Prologue
Throughout the last three years, a lot of rumors have been circulating about my behavior toward Jennifer Clinchy (formerly Jennifer Lee) and Evans Clinchy. They have painted a false picture in the minds of many Scrabble players that I harassed Jennifer, causing my ostracism from much of our mutual Scrabble community. Jennifer and Evans misunderstood and reacted poorly to my attempts to make closure between me and Jennifer, so that we ended up in exactly the kind of awkward social situation I had sought to avoid.
I’ve been over this entire story so many times. I have reflected on my behavior, Jennifer’s, and Evans’s, and on what might have/could have/should have happened. I have been over this in my own private thoughts and in conversations with others, both with people who are completely disconnected third parties and people who know all of the principals in the story well.
I recognize that you, the reader, are probably not on my side yet and might think that I am the bad guy here. I have been known to be verbally aggressive, on social media and in person. I assure you that is not what happened in this situation, and I ask you to suspend judgement until you hear me out.
In writing the body of this story, I have been completely honest and straightforward not only about what happened but also about what my emotions, attitudes, and opinions were at the time, which were often different than they are today. I have included screenshots of relevant emails, text messages, and even personal writings to myself to demonstrate that there is no revisionist history here. In the epilogues of both parts, I have reflected on the events from a present-day perspective. The epilogue of Part II also includes a short summary of the basic outline of the story.
The Crucible
There are times when you must speak, not because you are going to change the other person, but because if you don’t speak, they have changed you.
Jennifer and I had a de facto relationship for the better part of two years in 2015 and 2016, even though she never wanted to call it a committed relationship. We broke up and got together again several times in that period. Not only that, but we had a history of being unable to quit each other, continuing to stay in communication and sometimes hook up, even when one or both of us had started seeing other people.
In November 2016, I became aware that Jennifer was about to get into a romantic entanglement with Evans Clinchy, a Scrabble player whom I have known well for twelve years, far longer than either of us has known Jennifer. Even though Jennifer and I had not been dating regularly since late May or early June, things had never clearly ended between us. We hooked up once that summer at a Scrabble tournament. She clearly tried to maintain some sort of emotional relationship with me through the summer and early fall, as our text message history attests. (When I started to write this story three years later, I went through our text history to corroborate and in some cases to correct my memory of the chronology of events.) As recently as early October, she sent me a birthday gift in the mail.
Beginning that month, much of the rest of my life had come crashing down.
The pivotal event that started the downward turn was my mother having a serious accident over the summer. It was a freak thing. She had been taking care of my niece and nephew for a few days and had developed a cold, so she was a bit worn out but nothing more serious than that, until she fell badly in a public restroom in a restaurant. She didn’t realize how hurt she was and tried to get up but fell again. She ended up breaking both of her arms and lacerating her face. She needed stitches. One arm went in a cast, and she had to wear a wrist brace on the other one. It was a lot to deal with, but at first it seemed that it was all stuff that would naturally heal quickly enough.
However, when she wasn’t healing, the doctors discovered that they had failed to diagnose spinal damage. My mother needed surgery to widen the spinal column between her vertebrae so that the spine could heal properly. The doctors planned ahead of time that she would be in ICU for three days after the surgery so they could keep her stabilized and monitor her recovery. It was communicated to us ahead of time that there were a lot of risks and that even with success her fine motor skills might never be the same as they had been before.
I had a health drama of my own around the same time, not nearly life threatening like my mother’s, but still another thing to deal with. I was dating on Tinder extensively, trying to keep my mind off of Jennifer and her unwillingness to commit, and ended up in a stressful situation involving a disease scare and me running to the pharmacy in the middle of the night to get Plan B for a sexual partner with whom I had gone too far.
The stress of this led to serious physical illness. I ended up with the flu and the worst outbreak of canker sores in my life, which prevented me from eating solid food for a week and would not go away on their own. My doctor prescribed me a regimen of prednisone, which left me feeling like I was bouncing off the walls mentally. Even after the flu and canker sores went away later in November, I was drained of sexual energy and unable to have an erection for the next six months.
Concurrently with my illness, my mother had her surgery and a recovery that was far worse than the doctors thought it was going to be. The three days they had planned to have her in ICU turned into eight days. She screamed and howled in pain. She begged for more pain medication than they would give her, and she said suicidal things. She wanted them to put her out of her misery. My stepdad was with her the whole time, thankfully, but when my sisters and I talked to him, he was understandably really strung out by the whole situation and close to going crazy himself. After my mom got back from the hospital, for a long time she was barely mobile and still in a lot of pain. She needed a walker to get around, and she couldn’t lay down on the bed. They had to prop pillows up at 45 degrees for her to lay on, and she needed help getting up or going anywhere. She could never seem to have enough pain medication.
My mother’s surgery was on Halloween day. Because of my own illness, I wasn’t able to get up to New Jersey for a month. My three sisters each in turn traveled to my mother’s house in the following weeks to help out. Finally I made it there on Thanksgiving Day, after all of my sisters had returned to their own homes.
So, the entirety of November 2016 my family dealt with my mom’s surgery and harrowing recovery, and I battled my flu and mouth sore outbreak accompanied by sexual dysfunction. Do you remember what else happened in that month? Donald Trump was elected President. The outcome of the election was devastating to me, as it was for many, many other people, but that it happened in the midst of these illnesses just made everything all the more overwhelming.
Jennifer worked for the White House, in an office related to science and technology which sadly the Trump administration has now completely dismantled. As bad as Trump’s election was for the rest of us, I’m sure it was way worse for Jennifer and her colleagues. Based on the limited communication I had had with her in the time leading up to the election, she was already dealing with depression. She told me that herself. Then the shock from this result aggravated her situation.
In this time of crisis, I desperately wanted friends, not lovers, and I desperately wanted to play Scrabble. I had built my schedule from June to October so much around dating constantly that without it in my life I had nothing else to do. I didn’t have any friends who I was in the habit of socializing with anymore. Scrabble had completely emptied out of my life too.
I had no tournaments and no casual games left in the Washington DC area. Bob Linn was on a hiatus from the game because of health issues. Before that, Sammy Fomum had had a baby and not much time for Scrabble anymore. A few years earlier John Van Pelt and Marsh Richards had moved out of town, and so had Lucas Freeman after them. Toh Weibin had been in DC for school for a while and played with us regularly, but by this time he had already gone back to Singapore. Sam Rosin was still living in the area but was very busy and had no time for Scrabble. I was able to set up a meeting with Vince Castellano to play one time, but that was it. And that’s when it hit me, even though a few years earlier I had started up an active DC Collins Scrabble Club, it had lost a lot of people, and things had shifted to Jennifer being the main organizer of our Scrabble get-togethers. She had pulled a few other people who were mainly her friends (Zachary Dang, Mary Goulet, and Brent Weil) into playing with us sometimes, though none of them were frequent players. I think I reached out to each of them once to try to get some games in, but I got no takers.
The person I had played by far the most Scrabble with in the area was Jennifer. I couldn’t have sex if I wanted to, and romance was not on my mind. Yes, there was still a lot of emotional residue of our past relationship that made things awkward between us, but I also really needed Scrabble in my life. It was one of the only things that could keep me sane. I realized that Jennifer hadn’t just been my lover in a terribly unhealthy and foolish on-again-off-again relationship of the better part of two years. She had also been a good Scrabble partner and friend.
It was difficult to get Jennifer back into my life. The tenseness of our life events, the political moment, and our relationship history made for a weird mix. We were still in touch irregularly, but she was sporadic, slow, and reluctant in responding to my texts sometimes.
I reached out to Jennifer in early November attempting to arrange a get-together to play Scrabble, though this was when I was battling my own illness and not available yet. At first she wasn’t just amenable but even enthusiastic about the idea. But that changed abruptly after Election Day. She was shell-shocked and dragged her feet on making a time to play Scrabble happen, though she never explicitly took it off the table.
We had one phone call, less than a week after Election Day, that went very awkwardly. (It was between November 11th and November 14th, according to our text message history.) It did not help that I was hopped up on prednisone at the time. When I couldn’t stop talking heatedly about how we needed to respond politically to Trump’s election, she had to end the call abruptly. It was the last time we ever spoke on the phone.
In that same month, Jennifer signed up for the California Open Scrabble tournament, scheduled in early December. I do not remember whether she had signed up for it yet or whether I was aware of it at the time we spoke on the phone. However, I am 100% sure of this: The moment I saw her name on the signup list for the tournament, I intuitively knew that she was going to the tournament to hook up with Evans and that they were going to get into a relationship. To explain why, I need to rewind and elaborate some of my relationship history with Jennifer.
Jennifer and I made a trip to Australia together in November 2015. We both competed in the World Scrabble Championship in Perth at the beginning of the month and then spent a couple more weeks traveling around the rest of the country. We socialized with many of my other Scrabble friends who were at the tournament, and they knew that the two of us were staying together. On our first day there we made a day trip to Rottnest Island with John O’Laughlin, Cecilia Le, Jesse Matthews, Jesse Day, and Evans Clinchy.
Maybe later that evening or the next day, while Jennifer and I were home at our AirBnb in downtown Perth, we were engaged in a conversation while her laptop was open and on the screen was Evans Clinchy’s Facebook profile page. I observed immediately what page the laptop was on, but this was a complete nonissue to me. However, at some point I saw from her body language that she noticed what page the laptop was open to. I could easily read off of her that she was uncomfortable with this and that she was gradually positioning herself—while continuing to engage me in the conversation—in such a way that she could get close to the laptop and shut it so that this page was not shown anymore. She thought she was being subtle and unnoticed. I could read her clear as day, but I didn’t care. I showed no sign that I noticed what she was doing, while making a mental note that she must be interested in this guy and was embarrassed about the possibility of exposing that to me.
Fast forward to a group dinner at a nice restaurant. We were all seated at a round table. John and Cecilia were on my right. Jennifer was on my left. Evans was immediately left of her. Dave Wiegand had joined our group and was on the other side of the table. Jennifer had positioned her chair so she was sitting much more closely to Evans than to me. She was turned so that she was almost facing him. She relentlessly hit on him for the entire dinner. She kept trying to chat him up in a playful way and get him engaged. Evans did absolutely nothing wrong. I could tell he found the situation uncomfortable, but he handled it about as well as possible, respectfully engaging her when she talked to him but trying not to let things get too carried away. It was obvious not just to me but to everyone else at the table what Jennifer was doing. At one point my eyes met with Cecilia’s, and we both did an eye roll almost simultaneously.
I never spoke up or got upset or showed discomfort or displeasure with the situation at all during the dinner, except for the silent gesture to Cecilia that no one else noticed. After dinner I spoke to Jennifer while the two of us walked by ourselves. I believe my message got across to her about how hurtful her behavior was to me, maybe not right away, but the next day for sure. She recommitted to me for the rest of the trip, no longer acting flirtatiously toward my other male friends and more openly showing me affection and holding my hand in the company of others.
My relationship with Jennifer had often been rocky before the Australia trip, and it continued to be so after the trip. However, the next relevant part happened at a time when on the surface things were going well between us. In the spring of 2016, Jennifer was beginning to put out feelers for a new job. She intended to stay at her White House job through the inauguration to aid in the transition to the new President and then switch jobs shortly thereafter. She wanted to get back to Seattle, where her family was and where her brother had a couple of young children.
She planned a trip to Seattle in June, during which she set up a few job interviews. She told me that she was going to go down to Portland on the trip, as there was also a job opportunity that she wanted to interview for there. I don’t doubt that she set up a job interview in the Portland area, but I could tell she was trying to see Evans again. Not necessarily only Evans. She had also become friends with Conrad Bassett-Bouchard and might like to socialize with him and other Portland Scrabblers. But I was pretty sure that seeing Evans was a large part of her motivation for going to Portland.
From a lot of our earlier conversations in which she had not been willing to make our relationship “official,” I had learned to take the zero expectations approach and just be as supportive as possible. I recommended a particular guesthouse in Portland where I had stayed in 2015. I never argued with her or called out that she was trying to be around Evans, but it was the elephant in the room. Maybe in some ways because of how well I handled the situation, or maybe because the opportunities to spend time with him just didn’t materialize, the evening that she stayed in Portland she spent mostly on the phone with me in her room at the guesthouse. I didn’t force that conversation to happen, and his name never came up. But the subtext was there. I felt like she spent so much time talking to me that night to demonstrate that she wasn’t with him.
I spent the better part of a year and a half traveling to many Scrabble tournaments with Jennifer and seeing how she made her plans and where she traveled to. Getting back to November 2016, it was highly unusual for her to be going to the California Open. She never went all the way to the West Coast for a tournament. When I saw Evans’s name on the entrants list, it wasn’t hard to put two and two together to realize she was going to see him.
Also, we’d been having a lot of awkward conversations over text and email and the one by phone, and I could just tell how different things were compared to where they had been the last few months. I sensed that she was less interested in me now and that there was someone else.
What I desperately wanted to tell her before she left for California was this: “Jennifer, you and I have played the breakup-makeup game for a long time. Even when we have gotten involved with other people, we have not gotten over each other and kept going back to each other. When you get involved with another Scrabble player, that cannot keep happening. I refuse to get into a love triangle within Scrabble. Once you go down that path, it is over between us forever. We can still be friends. I’ll be happy to socialize with you at Scrabble tournaments and play friendly games with you. But we will never be lovers again. It is far more important to me that Scrabble is my sanctuary and that we don’t have this drama at our tournaments.”
Essentially, I wanted to have the breakup talk. I wanted to make sure that we put closure on our emotional relationship, so it did not mess up the Scrabble scene for us. We had tailed off of seeing each other regularly in June of 2016, around the same time that she made that trip to Seattle and Portland, but we had never had a real breakup talk. We still hooked up at a later Scrabble tournament when we weren’t rooming together, and she sent me that birthday gift in October. Back in 2015, we had crossed paths at some local DC tournaments at times when one or both of us was seeing someone else and the other one knew it, and it had been emotionally difficult. We had on multiple occasions gotten back together after being split up for a month or more. There were plenty of reasons to believe that closure was important even though we had not been together recently.
Maybe I should have just sent her something like what I wrote two paragraphs above by email or text message before the California Open. That might have been the best opportunity to avert the disaster of the next three years and counting. But in my personal ethics, you don’t have a breakup conversation over text or email. That’s the kind of thing that a solid human being should do face-to-face, or at very least over the phone where you can hear the other person talk and gauge emotions.
Jennifer didn’t completely cut me off at this stage, but a phone call never happened. I tried to make it happen through calling her and/or texting, but I was also concerned that if I tried too many times to talk to her or insisted too strongly that we needed to talk, it would be counterproductive. I assiduously avoided ever saying specifically that I wanted to talk to her about the tournament or that it was important that we talked before the tournament, and I didn’t say anything about Evans. A few days before she went to the California Open, we had an awkward email exchange in which I divulged my sexual dysfunction.
Very shortly after the California Open, both Jennifer’s and Evans’s names showed up on the entrants list for the January 2017 Scrabble tournament in New Orleans on the exact same day. Some important context about this tournament: My name was on the entrants list for almost an entire year ahead of time. I had booked my flight and hotel well in advance. When Jennifer and I were still dating in early 2016, I had specifically invited her to come with me. She had told me in no uncertain terms that there was a 0% chance she could attend, because it was the same week as the Presidential Inauguration. She said she would need to be in DC at that time in order to aid in the transition. I say this not to criticize her for going back on this, but only because this was strong circumstantial evidence that I had intuited correctly what had happened between Jennifer and Evans in California. It was not public knowledge as far as I know to anyone else that they were involved.
Now, while my mother was in unbearable pain and saying suicidal things, while I was dealing with a several week illness, while I had completely lost all sex drive and stopped dating, leading to my social isolation, while my opportunities to play Scrabble locally had all but evaporated; attending the very event that I had been looking forward to for so long was going to take me headfirst into a situation where I was likely to see Jennifer with another Scrabble player, someone whom I had known for over a decade, far longer than she had been in the scene. Further, this was a small enough tournament that I was almost sure to sit directly across the table from each of them and face off in a game.
When I was going through the previous worst time in my life, getting divorced in 2007 and 2008, Scrabble was my sanctuary. I poured my heart and soul into the game, studied more fervently than I ever had before, and had my best ever results to that point. I was so grateful to Scrabble for helping me escape the pain of the rest of life. Now, the thing I most wanted to run away to in a crisis would take me headlong into a crisis.
I admit that not all of my thoughts and motivations were as positive as simply wanting mental peace. In some ways I had been the one who had walked away more than she had when we had last dated earlier in the year. But I took an honest, introspective look at my own emotions, and I did perceive that this situation hurt my pride. Even though the relationship with her had been such a shit-show, having this pretty girl with me at Scrabble tournaments was a status symbol. It wasn’t really true that she had left me for him, but it crossed my mind that other people would perceive it that way, and that I would look less desirable. I knew that these were petty emotions and the wrong things for me to focus on. I mention them to fully disclose and not oversimplify the emotional complexity of the situation.
But what was much more my primary emotional driver was this: Jennifer and I had both dated other people a number of times while we were on-and-off together, but it had always been people outside of Scrabble whom the other person had not met. We still continued to see each other at tournaments and DC Scrabble get-togethers even when we weren’t dating. It would be much harder to deal face-to-face with her being in a relationship with someone whom I knew and had a long history with.
Within a few days after I saw both of their names show up on the tournament entry list, I felt compelled to contact Jennifer about the tournament via text. I probably tried to call her too, but she didn’t respond to either the texts or the phone call. So on December 19th, I sent this email.
from: Dave Koenig
to : Jennifer Lee
date: Dec 19, 2016, 4:28 PM
subject: meeting before New OrleansDear Jenn,
I suspect that you have gotten romantically involved with Evans, perhaps some other Scrabble player, but most likely him. My evidence for this is entirely circumstantial, and I could be wrong. However, with you not returning my calls and emails and the fact that you signed up for the New Orleans tournament on the same day as he confirmed his attendance, I feel compelled to write to you now.
You and I are not in a committed relationship, and you are free to date or have sex with whoever you want, of course. However, when you get into something with another Scrabble player I know and we are all going to be in the same place at the same time, you make it my business. That doesn’t mean it has to be a problem with me. But I need to know the truth from you. If you are indeed involved with him or some other Scrabble player, I will find out eventually, and I would much rather find out from you than some other way.
I think it is a good idea for you and me to have a conversation, preferably in person but alternatively over the phone, if meeting in person is not feasible with your travel schedule. I would like this conversation to happen before the New Orleans tournament. I think this is in your best interest and mine.
I am not going to be angry or yell or argue or try to convince you to do things otherwise. I just need to know the truth of where you are at. You do not have to worry about hurting my feelings. It hurts my feelings much more to be left in the dark and worrying about what might be happening than it does to hear the truth. But it will be a much more uncomfortable situation for both of us if the next time we talk is across the board at the New Orleans tournament, without having a conversation about this first. I would prefer to avoid that situation and not accidentally air any of our issues in front of other Scrabble players.
So please, talk to me before the New Orleans tournament, for the both of us. And I am sorry to have to ask you one more favor, but please take down your Facebook profile picture of you sitting on my balcony and smiling at me off camera. The thought of you continuing to use that picture while you are involved with someone else I know is very hurtful to me.
Sincerely,
Screenshot in appendix
Dave
“EMAILS” WAS A MISSTATEMENT IN THE FIRST PARAGRAPH. SHE HAD NOT RESPONDED TO TWO TEXT messages on december 15th and 16th. Prior to this, there had been no unanswered emails, only texts.
That was it. All I wanted was two things, just to know whether she was really together with him, so I could be mentally prepared for seeing them at the tournament, and to have her take down one Facebook profile picture.
I am well aware that the picture was entirely my own hang-up, but it really bothered me. Jennifer had for a long time had as her profile picture a selfie she had taken on a summery day while sitting out on the balcony of my apartment in Falls Church, Virginia. She had been sitting by herself posing for the camera when I walked onto the balcony a moment before she snapped the photo. This distracted her just enough that she turned her head toward me with a beaming smile, so as a result she is looking off to the side, but no one other than she and I knew the story of the photo. She captioned it “selfie interrupted.”
During a great deal of our relationship when we were playing the makeup-breakup game or just not seeing each other for a while, I had looked back at that photo fondly on Facebook. It had been a sign to me that she was still connected to me, that she still cared about me. That is my mental story, not hers. She might have just thought it was a nice picture and wanted to keep it up. She also didn’t always use Facebook all that much, so she might not have bothered to change it. But regardless of what the photo meant to her, it hurt me a lot for it to still be up when she was seeing Evans. Furthermore, I didn’t think it would be a big deal. Why should she want to have it up when she was seeing him? Surely if he knew the story of the photo, he wouldn’t have liked that it was up either.
The photo was the main thing I cared about. Yes, it would have been nice to get confirmation from her that she was indeed seeing him, but I already thought it was unlikely that I had intuited wrongly. However, I really, really wanted her to take down that picture, and if she had been able to give me that one act of kindness, it would have been a lot easier for me to handle the situation.
From that point forward, she completely ghosted me. She never responded to a text message, phone call, or email again. When most of the next day had passed and she hadn’t responded nor taken the photo down and I began to suspect that she would do nothing, my mental shape degraded quickly. I had already been very agitated and upset about things in the preceding days and weeks, but now I was angry too. How could she not take this photo down? It’s just about the smallest thing I could have asked for, and there’s no reason she should want to keep it up for herself, I thought. No matter how rocky things had been between us before, I strongly believe that the ways in which we had hurt each other had always been unintentional. However, it was hard to read anything but spite in her refusal to take the picture down.
Furthermore, I quickly realized that in asking for her to remove the picture and waiting to see if she had done it yet, I had made the crucial error of putting myself in an emotional position where I needed something from her. This was agonizing. In the mornings, in the afternoons when I got back from work, and late in the evenings, I found myself checking whether that photo was still up (it always was) and then falling apart in tears and anger again.
On the first day after I sent the email, I did consider the possibility that she might have already blocked my email address before this. That’s why I felt it was necessary to send her a text on December 20th saying “Did you read the email I sent you yet, and are you going to take down the Facebook profile picture as I asked? Please confirm.” I see that that could come across as petulant or harassing to her or to other people reading this, but I was just desperate. Desperately sad and angry and needing some certainty as to whether she was intentionally snubbing my request to take the photo down.
The holidays were almost upon us and in the next few days Jennifer and Evans both showed up on the attendance list of the Albany New Years tournament. At this point it became obvious that they were seeing each other. I was still connected to both of them on Facebook, and during that tournament they started posting photos of them together. As soon as I saw these, I immediately had a massive feeling of relief. I was so glad to know that their relationship wasn’t something I had just dreamed up in my head and that I had a better idea of what to expect at the New Orleans tournament a couple of weeks after that. I didn’t unfriend either of them on Facebook, but I unfollowed them both. I didn’t need to see anything else about their relationship. I was just glad that the ambiguity was gone and that my intuition had been right all along.
However, the picture still bothered me. Even without her in my Facebook feed, I checked her profile page every day to see whether the photo had come down, and I seethed because it had not.
I sent one more text to Jennifer on Christmas Day, the last one I ever sent her. It said, “Merry Christmas, Jenn. I have been very upset and angry and sometimes filled with hatred because you have not taken down the Facebook profile picture of you on my balcony as I asked you to. But I am trying to be more positive and move away from that negativity. I am asking you one more time politely to please take down that photo, and I hope you have a very happy holiday season and it provides you everything you desire and need.”
There was a specific reason that I felt it necessary to send that text. In thinking about the email of December 19th and the text of December 20th, it had suddenly occurred to me that there was still the possibility that she might not have a necessary part of the communication. If she had blocked the email and never seen it, then the December 20th text might not have had enough context for her to know exactly what photo I was talking about and why its removal was important to me, so I felt a need to reiterate that in the text message to ensure that she had the information.
The grieving I did over the picture was the right way forward. I needed to fully accept the loss of my relationship with Jennifer, to fully experience that grief before I got to New Orleans, so that I could focus on playing good Scrabble.
In the first days of 2017, with support from a few friends of mine, I began to turn the corner on my anger and sadness. One friend in particular helped me reshape my attitude toward Jennifer into “fuck you, I don’t need you in my life,” which is exactly where it needed to be. Once I didn’t need to keep looking back at the picture, I blocked her on Facebook.
I still wanted to tell her off for what she had done. I wanted to have that one last breakup conversation to create closure, but this time I didn’t need to hear anything from her. I just wanted to communicate how unkind she had been in ghosting me and not taking the picture down, and I believed that I could say things in just the right way that would make her cry in front of me. This time I wanted to talk in person, because I wanted to see those tears on her face, and I knew that if we talked on the phone, she would just hang up on me. I also knew that if I asked her again for a meeting, she was highly likely to just continue ghosting me. So I decided I had to give her an incentive to make the meeting happen. I sent her one more email on January 5th, and I copied it to both of her email accounts, just in case she had blocked the one I used previously.
from: Dave Koenig
to: Jennifer Lee, Jennifer Lee
date: Jan 5, 2017, 12:26 PM
subject: JenniferHi Jenn,
A lot has changed since I last wrote to you, but I still want to speak to you. I no longer want or need to hear anything about you and Evans, and I have no desire to get back together with you. The Facebook picture no longer matters either, as I have blocked you on Facebook and can’t see it anyway.
However, there are a few things that I would like to talk about to gain some closure between me and you. If you want to have a dialogue about these things, I welcome it, but if you have nothing to say to me, then I will just say what I need to say quickly to you and be done with it. But it does have to happen in person; I can’t do this over the phone.
I think it would be best to have this conversation in private, but I no longer have any compunctions about holding back in front of other Scrabble players we know. So if you do not meet with me before New Orleans, I will say what I need to say to you directly to your face across the Scrabble board in the tournament room with all the other players able to hear. I am almost certain that if that happens you will regret not having had this conversation in private.
I am available any day or evening for the rest of this week or the weekend or next week except Monday, January 9th.
Sincerely,
screenshot in appendix
Dave
That was the last communication I sent her before the tournament. She never responded, and no pre-New Orleans meeting ever happened. However, this was exactly the right thing to turn my brain around and get myself mentally ready. The dread of going to the tournament was gone. Now I was thinking, “I get to go there and say whatever I need to say to her face,” and I was looking forward to it.
It wasn’t even that important to me whether I said anything at all. I meant it quite literally when I wrote in the email “say what I need to say.” It might end up being something, and it might end up being nothing. But I was no longer in the position of needing anything from her. I could take care of my own needs.
One more relevant and amusing thing happened a week later, still before the tournament. I was hanging out at a bar in DC with a buddy from out of town. This guy was an infrequent Scrabble competitor, and he had met Jennifer once, at the 2014 Nationals in Buffalo where she and I had first started getting flirtatious. He had become her Facebook friend then, though they barely had any awareness of each other. When I told him the story about how I had blocked her over the picture, he pulled out his phone to look up her profile. He wasn’t trying to rub anything in my face, but just to remind himself who I was talking about. When we checked the profile, we saw that she had replaced the balcony picture with a new one on January 6th, literally the next day after I had emailed her telling her that I had blocked her and couldn’t see it anymore.
I just had to laugh at that. It seemed clear that she’d been keeping the photo up specifically because it hurt me.
About a day or two before I flew to the New Orleans tournament, I chatted briefly over text with one of my Scrabble buddies, Jason Broersma. I dropped a hint that something was amiss, and he very quickly started digging and understood that it was about Jennifer, Evans, and me. Then he told me to meet him and his partner Sue Tremblay at a bar in New Orleans on Friday night, the day before the tournament started. I was looking forward to this. I really wanted to reconnect with my Scrabble friends and talk about what I was going through, and I considered Jason a good friend.
However, our meeting did not go as well as I had hoped. What happened was that either he or Sue or maybe both of them talked to Jennifer first. They sort of listened to my story for a while, but with a distorted lens. It was clear that Jason thought I was still hung up on Jennifer and couldn’t let her and the situation go. He did not understand that I was trying to break up with her all along and at one point when I said that I never wanted her back, he did a double-take, because it clearly didn’t line up with the mental model he had of the situation. He tried to listen for a while, but frankly he wasn’t the best listener, and he was eager to try to stop me from doing something bad, when what I really needed was a friend who would just listen and understand what I was dealing with. I got very angry with him after a while, and the conversation was mostly unproductive. He was the only person I got angry with in the entire trip to New Orleans. The interaction with him was far more stressful and upsetting to me than anything that would happen with Jennifer or Evans.
At one point in the conversation I started to tell Jason about something I wrote in my phone’s notes, and he actually grabbed my phone and read it before I was even able to explain it fully. Prior to this writing, he is the only person other than me who has read it.
You were the only woman I’ve ever loved besides my ex-wife. And you were selfish and dishonest with me over and over again, and I loved you anyway. You made lies of omission, not commission. And sometimes I’d get mad or we’d break up for a few months, but we kept coming back together and I kept forgiving you. And most of the time, I asked for nothing from you. You said over and over that you had “nothing to give,” and I accepted it and I accepted you, even though you were being selfish. The one time we agreed to be in a committed relationship for a month, you couldn’t keep that commitment for 24 hours, and I just laughed it off and accepted it and accepted you. But the one time I really needed something from you so I could get some closure and peace, all I needed was for you to take down one Facebook picture. And even that was too much for you to give.
Thank you for not taking that picture down. I looked at it every day until it completely sank in that you give zero fucks about my well-being. And that I’ve never seen you do anything for someone else unless it was what you yourself wanted to do. You’re not my friend anymore, and you are permanently out of my life. Now, I care about your well-being as little as you care about mine, but I hope for the sake of the men you get involved with in the future that you learn to be less selfish than you were with me and with that other guy John and with your ex-husband.
screenshot in appendix
I wrote that short speech so that if I was under distress while facing Jennifer at the tournament and too flustered to come up with something to say, I would have it to fall back on. I had made no decision about whether I was actually going to say it to her in the tournament room. I figured I would know in the moment what I needed to say, which—as I mentioned before—might be something or might be nothing. I had even edited it down so that I could say it in less than two minutes and tried to write it in such a way that if I did have to deliver it in front of other people, only Jennifer would understand most of it.
At the end of our conversation, Jason told me that Jennifer was afraid of me making a scene at the tournament. Since she had completely ghosted me, I had no idea what her emotional response was to any of the communication I had sent her. The reason I wanted to talk by voice or in person in the first place was so that I could gauge her reactions.
It didn’t make sense to me for her to fear that I would make a scene. If she was concerned about that, the logical thing to do would have been to have a conversation with me before the tournament, which is exactly what I was trying to do all along. It was only because she was hard-set on not meeting with me ahead of time and instead insisted on creating this situation of us seeing each other for the first time in months across the board at the tournament that we were in this mess.
Prior to that moment, I had only conceived of the attitude in her refusal to talk to me or take the picture down as twisting the knife in my back, not as acting out of fear. Understanding to anticipate her being fearful when we met the next day was helpful.
On Saturday morning the tournament started, and fate would have it that Jennifer and I were paired to sit at the same table for the first three games in a row, playing each other in the second round and playing other opponents at adjacent boards in the other two rounds. I sat down to play my first game and did nothing out of the ordinary, but Jennifer was so afraid to even sit at the same table as me that she ended up convincing her new boyfriend Evans to switch tables with her. He sat right next to me, but we had no interaction. I didn’t worry about it and just played my first game, winning easily.
In round two, I sat at the board where I was going to play Jennifer, and Jason Broersma sat at the adjacent board. In retrospect, given the way the pairings were, he also must have pulled a switcheroo to put himself there, a fact I only realized now as I’m writing this three years later. He even at one point put his hand calmly on my back, surely from his point of view to stop me from shooting my mouth off, but it was completely unnecessary. He didn’t understand that there was zero chance of me doing anything untoward in this situation.
Jennifer delayed sitting down across from me until moments before the round was supposed to start. When she finally did, she started bagging up the tiles as quickly as possible to try to start the game without a conversation. She was visibly shaking and scared. I sat in silence as she bagged the tiles up. When she finished and we were about to start, I said, “Oh, I just remembered I wanted to say one thing to you. Let’s play Scrabble.”
Jennifer was a mess during the game. She got the better of the tiles, but she made a suboptimal bingo in the first few turns, missing a triple word score when she could have hit it with one of its anagrams. Later she lost a turn playing a phony bingo, allowing me to block her real one. I triumphed in an ugly low scoring game only because she fell apart.
She would end up again switching tables in the third round to avoid sitting near me, and that was the end of our interactions in New Orleans. We never ended up sitting near each other again in the rest of the tournament, both kept to ourselves in the tournament room, and never crossed paths outside of the tournament room.
Jason thought I did the classy thing by minimizing the conversation with Jennifer before our game. That’s not how I saw it. I saw that Jennifer had gotten herself so worked up and afraid because of how much she feared me saying something. What in her imagination might have been about to happen was so much worse than anything that I could or would have said in the moment—including the speech I had written. If I had said something, it would have pulled the bandaid off. Maybe there would have been some tears shed in the moment, but the tension would be over.
There’s a common saying from chess that went through my head while I sat there facing Jennifer: “Sometimes the threat is stronger than the execution.” I saw that saying nothing and maintaining the tension would be the way for her to experience the most agony. And as a bonus, Jason—and possibly anybody else nearby who had some idea of what was going on—would think that I was being above it all. The entire time that I was trying to make a conversation happen I was doing the good thing. Then I stopped trying and instead let Jennifer torture herself, and that was the evil thing. But Jason sees it exactly backwards, as probably do several other friends in Scrabble.
I delighted in watching Jennifer suffer in front of me. She punished herself for her behavior in a better way than I ever could have. I saw it as karmic justice for how much pain she had caused me in the last couple months. But at the same time, I did not do it to her. She did it to herself. She did it by coming to a tournament where she already knew I was going to be, by insisting on not communicating with me prior to the tournament, by avoiding a conversation that would have made things better, by building up so much tension in her own head that just being there with me was such a terrible experience, even though I wasn’t doing anything.
I didn’t end up playing against Evans until the following afternoon. Up to this point, he was a nonissue to me. My concerns about getting closure with Jennifer and making sure that I could have peace of mind at the tournament weren’t about him at all. I had no jealousy of him and wished him no ill will.
Furthermore, I even liked the guy. In fact, when I had been at home in the last month crying my eyes out with hatred and sadness toward Jennifer, I had worked to keep a positive image of him in my mind. I had had a few situations earlier in life when a girl I previously had been involved with got into a relationship with a guy I knew. I always found that a lot easier to handle when it was a guy I liked, because then I thought, “Of course she likes him, he’s a good guy.” It was when the girl got involved with a guy who was an asshole that it was a lot harder to take.
I don’t think he liked me though.
I’ve known Evans since we played in a Philadelphia tournament together in 2008, and in the early going we were chummy friends. Several years later, mostly—I believe—because of the way I comported myself in a number of online discussions with other Scrabble players in TWL/CSW arguments, Evans’s opinion of me had seemed to cool off, but nothing about my opinion of him had changed. Evans’s negative attitude about me had come out in little ways earlier, but there was one particular interaction on Facebook that I think is worth mentioning.
This was probably in 2013 or 2014, well before anything was going on between him and Jennifer, possibly before I knew her. I got into some explosive arguments on Facebook about the TWL/CSW divide. Evans wasn’t even participating in these discussions, but he observed them.
Evans commented in a different place on Facebook, I believe on a post by our mutual friend Marsh Richards, about what an asshole I was. This wasn’t an oblique mention, as in the link above. This time he specifically named and attacked me. I commented on Marsh’s post saying that I was going to respond to him but wasn’t going to do it there so as not to pollute her post.
I then made a post directly on his Facebook timeline telling him multiple times to go fuck himself and calling out his hypocrisy. From my point of view he often engaged in very similar argumentation to what I did online, but for some reason he was eager to criticize me for behavior that was much like his own. He neither responded to nor deleted my post or the ensuing comments. Several other friends spoke up and argued with me further. In the course of that argument, I also revealed that years earlier he had made some anonymous insulting posts on another Scrabbler’s Livejournal, and a lot of other people had assumed the posts were from me. He had never spoken up to admit the anonymous posts were his, and he allowed other people to go on thinking that they were from me.
The post on his Facebook timeline was an ugly moment, but the argument soon ended. Tempers calmed, and we all went on with the rest of our lives. I personally held no grudge toward Evans about it. My feeling was that I would not let an attack stand without a response, but once I said my piece I was done. In retrospect, I definitely could have used nicer language and not come down as hard on the guy as I did, but I still feel I was justified in attacking him and standing up for myself, because he initiated the encounter by attempting to talk behind my back, naming me, and insulting me.
For the next several years—right up until the New Orleans 2017 tournament—Evans and I continued to hang out in the same social group at Scrabble tournaments and go to group dinners and other events together. He never brought up anything about the Facebook incident in real life. If he had mentioned it and told me anything about how much it bothered him, I would have unhesitatingly apologized for my language and how hard I was on him. I would have communicated clearly that it was water under the bridge to me, but that if he still held a grudge I didn’t blame him. Then I likely would have asked him what I could do to make things better. But actually confronting interpersonal issues and improving the situation is not Evans’s style, as you will see much more of later in the story.
From that point forward, Evans pretty much never initiated conversation with me directly. I was often at the center of conversation with our mutual friends, and it seemed to me that whenever I was talking, Evans was very interested in what I had to say. I often felt like he was the person in the room who was most paying attention to every word from me, but he minimized any direct interaction with me. I didn’t like him any less than before, and whatever antipathy there was was completely unidirectional from him toward me. I didn’t worry or care about it, but I noticed it. I figured if he ever needed to resolve something with me, he needed to speak up and deal with me directly. Otherwise, it was his own issue.
When Evans and I sat down to play in New Orleans, after we put the tiles away I reached out my arm to shake his hand, as I am always in the habit of doing before games. However, he startled me when he refused to shake my hand. He didn’t say anything and just angrily shook his head. I had been oblivious until that moment to the fact that his body language was showing a massive amount of anger toward me. When we played, he spoke the minimum he had to, just to announce the scores. Other than that, he never said an intelligible word. He didn’t want to look me in the eye, and the only other communication I got was guttural noises.
Evans has been pretty much the same every other time I’ve seen him in the three years since. While I think that Jennifer’s fear of me has calmed down over time, his hatred of me has seemingly only hardened.
Evans got ahead early in that game and might have won anyway, but I made a crucial error of playing a phony bingo. Evans immediately shouted “Challenge!” before stopping the clock. While this is the correct thing to do in the game situation, he said it much more loudly than was necessary. We walked over to the challenge computer and got the verdict that the word was unacceptable. He immediately jumped up as if he were doing a touchdown dance, pumping his fist and bursting “YESSSSSS!” in the middle of the room. He was childishly gloating over besting me on a challenge.
I said nothing and went on to lose by about 100 points, but on the inside I was amused. He won the battle, but he lost the war. I could tell that I was in his head. I owned him now. Winning or losing against him was the same as it was against any other opponent, but he hated me so much that he was likely to go on tilt if things started going poorly against me in future games.
Something else started happening at this New Orleans tournament too, and my first observation of it was during my arrival at the airport, a few hours before I met up with Jason on Friday night, though I did not initially understand that it was related. When I got to the luggage carousel, I saw Rob Robinsky waiting for his bag. I walked up to him and tried to give him a friendly greeting, but he immediately flinched and reacted to me very coldly. I didn’t understand this at all, as he and I had always gotten along well before that, but I just assumed he might have been having a bad moment and didn’t worry about it.
It wasn’t until I started interacting with other Scrabble players at the tournament that I gleaned what was happening. Jennifer must have told a bunch of our mutual friends that I was harassing her, and they were turning on me, without ever telling me why or asking me what happened. I realized this when I spoke to other friends in the evening about dinner plans and started getting evasive answers. I immediately sensed what was happening. My friends were having a group dinner including Jennifer and Evans, and I wasn’t invited because they didn’t want me there. I didn’t fight it or try to explain anything at the time. On a couple of occasions out at bars, I tried to start telling a few Scrabblers a little bit of what I was going through, but I got shut down quickly. It was clear my friends were in no mood to talk about it, and I could see this wasn’t going to be the time and place to get the sympathy I needed.
The social awkwardness I faced in New Orleans with other Scrabble players who were mutual friends of Jennifer, Evans, and me was only the beginning of a change in the tenor of my relationships with many people that has persisted for over three years, from January 2017 to the present day. Many of my relationships with people I had known for the better part of two decades—far longer than any of us knew Jennifer—became strained. Some dropped out of my life almost entirely. Most often, I still interacted with people in a quasi-normal way, but I could just tell that they felt differently about me, though they never had the nerve and directness to discuss what was on their mind with me.
Epilogue
The night before the New Orleans tournament, when I tried to explain to Jason Broersma that the reason I wanted to talk to Jennifer was for closure, he said that she didn’t owe me that. I agree with that. I think it would have been wise of her to have that conversation with me ahead of time, as it would have relieved the tension for her and not made the scene in the tournament room so uncomfortable for her. However, there is no sense in which she had any moral obligation to do so.
But there’s another moral issue colliding with that one. Just as she has the right not to say anything, I have the right to say something. No one gets to treat me like shit for two years in a relationship, and then get involved with a guy I’ve known far longer than I’ve known her, and then ghost me, and then put herself in a position where she is literally sitting down at a table in front of me—nobody gets to do all those things without getting a piece of my mind. That is a matter of me setting my own boundaries. You don’t get to sit in front of me without seeing the emotional effect of your actions upon me. I have the right to speak my mind to whoever crosses my path. What I did in that email was assert that right.
I believe that I did nothing morally wrong, both in my communications to Jennifer before the New Orleans tournament and in my behavior at the tournament. My communication was ineffective in bringing out the desired result of a dissolution of the tension between us prior to meeting at the tournament, and the emotional state I was in at the time definitely affected my ability to communicate as calmly and effectively as possible. But my ineffectiveness was not a moral failing. That is an important distinction in my mind.
I have serious doubts that we would have reached a better resolution even if I had been able to communicate better. I think that Jennifer’s insistence on not talking to me ahead of time and in bringing herself to a tournament where we would have to sit across the board in a disastrously tense situation was probably inevitable, regardless of how much better I might have written those emails.
At the same time, I recognize that it was an extremely tough time emotionally for both of us and that we were both more reactive because of it. Although Evans undoubtedly behaved in the most inappropriate way in the tournament room, I understood that his reactions came from a place of pain in seeing Jennifer in distress, and I had no way of knowing how she had depicted the situation to him. I would hope that a person in Evans’s position would talk to me about what had happened in a reasonable way before jumping off the rails with anger, but it is easy for me to forgive his behavior in the heat of the moment.
I do not hold any grudge whatsoever for anything that Jennifer or Evans did up to this point in the story. That includes both the way Jennifer behaved before the tournament and the way Evans behaved at the tournament. In my head, I’ve already completely forgiven her for ghosting me and not taking the picture down, and him for his hateful behavior toward me during our game.
However, what I have not forgiven is all of their behavior toward me and affecting me in the more than three years of time since the 2017 New Orleans tournament, which I will address in the next part. I have been very angry and distressed over the last three years because of the social fallout I have experienced and the opportunities that I have been denied to play Scrabble, all things that were precipitated by the events I have described so far. These emotions have been apparent to many around me and have undoubtedly exacerbated my problems. My emotional response was not to what you have read already, but to what is coming.
You may judge my actions in this part of the story differently than I do. However, it will not even be the slightest bit controversial in the rest of this story, covering all of the time from after the New Orleans tournament to the present day, that my behavior toward Jennifer and Evans has been beyond reproach. I believe the historical record will vindicate that I have gone above and beyond by being understanding and reasonable even while they have behaved in hateful, cliquish, and destructive ways. Furthermore, they have avoided any communication with me, preventing this situation from getting fixed. As you will see, the path that Jennifer and Evans took from here would end up having negative effects not only on me but also more widely on our Scrabble community.
My relationship with Jennifer and Evans is not, however, the main reason that I am writing this. It is instead my relationship with the rest of the community, both how people have responded directly to me and how they have not stepped up in the face of odious behavior by Evans and Jennifer.
For a long time I haven’t wanted to bring up anything about the situation with Evans and Jennifer to other Scrabble players, for many reasons:
- I truly wasn’t holding an emotional grudge, even though they were, but I thought that if I spoke up to complain about what they were doing and how they were treating me, it would come across like I was also holding a grudge.
- Jennifer painted an image in other people’s heads that I was an angry harasser. I knew that if I spoke up and showed any anger at all about her or Evans that it would play into this perception and undermine people believing me.
- Most of the time when I crossed paths with other Scrabble players was at a tournament, and I didn’t want to dig up an emotional subject at a time when I needed to focus and play Scrabble well.
- I believe that good friends would have asked me what happened and listened to my side of the story instead of treating me differently while never talking to me about what happened. I don’t think the onus should be on me to win back people who have treated me in such a way, nor do I necessarily want to win them back.
I spent more than a year after the New Orleans 2017 tournament saying nothing about these events to almost everyone in Scrabble. I only started talking to other people in the community about these events much later because of other actions that Jennifer and Evans took. There were several longtime close friends with whom I never broached a conversation until 2019 or 2020. There are many others with whom I still have not discussed these matters.
After I first wrote out the entire story, I realized that it bifurcated at this point into two mostly separate plotlines: the continued interactions I have had with Jennifer and Evans, which have been very limited, and the interactions I have had with the rest of my Scrabble community, which have been plentiful. I believe that some of the context of my stories with other Scrabble players is necessary to fully appreciate what has happened, but I cannot bring in that full story without making what remains to be told significantly longer. I have edited and condensed the next part to include only a few anecdotes between me and other Scrabble players, either because they are important to the story or particularly emblematic of the problems I have dealt with.
On the other hand, I have judged that it is important not to omit any of the major details of the interactions I have had with Jennifer and Evans, because I do not want to give any possible appearance of a lopsided or biased depiction of events. The story will include every communication I have had with Jennifer or Evans and every time that we have been in the same place. In the appendices, I will also include screenshots of all of our communications, starting with the full history of text messages between me and Jennifer in November of 2016.
Appendix
Figure 1
My complete text message history with Jennifer in November and December 2016. My text has the blue background. There has been no text message correspondence between us since then. We used the emoji of a person crossing hands in an X to mean “hug.”
Almost all of this communication was well before the California Open on December 9th-11th, 2016. The two texts on December 15th and 16th were an attempt to contact her after she signed up for the New Orleans tournament. The December 20th and 25th texts were the only communication in between the two emails of December 19th and January 5th.
Figure 2
Email exchange with Jennifer shortly before she went to the California Open, divulging my sexual dysfunction.
Figure 3
Email to Jennifer on December 19th, 2016, shortly after she signed up for the New Orleans 2017 tournament, asking for a meeting before New Orleans and for her to take down a Facebook profile picture. She never responded. It was not yet public to other Scrabble players that she was together with Evans. Neither of them had yet signed up for the Albany New Years tournament.
Figure 4
Email to Jennifer on January 5th, 2017, my last communication before the New Orleans tournament.
Figure 5
Speech to Jennifer that I wrote on the notes app of my phone. I never delivered this speech to her, but Jason Broersma read it the night before the New Orleans tournament.
Figure 6
Comment made by Evans in a conversation on LiveJournal in 2012. His phrase “CSW bitching” and the final paragraph refer to me.
