Part of my take on this is that I just don’t think Gjoni is credible.
(Quick summary from Wikipedia for those who don’t know or who don’t remember: “In mid-August 2014 Eron Gjoni, Quinn’s former boyfriend, published the “Zoe Post”, a 9,425-word blog post, extensively quoting from personal chat logs, emails and text messages, detailing their relationship. According to Zachary Jason of Boston Magazine, who had spent three months in discussion with Gjoni, the post was designed to cause “maximum pain and harm” to Quinn.” Gjoni claims that Quinn emotionally abused him during their relationship.)
I don’t know if Quinn abused Gjoni, beyond the normal harm any cheating lover does when they lie to cover up their cheating, which I don’t think should be conflated with “abuse.”
Gjoni’s strongest claims about Quinn’s abuse – the “little emergent two player power / head game” he wrote about (which Ozy quotes here) – are either weakly supported, or not supported at all, in the chat logs Gjoni reproduced in the Zoepost. And the Zoepost also shows (imo) that Gjoni is deceptive and manipulative (he was pretending to extend the relationship in the hope of getting more material to attack Quinn with), and is more than willing to use misogyny to attack Quinn (in the Zoepost he nicknamed her ”Burgers and Fries” because she allegedly had sex with five guys, a misogynistic slut-bashing slur that took off with Gamergaters).
And I suspect some readers by now are thinking that I’d believe Gjoni if he were a woman, feminists are hypocrites, whatever happened to “believing the victim,” etc etc.
Here’s my take on “believing the victim”: If someone tells me “I was abused” or “I was raped,” I’m going to accept their account without question, for the purposes of that conversation. Because I’m aware of enormous harms that are caused to victims of rape and abuse by disbelief, and I don’t want to cause harm. It also matters that in the worse case scenario – if the story is a complete fabrication – I’m not doing any harm by accepting their account uncritically. (It’s not like I’m a courtroom.) From a “avoid harming people” perspective, the equation is easy.
But the Gjoni equation isn’t like that. This is more like walking into a public square, where X is being attacked by a mob, which is throwing eggs and rotten fruit at X and painting anti-Semitic signs to hang around X’s neck. And there, at the back of the mob, is Z, the person who targeted X in the first place, with a huge barrel of eggs and fruit and paint that Z is giving out to the mob. But Z says that deliberately enabling the mob is okay, because X is Z’s abusive ex.
Publicly subjecting the accused to extrajudicial punishment has changed the equation significantly. Uncritically believing Z is no longer a harmless position; failing to ask “is this story even true?” could now be harmful.
* * *
I don’t know if Quinn abused Gjoni, because I have only Gjoni’s word for it. But Gjoni doesn’t seem trustworthy to me – not because Gjoni is male, but because Gjoni is deceitful and manipulative in the logs Gjoni himself reproduced, because Gjoni’s decision to publicly share private relationship conversations shows that he’ll do unethical things to harm Quinn, because he contributes to and uses misogyny in his quest to punish Quinn for her alleged abuse, and because his attitude throughout Gamergate (which he more or less set off with the Zoepost) is one of indifference for the gargantuan collateral damage he’s caused.
In contrast, I do know that Gjoni emotionally abused Quinn, because he did it in public. Believing that isn’t a matter of believing or not believing Quinn; it’s a matter of believing my own eyes.
* * *
ETA: Some of what’s in this 2006 post I wrote is relevant.
It’s nice to see you calling out fake victims, Ampersand. I look forward to similar 600 word denouncements of Jackie, Crystal Magnum, Tawana Brawley, or any other fake victims that don’t happen to belong to your outgroup.
I think you (ampersand, not the above commenter) are probably right about this.
I’m primed to be sympathetic to people like who Eron Gjoni initially appeared to be. I have a lot of sympathy for people caught in the cycle of “my SO mistreated me, I got angry, they played the suicidality card, I backed down out of concern for their safety, then they mistreated me again.”
But that was a year ago and Gjoni is still at it.
If in the first week or so he had just said something like, “Ok, seriously, I was really angry when I wrote all that, but this is out of hand,” and then distanced himself from it, I’d have some sympathy for him. I’d still think that internet shaming his ex was wrong, but I’d understand it as a normal, run of the mill act of human weakness.
But that’s not what we have. It’s a year later and he’s litigating his restraining order in hopes of being allowed to feed gamergate more information on his ex, while collecting donations from gamergate to fund the legal campaign.
That’s really screwed up. Really, *really* screwed up.
@Patrick
If you really believed that Gonji was a victim of abuse, then you’re basically saying that victims should back down if the internet dogpiles their abusive exes, get over it within the year, not speak out about their abusive exes online (because that would be “internet shaming”), and quietly accept restraining orders that stifle their ability to speak out.
I’ve encountered you elsewhere, and I think you’re a good person. So I don’t think you’d EVER say something like that about someone you thought was a victim of abuse. This leads to believe that your starting point wasn’t really “Gonji is a victim; let’s analyze his behavior.”
The same applies to Amp. Gonji’s decision to share his personal communications – or to go with GamerGate etc – doesn’t seem that unethical if you’re starting with “he was a victim of abuse”. Which leads me to believe that you started from a place of skepticism. I think the reason you started from this place was because Gonji was a member of the outgroup.
@all
Just to be clear – I’m not currently taking any positions on the question of “was Quinn an abuser or not?” I haven’t read the Quinn report or any responses. Ozy and Barry have. Ozy thinks they show that she is; Barry thinks they don’t. I trust and like both of them so I’m exercising ambivalence on this.
I’m making a meta-point. This is a clear example of double standards. Not just of male/female, but outgroup/ingroup. Barry has finally discovered the question “we should always believe the victim – but was X really a victim?” And X turns out to be … a man. Who his ingroup – online feminists – already dislike. I’d be willing to believe Ampersand when he says that Gonji being a man or outgroup member had nothing at all to do with it – if he ever repeats this exercise of healthy skepticism with a female member of the ingroup, or anyone his ingroup thinks to be a victim (but Barry doesn’t.)
That said – you have my respect for taking a stand that other online feminists won’t articulate.
Correction; my sentence should read: I think the reason you (Ampersand, not Patrick) started from this place was because Gonji was a member of the outgroup.
Yeah. I’m actually saying that. I don’t think “is the victim of a non zero amount of abusive behavior” justifies unlimited retaliation. And in particular I don’t think “is the victim of the abusive behavior described” justifies the amount and extent of retaliation taking place, and planned to continue taking place.
We have courts for a reason. Private retaliation has a tendency to spiral out of control. While this particular incident may not have an available legal remedy, the general principle remains- privately administered “justice” meted out by the victim has a tendency to spiral out of control, and this plainly has.
I would have considered the initial Zoe Post thing to be a normal human response to being mistreated. Maybe not admirable, but normal. But there has to be a line, eventually. And this about as unambiguous example of going too far that I can imagine.
I think claiming otherwise is letting self righteousness replace any actual desire for justice. There is nothing about being abused that makes you incapable of abusing.
It would still be unethical. Yes, it would be sympathetic and understandable, but still wrong.
Look, if you tell me a victim of abuse Z hit their abuser X with a baseball bat as part of escaping the relationship, or in self-defense before escaping the relationship, I think that’s probably ethically okay. People have a right to self-defense, and pretty much anything a hostage could permissibly do to their kidnapper, I think a victim of abuse can do to their abuser.
But I don’t think the same standard applies to someone who is already out of the relationship and in no personal danger. As understandable and sympathetic as Z’s desire to hit X with a baseball bat is, it is still not okay for Z to assault X with a baseball bat.
No, when I first heard about the abuse (I think from Ozy’s tumblr), I initially believed Gonji’s account. Not in a “I’d vote guilty if I were on the jury” way, but in a “this seems credible and awful” way.
I really hate it when people decide to post about me, rather than (or in addition to) posting a response to what I said.
First of all, it’s an ad hom. The argument should stand or fall on its own merits, not based on who the speaker is.
Second of all, it goes against the norms of this blog to make a personal attack on another person commenting here. (And yes, there are plenty of examples of me invoking this norm to object to “ingroup” attacks on “outgroup” people.) So stop it.
@patrick – “Yeah. I’m actually saying that.”
Fair enough.
@Ampersand
“It would still be unethical. Yes, it would be sympathetic and understandable, but still wrong.”
Fair enough. There isn’t much in your post to suggest that Gonji’s actions were sympathetic and understandable – indeed you seem to be casting Gonji in the role of the bitter ex-boyfriend, rather than the over-reacting victim of abuse – but okay. I’ll take your word for it when you say this is how you would’ve spoken of someone you thought was a victim of abuse. (I know that sounds sarcastic but it’s really not.)
“First of all, it’s an ad hom. The argument should stand or fall on its own merits, not based on who the speaker is.”
But I’m not attacking your argument. I explicitly said that.
“Second of all, it goes against the norms of this blog to make a personal attack on another person commenting here.”
Fair enough. I am, in a sense, attacking you rather than your arguments, so I’ll stop.
Navin Kumar
His seeming desire to continue his (by his own admission) toxic relationship with Quinn makes him come off like a stalker to me.
I mean, here’s the thing: that post he wrote was already so long and so thorough that it was disturbing even before all this blew up. It’s hard to explain exactly, but even going in knowing “I’m about to read a post about two people I’ve never met cheating on each other” I read it and went “Wow, TMI, dude, TMI.”
But in any case he warned the world about his horrible ex. Post went viral, everybody heard his accusations and a substantial number of people believed them. That’s the cue to stop being in a relationship with her. It’s definitely not healthy or necessary for him, her or anybody else that he’s been picking at the open wound of their relationship for the last year.
Ampersand
In the modern world, this is true of every public accusation.
Any accusation has the potential to subject the accused to “extrajudicial punishment” from a flood of anonymous internet crusaders. At this point, do I even need to recite the litany of people who have been fired or threatened with death after something they’ve done or said has been posted online?
Remember that time that a woman complained about a rude joke about dongles and it got everybody involved fired? Or when those pizzeria owners went into hiding because they said in public they wouldn’t cater a gay wedding?
Neither of those things were even CLOSE to as bad as what Quinn’s accused of, but airing those things in public subjected them to pretty awful harassment, and given today’s climate that harassment was extremely predictable.
This means “Believe the victim” is a principle that’s really restricted only to purely private conversations with the victim.
Which, frankly, seems fine to me, I just wanted to put it in more explicit words.
Also, I’m not sure why it would be necessary to have an opinion about how truthful Gjoni was. He accused Quinn of cheating on him and then gaslighting him whenever he tried to confront her. Horrible behavior, certainly, but at the same time we don’t live in a Puritan colony and I don’t see the need to pin a scarlet letter on Quinn, and I’m honestly still one of those fringe people who thinks assholes should still be able to hold jobs.
I mean, as far as I can tell the only consequence of how much I believe him would be how much I trust Zoe Quinn, a complete stranger, to handle her personal relationships in a responsible manner.
Christopher – Obviously, I’m also one of those people who believe assholes should still be able to hold jobs, as I’ve posted about multiple times.
Yes, but I blame the people who did the firing, not the woman. The woman never pursued getting the man fired (only one of the guys was fired), said publicly that he shouldn’t be fired, and didn’t participate in or attempt to build an online harassment campaign against him. (Nor did any online harassment against him happen as a result of that incident, although people are still harassing her to this day.)
More generally, I wouldn’t object to an abuse victim saying “X abused me,” and continuing to say so. Everyone owns their own life story and has a right to tell it. And if Z simply saying “X abused me” leads to a harassment campaign against X, that sucks and is wrong, but I don’t blame Z for that.
But that isn’t all Gjoni did, by a long shot.
I don’t think it’s necessary for everyone to have an opinion about how truthful Gjoni is. But I do think his lengthy public vendetta against Quinn makes him someone whose actions and story should be critically examined, rather than accepted on its face in the name of “believing victims.” (Of course, critical examination doesn’t forclose coming to the conclusion that Gjoni is telling the truth.)
Update: I should clarify that I do think there are actions victims can take which are legitimate and ethical – for instance, the way that Bill Cosby’s victims have pursued justice against Cosby strikes me as fine. The end of pursuing justice is not wrong; but some means, including the means Gjoni used, are wrong.
When I broke up with my abusive ex – well, 6 or 7 years later when a chance encounter brought it all raining down on my psyche – I posted several long pieces about it and my relationship with her. It was a terrible decade that I spent with an emotional (and, rarely, physical) abuser. I’d managed to ignore it for a few years until a mutual friend started telling me about her & my wall collapsed.
I don’t remember giving out her name or address or phone number or email in those posts. Had people started harassing her, I certainly would have asked them to stop – as much as, to this day, I still wish nothing but misery and horror for her, I do not wish to be the cause of that misery and horror. I’m very far from the nicest, kindest, most forgiving person I know but I’m miles closer to that than Gjoni. I can hold a grudge for a long, long time. But there are lines not to be crossed and I think he’s gone over the horizon past those lines.
Re: believing the victim (I haven’t looked closely into the Zoepost, so I’m talking in more general terms here):
Domestic violence organizations that are current on best practices (which, unfortunately, a lot are not) have a screening process to figure out whether they’re talking to the abuser or the survivor in this relationship. Why? Because it is by no means uncommon for an abuser to contact a domestic violence organization claiming to be the abused person, in order to cut the person they’re abusing off from services. And the screening process, in my experience, isn’t a once-and-done thing – there’s a fairly thorough initial evaluation to access services, but staff and volunteers are trained to keep on listening for “red flags” that would suggest that the initial evaluation was wrong. Staff and volunteers are themselves screened in a similar way.
This, incidentally, is not something that typically comes up in the context of sexual violence and rape crisis work. It’s not common for someone to claim that they were sexually assaulted by someone who they actually sexually assaulted. I’ve never heard of anyone trying to deny their victim services in that way. And while people who are being abused by a partner sometimes resort to physical violence to defend themselves, I’ve never heard of one, say, raping their abuser as self-defense, and have no idea how that would even work.
Screening was developed mostly by LGBTQ-focused domestic violence organizations, because mainstream ones traditionally used a hetero/cisnormative gender-based screen (a “men abuse, women are victims” framework). This was causing serious problems for abused people in similar-gender relationships. Men had trouble accessing services at all (which is still a problem all too frequently), and women were ending up in shelters or support groups together with their abuser, or being denied services because their abuser called first. So, screening. But screening can and should be used with dissimilar-gender relationships too.
Of course, most people aren’t part of a domestic violence organization, and when they’re telling you about abuse, it’s not a matter of accessing formal services. So what’s an ordinary person to do?
I’d say Ampersand’s general strategy of believing, for purposes of the conversation, a person who comes to you for support around experiencing some type of violence, is a good one. Also, of course, remember that someone being an abuser doesn’t justify non-self-defensive violence against them.
@Lirael, thanks for that information, as I hadn’t known a lot of that before today.
Lirael, your generalizations reasonably match my professional experience with abusive people and situations.
But that’s not why I’m posting. I’m posting to appreciate this:
Awesome. Go, you.
Grace
Ampersand
Oh, I know, my point was this:
As far as I know Gjoni has accused Quinn of
1. Cheating on him
2. Using emotional blackmail and gaslighting to scare him off whenever he tried to confront her about it.
That’s certainly not a criminal matter, and to be honest, even though it’s reprehensible behavior I also think it’s private behavior.
Basically, if I believe Gjoni’s accusations how would I react?
Well, I’d stay out of relationships with Zoe Quinn and warn my friends about her, but I wouldn’t refuse to do business with her or people associated with her, and I’d think Gjoni was behaving in an unhealthy, cruel way that makes him seem like a stalker who you should also be very wary of getting into a personal relationship with.
And if I disbelieve his accusations?
Pretty much the same thing, except I’d be less worried about having a personal relationship with a woman I have never met and likely will never meet, let alone become romantically entangled with.
In practice, the extent to which I believe or disbelieve him changes nothing about how I behave, and nothing about how I see his actions or GamerGate in general, so I don’t see any reason to even have a particular opinion as to the credibility of his accusations.
@Christopher: While I agree with you that what Quinn allegedly did doesn’t come close to the level of criminal liability, nor should it, isn’t calling out abusers and publicaly voicing support for and belief in their victims generally seen as important work, especially for allies?
Here’s the thing about abusers.
They co-opt existing social structures to enable their abuse.
Look at how some abusers have figured out how to use the family court system to their advantage. Or have figured out how to use behavioral change programs to their advantage. Look at how some abusers enmesh themselves in the church or in fostering programs – which gives them credibility and access to victims.
And now that ‘always believe the victim’ is starting to gain mainstream awareness? Suddenly I’m seeing perpetrators of abuse frame their abusive actions in terms of the victim doing what they can to survive.
I realise that this is anecdotal from me, but I was abused by a man who claimed to have been abused by previous partners. Turns out after talking to some of those partners that they were abused by him. I’ve seen relationships where both parties speak out about being abused at the same time. I’m not saying that mutual abuse doesn’t exist – but one of those parties has had partners claim abuse before and after that relationship, while the other doesn’t.
You know, you can avoid these sorts of rationalization contortions by simply rejecting the default position of “believe the victim” in the first place. Just replace the word ‘victim’ with ‘accuser’ and the issue will become much clearer.
The comments above have done a decent enough job hashing out the particulars based on a standard victim/abuser or accuser/alleged abuser basis. However, this is a much larger issue.
The reason that this situation blew up was not because Gjoni wrote the huge post or they both just happened to be gamers. It blew up because of what the post allegedly hinted at concerning the gaming industry.
Quinn was a figure in this industry and the post accused her of using sex to manipulate many people, garner undue positive reviews and further her career. This hit a nerve with the “gamers” who have been the popular target of mainstream media for the apparent misogyny and sexism rampant in the medium.
There has long been rumors of back-room-dealings between developers and gaming reviewers to positively spin an upcoming game and buy favorable reviews only to have the actual release of the game be utter crap. Games have been almost broken and unplayable, yet garnered positive reviews and been heavily marketed on review sites and media. This post struck a nerve that had been waiting to explode.
Not only that, but this unfortunate incident also resulted in negative backlash on many ‘feminist gamers.’ While they have been attempting to shed light on the (sometimes apparent) issues associated with the industry, some of them also have been somewhat reactionary (which only served to add fuel to this fire).
So, say what you want about the standard victim issues that Gjoni may or may not have displayed, but keep in mind that he (at least ostensibly) had a larger issue that he wanted to bring to into the open. An issue that he felt was important within the gaming world.
NOTE: I am not endorsing or repudiating his behavior. I am only providing further context and an explanation of why this became such a huge issue in the first place that I felt has been lost in the above post and comments.
Yes, but the claim that Quinn used sex to advance her game or career was false, as well as misogynistic. That you repeat the false accusations, without mentioning that they are false, suggests that you’re not succeeding at “providing further context.”
That the false accusation gained such traction – and that the reaction was such an extraordinary large number of hateful and often overtly misogynistic messages aimed at Quinn – shows that, for a substantial number of gamers (#notallgamers), the criticism for rampant sexism and misogyny is well-founded.
Where does TZP show that? He describes realizing that Quinn perceived that he could go public with logs. Not that that was his diabolical plan behind his entirely bad-faith discussion all along.
You have to remember we have a lot of context missing when interpreting Gjoni’s behavior, largely because what scraps are publicly available are buried in obscure corners of his blog.
He implies there is more to his callout of Quinn than his own gaslighting and abuse, that their relationship isn’t the point, just an example. But due to Quinn’s abuse prevention order / gag order, which looks to be on the verge of being overturned as unconstitutional going by the public court docket(Quinn even recently moved to vacate the order before the higher court could rule on it), he’s been legally unable to actually follow up on that.
Probably the most he’s said is ‘the issue is the extent to which she lies and manipulates in a professional and community setting. The cheating and hypocrisy are just the base examples of blatant disregard for others for which I have an excess of solid proof. (Well, not entirely true, I have some evidence of community stuff in logs but, shit gets tricky)’
The idea that he’s making things up while spending thousands of dollars to get himself ungagged, which would allow him to speak about this shit again, seems ludicrous at this point. He offered to provide logs of Quinn gaslighting him (which you note are lacking in thezoepost), an offer no one took him up on before they promptly banned him from the subreddit–and he was later slapped with the court order making it impossible.
His continued public engagement for 12 months now seems like it has as much or more to do with him being constantly vilified and smeared in the press repeatedly as it does Quinn. (Though he seems to object more to the demonstrably false statements about him than the more subjective moral condemnations.)
Future boyfriends and girlfriends of his ex aren’t even the sole target of what he described as a warning and portrait of Quinn’s “actual personality.” He’s cited feeling he had a deontological mandate to not remain silent, that friends he sought out for advice agreed, that he would be allowing others to be harmed by not spreading what he knew about Quinn. He claims that she does not actually believe or follow any of the principled stances she espouses, except inasmuch as they’re useful for gaining social capital or as emotional weapons. He suggests the tactics used and admitted to in the posted Facebook chatlogs aren’t limited to romantic relationships, that lying is a consistent pattern with her, that she’s “ruined or greatly harmed people’s careers” even.
And it turns out that last part sounds almost exactly like what she tried to do with Mallorie Nasrallah’s career as a photographer, described in her own callout posts–corroborated with screencapped documentation of their email exchanges.
As well as the story of how Quinn’s friend and former editor reportedly grabbed her arm while drunk and grieving in 2011 retroactively became “he dislocated my shoulder” in subsequent retellings, contrary to the first version of the story that was publicly posted at the time, and the fact that, according to friends from back then, she was doing manual labor right after the incident.
Or the absolutely bizarre word games used in the affidavit that was used as the sole justification for the abuse prevention order on Gjoni.
And honestly, in a universe where Gjoni has the malicious motives to make things up, it’s… a stretch to say that he’d also have the motives to do half the shit he’s done with the apparent effect of reducing (relative to what was possible) harm from the fallout of his post. Like: a) censoring the ‘nunyabusiness’ parts of the logs; b) not shaming Quinn over the former modeling career, which he was aware of; c) refusing to comment on validity or nonvalidity of alleged dox of Quinn.
Why would he simultaneously make false accusations while taking steps that amount to damage control for those same accusations? Jason’s “maximum pain and harm” line makes no sense.
Hi. Long-time reader, long-time commenter here.
Eron Gjoni never accused Zoe Quinn of trading sex for reviews. It’s not in The Zoe Post. dmantis made this mistake, and Barry followed up on it. It’s entirely true that much of the gaming community’s true rejection of Zoe Quinn is “we hate women”. But this has little to do with believing that Quinn abused Gjoni!
Here, I’ll make an analogy, which I’ve made elsewhere. The situation here: Eron Gjoni accuses Zoe Quinn of abusive but not illegal acts (gaslighting, manipulation, emotional abuse) which contradict her public persona, with copious documentation. Quinn then receives a torrent of vile abuse and harassment from people who hate her for other things. (Being a woman with a particular political alignment, it seems.) This is blamed squarely on Gjoni, the social-justice community closes ranks around Quinn and engages in some pretty impressive hugboxing; Gjoni has lost his job and has been the recipient of his own two minutes’ hate (rather, One Year’s Hate at this point), whereas Quinn is pulling in just shy of four grand a month on Patreon and writing million-hit articles for Cracked.
The situation elsewhere: an anonymous student accuses Hugo Schwyzer of scummy acts (sex with students in his class) which contradict his public persona, without any evidence. Schwyzer then suffers a public meltdown, with the peanut gallery making jokes about him attempting suicide, which he subsequently attempted. Schwyzer received a torrent of hate from people who hated him for other things. (Some kind of infighting with feminists of color that I still can’t understand.) Nobody blames or outs the anonymous accuser, and Schwyzer receives no hugboxing whatsoever. He’s off in obscurity somewhere, and his name is cursed.
You may say that these events are completely different, and of course they are! Schwyzer’s accuser provided no evidence whatsoever, and was anonymous, for one. Schwyzer’s relationship with the anonymous student was by all appearances a happy one, and she said that she wasn’t harmed by it, which is more than Gjoni could say for his relationship with Quinn. I was initially mystified as to why Quinn wasn’t getting the Schwyzer treatment; I wasn’t cynical enough.
Navin Kumar, above, is correct. The salient difference here is that Quinn is a member of the ingroup in a way that Schwyzer was not. There was an opportunity here for the social justice community to decide whether “believe the survivor” was a principle or just another tool to be used to protect the ingroup and bully the outgroup. A few people made the right call. I’m disappointed, but not surprised, that most everyone else did not, that the rhetoric split the world into Evil Fedoras and Perfect Cinnamon Rolls. I am surprised that you failed in the same way. I expected better from you.
As I said in my original post (where I was commenting on Ozy’s post), I don’t think all that actually is well documented in the Zoepost. Gjoni makes big accusations, but the actual documentation shows more of a cheater lying to cover up her cheating, than an ongoing pattern of abuse. The chat logs on the Zoepost, as far as I can tell, document an emotionally intense relationship in which both people acted very badly, were dishonest, and were manipulative, in a way that I think is actually pretty common, especially among young people.
Cheating, and lying to cover it up, and doing emotional “why don’t you trust me?” bits to discourage questioning, is selfish and hurtful and incredibly painful for the person being lied to. I don’t make excuses for it. But I also don’t think conflating that with abuse is accurate.
* * *
Let’s imagine that someone who hated you had full recordings of hundreds and hundreds of intimate, private phone conversations, totally 200 hours, which they’re going to edit down to a one-hour track, with their own narration to set everything in a context. The two of you had the sort of relationship where you both declare love eternal one day and then are weeping in the bathroom the next day, and break up and then send emails begging to reunite, etc etc. Also, you weren’t perfect; there were times where you lied about where you were or who you were with.
While the person who hates you is gathering evidence for their “expose,” they demand being able to search your inbox and chat logs, and pressure you to swear that you won’t delete anything before they can read it. In your last dozen or so intimate, private conversations, they did their best to emotionally manipulate you into saying things that they knew would sound terrible, and that was the only reason they hadn’t already left the relationship. They were terribly worried that you might have caught on and were trying to avoid being recorded. This pissed them off.
When they release it, they frame the snippets of many intimate, private conversations with explanations of how each snippet proves you’re a vile human being – which, they say, is their goal, so that other people will be protected from you. They explain that they tried to make things really sensational so their piece on you would go viral.
Would it be completely fair for others to judge you based on that one-hour audio recording? You don’t see any problem with that?
* * *
I’m not saying that I assume every word Quinn says is true (although where we can’t know for sure, I don’t see any reason to assume that Gjoni is truthful and Quinn is lying, as many people seem to do). Maybe it’s not true that Gjoni left bruises on Quinn in her last encounter, and maybe Quinn’s witness is lying. I can’t say if that’s the truth for sure. But I don’t think you have any basis to assume both Quinn and her friend are lying (if that is what you assume). And I do think I have a basis to think that Gjoni is a liar – I can read for myself that the chat logs often aren’t what he claims they are.
In contrast, a lot of Quinn’s complaint – that Gjoni deliberately released a shit-ton of personal information about Quinn to a misogynistic mob that he knew had targeted Quinn in the past – I know is true, because we all saw it happen. I know that Gjoni intended to make his “expose” as sensational as possible, and to slut-shame Quinn (“burgers and fries”), because he’s said that was his intention. I know that he demanded to have access to her private files and that she never delete anything, because that’s in the Zoepost.
* * *
You’re right. I missed that Dmantis had said the source of the “trading sex for reviews” slander was the Zoe Post. It wasn’t the Zoe Post; the source was the fans of the Zoe post who made that up. My bad for not correcting Dmantis.
Gjoni merely set in motion the idea that Quinn was an incredible slut, and suggested the “burgers and fries” thing to emphasize what a slut she was. (He also attempted to start a “meme” of “the greyhound buses,” also to slut-shame Quinn, but that one didn’t take off.) But he says he figured there was only about an 80% chance that this would result in misogynistic abusers targeting Quinn. So that’s okay, right?
* * *
It is blamed on Gjoni because he believed it would happen, and worked hard to encourage and foster the abuse of Quinn by the mob, and has demonstrated an obsession with Quinn – which has now lasted longer than the relationship did – that puts his character and his credibility into doubt. (I don’t agree with every word of that post; but I do think parts are on target).
* * *
You didn’t mention that Quinn’s boyfriend had a job offer withdrawn because GamerGaters were harassing the employer. [ETA: And it appears that Gjoni may have left his job voluntarily: see my next comment.] And I’m not sure why you think it’s relevant that Quinn has a successful Patreon (to support her game-writing and also Crash Override Network). Having a successful Patreon is not a bad thing; it is not a point against Quinn; it does not justify or mitigate the abuse she’s received; nor Gjoni’s role in that abuse.
Yes, they’ve both been abused online (although, from what I can tell – and I can’t say I know for sure, maybe Gjoni’s uncharacteristically quiet about the abuse he’s gotten – Quinn has received much more abuse). Sending someone a rape threat or hoping they die is unambiguously wrong, no matter who the person is. I don’t approve of anyone doing that, to anyone. Period.
But… If a bully pushes his victim into traffic, but trips and falls into traffic himself, I genuinely don’t want either of them hurt. But if they both get hurt, let’s not suggest that the bully getting hurt mitigates how blameworthy he is for the situation.
(And by saying Gjoni is blameworthy, I’m not saying that people who send him abusive messages aren’t also blameworthy. It’s not a zero-sum game.)
* * *
“Schwyzer’s accuser” – or, specifically, the accuser who made me decide to stop associating with Hugo, after many years of friendly acquaintanceship – was not anonymous. It was Hugo himself, who wrote that he once attempted to murder his girlfriend (in what would have been a drugged-out murder/suicide). I don’t know if he was telling the truth, but either way – truth or lie – it put Hugo into the category of someone I don’t want to associate with.
To me, that puts Hugo light-years outside of anything we’re discussing here.
This is unfair. I like Hugo, feel sorry for him, and related to him very well; back in the day, we had many email and online exchanges. Because we were the two most prominent male feminist bloggers of that time, and were often targeted by the same MRAs and anti-feminists, I certainly thought of Hugo as part of my “ingroup,” and we had a lot in common. I continued linking to him long after he became controversial within the feminist blogosphere.
This sort of ingroup/outgroup analysis is an ad hom attack, when used to attack a particular person’s argument (as both you and Navin, who you said was right, did). I’d prefer that you refrain from making up motivations, and just concentrate on refuting my arguments.
As for you expecting better from me; honestly, that strikes me as passive-aggressive and needlessly personal.
But it’s not a big deal. It’s a common reaction, and I couldn’t even promise I haven’t done that at some point. :-)
Regarding “Gjoni has lost his job,” I read that and assumed he had been fired. But the real story seems to be more of a gray area. From a Buzzfeed story that Gjoni was interviewed for:
So, at least in this interview, Gjoni isn’t painting it as him having been either fired or forced to resign.
Gjoni is also open about his connection to GamerGate (which he downplays the misogyny of):
@Ampersand
She uses classic abusive methods to manipulate him though, in the chat logs from before that time. Like how she puts Gjoni in a no win situation, where everything he does is wrong:
Q: How can you be friends with her? I makes me feel horrible.
G: OK, I’ll dump her
Q: No, then I would feel equally bad
So no matter what G does now, Q is the victim and G is guilty of making her feel bad. This is (also) how abusers dis-empower their victim, by making them feel as a perpetrator who has to make up for his/her wrongs. Convincing the real victim that they are actually the perpetrator also plays a major role in the ‘you made me hit you’ dynamic.
Then there are extremely manipulative sentences like:
– it feels “like I don’t matter as much to you as you to me” aka prove that you love me
– “you really don’t have to do this if you don’t want to” aka I’m not controlling you, honest
– “nothing is worth messing up shit between us” aka do what I say
Also, her inability to just trust that her boyfriend will not sleep with his female friend is pure controlling/over jealous behavior. At the very least, it is a major red flag. The threat of suicide at the end of the relationship is also controlling behavior and another major red flag.
Now, I’m not familiar enough with this entire case to make a proper judgement on the whole. However, I want to refer you to my earlier argument about how the different gender norms/stereotypes result in ‘us’ refusing to see men as victims of women as easily as the reverse. This is extremely true in abuse scenario’s like these. Abuse is a spectrum, where we all have different requirements for the abusive behavior that will make us call someone an abuser. However, I think that most people (unconsciously) have a different limit for male and female perpetrators and victims.
Do you agree with me that this double standard exists in general society and that thus, ‘the social-justice community’ has the same double standard (on the whole)?
Even if what you’re saying is 100# true, it still doesn’t justify what Gjoni has done. I know that this post was about credibility but at this point that no longer matters. To me, at least. Gjoni has gone way past the bounds of acceptable vengeance. So far past acceptable bounds, in fact, that even if everything he says is 100% true, I’m going to be forced into defending an abuser. Because Gjoni (even if everything he claims is 100% true) is now an abuser himself. In a battle between two abusive people, if forced to take sides, I’m going with the less abusive of the two. Or at least with the one who is currently suffering the brunt of the abuse.
I say all of this as somebody who lived with an abusive partner for a decade. An abusive partner who did everything in her considerable power to make me miserable and hopeless and to separate me from my friends. An abusive partner who left me absolutely crushed and hopeless at the end. An abusive partner who I hope suffers for the rest of her life. Gjoni is much, much worse than Mrs. Squid v1.0 and deserves no sympathy from anybody. Quinn, even if she was as bad as Mrs. Squid v1.0, deserves to be defended against Gjoni’s abuse.
People are allowed to write about their lives, he doesn’t need any “justification” to do this. Fortunately, it looks like this incident will set a legal precedent and Gamergate’s campaigning and funding will help ensure the preservation of Gjoni’s and every other American’s freedom of speech.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/08/24/you-are-also-ordered-not-to-post-any-further-information-about-the-plaintiff/
If you want to maintain the fiction that all he’s done is write about his life… Then what you say is true in your world.
And to expand on my last comment. What Gjoni is doing is not illegal and I haven’t said it should be. What he is doing, however, is a classic form of abuse. And we should all be shunning him until he acts appropriately. He is obsessed with continuing and controlling his relationship with Quinn. This isn’t good for her, it isn’t doing anything for him other than prolonging his obsession. This is what counseling is for – to help us get over those things that are interfering with our enjoyment of life.
Gjoni may not be a bad person otherwise, but he is an abuser. And to get back to the original thread about credibility – he’s an abuser who has gone to such extremes that it makes me question his credibility about his previous relationship with Quinn. It’s quite a jump to go from a victim of emotional abuse to such an extreme and effective abuser.
Everybody who interacts with the guy should be saying, “Enough. You need to stop this right now.”
A brief follow-up. Thanks for de-spam-filtering my comment, and thank you especially for being civil about it even when I’m self-righteously upbraiding you.
I want to add that I’m not disappointed just because you disagree with me. It’s personal-to-you because you’re usually my go-to example of someone who has unabashedly feminist politics, but doesn’t do this kind of thing. It’s disappointing because you’re doing the same lazy dismissal–Gjoni accused Quinn of trading sex for reviews, called down the Internet Hate Machine on her out of misogynistic spite, and isn’t a Real Victim Worthy of Belief–that everyone from Amanda Marcotte to GamerGhazi is invested in.
When you do that, those of us who have been on the receiving end of that kind of manipulation and abuse hear that it was only Real Abuse if our perpetrators weren’t the Right Kind of People. That hurts.
I’ll stop making assumptions about your motivations; you’re right, I don’t know you well enough to do that. And indeed, I don’t know enough about Gjoni losing his job to speak definitively on the matter.
Death threats are bad. 4chan culture is terrible. Neither Zoe Quinn nor anyone else involved in this whole godforsaken monstrosity deserves to be doxxed, threatened or harmed. I can’t believe I have to stipulate this, but these are interesting times. If Gjoni physically attacked her, then that’s evil and he’s dangerous and so on. But I don’t think I really need to add to the chorus denouncing the guy here; there are million-hit Cracked articles about what a tool he is already.
I don’t think that cheating is abusive, or that lying is abusive. I think that stretching the definition of rape to include “cheating with someone who didn’t know you had a partner”, then backtracking when you yourself do that, is abusive. It was abusive when it was done to me; it was abusive here. Threatening to commit suicide when someone criticizes your behavior is abusive. Ozy said it better than I could. I’m a little weirded out that, like above with the “he said she traded sex for reviews” thing, you’re making weakened versions of these claims. Did you get your view of the situation from The Zoe Post, or from critics thereof?
I feel pretty confident that I couldn’t find extracts in a non-abusive relationship that fit that sort of description. It’s easy to make someone look like an asshole; it’s not so easy to make them look abusive. Reading The Zoe Post was terrifying for me, but what was worse was seeing people rush to her defense. If I were in Eron’s shoes, you’re damned right I would try to publically push back on the narrative that she’s a Cinnamon Roll and I’m a Neckbeard Brony, because it would feel like it was just more of the same reality-twisting horror. Even though I would plainly be digging myself deeper, and I’d be painted as “obsessive” and likely “jilted”. And given the choice between remaining silent about the abuse and an eighty percent chance of internet shitstorm coming down on my ex, I don’t know if I’d have just walked away.
I’m aware that Quinn’s Patreon is connected to her work. There’s a heuristic I’ve heard of to determine who the abuser and who the abused is in a relationship, that the perpetrator will appear to have their life in order, whereas the victim will appear to be a scatterbrained failure unable to do simple things. I’m aware that it’s a leaky heuristic, but the idea that Eron Gjoni sits on a throne of Vivian James plushies commanding his demon army while Zoe Quinn quakes in her boots in penury–which is the damned narrative, even if not here–is inaccurate.
The accuser who made you change your mind about Schwyzer was not the same one whose actions (as far as I can tell) drove him to his suicide attempt; it was a tumblr called “More Will Be Named” around summer of 2013, since deleted, but I was under the impression that this was what sparked his subsequent confessions and meltdowns, as it showed that he was still engaging in the behavior forsaken in his conversion narrative. You apparently didn’t have the reaction I’m talking about, but the casting-out of a marginal member of a group (e.g., Charles Clymer) is a common enough social-justice tradition. I saw the distinction being drawn between ‘prominent but problematic male feminist vs anonymous accusation’ in one case and ‘victim of online harassment vs dude from 4chan’ on the other. I’ll stop making assumptions about your reasoning, but your conclusions look the same as those from people who did perform that kind of reasoning.
Have you read Rachel M’s account of things? It boils down to: “I saw my friend being abused, and this was awful. Update: everyone is using this as a reason to dox and threaten Zoe Quinn, please stop. Update: I’m so sorry I wrote this. I’ve sent money to RAINN as an ethics offset.” Kind of the whole thing in a nutshell, really.
Sharing evidence that someone lied to, manipulated, and abused you is a “classic form of abuse”? Whose definition of abuse are you using?
I’m assuming you’re extremely heavily implying the well-traveled meme that he’s engaged in nefarious Internet conspiracy to maximize harassment despite no evidence of any such intention, and all evidence to the contrary? Unless you have concrete examples of him doing such terrible things to link.
One person is lionized by the press as the brave face of feminism and supported through countless monthly donations by fans, awash in social capital, and the other is vilified and put through legal hell that could permanently mar his record, harm his ability to get a job and possibly land him jail time.
Are you familiar with primary aggressor theory of so-called “two way” abuse?
Now, now. he’s raking in fifty bucks a month (for what sounds like a pretty cool project, for what it’s worth). So that’s gotta count for something. (In comparison, Quinn is pulling about seventy-five times that.)
(I should also make very certain to emphasize that our host didn’t say or even imply that you can determine who’s the bad guy by who has the bigger Patreon find. I did imply that above.)
One more thing I forgot.
I just have to admire how utterly open and honest this complete moving of the goalposts was. Not even trying to obfuscate it. It’s not about determining what’s true or not, it’s about how he’s a Bad Person and how Bad we should all be repeating he is just like everybody else does.