The following is the entirety of official communications I have had with all relevant Scrabble organizations regarding the story summarized in The Scapegoat.

Most documents are linked as PDFs or images within the timeline. Clicking those links will open them in a separate tab.

Two documents are included inline. For ease of navigation, here are links that jump to the beginning and end of those documents.

  1. My response to incident report (beginning) (end)
    (Addresses the statements seen by me on April 14th, 2022.)
  2. My appeal of NASPA’s suspension (beginning) (end)
    (Addresses the statements seen by me on November 15th, 2022 and the wrongdoing of the Scrabble associations toward me.)

Bad news: You cannot make people treat you well.
Good news: You can make them wish they had.

April 14, 2022

April 15, 2022

April 19 to June 3, 2022

April 25, 2022

May 22, 2022

May 23, 2022

May 27, 2022

June 23, 2022

June 29, 2022

August 8, 2022

August 24, 2022

August 25, 2022

September 6, 2022

Response to Incident Report

Introduction

The story that was laid out in the incident report submitted against me in April 2022 is completely false. I will demonstrate not only that there is no merit to the accusations but also that all three of Evans, Jennifer, and Lola knowingly and intentionally submitted false information1 with the express purpose of defaming my character, drumming up as much hatred in the Scrabble community for me as possible, and permanently banning me from the game.

The spark that ignited this course of action was Lola’s perception of our interactions at the January 2022 tournament in New Orleans. Her description of what happened at that tournament is out of line with reality and includes claims that I said things that were the exact opposite of what I said. Furthermore, she included in her statement a completely false history of our relationship, which I have thorough material evidence to prove.

Lola also gave a false story of our private conversations while we lived together in Spring 2020 to Evans and Jennifer in order to further their agenda of building a false case that I have been harassing them, when the true story is that they have been harassing me for the last six years. Evans and Jennifer then piled on their own untruths in their statements to echo what Lola wrote and make an even bigger character assassination.

Evans and Jennifer were already harassing and bullying me and doing many unethical things in the Scrabble world for three and a half years, from 2017 to July 2020, when I published The Crucible and The Fallout, revealing their wrongdoing. After I published the blog I was done with the story. I did not think about or interact with Evans or Jennifer at all for the next two years, until they again escalated against me by submitting this character assassination in April 2022.

Lola and I had also stopped dating by mid-2020, and we had a minimal amount of interaction over the next couple years, including no contact whatsoever between August 2021 and the January 2022 New Orleans tournament. Our interaction at the New Orleans tournament was altogether no more than 15 minutes over the course of the three day tournament.

Between July 2020 and April 2022 the only people in this story who were weighing on my mind in any way were Chris Lipe, Geoff Thevenot, Peter Armstrong, Becky Dyer, Dave Wiegand, Conrad Bassett-Bouchard, and Jesse Day.

Because of their own narcissism and/or intentional deception, Evans, Jennifer, and Lola have read what little they know about my actions as being about them, when they were not at all.

I will not simply go on the defensive, rebutting their false story but allowing it to remain the primary narrative. The Scrabble world needs to know the real story of what has happened from 2017 to 2022, the story that they are doing everything possible to distract you from and get you to disbelieve by sabotaging my character.

The rest of this document is structured as (A) an overview, (B) a statement about who I really am, (C) the full story of my interactions with Evans’s, Jennifer’s, and Lola’s circles from 2017 to 2022, (D) a corroborated summary of what really happened in my relationship with Lola, (E) a point-by-point rebuttal of Evans’s statement, and (F) a point-by-point rebuttal of Jennifer’s statement.

(A) Overview

Evans Clinchy, who was already predisposed not to like me for years previously, has hated me ever since early 2017, precipitated by communications that I sent to Jennifer Lee (now Jennifer Clinchy) in the month before the 2017 New Orleans Scrabble tournament. I have fully admitted to those communications and made them public to the world, and I accept full accountability for them. If he chooses to hate me for the rest of his life, I have earned that, and I have no problem with it.

However, he and Jennifer have turned a personal grudge into a Scrabble political matter over the last six years, using their grudge as a justification for repeatedly breaking the rules of NASPA for literally every tournament they directed under its banner from 2017 to 2019 in ways that unleveled the playing field, not only by excluding me and other players they did not like, but also by arbitrarily favoring their friends in their registration processes. Literally everyone who signed up for their tournaments using their secret pre-registration process was complicit in breaking the rules, including WESPA President Chris Lipe.

There are a small number of CSW Scrabble players in North America, although among them are many of the continent’s best players. Furthermore, there are few tournaments which include many of those top players, and since 2017 the events run by Evans and Jennifer have been a substantial percentage of those tournaments. Because of how our Scrabble rating systems work, players who have more opportunities to play in events like these have a significant advantage when it comes to getting into the top tiers of the rating system or maintaining such positions, which helps with qualifying for major international events such as the Alchemist Cup.

Evans and Jennifer broke the rules with the specific intention of keeping me out of tournaments, and I am not the only one who was disadvantaged by their tactics. Other top CSW players who were not part of their “in group,” such as Jason Keller, also had fewer opportunities to earn sufficient qualifying ratings for events such as the Alchemist Cup. In short, Evans and Jennifer—and all of their friends who used their secret pre-registrations—cheated.

Then Evans and Jennifer created a renegade association, poaching players, directors, and events from NASPA’s small CSW scene. They have continued unprofessional, unethical, and bullying tactics, and by making themselves leaders of this organization they are avoiding accountability to anyone.

Since early 2017, Evans has repeatedly disparaged me to many members of the Scrabble community, while they also have done many underhanded things in a preemptive attempt to keep me out of their tournaments and to frame me for harassment. The irony of this is that I have had no desire to play in their tournaments and was making no attempt to do so. They are living under a paranoid and narcissistic delusion that I am presenting any sort of problem for them and that I want to be in their lives in any way, while I am doing my best to ignore them, work around them, and get what CSW Scrabble games I can against the rest of the best players, both in North America and around the world.

I approached the situation as an investigative reporter. I dealt with them to the bare minimum necessary in the handful of times we played at tournaments in 2017 and 2018. I used my connections and relationships with the rest of the Scrabble community to collect evidence of what was happening. I blew the whistle on them by publishing The Crucible and The Fallout in July 2020, and I have received a great deal of blowback from them and their friends in the two years since that time, blowback which included doubling down on building an entirely false case that I have harassed them.

You can rightly criticize the wording of my communications to Jennifer in December 2016 to January 2017. I still believe that they were well-intentioned attempts to create a dissolution of tension before we met at the New Orleans tournament room, a dissolution that would have avoided the last six and a half years of agony for all of us, and I also accept that they were ineffective and had terribly unfortunate unintended consequences of pushing Evans over the edge and contributing to bad behavior by him and Jennifer ever since then. They are also the only thing I have done wrong in this entire story.

Evans and Jennifer have also dragged my April 2020 Facebook interaction with Darrell Day into this case as an attempt to drive up hatred toward me and get you to believe the outlandish story they try to weave about me. The situation with Darrell Day is irrelevant to this story,2 and furthermore it is one which NASPA has already had a hearing about. I have accepted NASPA’s ruling with no complaints, and I learned my lesson from the event. It is the only time in my life that I have expressed violent thoughts about a person toward that person, and it is something that I will not do again.

I have had essentially no personal interaction with Evans and Jennifer since the end of 2016. The very limited number of times that we were in the same place and spoke at all have been fully documented in The Crucible and The Fallout. Also documented there were all written communications we have had in the time period, with the only exception being a few organizational emails for Seattle area CSW Scrabble get-togethers that the two of them were simply cc’ed on.3 Not only that, but I have had zero interaction or communication with Evans or Jennifer since the publication of those blog posts in July 2020. In fact, the ceasing of communication with them goes back significantly earlier than that. The last time I ever emailed them personally was September 17, 2018, in response to Jennifer’s email banning me from the Hood River tournament. The last time I ever copied them on an email was March 26, 2019, and the last time we ever were in the same place was July 17, 2018, at the wedding of Chris Lipe and Randi Goldberg in Aruba.

Since the publication of the blog, the only way that my life has even tangentially intersected theirs was when I played in a handful of online Scrabble club sessions on the Woogles platform at the club with their organization’s name in January and February 2021. I never played with or interacted with Evans or Jennifer at those sessions; the two of them were not even present at most of the sessions I was at. I was talkative in the club chatroom at some of those sessions, and my chats were entirely about the joy of words. I only mentioned Evans once, in response to a question from director Becky Dyer. That was enough for them to decide to ban me from their online club into perpetuity. I never responded to their communication about the banning and never went back to the online club.

Since the ban from their online club on February 26, 2021, there is literally no story of anything between us. Everything that they have done since then, and that they claim has happened since then, is simply a product of their gossipping about and badmouthing me together with their friends and building a story in their own heads.

I am far more sympathetic to Lola, and it is extremely sad that she has gotten caught up in this mess. I have done absolutely nothing wrong toward Lola, and I have never had any ill will or anger toward her for a moment of my life. However, she has badly misunderstood the situation between her and me and has decided completely unnecessarily to submit an easily disprovable assassination of my character as part of this report. I am charitably interpreting that her point of view was that it was necessary to lie about me because she really felt in danger, rather than interpreting her actions as a malicious attempt to destroy my life. However, it does not change the fact that her testimony is entirely false, which I will show with no hard feelings to her. It is my sincere hope that she will recognize the truth of my recounting of our history and recant her statement, as I have a massive amount of material evidence to prove what I say. I have some optimism that unlike Evans and Jennifer she has enough maturity to admit that she was wrong and to do the right thing.

I would like to take a little time to talk about who I really am, and what I have really been doing in the Scrabble world for the last six years.

(B) Who I Am

I have been playing in Scrabble tournaments for two decades after thirteen years of competitive chess. Competitive board games have been a large part of my life for three quarters of it.

I have excelled not only in chess and Scrabble but also in mathematics and computer programming, all fields which require a large amount of objectivity and unbiased thinking. I was also a math teacher for many years, and one of my passions was teaching my students how to use statistics and data analysis to overcome their biases and see the world more objectively. One of my biggest political concerns is the fight for free and fair elections, defeating gerrymandering and other forms of electoral corruption and malfeasance that undermine our ability to choose our leaders fairly.

I have zero history of violent behavior in my life. I have never been in a fight with another human being. I have never punched or kicked or otherwise hit someone, with the exception of sparring sessions in Tae Kwon Do classes that I took when I was under ten years old. I have never even held a gun, let alone fired or owned one, and I do not ever plan to.

The only weapons that I would use on this community or any other are truth-bombs. I believe in holding our political leaders accountable for their behavior and speaking the uncomfortable truths.

I have never been anything but a positive social force in person at any Scrabble tournament I have ever attended, and I have always been well-behaved in every tournament room. Furthermore, since I played at the 2011 World Championships, I have been an advocate of unifying our tournament play in North America with the rest of the world by getting our continent to play with the CSW lexicon as the rest of the world does. I worked behind the scenes with John Chew in advance of the 2012 US National Championship to ensure a good and fair registration system for our first CSW event at Nationals and to increase the likelihood of the event happening, which it did. At the tournament, I took photos of every one of my opponents and shared stories about all of them on social media in celebration of the most international event that had ever happened at US Nationals.

When leading Singaporean player Weibin Toh moved to Washington DC, I picked him up at the airport and brought him to his domicile even though we had never met in person before. We became fast friends and I introduced him into our small DC CSW community.

I have played Scrabble on four continents, including representing the USA at multiple World Championships, at the Can-Am Championship, and at the King’s Cup in Bangkok, and through the game I have befriended people all over the world.

I have been immensely successful in tournaments, including often being ranked in the top 5 or 10 players in North America and earning the Grandmaster title from the Association of British Scrabble Players. Since I became a top ranked player, when I have played tournament Scrabble anywhere in the world with any group other than the close friends of Evans and Jennifer, I have been treated graciously and enthusiastically by the tournament organizers and by the locals at the event. Organizers have told me that my name on the registration list has increased the prestige of their events and helped draw in other players. In fact, organizer Peggy Fehily said just that at my most recent tournament, the 2022 Continental Scrabble Championship in Berlin.

I know my worth, and I only want to play Scrabble not just where I am allowed but where I am valued. I have zero interest in trying to fight my way into any subset of the community that does not value me. Just the opposite, the cost of disrespect to me is you losing my support and advocacy for your tournaments.

In addition to supporting many tournament directors and events, I have been influential in pulling many North American Scrabble players into the CSW fold over the years. Among those have been Scott Appel, Guy Ingram, Barry Keith, Jennifer Clinchy, and Lola McKissen.

For a few years I ran an unofficial CSW club in the DC area, and I also pulled together the CSW players in the Seattle area for casual Scrabble get-togethers when I made business trips there between 2014 and 2017, before I was living in the area. I met Bharath Balakrishnan at a tournament in Chicagoland in 2017, and when I learned he was in Seattle, I introduced him to the other CSW players there, which led to him becoming part of that community.

Many of the people in Evans’s and Jennifer’s circles over the last several years are people with whom I had longtime friendships, predating Evans and Jennifer running any Scrabble events, and Jennifer even being in our Scrabble scene. When Evans and Jennifer started disparaging me, I tried to give these mutual friends the benefit of the doubt and continue good relationships and Scrabble get-togethers with them, though it became more awkward over the last few years. One of the primary reasons I wrote The Crucible and The Fallout was to try to clear my name and the air with these people. I perhaps naively assumed that when they saw the truth of the story, they would recognize that I had done nothing wrong and would want to play Scrabble with me.

When a number of those people doubled down by criticizing or otherwise disrespecting me on account of anything to do with the story between Evans and Jennifer and me, I started instituting a one-strike-you’re-out policy. If people were going to act as if I did anything wrong beyond two poorly worded texts and two poorly worded emails between December 2016 and January 2017 or as if I was anything other than the victim of bullying since that time, I wasn’t going to waste my time seeking their approval.

I worked around this whole situation as best as I could by traveling far and wide to get as many CSW Scrabble games against strong players as I could. While I have been living in the Pacific Northwest since 2018, this has included flying to tournaments in San Francisco, CA; Chicagoland, IL; Austin, TX; New Orleans, LA; Albany, NY; Montclair, NJ; Niagara Falls, ON; Kingston, ON; Bordeaux, France; Berlin, Germany; Edinburgh, Scotland; Milton Keynes, England; Torquay, England; Warrington, England; Bristol, England; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; and Bangkok, Thailand. I have been extremely blessed that for much of this time I have had lucrative and flexible enough jobs that have afforded me the resources to be able to do so much travel and get many tournament games around the world.

But it has been exhausting, in terms of energy, time, and finances, that I have often had to get on a plane for nine or more hours simply to be able to play the game I love. It has also been saddening and frustrating that it has been so difficult to get local games because of the ways that Evans and Jennifer have poisoned the well, even though the Pacific Northwest has one of the strongest concentrations of high ranked CSW players in North America, including Dave Wiegand, Peter Armstrong, Conrad Bassett-Bouchard in Portland; Chris Grubb in Seattle; and Jesse Matthews and Dean Saldanha in Vancouver.

I have never wanted to play in a single tournament with directors who treat me terribly. All that I have ever wanted in the Pacific Northwest Scrabble scene is to be able to play casual games with many of the great players in the area, if they are willing to treat me respectfully and not act as if I am a bad person because two people in their community are mistreating me.

The treatment I have received from this community (and from a few people who live further away but are also closely connected with Evans and Jennifer) after I published The Crucible and The Fallout stands in stark contrast to what I have received from just about every other corner of the Scrabble universe. They have made me lose all desire to play Scrabble or be friends with any of these people. They have been complicit in bullying, and now I have no desire other than showing how terribly this subset of the Scrabble community has treated me, in hopes of warning everyone else that these bullies are an absolute poison for the larger world of competitive Scrabble.

I believe that the ways I shine a light on this are for the betterment of the rest of the Scrabble world, regardless of what happens to me.

(C) The Full Story

When I saw Evans and Jennifer sign up for the January 2017 New Orleans tournament, I suspected they were dating, and I emailed Jennifer on December 19, 2016, asking for a discussion before the tournament, in an attempt to avoid the awkward situation of us seeing each other for the first time in several months across the board at the Scrabble tournament with the tension of our personal relationships looming. She ignored my email, and I became angry and sad. I sent two text messages over the next week, asking for a reply to the email, and she continued not to respond. I sent one more email on January 5th, 2017, asserting that if she did not meet with me beforehand, I would speak my mind while we were sitting across the board.

That was eight days before the tournament. I then calmed myself and found peace and closure on my own. I did not contact her again prior to us sitting down to play in the second round, and before the game the only thing I said to her was “Let’s play Scrabble.”

Jennifer was visibly upset when I played her, and so was Evans when we played a day later. Evans refused to shake my hand or talk to me, and he rudely jumped up and down shouting “YES!” in the middle of the tournament room after winning a challenge.

I recognize that my communications, which ended more than a week before the tournament, contributed to their emotional reactions in the tournament room. I accept full responsibility for that. I did not misbehave in any way in the tournament room, and I did not do anything to exacerbate the situation.

For the next six years, I have done nothing untoward to Evans and Jennifer. I saw them only rarely at Scrabble tournaments in 2017 and 2018, and I did not interact with them any more than was necessary to play our Scrabble games. Meanwhile, Evans frequently disparaged me to other Scrabble players, which I have ample evidence to show.4 Evans and Jennifer also started organizing tournaments, first a one-off in Tennessee in August 2017 and then numerous one-days and holiday weekend events in the Pacific Northwest beginning in September 2017. I already wrote in the overview about how they broke NASPA rules for every tournament they ran since August 2017, and how it impacted me and other players. I did not, however, say or do anything about this until July 2020.

I moved to Seattle in April 2018, for a position at a company I had been working at since 2013. I had been making business trips there since 2014 and had already organized Scrabble get-togethers with Walker Willingham, Judy Romann, Chris Grubb, Bharath Balakrishnan, and Jesse Matthews when I had been in the area. In the month before I moved, I learned from both Chris Grubb and Walker Willingham that Evans had been badmouthing me to the Seattle area players and that he and Jennifer had specifically told the other players not to invite me to casual Scrabble get-togethers.5

I explained the entire back-story to Walker, who had been sending out emails to organize events. I even showed him the emails which had upset Jennifer a year and a half earlier. He agreed with me that this was not a reasonable grounds to exclude anyone. Walker decided to invite everyone via email to the next Seattle Scrabble get-together, and Evans immediately responded to him, “Was this a slip up?”, browbeating him for copying me on the email. Walker attempted to make peace and stand up for inclusivity in our small Seattle area CSW Scrabble community, and Evans and Jennifer chose to stop responding and coming to the get-togethers entirely. Walker and I shared email duties on sending out invites for get-togethers, and we continued copying Evans and Jennifer on those emails for a while, but we eventually removed them from the cc-list because of unresponsiveness.

At one of the get-togethers in Spring 2018, Judy Romann told me that she had asked Jennifer in the restroom a few weeks earlier what the problem was with playing Scrabble with me. Jennifer told her that she did not have a problem with me, but Evans did. This corresponded with my experience whenever we crossed paths at tournaments between March 2017 and May 2018.6 Things were always civil between me and Jennifer, and we played Scrabble with no problems. However, Evans always refused to speak to me, refused to make eye contact, and showed a massive amount of anger in his body language. He would also look away, turn his head down, or leave the room as soon as he saw me in a tournament room.

The last time I was ever in the same place as Evans and Jennifer was the wedding of Chris Lipe and Randi Goldberg in Aruba in July 2018. A couple days before the wedding I introduced my date Emily, who was not a Scrabble player, to a group of Scrabble players who were playing a boardgame in the lobby of the resort. Evans was present, and Jennifer was not. Evans insulted my date by refusing to stand up or even look in her direction or say hello. He simply muttered his name in a barely audible voice when it was his turn to make an introduction. I had no interaction with Evans on the trip.

At the wedding reception, I did not attempt to interact with Jennifer or Evans at all. I stayed at the bar area, and at the dance floor, and at a table on the opposite side from where Jennifer was sitting. At a moment when my date left to go to the bathroom, Jennifer walked across the reception toward me and attempted to start a conversation with me. I was uncomfortable with this and simply gave a one line reply before she left. This was the last time we ever interacted in person, and we have never been in the same place since that day, July 18, 2018.

Jennifer was later elected to the NASPA Advisory Board and attempted to change NASPA rules to give her and Evans more leverage to keep people out of tournaments.

In September 2018, I sent Evans an entry fee via Paypal for the 2019 Hood River tournament, the only time I have ever submitted an entry to one of their tournaments. I also sent him a three sentence courteous email notifying him. Later that same day, Evans refunded my entry and Jennifer sent an email back to me.

In the email she gave as a rationale that my January 5th, 2017 email included “a written threat from you that you would take action to intentionally cause me emotional distress at a Scrabble tournament in the playing room.” I understood and accepted that she saw it that way, but she was wrong about my intention. I was not trying to cause her emotional distress; I was attempting to alleviate my own emotional distress. Furthermore, my preference, as I had made clear in that email, and the one from three weeks earlier, was to have a discussion outside of the tournament room, specifically to avoid embarrassment.

Ironically, she also accused me of disparaging her. I had been doing no such thing, but her partner had been disparaging me for nearly two years.

On September 17, 2018, I replied with a brief email apologizing for my specific offending words in the January 5th, 2017 email. I respected their decision not to allow me to enter the tournament, and I specifically said I would not escalate to NASPA. I did not ask for a response nor anything else from them. The entirety of this email correspondence is in The Fallout, along with a longer draft of the response email that is contemporaneous evidence that my intention in signing up for the tournament all along was simply to open a line of communication and allow them to address their grievance with me. (Figures 37-38)

I never attempted to sign up for another tournament of theirs again. The apology email is the last time I personally communicated to them in any way.

In July 2019, nearly a year after being denied entry to Hood River, I began to write the story of the trauma I had already been experiencing for the last few years. Most of it was written in Spring 2020. The first draft was for my own therapeutic purposes, just to get out what was bothering me so much. However, I knew from the beginning that I needed to tell the mutual friends of Evans, Jennifer, and me some of my story, in hopes of salvaging my relationships with them.

I had not committed to publishing anything to the world at that time. I thought I might just send the story to a particular circle of friends. However, Evans and Jennifer took several more political actions within our Scrabble community over the next year that convinced me that the entire Scrabble world needed to hear my story.

At the end of 2019, Evans and Jennifer left NASPA and created a renegade association. They enlisted friends in other parts of the country to run tournaments under their new banner. I have consistently advocated for unity in our Scrabble world and criticized WGPO for forming nearly a decade earlier. A third organization was a bigger step in the wrong direction. Furthermore, Evans and Jennifer were attempting to put themselves in a position where they did not have to answer to anyone. They could continue unethical and vindictive practices against other Scrabble players unabated.

I also suspected, based on the rumor mill, that they intended to foist all of the tournaments using the CSW dictionary in North America away from NASPA, and to get recognition from WESPA as another official association for North America. If they got their way, I would potentially have no tournaments to play on my entire continent. This was the reason that I decided that I needed to go public. This was no longer just a personal vendetta, but something that impacted the entirety of North American competitive Scrabble.

While I was preparing the blog, Evans and Jennifer escalated even further against me and gave me another justification for going public. Shortly after the 2020 Alchemist Cup was canceled due to the pandemic, they stepped in and ran an online tournament they called the Virtual World Cup. I had already assured myself qualification for the 2020 Alchemist Cup. Evans and Jennifer used a different qualification system for the Virtual World Cup, but by their formula I also should have qualified for team USA at that event. However, they intentionally bypassed me and selected Dave Wiegand for the team, even though he had a lower qualifying rating than I.

My last direct communication to them had been an unqualified apology (Figure 37) more than a year and a half earlier, and now they were depriving me of opportunities to play against many of the world’s best players at what was—in the eyes of most competitive Scrabblers—a prestigious international Scrabble event. Evans’s and Jennifer’s grudge was no longer just a personal vendetta, but something that impacted the entirety of international competitive Scrabble.

I did not attack or criticize them in any personal ways in The Crucible and The Fallout. I told what happened leading up to and at the 2017 New Orleans tournament in the most charitable and fair way that I could. The criticisms that I leveled against them were entirely political in nature, for repeated and intentional actions that they took continuously for a period of three and a half years, (from 2017 to mid-2020 when I published the blog.) These actions harmed my reputation and deprived me—and not only me—of equal access to Scrabble games with many of the world’s best players. Meanwhile, the only things that I had done wrong were two emails and two text messages that were too harshly worded in a three week period between December 19, 2016 and January 5, 2017.

Most readers of my blog had the right takeaways from my story. The positive feedback far outnumbered the negative feedback, and even though I didn’t write about the Virtual World Cup, others connected the dots and drew the proper conclusions about it. (Figure 1) Almost all of the criticism I received was from friends of Evans and Jennifer, simply because they did not want to see their friends and themselves as being the bad guys, in defiance of where all of the facts pointed.

I had a phone call in July 2020 with Conrad Bassett-Bouchard, shortly after I published the blog. He was sympathetic and civil, telling me that I would always be welcome at his tournaments. Furthermore, he confided in me that he was soon moving to Portland, Oregon, close to where Dave Wiegand and Peter Armstrong were living. He even encouraged me to move to the same area so that we could all play Scrabble together. This was the last conversation we had.

However, I soon got word that Conrad was behaving differently behind my back, also attempting to sabotage my reputation and to support unethical things that Evans, Jennifer, and friends were doing to exclude me.

At the end of October 2020, I moved from Seattle to Portland, Oregon, (long before Lola did.) My primary motivations were not related to Scrabble. I have a close personal friend here who was my neighbor on the East Coast, and we are neighbors again. This was during the pre-vaccine time of the pandemic, and the weather was still bad for many months, so I did not rush to get in-person Scrabble games.

In late 2020, I played Scrabble on Woogles in Laurie Cohen’s Wednesday club and Mike Johnson’s Thursday club. My strongest competition was from Brian Bowman, Geoff Thevenot, Peter Armstrong, and Becky Dyer.

In January 2021, I had a schedule change and was looking for more games at other times. I started playing at the Woogles club affiliated with Evans’s and Jennifer’s association. I did not want to support their association, but none of these games were part of official rated tournaments. It was just casual online play. The reason I went to their club was to get games specifically with Geoff Thevenot, Peter Armstrong, and Becky Dyer, who were some of my best competitors available and the directors of the club.

I played as an evener at the end of one Tuesday session and then in two or three full Saturday sessions with no problems. The directors welcomed me cordially, paired me, and put my results on their organization’s website after each session. I talked in the chatroom only about the joy of words. Evans and Jennifer were not at these sessions.

On February 23, 2021, I played a full Tuesday session at their Woogles club for the only time. Before the first round, director Becky Dyer said the count of players was off. I checked the listing of players in the room and did not see Evans’s or Jennifer’s name. Jennifer did not come until later, but someone else in the chatroom suggested that Evans was there. I made a one line comment, “I do not see Evans. Is he blocking me?” Becky said that she did not see Evans either, but soon thereafter another player confirmed that he was there. (The website was still in its alpha stages, so it is possible that whatever blocking or chat opt-out mechanism was in place was not fully working yet.) I played the entire night uneventfully. The rest of my chat was just about the joy of words.

On Friday, February 26, 2021, I received an email from info@cocoscrabble.org banning me from their online club into perpetuity. (Figure 2) No justification for this banning was given, and no appeal process was offered. The letter implied that I was a harasser and ended with “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.” The names at the end of the email were the three directors Becky Dyer, Geoff Thevenot, and Peter Armstrong.

I never responded to the email and never attempted to go to the club again. Cesar verified that I did not do anything untoward in the online club, and he was unhappy with their organization using his Woogles platform for this kind of inappropriate exclusion. He told me later that when he brought this up with the Woogles team, Conrad argued vociferously that Woogles should not do anything to stop this organization from excluding me. Furthermore, Mina emailed Becky Dyer protesting what had been done, and Becky sent back a nasty and unprofessional email, asserting that the decision was confidential and that anyone who questioned it was disparaging their organization. (Becky’s email is quoted in full in Figure 2.)

By the end of April 2021, I was vaccinated against COVID-19 and ready to seek out in person Scrabble games again. I did not reach out either to Conrad, because of the ways he had been behaving behind my back, or to Peter, because his name was on this offensive letter banning me from the online club. Instead, I reached out to Dave Wiegand, the only top CSW Scrabble player in Portland who had not mistreated me, as far as I knew.

We played twice, in May and July 2021. On the first occasion we just played Scrabble and didn’t talk about much else. The second time, I brought up with Dave how the other Portland Scrabble players, particularly Conrad, were treating me. Dave was mostly unhappy to talk about it, but I did learn from him that Conrad had decided that he did not want to meet with or play with me at all anymore, not just in tournaments but at casual get-togethers too. I pointed out that this contradicted the last conversation I had with Conrad, and Dave said it was because of something that Conrad had learned about me more recently. Dave claimed not to know what it was. I suspected that Conrad’s change in attitude about me was related to his friendship with Lola.

I reached out to Dave two more times looking for games in preparation for the 2022 New Orleans tournament, but he ignored both my November 4th and December 9th texts. When I saw him again over the board at the New Orleans tournament on January 16th, 2022, he at first played dumb as if he hadn’t seen my texts. But when I asked him point blank if he was intentionally ignoring my texts, he admitted it. He then criticized me for alienating so many other people and attempted to mock my Scrabble results, saying “what have you ever won?”

Dave’s behavior was victim blaming. I had zero interaction of any kind with Conrad since our last friendly conversation in July 2020, when he had encouraged me to come to Portland to play Scrabble with him, but I was blamed for alienating him.

—

I must rewind to tell the story of my relationship with Lola. Lola and I had a very friendly relationship from a distance over text messages, phone calls, and video chats starting in late 2019. Our relationship became romantic as we made a trip to Puerto Rico together on March 10th-17th, 2020. For more than a month afterward we were romantic from a distance, until I temporarily moved in with her in Salt Lake City from April 25th to May 29th. Then she traveled back to Seattle with me and lived there starting on May 30th. On June 14th we decided the relationship had run its course, and she flew back to Salt Lake City the next day. We remained good friends and continued to socialize frequently over Google Meets with other friends and to have close conversations over text for more than a month after that, up to July 23rd. On July 24th, she decided that she needed to create more distance from me, and she was very direct in communicating that to me over email. We had a civil and kind conversation in which I respected her need for space.

Our relationship and her state of mind about it at the time was nothing like what her statement says. Furthermore, it is strange that she would submit a statement with so many lies, as there is a huge amount in it that I can easily disprove from our text message and email history. However, it is telling that the statement is addressed to the Woogles team and to WGPO, and not to NASPA, which was the sanctioning organization of the only tournament we were both at, the 2022 New Orleans event. My best guess is that she did not intend to submit this as part of an incident report, in which I would have an opportunity to read it and disprove the massive amount of falsehood in it. I think she intended the statement for behind-the-scenes consumption by people on the Woogles team and in WGPO in hopes that they would take other action to keep me away from those spheres. However, Evans and Jennifer then submitted it as part of this incident report.

I am highly sympathetic to Lola’s situation. I understand why she felt that she needed to lie. There was a period of time from early 2020 until mid-June when I exposed a lot of my inner trauma to her. I admitted many angry thoughts to her. None of it was directed at her, and none of it was a threat to do anything. It was simply off-the-cuff venting.7 Lola received the agony of my trauma in a supportive, sympathetic, and loving way, but it was a lot to bear.

She also took an active role in my grieving and healing process by helping me with my writing project that eventually became The Crucible and The Fallout, a project she knew about long before we moved in together. It was our plan all along that when I went to live with her in SLC I would work on my writing while she worked on her day job.

Lola is the only person besides me who read the first draft of the writing, and in so doing she did a large amount of emotional labor and took on a lot of my world view. She was my first editor, helping me figure out what subset of the story I needed to tell my Scrabble community, and making concrete suggestions for how to reshape and reorder parts to communicate it more effectively.

I published the blog a month after we stopped dating, on July 14th and 15th, 2020. We were still on very good terms, and she gave me positive feedback about it soon afterward. On my Facebook posts about it, she made numerous comments that were highly sympathetic and supportive of my situation, and she defused several of the criticisms that detractors wrote.

I do not believe that her opinion about any of this had changed when she said that she needed to create more distance on July 24th. Her reasons were unrelated. However, not long afterward, her opinion about me and the situation with other Scrabble players began to change, though I did not learn about this until almost the end of 2020.

An extremely unfortunate thing happened a week or two after Lola and I agreed to increase distance. A woman from Maryland who was in a Google Meet social group with us heard a rumor from a man named Kenny I had previously socialized with in the Washington DC area.

In December 2014, Kenny had sent me a text message out of the blue threatening violence on me and alleging that I had taken advantage of woman named Sarah, with whom I had been in a consensual sexual relationship over the period of several months. I immediately forwarded Kenny’s message to Sarah. She told him I had done nothing to hurt her and confirmed that with me via email and a phone call. (Figures 3 & 4) Then Kenny changed his story, saying it did not matter that I hadn’t done it, because he knew that I had done things to other women. He never named another woman and continued spreading vicious rumors, even though the only woman he ever mentioned explicitly denied the charge. I have had no connection with the man since 2014, but he was still spreading these lies six years later.

Some time right around the end of July or beginning of August 2020, this Maryland woman suddenly blocked me on Facebook and made at least one Facebook post spreading these same lies that Kenny had been saying in 2014. Because this Maryland woman had been part of my Google Meet social group with several Scrabble players, including Lola, Mina Le, and Cesar del Solar, a number of them saw a Facebook post including this hoax story. I thought there was a good chance that Lola saw this and that it might have affected her view of me.

I had been respecting Lola’s wishes, and we had no communication from the end of July until December 2020. She blocked me on Facebook at some point in between. In early December, Mina organized a group to do an online reading of a play, and both Lola and I volunteered to participate. Mina and Cesar were concerned because they knew that she had blocked me on Facebook, and during Woogles work Lola had expressed to Cesar being upset about my incident with Darrell Day.

On Mina’s recommendation, I emailed Lola on December 11, checking to make sure it was going to be okay for us both to participate in the play reading. Lola got back to me quickly, and we had a civil email exchange. She communicated that her concern was not the 2014 hoax story but screenshots she had seen of my Facebook messages to Darrell Day. (Figure 28)

I had told Lola immediately about the incident report that was filed to NASPA for the comments I made to Darrell Day when I received it on April 17th, 2020. (Figure 22) At the time I was feeling self-righteous in my anger and was tempted to write a response that would have fanned the flames and likely given me a bigger punishment. Lola advised me on how to edit down what I said and be more circumspect. NASPA had not sent me the screenshots of the comments, and neither Lola nor I had seen them at the time. She was only going on my description of the incident and the one that John Karris had sent me from NASPA.

I had forwarded everything I had received from NASPA to Lola back in April 2020. However, when she later saw the screenshots, she was shocked and upset. I believe she felt guilty about helping me with my defense to that incident report, and this perhaps led to her feeling guilty about helping me with the splenetic.net blog too. I think she also might have felt deceived by me, although there was no intentional deceit on my part. I had recounted what had happened as best as I could remember at the time, and I myself never saw the screenshots until this incident report was filed almost exactly two years later, in April 2022.

Lola ended her December 11, 2020 email with: (Figure 28)

I am not really interested in talking on the phone to you at this time. I will however unblock you as to minimize weird confusion in things like us both commenting on a friend’s post. I am also okay with you emailing me when you feel it’s necessary, like now.

We are not enemies, and you don’t need to worry about things like the play reading group, or Woogles, or tournaments if that ever is a thing again. We are also not friends.

We continued the email exchange with a few more messages that were just about communicating that there was no intentional deception on my part when it came to the Darrell Day comments, and we both ended by wishing the other one well. That was the last time we ever emailed each other.

She unblocked me on Facebook as she said she would, and we both participated in Mina’s play reading a couple weeks later with no issues. We never at this time or later had any interaction on Facebook, other than making a couple of comments on Mina’s posts about the December play reading and one later play reading in February that we also participated in.8

Lola then reinitiated communication with me by gifting me a subscription to Will Anderson’s Twitch channel on February 12, 2021. I sent her a quick text thanking her for the subscription and saying I didn’t know what it did. She first explained what it was, and then it turned into a catch-up conversation between us with eight screenfuls of text. (Figure 29) We told each other about our lives and families, and she mentioned that she was living in Florida and going to be a digital nomad later that year.9 She also told me that she was planning on starting her own Twitch broadcasting the very next day. She saw that I was not already following her, so she gave me her username and told me the time of the broadcast so that I could tune in.

I watched her debut broadcast on February 13, 2021. She was nervous. I participated actively in the chat, always from a perspective of trying to be supportive and calming, but I perceived after a while that my involvement probably made her more anxious, so I did not tune into any more of her broadcasts after that.

As far as I knew, we were on relatively good terms at that point, even though we didn’t keep up communicating. The last time I ever texted her was on May 2nd, 2021, because it was looking like I might make a business trip to Salt Lake City. Last I had known she was not living in SLC, but I just figured I would check if she was in the area and interested in meeting up. She did not respond to that text, and I made no attempts to follow up. (Figure 30)

Lola was out of my life and out of my mind for the rest of 2021, except for one time she accidentally came into my purview. On August 4th, 2021, my phone Instagram app recommended to me an account of someone I might know. The account showed the name Lola McKissen on the screen. I was surprised to see it, because I knew that Lola had already blocked me on Instagram long before, but this was a new account with a single photo. It showed the view from her apartment and mentioned that she was living in Portland, Oregon. I sent a quick message: “I don’t want to be intrusive, but Instagram just recommended this account. You’re living in Portland? Welcome to town!”

A day later she wrote a response:

Thanks. With my childhood history, I am not really mentally stable enough to have friends with bullying/anger issues. I just get sucked in and overly identify and placate and get stressed out. The last time I tried, you kinda took over my Twitch chat and made that too stressful for me. I understand that your intent was to be supportive and friendly, and my reaction is MY crazy. I really hope you are doing well, and that you can respect and accept that I can not have you in my life (with the understanding we’re going to overlap over the years on mutual friends and Scrabble.)

I hearted her response and wrote back, “Thank you for what you said. I wish you peace.” She hearted that response, and that was the end of the conversation. (Figure 31) I did not follow the Instagram account and did not look back at it again.10 Lola and I never had any contact again until we crossed paths at the New Orleans Scrabble tournament in mid-January 2022.

I still think highly of Lola, and I was completely fine with not having her in my life. Going into the New Orleans tournament, I wanted to have one conversation with her, but it was not about her and me at all. It was about Conrad.

I recruited Lola for the Woogles team when we were living together. I knew she was an experienced front-end developer and that Cesar needed someone with those skills for the website. She began work on the team while we were still dating, and I had known that she had become friendly with Conrad while they collaborated on the user interface. I suspected that she was in regular communication with him now that she was living in Portland and that she might have told him something about me, such as the 2014 hoax story, that explained why he did not want to see me. This was far from my highest priority at the tournament, but I figured if a good opportunity for a conversation came along, I would ask.

When I was walking back into the tournament hotel from lunch in the middle of the first day, a woman who was walking in the same direction as me said hello. Lola had changed her hair color and was dressed considerably differently than I had ever seen her before. It took me a few seconds to recognize her. As we walked to the tournament room, we exchanged a few pleasantries, and I asked how her tournament games were going.

We had one extended conversation. It probably happened later on the first day. We were both in the hallway outside the tournament room, and I asked her if we could talk for a bit. She agreed and pointed to some tables that were further down the hallway, away from the tournament room and suggested we go there. So we sat at one of them and talked for about 10 minutes.

I asked about her family. She thanked me for asking and gave me an update. Then I asked her if she had told Conrad about this 2014 hoax story or something else that might have caused him not to like me. She admitted that Conrad was her closest friend since she moved to Portland. She did not think that she had told him that particular story, though she seemed unsure. However, she did think that things she said about me might have been the last straw for him when it came to me.

We talked about the Pacific Northwest CSW Scrabble situation. She made clear that she still thought Evans and Jennifer were doing the wrong thing by excluding me, but when I pointed out that she was playing with their group and implicitly supporting them, she admitted a bit of hypocrisy. She wanted to get games and that’s where they were.

I then communicated that when she read the first draft of my blog, her initial reaction of “you did nothing wrong, and I hate them for what they did to you” was highly validating for me. I said the fact that she was now effectively part of their group felt like a betrayal. I specified that it was a “light betrayal,” not as bad as I had gotten from other people in Evans’s and Jennifer’s circles who were not communicating with me at all, and that I respected her for still talking to me and being straight with me.

I was not angry at all when I said this, and I did not raise my voice. I was just sad. My silent thoughts were that Lola was not in favor of my exclusion nor intentionally reinforcing it, but her connection with Conrad was contributing to the problem.

Lola did not respond and just got up and walked away. She did not appear distressed, and she did not hurry. I just gathered that the conversation had gotten too heavy and that she did not want to continue anymore, which was fine. I had already gotten the information I wanted about Conrad, which was the main thing to me.

All of our interactions in the tournament room were brief and uneventful. I believe we spoke three times. Once, when we passed by each other in the tournament room, I just thanked her for the longer conversation we had earlier and said we did not need to talk about it anymore. On two occasions, I asked about her tournament results. One of those was again as we passed each other while walking to our boards. The other was shortly after she had finished a game with Guy Ingram. I had walked up to Guy’s side of the board and spent a couple minutes there, mostly talking to Guy and looking at the board, but at one point I turned to Lola and asked how her games in that session had gone. I think Lola and I both said one sentence to each other during the entire time I was talking to Guy.

After those brief interactions there were two other times I saw Lola during the rest of the tournament. Neither of them involved any discussion between us.

The first one was near the end of round 15, the penultimate game on Sunday. I had finished my game and was walking away from the tournament room, toward the front of the hotel and the exits to outside. I was intending to just step outside and get some fresh air between rounds, but I came upon an unexpected situation. The setup in this hallway had changed since the last time I had noticed it. A TV had been set up along the wall to my right, and it was showing the live Twitch broadcast of the dramatic conclusion of Austin Shin’s 477-470 comeback victory over Puneet Sharma. Furthermore, both a table and a tree in a pot were set up in the middle of the hallway, in front of the TV and blocking much of the passageway. Lola was standing to the left of the table, looking over it and at the TV on the opposite wall. Dave Wiegand was standing beyond the table, closer to the right wall. He was also intently watching the television.

I wasn’t expecting any of this. I accidentally happened upon both of these players and this TV, and like them I quickly got distracted into watching the gripping game on the TV. Because of the awkwardness of the setup with the table and the tree, I ended up standing next to Lola and also watching the TV from over the table for several minutes. We were about arm’s length away, but there was no physical contact and no conversation. We both just watched the TV and left a few minutes later.

On the final day of the tournament, I won all of my games and finished in first place. Then I went back out to the hallway to do an interview on the livestream with Will Anderson. After that I returned to the tournament room shortly before the prize ceremony, after most of the players had already filed in. Lola was one of the first people I saw as I entered the room. I was not looking for her. She was sitting in one of the front row seats that was closest to the entrance of the room. There were no available seats near her, and I had no intention of sitting in the area. However, I figured I would walk up to her and make a bit of casual conversation before I moved on and sat somewhere else. Specifically, I was going to mention that I had really liked a TV show that she had recommended to me a couple years earlier.

However, I did not get an opportunity to say anything. After I took two steps in her direction, a woman who was sitting next to her and whom I did not know loudly exclaimed, “I’m bleeding and need to go to the bathroom right now!” as she grabbed Lola by the arm and they made a hasty exit. It was highly awkward and unexpected. It was clear to me that this woman thought I was stalking Lola and that she needed to rescue Lola from me.

I was flabbergasted and immediately walked as far away from there as I could, taking a seat in the back far corner of the room for the prize ceremony. Nothing about my interactions with Lola during the entire tournament seemed to justify such an extreme reaction, and that was the first and only sign I received that anything had gone seriously wrong from her point of view. It was also the last time I saw her.

Contrary to what Lola seems to think, I was not stalking her at the tournament. She was barely on my mind for most of it. I had far bigger things to deal with. I was playing the best Scrabble players in the country and in contention the whole way. It took most of my focus and energy to win the tournament. The first time I saw her, she initiated a short casual conversation with me. Later, I wanted to have one conversation to get clarity about the Conrad situation, which she was very willing to have and even suggested a location for. I got the information I needed and was done with the subject. Over the three days of the tournament we talked for just a moment uncontroversially in the tournament room three times. Then we had an accidental (and possibly awkward from her point of view) encounter where we both watched TV silently for a few minutes. And the next time I saw her on the following day, the woman next to her was acting like I was stalking her.

The reaction of the other woman suggested that something was amiss from Lola’s point of view, and I learned more a month later when I attempted to help Cesar with a Woogles issue.

On January 13, 2022, a few days before the New Orleans tournament, Cesar made a Facebook post asking for additional developer support for some Woogles back-end refactoring work that was in my wheelhouse. I wrote to him that day saying that I could help but that it would have to be after the New Orleans tournament. (Figure 5) I was too busy to get involved for nearly a month, and finally on Monday afternoon, February 7th, 2022, I reached out to Cesar to follow up. Cesar asked me to join a “Friends of Woogles” Discord channel that he used for communicating with people who worked on the codebase. I followed his directions and made just a couple of chats in the channel that were directly to Cesar. He pointed me to the locations of the codebase and  the build instructions, and I said I would get to it the next morning. I woke up the next morning to see a message from Cesar: (Figure 5)

Hi Dave, I don’t know if this is going to work. Several people on the core team are too uncomfortable with you contributing to the point that they actually threatened to leave the team. I spoke up for you but it doesn’t seem tenable. Let me know if you want to chat about it

My first response was “I am disgusted.” I talked on the phone with both Cesar and Mina later that day. I learned that Lola had told the Woogles team that at the New Orleans tournament I had said that she betrayed me worse than anyone else in Scrabble and that I had threatened her. This was the opposite of the truth. I specifically said that it was a “light betrayal” and that it was not as bad as what other people had done to me. I had not threatened her in any way, shape, or form. Furthermore, I learned that Conrad and Jesse Day had threatened to leave the team if I was allowed to participate in supporting the Woogles codebase.

My attempt to help Cesar with the Woogles codebase had nothing to do with Lola. It started with a conversation with Cesar before the New Orleans tournament, at a time when I hadn’t had any communication with Lola for nearly half a year. Furthermore, I knew that the back-end work that I was volunteering to assist with was totally separate from the front-end codebase that she worked on. I did not think it would involve any interaction with Lola or Conrad at all. I was merely trying to help my friend Cesar in response to his request for assistance.

I had zero knowledge or expectation that volunteering to do this work would put me in a Discord channel with these other people. It was entirely Cesar’s idea for me to join the channel, because he was just trying to treat me in the normal way he treated anyone who worked on the Woogles codebase.

I was disgusted and angry, not at Lola at all, and not really at Conrad, because I knew he was already a lost cause who had repeatedly been poisonous behind my back. I was angry at Jesse Day, because I had always seen him as a reasonable human being who had treated me well. We had a phone call not long after I published The Crucible and The Fallout in which he called out Evans’s and Jennifer’s poor treatment of me. Now, he was ready to go on a moral crusade against me and resign his position as manager and spokesperson of the Woogles team without even hearing my side of the story.

Part of me wanted to write an email to Jesse and Conrad right then and chew them out for their behavior. But I perceived that reacting angrily would play into the absurd lies that I was harassing a woman. Cesar had told me that he tried to advocate on my behalf to them, but it was both his impression and Mina’s that this group of people were repeatedly poisoning each other’s minds about me. Cesar said he was so disturbed by what he heard from them that he lost sleep about it. Cesar and Mina were also concerned that our country and our Scrabble community had gotten so caught up in this #MeToo fervor that there was no way to move forward with me doing Woogles coding work without looking bad.

It was not even that big a deal to me to work on the Woogles code base. I was just offering to help as a favor to Cesar, and the fact that so much of the team was treating me so poorly right off the bat made me unenthusiastic about supporting the project anyway. So I just told Cesar, forget about it, I won’t work on Woogles, and I ignored Lola’s, Jesse’s, and Conrad’s behavior.

I had no other contact with anyone in Scrabble related to any of this until I received this incident report with statements from Evans, Jennifer, and Lola in April 2022.

(D) Summary of Relationship with Lola

There is a huge amount of text message history between Lola and me. (over 400 screenshots) If you read the whole thing, it clearly shows that nothing she says about the history of our relationship and her attitude toward it at the time is credible. However, a surplus of information is not necessarily the best way to communicate the main ideas. Furthermore, there are parts of our text message history which include private and potentially embarrassing information about unrelated third parties, including both of our sons, and I would feel an obligation to redact such things before releasing a wider swath of our text communication.

Instead, I will give the highlights, which establish what our dynamic was really like and which directly refute many falsehoods in her testimony. Anticipating the potential counterargument that I am cherry-picking our text message history to paint the relationship in a way that was different from the big picture, I proclaim that everything I will show is exactly in line with the big picture. If NASPA has any doubt about this, I am willing to do the work of redacting and releasing the entire text message history to demonstrate that there is no deception in my account.

In early December 2019, Lola and I began talking about the possibility of me visiting Salt Lake City and seeing her, a trip we did not end up scheduling until January 30th-31st 2020. She showed no hesitancy about that possibility and was even proactive in making suggestions about methods of travel and places to stay while I was there. She canceled the trip at the last minute, on January 29, 2020, because she became ill, but she quickly initiated discussions of us making a trip elsewhere together, which resulted in us going to Puerto Rico together from March 10th to 17th. We had a wonderful time together, and afterward our texting became much more romantic. She lobbied hard for me to come to Salt Lake City, including telling me of endorsements of the idea from her family members and friends. We also joked during this period about my proclivity for going on angry rants that she had seen a little bit of while we were together in Puerto Rico.

On April 17th, I contacted her about the incident report regarding the Facebook conversation with Darrell Day, and she helped me compose a calm response which I submitted to NASPA. She was not put off by my anger and was highly sympathetic and supportive.

We lived together in Salt Lake City from April 24th to May 29th. During this time I wrote the vast majority of the first draft of the The Crucible and The Fallout, and Lola was my initial reader and editor. I continued to go on late night angry rants while we lived together, and while this undoubtedly weighed psychically on Lola, she never communicated feeling in danger with me. She only communicated sympathy and support. She felt safe and happy enough with me that she decided to drive back to Seattle with me from May 29th to 31st.

We lived together in Seattle from May 31st to June 15th, at which point we decided the relationship had run its course, and she flew back to Salt Lake City. We continued to be on good terms for over a month after that, through July 23rd. During that time period, she continued to participate in many Google Meet get-togethers with me and my friends to play games and socialize, and we continued to engage in many text conversations. When I published The Crucible and The Fallout on July 14th and 15th, she was highly supportive, both by sending me personal compliments about the blog and by writing comments on my Facebook posts that supported my side and disarmed several of the criticisms of detractors.

On July 24th, she emailed me about needing to create more distance, and we had a respectful conversation. I complied with her wishes and only contacted her again almost half a year later on December 11th, on the recommendation of Mina Le, because of a play reading event that Lola and I were both attending. We had another respectful email conversation in a series of December 11th emails, in which she explicitly said that it was not a problem for us to participate in the same events with mutual friends, such as the play readings and Scrabble tournaments, and that it was also no problem for me to contact her if the reason was important.

I didn’t initiate conversation after that, but she did, on February 12th, 2021, by gifting me a subscription to Will Anderson’s Twitch channel. We then had a lengthy text conversation catching up on each other’s lives, which included her telling me that she was living in Florida while I was already living in Portland, Oregon. She also asked me to watch her Twitch Scrabble broadcast the next day, which I did on that one occasion but never again.

We both participated in Mina Le organized play readings in December 2020 and February 2021 and exchanged friendly texts about the second one.

I thought we were on improving terms, and I texted her on May 2nd, 2021 about a possible business trip to Salt Lake City to see if she was in the area and wanted to meet. When she did not reply, I never texted her again.

The only later non-in-person communication we had was when I accidentally came across a new Instagram account of hers on August 4th, 2021, which showed that she had moved to Portland. I sent her a two sentence message simply welcoming her to town. She sent a longer response, in which she admitted that my interactions with her during the Twitch broadcast had been supportive and friendly and confessed that they were stressful for her because of her own craziness. I replied with a thank you and wished her peace, and I never contacted her in any way again.

Timeline and Index of Corroborating Evidence for Relationship with Lola

Elements in italics in the timeline do not have an associated screenshot, but are simply to make the chronology of the relationship clearer.

When I dated Lola she went by the name BriAnna McKissen, and Lola was an infrequently used nickname. It is my understanding that she now mostly goes by Lola, and in writing this document I have defaulted to using that out of respect for what she wants to be called. However, in emails and other written sources, I almost always addressed her as BriAnna or Bri.

December 11, 2019: Lola first mentions the possibility of me coming to SLC, after we had been texting for two months. (Figure 6)

January 9, 2020: I propose January 30th-31st dates for a visit, which she agrees to. Lola makes several suggestions about things we can do in SLC and discusses transportation options with me. (Figure 7)

January 23rd & 27th, 2020: More texts planning trip, including recommendations from her about hotels. (Figure 8)

January 29th & 30th, 2020: After I had already begun my drive from Seattle to Salt Lake City, she canceled the visit due to illness, and I redirected my travels to Butte, Montana. (Figure 9)

We also talked on the phone at that time, and she sounded sick. Within the next few days, she suggested on the phone that we both fly somewhere else instead of attempting a road trip.

February 7th, 2020: She brings up in text message that we should fly somewhere else and we begin to discuss possibilities. (Figure 10)

February 13th, 2020: I propose Puerto Rico, and she texts “Oooh, I very much like that idea.” (Figure 11)

February 14th, 2020: She confirms Puerto Rico trip for March 10th-17th and immediately puts in the vacation time at work. (Figure 12)

March 8th-9th, 2020: Amid many romantic texts, she texts me about places to visit in Puerto Rico. (Figure 13)

March 17th, 2020: After we both returned to our own homes from Puerto Rico, she texts, “I should have come to Seattle.” (Figure 14)

March 19th, 2020: I share a picture of me in my kitchen and she writes “❤️Wish I were there” (Figure 15)

March 28th, 2020: We joke about my tendency for making angry rants, while I was stressed that I might have caught COVID. (Figure 16)

April 2nd, 2020: She sends texts trying to coax me to come to Salt Lake City, including a picture of a joke paperback cover entitled, “Come Be My Friend.” (Figure 17)

April 9th, 2020: She tells me her friend Jordan supports me coming to SLC. (Figure 18)

April 10th, 2020: She tells me her friend Joel supports me coming to SLC. (Figure 19)

April 12th, 2020: She tells me her family supports me coming to SLC. I jokingly ask her if her family knows I’m a psychopath, and she says her son knows. (Figure 20)

April 14th, 2020: She sends me a long text saying “You have made me care very deeply about you.” (Figure 21)

April 17th, 2020: She helps me draft my response to the Darrell Day incident report and then says “❤️ Sending virtual hugs (and sympathetic rage).” (Figure 22)

April 20th, 2020: She talks about ordering a desk so we would both have workspaces and shows me that she has emptied closet space for me. (Figure 23)

April 22nd, 2020: She sends a romantic text, saying she is looking forward to me being there. (Figure 24)

April 24th to May 29th, 2020: Lola and I live together in her apartment in SLC.

May 30th to June 15th, 2020: After a two day drive from SLC to Seattle together, Lola and I live together in my apartment in Seattle. We stopped dating on June 15th.

June 15th to July 23rd, 2020: Each of us living in our separate homes but continuing to be on good terms.

June 29th, 2020: She texts me about how she was using coffee beans that I had bought her as a gift in Seattle. (Figure 25)

July 2nd, 2020: She compliments me on a Scrabble stream on Twitch. (Figure 26)

July 24th, 2020: She emails me that she needs to make distance. I email her back respectfully and we cease all communication for nearly half a year. (Figure 27)

October, 2020: I move from Seattle, Washington to Portland, Oregon.

December 11th, 2020: On Mina Le’s suggestion, I email Lola because of an upcoming play reading that we are both participating in. Lola writes back quickly, and we have a short and respectful email exchange in which she says it is not problem for us to be in the play reading group together, and that she will unblock me on Facebook, and that it is okay for me to email her if it’s important. (Figure 28)

December 26, 2020: Lola and I both participate in Mina Le’s play reading.

February 12th, 2021: Lola reinitiates contact by gifting me a subscription to Will Anderson’s Twitch channel. I send a text thanking her and asking what it does. She explains, and then we have an extended catch-up conversation about our lives, in which she reveals she is living in Florida, while I am living in Portland, Oregon. She then invites me to watch her Scrabble livestream the following day. (Figure 29)

February 13th, 2021: I watch Lola’s Scrabble livestream for the only time ever.

February 27th, 2021: Exchange of complimentary texts about second Mina Le play reading that we both attended. (Figure 29, at the end)

May 2nd, 2021: Last text to Lola, about possibly meeting in SLC during a business trip. (Figure 30)

August 4th, 2021: Conversation on her new Instagram account after she moved to Portland. (Figure 31)

(E) Review of Evans Clinchy’s Statement

Evans and Jennifer have been harassing me for six years and doing everything they can to write a false narrative that I have been harassing them. I will now review their statements, not only to demonstrate that their charges hold no water, but also to highlight all of the ways in which they are intentionally deceiving you in order to assassinate my character.

Evans’s point #1: He is not trying to ostracize me, FALSE

Before he levels any charges against me, Evans starts out by denying that he is attacking me and that he has been disparaging me for a long time. He is using the “black is white” rhetorical technique of saying the exact opposite of the truth. At the beginning of his statement he says

I understand that there’s a narrative out there in the Scrabble community that I have somehow turned other players against David Koenig – that because of some deep-seated anger or hatred that I feel, I’ve led some sort of campaign of ostracism to keep him out of the Scrabble community. That narrative is false.

He concludes his statement with the completely contradictory,

Respectfully, I am asking for his banishment for life from our community. I truly believe that is the only way to deal with this threat once and for all.

He is literally saying, “I am not trying to ostracize David Koenig. I am trying to ostracize David Koenig!” And he hopes that he has thrown enough obfuscation and lies in between that you won’t notice the blatant hypocrisy.

Evans’s point #2: He is ignoring me and not attacking my character, FALSE

He says “I have tried very hard to avoid doing anything at all to antagonize DK.” Here is a list of documented and observed ways in which this is a lie:

(1) Many people in the 2017 New Orleans tournament room saw him jump up and down, pump his fist, and childishly shout “YES!” In the middle of the tournament room after he won a challenge against me. 

(2) Well in advance of me moving to Seattle in April 2018, both Walker Willingham and Chris Grubb divulged to me that Evans had said hateful things about me and that he actively attempted to interfere with me getting together for casual Scrabble get-togethers with them. I had been making business trips to Seattle and getting together to play Scrabble with them for years before Evans moved to the area. More detail is in The Fallout.

(3) In an email from June 18, 2018 Walker Willingham wrote to me: (Figure 32)

I had a similar internal reaction when I overheard Evans talking to someone else in a public setting that you were “an awful, awful human being.”  It was especially jarring because it seemed out of character for Evans, and it sticks the listener in the uncomfortable position of wondering “is there really something that bad?”  Evans’ comment was worse because it was stated so publicly.  It may have made me wonder what it was about you, but it certainly redounded poorly on Evans in my eyes.

(4) Terry Kang told me in Edinburgh in 2019 that Evans had previously come up to her and specifically asked her not to mention my name in front of him. According to Terry, this was out of the blue. Apparently, Evans’s hatred of me was so intense he couldn’t even stand hearing my name.

(5) Shortly after I published The Crucible and The Fallout, Brian Bowman wrote in a comment on my Facebook wall dated July 16th, 2020: (Figure 33)

And it pissed me off a little to see Jennifer claim that Dave was “actively disparaging” her and hurting her reputation when I knew that Evans at least had been doing that to Dave for years.

(6) In another comment dated Thursday July 16th, 2020, Winter also testified to firsthand knowledge that Jennifer and/or Evans were disparaging me. (Refuting Martin DeMello’s statement. Figure 34.)

Martin De Mello: in all the years that I’ve known Jen and Evans I have not heard them say a single thing against or even about Dave. and likewise I was around for the starting of coco and my perceptions align with Melissa’s.

Winter: I know for a fact (because I was in the room where it happened) that Martin is mistaken (not in his experience, but his level of knowledge), and I have posted what happened on my own timeline earlier this year, so I’m not going to rehash it here.

(7) In a comment dated Wednesday July 15th, 2020, Shelley Stevens also testified to firsthand knowledge that Jennifer and Evans were disparaging me: (Figure 35)

Have you ever been in an uncomfortable situation with another person in your community that you KNOW FOR A FACT is badmouthing you to mutual friends and making things awkward?

I have.

It sucks and at least he is owning up to his own part in all of it. Emotions sometimes drive people to do unstable things, but I can tell you that even as a tangential member of this community, I am personally sympathetic to what he’s going through, mainly because I barely know [Jennifer and Evans] and I have heard them badmouth him and I knew there was some sort of issue after having like one dinner with them once.

This entire list refers to behavior of Evans toward and about me in the three and a half year period from January 2017 to July 2020, before the publication of The Crucible and The Fallout.

From my interactions with many other people in the Scrabble community, I have intuited that Evans has disparaged me many more times than I have observed. The list above is simply the cases that I observed for myself or got testimony from others about.

Evans’s point #3: In his mind, I am a man who abuses women, PURELY AD HOMINEM ATTACK WITH NO SUBSTANCE

Evans makes an unsubstantiated claim that I abuse women and a meaningless comparison of me to Sam Kantimathi. The only connection between us that he makes is that he has zero respect for either of us. There is nothing of substance about me in this entire paragraph, and all he is doing is trying to drum up hatred for me. It’s not even worth responding to.

Evans’s point #4: I attempted to register for a “house tournament”, FALSE, IT WAS A FULLY RATED NASPA TOURNAMENT

On what grounds does Evans criticize me for signing up for what he calls a “house tournament” (the 2019 Hood River tournament, for which I sent him an entry fee in September 2018) even though it was a NASPA rated event featuring a number of the best tournament Scrabble players in the country when all of the following are true?

(1) Neither he nor Jennifer had ever been willing to speak to me about what their grievances were with me.

(2) I had already behaved civilly to them for a period of 21 months after the 2017 New Orleans tournament, even in the face of disgusting behavior by Evans toward me and behind my back.

(3) I had not even attempted to enter nor contact them about any of the many tournaments they had run in that nearly two year period beforehand, and I had made no complaints to them or anyone else about the ways in which they were breaking NASPA rules to make the registration lists exclusive to their friends.

(4) I made no complaints when they denied my entry and simply sent a goodwill apology with no expectation of a response. (Figure 37)

(5) I never attempted to enter a tournament of theirs again.

Furthermore, as I revealed in the The Fallout, my intention all along in sending in an entry fee was not to attend the tournament, but rather to open up a line of communication so that Evans and Jennifer could address their grievances with me. This was demonstrated by the first draft of the apology email, which I sent to Chris Lipe and Jeremy Cahnmann, which included these lines: (Figure 38)

I don’t even really care about whether I go to this tournament or not; what is much more important is resolving the tension in this situation…

I signed up for this tournament, not out of any desire to make life difficult for the two of you, but simply because it is what I would have done if you two were not behaving the way you were, and I thought it might provide an opportunity for you to actually address your problems with me. I am glad that you have done so.

Evans’s point #5: I used Steve Pellinen as an intermediary to threaten to go public with grievances, FALSE

First, Evans and Jennifer are attempting to be political leaders and tournament organizers within our Scrabble tournament community. There is absolutely nothing wrong with making public statements that criticize them for their political record, which is the only thing I criticized them for in The Crucible and The Fallout.

Second, it’s not even true that I used Steve Pellinen as an intermediary. Steve misunderstood what I said to him, and I had no desire for him to pass anything I said back to Evans. At the time I talked to Steve, I had barely started writing what was then only a first draft of my story for my own therapeutic purposes, and I had made no decisions to publish anything.

In the beginning, my primary motivation for telling the story to others was to win back people who had been mutual friends of mine and of Evans and Jennifer, and I could have much more effectively done that by sending the story only to a select group of those friends.

I only became convinced that the story needed to be made public when Evans and Jennifer split off from NASPA at the end of 2019. I did so for two reasons, both entirely political: (1) to curtail the growth of their organization and the undermining of NASPA and (2) because of the way they corrupted the team USA selection process for their Virtual World Cup.

Evans’s point #6: My splenetic.net blog was a rant filled with distortions and lies about him, PURELY OPINION

I told the entire story in a responsible way that was as charitable to Evans and Jennifer as I could be. I criticized them only on political grounds, and I believe that it was in the best interest of the entire international Scrabble community that I made the story public. By creating a renegade organization, Evans and Jennifer evaded the oversight and disciplinary processes of NASPA and created a situation where individual Scrabble players needed to make informed choices about what organizations to support. I was a whistleblower, exposing the way they broke NASPA rules for literally 100% of the tournaments they ran, in ways that excluded me (and some others) and which unleveled the playing field.

Furthermore, as far as I can see, everything I speculated about Evans’s and Jennifer’s opinions and motivations was completely accurate. Everything they have done in the two years since that time, including the submission of this character-assassination and admitted attempt to ostracize me, posing as an incident report, is completely consistent with the story that I have told.

Evans’s point #7 (insinuated): I played in an online Woogles club directed by him and Jennifer, FALSE

When I played at the online Woogles club run by their organization from January to February 2021, neither Evans nor Jennifer were directors of the club. The only directors were Peter Armstrong, Becky Dyer, and Geoff Thevenot. This is corroborated by the email that Brian Bowman wrote to me on March 4th, 2021, in response to me telling him about the banning. (Figure 2, at the end)

Look closely at Evans’s words in this bullet point. It is obvious that he is intentionally trying to mislead you without telling an outright lie. He says, “he tried to play in our online Scrabble club, even though he knows he is not welcome to play Scrabble events that we direct. Three other co-directors of that club (not Jennifer or myself)” to attempt to get you to jump to a false conclusion that he and Jennifer were directing the club at the time.

Evans’s and Jennifer’s March 2020 decision to allow me to play only in events directed by other people in their organization was arbitrary, vindictive, and bullying. It was also a completely premeditated attempt to exclude me, since I had never attempted to nor indicated any interest in playing in anything run by their organization. Even if you could somehow make the case that it was a reasonable decision, it was also completely unprofessional to tell this decision to my personal friends Mina Le and Cesar del Solar rather than telling it to me directly.

Furthermore, regardless of how unprofessional and vindictive they were, I was nothing but professional and respectful in response. I followed their unreasonable demands to the letter, only playing in an online club which was not directed by them, and my behavior in those club sessions was impeccable, as Cesar del Solar, head developer of the Woogles platform, attested to in his email response to me telling him about the ban. (Figure 2) When the directors sent me their letter banning me and insinuating that I was a harasser, with no explanation or justification for their ban and no recourse to appeal, I made zero response and never returned to the club.

The directors Peter Armstrong, Becky Dyer, and Geoff Thevenot were fine with me playing in the club for several weeks, and seemingly the only thing that happened in between that might have influenced their change in policy was me making one relevant comment in response to a director’s question that might have drawn attention to the fact that Evans was blocking me on the website.

This follows a clear pattern. As far as I can see, the thing that Evans hates most from me is me holding him accountable for the bad and hateful things that he has actually done. As I mentioned in The Crucible, this started a decade ago when I revealed in a Facebook argument that he had made anonymous bullying messages on Jason Idalski’s LiveJournal and had allowed other people in the Scrabble community to think that they were from me. He also hates the splenetic.net blog because it exposes the corrupt and unethical behavior that he did as a tournament director and organizer, as well as his vindictive and bullying behavior toward me. And he literally started his statement in this incident report trying to deny that he has behaved angrily and hatefully toward me, despite a preponderance of evidence showing that this is a lie.

Evans’s point #8: I have homicidal intent toward him, FALSE

I don’t blame Evans for this one. I believe him and Jennifer that Lola painted the story of our past relationship to convince them that I had violent intentions toward Evans and toward other Scrabble players. I have already addressed all of the ways in which Lola’s statement is a lie.

Furthermore, as he and Jennifer admit themselves, the first time they had ever gotten the false idea into their heads that I was at any kind of risk of violence was in 2022. So how does that explain or justify their unethical and bullying behavior toward me for the past six years?

The rest of Evans’s statement is simply an attempt to weave the lies that he has already told into convincing you more to hate me.

My Facebook argument with Darrell Day is not only utterly irrelevant to him, Jennifer, or anyone else in the Scrabble community. It has also already been reviewed by NASPA, who have already come to a disciplinary decision about it. The only reason for including it is, again, to drum up more hatred for me.

(F) Review of Jennifer Clinchy’s Statement

Jennifer alleges that she has submitted something to the police. I have heard nothing from law enforcement in the several months since I received this incident report. If there was a police investigation into me, the law would require me to be notified. This means that either Jennifer is lying about submitting something to the police, or that the police considered her submission to have no legal merit.

A great deal of what Jennifer says is completely outside the bounds of what a Scrabble organization should be having any sort of hearing on. How good or bad a boyfriend I was is irrelevant and not the business of anyone reading this statement. Her entire reason for making this statement is a character assassination. Everything she says about me is false. Frankly, I value my good name as a human being and being a good partner in relationships more than I value ever being able to play in a Scrabble tournament again, and I believe that people who submit disgustingly dishonest and bullying testimony like this in a naked attempt to destroy another person’s life must be held accountable. Therefore, I will address all of it.

Part 1 of Jennifer’s Statement

I have zero memory of any kind of sexual coercion episode such as what she describes. Not only that, but to my knowledge she never said anything about such an episode to me nor to anyone else while we were dating or in any of the years since that time. As far as I can tell, she fabricated this story in April 2022, six years after we had any sort of relationship.

I understand that reading Lola’s false testimony in early 2022 might have put enough of a scare into Jennifer that she felt she had to lie in order to expel me from Scrabble, but her behavior even in the years between 2017 and 2021 is completely inconsistent with it. There were several years during which Jennifer seemed to have no problem with me at all, and all of the hatred I received was from Evans. She literally told Judy Romann in the restroom at a casual Scrabble get-together that she did not have a problem playing at Scrabble get-togethers with me and only Evans did. The last time we played Scrabble, at the May 2018 Portland one-day tournament, we had a friendly conversation and laughed a bit after the game. And the last time we were ever in the same place, on July 17, 2018 at Chris Lipe’s wedding in Aruba, she walked across the beach to me and attempted to start a conversation with me, which I was uncomfortable with. Does any of this sound like the behavior of someone from whom I coerced sex?

Furthermore, why is this story coming out now? Since 2017, Jennifer and Evans have been doing many unethical things within the Scrabble community to undermine fair and equal access to tournament registrations in a premeditated and unnecessary attempt to keep me out of their events. If this story was not a brand new concoction in 2022, why would she not have said anything about it sooner?

Part 2 of Jennifer’s Statement

“I attempted to end my informal relationship with Dave on at least five occasions, the last attempt being in person in September 2016,” is a blatant misrepresentation of our history. We played the makeup/breakup game over the period of two years, and we both alternated being the one who tried to get the other one back. In the summer and early fall of 2016, she was more often the one chasing me. She sent me a birthday gift in the mail in October 2016 with a sweet note that was an obvious attempt to stay emotionally connected to me, even though we had barely seen each other in the second half of the year. Looking back at our text message history, she also started text conversations with me on October 2nd, 8th, 15th, 16th, 18th, 29th, and 31st, including asking me to get together to play Scrabble on the 18th, which I did not do. (Figure 36)

I have already been over the emails and text messages leading up to 2017 New Orleans. My intention was getting the peace of mind I needed in order to play Scrabble well at the event. I understand that Jennifer was scared by my words, and I have accepted accountability for that.

Regarding the “speech,” I never delivered nor attempted to deliver it to her. I shared it in the blog as contemporaneous evidence of my thoughts, specifically to show that I have had no interest in being in her life or her being in mine, and that I’ve been completely consistent on that since 2017.

Literally everything else in part 2 of her statement, starting from “When I did face Dave in January 2017…” is a story about what was going on in her head, not about anything that I did. The communications that I made to Jennifer prior to the New Orleans tournament, upsetting as they admittedly were, ceased on January 5th, 2017, more than a week before the tournament. By the time I saw her at the tournament I was calm, and I did not misbehave in any way in the tournament room. I also got to a mental place where I did not need to say anything about the situation across the board, and I did not.

I explained in The Fallout that my move to Seattle had nothing to do with Jennifer and Evans. (emphasis added)

Around the New Year, I learned about an opportunity on a different team at my company that was a good match for my interests and skills and had virtually no on-call responsibility. This team was located at my company’s headquarters in Seattle.

I had been working at this company for four years—longer than I had known Jennifer—and I had already made many business trips to Seattle. I liked the city. I had organized Scrabble get-togethers with the handful of players in the area who played CSW.

I was also tired of working in our office in suburban Northern Virginia that kept me too far out of Washington DC for so much of the time. As I talked about in the previous part, most of my opportunities to play CSW Scrabble around DC had evaporated over the last two years.

As soon as the possibility of the Seattle job arose, I immediately knew there could be some problems. Tacoma and Seattle aren’t right next to each other. They’re like DC and Baltimore. But the CSW Scrabble scene is small. If I lived there, I was sure to cross paths with Jennifer and Evans, and we would want to play with the same players and at the same events. Furthermore, Jennifer and Evans were quickly filling a vacuum and starting to become the preeminent CSW organizers in the area, not just with the Hood River event but also a number of one-day tournaments.

…

Shortly after the [2018 New Orleans] tournament, I interviewed with several people on the team in Seattle, and it became clear that it was a good career fit. They wanted to work with me, and I wanted to work with them. Everything in my life suggested that this was a good direction to go in, except for the situation with Evans and Jennifer. In the end I decided I wasn’t going to let their behavior get in the way of making the right decision for me.

Furthermore, Jennifer has surely already read this on the blog and knows it to be true. I made many business trips to Seattle while we were dating in 2015 and 2016, and I had told her that I might move there eventually. The reason she writes about my move to Seattle is because she wants to paint a false story in the minds of the readers that I am a stalker, and in particular because she wants to lead the reader into the false insinuation that I stalked Lola to Portland, which she does in the final paragraph of this part.

I moved to Portland in October 2020, long before Lola did. Screenshots from the text conversation Lola and I had in February 2021 corroborate that I was already living in Portland and she was living in Florida, with intentions of becoming a digital nomad over the next year. (Figure 29)

Months before I made my move from Virginia to Seattle in spring 2018, I made a Facebook post mentioning that I would be moving there. Jeremy Cahnmann later admitted to me that when he saw my post, he immediately took a screenshot and forwarded it to Evans. This in turn led to the bullying behavior of Evans and Jennifer toward the other Seattle-area CSW players to try to preemptively ban me from casual Scrabble get-togethers well in advance of me moving to the area.5

These people have had an obsessive paranoid delusion of me as a stalker for years (or at least are interested in writing that story) and have, along with their friends, been tracking my moves on social media and reading their own story into it. When I moved to Portland at the end of October 2020, I am sure that Evans and Jennifer knew about it very quickly, considering how many other Scrabble players they talk to regularly follow me on social media, including several who live in Portland: Peter Armstrong, Conrad Bassett-Bouchard, and Dave Wiegand.

There is no doubt in my mind that Jennifer knew that I moved to Portland before Lola did, but she intentionally equivocates about dates with the sentence “In 2020 or 2021, Dave moved to Portland, OR, where Lola also lives,” to try to get the reader to jump to a false conclusion that I followed Lola to Portland.

We now have specific sentences in both Evans’s and Jennifer’s accounts which were intentionally written to mislead readers and cause them to believe false things about me.

Jennifer’s stories about therapy and her home security system are not about anything I did. They are about the false mental story she has written about me and the extreme reactions she has had (or wants you to think she has had) to her own narcissism.

How about the fact that ever since January 5th, 2017, my only communications with her were cc-ing both her and Evans on informational emails about Seattle area Scrabble get-togethers? Even when I signed up for the 2019 Hood River tournament in September 2018, I only sent my registration email to Evans, not her. She emailed me in response, copying him, and the only personal communication I have ever made to her in the last six years was my brief apology email on September 17, 2018 in response to her email. (Figure 37) It is simply untrue that I have been stalking Jennifer in any way, shape, or form, no matter how much she lies to write that story.

Part 3 of Jennifer’s Statement

As I said in the response to Evans’s statement, I believe Jennifer and Evans that Lola depicted things in this way to them, but her depiction was false. I do not blame Jennifer or Evans for the disinformation that Lola fed them.

Furthermore, what I may or may not have said while venting privately to a romantic partner in our shared domicile does not constitute a threat to do anything. Lola grossly distorted our relationship and interactions in her testimony. Even then it is only a distorted depiction of where my mind was at more than two years ago. Lola has been out of my life since mid-2020, and Evans and Jennifer have been out of my life since late 2016. None of them are in a position to make any kind of judgments about where my mind is at or has been at for the last two years. But what they have done for the last several years is (a) gossiped with each other and a number of their other friends who do not like me, (b) taken every tiny snippet of conversation or thing they have observed from a distance, and (c) tried to build it into a duplicitous account of me as stalking them, while I have been ignoring them.

Part 4 of Jennifer’s Statement

The Darrel Day situation is irrelevant to this story. It has already been heard by NASPA. A disciplinary decision was already reached. Their only reason for including it is to further poison your minds about me.

Part 5 of Jennifer’s Statement

Regarding part (b), there is only one quote in this section that I communicated to Jennifer. It is precisely what I apologized to her for. (Figure 37)

Everything else she says in part (b) is solely about trying to read my state of mind, not about my actions. The only thing she is accusing me of here is thoughtcrime. That is not harassment.

Regarding the alleged invasion of Jennifer’s privacy in part (a), she and Evans have decided to be leaders in our Scrabble community, both by running tournaments and by leading an association. As such, it is completely within the bounds of propriety for Scrabble players to hold them publicly accountable for their actions which affect the world of Scrabble politics, which includes registrations systems for tournaments and equal access for tournament players both to play in events and to have the opportunities to qualify for international events such as the Alchemist Cup. When Jennifer and Evans use their personal grudge against me and their twisted interpretations of our personal history as grounds for keeping me out of tournaments, they choose to take a personal issue and turn it into a political one.

Especially when they separate from the official Scrabble associations and make a renegade association, they create a situation where it is in the public interest of the entire Scrabble world to know the facts of their political malfeasance so that players can make their best decisions.

If Jennifer and Evans chose to disband their organization and never run another Scrabble tournament, I would gladly put all of this behind me, take down the blog, and never speak of it again. But I love Scrabble, and I want the tournament world to be fair and to ensure that neither I—nor any other Scrabble player in the future—suffers the kind of vindictive and bullying treatment they have been dishing out. I will continue into perpetuity to hold them accountable for all of their political actions which disadvantage me in the Scrabble world, and that is 100% a good act of whistleblowing.

Footnotes of Response to Incident Report

  1. Specifically, Jennifer lied about dates in regards to my relationships with both her and Lola, to make it seem like Jennifer had lost interest in me sooner than she had, and to paint a false picture that I had followed Lola to Portland, Oregon, when I really moved there a year earlier than Lola. Evans lied about disparaging me and about who directed their online Scrabble club on Woogles to paint a false picture that I had violated their arbitrary and vindictive rules. Lola lied about almost everything in her statement. Here I am only referring to things they said or insinuated that are provably false, and not to other false things they stated with zero supporting evidence, such as Jennifer’s coercion claim.
  2. except for the ways in which it influenced Lola’s change in attitude toward me, which I will explain later
  3. Walker Willingham sent most of these emails, but I occasionally filled in for him.
  4. Figures 32-35. A more complete list of evidence that Evans has disparaged me is in section (E).
  5. This screenshot is from my relevant conversation with Chris Grubb. There is also more detail in The Fallout about my discussions with Walker Willingham about this.
  6. The Portland one-day in May 2018 was the last time we were all at the same tournament and the last time I ever played a Scrabble game with either of them.
  7.  Furthermore, Evans and Jennifer were rarely ever the objects of my venting. Lola provided one alleged quote about Evans and one alleged quote about Jennifer, and this was twisted into a completely false allegation about spending hundreds of hours plotting anything. The only thing I plotted was the writing of a blog.
  8. Much later in 2021, Lola seemed to go back and forth between blocking and unblocking me on Facebook, but I have no idea what that was about.
  9. I had moved to Portland in October 2020, and I mentioned I was living there in the conversation.
  10. until I had to chase down evidence relevant to this incident report

September 20, 2022

  • NASPA Advisory Board judged my case at their monthly meeting

September 21, 2022

  • Within a few minutes of each other, two members of the NASPA Advisory Board, Jason Idalski and Stefan Rau, responded to my texts with contradictory information about the Advisory Board discussion the previous day.

September 23, 2022

September 25, 2022

November 8, 2022

November 10, 2022

November 15, 2022

April 14, 2023

May 26, 2023

Appeal to NASPA Executive Committee

I am writing to the Executive Committee of NASPA to request a reconsideration of the three-year ban imposed on me by the NASPA Advisory Board in September 2022. 

The Executive Committee should reverse its decision for several reasons. First, the allegations against me are completely false. Second, the decision was the result of a campaign of disinformation and defamation waged against me by other members of the American tournament Scrabble community. Third, the process by which the Board reached its decision was fatally flawed and did not allow me an opportunity to properly defend myself.

This story does not end with the decision of NASPA’s Executive Committee. Evans Clinchy, Jennifer Clinchy, and Lola McKissen have all broken the law.

I am confident that an objective, unbiased jury will accept what the facts in my case prove in a way that North American Scrabble leadership heretofore has not. Perhaps due to emotional and political connections or concerns, or perhaps as an overreaction to criticism of its handling of previous misconduct allegations, the NASPA Advisory Board was unable or unwilling to follow the facts of this case to their natural conclusion: that I have not violated the Code of Conduct in any way, and that my accusers have manufactured a false narrative with the specific intent of excommunicating me from tournament Scrabble across the continent and the world.  

I will start by describing the series of unexpected and unwarranted actions that led up to the Board’s misguided decision. I will then outline the background to the campaign against me, describe the procedural flaws in the Advisory Board’s process, and provide my response to statements made by my accusers which I was not given the opportunity to do during the Board’s process. I will then outline the proper resolution of my situation. 

All I expect from the members of this committee is that they treat me exactly as I would treat them if our positions were reversed.

My Experience with Scrabble Leadership in 2022

This section is identical to what is written in The Scapegoat starting with the paragraph “On April 14th, 2022, I received an email from Steven Pellinen…” and ending with the paragraph “On April 14th, 2023, I filed a lawsuit…” It is omitted here to remove redundancy.

Political Background

As this Committee is surely aware, the emergence of new tournament Scrabble organizations in recent years has led to various political and financial rivalries, and has threatened to fracture an already small community of players.

WGPO started as a rebellion from NASPA because of dissatisfaction with Chris Cree’s leadership around a decade ago, and it struggled to have relevance for the first decade of its existence. Before the pandemic, it was mostly a regional phenomenon in the Twin Cities, Reno, and Arizona areas and was ignored by much of North American competitive Scrabble in the rest of the country. Furthermore, almost no one was playing CSW Scrabble under its auspices.

When WGPO received a large cash infusion from Jon Shreve in 2021, they suddenly became more relevant. Shortly thereafter, Evans’ and Jennifer’s organization, the Collins Coalition, began to work more closely with WGPO. What I’ve heard from other Scrabble players is that WGPO saw CoCo as a natural fit to work together, because WGPO didn’t have much of a CSW presence, and it was an opportunity to grow.

Meanwhile, NASPA was rocked by the scandal surrounding Sam Kantimathi, who was credibly accused of multiple incidents of sexual harassment and assault, as well as cheating, over a lengthy period of time. Many members of NASPA expressed dissatisfaction with the way the Advisory Board handled that situation, and I agree wholeheartedly with them that Sam should have been punished more severely, up to a lifetime ban from tournament Scrabble anywhere.

Any comparison between me and Sam is absurd. I have never cheated at Scrabble, and I have never sexually harassed or assaulted women. Nonetheless, when Jennifer was on NASPA’s Advisory Board, she pushed through a change to the Code of Conduct making it explicit that the Code covered actions that occurred outside Scrabble tournaments themselves. In the opinion of fellow Board member Stefan Rau, Jennifer was using the Sam Kantimathi situation as a smokescreen to make this change, hoping it would give her and Evans more leverage to keep me out of tournament Scrabble.

Later, Evans and Jennifer used NASPA’s poor handling of the Sam Kantimathi situation as a main talking point for why they split off to form their renegade association, CoCo. It has obviously been a sensitive issue for NASPA leadership, given the investigation and the further disciplinary action that was taken against him after he had been reinstated from his suspension for cheating at 2013 Nationals.

Prior to this, Evans and Jennifer took preemptive measures to prevent me from ever being at the same Scrabble tournament as them. From 2017 to 2019 they did this by making all their events small “house tournaments” and gaming the registration systems. But they wanted to grow and start running bigger events, from which it would be more difficult to exclude me, so they split off from NASPA and started their own organization so they could keep out whoever they wanted. However, once they decided to collaborate with WGPO on the 2022 Word Cup, keeping me out was no longer their sole decision. They would have to get WGPO to agree with it.

Evans and Jennifer were working from an entirely false assumption that I wanted to play in any tournament they were involved in running. So it apparently became necessary to convince WGPO to exclude me as well.1

It is clear from the actions of Steven Pellinen and the WGPO Board that they completely bought the con that Evans and Jennifer sold them.2 I don’t doubt that there were people on the WGPO Board who sincerely believed the statements of Evans, Jennifer, and Lola, and who never suspected that they would lie as drastically as they did. However, it was also to the WGPO Board’s political advantage to go along with it. By standing together with CoCo in denouncing and suspending me, WGPO would both curry favor with Evans and Jennifer to strengthen the bond between their organizations and give both organizations a competitive advantage over NASPA by showing that they were tougher on protecting their members from abusers/harassers (both actual and merely accused), an area where NASPA had already shown weakness.

Steven Pellinen’s later behavior toward NASPA strongly supports my thesis. First, when I copied him as a courtesy on the email that I sent to NASPA on April 15th notifying them all that I would only be working with NASPA on the disciplinary process, he wrote back that day with a major overstep. He acted as if he should have any role at all in deciding on a timeline for my response to NASPA, and then he asked me to submit some response sooner. What he did was tantamount to a plaintiff telling a defendant in a court case that they need to provide their defense directly to the plaintiff outside the court system and ahead of the schedule of the court.

Second, Steven contacted me on May 27th, again pestering me for a response and threatening that WGPO would have a hearing about me without my defense. Where was the fire? Why was it necessary for WGPO to do anything when I had already communicated that I had no intentions of playing in any of their tournaments, and they knew that NASPA was going to have a hearing, and that they were going to see my defense eventually? Furthermore, why was this not solely NASPA’s domain, considering that I only played in NASPA tournaments and the only tournaments relevant to the statements were NASPA tournaments?

I believe the answer to these questions is that Steven and WGPO were trying to strongarm NASPA and demonstrate that they were not beholden to NASPA’s timelines. They wanted to act like the only organization in North American Scrabble that matters.

Everything I said about WGPO having no right to have a hearing about me applies just as much to CoCo, but I don’t take anything they do seriously. It had already been apparent to me that CoCo is not in any way a professional or unbiased organization.

In early August, Michael Tang made his announcement about the qualification procedures for Alchemist Cup, which had a unique provision that would keep me out of the event based on CoCo’s and WGPO’s judgments, regardless of what NASPA did. It is highly irregular that WGPO or CoCo would have any role in determining qualifications for international events, since only NASPA has previously had any role in determining American qualifiers for international events, and only NASPA is a WESPA-recognized member association. The rule makes even less sense considering that CoCo and WGPO combined have fewer players than NASPA.

Then, an August 24th email I received from Jason Idalski of NASPA attested that Steven Pellinen had been interfering even after WGPO made its decision:

Steve Pellinen also e-mailed the AB this afternoon asking for an update on your case, accusing both the AB and you of not taking this matter seriously given that we’ve done nothing since receiving his complaint. The AB has to consider that Steve may be getting ready to point out that WGPO and CoCo has suspended a man alleged of sexual assault for five years while NASPA has sat on its hands for four months, thereby making its clubs and tournaments unsafe for women (unfair as that characterization may be).

Jennifer made a false claim that I assaulted her while I was in a consensual relationship with her. That claim was not supported by any evidence whatsoever, and she made it six years after we were in a relationship. WGPO and CoCo both decided to suspend me based only on her word when I had not yet said anything in my defense. Then these organizations used those kangaroo-court decisions to exert pressure on NASPA to do the same.

For Steven to accuse me of not taking the matter seriously ignores the fact that I had many legitimate reasons for requiring the amount of time I requested (and was granted) by NASPA to prepare my initial response. Steven may not have known about these reasons, because they were none of his business. My only concern was making sure that NASPA understood that I did, in fact, take the situation seriously and wanted to submit as well-prepared and comprehensive a response as possible. I never failed to meet a deadline imposed by the Advisory Board without requesting and being granted an extension, and when it was made clear to me that I had a final deadline, I met it. Apart from the fact that it was emotionally exhausting and traumatizing to have to write the response in the first place, I experienced several personal crises that prevented me from putting my full mental focus on my response. The time I took preparing my response was both justified and approved by NASPA.

But based on what Jason wrote, Steven’s attempt to strongarm the Advisory Board was successful. They were afraid of Steven and WGPO telling this bogus story that they had been soft on me and that neither I nor they were taking things seriously, which would make NASPA look worse and both WGPO and CoCo look better. None of this was about fair treatment of me. It was about optics and the political infighting between these organizations.

The most egregious deviation from a fair and proper disciplinary process came just after I had submitted my response, although I did not learn about it until months later. Steven Pellinen, with whom I had shared my response to NASPA, provided it without my or, presumably, the Advisory Board’s permission, to Evans, Jennifer, and Lola, and the Board then allowed them to file rebuttals of my response, which they kept secret from me and which formed the basis of their decision to issue my suspension.

When my former lawyer sent a letter to NASPA in November, John Chew refused to give any more detailed explanation of NASPA’s rationale for its decision. Without a clear understanding of the basis for my suspension, the ability to appeal the Advisory Board’s decision to this Committee becomes almost worthless. Nonetheless, I believe that by taking the opportunity to respond to the September 9th statements by Jennifer and Lola, I will once again demonstrate that their allegations are false, that I have not violated NASPA’s Code of Conduct, and that my suspension should be immediately lifted.

Jennifer’s September 9th Statement

All I have ever cared about in this situation is being able to have fair and equal access to Scrabble tournaments with the best players and not letting relationship drama get in the way of my ability to focus on Scrabble. The only debates I would like to be having are about who should be running our tournaments and leading our organizations and how we ensure fair registration and qualification procedures. 

I did write about some of my relationship history with Jennifer in The Crucible in July 2020, but only insomuch as it pertained to our interaction at the January 2017 New Orleans tournament. I am addressing the entirety of what Jennifer and Lola have written about our past relationships here not because I feel a need to defend myself, but because I want to illustrate the full extent of their lies.

When I wrote The Crucible and The Fallout, I strove to avoid ad hominem attacks and to keep my criticisms of Evans and Jennifer limited to what was politically relevant to the Scrabble world. I was also, as always, an assiduous steward of truth and corroborated everything that I said to the fullest extent possible with contemporaneous evidence. They and Lola have done no such thing. They have repeatedly made ad hominem attacks, viciously attacked my character, and made things up. I think it is very important to consider the character and the track record of honesty or dishonesty of all parties involved, and that is why I feel I must now show that Jennifer has a long history of dishonesty and lack of ethics that goes beyond what either side has already discussed. One of the reasons that I feel I must do this is that some of the distortions she gives in her most recent statement relate to some of her past terrible behavior.

  • Jennifer and I had one conversation about the threatening text message I got from Kenny, but she knew nothing about the situation other than what I told her, and her version of our conversation is a lie that is at odds with all of the facts of that story. Kenny’s threat came months after I had any sexual relationship with Sarah. He made it in response to his wild misinterpretation of an approximately five minute long interaction a day earlier that Sarah, I, and another male friend of Kenny’s had in a pizzeria, at a time when Sarah and I were both drunk. The other man was calling an Uber for Sarah. Things that I said while I was trying to protect Sarah, because I was unsure whether to trust this man who was asking for her address, were twisted by Kenny, who wasn’t even present.
  • Jennifer tells the truth that I did call her a “dirty whore” once during sex, though it was not rough sex, and she omits the context of why it happened. On Friday, May 1st, 2015, after I had been away on the west coast for almost a week, Jennifer and I traveled together on a three-day and two-night trip to the Niagara Falls tournament. After we had checked into our bed and breakfast that Jennifer had arranged, at dinner that evening Jennifer revealed to me that she had spent the entire previous week hooking up with another man, and that after we returned home she did not want to date me anymore. What she had done was outside the bounds of our dating relationship as far as I understood it, but her explanation was that she had changed her mind about what her limitations were and had not felt any need to tell me that. Despite the conflict we both felt about the situation, we maintained our plans to stay together. The first time we had sex while on the trip, I called her a “dirty whore” a single time as a way of trying to channel my frustration with her cheating into sexual chemistry between us, but she did not like it and immediately told me not to say such things. So I did not ever repeat the phrase to her.
  • Jennifer and I broke up for a while and she continued to see this other man, but in early summer she broke up with him and got back together with me. She told me that she quoted to him the Taylor Swift song lyric, “we are never, ever, ever getting back together.” She mentioned that she had tickets that she had bought for the two of them to go to a video game music concert in Pittsburgh and said that she was going to sell them. In the last week of July, Jennifer and I booked flights and accommodations for a three week trip to Australia together to play in the World Scrabble Championship in Perth, including many nonrefundable costs. A day or two later, she revealed to me that she had not sold the concert tickets and was still planning to go to Pittsburgh with the other guy for the concert, which was happening the very next weekend of August 1st and 2nd.
  • Jennifer’s story about my rage in Perth, Australia is a complete lie. To describe my conversation with her that evening as “a screaming torrent of verbal abuse” is simply not accurate. I have already told the true story of that interaction in The Crucible. She is attempting to rewrite history specifically to undermine the evidence against herself that she admits to, that she point-blank told Judy Romann that she did not have a problem with me and that only Evans did. I am including a photo of a hand-written love letter that Jennifer gave me in December 2015, shortly after we returned from the trip to Australia, which illustrates that the dynamic between us and her feelings about me were completely different than what she has falsely portrayed. For ease of reading, here is the text:

December 13, 2015

Dearest Dave,

The wisest Scrabbler I know suggested I write to you, rather than further attempt to express myself in self-contradictory circles.

Everything about you, and about us, has defied my expectations. From the beginning, I could sense that you would impact me in significant ways. You disrupted my life and continue to surprise me. We have survived heartache and heartbreak, lust and hurt, gratitude and forgiveness. We have come together and split apart, and always I am drawn back to you.

After my divorce, I had in mind a logical sequence for what I thought I needed. It involved me dating many men to fill what I perceived as a gap in my experience and self-understanding. Instead, I found myself choosing to spend each spare day with you. Thinking of you makes me smile. When asked if you spark joy for me, I immediately answered, “Yes.”. There is much that I love about you. You are fiercely intelligent and stimulate me intellectually. I melt under your kisses and tremble when you caress my body. I am attracted to you now more than ever. You help and encourage me; you share my laughter and tears. I can be all of myself with you–elitist and sweet, elated and devastated. You have direction and motivation and strive to improve yourself. I admire your empathy, generosity, and thoughtfulness.

In our evolving relationship, you have been kind to me. You have responded to feedback and changed how you interact with me to better meet my needs. You listen and endeavor not to interrupt me, and I notice and appreciate you doing so. I feel heard. You preserve the quiet peace more than before, and more than perhaps feels natural to you, because you know I need it. You remind me that I am beautiful. You started exercising. You take interest in my hobbies, friends, and family. Your words and actions make me feel loved. You supported and comforted me through the hardest year of my life, and I will be forever grateful to you for that. You are special to me, and always will be.

At times, I have made mistakes and expressed confused and contradictory emotions. This remains a period of transition and growth for me. I am scared of relationships, but with respect to you, the prospect also excites me. We have cultivated a connection that I want to nurture, not abandon. Our relationship has never been easy, but the experiences we share have been worth the effort. I want to continue to envelope you in hugs and cover your body with soft kisses. I want to cradle your head in my arms, to comfort you when life disappoints, and support the pursuit of your dreams and goals.

I don’t know what lies ahead for us. For that reason, I wanted to write to you now, after much reflection, when times are good, so that you know what I think of us and how much you mean to me. I love you, sweety#.

Jenn 

  • Jennifer’s reference to her letter to Jason Idalski is a repeat of the same insinuation tactic that she used in her previous statement, when she didn’t outright say the falsehood that I followed Lola to Portland but did everything possible to imply it. Early in our relationship Jennifer revealed to me that, prior to marrying her first husband, she had been raped by a man. The second paragraph of section 1 of her statement does not mention me, but the placement of it is intentionally designed to deceive the reader into thinking the letter is about me, as is her inclusion of the letter with her statement. She highlights two sentences in the letter. The first is about the man who raped her, and the second is about Sam Kantimathi. Nothing in the paragraph mentioning Jennifer’s email to Jason nor in the email itself is about me.
  • Jennifer makes many pure appeals to emotion with a lot of details that are not evidence pertaining to me in any way. In her first statement she went on about installing a home security system. I have no desire to go anywhere near her home or ever be in her life again, and if she has built a false story in her head that I am threatening her, that is her prerogative and not my fault. None of those details should in any way be relevant to a judgment about my character or my participation in Scrabble tournaments. Similarly, it doesn’t surprise me that she has read books about sexual assault, considering that she has experienced such a thing. A list of titles and a bullet point list of warning signs of intimate partner violence have nothing to do with me, and do not even vaguely resemble evidence.
  • Jennifer has repeatedly mischaracterized the nature of our relationship. It’s true that during the time we dated, she did not want to be in an exclusive relationship. However, aside from one man she saw in the late spring of 2015, I’m not aware of anyone else she saw with any regularity. I believe that de facto we were both each other’s primary partner, even if she didn’t want to call it that, for most of a year and half. During this time, unlike what Jennifer says, I was far from controlling. Just the opposite, I was extremely understanding of how reluctant she was to commit, because I myself had experienced something similar in my early dating relationships in the first few years after I had divorced. I bent over backwards not to put pressure on her and just be as supportive a boyfriend as I could be with zero expectations, even as her ambivalence about being in a relationship sometimes tortured me. The letter from her above testifies to the true nature of our relationship, and Jennifer also verbally testified to this when she told me that a British male friend of hers, who never met me and only knew about our relationship from what she told him, advised her that she was acting crazy and that I was acting like a saint, and that if she did not shape up she was going to lose me.

This is not a case where the truth is somewhere in between Jennifer’s story and mine. The truth is exactly what I tell you, and the relevant parts of her statements are all false. I have provided evidence supporting my statements and proof of many of her lies, and not once has anything I have said ever been shown to be false.3 She and Evans have not even attempted to defend the unethical behavior I’ve accused them of, preferring to craft a false and irrelevant narrative to distract from their own misdeeds.

An Aside About My Point of View

I make a very clear delineation between my fantasies and reality. I have had many angry thoughts, and some of them have included violent words and imagery, but none of this means that I am in any way a risk for physical violence. I have never been physically violent in my life. The vast majority of the time when my words to Lola turned in that direction, I was talking about national and worldwide political issues, not about Scrabble tournaments or Scrabble players. I expressed anger at Scrabble players, but I did not usually express violence in those thoughts. There might have been a small number of occasions in which a few words about wanting to do violence to Scrabble players crossed my lips, but that’s all it was, a momentary way of getting my anger out verbally.

Forget about violent words for the moment. Let’s just talk about my angry words about Scrabble players. The vast majority of the time my anger was not directed toward Evans or Jennifer. I was angry at everyone else in the Scrabble world who was taking their craziness seriously, treating me worse on account of their bullying, and being complicit in cutting off my opportunities to get Scrabble games with the other best players. My angry words might have occasionally extended to Evans and Jennifer as well, but it was not the norm.

The only thing that bothered me about Evans and Jennifer was their influence on the rest of my friends. All I wanted was to try to win back and play Scrabble with some of those friends and to protect the sanctity of our tournaments by criticizing Evans, Jennifer, and their organization politically. Amid six years of abuse I spoke up about my side of the story exactly once, when I published The Crucible and The Fallout in July 2020. Afterward, the little bit of anger that I had toward Evans and Jennifer completely disappeared for almost the next two years.

Even after all of the abuse and lawbreaking from April 14th, 2022 onward, I do not hate Evans and Jennifer. I did for much of the last year, but I refuse to stay in a place of permanent hatred the way they have. I do not want to prevent them from playing Scrabble, only from organizing, running, and directing tournaments, because they have proven through their actions that they are completely unfit to be leaders in this community. I want this community to be better than them.

Lola’s September 9th Statement

Lola writes in her September 9th statement, “In responding to Dave’s claim that my statement is almost all lies, I cannot be completely sure which parts he’s arguing against, because his chain of events matches what I have shared, with just a few conflicts and many omissions and misrepresentations.” This is what is called gaslighting. The evidence I provided from our text message history shows that she completely lied about the history of our relationship. 

I do not want the narrative of this document to get too bogged down in the details of every single lie contained in Lola’s statements to NASPA. Let me just draw attention to a few of the more egregious lies from her April 2022 statement.

  • About my attempt to visit SLC by car in January 2020, Lola wrote: “He asked if he could come visit me in Utah. I ended up cancelling that. I thought that sounded very uncomfortable and a bit creepy.” Nothing in our text message history indicated the least amount of discomfort with the idea. Not only that, but shortly after she canceled due to her illness and no other reason, she was the first one to suggest by voice and then the first one to suggest by text message that we make a trip together somewhere else.4
  • About our time in Puerto Rico Lola wrote, “Other than the obsessive need to help him calm the fuck down, I found I really didn’t like him much in person.” Contrast that with what she texted me immediately after returning home to SLC: “I should have come to Seattle… Thanks again for the amazing week!”5 and then two days later: “❤️ Wish I were there”6 and the following month: “You have made me care very deeply about you.”7
  • About the time between the Puerto Rico trip and us living together in SLC Lola wrote, “When we get home to our respective apartments and a sudden unending lockdown, he does not move the fuck on. He continues to call me to cry and whine and rant, and I am incredibly anxious about the world and everything, and continue to text him. I become increasingly sure it’s my job to help him stop being this way.” She falsely described our relationship as if I was obsessively bothering her and she did not want the interaction. This is contradicted by hundreds of screenshots of our interaction over that month, of which I have so far only shared a small amount. She was extremely romantic over text communication with me for a month, and she practically begged me to come live with her in Salt Lake City, including mentioning that a personal friend, a coworker, and members of her immediate family wanted me to come.8

Previously I only called out her lies that I had textual evidence to disprove. Now I’m going to point out some of the other lies she told.

  • About our time at the 2022 New Orleans tournament, Lola wrote “he started hovering wherever I was talking to friends, like we were friends and he was waiting for me.” This did not happen a single time. The only time we were near each other with another friend around was when I was talking to Guy Ingram, and she was barely involved in the conversation at all.
  • Lola wrote, “On Sunday, I won a game too fast and headed out to the hallway to watch the Twitch stream. He followed me out, made a little small talk, and then launched into a rant, accusing me of all kinds of things, it was the same rage with the shaking and bulging eyes, but he was keeping his volume low.” The only time we were out in the hallway together on Sunday was when we both silently watched the end of Austin Shin’s and Puneet Sharma’s dramatic game. I did not follow her there. We ended up in the same place accidentally. We had zero conversation. The rant that she described never happened.

Now let’s go over all the ways Lola lied in her new statement.

  • It’s stupid and not even all that important in the scheme of things, but I don’t believe this conversation about a frozen pizza ever happened. This is just a fabrication to paint a false picture of me showing a lot of rage about something trivial at home, which never happened. When I did express anger, it was only about issues that were very serious to me, which included politics and the mistreatment I’d received in my Scrabble community.
  • Everything that Lola writes in the New Orleans section of her new statement is a lie. I already told the true story of what was spoken between us in my September 6th statement, and I included everything. All of her alleged quotes from both of us were never said. All of her representations of our conversations are completely inaccurate.
  • Everything Lola wrote in the “Dave’s Direct Treatment of Me” section about our travel to Seattle and living in Seattle is a lie. None of these arguments ever happened. Lola happily traveled with me to Seattle, and she was stressed while we were there because it was difficult to recreate a comfortable working environment for her in my smaller apartment. I worked hard to accommodate her as long as she was there. 

It shouldn’t be necessary, but I’d like to address one last time the incident in which I used violent imagery in a political Facebook comment addressed to Darrell Day. A comment which, for what it’s worth, was made in the early days of the pandemic lockdown, when millions of Americans were under extreme mental and emotional stress caused by the failure of political leadership, the stubborn ignorance of so many, and the existential threat of the pandemic. I was certainly not the only person to engage in heated rhetoric on social media during those terrible months.  Lola mischaracterizes the relevance of that incident to our relationship and to my character.

  • Lola and I did not argue about the Darrell Day incident repeatedly, nor even once. She spent a short amount of time helping me refine my defense on April 17, 2020, and that was it. There were a few times in the next month while I was living with her that I thought back to my feelings about Darrell and that situation and said some angry things about it late at night, but there was no later dialogue between us about it. What she says about her continually making arguments about the Darrell Day story and about me yelling at her to stop bringing it up never happened.
  • The Darrell Day email thread that she attached was a real exchange about my response to NASPA. At the top of the email, I explicitly explained that it was my first draft and that I was not going to send it to them in this form. I was sending it to her for the exact purpose of helping me edit it into a reasonable response.9 My words in that first draft sounded scary. I also had the good sense not to send them to anyone other than the person I was in a romantic relationship with at the time. No one else should have ever seen them, and the only reason anyone did is specifically because Lola is trying to assassinate my character. That first draft does not in any way indicate an intent to be disruptive or violent at a Scrabble event.
  • More importantly, this entire episode had already been litigated by NASPA, and a disciplinary decision was enacted. Furthermore, as I’ve pointed out many times, this wasn’t about my relationship with Lola or Jennifer or Evans or anyone else in this story. This was only between me and Darrell Day. Lola, Jennifer, and Evans keep trying to get NASPA to relitigate it.
  • Finally, even when I turned off all my internal filters and just spoke my guts without worrying about what other people would think, I included this sentence: “I believe that our tournaments and clubs should remain a sanctuary for the enjoyment of the game and that no one should ever experience physical endangerment in those surroundings.” This undermines the false story that all three of them have been trying to write, in which I am supposedly a violent threat to them or anyone else at a Scrabble tournament.

Back in August 2021 I wrote a long personal reflection to myself about what was happening to me in my Scrabble community that I’ve never yet shared with anyone, in particular talking about my grievances with a few of the friends of Evans and Jennifer. Lola isn’t even mentioned in it. I just don’t think about her that much. I wasn’t thinking about her much in New Orleans. Her idea that I was a threat to her was nothing but a product of her own mind.

Steven’s September 9th Statement

Steven writes, “Dave’s approach to this is disturbing.” The only reason he says this is because he believes the lies that Evans, Jennifer, and Lola have told him, even though I have provided plenty of evidence that they have lied repeatedly.

Steven does not know anything about my “pattern of behavior towards women or [my ability] to control my rage.” He barely knows me. The only “evidence” he has about that stuff are the incessant lies he has heard. But he has put himself into a situation where it is in his political interest to believe and support the lies. 

I already outlined the role that Steven played in propelling this case forward. Let me just add a few more observations about his behavior here.

Steven was the one who escalated this to NASPA and had all communication with NASPA on behalf of Evans, Jennifer, and Lola. Furthermore, Steven’s actions of rushing a WGPO judgment ahead of me presenting my defense and of pressuring the NASPA Advisory Board illustrate that Steven was attempting to use the full weight of WGPO’s influence and his personal influence as its President to interfere with my ability to play in NASPA tournaments. This also potentially affects my ability to play Scrabble all around the rest of the world, because NASPA is a WESPA recognized member association.

I cannot blame Steven entirely for the WGPO judgment, as the email said that he abstained from the vote, and it is possible that he did not write the wording of the last email I received from them. However, as President of the organization, he still bears ultimate responsibility for its actions. I have already been over how inappropriate it was for them to cast judgment on me before I had submitted a word in my own defense.

The reason that Jennifer and Lola were able to submit their September 9th responses to my September 6th statement was because Steven Pellinen shared my documents with them, after I had copied him on the email to NASPA. I was true to my word to him back in April 2022, and he used that to assist Jennifer and Lola in cheating NASPA’s disciplinary procedures, adding his own poisonous words for good measure.

In early March 2023, my close friend Scott Appel, who was familiar with the ongoing case through me, met with Will Anderson, who serves on the WGPO Board. Scott learned that Will had not seen my September 6th, 2022 documents disproving all of the April 2022 charges against me. Scott passed those documents along to Will himself, allowing Will to read them for the first time. This means that Steven Pellinen immediately shared my documents with the complainants in the case in September 2022, but he never shared those documents with the WGPO Board.

There is no explanation for this other than that Steven wanted to help the complainants win an unjust case and did not want the other leaders of the organization of which he was President to see the full story, both because my writing proves that their case is a lie and demonstrates the complainants’ own wrongdoing.

NASPA Advisory Board’s Decision

Prior to September 21st, 2022, I would have said that NASPA had handled this case well and treated me professionally. Of course, I did not know yet that they were withholding the September 9th documents from me. My only small complaint is that they told me that I had no deadline to get them a response, and then they went ahead and put me on the suspended players list before telling me a deadline.

The Board’s decision, when it did come, made no sense. The Advisory Board told me that I had violated the code of conduct three times but wouldn’t tell me what I did that was a supposed violation. The next paragraph was a vague statement about safety, values, a general pattern of behavior, and a lack of contrition, with no explanation of what the behavior was nor what I was supposed to be contrite for. 

The Board threatened me with a lifetime ban and in the next paragraph insinuated that it will potentially twist any communications I make with anyone in the Scrabble community to construe them as harassment.

The Board put ridiculous and insulting conditions on me ever returning to play in its tournaments, including a supposed need to approve my medical care. I’ve been playing in NASPA tournaments for 20 years with no problems in the tournament room whatsoever. The only basis NASPA has for thinking that I need anger management classes or any other mental health treatment are the words of people with a grudge against me who have spent no time with me for several years. 

There is no shame in addressing mental health issues, including anger management, and even though it’s no one’s business, I’ll mention that I’ve talked to many therapists about anger management. My anger stems more from how abusively the leadership of Scrabble organizations have treated me in 2022 than from how Evans and Jennifer and their friends have treated me for the last six years. But I am in a far better position than any Scrabble organization to make decisions about the best methods of treating my mental health.

I have never violated NASPA’s Code of Conduct in any way. The Board says I have to “write a genuine statement of [my] commitment to comply” when it can’t even name a single thing that I’ve done that is in violation. Does NASPA expect that of all its other members who have done nothing wrong?

The Board demanded that I publicly acknowledge wrongdoing. This is likely another attempt to insinuate a connection between me and Sam Kantimathi. When I called for Sam to be banned from the game in a Facebook post, I specifically called out how he should not have been reinstated when he had not apologized for and admitted to cheating. The Board is attempting to paint me as a hypocrite if I do not myself make a public admission. I would totally admit and apologize for my own wrongdoing, if I had done anything wrong. But I haven’t. Sam Kantimathi cheated at Scrabble. That is true. I did none of the things that Evans, Jennifer, and Lola accuse me of. They are all false.

Despite the Board’s wrongheaded decision, the NASPA Executive Committee still has an opportunity to start undoing the damage it caused and righting the ship. NASPA can, if it so chooses, persist in banning me from anything it runs, but if it does, it does not get to write any narrative other than the true one, which is that I have done nothing wrong and that anyone who has done anything to obstruct me from playing tournament Scrabble is behaving unethically.

There is only one path out of this mess and back to morality, and that is:

  1. A complete and total public apology to me, including an admission of all of the wrongdoing by NASPA, WGPO, and CoCo toward me, an admission that my only wrongdoing was too harsh a wording of two emails and two text messages sent between December 19, 2016 and January 5, 2017, communications which were a well-intentioned attempt to avoid all of this mess and pain that has been going on for over six years now.
  2. Vacating all punishments of me and restoring my status as a full-fledged member of any Scrabble association I choose to play in, with zero conditions on my reinstatement.
  3. Removing from any Scrabble leadership or directorship position any person who has been involved in any of the disciplinary decisions against me who is not willing to attach their name to a full public apology to me and a full admission of their wrongdoing and my lack of wrongdoing, aside from what I noted at the beginning of this list.
  4. Banning Evans Clinchy, Jennifer Clinchy, Steven Pellinen, and Lola McKissen from ever being in a leadership position in any Scrabble organization and from ever directing a Scrabble tournament again.

Unless and until all of those conditions are met, the current postings on the splenetic.net blog will stay up forever, and I reserve the right to post more information about this story on that website in the future.

I appreciate your consideration of this request for reconsideration. I look forward to rejoining a community that has meant so much to me for so many years.

Footnotes of Appeal to NASPA Executive Committee

  1. I had been vocal in my opposition to WGPO before, and my principles cannot be bought off by WGPO suddenly getting a cash infusion. Furthermore, there is zero chance that I would have signed up for the 2022 Word Cup, specifically because CoCo was allowed to have a role in organizing and running it.
  2. This was of course helped by Lola’s involvement. I will deal with her role in all of this later, but keep in mind that Lola did not become involved in any of this until early 2022. Evans and Jennifer had been laying the groundwork for much of what happened to me long before that.
  3.  I have additional evidence which corroborates several parts of the story involving the man Jennifer dated in spring 2015, but it is my judgment that this is getting too far afield of what a Scrabble association should spend its time considering. I will present that evidence at trial if my lawyer deems it worthwhile.
  4. Figures 6-10 from Screenshots of Corroborating Evidence. Lola’s comment in Figure 10 is the first mention in our entire text history mentioning what we had already agreed to verbally, that we would make a trip elsewhere together. If this is disputed, I can release the entire prior text message history to prove it.
  5. Figure 14 from Screenshots of Corroborating Evidence
  6. Figure 15 from Screenshots of Corroborating Evidence
  7.  Figure 21 from Screenshots of Corroborating Evidence
  8.  Figures 17-20 from Screenshots of Corroborating Evidence
  9. Figure 22 of Screenshots of Corroborating Evidence

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