Wallace
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jun 23, 2015
Found this article posted on Medium, describing the circular firing squad of leftists in RPGs. Notable names include David "Olivia" Hill, Anna "Ash" Krieder, Zak, Mike Mearls, and Paul "Ettin" Matijevic. About the only one in the industry that isn't a harasser is Zak.
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.
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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
Since lying about Zak Smith is something of a cottage industry now, before I go any further, a few basics:
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
“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.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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
