Prologue
Today I had a great conversation with Lukeman Owo-Owolabi, the soon to be President of the World English-language Scrabble Players Association (WESPA). My last hope for playing in the main event of the WESPA Championship, which starts tomorrow, was that Lukeman would intervene and do something about the other unethical actors within WESPA who had caused so much injustice to me.
Alas, that is not happening. I believe banning me from this tournament is a great injustice, but I am not upset with Lukeman for not helping me more. I understand and respect his position, and I like him on a personal level. I am optimistic that he will be a great WESPA President. In fact, when I recorded my first YouTube video summarizing the story of my banning, I considered endorsing his candidacy for President in that video. I even recorded a first draft in which I mentioned him and showed it to him to see if he would approve. He asked not to be mentioned, and I respected his wishes.
I believe that Lukeman and I have a lot of closely aligned desires in terms of what we want the Scrabble world to become, but we often have strongly divergent opinions about how we get there. I believe that there is a lot in this post that he will like and agree with strongly, and I also believe that there is a fair amount he may be unhappy that I posted. But as I explained to him in our conversation, the times when I have acted in a way that is contrary to his wishes have not been out of any disrespect for him, but only because the approach that is right for him and the approach that is right for me are not always congruent.
Playing in the WESPA Championship was not the only reason I came to Ghana. It was also important to me to go to the WESPA Big General Meeting (BGM) where the next WESPA Board will be elected, and to make a public statement there, before any of the elections take place. I addressed that specific desire with Lukeman, and he also refuses to advocate for me to be at that meeting. In fact, he has asked me not to come back to the venue hotel for the rest of the WESPA Championship. Although I think that is a ridiculous disrespect to me on top of the many other disrespects that have been done to me by the Scrabble community over the last several years, I intend to comply with his wish, out of respect for Lukeman alone, not out of any respect for anyone else in WESPA who made this ban from the premises happen. There are several other things Lukeman asked me to do that I said no to, so I will not always obey his wishes, but on this issue I will.
The rest of this post is the speech that I wanted to give at the BGM. Let me be clear from the outset that it was my preference only to give this speech there, and that I tried to work with both him and Chris Lipe so that I did not have to post this publicly on the internet. However, both Chris’s and Lukeman’s approaches to this situation have given me no other choice but to post it this way.
The purpose of this post is not to advocate for the end of my ban from Scrabble. The purpose is to illustrate the ways that the WESPA Executive Board needs to get its house in order and to become both a more professional and a more ethical organization. I will talk about some of the stories related to my banning only because there are some important lessons within them that provide guidance for how WESPA can do things better in the future.
There will always, always be someone who tries to silence you. Don’t let them.
Bradley Jackson
Over the last three years I have been chagrined about what I have learned about some of the inner workings of WESPA. I am going to name names, and I am going to be specific. However, please do not assume that I am criticizing everyone I name here. I hope that people will read this with nuance and only apportion blame where it is deserved.
The biggest leak I had on the WESPA Board was Eric Kinderman, and I had some compunctions about mentioning him out of a “journalists should protect their sources” mentality. But the reason I am mentioning it now is to praise him. I believe that Eric did entirely the right thing through his leaks. He did not reveal anything to me that I should not have been privy to. He provided transparency that should have been a common practice when it was not. He saw a number of unprofessional things happening on the WESPA Board and he pulled back the curtain for me in several different ways. He also gave me more help than anyone else in tracking down who was actually currently on the WESPA Board and obtaining their email addresses, though he alone was not able to complete that task.
That right there is a massive problem. Not everyone on the WESPA Board even knows who is on the WESPA Board. They have had two different websites over the last few years, and neither of them has ever when I have checked had an accurate listing of who is on the board nor means of contacting the board members.
Whether WESPA wants to provide a single public email address to contact the entire board is up to them. They currently do not. However, all WESPA board members are elected public servants of the entire worldwide tournament Scrabble community, and any Scrabble player anywhere in the world should be well within their rights to email any board member with any questions or concerns that they have. And any board member should always politely receive those emails. Even if that board member is not the right person to handle the particular inquiry, that board member should help the inquiring party get in touch with the right person.
This seems pretty basic and simple for any elected board, right? When Jason Broersma responded to my request to WESPA to appeal the NASPA decision against me with, “please do not email me directly on my personal account regarding WESPA committee business” this was an entirely inappropriate and unprofessional thing, because he was to my best knowledge using his personal email account for WESPA committee business. He was failing in one of his most basic duties of the job by intentionally trying to make himself inaccessible to a constituent. Furthermore, he also attempted to make other board members inaccessible by refusing to answer my question about who was on the board, as I detailed in The Obstructionists.
I fully understand that WESPA is run by volunteers who have busy lives and can only put so much in the way of time and resources into their roles, but I do not think it is asking too much for every board member to be given an official email account to do their WESPA business on, and for all of those board members to be listed on the website with their official WESPA email addresses.
However, the question of “who is on the board?” is actually even thornier than that. Another thing that I learned in the course of this saga is that there is often a significant discrepancy between who is officially on the WESPA Board and who is actually participating in their email discussions. When I first attempted to bring my appeal to the previous WESPA Board, which served up until the 2023 World Championship, I learned that Jason Keller was technically on the board but was a complete non-participant. He never wrote to the email list and possibly never read any of it.
On the flipside, Nick Ivanovski had not officially been on the board for a long time, but was still on the mailing list. Furthermore, Eric Kinderman attested that Nick was one of the most active participants on the mailing list, and apparently had a direct hand in coming up with the policy decision that was reflected by the first WESPA response in June 2023 to my initial request for appeal.
This is a situation where the “acting WESPA Board” is possibly quite out of sync with the “elected WESPA Board.” All of us Scrabble players should be entitled to know who is actually involved in the decision making processes, both voting and non-voting board members, and that should to the greatest extent possible be aligned with the people elected to do this job.
Again, I get that this is a volunteer job and that things come up. I am not blaming Jason Keller for his lack of involvement. But we should have public minutes accounting for who actually attends these meetings and how they vote. And we should have a mechanism for replacing someone who drops out. We certainly should not have people who are completely publicly unaccounted for being the most active participants in the discussion and most active policy setters.
After WESPA refused to handle the appeal, NASPA continued to stonewall me by not responding to my appeal to them for many months. After NASPA finally handled my appeal, and after my court case was thrown out with the terrible outcome of me owing defense attorney fees, I wrote the big three part piece on the blog, culminating in The Abusers, which is when I significantly ramped up my onslaught in revealing the wrongdoing of the Scrabble associations, (though not yet WESPA.)
I then emailed the WESPA board on October 30th, 20231, asking them to reconsider my appeal. I decided to take an inclusive approach of emailing everyone I thought might be on the mailing list, regardless of whether they were an official board member.
Nick Ivanovski wrote back to me very quickly telling me that he had not been a board member for a long time and asking me to remove him from the thread. When I wrote back inquiring whether he was still on the board email list and had participated actively in the policy decision from their last communication to me, he became defensive and volunteered the information that he was dropping off of the email list right away.
Karen Richards was an active board member at the time, though in a non-voting position, and she also emailed me privately in response, with the short message, “Please remove from this thread. I have no voting rights within WESPA committee, and am resigning my role as Chair of WESPA Youth Committee.”
Both Nick’s and Karen’s emails came to me very quickly, within an hour of me sending the email to WESPA. I do not think Karen necessarily did anything wrong, but I did find it curious that her immediate response to me starting to push harder with the Scrabble associations as a whole and restarting my inquiry with WESPA was to run away from WESPA. It might be the case that Karen was simply uncomfortable with how other people on the board were behaving and decided it was time to get out of Dodge.
Admittedly, this is speculation about Karen’s motives on my part, but the situation does not smell good. I was able to trim down the WESPA Executive Board mailing list by two people in less than an hour just by making a simple and polite inquiry for an appeal. When things like this happen, it is generally a sign that an organization is not functioning the way it is supposed to be.
In short, I want to see a more functional and accountable WESPA Board, that makes transparent who is on the board and who is present at all meetings, how they contribute to the conversations, and how they vote. That is what minutes are supposed to be for. We are not reinventing the wheel here. Given the recent extremely questionable behavior by members of the WESPA Board, I believe that a big step to rebuilding the Scrabble community’s trust in it would be to make those minutes public to the world on its website. Furthermore, if people are not willing to make themselves accessible to their constituents and want to hide who is actually on the board, they should not seek election for the board at all.
Most of what I am offering here are ideas about how to run the board better and what members of it should be willing to do, not concrete endorsement of or opposition to specific candidates. Although I have had strong personal and political disagreements with Jason Broersma in the past, I do not mean to imply that his suboptimal behavior I have highlighted is the whole story of him as a candidate. I know that he has done many other good things for Scrabble, and I do not necessarily oppose him being on the board in the future, as long as he is willing to change his attitude and behavior in the ways that I have addressed.
I also do not even know who most of the current candidates are for the different positions on the board, and in most cases I do not feel knowledgeable enough to comment on them. However, I do want to state endorsement for one particular candidate as well as opposition to one particular candidate.
The candidate I want to endorse is not even in Accra nor seeking election as of now, but I am going to endorse him anyway. That person is Eric Kinderman. Eric’s devotion to transparency in governance and his rightful calling out of a number of things that happened behind the scenes suggest to me that he is a person of strong integrity, and that his participation would be a huge asset to the WESPA Board.
No one will be surprised, of course, that the candidate I am opposing is Chris Lipe. I do not hide my very strong antipathy for him, but I also want to be crystal clear that is not why I am opposing him staying on the WESPA Board for another term. It is because of his record and character. His record in the story of my banning is a very important part of that, but it is not the only egregious problem with his record as a Scrabble political leader.
Before I say more about Chris, I want to emphasize that I am a person of extreme integrity and honesty. I am not exaggerating when I say that I believe I am possibly the most honest person I have ever met. In fact, back when Chris and I were on good terms he once said to me, “you are kind of obsessed with the truth, aren’t you?”
An even greater testament to my honesty was given by my very dear friend, Ghana’s own Augustine Adda:
If Dave has any character flaws, it is that he is honest and true to a fault. His word is impeccable, and he will call it as it is even if it means he will be viewed askance. I have never known him to tell a lie or shy away from speaking truth. Reputationally2, it could be argued that his directness and willingness to not hold back may have caused some disquiet in his dealings with other players.
from Augustine Adda’s statement included in my response to NASPA’s incident report
There are many cases in the course of my banning story in which I have called out Chris Lipe’s lies and intentional deception. Every time I have done so, it is absolutely the case that he has been lying, and I have provided evidence showing that he is lying whenever I have had it. I have been scrupulously honest in my telling of this story. On the few occasions in which I have stated something inaccurate because of a lack of knowledge or misunderstanding, I have striven to go back and correct the record. I have never committed any intentional deception on this blog nor in my related YouTube videos.
For Chris, deception is second nature. I already knew that he had been lying in many ways about this story since 2020, but when we finally met again in person yesterday3, it was immediately clear to me that he has descended to a new level of dishonesty. I truly believe that it is not an exaggeration to say that he has become literally evil. Chris yesterday reminded me a lot of Michael Fuller, the evil lawyer of the Clinchys who needed the Oregon State Bar to put lies in print in order to make an excuse to drop the ethics complaint against him. Like Michael, Chris has a knack for saying the most heinously disingenuous things in a very sweet and calming voice and getting people who believe things based more on emotional affect than rational truth to take his side.
I have pissed a lot of people off in this community. I do not deny my own role in making some of my own enemies, but Chris has also played an enormous role in defaming me and getting many people in the Scrabble community to hate me.
When Chris and I spoke in person yesterday, he did not say a single honest word, but it was not about trying to fool me about anything. He was just going through the motions with me so he could go back to the WESPA Board and tell them that he said the same things to me that he has been fooling them with for a long time.
Compared to all of the extremely dishonest things that he has done, many of which are documented in this blog post and in this video and in this one, I am going to call out a new lie that is very trivial and unimportant, just because it is hilarious and so obviously a lie to anyone who takes the time to learn the details of the story between me and the Clinchys and the subsequent bannings that I have received.
Yesterday, when Chris and I were starting our conversation, I announced at the outset that I hate his guts, and I am sure that he hates my guts too, but that was okay by me, and I thought we could still have a productive conversation. He immediately started saying that he does not hate me and that he is sad to see me spiraling so much, and that he wants to see me get better. He knows perfectly well that he and the Clinchys are the real abusers in this story, and that the ways I have been “spiraling” are more because of their abuse and defamation than any other reason, and I immediately told him, “Well, all you’ve got to do is stop getting in the way of me playing Scrabble, and spiral over!”
But the really hilarious part was that when Lukeman and I had a conversation this afternoon, Lukeman wanted me to come out with him to the patio area by the pool. And as soon as Chris saw me on the patio with Lukeman, Chris immediately shouted “security!” to attempt to get the security guards who had already accosted me earlier in the day to come over and drag me off the premises, even though I had been taken there by the person who is about to replace him as WESPA President. Lukeman, of course, immediately spoke up and told Chris not to do that. I am sorry, Chris, but that is only the action of a person who intensely, passionately hates me.4
But as I said earlier, there are other very big problems with Chris continuing to be a Scrabble political leader. As I discussed in section (A) of my response to NASPA’s incident report, Chris was complicit in the Clinchy’s scheme to break NASPA rules and give privileged access to their friends for every one of the tournaments they ran under NASPA auspices from 2017 to 2019. He and his friends are cheaters who unbalanced registration systems, thereby also unbalancing qualification opportunities for Americans to international events such as the 2018 Alchemist Cup.
I believe that it is likely Chris also went above and beyond in helping CoCo starting to get their tournaments rated by WESPA, which happened specifically during the time when the news of the accusations against me was spreading like wildfire throughout the Scrabble community and CoCo was using these defamatory stories as a political tool to undermine NASPA and poach their players and tournaments, while I had not yet been able to get in a single word to defend myself. CoCo is a massively unethical organization, if it can even be called that, and Chris has massively unethically attempted to help them gain more political power in the Scrabble community. Note also that after I started revealing a lot of the wrongdoing of CoCo, WESPA ended up backtracking on their policy of so freely rating CoCo events.
But there is one more important reason that Chris needs to be off of the WESPA Board entirely, and this is one that I am sad to put out in this public way. I would have rather addressed this at the BGM.
Keep in mind that despite Jennifer Clinchy’s defamatory claim to the contrary, I have never sexually harassed or assaulted any woman. I have provided more than ample proof that Jennifer’s accusation against me was a complete lie. Also, even with all of Lola’s crazy lies against me, she never accused me of anything along those lines.
I have seen how damaging false accusations about these things can be to my own life, and I do not wish to put anyone else in a situation of having people believe these kinds of things about them when due diligence has not been done to investigate their truth.
However, I feel it is essential right now to point out that Chris is an alleged rapist, and that the person who alleged this was quite possibly driven out of tournament Scrabble by his actions. The reason I have secondhand knowledge of this is the word of my dear friend who sang the praises of my honesty, Ghana’s own Augustine Adda. I believe that Augustine values honesty as much as I do, and I know that he heard this directly from the woman who alleged it.
I am not going to name her here, because she is not in the Scrabble world anymore, and she may not want to get involved in this at all. And if she does not want to pursue a complaint against Chris Lipe for this, I am not arguing that he should necessarily be punished for it in any way in the Scrabble community. But this happened well before the #MeToo movement and before the Scrabble community had its reckoning with Sam Kantimathi, and I am fairly certain no due diligence was ever done to investigate this situation at all and even find out if this woman wanted to pursue a complaint against Chris.
Augustine knows the woman much better than I do, but I know her too. All three of us lived close to each other when we were moving up through the intermediate ranks of Scrabble, and all three of us frequently played games against each other at some of our local clubs. And let me tell you, this woman was talented at Scrabble. At those local clubs, I usually felt that she and Augustine were my best competition, and I loved playing against both of them. The loss of her talent from the Scrabble community is a sad one, in my opinion.
Although I will preserve her anonymity here, I am happy to give her name privately to anyone at the Scrabble associations who wants to investigate this further, and I am happy also to put them in touch with Augustine Adda, who can testify that he told me everything I have written here about her allegations, and who can probably help put the appropriate people in the Scrabble world in touch with her.
I am not presuming Chris is guilty, but frankly the allegation against him at least has more credibility than the obviously false allegation against me. Furthermore, the women who made defamatory complaints against me are both still involved in the tournament scene. It is only Chris who possibly drove someone out of the game through his actions.
Though Chris does not deserve any punishment for this without due diligence being done first, in my opinion the bar should be higher to be a WESPA Executive Board member than to be a competing Scrabble player. A person with this skeleton in his closet that has never been properly investigated should not be the kind of person we entrust to be one of our elected representatives. This is, of course, in addition to the multitude of other reasons why Chris should no longer be entrusted with any political power in the Scrabble world.