Month: October 2023

To be silent is to be complicit.

Richard Edelman

I sent my appeal to NASPA’s Executive Committee on May 26th, 2023. On June 4th John Chew refused to give a date by which the appeal would be reviewed. More than two months later I had still heard nothing from NASPA, and on August 16th I wrote back to John Chew and Judy Cole asking “What is the status of my appeal to the Executive Committee? When will it be heard?” They did not respond.

After WESPA started putting pressure on them, I presume their stonewalling tactics became untenable, and John Chew finally sent me an email on September 18th, 115 days after the appeal had been submitted.

Dear Mr. Koenig,

The NASPA Executive Committee (EC) has concluded its review of your case, in response to your appeal dated 2023-05-26 of a decision by the NASPA Advisory Board (AB) on 2022-09-23 to suspend your NASPA membership for three years and to impose several other conditions, after the AB concluded that you had violated Section 2 of NASPA’s Code of Conduct.

Following that Code of Conduct, the terms of the review were that it was conducted de novo, but that clear and convincing evidence would be required to overrule the AB’s decision. 

With regard to your violations of the Code of Conduct, we did not find clear and convincing evidence that the AB’s findings were incorrect:

• Concerning the New Orleans tournament in 2017, you have not disputed that you threatened Jennifer Lee before the tournament by writing to her in email: “I think it would be best to have this conversation in private, but I no longer have any compunctions about holding back in front of other Scrabble players we know. So if you do not meet with me before New Orleans, I will say what I need to say to you directly to your face across the Scrabble board in the tournament room with all the other players able to hear. I am almost certain that if that happens you will regret not having had this conversation in private.” and you confirmed your malicious intent toward her in your public statement “I saw that saying nothing and maintaining the tension would be the way for her to experience the most agony.”
• Concerning what you describe as “angry thoughts” and “off-the-cuff venting” in your private conversations with Lola McKissen, which she described with words such as “Once it was a whole random tournament of Scrabblers he wanted to shoot down”, we find that the AB was exercising an appropriate degree of concern for the safety of our members in imposing additional conditions on your suspension.
• Concerning your threats on Facebook in 2020 to “beat the living shit out of” Darrell Day and “bash [his] fucking skull in”, since you mentioned them in your appeal, we reexamined them, and found that they also supported the conditions that the AB imposed on you.
• Concerning the emotional conversation you had with Lola McKissen at New Orleans in 2022, given your long and thoroughly documented history with Ms. McKissen, it’s impossible for the EC not to find that it was a case of harassment at a NASPA tournament.

We therefore uphold the decision of the AB, but in consideration of the above, we add to it as follows.

• Before you may be reinstated, you must take down all publicly accessible information about your private interactions with the complainants, not just the two documents originally identified by the AB. Posting similar content in future will be deemed a violation of the terms of your reinstatement.

EC decisions such as this are normally final. In this particular case however, given that you have already served close to one year of your suspension, and since you have expressed a strong desire to return to competitive play, the EC is willing to consider shortening the three-year term after you have complied with the AB’s other conditions. We hope that you will take advantage of this suggestion.

Sincerely,

John Chew
Chair, NASPA Executive Committee

I have already explained in my appeal to NASPA all of the conditions that would be required for me to take down the postings on this blog. Those conditions have not changed, and they are not negotiable.

NASPA has completely refused to address the abusive, defamatory, hateful, and immoral actions of Jennifer Clinchy, Evans Clinchy, and Lola McKissen towards me. It continues to intentionally ignore the fact that I am a reliable witness who has never lied in the entirety of these disciplinary proceedings, and that all of the complainants’ statements about me have been full of lies, deception, and manipulation. It continues to intentionally disregard the fact that the members of NASPA’s Advisory Board and Executive Committee, including John Chew himself, have behaved disgustingly unethically and immorally during these proceedings, as have many other North American Scrabble leaders, while my behavior has been beyond reproach.

John’s claims that NASPA needed so much time to do a de novo review of my case are nothing but lies. You did not do a de novo review of my case, nor do you have a clue what that means in a real legal setting. You had two people, who were on the Advisory Board that had already made a decision against me, stonewall me and run bureaucratic interference for as long as possible to avoid accountability for your actions, and when you finally had to say something, you gave a ridiculous interpretation of things that in no way justifies a ban of a single tournament game, let alone three years. You continue to attempt to bully me into silence, which will never succeed.

You said “the emotional conversation you had with Lola McKissen at New Orleans in 2022… was a case of harassment at a NASPA tournament.” Spell it out for me. Where was the harassment? What did I do or say that was harassing? You know that Lola is a proven liar and completely unreliable witness, so you avoid saying anything that affirms a belief in anything she said about our interaction at that tournament. Instead you just wave your hands and claim “harassment” even though you cannot name a single harassing thing that I said or did. There is a reason for that: because there was no harassment, and you too are lying.

The words that I wrote to Jennifer on January 5th, 2017 (and apologized to her for on September 17th, 2018) did not threaten her. The only thing I “threatened” to do was to use my First Amendment right to speak my mind.

The second passage that you quote says nothing about my intentions at the time that I wrote those words. It was me describing, three years later in July 2020, my inner thoughts at a time when I decided not to engage in conversation with her across the board on January 14th, 2017. Would you have preferred it if at that moment I did engage her in conversation about our past history? Certainly not. If I had done so, you would now be claiming that that was harassing behavior. Was keeping quiet, not engaging her, and just playing Scrabble not the ideal behavior in such a situation?

What you are doing is using thoughtcrime as a justification for suspending me. I do not care if you do not like my inner thoughts and they cause you to hate me forever. They do not give you license to keep me out of Scrabble tournaments.

Oh, I wrote down those thoughts, and that is why you think you can punish me? What about all of the disgusting, hateful, lying thoughts about me that the complainants wrote down? What about all of the disgusting, hateful, intellectually dishonest thoughts about me that the leaders of North American Scrabble organizations, including your organization, wrote down in your decisions against me? Shall I go over in detail how so much of the phrasing of your statements gives away your massive hatred toward me and bias against me? How about you start punishing your own Advisory Board and the complainants for all of your bullying and nasty thoughts about me?

Let us remember that back in July 2020 when I published The Crucible and The Fallout, I admitted to everything I wrote to Jennifer prior to the 2017 New Orleans tournament. Undoubtedly many people on the NASPA Advisory Board read all of those details then, as did many other people in the Scrabble world. What was NASPA’s official reaction at the time? I did not receive any word from NASPA that I had done anything wrong, and there was not one single official statement about harassment at the time. Instead, Heather McCall of NASPA spoke up about bullying. The general takeaway at the time was that the Clinchys and their clique had engaged in bullying behavior toward me, and that was what needed to be curtailed in our Scrabble community.

Let us also keep in mind that the Darrell Day episode and NASPA’s review of it had already happened a few months earlier in April 2020. Even with NASPA having full knowledge of both of those events, NASPA had no problem with me continuing to compete in tournaments for the next two years.

The exact reason you changed your position toward me and have retroactively reevaluated those things and used them as excuses for suspending me is because of the smear campaign of the complainants against me that included the April 2022 incident report.

We have already established that Lola is a completely unreliable witness. Her descriptions of our private conversations are not accurate, and they were intentionally and maliciously written in order to get you and the rest of North American Scrabble leadership to hate me. Explain to me how a person who has never held a gun, let alone fired or owned one, is any kind of threat for gun violence at a Scrabble tournament. Explain to me how you justify using the defamatory statements of proven liars to punish the victim of their defamation.

Once again, you are trying to punish me for thoughtcrime, only this time it is not even my thoughts. It is Lola’s dishonest recounting of her opinions about my thoughts, which was revisionist history that came two years after we lived together. Lola has obviously massively changed her story about me and blatantly contradicted a mountain of evidence about what our brief 2020 dating relationship was really like.

―

That is all I have to say about your latest letter. I am not writing this to defend myself, nor to try to change your mind. I am writing this to identify the real abusers in this story, and to catalog the full extent of their abusive behavior toward me. John Chew, you are one of the abusers. Any intellectually honest outsider will be able to see that you are guilty of far more wrongdoing than I am in this story, and you are far from the only one.

You will never have any right to judge or punish me for anything, because you have proven through your actions that you lack any moral authority whatsoever, and that a great deal of your abusive behavior toward me has been motivated by trying to save face for you and your organization and to cover up your own wrongdoing.

I am disgusted that the case I brought against the Clinchys and Lola was thrown out prematurely so that you were never held in contempt of court for refusing to abide by a subpoena. I am disgusted that whatever records you are hiding have not come out and seen the light of day, preventing the Scrabble public from seeing the full details of your and NASPA’s contemptible behavior.

Lola claimed in her April statement that I have “absolute certainty that [my] moral judgment is infallible.” That is definitely not true. I am far from a perfect person, and when I have made mistakes I have been very willing to admit those mistakes. However, what I am certain about is that in this particular story I have behaved more morally than every single person who has played any role in obstructing me from playing competitive Scrabble. We will now go down the list of all of the people who have played a role in this conspiracy and enumerate all of your sins against me.

Evans Clinchy

Evans Clinchy has cheated at Scrabble by circumventing proper NASPA procedures, giving his friends privileged access to register for tournaments and denying many others equal access to those same tournaments. Since 2017 he has repeatedly disparaged me to many members of the community. In 2022 he defamed me in writing with intentionally damaging statements that he knew were false. In addition to many examples of libel per se, including unsubstantiated claims that I abuse women, he falsely insinuated that he and Jennifer were directing the Woogles CoCo club in January 2021 so that he could further falsely insinuate that I broke his vindictive rule banning me only from events in his organization that he and/or Jennifer directed.

Jennifer Clinchy

Jennifer Clinchy has cheated at Scrabble by circumventing proper NASPA procedures, giving her friends privileged access to register for tournaments and denying many others equal access to those same tournaments. In 2022 she defamed me in writing with intentionally damaging statements that she knew were false. In addition to many examples of libel per se, including a completely made-up story that I sexually coerced her while we were in a consensual relationship six years earlier, she also made many false insinuations about me, including:

• She insinuated that I followed Lola to Portland, even though I moved there a year before Lola.
• She insinuated that she was writing about me in her letter to Jason Idalski about the 2018 US National Scrabble Championship, in sentences that were about the man that raped her before her first marriage and about Sam Kantimathi.
• In evasion of a question of whether she had ever contacted the police about me prior to 2022, she said that she “contacted federal officials” about me, when the truth was that she pulled strings at the White House to get me gifts and take me on nice dates.

Additionally, Jennifer filed a false police report against me with the Seattle Police Department in March 2022, which is a criminal offense. She also submitted an additional statement against me to NASPA on September 9th, 2022, in defiance of their rules for handling disciplinary procedures.

Lola McKissen

Lola McKissen defamed me in writing in 2022 with intentionally damaging statements that she knew were false. She coordinated her attack on me with those of the Clinchys, and she demonstrated clear intent of writing false pictures of our interactions at the January 2022 New Orleans tournament and of our entire dating relationship in early 2020.

Despite all of this, I chose to take no offense from Lola and assumed the best intentions, writing a thorough refutation of her statements that was also forgiving to her. I also structured my September 6th, 2022 response to the incident report in such a way so that I could remove the sections that gave detail about our relationship and thereby protect her privacy while only impugning the Clinchys, if she had been willing to admit that her earlier statement was a lie. Up until November 15th, 2022, I would have excluded her from being a defendant in the case, if she had been willing to recant her statement in the incident report.¹

However, I then learned that Lola had doubled down on her lies in her September 9th, 2022 statement, demonstrating a clearly malicious intent against me, and choosing to make a massive stink about the Darrell Day story, which she had not complained about at all previously. The only reason she became a defendant is because of that September 9th statement and her inability to back down from her proven lies.

Peter Armstrong, Becky Dyer, and Geoff Thevenot

Peter Armstrong, Becky Dyer, and Geoff Thevenot put their names on an egregiously offensive and unprofessional letter banning me from the Woogles CoCo club,² a letter which said nothing about any actions that I took to deserve such a ban, but just made a bunch of vague insinuations of harassment. They did this even though the only reason I went to the Woogles CoCo club was because I wanted to play Scrabble specifically with Peter, Becky, and Geoff. Perhaps they did not intentionally put their names on this email, as it came from an anonymous email address associated with CoCo. However, now that I have made it public, none of them has come forward and disavowed their involvement with this letter nor apologized to me. I will continue to consider them guilty of intellectually dishonest disparagement of me and of abetting the Clinchys in banning me from Scrabble until they issue a personal apology to me and a disavowal of the letter.

Peter, Becky, and Geoff, on a personal note: if you had any backbone and ethics and were capable of seeing this situation correctly, you would have said to Jennifer and Evans, “F— no, I’m not signing that. If you want to kick Dave out of the club, you put your own damn names on that letter.”

Zach Dang, Mary Goulet, Scott Jackson, and Mike McKenna

The CoCo Conduct Team that contacted me in April and May 2022 comprised Zach Dang, Mary Goulet, Scott Jackson, and Mike McKenna. Considering that I was not a part of CoCo and never had any intention to be, all of their communications to me were harassment. They conducted a kangaroo court against me, when they had no right to pass any judgments on me, and they made a defamatory decision against me based only on the testimony of other people.

Furthermore, in the first paragraph of the first email that CoCo attempted to send to me, they wrote:

These attachments are provided to you “for your eyes only” (including your own attorney, if any) and are NOT to be published or publicly distributed in any manner.

The only people who mistreat you and tell you that you cannot tell other people about it are abusers. Those words have zero legal impact and are solely an intimidation technique. Two parties can only be under a nondisclosure agreement if both parties agree.

Keith Hagel, Will Anderson, Jan Cardia, Laurie Cohen, Helen Flores, and Bennet Jacobstein

The WGPO Board of Directors (less President Steven Pellinen) comprising Keith Hagel, Will Anderson, Jan Cardia, Laurie Cohen, Helen Flores, and Bennet Jacobstein also had no right to contact me about any of this, and all of their communications to me were harassment. They conducted a kangaroo court against me, and they made a defamatory decision against me based only on the testimony of other people.

Steven Pellinen

Steven Pellinen coordinated this entire attack of Evans, Jennifer, and Lola against me. He also had no right to contact me about any of this, and all of his communications to me were harassment. Furthermore, he repeatedly harassed both me and NASPA regarding my case, including attempting to intimidate the NASPA Advisory Board. He pretended to be an objective third party until he revealed his disgusting hatred and bias in his September 9th, 2022 statement, which was submitted against NASPA rules for handling disciplinary procedures. He used my gracious inclusion of him on my September 6th, 2022 email responding to the incident report to get his September 9th statement in to NASPA, and to abet Jennifer and Lola in doing the same. He also never showed my response to the incident report to the rest of the WGPO Board of Directors, making it obvious that his intent was to aid the complainants in their crusade against me, rather than to see justice get served.

Michael Tang

Michael Tang created a new rule targeting me and no one else in the world, preventing me from signing up for the 2024 Alchemist Cup based only on the kangaroo court decisions of CoCo and WGPO, before I had said a word in my defense and before NASPA had passed any judgment on my case. The rule was written in such a way that even if NASPA had correctly judged that I had done nothing wrong and deserved no punishment, I would still be denied access to the tournament.

Michael, on a personal note: I have no beef with you, and I have always found our social interactions and our Scrabble games very pleasant. I am sure that you were deceived about me, and that is what led to you passing the rule that you did. I would gladly instantly forgive you and take your name off this list, but I need you to revoke that rule first.

Furthermore, I would love to know who in the Scrabble world approached you or influenced you to create that rule. If you are as interested as I am in having a fairer and more ethical world of competitive Scrabble, which I think you might be, you might be holding one of the keys to unlocking and revealing this conspiracy entirely.

John Chew, Judy Cole, Rich Baker, Lila Crotty, Josh Greenway, Andy Hoang, Jason Idalski, Ezekiel Markwei, Stefan Rau, Heidi Robertson, Peter Sargious, and Portia Zwicker (except for any who voted for no punishment of me)

John Chew, Judy Cole, Jason Idalski, Stefan Rau, Josh Greenway, Andy Hoang, Peter Sargious, Lila Crotty, Heidi Robertson, Portia Zwicker, Ezekiel Markwei, and Rich Baker comprised the NASPA Advisory Board that suspended me in 2022. They lied to me over text message, passed a judgment about me based on statements that they did not allow me to see or respond to, and made disgustingly invasive demands on my life, including them approving my medical care. They used their influence with WESPA to interfere in my ability to play Scrabble tournaments around the rest of the world, even though they could not identify to WESPA a single thing that I had done wrong. They also refused to abide by a court-ordered subpoena to turn over their documents related to this decision.

Furthermore, the reinstatement conditions they put in their decision against me demonstrate a clear intent to bully me into silence and to cover up their own wrongdoing by creating circumstantial evidence of a false narrative that I did something wrong. They continue to insist that I take down the blog, because it irrefutably shows that I have done nothing wrong and that both the complainants and the North American Scrabble leadership have done a massive number of things wrong. And they wanted to get a signed statement from me about the Code of Conduct so that they could use it as false proof that there is any substance behind their reasons for suspending me.

The WGPO Board of Directors said that they unanimously voted to ban me. The NASPA Advisory Board said no such thing. It is entirely possible that some members of the board had an ounce of sense and ethics and opposed any and all punishment for me, and if so they are not on this list of abusers. However, any NASPA Advisory Board member who favored in any way any punishment for me, any conditions on my reinstatement, and/or any probationary restrictions on me after reinstatement has abused me, just as every other person on this list has.

If you completely opposed any punishment for me and recognized this charade of injustice for what it is, I need you to speak up now. Say it out loud and publicly:

David did nothing wrong, and the Clinchys have been abusing him for seven years. Every single person who played any role in obstructing David from playing in Scrabble tournaments added to that abuse and punished the victim while rewarding the abusers. Every one of you is a far worse person than David if you cannot admit your wrongdoing, apologize to him, undo all of the unethical decisions you have made against him, and start punishing the actual abusers, namely Evans Clinchy, Jennifer Clinchy, and Lola McKissen. They did not just abuse David. They abused you, by lying to you, manipulating you, and influencing you to abuse an innocent person, who was doing nothing to you or them.

Some final words to John Chew. It is laughable and disgusting that you gave the weak justification for banning me for three years that you did, when the record clearly shows that your behavior has been much, much worse than mine. You have no need to worry about me trying to force my way into tournaments in your organization or pressing charges against you for what you have done. I have no interest in playing Scrabble for any organization whose leaders behave so abusively to me and are unable to correct their behavior in the face of overwhelming evidence of their own guilt and the innocence of the person they have punished.

However, we still have a massive problem, because your decision against me affects WESPA policy, and it affects the ability of other national associations who recognize that I have done nothing wrong, such as ABSP, to let me play in all of their tournaments. Is the fact that you got an entire other WESPA-recognized national association to stand up and call out your misbehavior not enough evidence of how much you are egregiously in the wrong?

John, I do not care how much you hate me. I do not care how much you cling to your weak justifications for your behavior. Regardless of whether I ever play in a Scrabble tournament again, stateside or anywhere else, I am making you a lifelong promise. If you do not relent and fix this, I will continue for all time to expose to the entire world all of your wrongdoing toward me or toward anyone else. I will do everything in my power to make sure that your reputation as a Scrabble leader is ruined and that you are permanently ousted from ever having a job in this community.

And that will be a completely moral and heroic action, because I will never lie. I will only indict you in the court of public opinion with the truth of your abusive and unethical behavior. Because I need to protect my ability to play Scrabble on other continents, and because your behavior has been so terrible as to interfere even with that. As such, your continued role in Scrabble leadership is a threat to me, and a threat to anyone else the Clinchys or their ilk decides to abuse in the future, since you have proven beyond any shadow of a doubt that you are a sucker who falls for their manipulation and that you will not back down from abusing their victim, no matter how obvious it is that you are in the wrong.

To everyone on the list of abusers, you all owe me an apology and a public statement disavowing your involvement in any decision that obstructed me from playing competitive Scrabble. If you do that, you will instantly be forgiven, because unlike the Clinchys I do not hold grudges. However, every day that passes in which you do not apologize and disavow your involvement in all of this I will consider to be a day that your abuse of me continues. As such, I will continue to do everything in my power to shine a light on this story and your involvement in it. I will also continue to expose any further wrongdoings you do to me.

To everyone else in the Scrabble community, thank you for reading. If you are motivated to do anything to help me, please speak up! Even just a comment on a Facebook post or in private message letting me know that you read it all is meaningful. Even better would be a post or comment with the text in the last quote box above, or your own reactions. Even better than that would be you saying something to the people on the list of abusers. Make sure that they know you also believe they owe me an apology. Best would be you saying something to them and letting me know what you said. I hope you all know that if you were ever treated this badly, I would be the very first person speaking up on your behalf—social cohesion with unethical people be damned.

Footnotes

1. In the narrative that I gave to my first lawyer Clifford Davidson back in October 2022, I included the following:
   
   I would like to make the incident report submitted against me and my response to it public to the entire Scrabble world, as part of holding the corrupt leaders of our North American Scrabble organizations accountable for their wrongdoing.
   
   I believe that Brianna “Lola” McKissen’s testimony played a large role in damaging my reputation and causing a groundswell of sentiment against me, but I would be willing to forgive her role in all of this if she is willing to give me a signed statement recanting her entire statement against me and admitting that my depiction of our relationship in my response to the incident report was entirely true.
   
   If I obtained such a statement from her, I think that I could publicly release all of the incident report with the exception of her statement, as well as all of my response except for the second part of section (C), all of section (D), and all screenshots that are referred to only in those parts, which would provide all of the necessary political accountability to other parties while minimizing any exposure or embarrassment to her.
   
   If Lola were willing to provide me with such a statement, I would be willing to grant her immunity from any damages in this case.
   ↩︎
2. Figure 2, page 2 of Screenshots of Corroborating Evidence ↩︎

Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.

Hannah Arendt

On Friday, July 28th, 2023 I officially became my own lawyer. The senior lawyer had sent me his delayed but expected refusal two days earlier. I had made no attempts to find other representation. Marc submitted his withdrawal to the court, and passed along his computer files related to the case. I traveled up to Seattle that weekend and did not get back until Tuesday, so I did not start digging into things until later in the week.

I saw for the first time the letter that Michael Fuller had sent Marc on July 6th, the one that almost caused him to withdraw on July 7th. Marc did not initially include the “attached email, currently designated confidential and attorney’s eyes only.” I emailed him back, and he finally sent me the email, confirming that it was from Terry Kang to Jennifer and Evans. It did not seem particularly earth-shattering to me. Terry had chosen her allegiance to Jennifer and Evans, and was now claiming that everything I had written in the blog that mentioned her and Stefan Rau (back when they were married) was a lie.

How this stupid email got Marc to panic and want to leave my case is mind-boggling. Mr. Fuller must have supplemented it with a bunch of cockamamie rhetoric and lies and totally pulled the wool over his eyes.

It was not clear from Marc’s disorganized records what had been filed and what had not. I learned that I had to go to the courthouse kiosk in order to see all the public filings from the case. So I spent an entire day there reading through them, and that was illuminating.

I learned that requests for production and their responses are not generally filed in the court, just served to the opposing counsel, but that most other things are filed in the court, including the requests for admission and their responses. I wrote out a timeline by hand that included all of the filings from both sides and what the attorneys had served to each other, as best as I could tell, by cross-referencing both the court’s records and the files I had from Marc. I found approximately ten documents that I didn’t have a copy of anywhere, neither in previous emails from Marc nor in the trove of files that he shared. I got a court clerk to send me electronic copies of them.

I spent the next day at home looking through the responses to requests for production to see what evidence had been served. Marc had sent over 400 pages of evidence, which he had tagged with Bates numbers. I cross-referenced it with the timeline I had produced in The Conspiracy and made a spreadsheet cataloging exactly which page of which document every Bates number referred to. What I quickly discovered was that Marc had labeled Bates numbers on documents in a haphazard order, including accidentally using the same number as the final page of one document and the starting page of another document, and that there were nearly twenty pages of documents that I had given him that he had never submitted as evidence.

Among the documents that Marc never submitted were my text conversations with Jason Idalski and Stefan Rau on September 21st, 2022, my Facebook messenger conversation with Eric Kinderman on September 25th, 2022, and the June 8th, 2023 email I had sent to both WESPA via Mina Le and ABSP via Wayne Kelly.

When Michael Fuller first accused me of withholding documents on June 16th, 2023, he specifically named Jason Idalski, Stefan Rau, Eric Kinderman, Mina Le, and Wayne Kelly as people whose communications we had not handed over.

As I already explained in The Smokescreen, as soon as Marc showed me that letter, I had specifically told him to submit the June 8th, 2023 email and all of the files that were in its attached zipfile. Guess what: all of those other missing documents were in that zipfile. And I told him twice, repeating myself on the phone, because he hadn’t followed my directions in the email. That was in mid-June. Marc was still my lawyer until July 28th, and he never submitted any of those documents. I only learned this in the first week of August, because while Marc was representing me he never shared with me most of the responses to requests for production that he made. (He also did not share with me the vast majority of other things he served and filed, but that is getting ahead of the story.)

In the last month and a half of Marc’s representation of me, he had contacted me a few times in a seeming panic, hounding me to give him any irrelevant text messages from some of these people, possibly believing accusations from Mr. Fuller that I was hiding things from him. I was baffled about why this was still an issue, as I of course had assumed that he had already sent along the documents I had twice told him to submit. Marc did not realize that the reason he kept getting protests from Mr. Fuller about documents was not because I was withholding anything relevant, but because of his own failure to follow directions.

If I had ever even been in one of those conversations between Marc and Mr. Fuller, we might have sorted that out. But they only talked behind my back, which I am sure is the way that Mr. Fuller preferred it.

After I had accounted for all the missing documents and sent them in a supplemental response to requests for production, I had a phone conversation with my now former lawyer Marc in which I briefly broached the subject of the gaps in discovery. I gathered from the call that he did not know what he had or had not submitted and was only interested in making excuses to cover his own ass.

It took me two days of diligent bookkeeping to get caught up on the case and to figure out where the gaps were and what I still needed to file and submit to discovery. Meanwhile, both Ms. Vaughn and Mr. Fuller had filed anti-SLAPP motions in that same week. Ms. Vaughn’s motion on behalf of Lola was not a surprise. This was something that she had communicated to us that she would do if we could not agree on a settlement. Mr. Fuller followed in her footsteps and filed motions on behalf of the Clinchys as well. I am not aware that he had any plans to do this beforehand, and I think he probably did it mostly because he smelled blood while I had no lawyer representing me. In those first couple days, I also read through both of their motions and got the gist of their arguments.

By the time I had reviewed Marc’s materials and learned how to do my own electronic filings in the case, it was Friday, August 4th, and the defense attorneys had already succeeded in getting a hearing for the anti-SLAPP motions scheduled for August 16th at 2:00 PM. So I had twelve days to prepare for it. I am not a lawyer, and it might seem like a ridiculously bad move to try to handle this hearing myself, especially considering that if the defendants succeeded in their motion, not only would all the charges be dropped, but also there would be a mandatory award of the defendants’ legal fees.

However, I do not think I had a better option. I had already failed to get an experienced lawyer to work with me, and the idea of dropping a big sum of money for another retainer to someone else was nerve-racking anyway. Furthermore, I knew this case and all the documents better than anyone, for sure better than my own previous lawyer to whom I had already paid a boatload of money. If I had spent time over the next week or two scrambling to find another lawyer, who knows if I would have been able to find anyone good, and even if I had, how much would they be able to get up to speed on what was going on in the case?

And what if I did put a bunch of time and effort into trying to find a lawyer and did not come up with anything? As things turned out, it took me almost all the time I had before the hearing to get everything filed that I wanted to. I never would have been able to get it all done if my attention had been divided between doing the lawyerly things and trying to find someone else to take over for me.

After doing my two days of reading up on things, I felt like I already had a good idea of what I wanted to file in the court and of the arguments I would make of why this case should go to trial. Also, it was fun. I had not had a job in more than two years, and the way I was able to jump into the deep end of a set of documents and figure out what was going on was reminiscent for me of a lot of work projects where I had jumped into a chaotic and poorly managed code base and turned it into something much better.

I was not planning to represent myself all the way through trial. This was a single hearing, scheduled for an hour, simply to decide whether the charges should be struck down by the anti-SLAPP motions. I am no expert in law, but on the surface it did not seem to me likely that the motions should succeed.

SLAPP stands for “Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation” and refers to frivolous lawsuits that are made to chill free speech. For example, someone says something you do not like, and you threaten them with a scary sounding defamation lawsuit. Even though they have the First Amendment right to say what they said, they might be too intimidated by the prospect of an expensive lawsuit and back down. The purpose of anti-SLAPP motions is to be able to knock those kind of lawsuits out of the courts quickly and make sure that they cost the plaintiffs money, to discourage them from being filed in the first place.

However, there was nothing frivolous about my lawsuit. I have a ton of evidence that the defendants did commit defamation, that it damaged my standing in the Scrabble community, and that it did result in me being diagnosed with PTSD. Furthermore, the defendants were not “publicly participating” by saying the things about me they did. They were doing just the opposite, bad-mouthing me to a cabal of corrupt Scrabble leaders in order to oust me from the game, while trying to keep what they were doing as out of the public eye as possible. I have been the one this entire time trying to blow the whistle and make what they are doing visible to the world.

I thought that if I succeeded in dismissing their motions that would buy me more time to find a lawyer. It might also incentivize the defendants to want to settle sooner, since I would show the opposing counsels that I could not be bullied even while I was representing myself.

When I read the parts of their motions that quoted prior legal decisions and discussed this or that precedent, I did not know what to make of them, and I did not have time to learn the intricacies of the law or to do my own research on previous legal cases and write something lawyerly along those lines.

The defense lawyers wrote many things in their motions about how my former attorney had not followed proper procedures in delivering the complaints and summonses, which I believe was quite possibly true, because he was absolutely clueless, had no previous trial experience, and was a one-man law firm with no experienced people helping him, not even a paralegal.

The defense lawyers also wrote things about how some of the claims my lawyer wrote in the complaint were not supported by Oregon law, and again I had no idea if their arguments were true. However, I definitely was not going to make the mistake that Marc made of just uncritically accepting whatever the opposing counsels told me.

Without time to educate myself about Oregon law, I decided to just focus on what I did know, which was the truth of my story. I figured I would just show in as plainspoken a way as I could what the defendants had done to me, and dismantle all of the lies and deception in what the defense lawyers had written.

What the defense had written was full of lies, because it had to be. Because the truth is on my side. Because the only way that the Clinchys and Lola and their lawyers could try to justify their behavior was by pouring more dishonesty on top of the massive amount of dishonesty they had already written. Because in reality there is no justification for their disgustingly abusive behavior.

So I got to work. The first thing I had to do was respond to a bunch of requests for admission that Mr. Fuller had filed on July 7th about the non-existent tampering story, so it was just a simple “deny, deny, deny…” down the line. Back when Marc was not willing to tell me about the letter from Terry, he had showed me these requests for admission, as if they somehow explained what this whole hubbub was about. Because he was so gullible that he believed all the inanity that the opposing counsel Mr. Fuller threw at him instead of believing his own client.

I was about to hit the 30 day deadline to respond to them, and so my first filing in the case was on August 4th, 2023, denying all of these spurious requests for admission.

My next priority was meeting the 30 day deadline to responding to the additional requests for production that Mr. Fuller had sent on July 9th, as a follow up to his accusations on July 6th and 7th. Mostly this was just a matter of filling in the gaps of documents that Marc had failed to submit. I downloaded PDF editing software that allowed me to add Bates numbers. I numbered all of the evidence I had, for which Marc had not already done so, and I updated my spreadsheet to include all of these documents to the catalog. I then served a supplemental response to the requests for production on August 8th.

I learned from Ms. Vaughn’s assistant that Marc had not sent most of the previous responses to requests for production to her after she joined the case late, so I also served electronic copies of them to her.

Now that I had met the pressing deadlines, I could finally start taking the initiative. Mr. Fuller had made many accusations against me of bad faith litigation conduct both in his nasty letters and in his anti-SLAPP motion. That was rich. I had done nothing wrong, while he had repeatedly lied and manipulated my former lawyer behind my back. I was going to make sure the real story of who actually behaved unethically was filed in the court record, which would also have the secondary benefit of documenting Marc’s failures to represent me competently, which could be helpful if I had to sue him for malpractice down the line.

So on August 10th, I filed the unassumingly named “Declaration of David Koenig,” in which I spilled all the tea about how Marc had failed to submit many pages of evidence and I showed the proof that I had sent him those documents.

I then explained all of the falsehoods in Mr. Fuller’s threatening letters, including the email from Terry Kang. I gave the screenshot of the real three message conversation that Terry and I had, and I also gave her previous communications with me about the situation with Jennifer and Evans going back to 2020, showing the complete inconsistency of her new position. I even included a quick email from Stefan Rau confirming that I was telling the truth about the stories that Terry had suddenly claimed I was lying about.

I followed that up with the story of how Marc, Mr. Fuller, and the judge had all signed the protective order while I was kept in the dark about its existence. Next was a laundry list of all the ways that Marc had represented me incompetently, and I made clear that these were the reasons that we had stopped working together, not because of anything to do with nonexistent witness tampering.

Finally, I said that I was reporting both Marc and Mr. Fuller to the Oregon State Bar to investigate potential ethics violations, and that I was including this declaration in the report. Indeed, I submitted complaints about both lawyers to the bar immediately after filing the declaration.

That declaration was the main thing I wanted to get done that day, but I ended up having enough time and energy to file a couple more things that called out Jennifer’s dishonesty and bad faith litigation conduct.

The Clinchys had avoided answering many of the requests for admission with ridiculous and frivolous excuses, including complaining that we had not defined terms adequately because we had not cited a particular source dictionary. Marc had made motions requesting a hearing to determine the insufficiency of their responses, but he had never followed up with the court staff to actually schedule that hearing. He also never told me about that motion nor shared many of the relevant documents with me. I only learned most of the details of this after I had started represented myself, while I stood at a court kiosk reading through all the public filings.

It was immediately obvious to me what Jennifer had done when she evaded answering our request for admission number 9: “Prior to 2022, you had never contacted law enforcement in any way regarding Plaintiff.” She first claimed that the term “law enforcement” was vague, and when later pressed into more explanation, she wrote a disingenuous excuse that said law enforcement could mean “federal officials,” not just “a local police department.” She said she had contacted federal officials about me, trying to get the reader to infer that she had complained to the FBI about me, or some boloney like that. I knew exactly what she was talking about. She had talked to federal officials to get strings pulled at the White House to do nice things for me on dates. Fortunately, I still had lots of physical evidence from several of those dates.

So on August 10th I also filed the “Plaintiff’s Declaration in Support of Plaintiff’s Motion To Determine the Sufficiency of Jennifer Clinchy’s Responses and Objections to Requests for Admission,” in which I spelled out exactly the dishonesty that Jennifer had used in that answer and included photos of the exact things that Jennifer had arranged when she “contacted federal officials regarding plaintiff.” I also accompanied it with a few more tightly worded requests for admission, to get her nailed down to saying something in the legal record revealing her dishonesty and bad faith litigation conduct in her earlier answer.

Months earlier, Marc had asked me to do an accounting of how much money I had made playing tournament Scrabble and an estimate of how much financial damage was done to me by the defendants interfering with my ability to play in tournaments. However, Marc had gotten so distracted by all of the sand that Mr. Fuller was throwing in his eyes, and I had mostly focused on my appeal and the continuing communications with the Scrabble associations, so it had gotten put aside. On Friday, August 11th, I finally finished it up and filed the “Plaintiff’s Declaration of Estimated Scrabble Prize Winnings,” which I figured was important, because one of the claims that we would be discussing in the anti-SLAPP hearing was for Intentional Interference with Economic Relations.

That was as far as I got in the first week and a half of being my own lawyer, and I thought I had made pretty good progress in starting to straighten out my case and prep for the hearing on the following Wednesday. But I came up against another obstacle. From Sunday, August 13th to Wednesday, August 16th, the high temperature was at least 100º every day, and I had no air conditioning at home. For most of those days, I got up at 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning so that I could get a full day of work done before it got too hot out. I also worked from the library in the courthouse a few times.

There was one more preliminary document I needed to serve the defendants before I made my arguments in response to the motions. One of the arguments that Ms. Vaughn had made in her motion was that the plaintiff had only alleged that two or three sentences in Lola’s statements had constituted defamation. That was ridiculous. Lola lied over and over again throughout those documents. I thought the problem was that when Marc had been representing me and he had been asked in responses to requests for production to “produce any statement by [defendant] which, according to plaintiff, constitutes libel per se” and to “produce any statements to third parties by [defendant] which, according to plaintiff, [defendant] knew were false,” he had given a short list.

This is something I had argued with Marc about a number of times. He only wanted to focus on a few sentences of the most egregious reputation-killing things they had said about me. But I protested that many of the most provable falsehoods in what they wrote were in the details of other sentences. And the cumulative effect of all of those big and little lies was to defame my character and to get the Scrabble associations to ban me. So I took out my highlighter and combed over the defamatory statements. Then I updated his incomplete responses with a much more thorough list of all of the instances of libel per se and of knowingly false statements. On Monday, August 14th, I served that as the “Plaintiff’s Fourth Supplemental Response to Jennifer Clinchy’s requests for production.”¹ (Duplicated with Evans’s name on it too, of course.)

Meanwhile on Monday there had been some emails between the lawyers and the court staff about preparation for Wednesday’s hearing. The last one sent on Monday was from the judge’s assistant saying, “Please note, all motions and subsequent filings must be sent to the Judge in hard copy form.” Damn, I thought, I guess I will need to run to a copy shop on Tuesday.

Interspersed with that email chain were some emails from Mr. Fuller to me, sometimes copying only the other lawyers, sometimes copying the court staff too. Mr. Fuller was, of course, irate about the ways I had exposed his wrongdoing and reported him to the Oregon State Bar. He threatened to get me held in contempt of court for including the Terry Kang email, which he had labeled “Confidential – Attorney’s Eyes Only,” in my public filing of August 10th. In his typical fashion, he also made up a cockamamie story that I had put malware on one of the documents I filed, because he or someone in his office had had trouble downloading and opening it properly.

I am not a lawyer, even though I played one for a couple weeks, but I do not think I did anything illegal by including the Terry Kang email in my public filing. If anyone did anything illegal, it was potentially Marc Mohan, by giving me the email when he was no longer involved in the case and I had not signed the protective order myself. I also figured the judge and the Oregon State Bar would rather know about the way Mr. Fuller had used the protective order to undermine my relationship with Marc, and that getting that truth out there was more important than whatever slap on the wrists someone might get from technically disseminating this short email improperly. I did not worry about Mr. Fuller’s empty threats, and no one else in the email chain paid him any heed for his attempts to intimidate me.

I finally got the whole response to the anti-SLAPP motions finished on Tuesday, August 15th. The main response is 22 pages, with about 200 pages of exhibits, which are mostly things you would have already seen if you have read through The Conspiracy, though I did add highlighting of a few key passages in some of the exhibits. Then, there is a supplemental response to the Clinchys’ motions to strike, which is 7 pages plus exhibits. The supplemental response completely dismantles all of their arguments about my supposed bad faith litigation conduct and shows that the only people who committed bad faith litigation conduct in this case are the Clinchys and Mr. Fuller.

It is my opinion that the main response to the motions also completely dismantles their arguments in the motions, maybe not in a legal sense, but in a layman’s sense of logic and justice. I did not quote any other cases or respond to their legal analysis that did so. I did not defend any of the procedural mistakes that Marc had made in representing me and simply apologized for them. But I believe I clearly and conclusively showed that the stories the defendants and their lawyers wrote in their motions were not good faith representations of what actually happened, that there was ample evidence for this to go to trial, and that in the big picture general sense of what anti-SLAPP motions were supposed to be about, it was unsuitable to use them to remove this case from the court, because I was not doing anything to chill the defendants’ free speech. In fact, they had been trying very hard to chill my free speech and criticizing me for exercising it.

It was just past midday when I got the responses to the motions to strike filed. I called a bunch of copy shops until I found one that was able to print color copies of all the documents that I needed in a hurry. I needed to print both the main and supplemental responses of the motions to strike, the August 10th declaration, and the August 11th declaration of Scrabble prize winnings. The whole thing was 310 pages, and I got two sets of copies made, one for me and one for the judge.

I rushed to the copy shop on a 102º afternoon to pick them up and discovered that the printout hadn’t been done properly, so that the “Exhibit 1”, “Exhibit 2”, etc. stuff didn’t show up on the pages, nor did most of the highlighting that I had added. I didn’t have time to sort it out with the printers and get them to print out a better batch, so I took out a pen and highlighter in the copy shop and labeled the first page of each exhibit with what number exhibit it was, and I went through by hand, adding all the highlighting I could remember, just on the judge’s copies.

Even with the discount they gave me for screwing things up, I still paid about $200 for all the copies. At least they were nice enough to do a smaller last minute job the next day for free.

I hustled over to the courthouse and delivered a box with all of the copies to the judge’s chambers, finally meeting the judge’s assistant in person. I do not think the judge was in that day, so she probably would not get the hard copies until the next morning, which was the day of the hearing, though she had gotten all the electronic copies. The assistant explained to me that by law all filings were supposed to be submitted to the court electronically and in print. Some judges made exceptions and allowed filings to only be done electronically, but this particular judge liked to have hard copies of everything and they were the primary ones she tended to read. It would have been nice to know this all sooner, but I had no training program. I had just jumped into the deep end of the pool representing myself pro se for the last two weeks.

That evening I organized all my sections of my paper copies of the responses, declarations, and exhibits into separately paper-clipped sections. In retrospect, it would have been nice to deliver the judge’s copies in that form. I also added all the highlighting and exhibit numbers that didn’t show up properly on the copies.

On the morning of August 16th, Mr. Fuller sent me another nasty letter, escalating his empty threats against me for failing to put the Terry Kang letter under seal. I fired back a quick letter of my own explaining that I had done nothing wrong, to which he responded with another letter distorting what I had written.

As I reviewed all the documents that morning to prepare for the hearing, I suddenly noticed a gap. As medical evidence of the emotional and physical distress that the defendants had inflicted on my life, I included summaries of visits to three different medical professionals: a psychiatrist, an otolaryngologist (ENT doctor), and a speech-language pathologist (SLP). One of my exhibits, the ENT summary, only included the first page, even though it was a three page document with the doctor’s diagnosis on the second page. I looked back at Marc’s responses to the requests for production and he had also included only the first page of the ENT visit summary. I had copied the Bates-number-tagged pages of the medical notes directly from those responses, so I had inadvertently repeated his error of using an incomplete document.

I had also noticed a day or two earlier that Marc had never previously submitted the psychiatrist summary as evidence, which forced me to assign it new Bates numbers and add it to the evidence list when I was writing up the responses to the anti-SLAPP motions. I had distinctly remembered emailing Marc the summaries of all three medical visits together.

These irregularities got me to examine the email I had sent to Marc with these doctor visit notes more carefully and to understand what had happened. Gmail’s preview functionality did not work properly on the psychiatrist and ENT attachments, so if Marc only clicked on the attachments and did not actually download them, he never would have seen beyond the first page. This explained why he never included the psychiatrist summary (because there was nothing useful on the first page) and why he only included the first page of the ENT summary, while he still included the entirety of the SLP summary, since Gmail’s preview functionality had no problems with the last one.

In short, the problem was that Marc could not figure out how to fully download the attachments that I gave him. Now, I understand that Marc was dealing with a lot of paperwork and emails in this case. I can sympathize with anyone in the heat of the moment making a mistake and not noticing that he had accidentally truncated a three page document to one. Plus, the SLP visit note reconfirmed the dysphonia diagnosis, so missing the ENT diagnosis was not that big a deal.

But imagine for a moment that you were a lawyer representing a client who was suing people for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Imagine then that your client gave you a note from a psychiatrist that included his PTSD diagnosis. Do you think that you would perhaps consider this an important piece of evidence, or maybe even the most important piece of evidence in the entire case? And if you clicked on the preview of the PDF and did not see the explanation of the PTSD that you were looking for, do you think you might have tried downloading the entire attachment to see if you were missing something? Or if you could not figure out how to download it and thought the diagnosis was not there, do you think you would have said something to your client, like, “hey the attachment does not appear to be there” instead of just omitting it from evidence?

What kind of moron not only cannot figure out how to download attachments properly, but also does not even bother to follow up with his client when the attachment does not appear to be complete? Apparently the kind who bills me over $14,000 for his legal work.

I quickly wrote up an additional declaration pertaining to medical records, which I filed just two and a half hours before the hearing. Then I got dressed up in my nicest suit and picked up printouts at the copy shop on the way to the courthouse.

I got to the courthouse a bit early and hand wrote out my main talking points from the response to the motion in my notebook while I waited. After the judge wrapped up a previous hearing and retired briefly to her chambers, I set up at the prosecution-side table, laying all my paper-clipped sections of my documents and exhibits in front of me, and plugging in and opening up my laptop, just in case I needed to search for anything else on it.

We were technically supposed to have the brief hearing about whether to grant Jennifer a protective order to answer the one request for admission before the main hearing about the anti-SLAPP motions, but it never happened. Instead we briefly talked about the existing protective order that Mr. Fuller had tried to criticize me for breaking. He said something to the judge about how I had taken the confidential letter and published it widely. I clarified that the only way I had published it was putting it in the court filing and reporting it to the Oregon State Bar. I also explained that Mr. Fuller and my former attorney Mr. Mohan had agreed to that protective order behind my back and that I never knew about it.

The judge did not seem to care about that particular letter, but she was insistent on me understanding that the protective order did apply to me going forward. Just as the associate lawyer had done on the phone with me a few weeks ago, she normalized the protective order as something that happens in these kinds of cases all the time. She also had no sympathy or patience for me separating what my former attorney had done and what I had done. If there were ethics issues about either of the lawyers, that was not the business of this courtroom. I did not argue and confirmed that I understood what the judge said about the protective order applying to me. Mr. Fuller never brought up a new protective order for the response to the request for admission, and I certainly was not going to bring it up for him, so we moved on.

Before we gave any oral arguments about the anti-SLAPP motions, the judge explained that she had read the entirety of the defendants motions and that she thought they were very well written. She had only skimmed my response, because it was very long and I had only gotten it to her the day before. Then she said that she was inclined to approve the motions. So much for objective justice.

Since the judge was more familiar with their arguments than mine, she let me go first. She quickly made clear that she had no stomach for any arguments about bad faith litigation conduct by either side, and I said that is no problem, that is why I put those arguments in the supplemental response. We can just focus on the ones in the main response.

I ended up taking the floor for somewhere between 30 and 45 minutes. I was the most calm, cool, and collected I have ever been in my life while talking about this story. For the last many years, it has been an enormous problem for me to explain the story of what the Clinchys have done to me without getting angry and raising my voice, even to close friends whom I know are on my side. The last time I had talked about some of these things, less than a week earlier to a friend on the phone, my friend had expressed concerns about how I was going to come across in the courtroom. But I mentioned to my friend that I can do better if I plan a script of what to say ahead of time and stay on that script. Plus, I knew that I absolutely had to do better. Losing my cool in front of the judge would have been the death knell for my case, and now the judge had already told me she was inclined to decide against me before I even started. If I was going to pull off a miracle comeback, I was going to need to be nearly perfect. Fortunately, I thrive under pressure.

I walked through my talking points one-by-one. I spoke slowly, clearly, and assertively yet gently, while they all listened quietly and attentively. My speech essentially went in order through the main ideas of each of the sections of the main response to the motions to strike.

I first dismissed the defendants repeated claim that my writings were a “manifesto,” pointing out that they contained plenty of evidence and lots of communications and points of view of other people. I explained why the charges were all filed within the statute of limitations, and why I thought anti-SLAPP was unsuitable, since it was the defendants who were trying to chill my free speech, not the other way around.

I talked about all of the claims against the defendants: why there was plenty of defamation, a repeated pattern of infliction of emotional distress, interference with my demonstrated pattern of making money with Scrabble winnings over many years, and evidence of conspiracy not only between the defendants but also with Steven Pellinen and possibly other Scrabble leaders. I mentioned that the only reason Steven was not a defendant was because he was eighty years old and had Parkinson’s and brain cancer and probably less than a year left to live.

After addressing all the claims, I then went through all my arguments that dismantled the criticisms the defendants had made in their background and introductory sections: how NASPA’s statement that it decided I had violated the code of conduct based on my own submissions was not plausible, given their later communications and behavior; how—contrary to the defendants’ claim that I had an “already-tanked reputation” based on one quote from one fifteen year old article—there was plenty of evidence that I had a positive reputation as a Scrabble player in the media; how the Darrell Day incident was not just irrelevant to my relationship with the defendants, but also how Lola’s increasing use of it in her later statements showed clear malicious intent against me; and how despite the cries of bad faith litigation conduct from the other side, I had already served 460 pages of evidence to them in discovery, and they had served zero.

When I was done, the first words out of the judge’s mouth were, “you just said a lot,” and I knew I was done for. All that time and energy and all that perfect presentation did not make a lick of difference. The main takeaway of the judge was essentially, “that’s a lot of words, and I am not even going to bother to process all of them.” She gave the defendants’ counsels time to respond, but they did not make very long arguments. They knew they did not need to, as it was clear the judge’s mind was already made up.

There were a few things that came out of the discussion afterward that made clear to me the fatal flaws in my case. It seems to me that the most crucial ones all related to the writing of the complaint itself, something that was only done by my former lawyer Marc Mohan.

The biggest by far is that civil conspiracy is not a claim in Oregon law. There is criminal conspiracy in Oregon, and there is civil conspiracy in some other states. My former lawyer had literally written a complaint that had invalid claims, and even though he had amended it twice, he never fixed this issue. The judge even acknowledged that there might very well have been a conspiracy against me in the Scrabble world, but that it was not a valid legal claim in civil court in Oregon.

I still have not gotten my head around where Ms. Vaughn got the idea that the claim for defamation rested on only two or three sentences in Lola’s statement. I thought I was properly addressing that by my supplemental response to requests for production that gave a laundry list of defamatory statements, which I also included as Exhibit 15 in the main response to the motions. (p. 186-198) But the judge told me that what mattered was what was in the complaint itself, not the requests for production.

Another problem with the complaint is that my lawyer asked for attorney’s fees, and this is not the kind of case where you can do that. The associate lawyer I had spoken to a month earlier had mentioned something like that on the phone. As best as I understand, the anti-SLAPP motion that was about to be granted was the only way that a case like this could result in an awarding of attorney’s fees. If it had not been approved and this had gone to trial, neither side would have been awarded any attorney’s fees, regardless of the verdict.

It seemed to me that the only way that I could have avoided the case being struck down was to make another amendment to the complaint that fixed all the problems with the first three versions,² and gotten it and new summonses delivered to the defendants in the two weeks between them making their motions and us having the hearing. Notwithstanding the fact that I still do not have the legal knowledge to write the complaint correctly, even if I had done that I do not know if it would have saved the case. Mr. Fuller had already written protests in his anti-SLAPP motion that the number of amendments to the original complaint was evidence of my attorney exercising bad faith litigation conduct. If I had scrapped the old complaints and written a new one at this point, four months into the case and after the defendants had written their motions specifically tailored to the way the old one was written, it would have looked unprofessional to the judge, especially because she did not care to distinguish what came from my previous lawyer and from me representing myself pro se.

In short, the complaint was written so badly that my case was DOA. The truth of my story and the falseness of the defendants’ stories did not matter. The oral arguments I gave in the courtroom did not matter. There was nothing I could have done, because Marc had screwed the pooch so badly. For that matter, even if I had dropped another big retainer to get another lawyer to take over the case for the last few weeks, it is unlikely that they would have been able to overcome Marc’s mistakes enough to keep this case going. I am glad that I represented myself for the last two weeks, because if I had just handed it off to another lawyer, I likely would have lost even more money, and I never would have known about a large amount of Marc’s incompetence and malpractice.

I could see the way the wind was blowing and that there was no point in putting up much resistance in the rest of the hearing. There were a few little things in the remaining discussion that annoyed me. At one point Mr. Fuller tried to use the litany of nasty, dishonest letters that he had sent me and my former attorney as “evidence” of our wrongdoing. This guy’s entire playbook was obvious to me. Practically every word he put in writing was false and accusatory, making ridiculous assumptions and interpretations of things that have no basis in reality and are just fabricating a bad story about his opponents, but his way of speaking was nothing like his writing. He spoke in a gentle, nice-sounding voice, and weak-minded people like Marc Mohan, who judge others based on emotional affect rather than the veracity of their statements, fall for his lies.

Right near the end of the hearing, I even saw Mr. Fuller flat out lie to the judge’s face, but I was too resigned to even complain about it. The judge had already said her decision at that point, and I knew that my pointing out the lie would not help me in any way. The lie was exactly what he had written to me in his second letter that morning, that I had said that I do not intend to comply with the Judge’s protective order. I simply said that I had not signed the order. I made no statement about my future intentions.

Mr. Fuller also tipped his hand to me a couple of times during the hearing. I am telling you right here and now what I believe he is going to do. He will try to get my August 10th “Declaration of David Koenig” put under seal, by arguing that it needs to be, because of the “confidential” letter from Terry Kang. And he will try to get my other declaration filed that day removed from the court record by arguing that the photo of me and Jennifer in it is an inappropriate invasion of privacy. His real motivation is removing as many things from the public records as possible that show his own bad faith litigation conduct.

I am somewhat optimistic that the attention I have drawn to this case by the complaints I made to the Oregon State Bar have meant that enough people in the state legal community will have already seen these filings that Mr. Fuller will not mitigate the damage much, even if he succeeds in getting these documents hidden. Furthermore, it is possible that attempting to hide the documents now might just make him look worse. But just in case, I am going to keep a copy of these documents up on my website, so that Mr. Fuller cannot escape scrutiny for his actions.

I have almost no bones to pick with Lola’s counsel, Ms. Vaughn. She was completely professional in all of her dealings with me, and her correspondence was polite, even though we were not able to agree on a settlement. Her representation of Lola in the courtroom gave me no cause to complain, except for one thing she said. She remarked that she saw a clear pattern in me of blaming other people: the defendants, the leaders of the Scrabble organizations, and even my own former lawyer.

Come on, Ms. Vaughn, you already knew you were going to get your motion granted and did not need to say that. And you know it was dishonest. I am sure that you came into the courtroom much more prepared than the judge did, having actually read all of my statements and all of the evidence I presented. You know your client and the other defendants lied over and over again about me, and you know that every word I have said is true, even though it is your job never to admit those things. You know that I have thoroughly demonstrated both an absurd amount of corruption by the Scrabble leaders and an absurd amount of incompetence by my former attorney. When you read the stories about my former attorney, you were probably horrified at the thought of anyone who was representing you in a legal matter ever doing their job that badly.

I get that it is your job to get the judge to go against me emotionally, but again this was not even necessary. Congratulations on finding a way to send a personal insult to the one person who has behaved morally better than anyone else in this story.

Finally, I have a few bones to pick with Judge Kelly Skye’s handling of this hearing. I have to admit that I was at the time fooled by Ms. Vaughn’s phrasing in her motion that the plaintiff had to “to establish a probability that he will prevail on every element of every claim.” I assumed because my complaint had invalid civil conspiracy claims that continuing to fight for the other claims was a lost cause. It was not until two months later, while I was writing this, that I realized this was a misinterpretation, possibly an intentional one by Ms. Vaughn. The statute never uses the phrase “every claim.” The way it is written seems to me to indicate that the anti-SLAPP motion applies to each claim in a complaint separately. In other words, the judge could and should have just struck down the civil conspiracy claims and allowed the case to proceed with the other three claims.

I wish I had been aware of that at the time and presented that argument to the judge, although I am doubtful that it would have made a difference. I think the fact that the judge had not thoroughly read my arguments against the motions on paper, because I was so late at getting them to her, doomed me. I did the best I could. I thought I did a helluva job for an inexperienced fake lawyer in writing up and filing everything that I did and getting it in the day before the hearing, but I only learned in the courtroom that for this judge that was not soon enough.

In my opinion, Judge Skye had already decided prior to our oral arguments that she wanted to knock this whole case out of court. She gave me some post hoc rationalizations of why the other claims would not have succeeded, and the most annoying thing she did was bring up qualified immunity, i.e., that because the defendants made their statements about me in a quasi-judicial context, “the Scrabble courts,” they were immune from defamation claims.

The defendants did not say a single thing about qualified immunity in any of their motions to strike or their oral arguments. I and my former attorney expected that the defendants might bring up qualified immunity in the trial, and there were good legal arguments to be made about why the defendants’ behavior should not be protected by that.³ But this case was not on trial yet and this was just a short hearing to address their anti-SLAPP motions. What was I supposed to do, bring up a new argument for them and then present my argument against it? But what the judge did was produce a new argument for the defendants’ side on her own, after we had all concluded our arguments. I saw a look of surprise on Mr. Fuller’s face when she mentioned it.

I thought that the judge might have thought she was being nice to me, by trying to present some reasons why I would not have won this case anyway, rather than just telling me the cold hard truth that the reasons why this case were being thrown out were procedural, because my former lawyer did not know how to write a valid complaint.

Along similar lines, she argued that all of my evidence that the defendants were lying about me was just hearsay. At the end, I told her that I accepted that there may have been procedural problems with how the complaint was written that made this decision inevitable, but I did not understand this hearsay criticism. I told her I had presented hundreds of text messages of Lola’s that showed she was lying about our entire relationship. I stunned the judge, and I could read it in her face. I am sure that she previously did not know what I had just told her, because she had never read my documents to NASPA demonstrating the defamation. She simply said, “your objection has been noted.”

That is the most tragic part of this whole thing. The facts of my case never got a fair trial, and instead the whole thing was booted out in a short hearing by an apathetic judge who did not read everything I gave her.

So I lost, and now I was on the hook for all of Mr. Fuller’s and Ms. Vaughn’s attorney fees too. It was the worst possible legal outcome for me. But after it was all said and done, when I packed up my box of 300 pages of documents and headed out of the court, I just had to laugh. It was the first time in the seven years of this horror show that I could laugh at the absurdity of it all.

I am proud of everything I have done. Of the dignified way I carried myself through this Scrabble community even while the Clinchys and Lola were gossiping and disparaging me for years, of how I told the story of what happened in as clear, objective, and fair a way as I did, of how I have now spent years diligently combing through documents and revealing every one of their lies, of how I did not succumb to panic and continued to represent myself strongly no matter how bad a hand I was dealt, of every word I wrote in my statements to NASPA, in the documents I filed in the court case, and in the posts on this blog, of how much complicity and corruption I have revealed in our Scrabble leadership.

But the result of it all to this point is that the people who told disgusting lies about me are not being punished at all by either our Scrabble community or the law, and I am being punished by both. I am banned from playing Scrabble, and—let us be clear—it is a lifetime ban, because I will never accommodate any of the insulting conditions that the Scrabble leaders have tried to put on me, least of all taking down this blog. I am about to owe more than all of my remaining savings to the lawyers who helped my abusers get away with it. I have still got PTSD, and I still have not worked in over two years. And all I wanted was to play a board game and be treated with the respect that I deserve.

Footnote

1. Exhibit 15, pages 186-199 of main response to the anti-SLAPP motions ↩︎
2. Mr. Mohan had amended the original complaint twice and still had not fixed the fundamental problems with it. What is worse is that he never told me about those amendments while he was working on them, only casually mentioning it once a month later when I was considering including the complaint in my public statements on this blog. He wrote in a June 14th email: “Instead of the initial complaint, you should attach the second amended complaint, which corrects a couple small factual errors and is the current operative complaint. I’m attaching a copy here.” ↩︎
3. For one, Cesar del Solar told me that Lola read her statement from the incident report about me to the Woogles team. So the defendants were not solely using their defamatory statements about me in a quasi-judicial context. ↩︎

Evil will always triumph, because good is dumb.

Dark helmet

When NASPA emailed me on September 23rd, 2022 with their three-year suspension for reasons that they would not state, they included this sentence.

This is a “one strike” warning, and we advise that you be extremely cautious about your communications with other Scrabble players, lest your words or actions be construed as harassment.

The leaders at NASPA have shown that they have no interest in dealing with me with any semblance of fairness or intellectual honesty. They have lied to me, hidden documents from me, (though I did not know about that part yet,) and sided with obviously dishonest bullies who have abused me for years. From that moment I decided that I needed to talk to NASPA through a lawyer, so that they could not spin any communication from me as harassment.

Before I found a defamation lawyer, I collected and organized all of the documents telling the history of how I had been mistreated by people in Scrabble, namely everything in The Conspiracy up through September 2022. Then I wrote a narrative explaining how it all linked together, which eventually became The Scapegoat.

I did a Google search for defamation lawyers in Oregon, and the one I found ended up being mostly a corporate lawyer. He reviewed my whole packet and told me that he believed I had legal claims against the Clinchys, Lola McKissen, and Steven Pellinen, though he never got around to specifying exactly what those legal claims were.

In the short time we were working together in late October and early November 2022, my highest priority was using him as a conduit to communicate with NASPA to see if I could get any information from them about why they suspended me. I did not think it was necessarily even worth trying to appeal to them, since I had already written a defense against the false accusations that was about as well stated as I could possibly make it, and I had zero expectation that they were going to suddenly start acting justly toward me. However, my lawyer thought that I should go through NASPA’s appeal process, as it might look questionable if I escalated to a lawsuit without doing so.

I drafted up a list of questions for my lawyer to send to NASPA, but when he sent me back a draft of the letter that he was going to send them, he had modified them slightly so that they were not in my opinion quite precisely targeting all of the information that I was trying to glean. When I tried to point this out, he became somewhat argumentative on the subject. I don’t want to exaggerate the problem. In the end, the letter he sent didn’t have exactly the wording that I had originally wanted, but the difference was minor. It just seemed like an unnecessary annoyance for something that should have been a simple task. It gave me a bit of doubt about whether he was going to be the best person to work with.

I also generally got the sense from working with him that my case was low on his priority list, as he was working with corporate clients that were a much bigger and easier source of income. To be fair, he was charging me a lower individual rate than he charged his corporate clients, and I had not asked him to do much beyond the initial evaluation of the case and sending out litigation hold letters to the relevant parties. There was no particular reason for him to be that invested in my case yet, especially because we had just gotten into a limited financial engagement and had agreed that we would renegotiate a new contract if he was going to file a case in court for me.

In short, we just weren’t vibing. I was getting the feeling that if I did file a lawsuit, I was probably going to want to do so with a different lawyer. He and I were in the middle of a Zoom call on November 15th, which I had requested in order to address some of my concerns about him potentially representing me in court, when John Chew unexpectedly emailed us both with the September 9th statements from Jennifer, Lola, and Steven Pellinen that they had never shown me before suspending me two months earlier.

That email did not just derail my meeting with the lawyer. It derailed me mentally for the next few months.

I had spent six months of my life, from April to September 2022, in psychological agony on account of the horrendous and false attacks on my character. It took a massive amount of strength and willpower to get my entire defense written down, and then a helluva lot more than that to edit it down and filter out all of the emotion in it. My initial draft was 75 pages, which I cut down to 17. And those pages were mostly just what turned into section (C) of the document. By the time I filled it out with the rest of what it needed and edited it down again, the final product was 36 pages, with another 53 pages of screenshots thoroughly corroborating it all.

During that six month period, I dealt with the further abuse of WGPO deciding to rush ahead and make a decision against me based only on the words of the other side and to send me an absolutely scathing and insulting email. It was also during that period that my relationship with my sisters and my son just about completely fell apart, due to family tensions that had already resulted in me cutting my mother out of my life in January. I have had almost no communication with anyone in my family for well over a year now.

Things were not all bad. In spring 2022 I spent a month in Mexico City and then went to the UK and Germany, on trips that had been planned before I received this incident report in April. Though I did do lots of fun things on those trips, I spent almost every weekday in Mexico City writing my defense, at least until I got COVID. By the time I got back to the States, I only had those 17 pages I mentioned earlier, and I decided to give myself a break entirely from working on the writing while I was in Europe.

On both trips, when I was alone in my hotel rooms, I sometimes found myself screaming at the top of my lungs. This was something that had started much earlier, due to the stress and anger I had about all of the people who were wronging me on account of Evans’s and Jennifer’s abuse. For most of the first year after I published The Crucible and The Fallout, there was only one person in the Scrabble community at whom I was angry: Chris Lipe. I might have occasionally stewed in anger about him, but it wasn’t a frequent thing until February 2021, when the names Geoff Thevenot, Peter Armstrong, and Becky Dyer showed up on an email banning me from the online Woogles CoCo club and insinuating that I was a harasser.¹

In July 2020, I had proven beyond any shadow of a doubt that I had done nothing wrong to Jennifer and Evans and that they were abusing me. Yet all of these people decided to ignore reality and pile on their own abuse. And every one of them—Chris, Geoff, Peter, and Becky—had been someone I had considered a good friend.

Ever since that Woogles banning, I found myself occasionally getting into angry yelling fits when I was alone because of the complicit and abusive behavior I was receiving in the Scrabble community. In April 2022 it became much worse and much more frequent after this smear campaign was launched on me and then the leaders of all these Scrabble organizations started piling on too. The worst part was that the first four names on the “Notice of Action” I received from WGPO were Keith Hagel, Will Anderson, Jan Cardia, and Laurie Cohen, people I had known and liked for a long time in my tournament Scrabble career.

The first time I completely lost my voice due to the yelling was in January 2022, just a few days after I had gotten back from my victory at the New Orleans tournament, which may end up being the last Scrabble tournament I ever play in the USA. At that tournament Dave Wiegand had added his name to the list of Scrabble players who were mistreating me on account of Evans’s and Jennifer’s abuse, but I had no idea of the tidal wave of abuse that would start three months later.

I was yelling in the car when it felt like something snapped in my throat, and I was not able to speak for about 48 hours afterward. I had a therapy telehealth appointment in which I had to communicate with my therapist almost entirely by typing.

At that time it seemed like just a one-off thing, but after the smear campaign started and so many other people jumped on the bandwagon of abuse, it happened many more times. For many months my voice became perpetually scratchy, because I could not give it enough time to heal after the last damage before I started screaming again.

There was a long stretch of weeks in summer of 2022, after I had gotten back from Mexico and Europe, when I could not get myself to work on writing the response to the incident report at all, even though it was well underway. I got stuck in a mental avoidance loop, and that made the yelling much worse. The only way I was able to calm myself down was to get back to the writing.

Yet in spite all of the terrible experiences, by the first week of September I somehow managed to compose a comprehensive defense against all of the lies and attacks that had been thrown at me, with thorough proof that all of the complainants had defamed me and were the actual wrongdoers, with a great deal of objectivity, contemporaneous evidence, and reasoned analysis. Friends predicted that there was no way NASPA could let my suspension stand after reading the document.

Getting back to November 15th, when my lawyer and I saw John Chew’s email, it suddenly hit me that after six months of these accusations tearing my life apart, it took Jennifer, Lola, and Steven only three days to pile on a huge amount of additional defamation and hatred. They got my defense on September 6th and then gave all that garbage back to NASPA on September 9th. They can lie so much faster than I can tell the truth.

After six months of writing my defense in the worst agony, I was going to have to do it all over again, in order to respond to all of these new accusations in the appeal to NASPA that the lawyer wanted me to submit.

I completely cut off all communication with the lawyer for months while I worked on round two of the defense, and this time I was a lot angrier, because so many people in the Scrabble associations had piled on so much of their own abusive behavior, including Steven Pellinen’s hateful screed about me and NASPA hiding documents from me for two months. There was again a stretch of weeks in late 2022 to early 2023 when I couldn’t get myself to work on it at all, which made me madder and yell more, just as my previous avoidance loop in Summer 2022 had.

I finally got on antidepressants around the end of 2022, which helped a little bit. I cycled through a bunch of therapists, none of whom helped much at all. But somehow, I powered through again and got a draft of my appeal to NASPA written by mid-March. Only this time it was way too angry, and I could not edit out all of the anger by myself.

Back when I wrote The Crucible and The Fallout in 2020, I had a bunch of eager readers in my Scrabble community who gave me great feedback and helped me refine the posts before I published them to the world. It was a lot harder to get editorial support for writing the response to the incident report in 2022. And in 2023, it was near impossible to get any for writing my appeal letter.

My repeated attempts to refine the appeal were having diminishing returns. I needed to do something else to move forward. So in mid-March 2023, I finally reached out to my lawyer again and sent him the appeal letter to NASPA. I mentioned the possibility of filing a lawsuit at the same time as sending the letter, but I wasn’t really writing about the lawsuit. I was mostly looking for help with the document.

Of course, the lawyer was knee deep in a bunch of other work and wasn’t able to get to it right away. But when he did get back to me a week later, a surprising thing happened. He offered me all of my money back to get himself untangled from the case. Who ever heard of this? A big law firm completely refunding money they had already billed a client. Granted, they actually hadn’t billed me that much yet, since we’d only worked together for a few weeks in October and November 2022, before I reached out again four months later.

This was great news to me, as I had already decided months earlier that I probably didn’t want to take this case to court with this guy, and now I had my money back to start with a new lawyer.

I get why the lawyer wanted to pull out, though I don’t know how he managed to convince his firm to refund my money. The time that I first wrote to him in late 2022 had been shortly before I had gotten on the antidepressants, and my mental duress surely came out in a lot of my emails. Also, serving as an editor for my appeal letter to NASPA was not in his wheelhouse at all. He was looking at the angry writing in that draft as an unchangeable reality of a person he had to decide whether to work with, rather than as something that he could help me mollify and adjust. Finally, I had already given him hints in our last Zoom call back in November that I was unsure that I wanted to continue working with him.

Even though he did not give me any detailed editorial advice, his email ended with a single sentence that was just the help I needed:

I recommend that you cut out everything but the factual details (which I think are persuasive).

That is what I needed to hear. For so long my Scrabble community had been gaslighting me, pretending that it was not plainly obvious that I was in the right and that the Clinchys and their accomplices were in the wrong. I needed this reminder that for an outsider who was not biased by liking them or hating me, just telling the facts was enough.

That one sentence was enough to help me make a much calmer revision of the appeal letter, but I decided that I should make sure my next lawyer approved it before I sent it.

While the lawyer and I were cordially wrapping up our working relationship, he was supportive of the idea that I might hire a publicist to help me with the communications to the Scrabble community. Though that did not end up happening, it was instrumental to how I ended up finding my next lawyer.

I started reaching out to PR firms in March 2023. Most of them were not interested, but I had a friendly phone conversation with a guy who led one of them. He recommended a couple of lawyers that he thought would be a good match for my case.

One was a high-powered lawyer who had represented a bunch of celebrities such as Patrick Mahomes and Snoop Dogg. I knew he was likely to be very expensive but he also might have the expertise in reputation management that I needed.

The PR guy also recommended Marc Mohan, whom he described as a “long-time friend who worked as a film critic and movie store owner before going back to law school. I use Marc and what makes me think he could be a fit is that I think he would understand the world well. His father, who recently passed, was a prominent author in the world of competitive gaming.”

Despite being in his fifties, Marc was inexperienced in this career field. He even had “baby lawyer” on his LinkedIn profile at the time. But shortly after we spoke on the phone, the PR guy told me that Marc was very interested in talking to me and learning more about my case. I figured that he might be hungry enough that he would make my case a high priority, and that it could be a good résumé builder for him. He would also be a lot less expensive than more experienced lawyers.

Still, I was unsure if I wanted to go with someone so inexperienced, so I reached out to both lawyers the PR guy recommended. I kept looking for other lawyers too, but without any success. I did not know how to find other people who would be a good match for my case, and multiple lawyers told me they had too full a caseload to take on additional ones right now. However, one of those unavailable lawyers alerted me that there was a one year statute of limitations on defamation in Oregon. I learned this on Monday, April 10th, 2023.

Steven Pellinen, Evans, Jennifer, and Lola had launched their defamatory attack on me with the Scrabble associations on April 14th, 2022. That meant that I had until that Friday to get charges filed against them. I called back the celebrity lawyer, but I found out that there was no way he was going to be able to take my case and get charges filed that quickly.

I had no other choice than to go to Marc. I decided to trust in the universe, and I pressed him to review all of my documents as quickly as possible and to get the charges filed by the end of the week.

To his credit, Marc busted his ass that week and got it done with a couple hours to spare. However, there was one major red flag. After he had already comprehensively read all my documents, he wrote up his initial draft of the complaint with the North American Scrabble Players Association acronym misspelled as NASPLA, despite the fact that I had referred to it as NASPA at least fifty times in the documentation I had given him. We quickly fixed it in the first round of proofreading, but it was an omen.

I believe that Marc is dyslexic, not just because of this particular typo, but also because of many other similar errors with spelling and details that he made throughout our time working together. I even saw a document where he typed his own phone number wrong, despite having it correct on the previous page.

Once we got the charges filed and the summons sent, it was not long before we heard from Michael Fuller, the lawyer the Clinchys retained and someone whom I quickly discovered was cut from the same immoral, bullying, dishonest, and manipulative cloth as Jennifer. Just about every letter he sent to my lawyer was filled with grotesque lies made to sound like we were doing something terribly wrong to the defendants and in the courts, even though the only side who made a mockery of justice was them.

I learned a lot over the next several months about how an immoral lawyer can represent guilty defendants and create a massive amount of distraction and bureaucratic interference to bring the wheels of justice to a grinding halt.

The first thing Jennifer and Mr. Fuller did was send us a barrage of requests for admission, inspection, and production. Requests for admission are supposed to be straightforward fact-based questions with a simple “Admit” or “Deny” answer that can help both sides establish some of the baseline facts about the case. I was suing Jennifer for defamation, and she seemed intent on proving to the world that she was doing exactly what I was accusing her of. She went straight for trying to drag every irrelevant thing into the case just to tarnish my reputation.

The entire first set of requests for admission were about my short Facebook interaction with Darrell Day. Never mind the real story of what has happened between me and the defendants. Let’s just make this entire thing about Dave’s short online interaction with a completely different person whom none of us are close to.

A day later we received another single request for admission, “David Koenig has a reputation as being the most despised person in Scrabble,” which was based on a single line from a trashy article written about me in 2008, before I ever met any of the defendants. Never mind that after that article was written Evans and I became friends for several years and both Jennifer and Lola dated me, when they all had already read the article beforehand. Let’s just pull out any irrelevant fifteen year old trash journalism we can to try to damage Dave’s reputation more, thereby demonstrating that we are doing exactly the character assassination that has made us defendants in the first place.

Some of the early requests for admission also tried to insinuate that I was lying about my medical diagnosis of PTSD, and the early barrage of paperwork also included a demand that I be evaluated by a psychologist at the cost of the defense. After I started producing paperwork that actually mentioned my PTSD diagnosis, this mental examination was put off and never rescheduled. I guess the defense decided it was not in their interest to pay to produce evidence that I was telling the truth about the damage they did to me.

Mr. Fuller also sent along requests for inspection, which tried to get me to turn over my cell phone and computer to the defendants, so they could search it for all communications related to them. I will tell you exactly why they did that. It is because Jennifer and Lola both surely deleted all of my text history with them a long time ago. Every time they keep telling made-up stories about our past, they keep running into me pulling out old text conversations that prove they are lying. They wanted to see the full record of those conversations so they could stop shooting themselves in the foot and instead make up new lies that I could not contradict and in which they could distort or twist actual conversations between us to give their falsehoods more believability. They had no right to inspect my devices. When my lawyer refused, they backed down on that one.

Mr. Fuller also sent us requests for production. These are requests for evidence related to the case, which are a normal part of the discovery process, but Mr. Fuller’s style was to make a zillion spurious requests to keep the prosecution overwhelmed with filling out paperwork. The first document had 253 requests for production from Jennifer Clinchy written over 49 pages. Sent at the same time was a document with 253 requests for production from Evans Clinchy written over 49 pages. That is a tactic Mr. Fuller continued to use throughout the case. He would send the exact same documents in duplicate, once with Jennifer’s name on top and once with Evans’s name, just to double the amount of paperwork and printing costs for the case. His tactics had the combined effect of keeping the prosecution so occupied with busy work that it was difficult to do proactive things to move the case forward, and driving up the legal costs for everyone, so that all the lawyers would make more money.

One day later Mr. Fuller sent supplemental requests for production. This one was 189 pages and had 644 additional requests. Of course, it was sent in duplicate.

I gave Marc the information he needed to respond to the requests for admission, and I also told him several questions that I wanted him to put to the defendants in our own requests for admission.

I wanted Evans to admit that he jumped up and down, pumped his fist, and yelled loudly after an adjudication in his favor in a game against me at the New Orleans 2017 tournament, an event that I wrote about in The Crucible. I wanted him also to admit that he said something in an online forum about breaking Cesar del Solar’s kneecaps so that he would have to crawl to the challenge computer, an event that Mina Le attested to in a 2020 Facebook conversation.² Finally, I wanted Evans to admit that he had frequently used the catch phrase, “Fuck you, you fucking fuck!” both in person and online.

I wanted Jennifer to admit that the two highlighted sentences in her letter to Jason Idalski that she included in her September 9th statement referred to other people and not me. I also wanted Jennifer to admit that, while she was working for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, she said on a date with me that it would be smarter to assassinate a Supreme Court Justice than to assassinate a President.

I wanted them to admit those things, because they are all true.

I admitted in my statements to NASPA that I said some violent things in private conversations with Lola, but that does not change the fact that Lola exaggerated, distorted, and in many cases completely fabricated things that she alleges I said. It does not change the fact that I have never done a violent thing in my life. And it does not change the fact that any story Jennifer tells about me using angry or violent-sounding speech with her is a total fabrication, intentionally and maliciously designed to resonate with secondhand reports she has gotten about how angry I was in interactions with other people, years after I have had any interaction with her.

I never thought there was a realistic chance that Evans was going to break Cesar’s knees, nor that Jennifer was going to do anything to assassinate a Supreme Court Justice. We all talk shit sometimes. I just wanted to point out their hypocrisy in trying to twist everything they thought I might have said—based on the testimony of an extremely unreliable witness, I might add—into an argument that I was a violent person, when I knew for absolute certain that they had said violent things themselves. I also wanted to point out Evans’s hypocrisy in painting me as someone who would disrupt a Scrabble tournament, when the only one of us who had behaved disruptively in a tournament room was he.

Meanwhile, I did not just want to proceed with a legal case against the Clinchys and Lola. I also wanted to proceed with my appeal to NASPA, to hopefully get the unjust suspension of me lifted before the National and World Championships happening in Las Vegas in July. The PR guy was too busy with a crisis of another client to work with me, so I asked Marc to review my writing. Marc was understandably swamped with paperwork in the first weeks after Mr. Fuller got involved in the case, but he eventually helped me make another big revision of the appeal letter. We cut it down from about 35 pages to 20, and the end product was much more dispassionate than earlier versions. I sent it to NASPA right before Memorial Day weekend.

As explained in The Scapegoat and The Conspiracy, the month of June saw both NASPA and WESPA running bureaucratic interference to make sure nothing was done on my case to prevent me from being able to play in either the National or World Championship. At this point I decided I had to make a public statement. If they were going to keep me out of the World Championship, the Scrabble leaders were going to have to pay the price of the entire world seeing their corrupt behavior.

On June 16th, 2023, a day after I published The Scapegoat, Marc received a nasty letter from Michael Fuller accusing that “plaintiff either withheld or destroyed relevant responsive documents that were in his possession.” I was baffled, as the summary of events and communications that I gave in The Scapegoat was completely corroborated by the zipfile full of documents that I had given to Marc when I first started working with him. There had been a few more recent relevant communications since the case had been underway, which I usually cc’ed or bcc’ed to Marc or forwarded him after the fact. But even if I had missed anything, I had given all those files in a zipfile to NASPA (and cc’ed Marc) when I emailed them the appeal on May 26, 2023. And then I had given all those files and then some to both WESPA and ABSP (and bcc’ed Marc) when I emailed them on June 8, 2023, by way of Wayne Kelly and Mina Le.

Furthermore, Marc had told me that Mr. Fuller had subpoenaed NASPA, and I assumed at that point that anything I had sent to NASPA would also be seen by the Clinchys.

Part of the problem is that Marc was not making transparent to me what he had submitted as evidence for discovery nor anything about his communications with Mr. Fuller, aside from the occasional angry letter. He did share a Google Drive with me with the first batch of discovery requests that he received from Michael Fuller in late April, before he had responded to anything, but he never updated it later. He never shared with me many of the responses that he made to their discovery requests nor many of the discovery requests he made to them, nor many of their inadequate responses, nor many of his attempts to follow up.

I was vaguely aware that Marc and Mr. Fuller had had a number of voice conversations in the course of the case so far, but I never was invited to any of those conversations. I also never got anything but a very scant report of what was talked about. Furthermore, I was disturbed by the fact that the little I heard often made it sound like the lawyer on the other side was a nice guy and that they had a good professional relationship. Marc seemed to like the Clinchys’ lawyer, even if he did not like them very much.

This did not jibe at all with the letters I saw from Mr. Fuller, and when I pointed this out to Marc, he mostly dismissed it as just the nasty way lawyers tend to write to each other. I do not buy that at all. Lola’s attorney, Ms. Vaughn, did not get involved in the case until later, but nothing that she sent to us had the same kind of intellectually dishonest and unfounded accusations that were found throughout Mr. Fuller’s letters.

I even pointed out to Marc that Mr. Fuller’s interests were directly opposed to his, and that if Mr. Fuller was being nice to him, it was probably because he was willingly doing something that was more in Mr. Fuller’s interest. I told him, make sure you don’t get played by a more experienced attorney.

On Saturday, June 17th, 2023, I wrote to Marc, shortly after I had heard from him about the Fuller letter from the previous day. I told him:

I think they’re just referring to the documents of communications that I’ve already passed to NASPA. I would think they’d be able to get them all from NASPA through discovery, but I’m happy to hand them all over directly too.

All of those documents are included in the attachments of the “David Koenig’s status in international Scrabble, including the upcoming WESPA Championship” that I sent to Mina and Wayne to forward to WESPA and ABSP and bcc’ed to you. So I think you should just forward that email with all of its attachments to them, and that should cover all the bases.

I’m not aware of any other documents.

from my june 17th, 2023 email to marc mohan, referring to my june 8th email to mina le and wayne kelly

Marc went ahead and had a meeting with Mr. Fuller at the beginning of the following week, which—I thought—was supposed to be about getting clarification of what documents the defendants were missing. However, when he talked to me on the phone afterward, he still did not give me any clarity on the subject. Furthermore, I then asked him specifically if he had given the defendants the same June 8th email I mentioned in the quote above. He told me he had not, and I assumed he had not read my June 17th email carefully. I then pointed out to him on the phone that I had just spelled this out in an email that weekend, and asked him to look specifically at the June 8th email and its attached zipfile. I reiterated verbally that all of the documents were in that zipfile.

It came out in our conversation around that time that NASPA had apparently refused to comply with the subpoena, which should be illegal and put them in contempt of court.

I was frustrated not just because I assumed that Mr. Fuller should already have all the relevant documents and was just fishing for more nonexistent documents to waste our time, but also because it was plainly obvious to me that the focus of the discovery process in this particular case should have been revealing communications that happened between CoCo, WGPO, and NASPA and within those organizations about disciplinary processes related to me.

For a period of five months from April to August 2022, I had had almost no communication with anyone in the Scrabble community, while many community leaders across multiple organizations were talking about me and causing a tidal wave of administrative decisions to be made that in some way related to me, including suspensions from three organizations and a rule applying to only me by a Singaporean director, and including an admission from a NASPA Advisory Board member that the WGPO President was pressuring them. Why was my lawyer not working proactively to get discovery to reveal all the relevant communications that must have happened in and between those organizations, and instead just responding reactively to every little thing that Mr. Fuller hounded him about?

In late June 2023, Marc finally attempted to subpoena NASPA, WGPO, and CoCo. I would not learn until much later that those subpoenas were never issued.

Meanwhile, Lola’s attorney Ms. Vaughn only started working on the case in early June, and other than a notice of representation we did not hear from her at all until late June. When Ms. Vaughn finally did reach out to us, it was to attempt to arrange a settlement. In particular, they wanted to get Lola removed as a defendant with neither side owing any money or legal fees to the other and opened the door to considering “other non-monetary demands you want to propose.” Both Marc and I read this as Lola being willing to put something in writing walking back her statements about me.

I was thrilled by this news. I would gladly have removed Lola as a defendant and not taken a penny from her if she would just admit that her statements about me were lies. In the last week of June, I wrote up a proposed statement by Lola that I asked Marc to pass along to Ms. Vaughn. Marc told me later that day that Ms. Vaughn was concerned that the proposed statement admitted too much liability and that she was going to run it by Lola. I assumed they might want to rework the statement, but that it was just going to be a matter of finding a wording all parties agreed to before we settled. However, it was also almost July 4th week, and Ms. Vaughn communicated that there might be a bit of time before she could get back to us.

I was feeling good about the case on the week of July 4th, but terrible otherwise, as I got a very bad illness. I did not talk to Marc for nearly a week, nor much of anyone else, because I was so out of commission. But I assumed it was just a matter of time before we heard back from Ms. Vaughn with a new proposal for the statement.

On Friday, July 7th, I received an email from Marc Mohan with three attachments. One was a letter from him to me stating that he had to withdraw from the case because he believed that continuing to represent me would

result in a violation of law or of the Oregon Rules of Professional Conduct. Based on the history of our interactions and the information I recently received, I believe that continuing to represent you in this matter would likely involve me in activities that could constitute witness tampering, fraud, and harassment.

He went on to say that he strongly recommended I voluntarily dismiss the entire case, and “your chances of obtaining a judgment in your favor have been seriously tarnished.”

Along with the letter he also attached both a motion to withdraw and an order granting withdrawal that he said he was going to file with the court on Monday.

There was nothing in his letter that specified what in the world he was talking about by “witness tampering, fraud, and harassment.” I was completely mystified. The last I had heard from him, we were on the verge of getting a settlement from a defendant, and this suddenly came out of nowhere on a Friday afternoon while I was sick as a dog.

I frantically called Marc after reading the email. When I finally reached him, my voice was too hoarse to say much, and he did not have much time to talk. In our short conversation, I tried to glean some information about what it was he thought I did, but he said he had received something confidential that he was not allowed to share back with me.

What in the flying hell? I had already experienced the leaders of my Scrabble community deciding to suspend me based on statements that they did not show me, and now my own lawyer, whom I had already paid a truckload of money to be my advocate, was telling me that he believed terrible things about me based on something that he was not even allowed to show me.

I did not believe the law worked like this at all. There was no way that he had to keep from his own client whatever he was sitting on, and I was certain that bullying and deceptive behavior from Mr. Fuller had cowed him into believing some horseshit about me and that his own career was in jeopardy. But all he was willing to tell me was that it was about some recent communication I had.

After the phone call, I searched through my recent text and message history, and I figured out what this must have been about. I had hardly talked to anyone in the last week because I had been so sick, so it was pretty obvious. It was a three message Facebook messenger conversation that was so inconsequential that I had forgotten about it right after it happened.

Terry Kang, with whom I had had barely any communication in the last year, messaged me out of the blue to tell me to drop my case against the Clinchys. Her presumptuousness and my crankiness from illness caused me to reply impolitely but briefly.

Terry: Hey Dave. I’ve been wanting to say this to you for a while, but didn’t know if you’d be open to it, and frankly nervous about your reaction. I realize how awful everything has been for you, but I strongly advise you to drop the lawsuit. For one, I think you’ll have very little chance of prevailing, and it’ll only further alienate you from the community. From experience, I can tell you that being in litigation is ten time more emotionally draining and stressful than you can imagine. I’m only trying to save you more distress. I really do wish you the best, and hope things get better for you.

Me: You’re completely wrong, Terry. It was way worse enduring the bullying and not being able to stand up for myself. On what basis do you think I have little chance of prevailing? Multiple lawyers have reviewed my case and deemed that I have a very strong case.

I’m frankly disgusted by you continuing to run a tournament under CoCo after I showed you how awful their behavior was.

facebook messenger conversation, july 6th, 2023

I immediately emailed Marc with a screenshot of that conversation³ and gave him some context about it, including that that was the entirety of our recent communication, that I was sick as a dog when Terry decided to bother me to drop my case, and that the last sentence referred to brief communication a year earlier, long before this had become a legal case.

In July 2022 I shared the accusatory documents from the incident report with Terry and temporarily gave her access to a Google document with an early draft of my defense document that eventually became the September 6th, 2022 response to the incident report. I did this because Terry had just announced that she was going to run a tournament under the CoCo banner, and I wanted her to know how evil these people were before she supported them.

I don’t even know how much of the defense document she read, but she wrote me back one email that just talked about how implausible Lola’s story sounded.⁴ I sent her a quick thank you. That was the entirety of our communications at the time, and I removed her read access from the document a while later.

I did not yet have confirmation from Marc that his reasons for withdrawing were related to this Terry Kang interaction, but I spoke to another lawyer friend over the weekend and gave him a quick rundown of what happened. He told me that interpreting my short conversation with Terry, which she started, as witness tampering was absurd.

I sent one more email to Marc over the weekend, pleading with him not to withdraw from my case until we had a chance to talk face-to-face on Monday. The problem is that it was obvious to me that my lawyer had been completely manipulated by the opposing lawyer. So even if I could convince him that he had misinterpreted this story, how could I trust him to continue representing me? My other lawyer friend had even said, “this is a problem with your lawyer, not with your case.”

By the time Marc and I met in person, he realized that he had been had. He started out the conversation admitting that he was deeply embarrassed, and that he was not a good enough lawyer to represent me. He had already reached out to the office of a senior lawyer with forty years of experience that was interested in taking over my case. The problem was that the lawyer was on vacation that week. There was an associate at the firm who started to review my case, and he was willing to be a point of contact until the senior lawyer returned. But the associate was leaving the law firm a couple of weeks later and would not actually be involved in representing me.

Later that week, I had a long phone call with the associate. He mentioned that this was going to be an expensive case, with probably at least $50,000-$70,000 of legal costs on my part. He mentioned in passing a protective order that Marc had made with the other lawyer to keep certain documents private.

Hold the phone! The only thing that Marc had said to me about a protective order was that Mr. Fuller had made a motion for a hearing to grant a protective order for Jennifer to be able to respond to one particular request for admission under seal, that she had said it would be smarter to assassinate a Supreme Court Justice than to assassinate a President. (Obviously she did say it, or else she would not be trying so hard to keep her response out of the public court record.) But that protective order had not been granted. The hearing about it was scheduled to happen in the next week or two.

The associate was talking about something else. A protective order that the lawyers on both sides had already agreed to and had been approved by the judge. I had zero knowledge of this. Marc had never told me it was under discussion, nor that he agreed to it, and he had never shared the document with me.

On the phone, the associate tried to diminish the importance of this protective order, saying that they were a common thing in cases like this, which would protect the privacy of sensitive information on both sides from the public court records.

I did not buy any of that. I had zero to hide in this case, because I have not done anything wrong. It is only the other side who wants to hide things to mask their own wrongdoing. And I had a feeling that the protective order explained why Marc thought he could not share the communication with me that had almost caused him to withdraw from representing me. I got the associate to email me a copy of it a few days later.

In the meantime, the law firm was willing to take me on board and sent me the paperwork. However, I pushed back and said that I wanted to talk to the senior lawyer who would represent me before I put any money down. So we planned for me to talk to him the following week, and in the meantime I sent my trove of documents over to his firm, since I did not have vision into what exactly they had seen in the court records nor what exactly Marc had shared with their firm.

My mental state had already started to degrade ever since Marc threatened to withdraw, but it became much worse after the conversation with the associate. I was angry at Marc, not only for his incompetence but also for making deals with the opposing counsel and not letting me know what was going on. Also, I was becoming more and more panicked about finances.

I have not worked in over two years. Though I made a lot of money as a software developer for many years before that, the PTSD I have been suffering as a result of the complicity of my Scrabble community to the abusiveness of the Clinchys toward me has had a massive effect on my ability to keep calm on my jobs and to maintain good relationships with most people in my life. In mid-2021 when I stopped working, I was in a good financial position, with no debts and enough liquid assets not to have to work for a while. After two years of living off my savings and starting to rack up legal expenses, those funds had dwindled. I could afford an initial retainer to the new lawyer, but I could not reasonably afford the money to see this legal case all the way through.

I probably would not have been able to afford all my legal expenses even if Marc had continued to be my lawyer, but with his low rates it was a slower bleed. It had been easier to stay in denial about the way my finances were heading.

I knew that regardless of who my lawyer was, I was going to have to go back to work sometime soon, and that prospect scared me. I was not any less traumatized than I had been when I stopped working. Heck, I was significantly more traumatized because of this smear campaign and all of the additional abuse toward me it had triggered.

Everyone like Terry who thinks that this lawsuit is a stressor for me has it exactly backwards. For so long I have been in deep trauma specifically because I have received so much disgusting abuse from this Scrabble community and have been unable to fight back. The only thing that calmed me down in the last year was taking this case to court, making progress on having my story heard, and on holding all of the abusers accountable. (Not just the defendants, the Scrabble leaders too.) But now that I was looking at the prospect of not being able to keep moving forward on it, all of the trauma was rushing back.

The senior lawyer was not able to schedule a meeting with me until the Friday of the following week, July 21st. So Marc Mohan had been my lame duck lawyer for two weeks already. In that time, I learned that Lola had apparently been so offended by the statement that I proposed that she was no longer willing to make any statement in order to settle.

Also in that lame duck period, Marc had mentally checked out of representing me in any useful way. He was so eager for the senior lawyer to take over, that he started doing everything he could to delay having to do any real work on the case, including agreeing to an extension of the deadline for the anti-SLAPP motion that Ms. Vaughn was considering filing and postponing the hearing he was supposed to have with Mr. Fuller to decide on whether Jennifer could answer the request for admission under seal.

I barely talked to Marc during that time, because I was so angry at him for agreeing to the protective order behind my back, but I thought it might make sense not to bring up that conversation until I had other representation.

It also did not help my calmness that during this entire mid-July period, two other events were happening in the background that I kept getting reminders of over social media. One was that my sister in New Jersey, her family, and my son all traveled to California for a vacation with my other sister and her family over there. This was the second year in a row that they all had a vacation together that I was not invited to. It was precisely in the leadup to the previous year’s vacation that my relationship with my sisters had disintegrated.

The other event was the 2023 NASPA Scrabble Players Championship, in Las Vegas, which was going to be immediately followed by the World Championship. Almost everyone in the Scrabble universe was descending on Vegas, a short distance from where I lived, and I was getting constant reminders of their excitement and the fun competition and the after-hours socializing. On July 21st, the day that I talked to the senior lawyer, I still have penciled in my paper calendar the letters LCQ, for the Last Chance Qualifier at the World Championship. When I submitted my appeal to NASPA in late May, I had maintained a bit of optimism that there was still a chance they would relent from their unjust ban, allowing me to win my way into the World Championship at that qualifier.

The fact that I was not allowed to compete in the World Championship, the first one I missed since 2009, even though none of the people who contributed to the incident report against me were even in Vegas, is yet another testament to the disgustingly abusive and immoral behavior of our Scrabble leadership toward me.

When I finally talked to the senior lawyer, it was a disaster. I was such an angry mess, that I could not avoid yelling for a significant portion of the Zoom call. I gave him a lot of useful background on the story, but I probably also convinced him that I was a hazard to put in front of a jury. I explained to him that Marc had coedited and approved both the appeal to NASPA and The Scapegoat blog post, but the senior lawyer demanded that I make no more public statements if we worked together.

After we talked, I knew there was just about no chance the lawyer was going to want to work with me. Furthermore, I was not sure I wanted to work with him. The entire reason I was taking this to court in the first place was not just to get a legal decision in my favor, but to help me in my battle with the Scrabble associations. I literally went to a publicist first and had him refer lawyers to me, so any lawyer who was expecting me to make no public statements about this was misguided. I had no desire to make public statements that were not approved by my lawyer, but I wanted to work with someone who could help me craft the right statements, or at least work with a publicist who would help me do so. Never mind that I could not reasonably afford a lawyer or a publicist at this point.

The senior lawyer told me at the end of our conversation that he was going to take the weekend to think about whether he was going to take my case. He ended up taking nearly a full week before he said no, but I never expected him to say yes. Meanwhile I had no backup plans for any other lawyers.

I dealt with the trauma the best way I could that Friday evening. I went out to socialize and drink with a group of friends. At the bar I met a friend of a friend whom I found out had also been a plaintiff in a defamation case. She was jaded about the legal system, even though she had won a small settlement from her case. She mentioned that both the judge and her lawyer had done things wrong, and that she eventually ended up representing herself pro se. She also said that if you have particular things you want to make public, you should go ahead and do that immediately. The lawyers will always discourage you from putting things out there and try to argue that it is a bargaining chip to hold against the other side, because they want to drag things out as long as possible, so that all the lawyers make more money. But if you put the things out there immediately, then it incentivizes the other side to resolve things more quickly, because they don’t like that painful information being out there.

I felt like the universe was speaking to me right then. This was just the nudge I needed to work up the bravery to publish The Conspiracy. I had wanted to put all of those documents out in public for a long time before that, but the only reason I held back was because the lawyers were telling me not to. Nothing in that document dump was a big secret anyway. It had already been shared with dozens of people, including the full executive committees of NASPA, WESPA, and ABSP. All I did was democratize the information, so that a cabal of corrupt Scrabble leaders would not have a monopoly on it.

I realized that a big part of the anxiety, anger, and upset I had been feeling over the last few weeks was out of pain that I would not be heard. I wanted to win the court case, because a legal victory would be a good tool for me in my battle with the Scrabble associations, but what was most important to me was getting my story out there. I decided right there and then that if any lawyer did not want to work with me because of my need to tell my story publicly, I did not care. Heck, if a judge wanted to throw my case out because I published those documents, I did not care either. No one was ever going to silence me. I had screamed at the top of my lungs for so long because I desperately yearned to be heard, and this was the exact story that I wanted people to hear.

I was right. Publishing The Conspiracy was exactly what I needed to do to calm myself down. And there was no better time to publish it than right in the middle of the first World Scrabble Championship on North American soil in 22 years.

I was in a much better place emotionally for the next several weeks. The trauma was far from over, but people were reading my story. (I see the metrics every day. I know they are.) And I know now that I will never let anyone shut me up from telling the real story again. I mostly did not feel a need to yell at anyone during the continued pursuit of the legal case, with one exception, and that exception is Marc Mohan.

The exact motivation for writing this post and its sequel, which will be published 24 hours later, is so that I can get off my chest how Marc failed me. If you think what I have told you about Marc so far demonstrates gross incompetence, I have news for you. You ain’t seen nothing yet.

Footnotes

1. Figure 2,page 2 of Screenshots of Corroborating Evidence ↩︎
2. Page 18 of Jennifer Clinchy’s attachments to incident report ↩︎
3. Exhibit G, page 16 of August 10, 2023 Declaration of David Koenig ↩︎
4. Exhibit H, Bates #454-455, pages 19-20 of Declaration of David Koenig ↩︎