Month: August 2021

This is the third post that I ever made on this blog. It was first posted on August 30th, 2021, but it was posted so that it was only visible to me and no one else for the last four years. Prior to it becoming public in June 2025, the only person other than me who has read it is my former attorney Marc Mohan.

I was considering posting this publicly at the time that I wrote it, but by the time I finished it I did not feel a need to do so. At the time it was solely for my therapeutic release. Thus I never edited out the intense emotionality and the redundancy. It is raw. It is not politic. I openly curse in it, much more often than in any of the other writing on this blog.

This was written at a very different time in the story and in my life than when I am publishing it. It is not reflective of my emotional state now, but I believe that all of my analysis in it is right on the money and has only been proven to a greater degree by the actions of the Clinchys and Chris Lipe in the four years since it was written.

Keep in mind that this was written over a year after the initial blog posts The Fallout and The Crucible (which are referred to as Part I and Part II below). This was still more than half a year before the Clinchys and Lola would begin their campaign to get me removed from tournament Scrabble beyond their cliquish and dickish CoCo organization.

A significant amount of the stories in this were used in my September 6th, 2022 response to the incident report that I sent to NASPA, so there is some redundancy with stories told in other parts of the blog, in addition to redundancy within the piece itself. Nonetheless I have opted not to edit it down and to publish it exactly as I left it at the end of August 2021. The reason I am doing this is because I want it to stand as unadulterated evidence of where my mind was at that time.

As I make very clear in this writing, it was obvious to me already at that time that the Clinchys were attempting to ostracize me from Scrabble and assassinate my character, and that Chris Lipe was extremely complicit with them in many of their actions, not only to wrong me but also to help CoCo gain in political importance in the Scrabble world. I also point out that there were many hints I gave in the first two blog posts that allowed astute readers who were familiar with the world of Scrabble politics to pick up on these things, and that a number of readers did.

Part of what offends me so much about this story is that I gave the entire Scrabble world an almost two year head start in warning them that the Clinchys were trying to assassinate my character, (in July 2020, when they did not begin their political campaign to get me removed from Scrabble until April 2022.) Despite this warning, a whole lot of people in this community were still too manipulable or dishonest that they bought into or were complicit with the campaign against me.

Also keep in mind that all of this was written before Lola had started spreading any defamatory stories of me being any kind of threat of violence, and neither the Clinchys nor Chris Lipe nor any of their friends would have made any such accusations about me at the time. Furthermore, as I’ve said a few times before, Lola, whom I dated more than a year before I wrote this, is not even mentioned in it, which is a testament to how little she was on my mind and how she was not part of the story until she started inserting herself into it many months after this was written.

I was very angry when I wrote this, and as I think comes out in the piece, almost the entirety of that anger was directed toward Chris Lipe. I am no longer as consumed by anger, but I still feel very strongly that he must be held accountable for his wrongdoing, both his personal insults toward me and his corrupt behavior as WESPA President.

david koenig, June 25th, 2025, posted concurrently with the video
Why chris lipe needs to be out of scrabble leadership entirely

Prologue

A little over a year ago I told the story (in two parts) of how Jennifer and Evans Clinchy have continually been mistreating me and attempting to blacklist me from the Scrabble community since 2017. As Evans and I have both represented the USA in World Scrabble Championships and are among the top ranked players in the country, much of the community gravitated to the story and read the posts very quickly. I did not allow feedback on this site, but I linked to these pages in a few friends-only posts on Facebook, which received hundreds of comments. Furthermore, many other people reached out to me via private messages and phone calls.

I was anxious about how the story would be received. I thought that getting it out there might make things better or worse. What I have found in the long run is that both of those things are true. It depends whom you ask. Within the first couple of days of publication, it was clear to me that I had made the right decision, and that my words had landed the way I wanted them to. I got plenty of positive and negative feedback, but in general people read it and they believed me.

I understand well, of course, that people who are already my friends on Facebook and who are going to take the time to read my writing and talk to me about it are a biased sample. I am sure there were people who read all of it, or just a small part of it, who had enough distaste for it and for me that they didn’t say anything at all, and I might have more awkward interactions at future Scrabble tournaments on account of that. There were also a few people who unfriended me on Facebook almost immediately after I put out the writing, but only a tiny number. I could count them on one hand without using all my fingers. There were others who were openly critical of my behavior in the story and my decision to publish it, some of whom reacted harshly or emotionally.

I welcomed all feedback, positive or negative, and I was grateful for all of it. I didn’t have the mental wherewithal to read all the feedback, but I probably read about 90% of it. For once, I felt very little need to argue with those who said things I disagreed with. At the same time, I was beyond grateful that some friends took my story especially to heart and argued vociferously on my behalf against some of the ridiculous things that were said.

I don’t want any of the negativity or conflict to obscure the fact that the positive feedback I got overwhelmingly outnumbered the negative feedback, by more than a two-to-one margin. Not only were people personally supportive of me in the face of the troubles I bared, but I also got many compliments about the quality of the writing and the effectiveness of the storytelling. Some people also said that it was better for the Scrabble community as a whole that all of this got out there.

I thought that I was clear about my intentions and goals in writing and publishing the piece, but the degree to which readers accepted that message seemed to vary. Even after reading the whole thing, some people still clung to the idea that I was hopelessly trying to improve my relationship with Jennifer and Evans or to get into their tournaments. Some warned me against publishing on the grounds that it would torpedo any hope of fixing our relationship. They were wrong on both counts. I was not trying to get into their tournaments, and there was already no hope of fixing our relationship long before I told the story to the world.

I wrote what I wrote specifically because there were many mutual friends of mine and theirs, some of whom I have had relationships with for the better part of two decades, who I believed were complicit in their mistreatment of me and in the shitty ways they were transforming our Scrabble community. As they formed a cliquish and dickish inner circle, a number of my long-term friendships were eroding, without those people ever talking to me or hearing my side of the story.

However, if this had all been only a personal matter, I never would have felt the need to tell the story to the world. I might have written a letter to the pertinent people and tried to start conversations with them.

Jennifer and Evans transformed a personal grudge into a Scrabble political matter that had repercussions not just for my circle of friends but also for all of CSW Scrabble in North America, and to some extent internationally. It was because of the political import of the events that I felt the need to publish the story on the internet. I was not the only person who felt this way. Other early readers of mine encouraged me to publish, because they also deemed that the story was in the public interest of the Scrabble community.

My writing in the first two parts focused on my personal story, because there was a lot to tell and there were heavy emotions. I did not think it would be helpful to water it down by getting too far afield into Scrabble political matters, though I did touch on some, but not all, of the issues near the end of the piece. I also knew that the readers who were plugged into the politics would be able to draw the right conclusions themselves, and they did. Many of the conversations on my Facebook posts among Scrabble players focused on these things, and many of the insights were right on the money.

Jennifer and Evans are not the focus of this part of the story. This is about my relationship with some of those other Scrabble players who were between us, and the ways in which they responded to the first two parts of the story, as well as how they have treated me in the year and a half since that time.

The Ostracism

Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.

At the end of 2019 when Evans and Jennifer announced their new Scrabble organization, they had recruited several friends to start running tournaments in several other places in the country under their new banner. Prior to this they had only run events in Washington and Oregon, close to where they lived, with the lone exception of the 2017 Nashville tourney that happened before they moved to Washington State. They had designs on converting what had previously been a very localized series of events into something resembling a national organization.

In early 2020 the Coronavirus pandemic put a halt to those plans just before they were able to get moving. All tournaments were put on hiatus for most of two years, and even now in late 2021 they are only slowly and tentatively starting to come back. Without opportunities to play in person, the competitive Scrabble community flocked to the Internet Scrabble Club (ISC) to get games with each other online. ISC goes back to the 1990s, but it had faded in popularity over the last few decades, until Coronavirus gave it a resurgence.

We competitive Scrabblers had never taken the online game very seriously. Since there is no way to tell if the opponent is using an anagram program or looking up words in a paper dictionary or even using an engine like Quackle to find plays, you can’t know if it is a fair fight. I think many other high rated players had a similar attitude about and approach to the online game as I did. I did not play that often, and I tended to only play people I knew from real-life tournaments who could give me a good match and whom I trusted to play fair. The results were unimportant. It was just a chance to get a little bit of extra practice in between the times we got to play in person, which is what really counted.

During the pandemic, online tournaments have not been sanctioned by the national associations and they have not been rated as our in-person tournaments are. They are usually played for no cash prizes. It has been a free-for-all, with anyone who wants to run a tournament and having enough connections and influence to draw the people doing so.

In mid-2020, stymied from running in-person tournaments under their new banner and eager to increase their organization’s prestige within the Scrabble world, Evans and Jennifer ran an event they called the Virtual World Cup. This tournament was intended to be a replacement for the Alchemist Cup, an event that had been planned for December 2020 in Malaysia by super-organizer Michael Tang but had of course been canceled.

Michael had run this event for the first time in 2018, and at the time the plan was to make it biannual. The tournament was structured as a series of matches between teams of five of the top players from each country. Just as happened with prior World Championships, Michael delegated the work of deciding who qualified for each national team to the respective national associations. Going into both the 2018 and 2020 events, there were seven top American CSW Scrabble players who had qualification ratings close enough to be within striking distance of participating in the event, but only five of the seven would get in.

In 2018 I was the seventh highest rated of the group, so even after one of the qualifiers, Rob Robinsky, dropped out, I just missed the cutoff. The team was Dave Wiegand, Evans Clinchy, Jesse Day, Conrad Bassett-Bouchard, and Will Anderson. My qualification rating was 12 points behind Will’s for the last spot.

The process for qualifying for the 2020 event had started more than a year beforehand. I busted my ass studying hard and competing frequently in late 2019 and early 2020 with hopes of participating this time. I had a great run of tournament success and reached my highest rating ever. This time it looked like the top 5 qualifiers were going to be Dave Wiegand, Will Anderson, Austin Shin, me, and Conrad Bassett-Bouchard, with Evans Clinchy and Jesse Day both narrowly missing the cutoff.

By June 2020 Michael had canceled the event, and Evans and Jennifer quickly jumped in to try to fill the void. Evans had played in several World Championships and had a lot of international Scrabble connections. He and Jennifer weren’t working with Michael Tang and it wasn’t practical to try to hunt down all the national associations and find out who would have qualified for their national teams. It is likely that with nearly half a year still to go before what was originally planned to be a December event many countries might have not had their qualification procedures as ironed out as had already been the case for team USA.

Jennifer and Evans made the reasonable compromise to declare that the qualification criterion would just be the players with the highest WESPA ratings from each country. (WESPA, the World English-language Scrabble Players Association, is the umbrella organization for all of the national associations.) There are philosophical reasons why this might be better or worse than the more complicated criteria that had been used for Alchemist Cup qualifications, but they are not important to this story. Given the quickness with which Evans and Jennifer were throwing together their event and the need for a simple and immediate solution that didn’t have to go through all the national associations, what they did made sense. They reached out to many of their international friends and were able to assemble a field of sixteen national teams for the Virtual World Cup to begin in July 2020.

Because the Virtual World Cup was using a different formula for qualification for team USA than the Alchemist Cup had been planning to use, the race shook out slightly differently. The top five players in the USA according to WESPA rating at that time were Conrad Bassett-Bouchard, Jesse Day, Austin Shin, Will Anderson, and Dave Koenig. The five players who ended up representing the USA at the Virtual World Cup were Conrad Bassett-Bouchard, Jesse Day, Austin Shin, Will Anderson, and Dave Wiegand. Why was there a discrepancy?

Long before this time Evans had completely blocked me on social media. I had blocked Jennifer even earlier than that, so I had no vision into what they were posting about. I only found out about the creation of their cliquish and dickish organization through the grapevine from other Scrabble players and had to go through the contortion of using a separate Facebook account to see Evans’s public post about launching the organization in late 2019. I was not in the habit of hunting more news and announcements about their organization after that. They created organizational pages on Facebook and Instagram, and I probably saw them pop up on my feed once, but I quickly pressed the button to remove those recommendations. I had no desire to get broadcasts of regular reminders of what they were doing.

I did at some point see a social media post from someone else announcing that the Virtual World Cup was happening, but only very shortly before the start of the event, after the team USA lineup was announced without me in it.

I have obviously never spoken to either Jennifer or Evans about this, since there has been literally no communication between us for several years. However, after I published parts I and II, several of their friends who have been complicit in their passive-aggressive game of fucking me over attempted to justify what they had done and create plausible deniability that they had intentionally snubbed me. Those people pointed out on my Facebook posts that there was a website that I needed to sign up on to be considered a qualifier for the event, and that they took the highest WESPA rated players among those who had signed up.

There is so much that is wrong with this. Although I cannot prove it, I am sure that Jennifer and Evans personally reached out to all five of the people who did represent team USA and made sure that their names got onto the qualifier list ASAP. I do not even know how long that website was up. Michael only announced the cancellation of the Alchemist Cup at the end of June, and Jennifer and Evans started their replacement event within a few weeks. They clearly were in a frenzy to recruit people for the event and didn’t hesitate at all to reach out to all corners of the globe to build teams. If they were really interested in putting together the top team USA, according to the qualification criterion that they themselves chose, they easily could have reached out to me as well.

Furthermore, as I already showed in great detail in Part II, Evans and Jennifer had spent several years attempting to frame me for harassment. Keep in mind that the time I am talking about is literally in the last few weeks before I published any of this story. Since January 5th, 2017, the date of the last email I sent Jennifer before the New Orleans tournament that year, I had been living my life and going about my business while ignoring their insanity. I included them on a few group emails to the Seattle area Scrabble players for our pub get-togethers in mid to late 2018, shortly after I moved to town. Walker sent the first few of these emails, but I sent a few later, and we both ended up removing Jennifer and Evans from the email list when they were unresponsive. I then sent one quick email to Evans in October 2019 when I signed up for the Hood River tournament, and then a short apology email to Jennifer, copying Evans, in response to her email to me which made the unsurprising charge of harassment. As I already explained, I did not even want to play in that tournament. I signed up solely because it opened up a small window of opportunity for communication to try to ease the situation, which they quickly slammed shut.

In the three and a half years of essentially no communication with them, Evans had behaved furiously angrily and uncivilly toward me on every one of the very few occasions when we were in the same place, and Jennifer had gotten herself elected to the Advisory Board of NASPA and fought for rule changes specifically to give them more leeway to ban me from tournaments on the basis that I made her uncomfortable. They broke the rules of NASPA by signing up their friends in advance of public registration for literally every single event that they ran, with the express intention of trying to keep me out. They did this for multiple years even though I wasn’t even trying to get into their tournaments! When they were not satisfied with all of this, they split off from NASPA and created a renegade association, so that they could continue to ban me and treat me like shit while not having to answer to anyone else. They literally told my personal friend that they were preemptively banning me from tournaments they directed in their new organization, even though I never indicated any interest in supporting it or playing in any of its events. And now they corrupted the qualification process of their own Virtual World Cup specifically to keep me out.

All of this happened over a three and a half year period during which I wasn’t doing anything to them. I was not trying to be in their lives. I was trying to just work around them and play Scrabble as much as I could. I knew that any attempt to contact them in any way would be twisted into charges of harassment. All of this was a grudge based on two emails and two text messages I sent to Jennifer over a three week period between December 19th, 2016 and January 5th, 2017, at a time when I was going through the worst mental anguish of my life, as I explained in excruciating detail in Part I. I had literally not behaved in any untoward way to either of them in any way from January 6th, 2017 onward, even in the face of disgusting, insulting, and abusive behavior from Evans literally every time we were in person after that. (Okay, one exception: calling him “Child” at the May 2018 Portland one-day tournament, but give me that. He deserved far worse.)

Even if I had known about the Virtual World Cup early enough to sign up for it, there is no guarantee that I would have. It would have put me in an awkward position. As far as I am concerned, what Evans and Jennifer are running is not a legitimate Scrabble organization. It is a couple of assholes who do not want to have to answer to anyone else while they arbitrarily exclude me from their Scrabble world, and while they desperately try (and fail) to hide that that is exactly what they are doing. If I had played in their event, it would have effectively lent my endorsement to it and caused their organization to seem more legitimate than it is. Nevertheless, it would have been nice to be asked and been able to make that choice for myself.

I do not feel empowered to reach out to either Jennifer or Evans. They made clear long before I published anything related to this that they would read all of my words and intentions in the most negative possible light, and that they had no interest in any kind of healing or restorative dialogue. All that they were interested in doing was excommunicating and ostracizing me. They do not have the right to call any of their events a World Cup or a World Championship. Anytime they use the word World, it should be read as World* (*Except for Dave Koenig).

Of course, their treatment of me was invisible to the rest of the Scrabble world as they organized the Virtual World Cup and the event began. The rest of the international Scrabble community perceived it as the biggest event in the game while we were all confined to our homes in the early pandemic months. This was good PR that would likely help them grow their cliquish and dickish organization into something more nationally and internationally relevant when in-person tournaments resumed.

What they did not count on was that only a few days into their Virtual World Cup, I would publish the entire story of their outrageous behavior toward me to the world, causing them a huge PR black eye. They had turned a three and a half year old personal grudge into something that affected the qualification of an event they were passing off as a Virtual World Cup of Scrabble. Through their own escalation, they had made a personal issue relevant politically to the entire international Scrabble world. They preemptively snubbed me from representing team USA at the event that they were billing as the replacement for the Alchemist Cup even though I would have qualified both for the Alchemist Cup by its qualification criterion and for their Virtual World Cup by the criterion they chose.

As I mentioned above, a lot of people received my story well and rallied to my side. Some of them just wanted peace between all parties, but more than a few were also critical of Jennifer and Evans and the way they ran their new Scrabble organization. I didn’t even mention anything about the Virtual World Cup in Parts I and II, and I didn’t bring it up in the online discussion. Other people did, because they understood the implications of Jennifer’s and Evans’s behavior and were able to read between the lines. It was only after they brought it up that I pointed that I should have qualified over Dave Wiegand. My good friend Mina distilled the issues very well in this post.

Here’s my distillation of my friend Dave Koenig’s posts, along with my responses to the criticisms: There was a messy breakup, with bad behavior on both sides. Evidence is presented so that you know he’s not a monster. No, it’s not ideal to publish private communications, but he could see no other way to clear his name, and truly intimate details about the other party have been omitted. No, he’s not still hung up on the events of 2016-17; he’s just going into this level of detail in order to set the record straight. Now that we’ve established in Part I that Dave is not a monster, we get to the meat of this story in Part II, namely that Dave has paid disproportionate social consequences in the Scrabble world as though he were some kind of monster. It is because of these disproportionate social consequences that he wrote these essays, aimed at the Scrabble community. CoCo has monopolized Collins Scrabble play in his part of the country, and they have crystallized a rule that he may not play unless neither Jenn nor Evans is organizing or directing. How could this rule possibly be justified? We know, from reading Part II, that Jenn is no longer afraid of Dave. If she can come up to him unbidden at the cocktail hour for a mutual friend’s wedding, when she could have just remained on the other side of the beach, then she can tolerate him at a tournament. It is also evident, from reading Part II if from nothing else, that Dave would pose no plausible threat to Jenn or Evans at future tournaments. So the only reason for his express exclusion would be Evans’ personal resentment. Is this reasonable? Do you like the premises of such a Scrabble organization? Dave was excluded a priori (meaning, whether he would have liked to join or not) from CoCo’s Virtual World Cup. (Edit, after the comments below: maybe not excluded in an ironclad sense, but extremely discouraged from signing up.) This online tournament has been touted as a replacement for the Alchemist Cup. But Dave would have qualified to represent the U.S. at the Alchemist Cup. You can’t argue with a straight face that he could possibly poison the atmosphere at an online tournament. Now do you want to support the Virtual World Cup?

Mina le, facebook post july 16th 2020

Conrad Bassett-Bouchard, a close friend of Jennifer and Evans who has helped organize their cliquish and dickish organization and designed their website, specifically commented on one of the Facebook posts in a way that tried to cast doubt on the idea that I didn’t know about their replacement event in time on the basis that he had posted it about the event many times on Facebook and that I used the site a whole lot. I laughed to myself and did not tell him at the time that even though we were connected on Facebook, I had removed his posts from my feed long before that, not even because of anything related to Jennifer or Evans, but just because I found him to be an annoying twat.

Conrad’s voice was one of several, as I’ve already mentioned, that tried to undermine the story of how Jennifer and Evans had screwed me over regarding Virtual World Cup qualification. Most of the people I heard from saw it my way, but seemingly everyone in Jennifer’s and Evans’s clique could only see it a different way. They were in damage control mode.

This was according to the larger pattern of the responses to my posts. The majority of the criticisms I received were all from the same circle of friends who had been attending Jennifer’s and Evans’s events. I understand well that they perceived my publication of the story as an attack upon their friends, and that they turned on me in a way that was at least in some cases driven by the shock of the story coming out how it did. Jeremy Cahnmann was the most emotional, and he made a long and often incoherent and illogical rant on one of my posts before promptly unfriending me.

At the time I was not hurt by Jeremy’s response, nor by just about any of the others like it. I was truly grateful that people were letting it out and giving me honest feedback about how they felt about things, and I felt no need to argue with them. I hearted Jeremy’s comments and just about everyone else’s. What had hurt me for so long before I published was that people were refusing to talk to me about these things. I wanted the dialogue regardless of whether I agreed with people. I also felt no particular pain about losing Jeremy as a friend. I understood now that he had always judged this situation poorly and had always judged me poorly on account of it, but he had held back his true opinions before. I was glad to have that bullshit out of my life, but I also have no hard feelings toward him. I recognize that he just doesn’t get it in certain ways and never will. He is too intent on trying to fit a #MeToo type structure on this story that just does not fit it very well and fundamentally misunderstands a lot of the dynamics. I believe he was being totally honest with me in his reactions. Though I think he is wrong about a lot of things, all I can ask for is people’s honest best.

I heard from over one hundred people in response to the story. Out of all of the responses I got, there was only one person whose response hurt me, and that person was Chris Lipe. Chris and I had been good friends (or so I thought) and traveled to many tournaments together even after the fallout with Jennifer and Evans, including Stockholm in 2017 and Edinburgh in 2019. He responded to the publication of my story in a disingenuous way that threw away a friendship of well over a decade for political reasons that tens of people care about.

You see, the Virtual World Cup angle was not the only reason that my story was politically relevant to the Scrabble community, nor was it even the primary one. Chris is the President of WESPA, the umbrella organization for all of the national associations, as mentioned earlier. Historically, most events are organized and rated by the individual national associations, not by WESPA, but the primary function of WESPA has been recognizing and connecting all of the different national associations. Before I ever published, I suspected that Chris was in cahoots with his friends Evans and Jennifer and wanted to try to get their organization recognized as an official national association for North America. This would be an unprecedented move, as North America already has an association recognized by WESPA, namely NASPA, the North American Scrabble Players Association, and WESPA has never allowed two different organizations to be recognized for the same geographic area.

However, North America (which means just the United States and Canada here) has always been a special case, as it is the only part of the world where Scrabble is owned by Hasbro, while Mattel owns the game across the rest of the globe. For this reason tournament play on the continent is divided between two different English language lexicons, TWL, the word list specific to North America, and CSW, the word list used across the rest of the world. In just about every other part of the world, all competitive play uses only CSW. Given that North America is in a unique situation and that the majority of tournament play sanctioned by NASPA uses TWL, while Jennifer and Evans were creating a new organization intended just for CSW play, I was worried that they might try to use this situation as a rationale for getting multiple national associations recognized. It does not help that NASPA has been saddled with ineffective and unpopular leadership for years, and that its base of tournament players has been shrinking for over a decade.

Essentially, I thought that Jennifer and Evans were trying to hijack all of CSW play on the continent to run under their own banner. This is a massive threat to me. I have been one of America’s leading CSW Scrabble players and proponents of using the international dictionary for the last decade. A tremendous amount of my sense of identity, my life energy, and my free time has gone into mastering Scrabble played with the CSW dictionary. I have strong aspirations of winning the World Scrabble Championship, as well as uniting North America with the rest of the world in playing CSW Scrabble. And now these people who have an irrational hatred of me and have given more than ample evidence that they want to exclude, ostracize, and mistreat me are trying to take over all of the North American tournaments that use the only dictionary I’ve played since 2011. And they quite possibly have the President of WESPA attempting to pull strings to make this happen.

When I first published my story, Chris wrote a long comment on my Facebook post about it. Here is the most relevant passage:

I honestly don’t believe that you were a motivation in founding CoCo. Evans has been clear, and you admit in the OP, that he’s wearing two hats. As a tournament organizer he excludes you due to your threats against Jen in 2016/7. As the head of the organization there is nothing preventing you from participating. I think your characterization of his organization is unfair.

Was their response to you non-proportional? Sure. But Evans is fiercely protective, and sometimes in life, you don’t get forgiven. Somehow, against all that, you have to persevere and struggle to heal, heal yourself, heal relationships, all of it. Maybe time can heal. Maybe someday we’ll all be in a home, waving our fists and toothlessly shouting at each other about injustices fifty years prior. I don’t know. Healing a wound is hard, but after it’s festered is harder. Sometimes impossible.

I have to say after reading this, I’m a bit horrified. Not at the story, but that you posted it like this. It’s a classic pattern of abusers to claim victimhood after consequences of their abuse come back on them. I know that’s not you, but the pattern is so common that I find this missive very problematic. I also think it makes it harder for everyone in Scrabble, you included, to find a peaceful path forward from this. I get that you feel a need to defend yourself and you find this cathartic, but ultimately it reflects poorly upon you as a person. I urge you to withdraw this essay and find a better path forward.

chris lipe, facebook comment july 15, 2020

He repeated the word “honest” from earlier in the comment, which is a crock of shit, because all he is trying to do is distort reality. First of all, he claims that my characterization of their organization is “unfair” but he says absolutely nothing to dispute what I said about the organization, because it all is 100% true. He cannot dispute the reality that they signed up all of their friends secretly in advance for 100% of their events, and he was one of those friends who had advance access. Instead, he tries to sweep it under the rug and distract from the issue.

He also does not deny at all that this is entirely driven by Evans’s hatred of me, not by Jennifer’s fear. Essentially his argument is, Evans’s behavior is over-the-top hateful and disproportionate, and that’s okay with me.

But the worst part is that he makes a completely untrue statement that I made “threats against Jen”. I literally shared every word of every communication I made in this period to show that that was not the case. There is literally nothing I said that was a threat against her, and saying that it was is a flat out lie. The only thing I “threatened” to do was to use my First Amendment right to speak my mind.

Neither she nor he nor anyone else has any right to freedom from embarrassment about what other people say. Not only that, but I had no desire to embarrass Jennifer publicly. I wanted to have a private conversation with her before we were in the tournament room together in New Orleans, specifically to avoid that possibility. And in the end when she didn’t give that to me, I found a way to make peace within myself, such that I was calm, relaxed, and didn’t speak or behave in any untoward way the entire time we were in the tournament room. Meanwhile, both she and especially Evans went apeshit in the tournament room, because they were so tense from misunderstanding where I was at.

What I wanted was the same thing as what she wanted, the ability to play Scrabble in peace. And I saw her behavior of refusing my request to take a picture down that she would have no reason for wanting to still have up—and then immediately taking it down after I told her I could no longer see it and didn’t care about it anymore—as twisting a knife in my back. I saw her behavior of giving me the silent treatment, refusing to meet with me beforehand, and insisting that the first time we meet in person in months is in the middle of the tournament room when we are about to compete against each other in a game, not as being afraid but as trying to make me uncomfortable. I had no way of being able to detect any fear from her, because she had cut off all communication. And the moment that I saw her in person and found out that she was afraid, I had no need to say anything at all. Because I was only feeling a need to speak up to protect myself, not to hurt her.

Chris, you and every other friend who was around her for all of that time before I saw her thinks that I should have already internalized what she was going through when I had no access to that information. That is exactly why it was important for us to talk ahead of time. You even admitted to me in a private conversation shortly after you posted that garbage on Facebook that she was stupid to not talk to me ahead of time. I am not saying she should have done it for me. She did not owe me anything. It would have been a better outcome for both her and Evans if she had actually had a conversation with me ahead of time and they had not gone into this situation in the tournament room raging with emotion and bouncing off the walls. We were all there to play Scrabble for Chrissakes, and none of us wanted to have bullshit happening in the tournament room. But the bullshit that did happen was entirely perpetrated by them, not me, because they could not be grownups enough to have a conversation with me ahead of time.

But as I said in Part I, I have already forgiven them for that. I understand it was an emotional time for all of us. I understand that they had so badly misunderstood me from my frazzled writing that a blowup from them right then in the tournament room might have been inevitable. And they handled the situation badly, but that is okay. We all easily could have moved on. I saw them two months later in Charlottesville, and we were all able to sit down and play Scrabble without drama spilling over. But the fact that they have continued to hold this grudge and behave hatefully and unethically for five years now and never once in all that time were able to even talk to me and find out they had gotten it wrong? That is all on them, not on me.

And if you continue to argue that two emails and two text messages that I sent in a three week period that ended more than a week before the New Orleans tournament outweighs the years of terrible behavior that they have perpetrated, then your head is so far up Evans’s ass that you’ve forgotten what bullshit smells like.

I should also point out, Chris, that after you made the comment above, you sang a different tune in that private conversation we had. You admitted that Jennifer was stupid not to talk to me about New Orleans and that both her and Evans’s behaviors were not good. You said, “you can’t control their failures, only how you respond to it.” And then I wrote the following:

But you know what, even with the deck stacked against me, after narrowly missing out on qualifying for the 2018 Alchemist Cup, I still found a way to qualify for the 2020 edition, bumping your asshole friend Evans out in so doing, I might add. How did I do that? By flying all over the continent, to Chicago, Austin, Niagara Falls, Albany, and New Jersey, getting every CSW tournament game I could against the strongest competition I could, even though there were a bunch of strong players and tournaments right in my neighborhood in the Pacific Northwest that I didn’t have access to. I could hardly get those strong players for practice games, let alone tournaments, because Jennifer and Evans had poisoned their minds against me. So I also flew all over the world to England, Scotland, Sweden, Malaysia, and Thailand to get every game against top level competition that I could. I’m very lucky that I had the resources to be able to do that, but it was also exhausting, in terms of both finances and energy. I regularly had to get on a nine hour flight just to get some games in against competition around my level, because I was being blacklisted from the local scene. What I would have given just to be able to get some casual games against a top player in on an every week or two basis.

I found out through social media posts of other friends the weekend that Jennifer and Evans got married. And I was sad. Do you know why? Not about them getting married or me not being there. I didn’t care about that in the least. I was sad because a whole bunch of the other top CSW Scrabble players came to my neighborhood in Seattle, and not a single one reached out to me. Nobody even wanted to see how I was doing or get a single game in with me.

If Jennifer and Evans want to run “house events” for themselves and their close friends, that’s fine. They don’t have to invite anyone they don’t want to. But they don’t get to call them rated tournaments. They’re not tournaments at all. They’re a bunch of cliquish and dickish friends. And in my opinion they’re not even the most dickish ones there. You are.

Most people who read the first two parts of my story probably weren’t able to read between the lines of it enough to know this yet, but you’re a smart guy. You might have already figured out that Jennifer and Evans aren’t the real bad guys in my story. You are.

You’re the asshole who saw how much pain I was in for three and a half fucking years before I said anything to the rest of the Scrabble world about this. You’re the asshole whom I tried to talk to about this but got zero fucking empathy from. I got nothing but you shutting your brains and emotions down and barely interacting with me while I tried to pour my heart out to you on numerous occasions. You’re the asshole who didn’t want to know anything about the story, as I understand now, because you must have already made up your mind that I was the bad guy based on Jennifer’s and Evans’s insane overreactions over the period of several years. You pretended to be my friend, but you were never my friend. And you were happy to maintain that status quo even though you knew it was absolutely torturing me. I told you long before I published the blog that I would eventually have to tell the story to the whole world, but you just didn’t take me seriously.

You didn’t take seriously that I was actually wronged here until I literally proved it by putting the story out there. And that made your fucking head implode, to the point where you became obsessed with trying to keep a cover on the story and stop people reading it, because you knew it proved me right and did massive damage to you and your friends. You were then willing to lie through your teeth and twist things to try to make me the bad guy, because you couldn’t stand the fact that you and your asshole friends actually are the bad guys in this story.

What kind of asshole invites one of his supposed best friends to his wedding of about 20 people but refuses to make seating arrangements and intentionally sets up the seating so that the number of seats at the Scrabble table is one short of the number of Scrabble players there? The kind of asshole who is fine with permanently treating me like a second-class citizen. Let me remind you that your wedding was a year and a half after 2017 New Orleans, and in all that time in between I hadn’t done or said anything to Jennifer and Evans. I hadn’t even attempted to sign up for any of their tournaments. The only time I reached out to them, about the Hood River tournament, was a few months after your wedding. You knew perfectly well that I wasn’t doing anything to them and was just living my life, while Evans was going full-on psychopath about me.

And you made that asshole your Best Man. Let me be clear, I’m not jealous. I didn’t care about being your Best Man. I cared that you knew one of your closest friends was massively mistreating another one of your closest friends, and somehow that wasn’t a disqualifying condition. That you were happy not to make waves, maintain the status quo, and condone his repulsive behavior. And now that it’s become public, you’ve swung so far away from sanity to the point of openly supporting him and tearing me down, when I proved beyond any shadow of a doubt how he has been an asshole to me for years while I wasn’t doing anything.

Your behavior makes you an even bigger asshole than he is. Because you should know better. You spent years still being my “friend” and traveling to tournaments with me after 2017 New Orleans. You had more than ample evidence and experience to see that I was the only person being an adult in this situation, while your friends and you behaved like high schoolers, and you were all too cowardly to ever talk things out.

I never needed or wanted his forgiveness. I wanted you, and the rest of the people between them and me, to treat me like a decent human being, as I deserve. I wanted you to not penalize me for their psychotic behavior. I wanted you to stand up to them, to call him out for being the horrible fucking human being that he is. Your failure to do that is a moral indictment of you.

And when I wrote out a long email that could have provided Jennifer and Evans precisely the information they needed to understand that they had been misperceiving this situation for years, you discouraged me from sending it. You had me edit out all of that and just give a quick apology. You wanted their misperception of reality to continue to live on forever, probably because you mispereceived reality in similar ways and couldn’t believe that you all had it so badly wrong about what I had supposedly done all those years ago.

And when I proved to you that I did nothing wrong, you didn’t even argue with that. You literally said in our private Facebook conversation that I shouldn’t be “emphasizing the moral rectitude of the original situation.” Which is no surprise now that I know you better. Because you don’t care about right and wrong. You don’t care about the objective truth of the situation, that I did nothing wrong and that you and your friends were the assholes. You just care about saving your face and theirs.

Well, guess what, you don’t get to save face, and neither do they. That’s called accountability for your actions. And I have published everything that I have said or done related to this, and it’s staying up there. I welcome full accountability for everything I have done, as long as the rest of you have to endure full accountability as well. Because I know full well, that anyone who looks at the story objectively and with an ounce of compassion, sympathy, and charity for all involved parties cannot come to the conclusion that my two emails and two text messages sent in a three week period of mental agony come anywhere close to outweighing the years of bad behavior that Evans and Jennifer have perpetrated, and the ways that you and many others have been complicit.

And the reaction to the publication of my story vindicates that. Did you notice that almost everyone who was not part of your cliquish and dickish group saw things my way, and that it was the same handful of assholes over and over again who were trying to me tear down? Because you’ve been living in Evans’s and Jennifer’s bullshit unreality for so fucking long that you’re incapable of seeing things with any objectivity.

And what happened when Kene Mezue, a Scrabble player I had never even met or talked to, read my story and had the takeaway that there was too much bullying in the Scrabble world? He made a heartfelt post on the Facebook group called NASPA Member Concerns on the anniversary of the suicide of his friend, a young Scrabble player who had complained about bullying behavior within our community. Kene linked to my story and wanted people to read it, because he saw a similar theme of bullying in it, and because he wanted the bullying behavior in our community to stop. So what happened? First, your friend Cahnmann went on the post and started verbally bullying Kene and insulting and degrading my reputation. Then you took the post down, even though there was absolutely nothing inappropriate in the post and it was completely appropriate for NASPA Member Concerns. You did this even though as President of WESPA you don’t have any position of authority in NASPA anymore, but you were able to do it because you were still a moderator of the group from long before.

Your behavior was unethical. You should have separated yourself from anything to do with official NASPA business. It is a conflict of interest for you to still be acting as a moderator on that group when you are WESPA President. And your claim that my blog violates Jennifer’s privacy is a complete crock of shit. Sorry that you and she and Evans don’t like having accountability for what you all actually did, but you do not get to escape it. I violated no laws nor ethics in publishing what I did, and it was completely necessary in order to hold all of you accountable, since you all are trying to make yourselves internationally relevant in Scrabble and your actions have political impact on the community. If you and they don’t want me talking about it, then fine. Get the fuck out of running in anything in Scrabble, and I will not need to say anything about it again. But as long as you and they want to head Scrabble organizations, I will continue to hold you and them accountable for every thing you do that has political impact on my ability to compete in tournaments. And if you do not like that, go fuck yourself.

After Kene complained about the post being taken down, you demanded that it only be put back up without a link to my blog, because you were obsessed with trying to limit the damage and stopping people from seeing the blog, because you knew it proved me right and proved what shitheads your friends are. So you then jumped back onto the conversation with Cahnmann and started trying to bully Kene into taking down the post. How do you live with yourself, you horrible piece of monkey crap? You lie that I am the bad guy because of two text messages and two emails from four years ago when I’ve done nothing but be a good person since, while your friends have been psychotic assholes. Then you become the psychotic asshole who bullies a guy who is mourning his friend who committed suicide due to bullying and who made a post with no other message than “let’s end the bullying and all play Scrabble nicely together.”

You lie that me telling the story makes me worse and is further attacking your friends. No it is not. It was absolutely necessary to defend my reputation, and it was politically relevant. I made no ad hominem attacks on them in the first two parts of this. Literally the only criticisms of them were things that were politically relevant. But you and Cahnmann just kept proving that you were the bullies here, degrading me and attacking Kene. Because you cannot stand your friends facing accountability for what they actually did.

Let us not forget the email exchange we had around that time:

From: Dave Koenig
To: Chris Lipe
Date: July 18, 2020

Dear Chris,

Evans’s outsize reactions over three and a half years from 2017 to 2020 to my admittedly subideal behavior in three weeks from December 2016 to January 2017 endangered my health, safety, and reputation. I had no choice but to tell the story to the world. If you cannot come to a place of accepting that, we will never be friends again.

Every time you attack my character, you reduce the chance of any reconciliation between us.

My story is 100% true and accurate from my point of view. If you read it and accept my point of view, you should see I had no malice, either in the lead up to and time at New Orleans 2017 or in any time thereafter. I fucked up and did inadvertent damage.

Can you say that Evans’s behavior in the three and a half years since then has been without malice?

I suspect that you have chosen sides and are saying the things publicly that you do for political reasons, not because they are what you believe are an accurate view of the world.

You don’t have to agree with me. You can point out to me where I’m missing things. But if you doubt or smear my honesty or character, you cross the line with me.

Sincerely,
Dave

From: Chris Lipe
To: Dave Koenig
Date: July 18, 2020

Dave,

The more I think about your post, the angrier I get. Publishing someone’s private communications without their consent is far outside the realm of normal, acceptable human behavior.

I think before I can address anything else with you, I need to know that you have basic respect for other people and their boundaries. You need to delete the post and publicly renounce and apologize for it. You need to find respectful, healthy ways to address your grievances.

I send this knowing that you may someday excerpt it and publish it publicly. I do not consent to this but I now realize that does not matter to you.

C

screenshot in appendix

Oh, you do not want me to publish your email? Fuck you. Welcome to accountability for your actions and words. By the way, I showed your email to Mina, and her initial reaction was laughter, because it is fucking absurd. Jennifer wrote a policy decision of why she was not allowing me into the Hood River tournament. That is in the public interest of the entire Scrabble community, and it is my goddamn right to tell the world. Claiming that people should be able to write shitty things and decide to keep other people out of their tournaments on shitty grounds and then the other person is committing wrongdoing by telling the world how they have been treated? That is victim-blaming, you son of a bitch.

Jennifer and Evans besmirched my character by falsely painting a picture that I harassed her to the point where you and many of our other friends believed it and massively mistreated me for many years. I revealed private text conversations that only contained embarrassing information about me, not her, to prove that I did not harass her. And the reason you hate that communication being out there is because it actually does prove that I was in the right and that there was no harassment. If you say that I harassed her, you are a fucking liar, and you are harassing me and degrading my reputation. I literally have accepted full accountability for everything I have said and done. I have given all the evidence in the world. And the evidence proves me right, and proves that you and your friends are shitheads. And that is why you want to keep it bottled up. And you lose. It is out there, and it will continue to stay out there forever, because you and your friends cannot escape accountability. GO FUCK YOURSELF.

If you are fighting against true information getting out there, you are on the wrong side. Keep fighting with reality. Keep losing. Every single way that you fight this makes you look worse. All your friends had to do in response to my blog was apologize. If they had just made a public statement saying something to the effect of “We misunderstood Dave’s words and actions, and we overreacted. We apologize, and he is welcome to play in our tournaments anytime,” this would have all been over. No one in the Scrabble community, myself or otherwise, would have held a grudge about it. I am not saying they should have done that for me. If they were truly interested in giving themselves the best possible reputation in the Scrabble world and growing their organization as much as possible, that would have been the way to do it. But Evans is not capable of that, because he is a child who cannot get over himself and his psychotic hatred for me.

Note that I did not even read, let alone participate in, the NASPA Member Concerns conversation, even while you and your asshole friends were doing everything you could to disparage me. I was taking a Facebook break at the time, and I only found out about it because other friends of mine saw it, spoke up to defend me, took screen shots, and told me about it. I’ve never gone back and read it either, and I have no intention of doing so.

Six Months Later

Meanwhile, my life went on, as much as it could in pandemic times. I moved from Seattle to Portland near the end of 2020, which brought me closer to Dave Wiegand, Pete Armstrong, and Conrad Bassett-Bouchard, but considering that we didn’t have vaccines yet and it was still the middle of a dark, wet Pacific Northwest winter, I was not in a rush to reach out for games.

We of course had no in-person tournaments, but I got a few online games in here and there on ISC, until my friend Cesar unveiled Woogles, a brand new and much nicer website for playing Scrabble online. With the whole competitive Scrabble world confined to the internet for the foreseeable future, there was an initial surge of excitement for Woogles as many Scrabble clubs started setting up weekly meetings on the website. Of course, these clubs did not require people to be in the same geographic location, but the biggest limitation was time zones. It was still hard to mesh schedules with players in places like the UK, Australia, and Asia, and there was not as much of a concentration of Scrabble players playing CSW in time zones close to me. Still, I got some regular games on Wednesday nights at Laurie Cohen’s Valley Virtual Scrabble Club and on Thursday nights at Mike Johnson’s Channel 275 Club. Jennifer and Evans put their cliquish and dickish organization’s name on another club that ran games on Tuesday evenings and Saturday afternoons. I did not initially play at their club, as I saw putting my name on there as effectively giving an endorsement to their organization. Other people might assume that we had made some sort of peace and that I was cool with their organization thriving and growing, when in fact we had zero communication after I published the story and still have not.

However, in early 2021 I had a schedule change which made the Wednesday night club harder to attend and was itching for more games. I did a bit of introspection and soul searching and told myself that my desire not to play in their online club was an ego reaction. Though I definitely did not want their in-person tournaments to supplant in-person NASPA CSW tournaments, for the time being there were no NASPA tournaments, so the point was moot. Several of the best players at Mike Johnson’s Thursday night club, with whom I was always eager to get games, were Geoff Thevenot, Pete Armstrong, and Becky Dyer, and they directed the weekly online events for Jennifer’s and Evans’s organization.

The first time I hopped over to their club page on Woogles was at the end of the night on a Tuesday session, just before the final round started. As I logged on, I saw another player in the club chat window who had joined late and was looking for a game. I spoke up simply to offer myself to play as an evener if I was needed. Pete Armstrong was directing at the time, and he told me that they were even, as when the other player had joined, Cesar had dropped out, so he didn’t pair me, which was no big deal. However, Cesar then saw I was without a game, so he offered to join back in and play me.

Anyone can play against anyone else on Woogles without doing it within a club. The interface is the same regardless of whether you’re playing in a club or not. You’ve got a chat room with all of the people online from which you can hop into games with other individuals. The only differences in a club are that you are at the website woogles.io/club/nameofclub instead of woogles.io, that only the people who are in that particular club share the same chat room, and that the lists of ongoing and completed games only include the ones started from the club page. It is purely an organizational thing to allow for communication within subdivisions of the website users and to allow the directors to see the results of only the games relevant to them.

Cesar and I could have played our game from the main Woogles page or from Jennifer’s and Evans’s club page. It would not have made any difference to me either way. But we happened to play it within their club subdivision, and no one objected. In fact, they had set up a separate website outside of Woogles to track their online club results, and after I beat Cesar they even added my name to their list of players, with a 1-0 all time record.

I came back and played for the full duration of a couple of Saturday sessions without incident. Neither Jennifer nor Evans were even at these sessions, which were generally directed by either Geoff Thevenot or Becky Dyer or both in tandem. They welcomed me graciously, and they continued to track my results all the other players on their club website.

I am a talkative person and my personality can fill a room. As I got comfortable playing at their online club, I chatted frequently in the club chat room, and my chats were totally benign. I just talked about Scrabble, sharing excitement for interesting words that were played, complimenting people on nice moves, occasionally telling an anecdote about how a particular word that just came up had been played by so-and-so at some event so many years ago. I didn’t speak about Jennifer or Evans or about their treatment of me at all, and nothing I said was even personally about me. My chatter could have come from many other Scrabble players and no one would have known the difference if not for the fact that my chats were prepended by my username dewk, which are my initials.

After a few Saturday sessions, I played on a Tuesday night in late February 2021, at a session which Evans and Jennifer did attend. When I first logged on, the director Becky asked everyone who was playing to say hello in the chat window, which was the common method to determine who should be paired. I and the other players indicated our intention to play. However, Becky then said that a player was missing. Someone else said something in the window suggesting that Evans was there, even though I did not see a chat from him. The interface showed a count of the number of people in the chat room but did not by default give a list of names, until you clicked on the number of people. So I clicked on it, and I did not see Evans’s username. (I did not see Jennifer’s either, but apparently she was running late and did not join until a later round.)

The Woogles website was still at this point very much in its beta stage. The team was adding new features all the time, but there were many things that were not fully developed yet. I did not even know if they had built a capability for Evans to block me yet, and if so how well the feature worked, or if Evans had a way to opt out of the chat room entirely. Meanwhile the director was saying the player count was off and another player was saying something confusing about Evans’s presence. I simply made a one line chat saying, “I don’t see Evans. Is he blocking me?” Director Becky responded that she didn’t see him either. Shortly afterward, a different player confirmed that Evans was playing.

I didn’t say anything else about it, and I never addressed or mentioned either Evans or Jennifer in the club chat room in any way. I did later make other comments in the chat room that were of the same benign nature as the stuff I chatted about at the Saturday sessions.

I played for the rest of the evening, except for a couple of games when I had to take a phone call. I opted out for those rounds, as was allowed in the club rules and was commonplace for players to do. I simply notified the director in the chat room when I had to leave and when I was back.

I did very well at the club night, winning all but two of my games. My only two losses were to wunderkind Noah Slatkoff, who was the only player to finish ahead of me. I was never paired with either Evans or Jennifer. Late in the evening when I was leading the pack and Evans was one of the few players who could have caught me, it would have been a logical pairing for me to play Evans, but they instead assigned me a repeat pairing against David Whitley. I said nothing in the chat room and didn’t care.

That Friday morning, I received the following email:

From: Collins Coalition (info@cocoscrabble.org)
To: Dave Koenig
Subject: CoCo Club Participation

February 26th, 2021

Dave,

We are sending this email on behalf of the CoCo online clubs. After discussion, it was unanimously decided that continuing to allow you to participate in CoCo online club play would not be consistent with our organization’s commitment to providing our players a safe and harassment-free environment.

You will no longer be permitted to attend any CoCo online clubs, specifically the two occurring on Tuesday and Saturday. If you do attempt to attend any CoCo online clubs, the director will not enter you into the pairings. This goes into effect now, and is effective indefinitely.

One of the CoCo’s founding principles is the importance of creating a welcoming and harassment-free environment. As stated in our mission, we are committed to fostering a safe community. That commitment means that we take action to protect members of our community from harassment and threats made by other players. See the CoCo website; specifically, sections titled “Who We Are” and “Policies.”

Note that directors for the CoCo have discretion to consider all relevant information for decisions of this nature, not just events that happen during club sessions.

Sincerely,

Becky Dyer, Geoff Thevenot, and Peter Armstrong

Online club directors for the CoCo

screenshot in appendix

I immediately took the step of forwarding this email to Cesar, the founder and creator of the Woogles website, and his wife Mina. I asked Cesar if he could look over all of the chat records of my time in their club sessions and check whether I had behaved in any untoward way. Cesar only had a limited amount of the chat history to look back on, but he also had been at most of the online sessions that I had been at. He looked at everything he could, and his verdict was, “I’m sure you have not done anything untoward at club, this whole thing is messed up – I really don’t like this. In the email they specifically say ‘all relevant information’ and not just events that happen during club, so I’m sure it’s still from the grudge.”

My response was, “I don’t want to force them to let me play in their club. I don’t want to play in their club specifically because they have done this. I just want everyone to know what they have done.”

Recap time. Jennifer and Evans have never contacted me to tell me about any of their preemptive policy decisions to ban me. I only found out because they told Mina and Cesar privately. Even from what I found out, they specifically forbade me only from playing in CoCo tournaments that they themselves directed. In fact, after I published the first two parts of this story, I had a phone call with Conrad Bassett-Bouchard in which he emphasized to me that I would be welcome at CoCo tournaments that he directed. When the conversation in response to the first two parts turned to how they had shittily excluded me from the Virtual World Cup, I never heard anything from Jennifer and Evans either. But their friends, especially Chris Lipe, tried to paint a picture that I was not banned from participating in the Virtual World Cup, and that I had not been on the team simply because I had not signed up. He was strenuous in emphasizing that the ban I was under only applied to in-person tournaments, not online events. Furthermore, the online club sessions that I was playing in were not directed by either Jennifer or Evans, but only by Becky, Pete, and Geoff.

It is funny how they keep escalating how shittily they treat me, and they keep being obsessed with trying to hide what they are doing and create plausible deniability that it is not real. Does anyone with any goddamn common sense think that I had a fair shake to play in the Virtual World Cup or their weekly club sessions or anything else with their cliquish and dickish organization’s name on it? And their defense mechanism is to besmirch my character and reputation by calling me a harasser when all I am trying to do is play Scrabble with several of the other best CSW players in the world.

Mina was so infuriated by their behavior that she personally wrote a letter to Becky. I did not ask her to do this.

From: Mina Le
To: Becky Dyer
Subject: Unjust exclusion
Date: Feb 28, 2021

Dear Becky,

I was aggrieved to learn that Dave Koenig has been banned from CoCo club in perpetuity, presumably because he and Jennifer Clinchy had a bad breakup and Evans continues to hold a grudge about it.

The circumstances that led to Dave being deemed a “harasser” have been publicly published. What is clear to readers of the full story is that his actions — those of an angry, desperate, spurned off-and-on lover — did not meet the legal definition of harassment. He does not deserve to be branded as one or treated as one.

I have trouble imagining how anyone could feel unsafe while sitting in the same online club room as Dave, where he could not so much as broach anyone’s physical personal space or look at them askance. His behavior in CoCo club to date has also been spotless, and as his personal friend I can vouch for his character.

Won’t it bring CoCo PR trouble, as well, when people learn that the directors are banning players simply because they personally dislike them?

Thank you for your consideration,
Mina

From: Becky Dyer
To: Mina Le

Hi Mina,

Thanks for your note. The discussion within our directors’ group is considered confidential; therefore, I can’t comment on it. It’s interesting that you are taking it upon yourself to make assumptions about this matter. We understand that there are people who have already chosen to disparage our organization, and therefore are likely to continue to do so. I’m sorry that you feel that is a good use of your valuable time. I would respectfully ask you to consider whether there might be better activities to undertake.

Sincerely,
Becky

screenshot in appendix

Would you listen to this crap? They want to ban me from their online club forever without sharing the justification with me or anyone else, and they consider anyone else speaking up about this to be disparaging their organization.

Look, they’ve already made it clear that they are complete dicks. I don’t want to play Scrabble with anyone who treats me like this. But it is absurd to pretend that this is in any way a legitimate Scrabble organization, let alone one that claims to be inclusive and welcoming. This is a group of cliquish and dickish friends who want complete control over who can and cannot play with them and do not want to justify themselves to anyone else. This is a group of cliquish and dickish assholes who have no problem accusing another player of harassment on a completely false basis and attempting to assassinate his character, because he dares to show the world how they are treating him.

I have no problem with Jennifer and Evans and all of their asshole friends having their private little Scrabble parties in person and online and not inviting me. But they don’t get to call them tournaments. They don’t get to rate them. They don’t get to call what they are doing a Scrabble organization. I hope that there are enough people in the Scrabble world who have some actual backbone and morals, who will speak up and say, “These people are pieces of shit, and I will never participate in anything with their name or their organization’s name on it, because of the disgusting ways in which they have been treating Dave Koenig for the last four years, while he has been the only one behaving like a sane adult.”

It is funny how it was no problem for me to play in CoCo online clubs for the first few weeks, and how I never did anything in any way harassing to Jennifer or Evans in between that and them banning me. I never even addressed Jennifer or mentioned or suggested anything about her in any way. But the sheer mention of how Evans might have been blocking me was enough to push him over the edge.

The guy is a complete psychotic asshole toward me, and he is obsessed with hiding that from the entire rest of the world. Guess what. He doesn’t get to hide it. It is called accountability for your fucking actions.

I have never been upset at all, not from day one, that Jennifer and Evans banned me from their online club. I am happy about it. I already did not want their organization to succeed. I preferred not to tear it down, but to let them do so by their own actions. And that is what they are doing. They just can’t help themselves and keep demonstrating to the world how terrible they are toward me. I am glad that they are through their actions making it so clear that I never had a fair shake of the tiles when it came to the Virtual World Cup or anything else involving them.

But I am truly appalled that Becky’s, Pete’s, and Geoff’s names are on this letter disparaging me. I came to the online club not because I fucking cared about Jennifer or Evans and their absurd campaign of hatred against me at all, but because I wanted to play Scrabble with the three of you. Literally, you three were the people I was most eager to get games with. And I figured it didn’t matter if we met at woogles.io or woogles.io/club/thisclubname or woogles.io/club/thatclubname. I just wanted to play the fucking game, and I was just a civil human being the whole time that I joined you online to play.

I have proven that this entire mess is 100% their fault and 0% my fault. That I have not done anything but be a civil human being since January 6th, 2017. And if you think that two emails and two text messages sent in a three week period of extreme agony before that outweighs all of the absurd wrongdoing of these assholes in the five years since that time, you are fucking idiots.

And don’t try to argue that my language and tone in this third part of the story is uncivil. Because fuck yeah, it is, and I wear that proudly. I’ve learned that being a civil human being doesn’t work with you fuckers. You, Becky, Pete, and Geoff, have now graduated to not just being complicit in their asshole behavior, but to actively participating in besmirching my character. You have called me a harasser, and in so doing you have burned your bridges with me.

If you had any kind of moral clarity or backbone, you would have said to Jennifer and Evans, “No, fuck you, I am not putting my name on this garbage letter disparaging Dave’s character. If you want to ban him from your online clubs, you do it your damn selves and put your own fucking names on the letter.”

I do not give a shit what Jennifer and Evans do and what they think of me. The only reason I am still talking about this is because they have warped the minds of other people who I used to like and care about. Pete, I stayed at your home in Baltimore and hung out with you and your dog when we played in a tournament over a decade ago. I hung out with you in NYC when you visited too. Becky, you came to my home in Virginia and I made you dinner while we played lovely Scrabble games together. Geoff, you were my roommate and travel buddy when I went to my first ever World Scrabble Championship. We romped through London, Warsaw, and Krakow together and had a blast.

I gave you all more than enough material evidence to clear my name, and you still allowed your names to get on this fucking letter. Now I don’t know for sure who wrote it, and the wording sounds to me like Jennifer’s. It came from an anonymous account from their organization, so it is possible that she just wrote it and put your name on it. But now it is out there with your name on it. So you’ve got one opportunity left to not permanently burn your bridges with me.

You owe me a fucking apology. I want you to personally apologize to me and to publicly recant ever having your name on this letter. I’m not holding my breath for that to happen, but if it doesn’t, you are permanently on my shit list.

Look at your fucking selves. Look at the wording of Becky’s response to Mina. Do you know what you sound like? A fucking Trumper. Your fearless leader just keeps behaving more and more hatefully and ridiculously, and all you want to do is keep in line and keep covering his tracks.

But what happened after that letter came out? I didn’t say anything publicly about it for almost the next year. Meanwhile, you all stopped coming to Mike Johnson’s Thursday night club, so I couldn’t get games with you there either. Cesar spoke up about the treatment of me in the online club to the Woogles team. I hope he was not going to insist that they let me into the club, as I told him not to do that, but there was the question of whether to censure their cliquish and dickish organization for their behavior. When Cesar brought this up, the only person who vigorously objected was Conrad, who wears two hats as a member of the Woogles team and one of the organizers of their cliquish and dickish group. He said, so I am told, “Dave can play in any other online club.” So it’s separate but equal. You admit that there’s no valid excuse for your repugnant behavior. You just don’t want me around.

Conrad blocked me on Facebook within the next few weeks after the letter was sent. There was no communication between me and him leading up to this, not on Facebook or in-person or any other way. I only heard about him crusading against me in the Woogles meeting through Cesar and Mina. The irony of this is that I had only recently readded him to my feed when he did this.

There is another thing that Conrad did, that he does not know that I already know. Literally one day after he and I spoke on the phone back in July 2020 and he acted nice and emphasized that I was welcome at his tournaments, he got on the phone with Marsha Gillis, who had retracted her cash donations to their cliquish and dickish organization in response to the first two parts of my story coming out. And he told her that I have done things to make other women uncomfortable, as a way of justifying their treatment of me. He even used the phrase, “I’m not trying to disparage Dave’s character,” to which Marsha responded, “That’s exactly what you’re doing.”

I am not trying to win anybody back. I just want the entire world to see you all for the assholes that you are. I live in Portland now, and I could easily meet up with Pete or Conrad for Scrabble games, but I haven’t reached out to them. Why would I, after they have proven from afar what assholes they are? Here’s a hint, if you haven’t gotten it from the last fifty of them I’ve given you. Your attachment to the emotional world of Jennifer and Evans has completely interfered with your moral clarity. They built up a false story in their heads over the last five years that I was harassing them when I was literally doing nothing. I wasn’t signing up for their tournaments. I wasn’t bothering them. I was just living my life, while they kept escalating against me. They kept poisoning your minds and trying to rebuild their Scrabble world so that I was excommunicated. And you lived in that world and bought their bullshit, while I’ve been a better human being than them the entire fucking time. You’ve aligned yourselves with horrible fucking people and participated in the character assassination of a person who not only has had the moral high ground the entire fucking time but hasn’t retaliated in any way.

It is true. I have not done anything to them. All I have done is tell the true story of how shitty their behavior toward me has been. That is not attacking them. That is holding a mirror up so that they and you and the rest of the world can see how shitty their behavior toward me has truly been. And that makes me a whistle-blower and hero, warning the rest of the Scrabble world about how bad these people are, based on what they actually did, and warning the rest of the Scrabble world about how badly you all have fallen into Trumpist groupthink.