If you already have a staunch stance on Zoe Quinn, this probably isn’t going to change your mind. This is going to be long and inelegant, but I want to get this thing done and put to rest the urge to stop remaining silent about this.I realize a lot of this is “You have no proof, I refuse to believe until you do the legwork, etc” stuff. That’s fine. I’ve been told a lot of things in confidence and I’m hoping that some of these people will eventually come forward. Not even a week before thezoepost happened, I was in a pub shooting my mouth off about what a cool person Zoe Quinn was. I thought it was cool that she didn’t compromise what she believed in during that shitty game jam that ultimately crashed. Even now as I type this, my instinct is to further that idea with, “I thought it was cool how she also ___________.” Then I wonder what she has actually done. There’s just this incredible amount of spin and
feeling around this person who ostensibly has done dick. Kind of weird how Zoe Quinn is so influential for having done almost nothing. The thing is, for whatever reason, she’s a really neat idea to get behind. A young person making games who believes in things strongly and also wants women to be treated better and is somehow the incarnation of all this really cool morality. Why wouldn’t you want to holler, “Fuckin eh! Give’em shit!” to that?
Thezoepost happened and it turned out that Zoe Quinn wasn’t the saint of video games she was selling herself as. I had my laughs on twitter about it and then generally disregarded the thing. Weeks passed and curiosity nagged me. I started asking around. What presented itself was a clear picture of Zoe Quinn as an abusive manipulating sociopath, to the extent that it was actually incredible that so many were leaping to her defence. I’ve realized that it’s mostly because Zoe has lied to these people as well; many have no clue of the degree to which they’re being manipulated. Others know exactly what she’s truly like and still protect her. Regardless, Zoe and her cartel exert a hegemony over those who disagree or contend with their agenda.
This is a real thing. Isn’t that fucked up?
So here’s where you get your tinfoil hat out.
-Wolf Wozniak, a game developer acquaintance of Zoe, expresses anxiety over the potential ostracism for coming forward with information about her. He states on twitter that he was sexually harassed by Zoe and is immediately shouted down by Zoe’s cartel. He retracts his statements. He could be lying, or maybe this is an example of Zoe’s agreement club at play.
http://i.imgur.com/G0XIkB6.pnghttp://i.imgur.com/lqs1bJy.png-Mallorie Nasrallah comes forward with an account of dealing with Zoe years ago, revealing her as a lying, selfish, ungrateful manipulator. Zoe claims to have killed a man. That’s the TL;DR, read the thing.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10152274323855882&set=a.412206445881.199341.597085881&type=1-A game jam supporting women is ruined by Zoe Quinn. You’ve probably heard about it by now. You can get into the semantics all you want, but Zoe Quinn was instrumental in destroying the event and mockingly posted about it on twitter. This was probably both because she had her own game jam in mind that she felt this would steal attention from, and because she wants to be a gatekeeper of knowing what is right for women.
http://thefineyoungcapitalists.tumblr.com/post/96578864050/on-apologizing-for-getting-punched-in-the-facehttp://imgur.com/hevcUWxMaybe these are all just isolated events manipulated into an ugly context.
-Chloe Van K. has a boyfriend, Patrick Lindsey. Patrick has this “cool lesbian friend” who he worked on a game with. This friend would ritually call up Patrick in the middle of the night and need talking down from whatever mental situation she’d gotten herself into over the game’s development and Chloe’s potential interference. Then Chloe would also speak to the frenzied individual and affirm her that she had no plans to fuck up their game dev dreams. Patrick eventually cheated on Chloe with this friend, who is obviously Zoe Quinn. Zoe told Patrick that they were soulmates, she always loved him, Chloe wanted only to fuck up their plans and their lives and that Chloe could never understand him like Zoe does. Might I also just add here that flinging the use of “love” around so freely is a sign of sociopathic behaviour? Cool. Zoe and Patrick moved to San Francisco and within a few days, he’d had enough of her. Also, the game they were working on was Depression Quest. It kind of seems like Zoe Quinn will take the path of least resistance for her own benefit, or sometimes just create that path. If it seems like fucking Patrick to enlist him as part of her rad indie developer lifestyle dream will work, she’ll go for it. That’s depressing.
-Another interesting item is Zoe’s Deviant Nation account. That’s the site where she got naked on the internet 7 years ago.
Here is where we see Training Quinn in action. There are stories about attacking men who are often trying to sexually assault her, resulting in her having to leave her unsafe job. She also just hates “normal” jobs, which is the reason why she doesn’t work “normal” jobs to this day; every time she does, a man sexually assaults her. It was during this period that she did the photoshoot with Mallorie Nasrallah, but while she usually is quite forward about her violent incidents, she never wrote about the time she stabbed a guy in the eye and killed him. Maybe it was an insecure time where she wanted to sound tough, or tell some cool stories to build up her internet persona’s character. Kind of weird that it fits into the paradigm of Zoe as a manipulator though. Later, someone sick of Zoe flirting with her boyfriend sends Zoe an email calling out a bunch of claims she’s made. Even back then, Zoe demonstrated these trends.
(Images of these posts here)
http://i.imgur.com/K4MbxBE.jpghttp://i.imgur.com/wh1kDAO.jpghttp://i.imgur.com/VpCsmwA.jpgLook it up here, there are archived versions of her posts all the way back to 2006 (she went by “Locke Valentine” back then).
https://web.archive.org/web/20070702023716/http://www.deviantnation.com/girls/Locke/This isn’t even all of it. There are people afraid to come forward because they’ll face the same reaction Wolf Wozniak got, they’ll probably lose their jobs, be branded as a misogynist or
Zoe will make rape accusations against them. You are welcome to believe I am just making any of this up for some “fuck you, white girl” agenda, but this is what I’ve actually been told from sources very close to her. To be honest, I don’t even know why I give a shit about this beyond having a few cackles at twitter and then moving on. After talking to these people, I would just have an extremely guilty conscience not saying anything while this individual is paraded around as the patron saint of righteous video games. You should see what this is doing to the people she’s abused.
I feel like this is where doctrine like “Listen and Believe” is failing us. For sure listen and be open to believing, but make an effort to verify. Women are allowed to be subjected to scrutiny as well.
This doesn’t come from a place of “women lie about abuse to win free shit or get their way”. My mother was sexually harassed and sexually assaulted in her workplace and took the fuckers to court in a monumental lawsuit. No one believed her, no one wanted to hear about it and it finally took a lot of courage and resolve to keep pressing on and seek some kind of legal vindication. She was treated like a sub-human sex object to mock, jeer at, make sexual advances towards and even use physical violence against, at an executive level of a corporation. Christ, and that’s only the stuff she’s told me about.
Imagine how cool it is to know stuff like this goes on and then see entry-level cosmetic victims want to take up a similar sisterhood of survivorship. Finally, through legal proceedings and enough other witnesses and women who had gone through similar treatment coming forward, people listened to, believed, and verified the claims my mom made. It would have been great if people believed my mom right away, but she wouldn’t expect the individuals involved to be summarily terminated upon the mere mention of what she was dealing with. However, this is the kind of hysteria we’re expected to put into play with Zoe Quinn.
A lot of these people are actually doing something terrific. They’re coming to the aid of a women they believe is in danger.
We want this! The problem is that when anyone tries to verify what she’s saying, any conflicting accounts are instantly dismissed. Even when there are a lot of them. We so badly want to save a woman facing abuse that we don’t even want to entertain the notion that there’s a degree to which her story may be inaccurate. I suppose it’s a bit more complex than just trying to verify. In Josh Mattingly’s case, it would have been a difficult situation if there were no facebook records to prove he was a dickhead (
http://i.imgur.com/DopysNy.png). In my mom’s case, she probably would have had to just walk away from a 2 decades long career with nothing if no one else came forward to corroborate her side in the face of several men claiming there were no actual incidents that took place. It’s a complex situation! Being open to hearing any account without immediately discarding them goes a long way and is vital, and is something we aren’t seeing a lot of in regards to Zoe.
Another part of the problem is that vocal or influential people try to weigh in without knowing anything about what’s going on. For some reason, I showed up in the top secret GameJournoPros mailing list for having a laugh at Zoe’s expense (
http://i.imgur.com/TSeEf4t.png). Later, Chris apologized in an email to me and told me he had no idea really what the situation was, and had just acted off a gut instinct against “kids these days”. Again, this is actually a really good thing,
usually. If Zoe wasn’t an abusive manipulator, then
we’d definitely want this reaction. We’d want an
informed public who had at least done a modicum of investigation rallying against those who sought to disturb someone’s life for no other reason than the fact that she happened to be a woman, spreading lies about her or trying to ruin her life just because they don’t like her, or because she fucked a few guys. Even so, knowing what is being said about Zoe is true and is most likely not even close to a full account of what she will do and has done to get her way, harassing her is fucking stupid. Are you really going to kill her because of any of this? Or even try to scare her? Why? If you believe Zoe Quinn is a terrible person, wouldn’t you want her at her best to be able to attempt to rebut your claims with a sound mind and find herself unable to do so because she has lied? The harassment and threats were idiotic, but luckily mostly carried out by children. I think the actual danger to Zoe is minimal, which still isn’t a real comfort. It shouldn’t have happened, and it sucks to be at a point where you’d have to make concessions such as this to someone so vile.
I think Zoe comes from a childhood of abuse. People like this can easily get into a survival mode where they’ll make selfish moves at the expense of others for what they feel is self-preservation; anything is justified. Hell, even people without a background of abuse do this. With abuse cases though, this behaviour can be amplified into sociopathic territory. I think it’s hard for a lot of people to believe that Zoe would go to this extent to concoct fictions to ostracize others or position herself into favourable situations, but with that background coupled with her self-ascribed love of creating stories, I really don’t think it’s too far fetched. She has a writing blog (thehumblebumble.tumblr.com) where she claims to have worked for several years writing and editing articles and materials.
http://i.imgur.com/tiea9on.pngAnd as also stated by Eron Gjoni in thezoepost:
http://i.imgur.com/AjzofDC.pngThis is while she was in Toronto, after apparently exhausting all her contacts in Albany, NY for job leads, money, or simply had enough of her shit. So it’s easy to see why people she meets suspect nothing of her. Sociopaths don’t often broadcast their manipulative tendencies. I had an abusive step-father for most of my childhood who was sociopathic as fuck. Everyone thought he was a really nice guy. He wasn’t. I still dream about that cunt at least 3 times a week, maybe actually more since this Zoe Quinn shit has started to nag at me. Even those with well-tuned bullshit sensors are easily persuaded; Zoe is by all accounts a carefree zany fungirl a lot of the time who pours forth good feelings about video games. I can’t really blame this gamespot guy too much for trying to make me feel bad for losing his favour when I posted stuff about Zoe on twitter.
http://i.imgur.com/qHlyrFn.pngIn the midst of scandal, people with nothing to hide will come forward immediately and talk to anyone who has questions. This is why I knew Matthew Wegner, co-chair of the IGF, wasn’t part of some dirtbag-vote-rigging-conflict-of-investment-interest scheme when accused. He immediately got on IRC to answer questions. He wanted to make everything perfectly clear (plus I met the guy and he is the quintessential handsome man, plus a gentleman. He even let me use his Oculus Rift). Liars first try to contain the issue once exposed, then hide and regroup and take time to make sure they have their story straight. They deny any claims and make very controlled appearances. They’ll try to “teach the controversy” instead of definitively answering any questions. Then they start to downplay the scope of the scandal or their involvement. Finally comes gradual admission, while still portraying themselves as a victim and reaching out to build bridges. Zoe Quinn did all of this.
FUCKING EVEN ROB FORD DID ALL THIS I encourage you all to investigate on your own. There are people out there willing to talk to you and answer your questions. Maybe when they feel they aren’t in danger, they’ll come forward. There is a way to proceed that is completely civil. Ask questions. Be diligent.
Be kind.
