Shortly after Quinn initiated email contact, the two women were on the phone. It didn’t go well. Owens said she found Quinn “pompous” and that she didn’t think Quinn’s concerns, which varied from the potential of children getting doxxed by Social Autopsy to the threat she thought Gamergate posed to Owens herself, were well-founded. Quinn, Owens also told me, said she was calling on behalf of a group of anti-bullying organizations, but wouldn’t say which ones. Things got increasingly heated, and then Quinn broke into tears and said something like “I don’t think you understand — this is going to ruin everything!” Owens said she found it odd and suspicious that Quinn started crying, especially given that she was calling as a representative of various organizations. After they got off the phone, the two had a brief email correspondence which culminated, Owens said, in Quinn asking her not to contact her again. (In a DM conversation, Quinn acknowledged she had teared up, but denied saying anything that Owens could have interpreted as “This is going to ruin everything!” She also denied having claimed to be speaking for anyone other than herself.)
About 45 minutes after Quinn sent her final email, Owens said she started receiving racist hate mail at the main Kickstarter contact email for Social Autopsy, and at her own personal email — the first email she received simply said “NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER” (Owens is African-American). It soon became a deluge of harassment, some of it violent, with many of the fake email addresses the harassers used containing words like “gaming” or a variation thereof. “I spent an entire night being harassed — I couldn’t even answer the real questions from people that were coming from our Kickstarter campaign,” said Owens. Here are some of the messages she received, which are quite graphic:
By the time I spoke with her on Saturday night, Owens had convinced herself that it was Quinn sending her at least some of those harassing notes. For one thing, she found the fake handles suspicious. Gaming was “an industry and a community that I had, prior to talking to Zoe Quinn, no idea about — they were not on our radar.” It also seemed a little too pat that Quinn had warned her there would be a wave of harassment and then, voilà, there was a wave of harassment, especially given that the Kickstarter had been operating for the better part of a day with nary a critique from haters. I pressed Owens on this: she really thought Quinn sent her the “NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER” note, and the other over-the-top hateful ones? “She sent or knew who sent them,” she responded. “100 percent undeniable.” The belief seems to hinge almost entirely on the facts that the abusive emails came in after she spoke with Quinn, and that both Quinn and some of the notes mentioned gamers.