I have been working with an international reporter, Ralph Jones, to try to get a story published about the wrongdoing done to me in the Scrabble world. For a long time, people in Scrabble leadership were refusing to talk to him, but eventually enough pressure from the threat of the article actually getting published convinced several of them to start speaking to him. It became clear to me from my later conversations with the reporter that some of those people were making progress in gaslighting him about my story. Most of this post was originally an email that I sent to him to try to set the record straight and end the gaslighting.

At the time that I sent the email to Ralph Jones, Monday, March 24th, 2025, I did not yet have access to the recording of the conversation between my former lawyer Marc Mohan, Sue Tremblay, and Jason Broersma. However, I was able to obtain that recording a week later, and I have edited the document slightly based on new information that I obtained from listening to it. Later in this post is a link to a sound file containing the entirety of that conversation.

The postscript to Jason Broersma was not part of the original email that I sent to the reporter.

In March 2022 I traveled to Kingston, Ontario, Canada for what might end up being the last Scrabble tournament I ever play in North America, an event that was sanctioned by NASPA. At that tournament, I caught up with Will Anderson. Will and I have always gotten along very well in person, but we had not been in the same place since the January 2020 New Orleans tournament, before the pandemic and half a year before I created the splenetic.net website, thereby making public the ways in which the Clinchys had been disparaging me and eroding my friendships since 2017.

Will had interviewed me over the livestream of the New Orleans tournament just a couple months earlier, but that had been over a webcam connection as he broadcasted from home. Of course, that interaction was only in the moments after I had won the tournament, when I was elated and when the cameras and hundreds of eyes were on both of us, and it consisted of nothing but positivity in talking about my tournament.

I did not know what to expect when Will and I finally caught up in Kingston, but I knew that he had sometimes been buddy-buddy with Evans Clinchy when they had worked on broadcasting some Scrabble events together. I sensed a bit of hesitancy from Will during our first conversation before the tournament, but it quickly went away and we again got along well for the entire weekend.

On a couple of occasions Will opened up to me and told me at length about what was going on in his life. He mentioned that he had gotten hired by Scopely, the company that produced the Scrabble Go app, so now he had corporate backing to promote the game. This was a big win not only for Scrabble, but also for Will personally, as he had always been underemployed previously. He also mentioned in passing that he was now on the Board of WGPO, which was a surprise to me and not something that I believe was common knowledge among many Scrabble players yet. We did not talk any more about WGPO. The limited extent to which the different Scrabble organizations came up in our conversations was mostly about how we both wanted unity, instead of a divide of North American tournaments into various competing organizations.

On the last day of the tournament, Sunday, March 13th, 2022, Will and I went out to dinner with a group of other Scrabble players. We were bonding so well that after all the other players had left the restaurant, the two of us remained at the table and had one more drink. During that conversation, still the last one that we have had, Will gave me vague outlines of a story of something that had happened to him at the Scopely job. He mentioned that there was some guy who was pretty obnoxious, maybe a Trumper, and had not been too good to women. And he mentioned that some people had complained about him or made some accusations, but that he could tell at least some of the accusations were bullshit. But Will did the calculation that the guy was not that good a person, and he was okay with pushing him out with suspect evidence, because the company would be better for it. The ends justified the means.

At the time that Will told me this story, it did not particularly resonate with me. I listened and understood, and even affirmed that I could see where he was coming from. I did not judge him for his behavior. I did not really care about the story that much and did not know why he was telling me. I figured it was just something on his mind that he needed to talk to someone about.

One month and one day after that conversation, on April 14th, 2022, I was blindsided by the trove of accusatory documents that were sent to me from WGPO President Steven Pellinen and then re-sent by Judy Cole of NASPA.

I have already written extensively about the trauma of the next six months, as I scrambled to write my defense to NASPA. WGPO and CoCo continued to harass me and the NASPA Advisory Board and began poaching tournaments from NASPA. WESPA began rating WGPO and CoCo tournaments–a policy they have more recently backed down on, a result that was surely influenced by the ways I later exposed the wrongdoing of WGPO and CoCo.

My last conversation with Will Anderson was a small drop in the bucket compared to everything else that I have gone through. It has never weighed on my head particularly heavily. But in retrospect, it seems to me that Will was speaking like a mafia don. Who knows if the story about the Scopely employee was really true? But it is obvious to me now that Will was threatening me, essentially saying he didn’t care about the truth of the accusations and would be willing to push me out, because of a belief that I deserved it.

Will was far from the only person who sensed that there was a lot of bullshit about the accusations against me before I was even able to submit my defense to NASPA in September 2022.

In mid-July 2022, I emailed the April 14th accusatory documents to Terry Kang, and I also temporarily gave her access to Google Documents, which were the work in progress that eventually became my September 6th response to the incident report and the corroborating screenshots. I don’t remember how complete that document was yet, and I’m frankly not sure whether Terry ever read it. If she had, she would have at least seen the many screenshots of text messages from Lola that completely contradicted her story.

The way Terry’s email response to me on July 18th, 2022 reads (page 19 here) makes it seem to me like she might not have even read my response yet and was just reacting to the implausibility of Lola’s story that she picked up from reading her accusatory document alone.

I know for a fact that in the nearly two years between me publishing the first two splenetic.net blog posts, The Crucible and The Fallout, in July 2020 and this full-blown attack being launched in spring 2022 to get me kicked out of Scrabble, Jason Broersma had refused to read the posts, but his partner Sue Tremblay had read them.

Jason and Sue had already fallen out with the Clinchys for all or most of that time. Jason’s anger at me for putting the blog out there, along with his stubbornness in incorrectly perceiving what was going on in my head at the 2017 New Orleans tournament, was not borne out of any favoritism for the Clinchys, but simply out of his own desire to withdraw from drama.

Sue, on the other hand, very much saw the story the right way and was sympathetic to my point of view. She felt that the Clinchys should have accepted my apology in September 2018, talked things out with me, and ended this drama once and for all, and she correctly perceived that they were the only ones keeping this drama alive.

I reached out to Sue in September 2022, in between me submitting my response to the incident report and hearing back from NASPA about the decision. The entire reason I did was to arrange for the possibility of me entering the Niagara Falls tournament in early October, if NASPA lifted the suspension on me in late September. I fully expected them to do so, since I had completely proven that I had done nothing wrong and that the Clinchys and Lola had intentionally borne false witness against me.

I knew that Sue was the more sympathetic one of the couple, and my communications were with her, not Jason. I passed my response to the incident report to her so that she could see how phony the attack on me was. If I remember right, I learned that Jason had perhaps gotten a copy of the accusatory documents against me earlier, because he was the WESPA Treasurer and someone might have passed those documents to the WESPA board, but I doubt he looked at them in much detail. It was not WESPA’s business at that point, and I’m sure Jason had continued disdain for getting involved in other people’s drama. The little bit I understood from his point of view, through Sue, is that it was obvious to him that the attacks on me were a whole lot of bullshit before he ever saw my response, which I am still not sure he has ever read.

Furthermore, Sue’s biggest concern in the whole story was that she had been entirely kept out of the loop even though she was the Community Advocate for NASPA. It was literally her job to be involved in complaints like this, and she had always been so in the past. But she had not even seen the accusatory documents against me until I showed them to her in September. I believe that she was intentionally cut out of this process because people within NASPA did not want someone like her, who was sympathetic to me and knew that the Clinchys had already been behaving ridiculously toward me for years, involved in this crusade to get me kicked out.

After I began legal proceedings against the Clinchys and Lola, Sue and Jason both talked to my lawyer Marc Mohan on May 3rd, 2023. At that point, I believed that they were both sympathetic to me. I never listened to the interview at the time, and I eventually lost access to the drive where Marc Mohan was storing it. Almost two years later, in March 2025, I was able to get a copy of that recording from Marc, and I am including a link to it here. Keep in mind that at the time of this interview the only things on my blog were the first two posts, The Crucible and The Fallout. When they speak about the blog, they are only referring to those.

Here is the complete interview between Marc Mohan, Sue Tremblay, and Jason Broersma.

I urge you to listen to the entire interview. Right near the end of it, Jason makes a very strong statement about this disciplinary case against me being a “witch hunt” orchestrated by Evans and Jennifer.

Nothing in that interview surprised me. It is what I expected from Sue and Jason, and I believe that they gave honest answers of what things looked like from their points of view. I agree with a great deal of it. The one major correction I would like to make about Jason’s opinion is his wrong take that I was just as obsessed with Evans as he was with me. I believe I have made it clear from all of my writings that I have never been obsessed with Evans. The only thing I have been obsessed with is Scrabble, and all of my anger and activism has solely been about getting people to stop obstructing me from playing the game.

I have already explained in The Ostracism that my intention leading up to and at the 2017 New Orleans tournament was never to embarrass Jennifer; it was only to protect myself. Unfortunately, Jason and Sue bought into Jennifer’s incorrect impression of my communication to her and never opened themselves up to seeing my point of view. Jason was frankly the person I most wanted to read The Crucible and The Fallout, and the fact that he has never done so offends me greatly.

Sue also provided other insight in this interview of which I was previously unaware. She specifically did not think that Jennifer’s sexual coercion accusation against me was consistent with Jennifer’s earlier behavior while they worked together on examining such cases for NASPA. It was Sue’s impression that if Jennifer’s story had been true, (rather than the new fabrication in 2022 that it was) Jennifer would have brought it up in the time they worked together in NASPA in 2019.

Jason did not start becoming obstinate toward me in this story until later, when I began putting pressure on the WESPA Executive Committee, as I explained in The Obstructionists, around which time he unfriended me on Facebook. (To be fair, he has done that a few other times in our long past history of knowing each other.)

My point in telling this whole story is that the accusations against me from Lola and the Clinchys were never credible to begin with. People who looked at those documents rationally could see right through their bullshit, even before I thoroughly refuted every one of their accusations. But my accusers also succeeded in getting some segment of the North American Scrabble leadership into a moral panic about me, and there were a number of people in positions of power who were hell-bent on excommunicating me from the game, in defiance of the truth about who the actual abusers were and who the actual victim was.

What CoCo and WGPO—spearheaded by Steven Pellinen—did to me was an aggressive and unprovoked attack on my character, my safety, and my ability to pursue my own happiness by playing in Scrabble tournaments, as I had already been doing for 20 years. I have never even attempted to play in any CoCo or WGPO tournaments, and I never had any intention of doing so.

However, the Clinchys, Lola, and the other people they conned into joining the attack on me, did so specifically because they were afraid of the possibility that I might sign up for the 2022 Word Cup, which was the first tournament that CoCo collaborated with WGPO on and in which CoCo would have access to a large prize fund, thanks to Jon Shreve’s magnanimous contribution.

I suspected this as soon as I saw the April 14th, 2022 accusatory emails, before I had even read them in depth, as I communicated in my very first email response to NASPA and Steven Pellinen the next day. Only later did I notice that Lola made it obvious that this attack on me was specifically related to trying to preemptively keep me out of the Word Cup in her earlier letter to Jennifer that Jennifer included among her attachments. (page 2, first paragraph)

There was zero percent chance of me signing up for the Word Cup, specifically because Jennifer, Evans, and CoCo were involved in organizing it. The exact reason I copied Steven but not the WGPO Board in my emails to NASPA was that it is my belief that WGPO has never had legitimate authority over Scrabble tournaments in North America and that they had to earn it in my eyes before I would respect them.

My sincere hope was that I would have been able to provide my response, which would clearly vindicate me and show that the Clinchys and Lola were the actual abusers, to Steven—and thereby indirectly to WGPO—long before the Word Cup, and that the truth of the atrocious behavior of my accusers would convince WGPO to sever all ties with CoCo. If WGPO had been willing to interpret the story honestly, to cut out CoCo, and to speak up in defense of me, then I might have considered supporting WGPO and playing in the tournament. That is exactly why I offered to Steven that I would send him a copy of the documents I sent to NASPA.

However, as I explained in The Scapegoat and fully documented in The Conspiracy, Steven Pellinen stepped up his harassment of me and the NASPA Advisory Board over the next several months and the WGPO Board rushed to make a decision banning me for five years, before I submitted my response to the accusations. Furthermore, Steven immediately gave my September 6th, 2022 response right back to my accusers, so that Jennifer, Lola, and Steven himself could pile on more vile, defamatory words about me on September 9th. (Documents that NASPA hid from me for more than two months.)

The chronology of the accusatory documents against me is clear. Lola first wrote her letter to Jennifer that is in Jennifer’s attachments, and then Lola wrote her statement (dated March 3rd, 2022) that ended up becoming part of the incident report. That statement was originally given to WGPO and the Woogles development team. (That is obvious from the filename that the document still had when it was sent to me: LolaToWooglesandWGPO.pdf.) Jennifer and Evans then later wrote their own accusatory documents that were intentionally designed to magnify and reverberate with what Lola said.

Steven Pellinen was a doddering old man who was dying of Parkinson’s and brain cancer by the time of this story, and I have no doubt that the Clinchys manipulated him a lot. It would not surprise me if Jennifer wrote or at least had a hand in writing the document that was later submitted under Steven’s name. A big hint of that is that Steven mentioned the same book “The Gift Of Fear” that Jennifer mentioned twice in her statement submitted at the same time.

WGPO and CoCo went over the top to attack me and to use the false story about me to attack NASPA, and it worked. During that period between the attacks beginning in April 2022 and me submitting my response to NASPA in September 2022, the organizers of both the New Orleans and Albany tournaments decided to pull out from NASPA and to run their events under WGPO/CoCo auspices. Michael Tang also wrote a rule that would keep me out of the Alchemist Cup even if NASPA had done the honest thing, dismissing all punishments against me and stating that the Clinchys and Lola were the actual wrongdoers. Jason Idalski’s August 24th, 2022 email to me makes Steven Pellinen’s political goals clear.

This was obviously a premeditated, preemptive, and unprovoked attack by WGPO and CoCo toward me. Furthermore, I am sure that as a WGPO Board member Will Anderson had already seen at least Lola’s March 3rd, 2022 letter to WGPO that later became part of the incident report, when he and I had our last discussion on March 13th, 2022 in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Will absolutely knew that an attack against me from the leadership of WGPO and CoCo was coming.

The exact people who started the strain of thought in the Scrabble community that I had to make a statement admitting wrongdoing in response to the false accusations against me were the WGPO Board in their defamatory June 29th letter banning me for five years, which—keep in mind—was written more than a month before I had said anything in my own defense. Will Anderson’s name was on this letter.

NASPA at least waited until I had submitted my response before deciding against me, and their letter was most likely written by their lawyers just to avoid getting themselves in legal trouble, but they stepped up the strain of thought from WGPO with their dishonest, obscurantist writing:

AB members were concerned by a general pattern of behavior and lack of contrition that we feel warrants measures to protect the safety of our members and uphold the values of our community.

There was no pattern of bad behavior, and there was nothing for me to be contrite for. That should be obvious enough to anyone who thoroughly read and honestly interpreted both the accusations against me and my complete refutation of those accusations. But NASPA made it even more obvious when my then lawyer Clifford Davidson point blank asked NASPA:

  1. What are the specific things that David did that constituted Code of Conduct violations? To the extent you are citing violations of provisions that are unavailable through the NASPA website, please send a copy of such provisions.
  2. You have requested that David display contrition. Contrition for having done what?
  3. What is the “general pattern of behavior” referenced in your notification to David of the suspension, and what specific acts evidence that alleged pattern?
  4. Were there any other documents submitted, or statements made, to the Board that have not been shared with David? If so, why, and may we please see those documents or statements?

After a first evasive email and then waiting two days, John Chew responded:

The AB will not however elaborate on their ruling, as their part in our disciplinary/appellate process ended with their issuing their decision, which included everything that they wanted to express. 

Then, unprompted by any more communications by me or my lawyer, John five days later revealed the documents that NASPA had been hiding from me for the last two months.

—

One year after my last conversation with Will Anderson, Scott Appel had an in person meeting with Will that I later described in my appeal to NASPA:

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

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

There is a postscript to that story that I did not write about in the appeal document. After Will apparently went back and read my documents proving my innocence, he and Scott met up and talked about it again. The gist of Will’s response, according to Scott, was that he was not inclined to change his mind about the punishment of me, because I had not shown contrition for what I had done. Scott’s immediate reply was, “How can you say that?”

Now, I should clarify that there is another potential explanation for what I wrote above. It is possible, perhaps, that Steven Pellinen did share the documents with the rest of the WGPO Board and that Will Anderson was lying to Scott Appel about not having seen them before. But regardless of whether Will lied about that, what happened in this conversation is that Will Anderson gaslit Scott Appel.

Will is a more than intelligent and rational enough person to properly deduce that I completely dismantled all the false accusations against me and that the only abusers in this story were the Clinchys and Lola. Furthermore, he was on the board that started the rhetoric that I had to admit wrongdoing.

Before you, Ralph Jones, the reporter covering this story, started getting people on the other side to talk to you, and they started foisting on you this narrative that I had to express contrition, I had only ever heard of anyone saying I needed to show “contrition” in this story three times:

  1. In the legalese letter from NASPA suspending me for three years, which was obviously dishonest and probably written by their lawyers to cover NASPA’s ass.
  2. By Will Anderson when he was gaslighting Scott Appel.
  3. By Laurie Cohen, the new President of WGPO who took over after Steven Pellinen, when our mutual friend Steve Grob approached her to ask about WGPO’s treatment of me, in a conversation that Steve told me Laurie was very uncomfortable with.

Anyone who is telling you that I need to show contrition is gaslighting you, and it is likely that the exact phrasing they are using was supplied to them by lawyers in order for them to obscure the obvious facts that WGPO and CoCo attacked me in premeditated, preemptive, and unprovoked ways and that NASPA complicitly joined the attack on me, and to minimize the organizations’ legal liability, when they absolutely know that they are writing a false narrative.

If you look over all of the documents that I submitted to the Scrabble organizations, that I wrote on my blog, that I submitted to the court and to the Oregon State Bar, and the email communications that I revealed in full on The Conspiracy, you will see that I behaved like a perfect gentleman the whole time, even as more and more people dishonestly abused me. I have literally not a damn thing to apologize for in how I conducted myself during all of these shams of disciplinary processes and in the sham of a court case.

I did not put a thing about any of this online on the splenetic.net website, other than the two original posts from July 2020, until three years later on June 15th, 2023, when NASPA had both made a ridiculous decision against me the previous September and was intentionally delaying handling my appeal to prevent me from playing in the 2023 World Championship, and until the Association of British Scrabble Players (ABSP) had already reviewed my documents and their president Wayne Kelly had called out how improper the crusade against me was.

I did not start verbally ripping people a new asshole in Facebook posts or in private messages or texts about any of this until after my court case had been thrown out with an upside-down judgment awarding the Clinchys and Lola legal fees against me, and after the committees of both NASPA and WESPA had decided to be complicit with WGPO and CoCo in forcing me out of Scrabble—including WESPA bullying the ABSP leadership to exclude me too, against the wishes of the entire ABSP Board, as the screenshots of a conversation with an ABSP Board member that I sent you attest.1

Furthermore, none of my verbal nastiness has gone toward any of the people who started this attack: not the Clinchys, nor Lola, nor anyone who was officially involved in the disciplinary processes of WGPO and CoCo.2 The only people I have been nasty toward have been the people who failed to do the right thing in defending me sufficiently and who have let the bullies win, when they had moral obligations to stand up for me and to protect me, either (a) because of previous friendships with me or (b) because they were in political positions to make disciplinary decisions in NASPA, WESPA, or ABSP, or (c) both, in the case of Stefan Rau.

Ralph, if you fall for this gaslighting and try to extract a quote from me showing contrition in our interview, it will be an unproductive use of our time. I am not interested in having that discussion in an interview with you. What I hope you will do as a reporter is put the screws to these people: Point out their hypocrisy in trying to write a false narrative that I need to express contrition to them, when they are the ones who have behaved much worse than I have and who should be expressing contrition to me. Point out that the only times I have become verbally nasty and abusive are long after they have doubled, tripled, and quadrupled down on their wrongdoing against me and are continuing to stick to their lies. Point out that I have extended enormous grace and charity to them in how I conducted myself during the disciplinary processes and communications, and exhibited great restraint and emotional control in not giving them tongue-lashings sooner, far more than most humans would have been able to in my circumstances. Point out that demanding contrition from the person they have abused and are continuing to abuse is in fact adding additional abuse beyond what they have already done.

P.S., One final note to Jason Broersma

Unlike Evans Clinchy, I do not unnecessarily hold onto grudges. The only reason I am still angry at you and at every person who is conspiring to obstruct me is because I still do not have unfettered access to Scrabble tournaments. You, as a member of the WESPA Executive Board, are part of the reason for that problem. I will no longer hold any grudge whatsoever once I have unfettered access to tournaments and one of the two following things happens:

  1. You and every other person in Scrabble leadership who has contributed to banning me from Scrabble makes a written, signed, public statement admitting that my banning is 100% the fault of my accusers and the people in Scrabble leadership, yourself included, who did unethical things to help them succeed, and 0% my fault.3

OR

  1. You and every other complicit Scrabble leader like you who refuses to sign a document as described in (1.) above is permanently removed from any Scrabble leadership position and permanently barred from ever organizing a Scrabble tournament.

You may never agree with what I wrote in (1.), and I give zero shits about that, because it is an absolutely correct evaluation of the situation, even if you are too pigheaded or stupid to ever see it that way. If you cannot admit that everything I wrote in (1.) is correct, then you deserve to have everything in (2.) happen to you.

Footnotes

  1. I had previously emailed Ralph Jones with screenshots of a private conversation with an ABSP Board member, but I have not made those screenshots public yet. ↩︎
  2. One could make the case that this post (along with a few social media mentions previewing it in the last few days) is the first time that I am publicly going after WGPO Board member Will Anderson for his wrongdoing in the story. However, at the time that I sent this post as an email to Ralph Jones (March 24th, 2025) it was a true statement that all of my vitriolic social media posts had only gone toward leaders in NASPA, WESPA, and ABSP, and not toward anyone in CoCo or WGPO. ↩︎
  3. I have already admitted my own fault in my communications to Jennifer in the month prior to the 2017 New Orleans tournament. Nothing I said here contradicts that. The point is that none of the fault of my very few mistakes in this story justified banning me from even one single tournament game. ↩︎