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
