquotes of Smith in both their interviews with me and their public comments within hours of Smith posting a blog entry or writing the tweet they were mangling.
The answer may lie in the power of #metoo or the endless whack-a-mole of paper-thin bullshit but it may also be something to do with B’s “Sarkeesian problem” — harassers could identify every toxic social tendency that lead them to join a hate mob, but admitting to what they did would put them too close to their political enemies.
B opines:
“You don’t want to be the person when, you know, like the dice fall that’s standing closest to Zak, right? Like think of it as like you’re tossing a live grenade to the person on your left, right, like, you know? You don’t want to be standing closest to him when the grenade goes off.”
The Only Community They Have
I suspect Geist was constantly passing on the sort of misinformation she did in our interviews simply because she thought about Smith so often that she could no longer remember where she heard anything. And, naturally, she did not have the moral sense that she should check some of these claims before talking to someone doing a study and recording her.
They assumed their detailed narratives of the feelings sparked by the claims they had manufactured would naturally be more important to me, a psychotherapist, than the reality.
Others, including Hill and Yaksha, were so constantly reckless with the truth that I first assumed everything they knew about Zak was a result of a long game of gossipy telephone. But then I would find them manufacturing clearly skewed misquotes of Smith in both their interviews with me and their public comments within hours of Smith posting the blog entry or writing the tweet they were mangling — they were the telephone, all by themselves. Which causes a question to occur to me that must also have occurred to you by now: Why did so many of these people agree to talk to me? On tape — without asking for anonymity?
Perhaps when I said I was a researcher they did not understand what a researcher really does? (Research.) Perhaps, in the course of an hour or so, they had worked themselves into a state where they already believed their own lies? I suspect something else at work. I suspect they were conditioned to operating in a post-truth Internet zone where evidence was the least important concern. They assumed their detailed narratives of the feelings sparked by the claims they had manufactured would naturally be more important to me, a psychotherapist, than the reality. And why not? This is how it had worked for their entire online careers. This behavior had won them sympathy for years. And in an attention economy it only took a little work to turn that sympathy into money.
Many of the harassers appeared to have a very genuine belief that lying about abuse, harassment, or other harmful behavior was an acceptable form of “venting” and that people who did it should get a pass, no matter how much damage this caused to the people they lied about.
There were, for sure, many harassers who refused to speak to me, and it is easy to see why. Whitney Beltrán, for example, the designer who had used what her colleague Ash Kreider referred to as a “GamerGate tactic” against Smith by contacting all of their mutual twitter followers the day of the accusations and telling them to unfollow him. When Smith tried to defend himself by telling his side of the story, Beltrán shamelessly played the gender card by calling him a “creepy stalker” for doing it. On top of that she actively told her followers to ignore the models, artists and porn actresses that were speaking up for Smith, as if these women did not have far more intimate knowledge of what had really happened than Beltrán, who — so far as I could discover — had never directly interacted with Smith and certainly never spent any time with Nagy. Beltrán knew what she did, she probably knew it was wildly dishonest, she knew her fellow harassers were being sued, and she definitely knew she was under contract to Hasbro. So no wonder she was not going to talk to someone who asked questions for a living.
The behavior of Beltrán and others matches the active mendacity familiar from studies of the boring old run-of-the-mill right-wing trolls and incels and is undeniably a factor here, but so is something subtler. Many of the harassers appeared to have a very genuine belief that lying about abuse, harassment, or other harmful behavior was an acceptable form of “venting” and that people who did it should get a pass, no matter how much damage this caused to the people they lied about. Chris McDowall said as much when he was trying to justify changing the “no lying” rule in his OSR forum to me — “People just wanted to vent”.
This is in many ways the story of an online community fighting an offline one.
And this is the point where I mouth the cliché of my profession: a great many of these people need better mental health care, and real communities around them that provide them with that and remind them to use it in ways they can feel are credible.
I know therapy is no panacea, but so many of the interviewees, especially Smith’s former allies with their sudden lists of retroactive grudges, had no-one in their lives who said “Why not call him and talk about it?”.
Harasser A (who is white, not queer, and able-bodied) perhaps said more than he knew when he mentioned that the group of online RPG friends his career grew from, the catty, mutually-distrustful, palace-coup-prone, wildly dishonest “Mongrel Banquet Club” was the first community, online or off, he ever belonged to.
I do not know how you feel about that, but it depressed the hell out of me.
The Extremely Online vs The Extremely Offline
In the end we are left with a large group of harassers who cancelled someone on vibes alone because, well, he spent a decade trying to tell them to stop being the kind of harassers who cancelled people on vibes alone.
Smith allowed me to do a psych eval on him without hesitation:
As a psychotherapist I can tell you he exhibits no symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder or any of the other diagnoses du jour Internet strangers like to pin on him, though he does show minor signs of the depression and anxiety that you would expect from someone who has almost nothing because he was betrayed by the person he loved most and dozens of people he had tried to help.
In our interviews, no-one, including the harassers most gleeful about Smith’s cancellation, claimed the current public conversation online about games is actually good.
He is still remarkably high-functioning, all things considered, but he would undeniably be dead by suicide several times over if it were not for the coterie of family, porn friends, artists and activists who knew Mandy, do not believe a word of what she said, help out with grocery money and keep his lawyers coffers full while trying to avoid having their own careers destroyed by publicly supporting someone they love. The financial records tell the same tale, and all add up. I met Smith’s alleged “sock puppets” —they are real women. They are not scared to testify under oath for him, but they are terrified of Mandy’s online mob.
This is in many ways the story of an online community fighting an offline one.
Believing It and Not Believing It
And what about Shoe Skogen’s dream? Is the RPG community a warmer, happier place without Smith?
Short answer? No. It is, in many ways, harder and harsher than ever.
Geist describes a conflict with Skogen shortly after the latter took over in the Discord forum they shared:
Geist: “She messages me directly and I say don’t. Right?”
Me: “What does the message say?”
Geist: “Fuck if I know basically it says like “Stop stop throwing me under the bus” type shit and I say, like, “This is a boundary. You are crossing the boundary. You know, I say that in actually pretty articulate words. I basically say like, I do not want to have this conversation with you, I do not want to have this conversation in private, there is a power imbalance. I am talking about your role as a mod and you’re directly contacting me”.
Me: “Okay.”
Geist: “She steamrolls that, info dumps like a multi-paragraph explanation about their feelings as though I haven’t read it multiple times. And I refuse to acknowledge it and continue on on the server, to a degree and then like, go away. And because I’m still getting messages, and like, you know, and panicking because I don’t like conflict, and I don’t like any of this shit. I don’t like any of it, I don’t want it. Um, it is a thing that I would like to be as far fucking away from as possible. I finally go back I write in the server ‘Hey, you know, this is how I was directly contacted by someone that I am describing, I do not feel safe here. I do not feel like this is a safe space, I do not feel like this is acceptable. I do not think that you can have power if you try to have a private conversation with a person to influence their like response.’ Calling or throwing someone under a bus is like fucking insulting. I’m not throwing you under a bus. If I was throwing you under a bus, I would say you’re unfit to be a fucking mod because of the fact that you’re an unfit person. And I would attack your personhood. If I say the action you took is fucking harmful to people then I’m talking about the fucking action and you need to have the fucking adulthood in you to get the fucking cock out of your mouth, get your fucking brain together like anyone gave you something to think with and fucking imagine that you’re not the center of the fucking universe.
Then Skogen’s girlfriend Cavegirl accuses her of abuse, Geist accuses Cavegirl of lying about Geist, and then, eventually, Chris McDowall turned the server over to another one of the people who was most aggressive in harassing Smith — “AuraTwilight” or “Paimon Prowler” or “Jared Cassady”, a self-styled cult leader who disappeared offline after — I swear I am not making this up — being widely accused of being an abuser in the online gay greaser-furry hypnosis-fetish community. You can Google it.
As of this writing, at least one of the new current mods was openly a member and active participant on Something Awful’s gamer-trolling boards.
Skogen got cancelled and insists its really unfair. B claims Skogen stole money from Nagy’s donation coffers.
A human being’s entire career, life and future have been decimated and still I cannot get a straight answer on why.
In the wider scene outside the forum, a year after Smith was dogpiled the wider RPG community was cancelling so many authors and community members and for such confusing reasons so fast that on any given day the most common form of discourse on RPG twitter was about the poor quality of the discourse itself. At least fifty of the people involved in harassing Smith had been tossed off Twitter at one time or another for harassment even before Elon Musk bought the platform. In our interviews, no-one, including the harassers most gleeful about Smith’s cancellation, claimed the current public conversation online about games is actually good.
By all accounts, fans cooperate less and create less in public, and the universe of games on the web is now organised into small, nonpublic Discord servers centered around popular game streamers or specific companies and their products.
Geist: “Like, I just don’t, you know, like — it — misinformation is so rife on the Internet, that it’s very difficult to trust people on those, right? Like high degrees of trust are necessary to believe when someone says you should cancel this person that you should cancel them. We don’t have high degrees of trust.”
Me: “So — So you believed Mandy? You believe Mandy?”
Geist: “I do. Um, and I don’t. Right? Like I don’t.”
I could pretend I knew what that means but I do not, especially from Geist — who is in regular contact with Mandy. A human being’s entire career, life and future have been decimated and still I cannot get a straight answer on why. The next time I interview Geist she says this, which I understand a little better:
Geist: “Whenever people from like academia are like ’It seems like you’ve had a wild time since leaving’ I’m like ‘Yeah, I have!’ But like, look, the only person that’s ever backed my career, in many cases, is a man who has been #MeTooed?”
Me: “Yeah.”
Geist: “Do you think I feel great about that? Like, do you think that that’s what I wake up in the morning thankful for? Like, I feel like shit every single morning most of the time.”
