A Statement Regarding Jourdain Searles, Kyle Kallgren, and Lina Morgan
A week ago Jourdain Searles and Kyle Kallgren leveled a number of false accusations about me, and about several people associated with me. This is not the first time they’ve done this; it’s part of a pattern dating back two years where Jourdain will issue serious (but vague) allegations and then shortly delete everything after it’s gained attention. These lies have hurt very many people, but despite the serious pain they’ve inflicted on us, we’ve never reacted publicly in the hope that they would eventually lose interest and stop. I have never had any desire to amplify this drama, and rarely spoken about it privately except with the people who were directly involved. I once considered both Kyle and Jourdain close friends, and I’m scared about how responding now may hurt them, but this has escalated to a level where the burden of secrecy is now too heavy to bear; it has caused too much harm to my life and to the lives of people I care about. Everyone knows that I am intensely protective of my privacy, and I would have happily taken this story to my grave if they would just leave us alone, but their stories are not true and it is now abundantly clear that they are never going to stop.
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Background (2015-201
Around the end of 2015, I needed a new place to live after I broke up with my then-girlfriend Lindsay Ellis. (We stayed friends, and we’re still friends now.) I asked my friend and colleague Kyle Kallgren if he could room with me, he agreed, and we set up the new place in November 2015.
Jourdain Searles was an aspiring comedian/critic Kyle met through a dating app in 2016; she recognized him from his YouTube videos. I think I had only met her a few times when I noticed that there was a third toothbrush in the bathroom all of a sudden. Eventually it became clear that they intended this to be a permanent arrangement; her housing situation at her previous residence was going badly and she needed a place to stay. I told them they couldn’t just make these decisions without me, but I decided that I was willing to let her move in anyway, even though she was scratching by and couldn’t pay rent; it’s hard trying to make it in the big city, people had been generous with me when I was struggling and I wanted to pay it forward.
I’m not a person who gets very close to people, but by my standards Jourdain soon became a close friend. She was a lot of fun, and good for my social life. She had a bad habit of being volatile on Twitter, though; she would get in long tedious arguments on there or post vague subtweets all day, which made me kind of wary of her.
In the summer of 2018, Jourdain and Kyle were starting to have serious problems; I would hear really loud fights. Kyle and Jourdain broke up briefly during this period and Jourdain started staying at other friends’ places for a while, including our mutual friend Lina Morgan, who is the co-host of my podcast. (Lina is a trans woman, and only transitioned very recently; at the time she was living as a man, under a different name.) After couch-crashing at different places for a week, she eventually returned to our apartment for lack of anywhere else to go and ended up patching things up with Kyle. By that point I’d decided that I could afford my own place. I moved out shortly after, Kyle and Jourdain seemed to have smoothed things over and got a place of their own, and everything went back to normal for a while.
April 2019
Things started to go bad when Kyle’s ex wrote up a callout post on Twitter accusing him of abuse.
Let me say clearly and for the record that Kyle had my complete support against this accusation. This is not because I believed his side of the story; I never heard his side of the story. I supported him because the story his ex told, the one they described as abuse, was very clearly not abuse. Their story was that Kyle dumped them, and when the ex started freaking out and refused to leave his apartment, Kyle ended up calling the police. I learned secondhand that this leaves out some key details – namely, the ex was threatening suicide and hurting themselves – but it hardly matters. I’m embarrassed that I have to explain this but you haven’t been victimized if you refuse to respect an ex’s boundaries to the point where the cops have to be called. The only harm that came to Kyle’s ex, according to their story, was that the experience was “triggering”; they even said that Kyle stayed with them during the ordeal and made sure they got back home safely. I reached out privately to support him, as did several others including Lindsay (who had moved away from New York three years earlier). Kyle reached out to his ex during the ordeal, and they resolved the matter privately. A number of mutual contacts supported the ex regardless, and Kyle seemed to take it very hard.
Jourdain was very stressed about this, understandably. I advised her to talk to Lindsay because she’s been dogpiled with false accusations before and is generally pretty smart about how to handle these things. Lindsay gave them both strong advice to put out the fire before it did any damage to Kyle or his reputation: put out a statement privately to friends on Facebook, do not engage publicly, and say nothing at all about it on Twitter. Independently, I gave her the same advice. Kyle did make a statement to friends apologizing for any hurt he’d caused. Jourdain, meanwhile, did not follow our advice and started getting in long loud arguments on social media with Kyle’s attackers. Kyle decided he needed a break from the world, so he disappeared to his hometown of D.C. for a week where he was incommunicado with everyone, including Jourdain.
I sensed through some brief texts I had with Jourdain that she was struggling with the situation, but I figured she could vent with Lina, who was a lot closer to Jourdain than I was. However, I learned that there was trouble brewing in that direction also. I saw Lina a couple times that week, and Lina was already getting vocally frustrated with the texts Jourdain was sending. From what I gathered, Lindsay and Jourdain had fallen out because she hadn’t followed Lindsay’s advice, and that was affecting Lina and Jourdain’s friendship too. I decided to avoid the situation some more, but the situation found me.
May 2019
On May 13, 2019, I got a ring at my doorbell and it was Jourdain, crying and panicking. I gathered quickly that something bad had happened; I checked my phone while she was in the bathroom and found I had missed several messages from Jourdain and also from several of her friends who were concerned about her safety. Kyle was nowhere to be found. Though he had returned to New York by this point, he had apparently lost his phone in D.C. and was unreachable. I knew he was somewhere out in the city because I had run into him at the train station earlier that day. That was the last time I ever saw him.
I sat down and let Jourdain vent for an hour until she felt better. I barely said a word; I just sat and listened. At the end of it, here is what I knew happened, from Jourdain’s own words:
- Lindsay had gotten annoyed with Jourdain for ignoring her advice and making the situation worse.
- Jourdain reacted defensively and the two argued. Jourdain eventually apologized to Lindsay.
- Jourdain felt Lindsay hadn’t been receptive enough to her apology so she followed it up several days later with another Facebook message, demanding that Lindsay apologize for not being more sympathetic to her during the Twitter ordeal
- Lindsay unfriended her on Facebook instead
- Lina listened to Jourdain’s account and didn’t think, despite Jourdain’s accusations to the contrary, that Lindsay had been abusive or bullying in unfriending her or not apologizing; to Lina, it just sounded like two people falling out (this is also how it sounded to me)
- Jourdain refused to let it go and kept pestering Lina with texts over the course of a week, trying to get Lina to change her mind, making Lina more and more frustrated.
- That night, Lina had finally snapped at her and told her to stop calling because she was having dinner with someone. Lina turned off her phone at this point to end the conversation.
- Jourdain had a panic attack and kept calling frantically, despite Lina’s phone being off. Lina must have turned her phone back on at some point because Jourdain eventually did manage to get through
- Lina really lost her temper at this point and yelled at her. I wasn’t told exactly what Lina said to her, but Jourdain was very hurt by it.
Jourdain’s account didn’t give me any indication that she felt she bore any responsibility in this, which made me concerned. I know Lindsay can be short with people, and I figured Lina must have said something really harsh. But I, like Lindsay, had also advised Jourdain to not engage on Twitter, and I too had been offended that I was ignored; I thought her actions were immature and dangerous, considering that Kyle was the one who’d have to bear the brunt of any shitstorm she stirred up. So, based on what she told me, it didn’t seem like she had any right to demand an apology from Lindsay, nor that Lindsay was out of line in unfriending her. It also sounded like Jourdain had bulldozed past some obvious boundaries with Lina. My judgment (which I kept to myself) was that she was deflecting her share of the blame for this. But there was one other point that, more than anything, I found really disturbing:
- During her hour at my apartment, one of the many things she told me was that Kyle had sent some messages to Lindsay, checking in to make sure that Kyle and Lindsay were still okay regardless of Lindsay’s rift with Jourdain. He agreed with Lindsay that Jourdain was out of line.
- Jourdain found out about it (she didn’t say how) and became offended that he didn’t back her up
- Jourdain argued with Kyle until she convinced him to message Lindsay again, this time rescinding his earlier messages and defending Jourdain, which ended with Kyle and Lindsay cutting off contact with each other
This was seriously worrying. It would be one thing if Kyle had simply changed his mind, but Jourdain presented it to me as a screaming match they’d had, like the ones I’d heard them having in our apartment, and now it was costing Kyle friendships. Worse, Jourdain didn’t seem to be concerned at all with how losing a friend might affect Kyle. To be blunt, this was starting to sound like actual abusive behavior.
After about an hour, she was in a better mood and she felt stable enough that she could get home on her own. At that point she told me forcefully that she had been putting up with “too much for too long” and she was “done taking it.” I prayed that that wasn’t as ominous as it sounded. It was.
A day later, she declared on Facebook to all our friends that Lina had “abused [her] emotionally” That post was a lot longer on accusations than the stream of consciousness she gave me the night before, and a lot shorter on details. In a follow-up post, she started calling people racist for not abandoning their abusive white friend. Lina didn’t tell me her side of the story for another month or so; I think we were both too rattled to talk about it. I didn’t need Lina’s side; everything I needed to know came from Jourdain’s own mouth that night.
After a couple weeks, Jourdain upped the accusation from “emotional abuse” to sexual assault.
Her story is that Lina kissed her at a party in March 2019. I cannot testify to that since I didn’t see it, but here’s the part I can attest to: The night in May 2019 in my apartment during her hour-long cry, she mentioned offhand, “…[Lina] kissed me once,” then moved on to another subject. She did not say a single other thing about it, nor did she seem at all upset about it (especially compared to all the other things she seemed extremely upset about). I did not in any way get the sense, at that moment, that she was accusing Lina of anything with that statement. I found out later that she told multiple people about the kiss when it happened, and they all say the same thing, that no one got the sense that she felt hurt or violated by it; she relayed it in the tone of gossip, not accusation. This happened months before their final argument; Jourdain and Lina stayed close friends up until then.
On the other hand, I can tell you that the person who *did* come to me to say that they were made uncomfortable by the other’s sexual advances was, in fact, Lina, a year before any of this had happened. This was in June of 2018, shortly after the period where she had been crashing at Lina’s; Jourdain got back together with Kyle, but a couple days later Jourdain made a pass at Lina one night while drunk. Lina was offended, and told me about it that week; I remember she actually stopped hanging out with Jourdain for a while because of it, before things cooled down and they became close again. That is all I can attest to directly; any more will have to come from the people involved.
June 2019-present
I attempted to stay friends with Jourdain, partially in the hopes that the situation could be salvaged, but mostly I was concerned for Kyle at that point. He’s struggled with his mental health the entire time I’ve known him, and I was worried. I was hoping to get to a point where I could pull him aside and have a man-to-man conversation with him about everything, but I wasn’t sure how to approach him, and I never got the chance. A few weeks later Jourdain learned that I had organized a small karaoke party to which I did not invite her or Kyle; she blew up at me over it and announced that our friendship was over. I never spoke to Kyle or Jourdain again.
I watched the public accusation hang over Lina’s head. It mentally destroyed her; her work suffered; her health suffered. She offered to resign as co-host of our podcast so that I wouldn’t be tarnished by Jourdain’s accusation against her, and I considered accepting. At the same time, I watched as Kyle, who had just gone an entire week without speaking to or contacting Jourdain, announce their engagement, and then I watched as he cut ties with all our mutual friends one by one, even the ones with no connection to the drama.
A few months later, Jourdain started attacking us (me, Lina, Lindsay) on Twitter. We started getting nasty accusations from randos in our mentions. She and Kyle both attacked us on livestreams. We held our tongues in the hopes that it would blow over. Eventually she deleted all her tweets, but other people, people who know nothing about the actual situation, still throw it at us sometimes. It’s loomed over all of us for two years. Jourdain knows a lot of people, she’s a broad networker and she’s had articles published in major outlets like the New York Times. She has a bigger platform than Lina and she’s used that to her advantage, and over the last two years both Kyle and Jourdain have occasionally fired potshots, subtweeted, or revived their allegations about us, always without context and sometimes without any clarity of what they’re even implying. None of us have ever said anything about them on any social media platform, public or private.
Meanwhile, I watched through social media as Kyle slipped into a serious depressive period. A few months ago, Kyle revealed on a private Facebook group for Youtubers that in September of 2020, because of the loss of all his friends and the resulting isolation, he attempted to kill himself – the exact thing that we were all scared would happen, given his history of poor mental health. I thought about reaching out to him, as I’ve thought about constantly since this happened, but only a week later Jourdain started attacking Lindsay and me again on Twitter, and Kyle moved in to back her up. Since they had no specific accusations, most observers just reacted in confusion. But I took it as a sign that those bridges would have to stay burnt. I wonder every day if I could have done more for Kyle. I tell myself that he’s an adult who makes his own decisions and I can’t be responsible for him, but I can’t stop myself from worrying about him.
I also worry for myself; the most obvious thing for me to have done is disassociate from Lina for my own protection. My podcast with Lina is a side project I do for fun; it’s not a substantial part of my income and I can abandon it without repercussions at any time. I know Lina regrets some of the things she said and did; Lina kissing Jourdain was a serious lapse in judgment, and we’ve had words about it. But I do not believe that one kiss makes her an abuser or a predator, especially since I already know that this is part of a years-long emotional entanglement in which both sides crossed boundaries, and that the accusation is being cynically deployed as ammunition in a completely unrelated conflict.
If you need any further evidence of Jourdain’s dishonesty, you can see how she has misrepresented and rearranged events to use the accusation against Lina to hurt Lindsay, even though Lindsay had already well removed herself from the situation by that point and didn’t even know about any of the rest of this for months. Jourdain was never close friends with Lindsay; arguably none of us were close with Lindsay at the time. Lindsay had moved away from New York only a few months after Kyle met Jourdain, and had by mid-2019 been in Los Angeles for nearly three years; none of the people in this story were in regular contact with her. At most Lindsay was a professional contact for Jourdain and a friend of friends; when Lindsay was in town we’d all get together and catch up and Jourdain would be invited along, but it was never anything more than that. The details of their falling out are entirely mundane, interpersonal and irrelevant to the public; Lindsay was well within her rights to unfriend Jourdain, and that had nothing to do with anything that came after.
The abuser, to be clear, is Jourdain; she’s a malicious bad actor, and has continually issued unspecific allegations (“racism,” “gaslighting,” “bullying”) that simply do not line up with the facts. Jourdain has always kept her accusations short of details and lashed out at anyone who asked for clarification. I have never sought to hurt her or Kyle; this is why I’ve avoided saying anything until now, and I dearly hope that I never have to talk about it again. I just want them to stop hurting me and the people I care about.
