Splenetic

Page 2 of 2

The Conspiracy

July 24, 2023 /

The following is the entirety of official communications I have had with all relevant Scrabble organizations regarding the story summarized in The Scapegoat.

Most documents are linked as PDFs or images within the timeline. Clicking those links will open them in a separate tab.

Two documents are included inline. For ease of navigation, here are links that jump to the beginning and end of those documents.

  1. My response to incident report (beginning) (end)
    (Addresses the statements seen by me on April 14th, 2022.)
  2. My appeal of NASPA’s suspension (beginning) (end)
    (Addresses the statements seen by me on November 15th, 2022 and the wrongdoing of the Scrabble associations toward me.)

Bad news: You cannot make people treat you well.
Good news: You can make them wish they had.

April 14, 2022

April 15, 2022

April 19 to June 3, 2022

April 25, 2022

May 22, 2022

May 23, 2022

May 27, 2022

June 23, 2022

June 29, 2022

August 8, 2022

August 24, 2022

August 25, 2022

September 6, 2022

Response to Incident Report

Introduction

The story that was laid out in the incident report submitted against me in April 2022 is completely false. I will demonstrate not only that there is no merit to the accusations but also that all three of Evans, Jennifer, and Lola knowingly and intentionally submitted false information1 with the express purpose of defaming my character, drumming up as much hatred in the Scrabble community for me as possible, and permanently banning me from the game.

The spark that ignited this course of action was Lola’s perception of our interactions at the January 2022 tournament in New Orleans. Her description of what happened at that tournament is out of line with reality and includes claims that I said things that were the exact opposite of what I said. Furthermore, she included in her statement a completely false history of our relationship, which I have thorough material evidence to prove.

Lola also gave a false story of our private conversations while we lived together in Spring 2020 to Evans and Jennifer in order to further their agenda of building a false case that I have been harassing them, when the true story is that they have been harassing me for the last six years. Evans and Jennifer then piled on their own untruths in their statements to echo what Lola wrote and make an even bigger character assassination.

Evans and Jennifer were already harassing and bullying me and doing many unethical things in the Scrabble world for three and a half years, from 2017 to July 2020, when I published The Crucible and The Fallout, revealing their wrongdoing. After I published the blog I was done with the story. I did not think about or interact with Evans or Jennifer at all for the next two years, until they again escalated against me by submitting this character assassination in April 2022.

Lola and I had also stopped dating by mid-2020, and we had a minimal amount of interaction over the next couple years, including no contact whatsoever between August 2021 and the January 2022 New Orleans tournament. Our interaction at the New Orleans tournament was altogether no more than 15 minutes over the course of the three day tournament.

Between July 2020 and April 2022 the only people in this story who were weighing on my mind in any way were Chris Lipe, Geoff Thevenot, Peter Armstrong, Becky Dyer, Dave Wiegand, Conrad Bassett-Bouchard, and Jesse Day.

Because of their own narcissism and/or intentional deception, Evans, Jennifer, and Lola have read what little they know about my actions as being about them, when they were not at all.

I will not simply go on the defensive, rebutting their false story but allowing it to remain the primary narrative. The Scrabble world needs to know the real story of what has happened from 2017 to 2022, the story that they are doing everything possible to distract you from and get you to disbelieve by sabotaging my character.

The rest of this document is structured as (A) an overview, (B) a statement about who I really am, (C) the full story of my interactions with Evans’s, Jennifer’s, and Lola’s circles from 2017 to 2022, (D) a corroborated summary of what really happened in my relationship with Lola, (E) a point-by-point rebuttal of Evans’s statement, and (F) a point-by-point rebuttal of Jennifer’s statement.

(A) Overview

Evans Clinchy, who was already predisposed not to like me for years previously, has hated me ever since early 2017, precipitated by communications that I sent to Jennifer Lee (now Jennifer Clinchy) in the month before the 2017 New Orleans Scrabble tournament. I have fully admitted to those communications and made them public to the world, and I accept full accountability for them. If he chooses to hate me for the rest of his life, I have earned that, and I have no problem with it.

However, he and Jennifer have turned a personal grudge into a Scrabble political matter over the last six years, using their grudge as a justification for repeatedly breaking the rules of NASPA for literally every tournament they directed under its banner from 2017 to 2019 in ways that unleveled the playing field, not only by excluding me and other players they did not like, but also by arbitrarily favoring their friends in their registration processes. Literally everyone who signed up for their tournaments using their secret pre-registration process was complicit in breaking the rules, including WESPA President Chris Lipe.

There are a small number of CSW Scrabble players in North America, although among them are many of the continent’s best players. Furthermore, there are few tournaments which include many of those top players, and since 2017 the events run by Evans and Jennifer have been a substantial percentage of those tournaments. Because of how our Scrabble rating systems work, players who have more opportunities to play in events like these have a significant advantage when it comes to getting into the top tiers of the rating system or maintaining such positions, which helps with qualifying for major international events such as the Alchemist Cup.

Evans and Jennifer broke the rules with the specific intention of keeping me out of tournaments, and I am not the only one who was disadvantaged by their tactics. Other top CSW players who were not part of their “in group,” such as Jason Keller, also had fewer opportunities to earn sufficient qualifying ratings for events such as the Alchemist Cup. In short, Evans and Jennifer—and all of their friends who used their secret pre-registrations—cheated.

Then Evans and Jennifer created a renegade association, poaching players, directors, and events from NASPA’s small CSW scene. They have continued unprofessional, unethical, and bullying tactics, and by making themselves leaders of this organization they are avoiding accountability to anyone.

Since early 2017, Evans has repeatedly disparaged me to many members of the Scrabble community, while they also have done many underhanded things in a preemptive attempt to keep me out of their tournaments and to frame me for harassment. The irony of this is that I have had no desire to play in their tournaments and was making no attempt to do so. They are living under a paranoid and narcissistic delusion that I am presenting any sort of problem for them and that I want to be in their lives in any way, while I am doing my best to ignore them, work around them, and get what CSW Scrabble games I can against the rest of the best players, both in North America and around the world.

I approached the situation as an investigative reporter. I dealt with them to the bare minimum necessary in the handful of times we played at tournaments in 2017 and 2018. I used my connections and relationships with the rest of the Scrabble community to collect evidence of what was happening. I blew the whistle on them by publishing The Crucible and The Fallout in July 2020, and I have received a great deal of blowback from them and their friends in the two years since that time, blowback which included doubling down on building an entirely false case that I have harassed them.

You can rightly criticize the wording of my communications to Jennifer in December 2016 to January 2017. I still believe that they were well-intentioned attempts to create a dissolution of tension before we met at the New Orleans tournament room, a dissolution that would have avoided the last six and a half years of agony for all of us, and I also accept that they were ineffective and had terribly unfortunate unintended consequences of pushing Evans over the edge and contributing to bad behavior by him and Jennifer ever since then. They are also the only thing I have done wrong in this entire story.

Evans and Jennifer have also dragged my April 2020 Facebook interaction with Darrell Day into this case as an attempt to drive up hatred toward me and get you to believe the outlandish story they try to weave about me. The situation with Darrell Day is irrelevant to this story,2 and furthermore it is one which NASPA has already had a hearing about. I have accepted NASPA’s ruling with no complaints, and I learned my lesson from the event. It is the only time in my life that I have expressed violent thoughts about a person toward that person, and it is something that I will not do again.

I have had essentially no personal interaction with Evans and Jennifer since the end of 2016. The very limited number of times that we were in the same place and spoke at all have been fully documented in The Crucible and The Fallout. Also documented there were all written communications we have had in the time period, with the only exception being a few organizational emails for Seattle area CSW Scrabble get-togethers that the two of them were simply cc’ed on.3 Not only that, but I have had zero interaction or communication with Evans or Jennifer since the publication of those blog posts in July 2020. In fact, the ceasing of communication with them goes back significantly earlier than that. The last time I ever emailed them personally was September 17, 2018, in response to Jennifer’s email banning me from the Hood River tournament. The last time I ever copied them on an email was March 26, 2019, and the last time we ever were in the same place was July 17, 2018, at the wedding of Chris Lipe and Randi Goldberg in Aruba.

Since the publication of the blog, the only way that my life has even tangentially intersected theirs was when I played in a handful of online Scrabble club sessions on the Woogles platform at the club with their organization’s name in January and February 2021. I never played with or interacted with Evans or Jennifer at those sessions; the two of them were not even present at most of the sessions I was at. I was talkative in the club chatroom at some of those sessions, and my chats were entirely about the joy of words. I only mentioned Evans once, in response to a question from director Becky Dyer. That was enough for them to decide to ban me from their online club into perpetuity. I never responded to their communication about the banning and never went back to the online club.

Since the ban from their online club on February 26, 2021, there is literally no story of anything between us. Everything that they have done since then, and that they claim has happened since then, is simply a product of their gossipping about and badmouthing me together with their friends and building a story in their own heads.

I am far more sympathetic to Lola, and it is extremely sad that she has gotten caught up in this mess. I have done absolutely nothing wrong toward Lola, and I have never had any ill will or anger toward her for a moment of my life. However, she has badly misunderstood the situation between her and me and has decided completely unnecessarily to submit an easily disprovable assassination of my character as part of this report. I am charitably interpreting that her point of view was that it was necessary to lie about me because she really felt in danger, rather than interpreting her actions as a malicious attempt to destroy my life. However, it does not change the fact that her testimony is entirely false, which I will show with no hard feelings to her. It is my sincere hope that she will recognize the truth of my recounting of our history and recant her statement, as I have a massive amount of material evidence to prove what I say. I have some optimism that unlike Evans and Jennifer she has enough maturity to admit that she was wrong and to do the right thing.

I would like to take a little time to talk about who I really am, and what I have really been doing in the Scrabble world for the last six years.

(B) Who I Am

I have been playing in Scrabble tournaments for two decades after thirteen years of competitive chess. Competitive board games have been a large part of my life for three quarters of it.

I have excelled not only in chess and Scrabble but also in mathematics and computer programming, all fields which require a large amount of objectivity and unbiased thinking. I was also a math teacher for many years, and one of my passions was teaching my students how to use statistics and data analysis to overcome their biases and see the world more objectively. One of my biggest political concerns is the fight for free and fair elections, defeating gerrymandering and other forms of electoral corruption and malfeasance that undermine our ability to choose our leaders fairly.

I have zero history of violent behavior in my life. I have never been in a fight with another human being. I have never punched or kicked or otherwise hit someone, with the exception of sparring sessions in Tae Kwon Do classes that I took when I was under ten years old. I have never even held a gun, let alone fired or owned one, and I do not ever plan to.

The only weapons that I would use on this community or any other are truth-bombs. I believe in holding our political leaders accountable for their behavior and speaking the uncomfortable truths.

I have never been anything but a positive social force in person at any Scrabble tournament I have ever attended, and I have always been well-behaved in every tournament room. Furthermore, since I played at the 2011 World Championships, I have been an advocate of unifying our tournament play in North America with the rest of the world by getting our continent to play with the CSW lexicon as the rest of the world does. I worked behind the scenes with John Chew in advance of the 2012 US National Championship to ensure a good and fair registration system for our first CSW event at Nationals and to increase the likelihood of the event happening, which it did. At the tournament, I took photos of every one of my opponents and shared stories about all of them on social media in celebration of the most international event that had ever happened at US Nationals.

When leading Singaporean player Weibin Toh moved to Washington DC, I picked him up at the airport and brought him to his domicile even though we had never met in person before. We became fast friends and I introduced him into our small DC CSW community.

I have played Scrabble on four continents, including representing the USA at multiple World Championships, at the Can-Am Championship, and at the King’s Cup in Bangkok, and through the game I have befriended people all over the world.

I have been immensely successful in tournaments, including often being ranked in the top 5 or 10 players in North America and earning the Grandmaster title from the Association of British Scrabble Players. Since I became a top ranked player, when I have played tournament Scrabble anywhere in the world with any group other than the close friends of Evans and Jennifer, I have been treated graciously and enthusiastically by the tournament organizers and by the locals at the event. Organizers have told me that my name on the registration list has increased the prestige of their events and helped draw in other players. In fact, organizer Peggy Fehily said just that at my most recent tournament, the 2022 Continental Scrabble Championship in Berlin.

I know my worth, and I only want to play Scrabble not just where I am allowed but where I am valued. I have zero interest in trying to fight my way into any subset of the community that does not value me. Just the opposite, the cost of disrespect to me is you losing my support and advocacy for your tournaments.

In addition to supporting many tournament directors and events, I have been influential in pulling many North American Scrabble players into the CSW fold over the years. Among those have been Scott Appel, Guy Ingram, Barry Keith, Jennifer Clinchy, and Lola McKissen.

For a few years I ran an unofficial CSW club in the DC area, and I also pulled together the CSW players in the Seattle area for casual Scrabble get-togethers when I made business trips there between 2014 and 2017, before I was living in the area. I met Bharath Balakrishnan at a tournament in Chicagoland in 2017, and when I learned he was in Seattle, I introduced him to the other CSW players there, which led to him becoming part of that community.

Many of the people in Evans’s and Jennifer’s circles over the last several years are people with whom I had longtime friendships, predating Evans and Jennifer running any Scrabble events, and Jennifer even being in our Scrabble scene. When Evans and Jennifer started disparaging me, I tried to give these mutual friends the benefit of the doubt and continue good relationships and Scrabble get-togethers with them, though it became more awkward over the last few years. One of the primary reasons I wrote The Crucible and The Fallout was to try to clear my name and the air with these people. I perhaps naively assumed that when they saw the truth of the story, they would recognize that I had done nothing wrong and would want to play Scrabble with me.

When a number of those people doubled down by criticizing or otherwise disrespecting me on account of anything to do with the story between Evans and Jennifer and me, I started instituting a one-strike-you’re-out policy. If people were going to act as if I did anything wrong beyond two poorly worded texts and two poorly worded emails between December 2016 and January 2017 or as if I was anything other than the victim of bullying since that time, I wasn’t going to waste my time seeking their approval.

I worked around this whole situation as best as I could by traveling far and wide to get as many CSW Scrabble games against strong players as I could. While I have been living in the Pacific Northwest since 2018, this has included flying to tournaments in San Francisco, CA; Chicagoland, IL; Austin, TX; New Orleans, LA; Albany, NY; Montclair, NJ; Niagara Falls, ON; Kingston, ON; Bordeaux, France; Berlin, Germany; Edinburgh, Scotland; Milton Keynes, England; Torquay, England; Warrington, England; Bristol, England; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; and Bangkok, Thailand. I have been extremely blessed that for much of this time I have had lucrative and flexible enough jobs that have afforded me the resources to be able to do so much travel and get many tournament games around the world.

But it has been exhausting, in terms of energy, time, and finances, that I have often had to get on a plane for nine or more hours simply to be able to play the game I love. It has also been saddening and frustrating that it has been so difficult to get local games because of the ways that Evans and Jennifer have poisoned the well, even though the Pacific Northwest has one of the strongest concentrations of high ranked CSW players in North America, including Dave Wiegand, Peter Armstrong, Conrad Bassett-Bouchard in Portland; Chris Grubb in Seattle; and Jesse Matthews and Dean Saldanha in Vancouver.

I have never wanted to play in a single tournament with directors who treat me terribly. All that I have ever wanted in the Pacific Northwest Scrabble scene is to be able to play casual games with many of the great players in the area, if they are willing to treat me respectfully and not act as if I am a bad person because two people in their community are mistreating me.

The treatment I have received from this community (and from a few people who live further away but are also closely connected with Evans and Jennifer) after I published The Crucible and The Fallout stands in stark contrast to what I have received from just about every other corner of the Scrabble universe. They have made me lose all desire to play Scrabble or be friends with any of these people. They have been complicit in bullying, and now I have no desire other than showing how terribly this subset of the Scrabble community has treated me, in hopes of warning everyone else that these bullies are an absolute poison for the larger world of competitive Scrabble.

I believe that the ways I shine a light on this are for the betterment of the rest of the Scrabble world, regardless of what happens to me.

(C) The Full Story

When I saw Evans and Jennifer sign up for the January 2017 New Orleans tournament, I suspected they were dating, and I emailed Jennifer on December 19, 2016, asking for a discussion before the tournament, in an attempt to avoid the awkward situation of us seeing each other for the first time in several months across the board at the Scrabble tournament with the tension of our personal relationships looming. She ignored my email, and I became angry and sad. I sent two text messages over the next week, asking for a reply to the email, and she continued not to respond. I sent one more email on January 5th, 2017, asserting that if she did not meet with me beforehand, I would speak my mind while we were sitting across the board.

That was eight days before the tournament. I then calmed myself and found peace and closure on my own. I did not contact her again prior to us sitting down to play in the second round, and before the game the only thing I said to her was “Let’s play Scrabble.”

Jennifer was visibly upset when I played her, and so was Evans when we played a day later. Evans refused to shake my hand or talk to me, and he rudely jumped up and down shouting “YES!” in the middle of the tournament room after winning a challenge.

I recognize that my communications, which ended more than a week before the tournament, contributed to their emotional reactions in the tournament room. I accept full responsibility for that. I did not misbehave in any way in the tournament room, and I did not do anything to exacerbate the situation.

For the next six years, I have done nothing untoward to Evans and Jennifer. I saw them only rarely at Scrabble tournaments in 2017 and 2018, and I did not interact with them any more than was necessary to play our Scrabble games. Meanwhile, Evans frequently disparaged me to other Scrabble players, which I have ample evidence to show.4 Evans and Jennifer also started organizing tournaments, first a one-off in Tennessee in August 2017 and then numerous one-days and holiday weekend events in the Pacific Northwest beginning in September 2017. I already wrote in the overview about how they broke NASPA rules for every tournament they ran since August 2017, and how it impacted me and other players. I did not, however, say or do anything about this until July 2020.

I moved to Seattle in April 2018, for a position at a company I had been working at since 2013. I had been making business trips there since 2014 and had already organized Scrabble get-togethers with Walker Willingham, Judy Romann, Chris Grubb, Bharath Balakrishnan, and Jesse Matthews when I had been in the area. In the month before I moved, I learned from both Chris Grubb and Walker Willingham that Evans had been badmouthing me to the Seattle area players and that he and Jennifer had specifically told the other players not to invite me to casual Scrabble get-togethers.5

I explained the entire back-story to Walker, who had been sending out emails to organize events. I even showed him the emails which had upset Jennifer a year and a half earlier. He agreed with me that this was not a reasonable grounds to exclude anyone. Walker decided to invite everyone via email to the next Seattle Scrabble get-together, and Evans immediately responded to him, “Was this a slip up?”, browbeating him for copying me on the email. Walker attempted to make peace and stand up for inclusivity in our small Seattle area CSW Scrabble community, and Evans and Jennifer chose to stop responding and coming to the get-togethers entirely. Walker and I shared email duties on sending out invites for get-togethers, and we continued copying Evans and Jennifer on those emails for a while, but we eventually removed them from the cc-list because of unresponsiveness.

At one of the get-togethers in Spring 2018, Judy Romann told me that she had asked Jennifer in the restroom a few weeks earlier what the problem was with playing Scrabble with me. Jennifer told her that she did not have a problem with me, but Evans did. This corresponded with my experience whenever we crossed paths at tournaments between March 2017 and May 2018.6 Things were always civil between me and Jennifer, and we played Scrabble with no problems. However, Evans always refused to speak to me, refused to make eye contact, and showed a massive amount of anger in his body language. He would also look away, turn his head down, or leave the room as soon as he saw me in a tournament room.

The last time I was ever in the same place as Evans and Jennifer was the wedding of Chris Lipe and Randi Goldberg in Aruba in July 2018. A couple days before the wedding I introduced my date Emily, who was not a Scrabble player, to a group of Scrabble players who were playing a boardgame in the lobby of the resort. Evans was present, and Jennifer was not. Evans insulted my date by refusing to stand up or even look in her direction or say hello. He simply muttered his name in a barely audible voice when it was his turn to make an introduction. I had no interaction with Evans on the trip.

At the wedding reception, I did not attempt to interact with Jennifer or Evans at all. I stayed at the bar area, and at the dance floor, and at a table on the opposite side from where Jennifer was sitting. At a moment when my date left to go to the bathroom, Jennifer walked across the reception toward me and attempted to start a conversation with me. I was uncomfortable with this and simply gave a one line reply before she left. This was the last time we ever interacted in person, and we have never been in the same place since that day, July 18, 2018.

Jennifer was later elected to the NASPA Advisory Board and attempted to change NASPA rules to give her and Evans more leverage to keep people out of tournaments.

In September 2018, I sent Evans an entry fee via Paypal for the 2019 Hood River tournament, the only time I have ever submitted an entry to one of their tournaments. I also sent him a three sentence courteous email notifying him. Later that same day, Evans refunded my entry and Jennifer sent an email back to me.

In the email she gave as a rationale that my January 5th, 2017 email included “a written threat from you that you would take action to intentionally cause me emotional distress at a Scrabble tournament in the playing room.” I understood and accepted that she saw it that way, but she was wrong about my intention. I was not trying to cause her emotional distress; I was attempting to alleviate my own emotional distress. Furthermore, my preference, as I had made clear in that email, and the one from three weeks earlier, was to have a discussion outside of the tournament room, specifically to avoid embarrassment.

Ironically, she also accused me of disparaging her. I had been doing no such thing, but her partner had been disparaging me for nearly two years.

On September 17, 2018, I replied with a brief email apologizing for my specific offending words in the January 5th, 2017 email. I respected their decision not to allow me to enter the tournament, and I specifically said I would not escalate to NASPA. I did not ask for a response nor anything else from them. The entirety of this email correspondence is in The Fallout, along with a longer draft of the response email that is contemporaneous evidence that my intention in signing up for the tournament all along was simply to open a line of communication and allow them to address their grievance with me. (Figures 37-38)

I never attempted to sign up for another tournament of theirs again. The apology email is the last time I personally communicated to them in any way.

In July 2019, nearly a year after being denied entry to Hood River, I began to write the story of the trauma I had already been experiencing for the last few years. Most of it was written in Spring 2020. The first draft was for my own therapeutic purposes, just to get out what was bothering me so much. However, I knew from the beginning that I needed to tell the mutual friends of Evans, Jennifer, and me some of my story, in hopes of salvaging my relationships with them.

I had not committed to publishing anything to the world at that time. I thought I might just send the story to a particular circle of friends. However, Evans and Jennifer took several more political actions within our Scrabble community over the next year that convinced me that the entire Scrabble world needed to hear my story.

At the end of 2019, Evans and Jennifer left NASPA and created a renegade association. They enlisted friends in other parts of the country to run tournaments under their new banner. I have consistently advocated for unity in our Scrabble world and criticized WGPO for forming nearly a decade earlier. A third organization was a bigger step in the wrong direction. Furthermore, Evans and Jennifer were attempting to put themselves in a position where they did not have to answer to anyone. They could continue unethical and vindictive practices against other Scrabble players unabated.

I also suspected, based on the rumor mill, that they intended to foist all of the tournaments using the CSW dictionary in North America away from NASPA, and to get recognition from WESPA as another official association for North America. If they got their way, I would potentially have no tournaments to play on my entire continent. This was the reason that I decided that I needed to go public. This was no longer just a personal vendetta, but something that impacted the entirety of North American competitive Scrabble.

While I was preparing the blog, Evans and Jennifer escalated even further against me and gave me another justification for going public. Shortly after the 2020 Alchemist Cup was canceled due to the pandemic, they stepped in and ran an online tournament they called the Virtual World Cup. I had already assured myself qualification for the 2020 Alchemist Cup. Evans and Jennifer used a different qualification system for the Virtual World Cup, but by their formula I also should have qualified for team USA at that event. However, they intentionally bypassed me and selected Dave Wiegand for the team, even though he had a lower qualifying rating than I.

My last direct communication to them had been an unqualified apology (Figure 37) more than a year and a half earlier, and now they were depriving me of opportunities to play against many of the world’s best players at what was—in the eyes of most competitive Scrabblers—a prestigious international Scrabble event. Evans’s and Jennifer’s grudge was no longer just a personal vendetta, but something that impacted the entirety of international competitive Scrabble.

I did not attack or criticize them in any personal ways in The Crucible and The Fallout. I told what happened leading up to and at the 2017 New Orleans tournament in the most charitable and fair way that I could. The criticisms that I leveled against them were entirely political in nature, for repeated and intentional actions that they took continuously for a period of three and a half years, (from 2017 to mid-2020 when I published the blog.) These actions harmed my reputation and deprived me—and not only me—of equal access to Scrabble games with many of the world’s best players. Meanwhile, the only things that I had done wrong were two emails and two text messages that were too harshly worded in a three week period between December 19, 2016 and January 5, 2017.

Most readers of my blog had the right takeaways from my story. The positive feedback far outnumbered the negative feedback, and even though I didn’t write about the Virtual World Cup, others connected the dots and drew the proper conclusions about it. (Figure 1) Almost all of the criticism I received was from friends of Evans and Jennifer, simply because they did not want to see their friends and themselves as being the bad guys, in defiance of where all of the facts pointed.

I had a phone call in July 2020 with Conrad Bassett-Bouchard, shortly after I published the blog. He was sympathetic and civil, telling me that I would always be welcome at his tournaments. Furthermore, he confided in me that he was soon moving to Portland, Oregon, close to where Dave Wiegand and Peter Armstrong were living. He even encouraged me to move to the same area so that we could all play Scrabble together. This was the last conversation we had.

However, I soon got word that Conrad was behaving differently behind my back, also attempting to sabotage my reputation and to support unethical things that Evans, Jennifer, and friends were doing to exclude me.

At the end of October 2020, I moved from Seattle to Portland, Oregon, (long before Lola did.) My primary motivations were not related to Scrabble. I have a close personal friend here who was my neighbor on the East Coast, and we are neighbors again. This was during the pre-vaccine time of the pandemic, and the weather was still bad for many months, so I did not rush to get in-person Scrabble games.

In late 2020, I played Scrabble on Woogles in Laurie Cohen’s Wednesday club and Mike Johnson’s Thursday club. My strongest competition was from Brian Bowman, Geoff Thevenot, Peter Armstrong, and Becky Dyer.

In January 2021, I had a schedule change and was looking for more games at other times. I started playing at the Woogles club affiliated with Evans’s and Jennifer’s association. I did not want to support their association, but none of these games were part of official rated tournaments. It was just casual online play. The reason I went to their club was to get games specifically with Geoff Thevenot, Peter Armstrong, and Becky Dyer, who were some of my best competitors available and the directors of the club.

I played as an evener at the end of one Tuesday session and then in two or three full Saturday sessions with no problems. The directors welcomed me cordially, paired me, and put my results on their organization’s website after each session. I talked in the chatroom only about the joy of words. Evans and Jennifer were not at these sessions.

On February 23, 2021, I played a full Tuesday session at their Woogles club for the only time. Before the first round, director Becky Dyer said the count of players was off. I checked the listing of players in the room and did not see Evans’s or Jennifer’s name. Jennifer did not come until later, but someone else in the chatroom suggested that Evans was there. I made a one line comment, “I do not see Evans. Is he blocking me?” Becky said that she did not see Evans either, but soon thereafter another player confirmed that he was there. (The website was still in its alpha stages, so it is possible that whatever blocking or chat opt-out mechanism was in place was not fully working yet.) I played the entire night uneventfully. The rest of my chat was just about the joy of words.

On Friday, February 26, 2021, I received an email from info@cocoscrabble.org banning me from their online club into perpetuity. (Figure 2) No justification for this banning was given, and no appeal process was offered. The letter implied that I was a harasser and ended with “Note that directors for the CoCo have discretion to consider all relevant information for decisions of this nature, not just events that happen during club sessions.” The names at the end of the email were the three directors Becky Dyer, Geoff Thevenot, and Peter Armstrong.

I never responded to the email and never attempted to go to the club again. Cesar verified that I did not do anything untoward in the online club, and he was unhappy with their organization using his Woogles platform for this kind of inappropriate exclusion. He told me later that when he brought this up with the Woogles team, Conrad argued vociferously that Woogles should not do anything to stop this organization from excluding me. Furthermore, Mina emailed Becky Dyer protesting what had been done, and Becky sent back a nasty and unprofessional email, asserting that the decision was confidential and that anyone who questioned it was disparaging their organization. (Becky’s email is quoted in full in Figure 2.)

By the end of April 2021, I was vaccinated against COVID-19 and ready to seek out in person Scrabble games again. I did not reach out either to Conrad, because of the ways he had been behaving behind my back, or to Peter, because his name was on this offensive letter banning me from the online club. Instead, I reached out to Dave Wiegand, the only top CSW Scrabble player in Portland who had not mistreated me, as far as I knew.

We played twice, in May and July 2021. On the first occasion we just played Scrabble and didn’t talk about much else. The second time, I brought up with Dave how the other Portland Scrabble players, particularly Conrad, were treating me. Dave was mostly unhappy to talk about it, but I did learn from him that Conrad had decided that he did not want to meet with or play with me at all anymore, not just in tournaments but at casual get-togethers too. I pointed out that this contradicted the last conversation I had with Conrad, and Dave said it was because of something that Conrad had learned about me more recently. Dave claimed not to know what it was. I suspected that Conrad’s change in attitude about me was related to his friendship with Lola.

I reached out to Dave two more times looking for games in preparation for the 2022 New Orleans tournament, but he ignored both my November 4th and December 9th texts. When I saw him again over the board at the New Orleans tournament on January 16th, 2022, he at first played dumb as if he hadn’t seen my texts. But when I asked him point blank if he was intentionally ignoring my texts, he admitted it. He then criticized me for alienating so many other people and attempted to mock my Scrabble results, saying “what have you ever won?”

Dave’s behavior was victim blaming. I had zero interaction of any kind with Conrad since our last friendly conversation in July 2020, when he had encouraged me to come to Portland to play Scrabble with him, but I was blamed for alienating him.

—

I must rewind to tell the story of my relationship with Lola. Lola and I had a very friendly relationship from a distance over text messages, phone calls, and video chats starting in late 2019. Our relationship became romantic as we made a trip to Puerto Rico together on March 10th-17th, 2020. For more than a month afterward we were romantic from a distance, until I temporarily moved in with her in Salt Lake City from April 25th to May 29th. Then she traveled back to Seattle with me and lived there starting on May 30th. On June 14th we decided the relationship had run its course, and she flew back to Salt Lake City the next day. We remained good friends and continued to socialize frequently over Google Meets with other friends and to have close conversations over text for more than a month after that, up to July 23rd. On July 24th, she decided that she needed to create more distance from me, and she was very direct in communicating that to me over email. We had a civil and kind conversation in which I respected her need for space.

Our relationship and her state of mind about it at the time was nothing like what her statement says. Furthermore, it is strange that she would submit a statement with so many lies, as there is a huge amount in it that I can easily disprove from our text message and email history. However, it is telling that the statement is addressed to the Woogles team and to WGPO, and not to NASPA, which was the sanctioning organization of the only tournament we were both at, the 2022 New Orleans event. My best guess is that she did not intend to submit this as part of an incident report, in which I would have an opportunity to read it and disprove the massive amount of falsehood in it. I think she intended the statement for behind-the-scenes consumption by people on the Woogles team and in WGPO in hopes that they would take other action to keep me away from those spheres. However, Evans and Jennifer then submitted it as part of this incident report.

I am highly sympathetic to Lola’s situation. I understand why she felt that she needed to lie. There was a period of time from early 2020 until mid-June when I exposed a lot of my inner trauma to her. I admitted many angry thoughts to her. None of it was directed at her, and none of it was a threat to do anything. It was simply off-the-cuff venting.7 Lola received the agony of my trauma in a supportive, sympathetic, and loving way, but it was a lot to bear.

She also took an active role in my grieving and healing process by helping me with my writing project that eventually became The Crucible and The Fallout, a project she knew about long before we moved in together. It was our plan all along that when I went to live with her in SLC I would work on my writing while she worked on her day job.

Lola is the only person besides me who read the first draft of the writing, and in so doing she did a large amount of emotional labor and took on a lot of my world view. She was my first editor, helping me figure out what subset of the story I needed to tell my Scrabble community, and making concrete suggestions for how to reshape and reorder parts to communicate it more effectively.

I published the blog a month after we stopped dating, on July 14th and 15th, 2020. We were still on very good terms, and she gave me positive feedback about it soon afterward. On my Facebook posts about it, she made numerous comments that were highly sympathetic and supportive of my situation, and she defused several of the criticisms that detractors wrote.

I do not believe that her opinion about any of this had changed when she said that she needed to create more distance on July 24th. Her reasons were unrelated. However, not long afterward, her opinion about me and the situation with other Scrabble players began to change, though I did not learn about this until almost the end of 2020.

An extremely unfortunate thing happened a week or two after Lola and I agreed to increase distance. A woman from Maryland who was in a Google Meet social group with us heard a rumor from a man named Kenny I had previously socialized with in the Washington DC area.

In December 2014, Kenny had sent me a text message out of the blue threatening violence on me and alleging that I had taken advantage of woman named Sarah, with whom I had been in a consensual sexual relationship over the period of several months. I immediately forwarded Kenny’s message to Sarah. She told him I had done nothing to hurt her and confirmed that with me via email and a phone call. (Figures 3 & 4) Then Kenny changed his story, saying it did not matter that I hadn’t done it, because he knew that I had done things to other women. He never named another woman and continued spreading vicious rumors, even though the only woman he ever mentioned explicitly denied the charge. I have had no connection with the man since 2014, but he was still spreading these lies six years later.

Some time right around the end of July or beginning of August 2020, this Maryland woman suddenly blocked me on Facebook and made at least one Facebook post spreading these same lies that Kenny had been saying in 2014. Because this Maryland woman had been part of my Google Meet social group with several Scrabble players, including Lola, Mina Le, and Cesar del Solar, a number of them saw a Facebook post including this hoax story. I thought there was a good chance that Lola saw this and that it might have affected her view of me.

I had been respecting Lola’s wishes, and we had no communication from the end of July until December 2020. She blocked me on Facebook at some point in between. In early December, Mina organized a group to do an online reading of a play, and both Lola and I volunteered to participate. Mina and Cesar were concerned because they knew that she had blocked me on Facebook, and during Woogles work Lola had expressed to Cesar being upset about my incident with Darrell Day.

On Mina’s recommendation, I emailed Lola on December 11, checking to make sure it was going to be okay for us both to participate in the play reading. Lola got back to me quickly, and we had a civil email exchange. She communicated that her concern was not the 2014 hoax story but screenshots she had seen of my Facebook messages to Darrell Day. (Figure 28)

I had told Lola immediately about the incident report that was filed to NASPA for the comments I made to Darrell Day when I received it on April 17th, 2020. (Figure 22) At the time I was feeling self-righteous in my anger and was tempted to write a response that would have fanned the flames and likely given me a bigger punishment. Lola advised me on how to edit down what I said and be more circumspect. NASPA had not sent me the screenshots of the comments, and neither Lola nor I had seen them at the time. She was only going on my description of the incident and the one that John Karris had sent me from NASPA.

I had forwarded everything I had received from NASPA to Lola back in April 2020. However, when she later saw the screenshots, she was shocked and upset. I believe she felt guilty about helping me with my defense to that incident report, and this perhaps led to her feeling guilty about helping me with the splenetic.net blog too. I think she also might have felt deceived by me, although there was no intentional deceit on my part. I had recounted what had happened as best as I could remember at the time, and I myself never saw the screenshots until this incident report was filed almost exactly two years later, in April 2022.

Lola ended her December 11, 2020 email with: (Figure 28)

I am not really interested in talking on the phone to you at this time. I will however unblock you as to minimize weird confusion in things like us both commenting on a friend’s post. I am also okay with you emailing me when you feel it’s necessary, like now.

We are not enemies, and you don’t need to worry about things like the play reading group, or Woogles, or tournaments if that ever is a thing again. We are also not friends.

We continued the email exchange with a few more messages that were just about communicating that there was no intentional deception on my part when it came to the Darrell Day comments, and we both ended by wishing the other one well. That was the last time we ever emailed each other.

She unblocked me on Facebook as she said she would, and we both participated in Mina’s play reading a couple weeks later with no issues. We never at this time or later had any interaction on Facebook, other than making a couple of comments on Mina’s posts about the December play reading and one later play reading in February that we also participated in.8

Lola then reinitiated communication with me by gifting me a subscription to Will Anderson’s Twitch channel on February 12, 2021. I sent her a quick text thanking her for the subscription and saying I didn’t know what it did. She first explained what it was, and then it turned into a catch-up conversation between us with eight screenfuls of text. (Figure 29) We told each other about our lives and families, and she mentioned that she was living in Florida and going to be a digital nomad later that year.9 She also told me that she was planning on starting her own Twitch broadcasting the very next day. She saw that I was not already following her, so she gave me her username and told me the time of the broadcast so that I could tune in.

I watched her debut broadcast on February 13, 2021. She was nervous. I participated actively in the chat, always from a perspective of trying to be supportive and calming, but I perceived after a while that my involvement probably made her more anxious, so I did not tune into any more of her broadcasts after that.

As far as I knew, we were on relatively good terms at that point, even though we didn’t keep up communicating. The last time I ever texted her was on May 2nd, 2021, because it was looking like I might make a business trip to Salt Lake City. Last I had known she was not living in SLC, but I just figured I would check if she was in the area and interested in meeting up. She did not respond to that text, and I made no attempts to follow up. (Figure 30)

Lola was out of my life and out of my mind for the rest of 2021, except for one time she accidentally came into my purview. On August 4th, 2021, my phone Instagram app recommended to me an account of someone I might know. The account showed the name Lola McKissen on the screen. I was surprised to see it, because I knew that Lola had already blocked me on Instagram long before, but this was a new account with a single photo. It showed the view from her apartment and mentioned that she was living in Portland, Oregon. I sent a quick message: “I don’t want to be intrusive, but Instagram just recommended this account. You’re living in Portland? Welcome to town!”

A day later she wrote a response:

Thanks. With my childhood history, I am not really mentally stable enough to have friends with bullying/anger issues. I just get sucked in and overly identify and placate and get stressed out. The last time I tried, you kinda took over my Twitch chat and made that too stressful for me. I understand that your intent was to be supportive and friendly, and my reaction is MY crazy. I really hope you are doing well, and that you can respect and accept that I can not have you in my life (with the understanding we’re going to overlap over the years on mutual friends and Scrabble.)

I hearted her response and wrote back, “Thank you for what you said. I wish you peace.” She hearted that response, and that was the end of the conversation. (Figure 31) I did not follow the Instagram account and did not look back at it again.10 Lola and I never had any contact again until we crossed paths at the New Orleans Scrabble tournament in mid-January 2022.

I still think highly of Lola, and I was completely fine with not having her in my life. Going into the New Orleans tournament, I wanted to have one conversation with her, but it was not about her and me at all. It was about Conrad.

I recruited Lola for the Woogles team when we were living together. I knew she was an experienced front-end developer and that Cesar needed someone with those skills for the website. She began work on the team while we were still dating, and I had known that she had become friendly with Conrad while they collaborated on the user interface. I suspected that she was in regular communication with him now that she was living in Portland and that she might have told him something about me, such as the 2014 hoax story, that explained why he did not want to see me. This was far from my highest priority at the tournament, but I figured if a good opportunity for a conversation came along, I would ask.

When I was walking back into the tournament hotel from lunch in the middle of the first day, a woman who was walking in the same direction as me said hello. Lola had changed her hair color and was dressed considerably differently than I had ever seen her before. It took me a few seconds to recognize her. As we walked to the tournament room, we exchanged a few pleasantries, and I asked how her tournament games were going.

We had one extended conversation. It probably happened later on the first day. We were both in the hallway outside the tournament room, and I asked her if we could talk for a bit. She agreed and pointed to some tables that were further down the hallway, away from the tournament room and suggested we go there. So we sat at one of them and talked for about 10 minutes.

I asked about her family. She thanked me for asking and gave me an update. Then I asked her if she had told Conrad about this 2014 hoax story or something else that might have caused him not to like me. She admitted that Conrad was her closest friend since she moved to Portland. She did not think that she had told him that particular story, though she seemed unsure. However, she did think that things she said about me might have been the last straw for him when it came to me.

We talked about the Pacific Northwest CSW Scrabble situation. She made clear that she still thought Evans and Jennifer were doing the wrong thing by excluding me, but when I pointed out that she was playing with their group and implicitly supporting them, she admitted a bit of hypocrisy. She wanted to get games and that’s where they were.

I then communicated that when she read the first draft of my blog, her initial reaction of “you did nothing wrong, and I hate them for what they did to you” was highly validating for me. I said the fact that she was now effectively part of their group felt like a betrayal. I specified that it was a “light betrayal,” not as bad as I had gotten from other people in Evans’s and Jennifer’s circles who were not communicating with me at all, and that I respected her for still talking to me and being straight with me.

I was not angry at all when I said this, and I did not raise my voice. I was just sad. My silent thoughts were that Lola was not in favor of my exclusion nor intentionally reinforcing it, but her connection with Conrad was contributing to the problem.

Lola did not respond and just got up and walked away. She did not appear distressed, and she did not hurry. I just gathered that the conversation had gotten too heavy and that she did not want to continue anymore, which was fine. I had already gotten the information I wanted about Conrad, which was the main thing to me.

All of our interactions in the tournament room were brief and uneventful. I believe we spoke three times. Once, when we passed by each other in the tournament room, I just thanked her for the longer conversation we had earlier and said we did not need to talk about it anymore. On two occasions, I asked about her tournament results. One of those was again as we passed each other while walking to our boards. The other was shortly after she had finished a game with Guy Ingram. I had walked up to Guy’s side of the board and spent a couple minutes there, mostly talking to Guy and looking at the board, but at one point I turned to Lola and asked how her games in that session had gone. I think Lola and I both said one sentence to each other during the entire time I was talking to Guy.

After those brief interactions there were two other times I saw Lola during the rest of the tournament. Neither of them involved any discussion between us.

The first one was near the end of round 15, the penultimate game on Sunday. I had finished my game and was walking away from the tournament room, toward the front of the hotel and the exits to outside. I was intending to just step outside and get some fresh air between rounds, but I came upon an unexpected situation. The setup in this hallway had changed since the last time I had noticed it. A TV had been set up along the wall to my right, and it was showing the live Twitch broadcast of the dramatic conclusion of Austin Shin’s 477-470 comeback victory over Puneet Sharma. Furthermore, both a table and a tree in a pot were set up in the middle of the hallway, in front of the TV and blocking much of the passageway. Lola was standing to the left of the table, looking over it and at the TV on the opposite wall. Dave Wiegand was standing beyond the table, closer to the right wall. He was also intently watching the television.

I wasn’t expecting any of this. I accidentally happened upon both of these players and this TV, and like them I quickly got distracted into watching the gripping game on the TV. Because of the awkwardness of the setup with the table and the tree, I ended up standing next to Lola and also watching the TV from over the table for several minutes. We were about arm’s length away, but there was no physical contact and no conversation. We both just watched the TV and left a few minutes later.

On the final day of the tournament, I won all of my games and finished in first place. Then I went back out to the hallway to do an interview on the livestream with Will Anderson. After that I returned to the tournament room shortly before the prize ceremony, after most of the players had already filed in. Lola was one of the first people I saw as I entered the room. I was not looking for her. She was sitting in one of the front row seats that was closest to the entrance of the room. There were no available seats near her, and I had no intention of sitting in the area. However, I figured I would walk up to her and make a bit of casual conversation before I moved on and sat somewhere else. Specifically, I was going to mention that I had really liked a TV show that she had recommended to me a couple years earlier.

However, I did not get an opportunity to say anything. After I took two steps in her direction, a woman who was sitting next to her and whom I did not know loudly exclaimed, “I’m bleeding and need to go to the bathroom right now!” as she grabbed Lola by the arm and they made a hasty exit. It was highly awkward and unexpected. It was clear to me that this woman thought I was stalking Lola and that she needed to rescue Lola from me.

I was flabbergasted and immediately walked as far away from there as I could, taking a seat in the back far corner of the room for the prize ceremony. Nothing about my interactions with Lola during the entire tournament seemed to justify such an extreme reaction, and that was the first and only sign I received that anything had gone seriously wrong from her point of view. It was also the last time I saw her.

Contrary to what Lola seems to think, I was not stalking her at the tournament. She was barely on my mind for most of it. I had far bigger things to deal with. I was playing the best Scrabble players in the country and in contention the whole way. It took most of my focus and energy to win the tournament. The first time I saw her, she initiated a short casual conversation with me. Later, I wanted to have one conversation to get clarity about the Conrad situation, which she was very willing to have and even suggested a location for. I got the information I needed and was done with the subject. Over the three days of the tournament we talked for just a moment uncontroversially in the tournament room three times. Then we had an accidental (and possibly awkward from her point of view) encounter where we both watched TV silently for a few minutes. And the next time I saw her on the following day, the woman next to her was acting like I was stalking her.

The reaction of the other woman suggested that something was amiss from Lola’s point of view, and I learned more a month later when I attempted to help Cesar with a Woogles issue.

On January 13, 2022, a few days before the New Orleans tournament, Cesar made a Facebook post asking for additional developer support for some Woogles back-end refactoring work that was in my wheelhouse. I wrote to him that day saying that I could help but that it would have to be after the New Orleans tournament. (Figure 5) I was too busy to get involved for nearly a month, and finally on Monday afternoon, February 7th, 2022, I reached out to Cesar to follow up. Cesar asked me to join a “Friends of Woogles” Discord channel that he used for communicating with people who worked on the codebase. I followed his directions and made just a couple of chats in the channel that were directly to Cesar. He pointed me to the locations of the codebase and  the build instructions, and I said I would get to it the next morning. I woke up the next morning to see a message from Cesar: (Figure 5)

Hi Dave, I don’t know if this is going to work. Several people on the core team are too uncomfortable with you contributing to the point that they actually threatened to leave the team. I spoke up for you but it doesn’t seem tenable. Let me know if you want to chat about it

My first response was “I am disgusted.” I talked on the phone with both Cesar and Mina later that day. I learned that Lola had told the Woogles team that at the New Orleans tournament I had said that she betrayed me worse than anyone else in Scrabble and that I had threatened her. This was the opposite of the truth. I specifically said that it was a “light betrayal” and that it was not as bad as what other people had done to me. I had not threatened her in any way, shape, or form. Furthermore, I learned that Conrad and Jesse Day had threatened to leave the team if I was allowed to participate in supporting the Woogles codebase.

My attempt to help Cesar with the Woogles codebase had nothing to do with Lola. It started with a conversation with Cesar before the New Orleans tournament, at a time when I hadn’t had any communication with Lola for nearly half a year. Furthermore, I knew that the back-end work that I was volunteering to assist with was totally separate from the front-end codebase that she worked on. I did not think it would involve any interaction with Lola or Conrad at all. I was merely trying to help my friend Cesar in response to his request for assistance.

I had zero knowledge or expectation that volunteering to do this work would put me in a Discord channel with these other people. It was entirely Cesar’s idea for me to join the channel, because he was just trying to treat me in the normal way he treated anyone who worked on the Woogles codebase.

I was disgusted and angry, not at Lola at all, and not really at Conrad, because I knew he was already a lost cause who had repeatedly been poisonous behind my back. I was angry at Jesse Day, because I had always seen him as a reasonable human being who had treated me well. We had a phone call not long after I published The Crucible and The Fallout in which he called out Evans’s and Jennifer’s poor treatment of me. Now, he was ready to go on a moral crusade against me and resign his position as manager and spokesperson of the Woogles team without even hearing my side of the story.

Part of me wanted to write an email to Jesse and Conrad right then and chew them out for their behavior. But I perceived that reacting angrily would play into the absurd lies that I was harassing a woman. Cesar had told me that he tried to advocate on my behalf to them, but it was both his impression and Mina’s that this group of people were repeatedly poisoning each other’s minds about me. Cesar said he was so disturbed by what he heard from them that he lost sleep about it. Cesar and Mina were also concerned that our country and our Scrabble community had gotten so caught up in this #MeToo fervor that there was no way to move forward with me doing Woogles coding work without looking bad.

It was not even that big a deal to me to work on the Woogles code base. I was just offering to help as a favor to Cesar, and the fact that so much of the team was treating me so poorly right off the bat made me unenthusiastic about supporting the project anyway. So I just told Cesar, forget about it, I won’t work on Woogles, and I ignored Lola’s, Jesse’s, and Conrad’s behavior.

I had no other contact with anyone in Scrabble related to any of this until I received this incident report with statements from Evans, Jennifer, and Lola in April 2022.

(D) Summary of Relationship with Lola

There is a huge amount of text message history between Lola and me. (over 400 screenshots) If you read the whole thing, it clearly shows that nothing she says about the history of our relationship and her attitude toward it at the time is credible. However, a surplus of information is not necessarily the best way to communicate the main ideas. Furthermore, there are parts of our text message history which include private and potentially embarrassing information about unrelated third parties, including both of our sons, and I would feel an obligation to redact such things before releasing a wider swath of our text communication.

Instead, I will give the highlights, which establish what our dynamic was really like and which directly refute many falsehoods in her testimony. Anticipating the potential counterargument that I am cherry-picking our text message history to paint the relationship in a way that was different from the big picture, I proclaim that everything I will show is exactly in line with the big picture. If NASPA has any doubt about this, I am willing to do the work of redacting and releasing the entire text message history to demonstrate that there is no deception in my account.

In early December 2019, Lola and I began talking about the possibility of me visiting Salt Lake City and seeing her, a trip we did not end up scheduling until January 30th-31st 2020. She showed no hesitancy about that possibility and was even proactive in making suggestions about methods of travel and places to stay while I was there. She canceled the trip at the last minute, on January 29, 2020, because she became ill, but she quickly initiated discussions of us making a trip elsewhere together, which resulted in us going to Puerto Rico together from March 10th to 17th. We had a wonderful time together, and afterward our texting became much more romantic. She lobbied hard for me to come to Salt Lake City, including telling me of endorsements of the idea from her family members and friends. We also joked during this period about my proclivity for going on angry rants that she had seen a little bit of while we were together in Puerto Rico.

On April 17th, I contacted her about the incident report regarding the Facebook conversation with Darrell Day, and she helped me compose a calm response which I submitted to NASPA. She was not put off by my anger and was highly sympathetic and supportive.

We lived together in Salt Lake City from April 24th to May 29th. During this time I wrote the vast majority of the first draft of the The Crucible and The Fallout, and Lola was my initial reader and editor. I continued to go on late night angry rants while we lived together, and while this undoubtedly weighed psychically on Lola, she never communicated feeling in danger with me. She only communicated sympathy and support. She felt safe and happy enough with me that she decided to drive back to Seattle with me from May 29th to 31st.

We lived together in Seattle from May 31st to June 15th, at which point we decided the relationship had run its course, and she flew back to Salt Lake City. We continued to be on good terms for over a month after that, through July 23rd. During that time period, she continued to participate in many Google Meet get-togethers with me and my friends to play games and socialize, and we continued to engage in many text conversations. When I published The Crucible and The Fallout on July 14th and 15th, she was highly supportive, both by sending me personal compliments about the blog and by writing comments on my Facebook posts that supported my side and disarmed several of the criticisms of detractors.

On July 24th, she emailed me about needing to create more distance, and we had a respectful conversation. I complied with her wishes and only contacted her again almost half a year later on December 11th, on the recommendation of Mina Le, because of a play reading event that Lola and I were both attending. We had another respectful email conversation in a series of December 11th emails, in which she explicitly said that it was not a problem for us to participate in the same events with mutual friends, such as the play readings and Scrabble tournaments, and that it was also no problem for me to contact her if the reason was important.

I didn’t initiate conversation after that, but she did, on February 12th, 2021, by gifting me a subscription to Will Anderson’s Twitch channel. We then had a lengthy text conversation catching up on each other’s lives, which included her telling me that she was living in Florida while I was already living in Portland, Oregon. She also asked me to watch her Twitch Scrabble broadcast the next day, which I did on that one occasion but never again.

We both participated in Mina Le organized play readings in December 2020 and February 2021 and exchanged friendly texts about the second one.

I thought we were on improving terms, and I texted her on May 2nd, 2021 about a possible business trip to Salt Lake City to see if she was in the area and wanted to meet. When she did not reply, I never texted her again.

The only later non-in-person communication we had was when I accidentally came across a new Instagram account of hers on August 4th, 2021, which showed that she had moved to Portland. I sent her a two sentence message simply welcoming her to town. She sent a longer response, in which she admitted that my interactions with her during the Twitch broadcast had been supportive and friendly and confessed that they were stressful for her because of her own craziness. I replied with a thank you and wished her peace, and I never contacted her in any way again.

Timeline and Index of Corroborating Evidence for Relationship with Lola

Elements in italics in the timeline do not have an associated screenshot, but are simply to make the chronology of the relationship clearer.

When I dated Lola she went by the name BriAnna McKissen, and Lola was an infrequently used nickname. It is my understanding that she now mostly goes by Lola, and in writing this document I have defaulted to using that out of respect for what she wants to be called. However, in emails and other written sources, I almost always addressed her as BriAnna or Bri.

December 11, 2019: Lola first mentions the possibility of me coming to SLC, after we had been texting for two months. (Figure 6)

January 9, 2020: I propose January 30th-31st dates for a visit, which she agrees to. Lola makes several suggestions about things we can do in SLC and discusses transportation options with me. (Figure 7)

January 23rd & 27th, 2020: More texts planning trip, including recommendations from her about hotels. (Figure 8)

January 29th & 30th, 2020: After I had already begun my drive from Seattle to Salt Lake City, she canceled the visit due to illness, and I redirected my travels to Butte, Montana. (Figure 9)

We also talked on the phone at that time, and she sounded sick. Within the next few days, she suggested on the phone that we both fly somewhere else instead of attempting a road trip.

February 7th, 2020: She brings up in text message that we should fly somewhere else and we begin to discuss possibilities. (Figure 10)

February 13th, 2020: I propose Puerto Rico, and she texts “Oooh, I very much like that idea.” (Figure 11)

February 14th, 2020: She confirms Puerto Rico trip for March 10th-17th and immediately puts in the vacation time at work. (Figure 12)

March 8th-9th, 2020: Amid many romantic texts, she texts me about places to visit in Puerto Rico. (Figure 13)

March 17th, 2020: After we both returned to our own homes from Puerto Rico, she texts, “I should have come to Seattle.” (Figure 14)

March 19th, 2020: I share a picture of me in my kitchen and she writes “❤️Wish I were there” (Figure 15)

March 28th, 2020: We joke about my tendency for making angry rants, while I was stressed that I might have caught COVID. (Figure 16)

April 2nd, 2020: She sends texts trying to coax me to come to Salt Lake City, including a picture of a joke paperback cover entitled, “Come Be My Friend.” (Figure 17)

April 9th, 2020: She tells me her friend Jordan supports me coming to SLC. (Figure 18)

April 10th, 2020: She tells me her friend Joel supports me coming to SLC. (Figure 19)

April 12th, 2020: She tells me her family supports me coming to SLC. I jokingly ask her if her family knows I’m a psychopath, and she says her son knows. (Figure 20)

April 14th, 2020: She sends me a long text saying “You have made me care very deeply about you.” (Figure 21)

April 17th, 2020: She helps me draft my response to the Darrell Day incident report and then says “❤️ Sending virtual hugs (and sympathetic rage).” (Figure 22)

April 20th, 2020: She talks about ordering a desk so we would both have workspaces and shows me that she has emptied closet space for me. (Figure 23)

April 22nd, 2020: She sends a romantic text, saying she is looking forward to me being there. (Figure 24)

April 24th to May 29th, 2020: Lola and I live together in her apartment in SLC.

May 30th to June 15th, 2020: After a two day drive from SLC to Seattle together, Lola and I live together in my apartment in Seattle. We stopped dating on June 15th.

June 15th to July 23rd, 2020: Each of us living in our separate homes but continuing to be on good terms.

June 29th, 2020: She texts me about how she was using coffee beans that I had bought her as a gift in Seattle. (Figure 25)

July 2nd, 2020: She compliments me on a Scrabble stream on Twitch. (Figure 26)

July 24th, 2020: She emails me that she needs to make distance. I email her back respectfully and we cease all communication for nearly half a year. (Figure 27)

October, 2020: I move from Seattle, Washington to Portland, Oregon.

December 11th, 2020: On Mina Le’s suggestion, I email Lola because of an upcoming play reading that we are both participating in. Lola writes back quickly, and we have a short and respectful email exchange in which she says it is not problem for us to be in the play reading group together, and that she will unblock me on Facebook, and that it is okay for me to email her if it’s important. (Figure 28)

December 26, 2020: Lola and I both participate in Mina Le’s play reading.

February 12th, 2021: Lola reinitiates contact by gifting me a subscription to Will Anderson’s Twitch channel. I send a text thanking her and asking what it does. She explains, and then we have an extended catch-up conversation about our lives, in which she reveals she is living in Florida, while I am living in Portland, Oregon. She then invites me to watch her Scrabble livestream the following day. (Figure 29)

February 13th, 2021: I watch Lola’s Scrabble livestream for the only time ever.

February 27th, 2021: Exchange of complimentary texts about second Mina Le play reading that we both attended. (Figure 29, at the end)

May 2nd, 2021: Last text to Lola, about possibly meeting in SLC during a business trip. (Figure 30)

August 4th, 2021: Conversation on her new Instagram account after she moved to Portland. (Figure 31)

(E) Review of Evans Clinchy’s Statement

Evans and Jennifer have been harassing me for six years and doing everything they can to write a false narrative that I have been harassing them. I will now review their statements, not only to demonstrate that their charges hold no water, but also to highlight all of the ways in which they are intentionally deceiving you in order to assassinate my character.

Evans’s point #1: He is not trying to ostracize me, FALSE

Before he levels any charges against me, Evans starts out by denying that he is attacking me and that he has been disparaging me for a long time. He is using the “black is white” rhetorical technique of saying the exact opposite of the truth. At the beginning of his statement he says

I understand that there’s a narrative out there in the Scrabble community that I have somehow turned other players against David Koenig – that because of some deep-seated anger or hatred that I feel, I’ve led some sort of campaign of ostracism to keep him out of the Scrabble community. That narrative is false.

He concludes his statement with the completely contradictory,

Respectfully, I am asking for his banishment for life from our community. I truly believe that is the only way to deal with this threat once and for all.

He is literally saying, “I am not trying to ostracize David Koenig. I am trying to ostracize David Koenig!” And he hopes that he has thrown enough obfuscation and lies in between that you won’t notice the blatant hypocrisy.

Evans’s point #2: He is ignoring me and not attacking my character, FALSE

He says “I have tried very hard to avoid doing anything at all to antagonize DK.” Here is a list of documented and observed ways in which this is a lie:

(1) Many people in the 2017 New Orleans tournament room saw him jump up and down, pump his fist, and childishly shout “YES!” In the middle of the tournament room after he won a challenge against me. 

(2) Well in advance of me moving to Seattle in April 2018, both Walker Willingham and Chris Grubb divulged to me that Evans had said hateful things about me and that he actively attempted to interfere with me getting together for casual Scrabble get-togethers with them. I had been making business trips to Seattle and getting together to play Scrabble with them for years before Evans moved to the area. More detail is in The Fallout.

(3) In an email from June 18, 2018 Walker Willingham wrote to me: (Figure 32)

I had a similar internal reaction when I overheard Evans talking to someone else in a public setting that you were “an awful, awful human being.”  It was especially jarring because it seemed out of character for Evans, and it sticks the listener in the uncomfortable position of wondering “is there really something that bad?”  Evans’ comment was worse because it was stated so publicly.  It may have made me wonder what it was about you, but it certainly redounded poorly on Evans in my eyes.

(4) Terry Kang told me in Edinburgh in 2019 that Evans had previously come up to her and specifically asked her not to mention my name in front of him. According to Terry, this was out of the blue. Apparently, Evans’s hatred of me was so intense he couldn’t even stand hearing my name.

(5) Shortly after I published The Crucible and The Fallout, Brian Bowman wrote in a comment on my Facebook wall dated July 16th, 2020: (Figure 33)

And it pissed me off a little to see Jennifer claim that Dave was “actively disparaging” her and hurting her reputation when I knew that Evans at least had been doing that to Dave for years.

(6) In another comment dated Thursday July 16th, 2020, Winter also testified to firsthand knowledge that Jennifer and/or Evans were disparaging me. (Refuting Martin DeMello’s statement. Figure 34.)

Martin De Mello: in all the years that I’ve known Jen and Evans I have not heard them say a single thing against or even about Dave. and likewise I was around for the starting of coco and my perceptions align with Melissa’s.

Winter: I know for a fact (because I was in the room where it happened) that Martin is mistaken (not in his experience, but his level of knowledge), and I have posted what happened on my own timeline earlier this year, so I’m not going to rehash it here.

(7) In a comment dated Wednesday July 15th, 2020, Shelley Stevens also testified to firsthand knowledge that Jennifer and Evans were disparaging me: (Figure 35)

Have you ever been in an uncomfortable situation with another person in your community that you KNOW FOR A FACT is badmouthing you to mutual friends and making things awkward?

I have.

It sucks and at least he is owning up to his own part in all of it. Emotions sometimes drive people to do unstable things, but I can tell you that even as a tangential member of this community, I am personally sympathetic to what he’s going through, mainly because I barely know [Jennifer and Evans] and I have heard them badmouth him and I knew there was some sort of issue after having like one dinner with them once.

This entire list refers to behavior of Evans toward and about me in the three and a half year period from January 2017 to July 2020, before the publication of The Crucible and The Fallout.

From my interactions with many other people in the Scrabble community, I have intuited that Evans has disparaged me many more times than I have observed. The list above is simply the cases that I observed for myself or got testimony from others about.

Evans’s point #3: In his mind, I am a man who abuses women, PURELY AD HOMINEM ATTACK WITH NO SUBSTANCE

Evans makes an unsubstantiated claim that I abuse women and a meaningless comparison of me to Sam Kantimathi. The only connection between us that he makes is that he has zero respect for either of us. There is nothing of substance about me in this entire paragraph, and all he is doing is trying to drum up hatred for me. It’s not even worth responding to.

Evans’s point #4: I attempted to register for a “house tournament”, FALSE, IT WAS A FULLY RATED NASPA TOURNAMENT

On what grounds does Evans criticize me for signing up for what he calls a “house tournament” (the 2019 Hood River tournament, for which I sent him an entry fee in September 2018) even though it was a NASPA rated event featuring a number of the best tournament Scrabble players in the country when all of the following are true?

(1) Neither he nor Jennifer had ever been willing to speak to me about what their grievances were with me.

(2) I had already behaved civilly to them for a period of 21 months after the 2017 New Orleans tournament, even in the face of disgusting behavior by Evans toward me and behind my back.

(3) I had not even attempted to enter nor contact them about any of the many tournaments they had run in that nearly two year period beforehand, and I had made no complaints to them or anyone else about the ways in which they were breaking NASPA rules to make the registration lists exclusive to their friends.

(4) I made no complaints when they denied my entry and simply sent a goodwill apology with no expectation of a response. (Figure 37)

(5) I never attempted to enter a tournament of theirs again.

Furthermore, as I revealed in the The Fallout, my intention all along in sending in an entry fee was not to attend the tournament, but rather to open up a line of communication so that Evans and Jennifer could address their grievances with me. This was demonstrated by the first draft of the apology email, which I sent to Chris Lipe and Jeremy Cahnmann, which included these lines: (Figure 38)

I don’t even really care about whether I go to this tournament or not; what is much more important is resolving the tension in this situation…

I signed up for this tournament, not out of any desire to make life difficult for the two of you, but simply because it is what I would have done if you two were not behaving the way you were, and I thought it might provide an opportunity for you to actually address your problems with me. I am glad that you have done so.

Evans’s point #5: I used Steve Pellinen as an intermediary to threaten to go public with grievances, FALSE

First, Evans and Jennifer are attempting to be political leaders and tournament organizers within our Scrabble tournament community. There is absolutely nothing wrong with making public statements that criticize them for their political record, which is the only thing I criticized them for in The Crucible and The Fallout.

Second, it’s not even true that I used Steve Pellinen as an intermediary. Steve misunderstood what I said to him, and I had no desire for him to pass anything I said back to Evans. At the time I talked to Steve, I had barely started writing what was then only a first draft of my story for my own therapeutic purposes, and I had made no decisions to publish anything.

In the beginning, my primary motivation for telling the story to others was to win back people who had been mutual friends of mine and of Evans and Jennifer, and I could have much more effectively done that by sending the story only to a select group of those friends.

I only became convinced that the story needed to be made public when Evans and Jennifer split off from NASPA at the end of 2019. I did so for two reasons, both entirely political: (1) to curtail the growth of their organization and the undermining of NASPA and (2) because of the way they corrupted the team USA selection process for their Virtual World Cup.

Evans’s point #6: My splenetic.net blog was a rant filled with distortions and lies about him, PURELY OPINION

I told the entire story in a responsible way that was as charitable to Evans and Jennifer as I could be. I criticized them only on political grounds, and I believe that it was in the best interest of the entire international Scrabble community that I made the story public. By creating a renegade organization, Evans and Jennifer evaded the oversight and disciplinary processes of NASPA and created a situation where individual Scrabble players needed to make informed choices about what organizations to support. I was a whistleblower, exposing the way they broke NASPA rules for literally 100% of the tournaments they ran, in ways that excluded me (and some others) and which unleveled the playing field.

Furthermore, as far as I can see, everything I speculated about Evans’s and Jennifer’s opinions and motivations was completely accurate. Everything they have done in the two years since that time, including the submission of this character-assassination and admitted attempt to ostracize me, posing as an incident report, is completely consistent with the story that I have told.

Evans’s point #7 (insinuated): I played in an online Woogles club directed by him and Jennifer, FALSE

When I played at the online Woogles club run by their organization from January to February 2021, neither Evans nor Jennifer were directors of the club. The only directors were Peter Armstrong, Becky Dyer, and Geoff Thevenot. This is corroborated by the email that Brian Bowman wrote to me on March 4th, 2021, in response to me telling him about the banning. (Figure 2, at the end)

Look closely at Evans’s words in this bullet point. It is obvious that he is intentionally trying to mislead you without telling an outright lie. He says, “he tried to play in our online Scrabble club, even though he knows he is not welcome to play Scrabble events that we direct. Three other co-directors of that club (not Jennifer or myself)” to attempt to get you to jump to a false conclusion that he and Jennifer were directing the club at the time.

Evans’s and Jennifer’s March 2020 decision to allow me to play only in events directed by other people in their organization was arbitrary, vindictive, and bullying. It was also a completely premeditated attempt to exclude me, since I had never attempted to nor indicated any interest in playing in anything run by their organization. Even if you could somehow make the case that it was a reasonable decision, it was also completely unprofessional to tell this decision to my personal friends Mina Le and Cesar del Solar rather than telling it to me directly.

Furthermore, regardless of how unprofessional and vindictive they were, I was nothing but professional and respectful in response. I followed their unreasonable demands to the letter, only playing in an online club which was not directed by them, and my behavior in those club sessions was impeccable, as Cesar del Solar, head developer of the Woogles platform, attested to in his email response to me telling him about the ban. (Figure 2) When the directors sent me their letter banning me and insinuating that I was a harasser, with no explanation or justification for their ban and no recourse to appeal, I made zero response and never returned to the club.

The directors Peter Armstrong, Becky Dyer, and Geoff Thevenot were fine with me playing in the club for several weeks, and seemingly the only thing that happened in between that might have influenced their change in policy was me making one relevant comment in response to a director’s question that might have drawn attention to the fact that Evans was blocking me on the website.

This follows a clear pattern. As far as I can see, the thing that Evans hates most from me is me holding him accountable for the bad and hateful things that he has actually done. As I mentioned in The Crucible, this started a decade ago when I revealed in a Facebook argument that he had made anonymous bullying messages on Jason Idalski’s LiveJournal and had allowed other people in the Scrabble community to think that they were from me. He also hates the splenetic.net blog because it exposes the corrupt and unethical behavior that he did as a tournament director and organizer, as well as his vindictive and bullying behavior toward me. And he literally started his statement in this incident report trying to deny that he has behaved angrily and hatefully toward me, despite a preponderance of evidence showing that this is a lie.

Evans’s point #8: I have homicidal intent toward him, FALSE

I don’t blame Evans for this one. I believe him and Jennifer that Lola painted the story of our past relationship to convince them that I had violent intentions toward Evans and toward other Scrabble players. I have already addressed all of the ways in which Lola’s statement is a lie.

Furthermore, as he and Jennifer admit themselves, the first time they had ever gotten the false idea into their heads that I was at any kind of risk of violence was in 2022. So how does that explain or justify their unethical and bullying behavior toward me for the past six years?

The rest of Evans’s statement is simply an attempt to weave the lies that he has already told into convincing you more to hate me.

My Facebook argument with Darrell Day is not only utterly irrelevant to him, Jennifer, or anyone else in the Scrabble community. It has also already been reviewed by NASPA, who have already come to a disciplinary decision about it. The only reason for including it is, again, to drum up more hatred for me.

(F) Review of Jennifer Clinchy’s Statement

Jennifer alleges that she has submitted something to the police. I have heard nothing from law enforcement in the several months since I received this incident report. If there was a police investigation into me, the law would require me to be notified. This means that either Jennifer is lying about submitting something to the police, or that the police considered her submission to have no legal merit.

A great deal of what Jennifer says is completely outside the bounds of what a Scrabble organization should be having any sort of hearing on. How good or bad a boyfriend I was is irrelevant and not the business of anyone reading this statement. Her entire reason for making this statement is a character assassination. Everything she says about me is false. Frankly, I value my good name as a human being and being a good partner in relationships more than I value ever being able to play in a Scrabble tournament again, and I believe that people who submit disgustingly dishonest and bullying testimony like this in a naked attempt to destroy another person’s life must be held accountable. Therefore, I will address all of it.

Part 1 of Jennifer’s Statement

I have zero memory of any kind of sexual coercion episode such as what she describes. Not only that, but to my knowledge she never said anything about such an episode to me nor to anyone else while we were dating or in any of the years since that time. As far as I can tell, she fabricated this story in April 2022, six years after we had any sort of relationship.

I understand that reading Lola’s false testimony in early 2022 might have put enough of a scare into Jennifer that she felt she had to lie in order to expel me from Scrabble, but her behavior even in the years between 2017 and 2021 is completely inconsistent with it. There were several years during which Jennifer seemed to have no problem with me at all, and all of the hatred I received was from Evans. She literally told Judy Romann in the restroom at a casual Scrabble get-together that she did not have a problem playing at Scrabble get-togethers with me and only Evans did. The last time we played Scrabble, at the May 2018 Portland one-day tournament, we had a friendly conversation and laughed a bit after the game. And the last time we were ever in the same place, on July 17, 2018 at Chris Lipe’s wedding in Aruba, she walked across the beach to me and attempted to start a conversation with me, which I was uncomfortable with. Does any of this sound like the behavior of someone from whom I coerced sex?

Furthermore, why is this story coming out now? Since 2017, Jennifer and Evans have been doing many unethical things within the Scrabble community to undermine fair and equal access to tournament registrations in a premeditated and unnecessary attempt to keep me out of their events. If this story was not a brand new concoction in 2022, why would she not have said anything about it sooner?

Part 2 of Jennifer’s Statement

“I attempted to end my informal relationship with Dave on at least five occasions, the last attempt being in person in September 2016,” is a blatant misrepresentation of our history. We played the makeup/breakup game over the period of two years, and we both alternated being the one who tried to get the other one back. In the summer and early fall of 2016, she was more often the one chasing me. She sent me a birthday gift in the mail in October 2016 with a sweet note that was an obvious attempt to stay emotionally connected to me, even though we had barely seen each other in the second half of the year. Looking back at our text message history, she also started text conversations with me on October 2nd, 8th, 15th, 16th, 18th, 29th, and 31st, including asking me to get together to play Scrabble on the 18th, which I did not do. (Figure 36)

I have already been over the emails and text messages leading up to 2017 New Orleans. My intention was getting the peace of mind I needed in order to play Scrabble well at the event. I understand that Jennifer was scared by my words, and I have accepted accountability for that.

Regarding the “speech,” I never delivered nor attempted to deliver it to her. I shared it in the blog as contemporaneous evidence of my thoughts, specifically to show that I have had no interest in being in her life or her being in mine, and that I’ve been completely consistent on that since 2017.

Literally everything else in part 2 of her statement, starting from “When I did face Dave in January 2017…” is a story about what was going on in her head, not about anything that I did. The communications that I made to Jennifer prior to the New Orleans tournament, upsetting as they admittedly were, ceased on January 5th, 2017, more than a week before the tournament. By the time I saw her at the tournament I was calm, and I did not misbehave in any way in the tournament room. I also got to a mental place where I did not need to say anything about the situation across the board, and I did not.

I explained in The Fallout that my move to Seattle had nothing to do with Jennifer and Evans. (emphasis added)

Around the New Year, I learned about an opportunity on a different team at my company that was a good match for my interests and skills and had virtually no on-call responsibility. This team was located at my company’s headquarters in Seattle.

I had been working at this company for four years—longer than I had known Jennifer—and I had already made many business trips to Seattle. I liked the city. I had organized Scrabble get-togethers with the handful of players in the area who played CSW.

I was also tired of working in our office in suburban Northern Virginia that kept me too far out of Washington DC for so much of the time. As I talked about in the previous part, most of my opportunities to play CSW Scrabble around DC had evaporated over the last two years.

As soon as the possibility of the Seattle job arose, I immediately knew there could be some problems. Tacoma and Seattle aren’t right next to each other. They’re like DC and Baltimore. But the CSW Scrabble scene is small. If I lived there, I was sure to cross paths with Jennifer and Evans, and we would want to play with the same players and at the same events. Furthermore, Jennifer and Evans were quickly filling a vacuum and starting to become the preeminent CSW organizers in the area, not just with the Hood River event but also a number of one-day tournaments.

…

Shortly after the [2018 New Orleans] tournament, I interviewed with several people on the team in Seattle, and it became clear that it was a good career fit. They wanted to work with me, and I wanted to work with them. Everything in my life suggested that this was a good direction to go in, except for the situation with Evans and Jennifer. In the end I decided I wasn’t going to let their behavior get in the way of making the right decision for me.

Furthermore, Jennifer has surely already read this on the blog and knows it to be true. I made many business trips to Seattle while we were dating in 2015 and 2016, and I had told her that I might move there eventually. The reason she writes about my move to Seattle is because she wants to paint a false story in the minds of the readers that I am a stalker, and in particular because she wants to lead the reader into the false insinuation that I stalked Lola to Portland, which she does in the final paragraph of this part.

I moved to Portland in October 2020, long before Lola did. Screenshots from the text conversation Lola and I had in February 2021 corroborate that I was already living in Portland and she was living in Florida, with intentions of becoming a digital nomad over the next year. (Figure 29)

Months before I made my move from Virginia to Seattle in spring 2018, I made a Facebook post mentioning that I would be moving there. Jeremy Cahnmann later admitted to me that when he saw my post, he immediately took a screenshot and forwarded it to Evans. This in turn led to the bullying behavior of Evans and Jennifer toward the other Seattle-area CSW players to try to preemptively ban me from casual Scrabble get-togethers well in advance of me moving to the area.5

These people have had an obsessive paranoid delusion of me as a stalker for years (or at least are interested in writing that story) and have, along with their friends, been tracking my moves on social media and reading their own story into it. When I moved to Portland at the end of October 2020, I am sure that Evans and Jennifer knew about it very quickly, considering how many other Scrabble players they talk to regularly follow me on social media, including several who live in Portland: Peter Armstrong, Conrad Bassett-Bouchard, and Dave Wiegand.

There is no doubt in my mind that Jennifer knew that I moved to Portland before Lola did, but she intentionally equivocates about dates with the sentence “In 2020 or 2021, Dave moved to Portland, OR, where Lola also lives,” to try to get the reader to jump to a false conclusion that I followed Lola to Portland.

We now have specific sentences in both Evans’s and Jennifer’s accounts which were intentionally written to mislead readers and cause them to believe false things about me.

Jennifer’s stories about therapy and her home security system are not about anything I did. They are about the false mental story she has written about me and the extreme reactions she has had (or wants you to think she has had) to her own narcissism.

How about the fact that ever since January 5th, 2017, my only communications with her were cc-ing both her and Evans on informational emails about Seattle area Scrabble get-togethers? Even when I signed up for the 2019 Hood River tournament in September 2018, I only sent my registration email to Evans, not her. She emailed me in response, copying him, and the only personal communication I have ever made to her in the last six years was my brief apology email on September 17, 2018 in response to her email. (Figure 37) It is simply untrue that I have been stalking Jennifer in any way, shape, or form, no matter how much she lies to write that story.

Part 3 of Jennifer’s Statement

As I said in the response to Evans’s statement, I believe Jennifer and Evans that Lola depicted things in this way to them, but her depiction was false. I do not blame Jennifer or Evans for the disinformation that Lola fed them.

Furthermore, what I may or may not have said while venting privately to a romantic partner in our shared domicile does not constitute a threat to do anything. Lola grossly distorted our relationship and interactions in her testimony. Even then it is only a distorted depiction of where my mind was at more than two years ago. Lola has been out of my life since mid-2020, and Evans and Jennifer have been out of my life since late 2016. None of them are in a position to make any kind of judgments about where my mind is at or has been at for the last two years. But what they have done for the last several years is (a) gossiped with each other and a number of their other friends who do not like me, (b) taken every tiny snippet of conversation or thing they have observed from a distance, and (c) tried to build it into a duplicitous account of me as stalking them, while I have been ignoring them.

Part 4 of Jennifer’s Statement

The Darrel Day situation is irrelevant to this story. It has already been heard by NASPA. A disciplinary decision was already reached. Their only reason for including it is to further poison your minds about me.

Part 5 of Jennifer’s Statement

Regarding part (b), there is only one quote in this section that I communicated to Jennifer. It is precisely what I apologized to her for. (Figure 37)

Everything else she says in part (b) is solely about trying to read my state of mind, not about my actions. The only thing she is accusing me of here is thoughtcrime. That is not harassment.

Regarding the alleged invasion of Jennifer’s privacy in part (a), she and Evans have decided to be leaders in our Scrabble community, both by running tournaments and by leading an association. As such, it is completely within the bounds of propriety for Scrabble players to hold them publicly accountable for their actions which affect the world of Scrabble politics, which includes registrations systems for tournaments and equal access for tournament players both to play in events and to have the opportunities to qualify for international events such as the Alchemist Cup. When Jennifer and Evans use their personal grudge against me and their twisted interpretations of our personal history as grounds for keeping me out of tournaments, they choose to take a personal issue and turn it into a political one.

Especially when they separate from the official Scrabble associations and make a renegade association, they create a situation where it is in the public interest of the entire Scrabble world to know the facts of their political malfeasance so that players can make their best decisions.

If Jennifer and Evans chose to disband their organization and never run another Scrabble tournament, I would gladly put all of this behind me, take down the blog, and never speak of it again. But I love Scrabble, and I want the tournament world to be fair and to ensure that neither I—nor any other Scrabble player in the future—suffers the kind of vindictive and bullying treatment they have been dishing out. I will continue into perpetuity to hold them accountable for all of their political actions which disadvantage me in the Scrabble world, and that is 100% a good act of whistleblowing.

Footnotes of Response to Incident Report

  1. Specifically, Jennifer lied about dates in regards to my relationships with both her and Lola, to make it seem like Jennifer had lost interest in me sooner than she had, and to paint a false picture that I had followed Lola to Portland, Oregon, when I really moved there a year earlier than Lola. Evans lied about disparaging me and about who directed their online Scrabble club on Woogles to paint a false picture that I had violated their arbitrary and vindictive rules. Lola lied about almost everything in her statement. Here I am only referring to things they said or insinuated that are provably false, and not to other false things they stated with zero supporting evidence, such as Jennifer’s coercion claim.
  2. except for the ways in which it influenced Lola’s change in attitude toward me, which I will explain later
  3. Walker Willingham sent most of these emails, but I occasionally filled in for him.
  4. Figures 32-35. A more complete list of evidence that Evans has disparaged me is in section (E).
  5. This screenshot is from my relevant conversation with Chris Grubb. There is also more detail in The Fallout about my discussions with Walker Willingham about this.
  6. The Portland one-day in May 2018 was the last time we were all at the same tournament and the last time I ever played a Scrabble game with either of them.
  7.  Furthermore, Evans and Jennifer were rarely ever the objects of my venting. Lola provided one alleged quote about Evans and one alleged quote about Jennifer, and this was twisted into a completely false allegation about spending hundreds of hours plotting anything. The only thing I plotted was the writing of a blog.
  8. Much later in 2021, Lola seemed to go back and forth between blocking and unblocking me on Facebook, but I have no idea what that was about.
  9. I had moved to Portland in October 2020, and I mentioned I was living there in the conversation.
  10. until I had to chase down evidence relevant to this incident report

September 20, 2022

  • NASPA Advisory Board judged my case at their monthly meeting

September 21, 2022

  • Within a few minutes of each other, two members of the NASPA Advisory Board, Jason Idalski and Stefan Rau, responded to my texts with contradictory information about the Advisory Board discussion the previous day.

September 23, 2022

September 25, 2022

November 8, 2022

November 10, 2022

November 15, 2022

April 14, 2023

May 26, 2023

Appeal to NASPA Executive Committee

I am writing to the Executive Committee of NASPA to request a reconsideration of the three-year ban imposed on me by the NASPA Advisory Board in September 2022. 

The Executive Committee should reverse its decision for several reasons. First, the allegations against me are completely false. Second, the decision was the result of a campaign of disinformation and defamation waged against me by other members of the American tournament Scrabble community. Third, the process by which the Board reached its decision was fatally flawed and did not allow me an opportunity to properly defend myself.

This story does not end with the decision of NASPA’s Executive Committee. Evans Clinchy, Jennifer Clinchy, and Lola McKissen have all broken the law.

I am confident that an objective, unbiased jury will accept what the facts in my case prove in a way that North American Scrabble leadership heretofore has not. Perhaps due to emotional and political connections or concerns, or perhaps as an overreaction to criticism of its handling of previous misconduct allegations, the NASPA Advisory Board was unable or unwilling to follow the facts of this case to their natural conclusion: that I have not violated the Code of Conduct in any way, and that my accusers have manufactured a false narrative with the specific intent of excommunicating me from tournament Scrabble across the continent and the world.  

I will start by describing the series of unexpected and unwarranted actions that led up to the Board’s misguided decision. I will then outline the background to the campaign against me, describe the procedural flaws in the Advisory Board’s process, and provide my response to statements made by my accusers which I was not given the opportunity to do during the Board’s process. I will then outline the proper resolution of my situation. 

All I expect from the members of this committee is that they treat me exactly as I would treat them if our positions were reversed.

My Experience with Scrabble Leadership in 2022

This section is identical to what is written in The Scapegoat starting with the paragraph “On April 14th, 2022, I received an email from Steven Pellinen…” and ending with the paragraph “On April 14th, 2023, I filed a lawsuit…” It is omitted here to remove redundancy.

Political Background

As this Committee is surely aware, the emergence of new tournament Scrabble organizations in recent years has led to various political and financial rivalries, and has threatened to fracture an already small community of players.

WGPO started as a rebellion from NASPA because of dissatisfaction with Chris Cree’s leadership around a decade ago, and it struggled to have relevance for the first decade of its existence. Before the pandemic, it was mostly a regional phenomenon in the Twin Cities, Reno, and Arizona areas and was ignored by much of North American competitive Scrabble in the rest of the country. Furthermore, almost no one was playing CSW Scrabble under its auspices.

When WGPO received a large cash infusion from Jon Shreve in 2021, they suddenly became more relevant. Shortly thereafter, Evans’ and Jennifer’s organization, the Collins Coalition, began to work more closely with WGPO. What I’ve heard from other Scrabble players is that WGPO saw CoCo as a natural fit to work together, because WGPO didn’t have much of a CSW presence, and it was an opportunity to grow.

Meanwhile, NASPA was rocked by the scandal surrounding Sam Kantimathi, who was credibly accused of multiple incidents of sexual harassment and assault, as well as cheating, over a lengthy period of time. Many members of NASPA expressed dissatisfaction with the way the Advisory Board handled that situation, and I agree wholeheartedly with them that Sam should have been punished more severely, up to a lifetime ban from tournament Scrabble anywhere.

Any comparison between me and Sam is absurd. I have never cheated at Scrabble, and I have never sexually harassed or assaulted women. Nonetheless, when Jennifer was on NASPA’s Advisory Board, she pushed through a change to the Code of Conduct making it explicit that the Code covered actions that occurred outside Scrabble tournaments themselves. In the opinion of fellow Board member Stefan Rau, Jennifer was using the Sam Kantimathi situation as a smokescreen to make this change, hoping it would give her and Evans more leverage to keep me out of tournament Scrabble.

Later, Evans and Jennifer used NASPA’s poor handling of the Sam Kantimathi situation as a main talking point for why they split off to form their renegade association, CoCo. It has obviously been a sensitive issue for NASPA leadership, given the investigation and the further disciplinary action that was taken against him after he had been reinstated from his suspension for cheating at 2013 Nationals.

Prior to this, Evans and Jennifer took preemptive measures to prevent me from ever being at the same Scrabble tournament as them. From 2017 to 2019 they did this by making all their events small “house tournaments” and gaming the registration systems. But they wanted to grow and start running bigger events, from which it would be more difficult to exclude me, so they split off from NASPA and started their own organization so they could keep out whoever they wanted. However, once they decided to collaborate with WGPO on the 2022 Word Cup, keeping me out was no longer their sole decision. They would have to get WGPO to agree with it.

Evans and Jennifer were working from an entirely false assumption that I wanted to play in any tournament they were involved in running. So it apparently became necessary to convince WGPO to exclude me as well.1

It is clear from the actions of Steven Pellinen and the WGPO Board that they completely bought the con that Evans and Jennifer sold them.2 I don’t doubt that there were people on the WGPO Board who sincerely believed the statements of Evans, Jennifer, and Lola, and who never suspected that they would lie as drastically as they did. However, it was also to the WGPO Board’s political advantage to go along with it. By standing together with CoCo in denouncing and suspending me, WGPO would both curry favor with Evans and Jennifer to strengthen the bond between their organizations and give both organizations a competitive advantage over NASPA by showing that they were tougher on protecting their members from abusers/harassers (both actual and merely accused), an area where NASPA had already shown weakness.

Steven Pellinen’s later behavior toward NASPA strongly supports my thesis. First, when I copied him as a courtesy on the email that I sent to NASPA on April 15th notifying them all that I would only be working with NASPA on the disciplinary process, he wrote back that day with a major overstep. He acted as if he should have any role at all in deciding on a timeline for my response to NASPA, and then he asked me to submit some response sooner. What he did was tantamount to a plaintiff telling a defendant in a court case that they need to provide their defense directly to the plaintiff outside the court system and ahead of the schedule of the court.

Second, Steven contacted me on May 27th, again pestering me for a response and threatening that WGPO would have a hearing about me without my defense. Where was the fire? Why was it necessary for WGPO to do anything when I had already communicated that I had no intentions of playing in any of their tournaments, and they knew that NASPA was going to have a hearing, and that they were going to see my defense eventually? Furthermore, why was this not solely NASPA’s domain, considering that I only played in NASPA tournaments and the only tournaments relevant to the statements were NASPA tournaments?

I believe the answer to these questions is that Steven and WGPO were trying to strongarm NASPA and demonstrate that they were not beholden to NASPA’s timelines. They wanted to act like the only organization in North American Scrabble that matters.

Everything I said about WGPO having no right to have a hearing about me applies just as much to CoCo, but I don’t take anything they do seriously. It had already been apparent to me that CoCo is not in any way a professional or unbiased organization.

In early August, Michael Tang made his announcement about the qualification procedures for Alchemist Cup, which had a unique provision that would keep me out of the event based on CoCo’s and WGPO’s judgments, regardless of what NASPA did. It is highly irregular that WGPO or CoCo would have any role in determining qualifications for international events, since only NASPA has previously had any role in determining American qualifiers for international events, and only NASPA is a WESPA-recognized member association. The rule makes even less sense considering that CoCo and WGPO combined have fewer players than NASPA.

Then, an August 24th email I received from Jason Idalski of NASPA attested that Steven Pellinen had been interfering even after WGPO made its decision:

Steve Pellinen also e-mailed the AB this afternoon asking for an update on your case, accusing both the AB and you of not taking this matter seriously given that we’ve done nothing since receiving his complaint. The AB has to consider that Steve may be getting ready to point out that WGPO and CoCo has suspended a man alleged of sexual assault for five years while NASPA has sat on its hands for four months, thereby making its clubs and tournaments unsafe for women (unfair as that characterization may be).

Jennifer made a false claim that I assaulted her while I was in a consensual relationship with her. That claim was not supported by any evidence whatsoever, and she made it six years after we were in a relationship. WGPO and CoCo both decided to suspend me based only on her word when I had not yet said anything in my defense. Then these organizations used those kangaroo-court decisions to exert pressure on NASPA to do the same.

For Steven to accuse me of not taking the matter seriously ignores the fact that I had many legitimate reasons for requiring the amount of time I requested (and was granted) by NASPA to prepare my initial response. Steven may not have known about these reasons, because they were none of his business. My only concern was making sure that NASPA understood that I did, in fact, take the situation seriously and wanted to submit as well-prepared and comprehensive a response as possible. I never failed to meet a deadline imposed by the Advisory Board without requesting and being granted an extension, and when it was made clear to me that I had a final deadline, I met it. Apart from the fact that it was emotionally exhausting and traumatizing to have to write the response in the first place, I experienced several personal crises that prevented me from putting my full mental focus on my response. The time I took preparing my response was both justified and approved by NASPA.

But based on what Jason wrote, Steven’s attempt to strongarm the Advisory Board was successful. They were afraid of Steven and WGPO telling this bogus story that they had been soft on me and that neither I nor they were taking things seriously, which would make NASPA look worse and both WGPO and CoCo look better. None of this was about fair treatment of me. It was about optics and the political infighting between these organizations.

The most egregious deviation from a fair and proper disciplinary process came just after I had submitted my response, although I did not learn about it until months later. Steven Pellinen, with whom I had shared my response to NASPA, provided it without my or, presumably, the Advisory Board’s permission, to Evans, Jennifer, and Lola, and the Board then allowed them to file rebuttals of my response, which they kept secret from me and which formed the basis of their decision to issue my suspension.

When my former lawyer sent a letter to NASPA in November, John Chew refused to give any more detailed explanation of NASPA’s rationale for its decision. Without a clear understanding of the basis for my suspension, the ability to appeal the Advisory Board’s decision to this Committee becomes almost worthless. Nonetheless, I believe that by taking the opportunity to respond to the September 9th statements by Jennifer and Lola, I will once again demonstrate that their allegations are false, that I have not violated NASPA’s Code of Conduct, and that my suspension should be immediately lifted.

Jennifer’s September 9th Statement

All I have ever cared about in this situation is being able to have fair and equal access to Scrabble tournaments with the best players and not letting relationship drama get in the way of my ability to focus on Scrabble. The only debates I would like to be having are about who should be running our tournaments and leading our organizations and how we ensure fair registration and qualification procedures. 

I did write about some of my relationship history with Jennifer in The Crucible in July 2020, but only insomuch as it pertained to our interaction at the January 2017 New Orleans tournament. I am addressing the entirety of what Jennifer and Lola have written about our past relationships here not because I feel a need to defend myself, but because I want to illustrate the full extent of their lies.

When I wrote The Crucible and The Fallout, I strove to avoid ad hominem attacks and to keep my criticisms of Evans and Jennifer limited to what was politically relevant to the Scrabble world. I was also, as always, an assiduous steward of truth and corroborated everything that I said to the fullest extent possible with contemporaneous evidence. They and Lola have done no such thing. They have repeatedly made ad hominem attacks, viciously attacked my character, and made things up. I think it is very important to consider the character and the track record of honesty or dishonesty of all parties involved, and that is why I feel I must now show that Jennifer has a long history of dishonesty and lack of ethics that goes beyond what either side has already discussed. One of the reasons that I feel I must do this is that some of the distortions she gives in her most recent statement relate to some of her past terrible behavior.

  • Jennifer and I had one conversation about the threatening text message I got from Kenny, but she knew nothing about the situation other than what I told her, and her version of our conversation is a lie that is at odds with all of the facts of that story. Kenny’s threat came months after I had any sexual relationship with Sarah. He made it in response to his wild misinterpretation of an approximately five minute long interaction a day earlier that Sarah, I, and another male friend of Kenny’s had in a pizzeria, at a time when Sarah and I were both drunk. The other man was calling an Uber for Sarah. Things that I said while I was trying to protect Sarah, because I was unsure whether to trust this man who was asking for her address, were twisted by Kenny, who wasn’t even present.
  • Jennifer tells the truth that I did call her a “dirty whore” once during sex, though it was not rough sex, and she omits the context of why it happened. On Friday, May 1st, 2015, after I had been away on the west coast for almost a week, Jennifer and I traveled together on a three-day and two-night trip to the Niagara Falls tournament. After we had checked into our bed and breakfast that Jennifer had arranged, at dinner that evening Jennifer revealed to me that she had spent the entire previous week hooking up with another man, and that after we returned home she did not want to date me anymore. What she had done was outside the bounds of our dating relationship as far as I understood it, but her explanation was that she had changed her mind about what her limitations were and had not felt any need to tell me that. Despite the conflict we both felt about the situation, we maintained our plans to stay together. The first time we had sex while on the trip, I called her a “dirty whore” a single time as a way of trying to channel my frustration with her cheating into sexual chemistry between us, but she did not like it and immediately told me not to say such things. So I did not ever repeat the phrase to her.
  • Jennifer and I broke up for a while and she continued to see this other man, but in early summer she broke up with him and got back together with me. She told me that she quoted to him the Taylor Swift song lyric, “we are never, ever, ever getting back together.” She mentioned that she had tickets that she had bought for the two of them to go to a video game music concert in Pittsburgh and said that she was going to sell them. In the last week of July, Jennifer and I booked flights and accommodations for a three week trip to Australia together to play in the World Scrabble Championship in Perth, including many nonrefundable costs. A day or two later, she revealed to me that she had not sold the concert tickets and was still planning to go to Pittsburgh with the other guy for the concert, which was happening the very next weekend of August 1st and 2nd.
  • Jennifer’s story about my rage in Perth, Australia is a complete lie. To describe my conversation with her that evening as “a screaming torrent of verbal abuse” is simply not accurate. I have already told the true story of that interaction in The Crucible. She is attempting to rewrite history specifically to undermine the evidence against herself that she admits to, that she point-blank told Judy Romann that she did not have a problem with me and that only Evans did. I am including a photo of a hand-written love letter that Jennifer gave me in December 2015, shortly after we returned from the trip to Australia, which illustrates that the dynamic between us and her feelings about me were completely different than what she has falsely portrayed. For ease of reading, here is the text:

December 13, 2015

Dearest Dave,

The wisest Scrabbler I know suggested I write to you, rather than further attempt to express myself in self-contradictory circles.

Everything about you, and about us, has defied my expectations. From the beginning, I could sense that you would impact me in significant ways. You disrupted my life and continue to surprise me. We have survived heartache and heartbreak, lust and hurt, gratitude and forgiveness. We have come together and split apart, and always I am drawn back to you.

After my divorce, I had in mind a logical sequence for what I thought I needed. It involved me dating many men to fill what I perceived as a gap in my experience and self-understanding. Instead, I found myself choosing to spend each spare day with you. Thinking of you makes me smile. When asked if you spark joy for me, I immediately answered, “Yes.”. There is much that I love about you. You are fiercely intelligent and stimulate me intellectually. I melt under your kisses and tremble when you caress my body. I am attracted to you now more than ever. You help and encourage me; you share my laughter and tears. I can be all of myself with you–elitist and sweet, elated and devastated. You have direction and motivation and strive to improve yourself. I admire your empathy, generosity, and thoughtfulness.

In our evolving relationship, you have been kind to me. You have responded to feedback and changed how you interact with me to better meet my needs. You listen and endeavor not to interrupt me, and I notice and appreciate you doing so. I feel heard. You preserve the quiet peace more than before, and more than perhaps feels natural to you, because you know I need it. You remind me that I am beautiful. You started exercising. You take interest in my hobbies, friends, and family. Your words and actions make me feel loved. You supported and comforted me through the hardest year of my life, and I will be forever grateful to you for that. You are special to me, and always will be.

At times, I have made mistakes and expressed confused and contradictory emotions. This remains a period of transition and growth for me. I am scared of relationships, but with respect to you, the prospect also excites me. We have cultivated a connection that I want to nurture, not abandon. Our relationship has never been easy, but the experiences we share have been worth the effort. I want to continue to envelope you in hugs and cover your body with soft kisses. I want to cradle your head in my arms, to comfort you when life disappoints, and support the pursuit of your dreams and goals.

I don’t know what lies ahead for us. For that reason, I wanted to write to you now, after much reflection, when times are good, so that you know what I think of us and how much you mean to me. I love you, sweety#.

Jenn 

  • Jennifer’s reference to her letter to Jason Idalski is a repeat of the same insinuation tactic that she used in her previous statement, when she didn’t outright say the falsehood that I followed Lola to Portland but did everything possible to imply it. Early in our relationship Jennifer revealed to me that, prior to marrying her first husband, she had been raped by a man. The second paragraph of section 1 of her statement does not mention me, but the placement of it is intentionally designed to deceive the reader into thinking the letter is about me, as is her inclusion of the letter with her statement. She highlights two sentences in the letter. The first is about the man who raped her, and the second is about Sam Kantimathi. Nothing in the paragraph mentioning Jennifer’s email to Jason nor in the email itself is about me.
  • Jennifer makes many pure appeals to emotion with a lot of details that are not evidence pertaining to me in any way. In her first statement she went on about installing a home security system. I have no desire to go anywhere near her home or ever be in her life again, and if she has built a false story in her head that I am threatening her, that is her prerogative and not my fault. None of those details should in any way be relevant to a judgment about my character or my participation in Scrabble tournaments. Similarly, it doesn’t surprise me that she has read books about sexual assault, considering that she has experienced such a thing. A list of titles and a bullet point list of warning signs of intimate partner violence have nothing to do with me, and do not even vaguely resemble evidence.
  • Jennifer has repeatedly mischaracterized the nature of our relationship. It’s true that during the time we dated, she did not want to be in an exclusive relationship. However, aside from one man she saw in the late spring of 2015, I’m not aware of anyone else she saw with any regularity. I believe that de facto we were both each other’s primary partner, even if she didn’t want to call it that, for most of a year and half. During this time, unlike what Jennifer says, I was far from controlling. Just the opposite, I was extremely understanding of how reluctant she was to commit, because I myself had experienced something similar in my early dating relationships in the first few years after I had divorced. I bent over backwards not to put pressure on her and just be as supportive a boyfriend as I could be with zero expectations, even as her ambivalence about being in a relationship sometimes tortured me. The letter from her above testifies to the true nature of our relationship, and Jennifer also verbally testified to this when she told me that a British male friend of hers, who never met me and only knew about our relationship from what she told him, advised her that she was acting crazy and that I was acting like a saint, and that if she did not shape up she was going to lose me.

This is not a case where the truth is somewhere in between Jennifer’s story and mine. The truth is exactly what I tell you, and the relevant parts of her statements are all false. I have provided evidence supporting my statements and proof of many of her lies, and not once has anything I have said ever been shown to be false.3 She and Evans have not even attempted to defend the unethical behavior I’ve accused them of, preferring to craft a false and irrelevant narrative to distract from their own misdeeds.

An Aside About My Point of View

I make a very clear delineation between my fantasies and reality. I have had many angry thoughts, and some of them have included violent words and imagery, but none of this means that I am in any way a risk for physical violence. I have never been physically violent in my life. The vast majority of the time when my words to Lola turned in that direction, I was talking about national and worldwide political issues, not about Scrabble tournaments or Scrabble players. I expressed anger at Scrabble players, but I did not usually express violence in those thoughts. There might have been a small number of occasions in which a few words about wanting to do violence to Scrabble players crossed my lips, but that’s all it was, a momentary way of getting my anger out verbally.

Forget about violent words for the moment. Let’s just talk about my angry words about Scrabble players. The vast majority of the time my anger was not directed toward Evans or Jennifer. I was angry at everyone else in the Scrabble world who was taking their craziness seriously, treating me worse on account of their bullying, and being complicit in cutting off my opportunities to get Scrabble games with the other best players. My angry words might have occasionally extended to Evans and Jennifer as well, but it was not the norm.

The only thing that bothered me about Evans and Jennifer was their influence on the rest of my friends. All I wanted was to try to win back and play Scrabble with some of those friends and to protect the sanctity of our tournaments by criticizing Evans, Jennifer, and their organization politically. Amid six years of abuse I spoke up about my side of the story exactly once, when I published The Crucible and The Fallout in July 2020. Afterward, the little bit of anger that I had toward Evans and Jennifer completely disappeared for almost the next two years.

Even after all of the abuse and lawbreaking from April 14th, 2022 onward, I do not hate Evans and Jennifer. I did for much of the last year, but I refuse to stay in a place of permanent hatred the way they have. I do not want to prevent them from playing Scrabble, only from organizing, running, and directing tournaments, because they have proven through their actions that they are completely unfit to be leaders in this community. I want this community to be better than them.

Lola’s September 9th Statement

Lola writes in her September 9th statement, “In responding to Dave’s claim that my statement is almost all lies, I cannot be completely sure which parts he’s arguing against, because his chain of events matches what I have shared, with just a few conflicts and many omissions and misrepresentations.” This is what is called gaslighting. The evidence I provided from our text message history shows that she completely lied about the history of our relationship. 

I do not want the narrative of this document to get too bogged down in the details of every single lie contained in Lola’s statements to NASPA. Let me just draw attention to a few of the more egregious lies from her April 2022 statement.

  • About my attempt to visit SLC by car in January 2020, Lola wrote: “He asked if he could come visit me in Utah. I ended up cancelling that. I thought that sounded very uncomfortable and a bit creepy.” Nothing in our text message history indicated the least amount of discomfort with the idea. Not only that, but shortly after she canceled due to her illness and no other reason, she was the first one to suggest by voice and then the first one to suggest by text message that we make a trip together somewhere else.4
  • About our time in Puerto Rico Lola wrote, “Other than the obsessive need to help him calm the fuck down, I found I really didn’t like him much in person.” Contrast that with what she texted me immediately after returning home to SLC: “I should have come to Seattle… Thanks again for the amazing week!”5 and then two days later: “❤️ Wish I were there”6 and the following month: “You have made me care very deeply about you.”7
  • About the time between the Puerto Rico trip and us living together in SLC Lola wrote, “When we get home to our respective apartments and a sudden unending lockdown, he does not move the fuck on. He continues to call me to cry and whine and rant, and I am incredibly anxious about the world and everything, and continue to text him. I become increasingly sure it’s my job to help him stop being this way.” She falsely described our relationship as if I was obsessively bothering her and she did not want the interaction. This is contradicted by hundreds of screenshots of our interaction over that month, of which I have so far only shared a small amount. She was extremely romantic over text communication with me for a month, and she practically begged me to come live with her in Salt Lake City, including mentioning that a personal friend, a coworker, and members of her immediate family wanted me to come.8

Previously I only called out her lies that I had textual evidence to disprove. Now I’m going to point out some of the other lies she told.

  • About our time at the 2022 New Orleans tournament, Lola wrote “he started hovering wherever I was talking to friends, like we were friends and he was waiting for me.” This did not happen a single time. The only time we were near each other with another friend around was when I was talking to Guy Ingram, and she was barely involved in the conversation at all.
  • Lola wrote, “On Sunday, I won a game too fast and headed out to the hallway to watch the Twitch stream. He followed me out, made a little small talk, and then launched into a rant, accusing me of all kinds of things, it was the same rage with the shaking and bulging eyes, but he was keeping his volume low.” The only time we were out in the hallway together on Sunday was when we both silently watched the end of Austin Shin’s and Puneet Sharma’s dramatic game. I did not follow her there. We ended up in the same place accidentally. We had zero conversation. The rant that she described never happened.

Now let’s go over all the ways Lola lied in her new statement.

  • It’s stupid and not even all that important in the scheme of things, but I don’t believe this conversation about a frozen pizza ever happened. This is just a fabrication to paint a false picture of me showing a lot of rage about something trivial at home, which never happened. When I did express anger, it was only about issues that were very serious to me, which included politics and the mistreatment I’d received in my Scrabble community.
  • Everything that Lola writes in the New Orleans section of her new statement is a lie. I already told the true story of what was spoken between us in my September 6th statement, and I included everything. All of her alleged quotes from both of us were never said. All of her representations of our conversations are completely inaccurate.
  • Everything Lola wrote in the “Dave’s Direct Treatment of Me” section about our travel to Seattle and living in Seattle is a lie. None of these arguments ever happened. Lola happily traveled with me to Seattle, and she was stressed while we were there because it was difficult to recreate a comfortable working environment for her in my smaller apartment. I worked hard to accommodate her as long as she was there. 

It shouldn’t be necessary, but I’d like to address one last time the incident in which I used violent imagery in a political Facebook comment addressed to Darrell Day. A comment which, for what it’s worth, was made in the early days of the pandemic lockdown, when millions of Americans were under extreme mental and emotional stress caused by the failure of political leadership, the stubborn ignorance of so many, and the existential threat of the pandemic. I was certainly not the only person to engage in heated rhetoric on social media during those terrible months.  Lola mischaracterizes the relevance of that incident to our relationship and to my character.

  • Lola and I did not argue about the Darrell Day incident repeatedly, nor even once. She spent a short amount of time helping me refine my defense on April 17, 2020, and that was it. There were a few times in the next month while I was living with her that I thought back to my feelings about Darrell and that situation and said some angry things about it late at night, but there was no later dialogue between us about it. What she says about her continually making arguments about the Darrell Day story and about me yelling at her to stop bringing it up never happened.
  • The Darrell Day email thread that she attached was a real exchange about my response to NASPA. At the top of the email, I explicitly explained that it was my first draft and that I was not going to send it to them in this form. I was sending it to her for the exact purpose of helping me edit it into a reasonable response.9 My words in that first draft sounded scary. I also had the good sense not to send them to anyone other than the person I was in a romantic relationship with at the time. No one else should have ever seen them, and the only reason anyone did is specifically because Lola is trying to assassinate my character. That first draft does not in any way indicate an intent to be disruptive or violent at a Scrabble event.
  • More importantly, this entire episode had already been litigated by NASPA, and a disciplinary decision was enacted. Furthermore, as I’ve pointed out many times, this wasn’t about my relationship with Lola or Jennifer or Evans or anyone else in this story. This was only between me and Darrell Day. Lola, Jennifer, and Evans keep trying to get NASPA to relitigate it.
  • Finally, even when I turned off all my internal filters and just spoke my guts without worrying about what other people would think, I included this sentence: “I believe that our tournaments and clubs should remain a sanctuary for the enjoyment of the game and that no one should ever experience physical endangerment in those surroundings.” This undermines the false story that all three of them have been trying to write, in which I am supposedly a violent threat to them or anyone else at a Scrabble tournament.

Back in August 2021 I wrote a long personal reflection to myself about what was happening to me in my Scrabble community that I’ve never yet shared with anyone, in particular talking about my grievances with a few of the friends of Evans and Jennifer. Lola isn’t even mentioned in it. I just don’t think about her that much. I wasn’t thinking about her much in New Orleans. Her idea that I was a threat to her was nothing but a product of her own mind.

Steven’s September 9th Statement

Steven writes, “Dave’s approach to this is disturbing.” The only reason he says this is because he believes the lies that Evans, Jennifer, and Lola have told him, even though I have provided plenty of evidence that they have lied repeatedly.

Steven does not know anything about my “pattern of behavior towards women or [my ability] to control my rage.” He barely knows me. The only “evidence” he has about that stuff are the incessant lies he has heard. But he has put himself into a situation where it is in his political interest to believe and support the lies. 

I already outlined the role that Steven played in propelling this case forward. Let me just add a few more observations about his behavior here.

Steven was the one who escalated this to NASPA and had all communication with NASPA on behalf of Evans, Jennifer, and Lola. Furthermore, Steven’s actions of rushing a WGPO judgment ahead of me presenting my defense and of pressuring the NASPA Advisory Board illustrate that Steven was attempting to use the full weight of WGPO’s influence and his personal influence as its President to interfere with my ability to play in NASPA tournaments. This also potentially affects my ability to play Scrabble all around the rest of the world, because NASPA is a WESPA recognized member association.

I cannot blame Steven entirely for the WGPO judgment, as the email said that he abstained from the vote, and it is possible that he did not write the wording of the last email I received from them. However, as President of the organization, he still bears ultimate responsibility for its actions. I have already been over how inappropriate it was for them to cast judgment on me before I had submitted a word in my own defense.

The reason that Jennifer and Lola were able to submit their September 9th responses to my September 6th statement was because Steven Pellinen shared my documents with them, after I had copied him on the email to NASPA. I was true to my word to him back in April 2022, and he used that to assist Jennifer and Lola in cheating NASPA’s disciplinary procedures, adding his own poisonous words for good measure.

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

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

NASPA Advisory Board’s Decision

Prior to September 21st, 2022, I would have said that NASPA had handled this case well and treated me professionally. Of course, I did not know yet that they were withholding the September 9th documents from me. My only small complaint is that they told me that I had no deadline to get them a response, and then they went ahead and put me on the suspended players list before telling me a deadline.

The Board’s decision, when it did come, made no sense. The Advisory Board told me that I had violated the code of conduct three times but wouldn’t tell me what I did that was a supposed violation. The next paragraph was a vague statement about safety, values, a general pattern of behavior, and a lack of contrition, with no explanation of what the behavior was nor what I was supposed to be contrite for. 

The Board threatened me with a lifetime ban and in the next paragraph insinuated that it will potentially twist any communications I make with anyone in the Scrabble community to construe them as harassment.

The Board put ridiculous and insulting conditions on me ever returning to play in its tournaments, including a supposed need to approve my medical care. I’ve been playing in NASPA tournaments for 20 years with no problems in the tournament room whatsoever. The only basis NASPA has for thinking that I need anger management classes or any other mental health treatment are the words of people with a grudge against me who have spent no time with me for several years. 

There is no shame in addressing mental health issues, including anger management, and even though it’s no one’s business, I’ll mention that I’ve talked to many therapists about anger management. My anger stems more from how abusively the leadership of Scrabble organizations have treated me in 2022 than from how Evans and Jennifer and their friends have treated me for the last six years. But I am in a far better position than any Scrabble organization to make decisions about the best methods of treating my mental health.

I have never violated NASPA’s Code of Conduct in any way. The Board says I have to “write a genuine statement of [my] commitment to comply” when it can’t even name a single thing that I’ve done that is in violation. Does NASPA expect that of all its other members who have done nothing wrong?

The Board demanded that I publicly acknowledge wrongdoing. This is likely another attempt to insinuate a connection between me and Sam Kantimathi. When I called for Sam to be banned from the game in a Facebook post, I specifically called out how he should not have been reinstated when he had not apologized for and admitted to cheating. The Board is attempting to paint me as a hypocrite if I do not myself make a public admission. I would totally admit and apologize for my own wrongdoing, if I had done anything wrong. But I haven’t. Sam Kantimathi cheated at Scrabble. That is true. I did none of the things that Evans, Jennifer, and Lola accuse me of. They are all false.

Despite the Board’s wrongheaded decision, the NASPA Executive Committee still has an opportunity to start undoing the damage it caused and righting the ship. NASPA can, if it so chooses, persist in banning me from anything it runs, but if it does, it does not get to write any narrative other than the true one, which is that I have done nothing wrong and that anyone who has done anything to obstruct me from playing tournament Scrabble is behaving unethically.

There is only one path out of this mess and back to morality, and that is:

  1. A complete and total public apology to me, including an admission of all of the wrongdoing by NASPA, WGPO, and CoCo toward me, an admission that my only wrongdoing was too harsh a wording of two emails and two text messages sent between December 19, 2016 and January 5, 2017, communications which were a well-intentioned attempt to avoid all of this mess and pain that has been going on for over six years now.
  2. Vacating all punishments of me and restoring my status as a full-fledged member of any Scrabble association I choose to play in, with zero conditions on my reinstatement.
  3. Removing from any Scrabble leadership or directorship position any person who has been involved in any of the disciplinary decisions against me who is not willing to attach their name to a full public apology to me and a full admission of their wrongdoing and my lack of wrongdoing, aside from what I noted at the beginning of this list.
  4. Banning Evans Clinchy, Jennifer Clinchy, Steven Pellinen, and Lola McKissen from ever being in a leadership position in any Scrabble organization and from ever directing a Scrabble tournament again.

Unless and until all of those conditions are met, the current postings on the splenetic.net blog will stay up forever, and I reserve the right to post more information about this story on that website in the future.

I appreciate your consideration of this request for reconsideration. I look forward to rejoining a community that has meant so much to me for so many years.

Footnotes of Appeal to NASPA Executive Committee

  1. I had been vocal in my opposition to WGPO before, and my principles cannot be bought off by WGPO suddenly getting a cash infusion. Furthermore, there is zero chance that I would have signed up for the 2022 Word Cup, specifically because CoCo was allowed to have a role in organizing and running it.
  2. This was of course helped by Lola’s involvement. I will deal with her role in all of this later, but keep in mind that Lola did not become involved in any of this until early 2022. Evans and Jennifer had been laying the groundwork for much of what happened to me long before that.
  3.  I have additional evidence which corroborates several parts of the story involving the man Jennifer dated in spring 2015, but it is my judgment that this is getting too far afield of what a Scrabble association should spend its time considering. I will present that evidence at trial if my lawyer deems it worthwhile.
  4. Figures 6-10 from Screenshots of Corroborating Evidence. Lola’s comment in Figure 10 is the first mention in our entire text history mentioning what we had already agreed to verbally, that we would make a trip elsewhere together. If this is disputed, I can release the entire prior text message history to prove it.
  5. Figure 14 from Screenshots of Corroborating Evidence
  6. Figure 15 from Screenshots of Corroborating Evidence
  7.  Figure 21 from Screenshots of Corroborating Evidence
  8.  Figures 17-20 from Screenshots of Corroborating Evidence
  9. Figure 22 of Screenshots of Corroborating Evidence

May 30, 2023

June 1, 2023

June 4, 2023

June 8, 2023

June 20, 2023

June 22, 2023

June 30, 2023

July 1, 2023

July 10, 2023

The Scapegoat

June 15, 2023 /

As members of the tournament Scrabble community are aware, both the national and world championships are being held next month in Las Vegas. I have participated in the world championship tournament in every year that it has happened since 2011, and this is the first time since 2001 that the tournament is being held on American soil. After the disruption caused by the pandemic, these two events are a great opportunity for me and other Scrabble players to regain some of what we missed over the last few years.

Unfortunately, I will not be able to participate in either tournament. Last September, I was handed a three-year ban from NASPA. This ban was the culmination of a smear campaign against me by other members of the Scrabble community, specifically Evans Clinchy, Jennifer Clinchy, and Lola McKissen, aided and abetted by Steven Pellinen. I have taken legal action against those individuals, with the exception of Steven Pellinen. I do not want to air my grievances against them here, but I do want to draw the Scrabble community’s attention to the irresponsible and unfair way that NASPA (and WESPA) have handled this situation.

What follows is a summary of my interactions with the various Scrabble associations in 2022 and 2023. All of the below except for the last few paragraphs has already been communicated to NASPA, WESPA, and ABSP.

Stand in your truth, fortified by kindness, and tell your story.

Kacy duke

On April 14, 2022, I received an email from Steven Pellinen, copied to the WGPO Board with the subject heading “Notice of Potential Disciplinary Action”, including five attachments:

  1. A more detailed letter from Steven Pellinen
  2. A statement from Lola McKissen
  3. A statement from Evans Clinchy
  4. A statement from Jennifer Clinchy
  5. A collection of attached documents (the majority of which is screenshots of my blog at splenetic.net)

I believe that this email was the culmination of an attempt to destroy my reputation within the American tournament Scrabble community by spreading defamatory falsehoods. From 2017 to 2019, Evans and Jennifer Clinchy had done many underhanded things to keep me out of NASPA tournaments they organized, and when that wasn’t enough, they decided to create a whole separate Scrabble organization, from which I was excluded. I strongly believe that they convinced Steven Pellinen to file this complaint in an attempt to give their personal grudge against me an air of bureaucratic legitimacy. Unsatisfied with excluding me from their new organization, in which I had no interest to begin with, they expanded their efforts to get me banned from all tournament Scrabble. These statements are an attempt to frame me for harassment and other misdeeds by creating a false narrative about me.

It was absurd that I even received this email from WGPO on many grounds. First, the vast majority of the allegations in the documents were about private relationships that should not be the business of any Scrabble organization to cast judgment on. Second, the few allegations that may have been relevant were related to NASPA-sanctioned tournaments, which are the only sanctioned ones that I play in North America. I am not a member of WGPO, and I have had zero interest in playing in any WGPO tournaments.

Later that same day, I received an email from Judy Cole, copied to the Advisory Board at NASPA containing the same five attachments, informing me that Steven Pellinen had sent all of the documents to the NASPA Executive Committee, and that the NASPA Advisory Board wanted my response “within 10 days if possible.”

The next morning, April 15th, I responded to NASPA and copied Steven Pellinen personally (but not WGPO) saying I only recognized NASPA as having authority over Scrabble in North America, and that I would only deal with them. I further stated that I would need at least a month to respond, and that I would additionally provide my official response to Steven Pellinen as a personal courtesy to him.

Two people from NASPA replied in agreeable and helpful ways. Steven Pellinen responded, asking me to respond to part of the complaint sooner. I ignored Steven’s message. Steven was the plaintiff in the case against me, and it was completely inappropriate for him to circumvent NASPA and ask for a reply sooner, just as it was completely inappropriate for WGPO to contact me in any way whatsoever about this. A few days later, on April 19th, NASPA told me that I had as much time as I needed to respond and to refrain from attending any NASPA clubs or tournaments and from making contact with the complainants until they made their ruling, which I complied with.

On April 25th, I received an email that was caught in my spam filter from conduct@cocoscrabble.org telling me that I had until April 28th to respond to them because of this incident report. This email included quotes from an April 14th email that they had allegedly sent me, but I had never received that one.1 I never responded to any of CoCo’s communication, and they sent me another email on May 22nd with their disciplinary decision in an attachment, which banned me from playing in their tournaments for five years.

I had hoped to get my response back to NASPA by late May, but I was unable to do so. I had already booked travel, long before I received the incident report, to go to the UK and Germany to compete in tournaments in both countries that were sanctioned by the Association of British Scrabble Players (ABSP) and WESPA. Technically, this was not within NASPA’s purview, but I was completely above board with NASPA in letting them know about my planned travel and intent to play in the tournaments. The NASPA Advisory Board explicitly okayed me playing in the European tournaments before adjudication of my case. These are the only tournaments I played after receiving this incident report, and I have not attended any clubs nor even played Scrabble with anyone online in that time.

Meanwhile, Steven Pellinen emailed me again on May 27th telling me that WGPO was proceeding with a review of my case without my statement, because I had not submitted it on time. I responded, reminding Steven that I would copy him on my response to NASPA and informing him that NASPA had given me no deadline. I further pointed out that WGPO had no right to ask me for anything or to have a hearing about me, as I was not playing in their tournaments and had no intention to do so, and that the only tournaments relevant to the incident report were NASPA tournaments. On June 29th, I received an email from Keith Hagel, on behalf of the WGPO Board of Directors, notifying me that I had received a five-year ban.

I had been registered to play in the NASPA Scrabble Players Championship in Baltimore in late July, but because I was not able to get my response to the incident report written in a timely way, I dropped out of the tournament.

On August 8th, Michael Tang made an announcement about the Alchemist Cup 2024, which is an international event pitting teams of the top 5 players from many countries against each other. His announcement included the news that players who were suspended by two out of three Scrabble associations in North America would not be permitted to register for the event, and he specified that he was considering NASPA, WGPO, and CoCo to all count as Scrabble associations for North America. This rule was clearly targeting me, as I was the only person in the world who was suspended by two out of three North American associations. Furthermore, it was unprecedented to consider either WGPO or CoCo as an association for qualifying purposes. Only NASPA had WESPA recognition and had ever been involved in international qualifying before.

(Note also that the exact ways in which Evans and Jennifer had broken NASPA rules in 2017-2019 had the effect of corrupting the qualifying process for the 2018 and 2020 Alchemist Cup tournaments. Evans and Jennifer had organized their own Virtual World Cup in 2020, which was billed as a replacement for the canceled 2020 Alchemist Cup, and they had also cheated me out of a spot in that event.)

On August 24th, I received another email from the NASPA Advisory Board telling me that my name was now on the suspended players list and that I had until two weeks from that date, September 7th, to get a response to NASPA. The email also mentioned that Steven Pellinen had contacted the Advisory Board and was pressuring them to act sooner. I responded the next day saying that I would get my response in by September 7th.

On September 6th, I sent my response to the NASPA Advisory Board, copying it to Steven Pellinen. A day later, Jason Idalski, who had been my main point of contact on the NASPA Advisory Board, informed me that their next meeting would be on September 20th.

On the morning of September 21st, I texted Jason Idalski back to inquire about whether the Advisory Board had made a decision. I did not hear back for several hours. I then texted Stefan Rau, another member of the Advisory Board I know well, asking the same thing. Jason Idalski and Stefan Rau got back to me within ten minutes of each other, each giving me contradictory information.

On September 23rd, I received an email from Jason Idalski, copying both the Advisory Board and Steven Pellinen, informing me that I had been given a three-year ban. The email referred to three violations by me of the Code of Conduct but gave no specifics as to what I had done to violate the Code or what part or parts of the Code I had allegedly violated, other than a reference to Section 2.

On September 25th, I was contacted via Facebook Messenger by Eric Kinderman, a non-voting member of the WESPA board, telling me that NASPA had told them that I was sanctioned for three years but did not give a reason. He suspected foul play. I responded,

I did submit a defense, and if you read it, it conclusively proves that all the charges against me were false, and also that all three people who submitted statements knowingly and intentionally submitted false information against me. The response they gave me also did not specify what I did that supposedly merited the suspension. All of my communication with the Scrabble associations henceforth will be through my lawyer.

I also learned around this time that Sue Tremblay, Community Advocate of NASPA, was never informed of the incident report brought against me or the NASPA Advisory Board’s deliberations about it. She only learned about the case from me after I had already submitted my response. According to NASPA’s website, the Community Advocate’s “mandate is to provide a safe environment for members reporting cases of harassment within the association.” Sue was always looped into incident reports like this one since her appointment, and she seems to have been intentionally excluded from this process.

On November 8th, 2022, my former attorney sent a letter to the NASPA Advisory Board asking for explanation of the rationale behind their decision and whether there were any additional documents submitted as part of the case that I had not been shown. The letter also doubled as a litigation hold letter.2

On November 10th, John Chew, the President of NASPA, who serves on both the Advisory Board and the Executive Committee, wrote back notifying me that the Advisory Board would not elaborate on the ruling.

On November 15th, John Chew wrote again, attaching additional statements from Jennifer Clinchy, Lola McKissen, and Steven Pellinen dated September 9th, 2022. These statements contained a large amount of additional defamatory material from Jennifer and Lola. The statement from Steven Pellinen also showed that he was very obviously not an objective third party and was a further scathing criticism of me. Though NASPA’s Advisory Board did not meet to consider my case until 11 days later, on September 20th, I was never informed of the additional documents prior to NASPA’s verdict. Furthermore, I never would have found out about them if not for the letter from my former attorney.

The submission of the September 9th documents was against the rules of NASPA’s disciplinary procedures as far as I understood. Jason Idalski had explained to me over the phone that the disciplinary process was just that the Advisory Board would review the complainants’ original statements from April 2022 and my response in a private meeting. Neither I nor the complainants would be at the meeting. There would be no cross-examinations or further rounds of statements.

On April 14th, 2023, I filed a lawsuit in Multnomah County Circuit Court against Evans, Jennifer, and Lola for Defamation, Conspiracy to Defame, Intentional Interference with Economic Relations, Conspiracy to Tortiously Interfere with Economic Relations, Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress, and Conspiracy to Intentionally Inflict Emotional Distress. I did this, at great personal financial risk to myself, because my reputation has been unlawfully tarnished and I need the Scrabble world to see the truth.

On May 26th, I emailed an appeal to the NASPA Executive Committee in which I thoroughly disproved all of the accusations from the September 9th statements, just as my September 6th response disproved all of the accusations from the earlier statements. Within a few minutes, John Chew emailed me back confirming receipt of the email and saying it would be placed on the next week’s agenda.

On May 30th, Judy Cole emailed me saying that the Executive Committee has agreed to hear the appeal but has not yet set a date when to do so.

On June 1st, my attorney emailed both Judy and John, who are presently the entirety of the Executive Committee, asking for the timetable for when a decision can be expected and letting them know that I want to play in the 2023 Scrabble Players Championship and 2023 WESPA Championship in July.

On June 4th, John Chew wrote back to my attorney, “Due to David’s eight-month delay in submitting his appeal, the Executive Committee’s ongoing planning of our annual championship next month, and the need to perform a thorough and de novo review of the case, we cannot provide a date by which our deliberations will be complete.” John was counting eight months from September 23rd, 2022 to May 26th, 2023, even though I did not receive the latter statements made against me until November 15th, 2022. The only party who has made an eight-month delay is NASPA, who has still given neither me nor WESPA any explanation of what I did that merited a suspension.

On June 8th, I emailed my appeal and all previous communication on the case to Mina Le and Wayne Kelly, who put it before the WESPA Executive Committee and ABSP Committee respectively.

On June 11th, Mina notified me that the WESPA Executive Committee is refusing to intervene and letting NASPA address it.

On that same day, Wayne Kelly notified me that ABSP will not reciprocate NASPA’s suspension of me. He mentioned that my standing in the UK is “beyond question.”

I hope that this situation will be corrected soon, so that I can sit down across the table and play Scrabble again with all of the wonderful people I have enjoyed tournament games with for over twenty years now.

Footnotes

  1. It is possible that the April 14th email was lost in my spam filter, but that seems unlikely to me, because my email provider says that it deletes things from spam after 30 days. I checked the spam filter in late April and saw the April 25th email from CoCo but no April 14th email.
  2. On November 11th, 2022, litigation hold letters also went out to Evans Clinchy, Jennifer Clinchy, CoCo, Steven Pellinen, WGPO, and Lola McKissen.

Part II: The Fallout

July 15, 2020 /

In Part I, I described how my troubles with Jennifer and Evans began.  Herein, I will show how they escalated their vendetta against me over the next three years, turning my old friends against me and increasingly manipulating the Scrabble scene to shut me out.

People have to pretend you’re a bad person, so they don’t feel guilty about the things they did to you.

The next time we crossed paths was at a tournament in Charlottesville in March 2017. By this point I was over Jennifer completely. I played Evans twice and Jennifer once. Evans continued not talking to me at all, but I acted like nothing unusual was happening. I didn’t attempt to get a handshake before the games, as I knew he wouldn’t want to do so. I tried to make some friendly chat after the closer of our two games about possible strategic and tactical decisions for him. He said nothing and just walked away.

When I played Jennifer, I did offer a handshake, but she politely declined saying that she had a cold, which was visibly true. Our game was cordial enough. If she was uncomfortable playing me this time, she didn’t show it. She never gave me anything like the silent treatment that Evans did, and she did not behave in an untoward way to me.

The next time I was in the same place as Jennifer and Evans was the Niagara Falls tournament in May. I never played or talked to either of them at that event. There was at least an occasion or two when I noticed that Evans saw me in the tournament room and immediately looked away. He couldn’t bear to see me, let alone interact with me.

One moment sticks in my mind. At one of our meal breaks, I had left the playing room and almost gotten to the exit doors of the Convention Centre when I came near a group that included Jennifer and Evans. I was ignored by everyone and didn’t attempt any interaction with them. Moments later, I crossed paths with Chris Lipe outside and said something about all the people avoiding me. Chris said, “I’m sorry this is so awkward for you.” My response, “This isn’t awkward for me. It’s awkward for them,” genuinely surprised him. We didn’t have a long conversation, but I communicated that if there were any justice in the world the other people would be hanging out with me and spurning them, because they were the ones being rude to me, not the other way around.

Chris saw that he had misunderstood the situation. I believe he abandoned plans to join their lunch group and ate with me instead. We didn’t talk about it more. In the big picture, there are many ways that I have been dissatisfied with how Chris has responded to their behavior, but this was a moment when he did right by me.

In August of 2017, Jennifer and Evans organized a tournament in Nashville, Tennessee, concurrent with the solar eclipse happening in that region. They rented a house to use for the tournament and lodging. In what became the archetype of the pattern they would follow in future years, they reached out to a bunch of their friends privately and got them to sign up in advance so that the event could be full before registration ever went public.

The timing of that event happened to be when I couldn’t have attended even if I were welcome, as it was just days before the World Scrabble Championship in Nottingham, England. I am sure that Jennifer and Evans were aware of the impossibility of me attending at that time, and I’m also sure that I was not the only person they were interested in excluding. I heard through an inside connection that they specifically did not want Joey Krafchick to attend. Joey was a young and talented Scrabble player, who was living in Atlanta and playing a lot of CSW. Around this time he had also become an outspoken pro-Trumper, alienating himself from many Scrabble players.

None of this bothered me. For me, their tournament was moot, as I had much bigger things on my plate. I led the World Championship for most of the first half and finished in 11th place. I won the British Matchplay Scrabble Championship (BMSC) a few days later, also in Nottingham. But I made a mental note of what Jennifer and Evans were doing.

On one of the evenings during the BMSC, I went out to a bar with Brett Smitheram. He is a Londoner, a close friend, and the winner of the 2016 World Championship. Brett has done many media appearances and feels it is the duty of a World Champion to help promote and grow the game. I’m inclined to agree with him.

David Eldar, an Australian expat who also lives in London, had just won the 2017 World Scrabble Championship a day or so before. Brett told me that the BBC had wanted to do a TV interview with both Brett and David, as the outgoing and incoming World Champions, but David had declined the interview. Of course, they weren’t going to have the old Champion on without the new one, so the whole piece got canceled. Brett was understandably annoyed that David hadn’t been willing to go along with this.

Immediately after the two tournaments in Nottingham, I traveled with Chris Lipe to Stockholm, Sweden. Chris and I were competing in the Continental Scrabble Championship the following weekend, but we had a few days to be tourists first. One afternoon I was enjoying a few G&T’s made from a nice bottle of gin that I’d bought at Gatwick Airport. On a Facebook group called Scrabble Snippetz, populated mostly by UK players but also by more than a few of my North American CSW brethren, there was a discussion about whether tournament competitors ought to be able to opt out of live annotation of their games for internet coverage. Some players were embarrassed about having their racks, plays, and errors shown to the world.

David and I made contributions to the discussion, and we were in vociferous agreement. Both of us espoused the position that if a tournament is getting any kind of outside sponsorship for prize money, then players should not be able to opt out. Doing our part to help the promotion of the event ought to be a condition of getting to compete for that prize money.

In one comment, David said “It would be as absurd as professional athletes refusing to be on television in their games.” I have never been one to hold back from jibing my friends for their apparent hypocrisy. Already a few drinks in, I couldn’t resist. I made a one-line response to David saying, “It would be as absurd as the World Scrabble Champion refusing to appear on BBC.” The previous dialogue was paraphrased, but I remember his next reply exactly: “Do you talk to your partners this way?” I was baffled by his phrasing, but I knew that he was not taking my words in good humor. I clarified that I was tipsy and meant the comment light-heartedly, adding a smiley. That seemed to smooth things over.

A little while later Chris and I went out to dinner at a cool medieval Swedish restaurant. I enjoyed the meal, and Chris buried his face in his phone, checking the Scrabble gossip online. Suddenly Chris said, “You might want to check Snippetz. Eldar is trashing you really hard right now.”

After reading the brief exchange between David and me, several other Scrabble players had asked him whether he had turned down a BBC interview. He made a brand new post on Snippetz to address it. This post was nothing less than a full-blown ad hominem attack on me. He said that I was a passive-aggressive jerk and that I would never win the World Scrabble Championship. He furthermore explained that the BBC interview was in Manchester, and that was the main reason he had turned it down. He had really wanted to get back to London without delay, and furthermore it seemed ridiculous to him that the BBC couldn’t do the piece in London, considering that both he and Brett lived there.

While I appreciated the explanation of the Manchester thing, which Brett had not mentioned, I thought David’s personal attack on me was completely unwarranted and outsize, in response to what I had clearly communicated was an alcohol-laden attempt to joke with him. His egregious attack caused a pile-on effect. A lot of people liked David’s post, including people whom I had considered good friends in the Scrabble community, even though it was so obviously inappropriate. A close friend of mine made a long comment that was an even more vicious and personal attack on me and not in any way related to what David was talking about. My internal reaction was, “All these people hate me, and they’re looking for an excuse. As soon as one person gives them permission to attack me, it’s the trendy thing to do.”

I believe that if I were valued and loved in this community, other people would have spoken up in my defense. That did not happen. I was the lone voice who defended myself.

That incident with David—not anything with Jennifer and Evans—made me snap. From that moment onward I decided that if no one else in the Scrabble community was going to defend me, to speak out against the wrongdoing done to me, to shut down those who attacked me, I was going to do it my damn self. I made a decision right then and there that anyone attacking me publicly on social media would be met with the nuclear option. I was going to attack, embarrass, and hurt them back so badly that I would cripple their ability to ever attack me again. I would come out so hard in response to anything like that that I would intimidate those who were even considering attacking me.

I stand by that decision, even though it has made my relationship with the Scrabble community even more fraught than it was before.

From age 11 to 18, I grew up with a monster in my house. My mother had a live-in boyfriend who was emotionally abusive to me and my three sisters. He did many inappropriate and harmful things, often in front of my mother. My mother let it all happen, almost never raising her voice, nor complaining, nor doing anything to stop him, no matter how outrageous his behavior was. Her passivity was complicity, and she normalized his abusive behavior. When I was 18, I was the one who finally called the police and had him removed from our home. My mother got a restraining order against him. Later she canceled the order without telling her children, and she started letting him come back to the house when her children were not around. This happened until he accidentally showed up when I was home. I screamed at him from the doorstep, threatening to call the police and doing everything I could to attract the neighbors’ attention, until he went away.

Ever since that time, I have intentionally taken a pro-confrontation attitude. I believe that we only solve our problems by facing them head on, by having the hard conversations, by standing up to our abusers, by doing whatever it takes to make sure that they can never hurt us again.

Nothing in David’s screed against me nor the comments on it even mentioned anything related to Jennifer and Evans. I have no idea whether David knew anything about that situation. I think it is likely he did not and was just dealing with his own demons. However, I am sure that the pile-on that I experienced was in large part due to the perception of my history with Jennifer and Evans. (I knew this intuitively right away, and it was confirmed by a much later conversation with the person who wrote the long comment on David’s post.) It was not the first time that I was treated differently because of what people thought that I did, but it was when the dam broke open.

My next tournament after returning from Europe was in Asheville, North Carolina, in November 2017. This was the first time I have ever played in a multiday Scrabble tournament and not had any after-hours socialization with the other players. In fairness, Matthew Bernardina did meet up with me the night before the tournament for a couple of hours at a cute little board game cafe. But on Saturday night after the games, I ate dinner by myself and called it an early night. Most of the people in the CSW division were at a group dinner that I was not invited to. The person who organized the dinner is someone who I have considered a longtime friend. We have socialized for over a decade, and I have stayed at her home multiple times. I have had essentially no relationship with this person ever since Jennifer and Evans have been together.

Jennifer and Evans were not even at the Asheville tournament.

I don’t know when I became cognizant that Evans had started back-filling annotations of our games on cross-tables, only games that he had won. I don’t think I noticed this until long after he had done it. It wouldn’t surprise me if he had done this as a way of trying to assert superiority over me, perhaps thinking that I might be hurt by it. The effect was completely the reverse. Like his behavior during our game in New Orleans, this reinforced to me how much I was in his head, and what a huge psychological advantage I would hold over him in future games.

In late 2017 Jennifer and Evans moved together to Tacoma, Washington. It didn’t matter to me at the time, but fate decided that it would become a significant fact in my life not much later. They organized a tournament in Hood River, Oregon, for Presidents Day weekend 2018. They treated it the same way they had the Nashville tournament, getting their friends to fill up all the spots before the tournament became public. On the cross-tables page they claimed there was a waiting list for anyone else who wanted to play, but they kept the names and order on the list private.

This event was on the opposite side of the country from me, and it wasn’t a good time for me to go anyway. But again, I stayed aware of what they were doing and guessed what their frame of mind must have been. Their private registration method made it impossible for me to sign up. Meanwhile, they got all the best CSW players in the Pacific Northwest to come, as well as a number of strong players from elsewhere.

I was swamped at work. My team had delivered a new product in the fall which drastically increased our maintenance burden and made my on-call shifts hellish. It was disrupting my sleep and taking a serious toll on my health. Around the New Year, I learned about an opportunity on a different team at my company that was a good match for my interests and skills and had virtually no on-call responsibility. This team was located at my company’s headquarters in Seattle.

I had been working at this company for four years—longer than I had known Jennifer—and I had already made many business trips to Seattle. I liked the city. I had organized Scrabble get-togethers with the handful of players in the area who played CSW.

I was also tired of working in our office in suburban Northern Virginia that kept me too far out of Washington DC for so much of the time. As I talked about in the previous part, most of my opportunities to play CSW Scrabble around DC had evaporated over the last two years.

As soon as the possibility of the Seattle job arose, I immediately knew there could be some problems. Tacoma and Seattle aren’t right next to each other. They’re like DC and Baltimore. But the CSW Scrabble scene is small. If I lived there, I was sure to cross paths with Jennifer and Evans, and we would want to play with the same players and at the same events. Furthermore, Jennifer and Evans were quickly filling a vacuum and starting to become the preeminent CSW organizers in the area, not just with the Hood River event but also a number of one-day tournaments.

The Seattle job was already on my radar, but I wasn’t sure if it was the direction I would go when I next crossed paths with Evans and Jennifer, at the New Orleans tournament in January 2018, one year after all this hubbub had started. Evans won his first 12 games in a row and looked like he might run away with the tournament. As soon as I sat down at the top board to face him in round 14, I thanked him for refusing Sam Kantimathi’s entry to the Hood River tournament. I didn’t get him to say much, but he at least looked at me and made an acknowledgment that he heard me, which was more than I’ve gotten from him any other time we met since these things started.

If you haven’t heard of Sam Kantimathi, the quickest way to get up to speed is to read the public post I made on Facebook calling for him to receive a lifetime ban from the game. My arguments were entirely about Sam’s cheating and the integrity of the game. Additionally, in the responses other people brought up Sam’s terrible treatment of women. After I made that post, Sam withdrew from all of the tournaments he had signed up for, but he gradually began reentering events soon afterward. Some directors started disallowing him from events, and some players started working within the North American Scrabble Players Association (NASPA) to investigate his wrongdoings toward women and attempt to get him banned. None of this has yet resulted in an expulsion. The 2018 Hood River event was one of the first test cases in which the directors were successful in disallowing him. I had learned this through the grapevine.

The board Evans and I were playing on was being broadcast on the internet, so there was a contraption with an overhead camera looking down on the board. When the game was about to start, I extended my hand across the board to try to shake Evans’s hand. This is the only time I have done so since he surprised me with his refusal at this same tournament the previous year. I said aloud something like, “C’mon Evans, you’re not going to refuse to shake my hand with the camera on.” He ignored me, and my hand hung awkwardly in the air for too long.

I didn’t think he was going to shake my hand. I did it because I wanted the rest of the world to see that I was treating him normally, while he was being rude. My attempt was unsuccessful. I checked the online footage later. The overhead camera was capturing the board but neither of our bodies, and there was no sound. So you could see my hand hanging over the board, but with no other context it wasn’t even obvious that it was an attempt at a handshake.

This was the first moment in this entire story that I became angry at Evans. I totally understood him losing his cool the year before, but he had had an entire year to get over himself and calm down enough to actually talk to me. Instead, he had completely avoided having any communication. He never said a word to me, and I could tell from his body language every time we were in the same place that he couldn’t stand even being in my presence. He never even wanted to look in my direction, and now he had finally insulted me to my face, while I had done absolutely nothing but be a civil human being to him the entire time.

Part of me wanted to chew him out right then and there, but I knew it would be useless and counterproductive, both because it was clear that he hated me so much that nothing I said would get through to him, and because letting him stay mad at me gave me the advantage over the board. I shook with anger on the first play of the game, but I quickly calmed myself. Then I beat him at Scrabble.

Evans’s consolation was that he beat me in our round 18 rematch, a game in which no conversation or handshakes were attempted.

Shortly after the tournament, I interviewed with several people on the team in Seattle, and it became clear that it was a good career fit. They wanted to work with me, and I wanted to work with them. Everything in my life suggested that this was a good direction to go in, except for the situation with Evans and Jennifer. In the end I decided I wasn’t going to let their behavior get in the way of making the right decision for me. I met up with an old friend in DC and told him a little bit about the story and my concern about the tension when I went to Seattle. He said optimistically, “Maybe this will force you all to deal with it.”

I came to Seattle in early March 2018 for a business trip, during which I ramped up with my new team and did an apartment search. This was a very busy time, so Scrabble wasn’t much of a priority. I had a text chat with Chris Grubb, a CSW player who lives in Seattle, who revealed to me that there was a group of players meeting on Fridays downtown that started when Jennifer and Evans moved to Tacoma. Furthermore, Jennifer and Evans had told his fiancee Rachel, also a player, that they would not come if I was there.

Chris wrote, “Don’t know how to say this, but rumor has it that there is some problematic history between you and them (?)… not that I know or care about any of that. I hate drama.”

My response was, “Yes, they’ve been complete assholes to me ever since they’ve gotten together and I’ve done nothing to them. Curious what they’re telling people though.” This was not something I had any bandwidth to deal with during this trip, but again I was taking mental notes about what they were doing.

I found an apartment that wasn’t going to be available until late April, so I went back to the east coast and worked remotely for my new team for the next month and a half. Shortly before I made the move, I played in a Scrabble tournament in Princeton, New Jersey, where one of my competitors was Walker Willingham, another CSW player who lives in the Seattle area, on Bainbridge Island.

I could tell Walker wanted to talk to me about my move to Seattle. We went out to lunch. He made clear that Evans hated me, but that he (Walker) didn’t want to know what the drama was about. Then he tried to negotiate some arrangement where we would have the CSW players meet on alternate Fridays with me and with Jennifer and Evans. I said that this was not acceptable to me.

Walker was the first Scrabble player to whom I told the whole backstory. I had told a therapist and a few close people among my family and non-Scrabble friends, but I had been keeping it out of the purview of Scrabble players and trying to stay above the fray. However, I now had evidence that Jennifer and Evans were directly talking to other players about their version of events and trying to reduce my chances to play Scrabble in Seattle. This was fifteen months after the New Orleans tournament that Jennifer and Evans were still holding a grudge about.

I told Walker not only about what happened leading up to and at the 2017 New Orleans tournament, but also about Evans’s treatment of me since, and about what he and Jennifer were doing to keep me out of their “private club” tournaments, even though I wasn’t even trying to sign up. And that they were now surreptitiously gathering the other Seattle CSW Scrabble players and trying to get them all to agree to keep me away.

Despite all of that, I continued to Walker, I had no problem getting together with them and all the other Seattle CSW players to play games. It was only they who had mistreated me and they who were trying to avoid me. I shouldn’t be left out of anything on account of their misbehavior. Furthermore, this was all something which easily could have been ironed out at any time in the more than a year that had passed since that time, if they would have ever just talked to me.

It was ridiculous. Not only had I organized get-togethers with the other Seattle CSW players before Jennifer and Evans had even moved there, but I had also introduced some of them to each other. Jennifer and Evans needed to get over themselves, and the rest of the group needed to say no to their divisiveness.

A couple of weeks after I moved to town, Walker sent out an email to all the local CSW players, including Jennifer, Evans, and me, suggesting a get-together at the same bar where they had already been meeting. Walker would later let me know that shortly after he sent the email Evans responded only to him saying “Was this a slip up?”

Evans and Jennifer attempted to browbeat the other Seattle area Scrabble players into excluding me from their casual Scrabble get-togethers, and when the other players did not comply, Evans and Jennifer stopped attending. They did not respond to any group emails, and they never showed up once in the entire time I’ve lived here. Walker and I continued including them on the group emails for a while, but we eventually gave up because they were not responsive.

The only players who showed up for that first session after I arrived were Walker, Judy Romann, and me. Chris Grubb and his partner Rachel came sporadically to later meetings, as did Bharath Balakrishnan. But it was difficult to get a critical mass. Often it was only me, Judy, and Walker. Sometimes knowing that we would have an odd number, Walker wouldn’t bother to come, so I would just spend the evening playing against Judy. This was part of the problem: Jennifer and Evans weren’t just organizers. They were a significant chunk of a small CSW Scrabble community. Without them, it was hard to achieve a critical mass.

A week after that first Seattle get-together, there was a one-day tournament in Portland. I offered to drive, and Walker, Judy, and Bharath all came with me. Jennifer and Evans also played in the tournament, which turned out to be the last time we ever played at the same event, and the second-to-last time that we have ever been in the same place.

This was a small event of only eight players, played in the dining area of a pizzeria. Of course, the moment I walked into the room, Evans looked down at the table where he and Jennifer were sitting, and he ignored me the entire day. In the fourth round, he and I played. I did not offer a handshake. He was due to go first, so I shuffled the tiles in the bag and said, “You may go first, Child.” There was no other conversation.

In the final round I played Jennifer. This was only the second time we were playing after New Orleans, as we’d happened not to get paired at the few other tournaments we both attended, except for Charlottesville. Prior to this game, I attempted to reach my hand out for a handshake, simply because it was the civil thing to do and I wasn’t aware that Jennifer had any problem with it. She declined. At least she wasn’t obnoxious or abrasive about it. We had a little bit of polite conversation about the game afterward. That seemed to put her in better spirits. Perhaps she was starting to come around to the realization that I’m just living my life and have no issue with her.

In one of my early conversations with Judy in Seattle, she mentioned that she had asked Jennifer in the restroom one time before I moved to town about why she didn’t want to play with me. Judy told me that Jennifer said it wasn’t really her, it was Evans.

The irony is that the person with whom I most want to play Scrabble in the entire Seattle area is Evans Clinchy. I don’t care whether he likes me or not, but he is my best possible sparring partner living nearby. We’re very close in playing strength. If he and Jennifer had ever been willing to come to any of our gatherings, he would have seen that I had no issue with him and was happy to play. He might have calmed down and just enjoyed the games. It might have eventually opened up an opportunity to have a conversation that would help him make peace with the past. However, he and Jennifer have done nothing but put up walls since I have moved here.

In late 2017 and early 2018, Jennifer and Evans had just been starting to ramp up organizing more CSW tournaments in the region, but that changed significantly after I came to town. There was one holdover one-day event at their home in Tacoma in June, about a month after the Portland event, that they had already put on the calendar before I moved to town. I think it was probably already full before I got to town. I didn’t make any effort to try to get in. The only time they ran an event at that same location again was during the 2018 World Championship, in which they knew I was competing.

They almost entirely stopped going to the monthly Portland tournaments. They’ve been mostly inactive in the Scrabble scene in the Pacific Northwest publicly, except for their two signature annual events, both of which they started in 2018. The first of these was the Hood River tournament on Presidents Day weekend, which I mentioned earlier.

The other event was scheduled for Labor Day weekend at a lodge on the Oregon coast. They had already put this event on the calendar before I had moved to Seattle, and they pulled the same shenanigans with signups as they had for the Nashville and Hood River tournaments. This time they didn’t manage to quite fill up all of the spots before the registration went public. I know this because a Portland-area Scrabble player tipped me off with a Facebook message shortly before I moved from Virginia. I guessed by the way he brought it up that he must have heard something through the rumor mill and was trying to stir the pot. At the time, I was fully occupied with a cross-country move and didn’t have the energy to even try to engage Evans and Jennifer about the tournament, and by the time I got settled in Seattle the event was already full. It is not an exaggeration to say that they invited all of the CSW Scrabble players in the Pacific Northwest to play in that event except me.

I crossed paths with Jennifer and Evans precisely one more time. Chris Lipe and Randi Goldberg were having a small destination wedding in Aruba, with only about 20 guests in total, roughly half of whom were Scrabble players. Randi mentioned that Jennifer and Evans would be there, and that they weren’t making any seat assignments for the small dinner on the beach.

I wanted to go to support Chris and Randi, and I loved the idea of getting away to Aruba. I easily imagined what this was going to look like. The Scrabble players would probably all hang out together in the days around the wedding, playing games, having meals, etc. If I joined them, Evans was going to pull his usual shtick of not looking at or talking to me. There was part of me that wanted to join the group as much as possible, just so all the rest of them could see that I had no problem interacting like a normal human being, while he was the only one being ludicrously uncivil. However, I didn’t want to escalate things at a wedding, out of respect for the bride and groom.

Fortunately, I had started dating Emily early in my time in Seattle, and she agreed to come to the wedding with me. She wasn’t a Scrabble player, so there would be no pressure to hang out with the other players, and we could just have fun on our own. I informed her of the backstory with Jennifer and Evans before we headed to Aruba, so she wouldn’t be surprised by anything from them.

Emily and I arrived at the resort in Aruba on an afternoon in the middle of July, two days before the wedding. After checking into our room, we crossed through the lobby on our way to the beach. Mina, a Scrabble player and good friend, waved to me. She was sitting with a group of Scrabble players playing a different board game. Evans was with the group, but Jennifer was not. Emily and I walked up, and I said hello and introduced her. Several people got up to introduce themselves and shake her hand or give her a hug. Everyone gave her a friendly greeting except Evans. Evans stayed seated, averting his eyes. He wouldn’t look at or talk to me or anyone associated with me, apparently. When it was his turn to introduce himself, he didn’t even say hello. He just muttered, “Evans.” Neither I nor anyone else called him out on it. Emily and I said our goodbyes a minute or so later and walked away. We didn’t see the other Scrabble players again until the wedding.

The wedding ceremony was short, and as I expected there were about 11 or 12 Scrabble players in attendance. During the cocktail hour, Emily and I chatted with Mina and her date César, as well as Stefan and Terry Kang Rau, all longtime friends of mine from Scrabble. None of the other Scrabble players made any effort to talk to us. Emily and I hovered near the open bar, refilling our drinks several times. I have to give her credit. She sensed a lot of the awkwardness, but she was a champ, never showing any displeasure.

At a moment when Emily had slipped away, Jennifer came up to the bar. Unexpectedly, she said hello to me and asked how I was doing. I said I was doing great, probably a bit too loudly and awkwardly, taken aback that she was interacting with me at all. That was the extent of the conversation, and she walked away.

Emily was back, and cocktail hour was winding down, with guests starting to take seats for dinner. There were only four tables, not including the little table for the bride and groom in the middle. Two of them were for Chris’s and Randi’s families, and the other two were on opposite sides of the dance floor that had been set up on the beach. All of the Scrabble players were starting to gather at the table on the far side from the bar area.

Emily and I lingered by the bar. She whispered to me, asking whether it would be more awkward to sit with the Scrabble players or not sit with them. I said, “It’s going to be awkward either way.” We waited until everyone else had sat down, and as expected all the other Scrabble players had filled up the other table. The two seats that were left were at the non-Scrabble friends table.

Emily and I sat down and got to know Chris’s and Randi’s other friends, who were mostly from Saint Louis or climbing buddies or both. We are both very outgoing people and had no trouble making new friends. The other people at our table knew all the other Scrabble players were at the other table, but they were too polite to say anything about it. At a wedding with two non-family tables, I was sitting at the table where I knew nobody instead of the table where I knew everybody.

When the reception was nearly over, Chris and Randi left their table and made an especial point of coming up to me and Emily to talk to us on their way out. On the surface this might have seemed like a nice gesture, but it was already clear from earlier conversations that the Scrabble players were going to gather in the lobby of the resort, which was only about a hundred feet or so from where we were sitting, to play some more board games, right in the same spot where Emily and I had run into them two days earlier. While Chris was trying to be polite and graceful, he was essentially saying goodbye to me and Emily because he was about to go play with his other friends. He didn’t say that I wasn’t welcome to join them. He just assumed that I wouldn’t.

Emily read right through it. The moment he walked away, she whispered again to me, letting no one else but me see how pissed she was at him for being a lousy friend to me. Chris’s behavior bothered her more than me in that moment. I was unsurprised by his behavior, but the fact that Emily was piqued on my behalf was an act of kindness to me. It was the best thing about the entire experience at the wedding for me.

Later in 2018, Jennifer got herself elected to the Advisory Board of NASPA. A little while later I saw a newsletter blurb about how NASPA was making rule changes to allow directors to disallow a player from entering their tournaments if the directors felt that the player would disrupt the safety and environment of the event. There was a further clarification that directors could not disallow players simply because they disliked them. I immediately suspected that Jennifer might have been involved in that rule change, but I did not act on this or say anything to anyone about it at the time.

On the evening of September 12, 2018, a week and a half after the Oregon Coast tournament, I went to cross-tables.com and saw that the second Hood River tournament would occur on Presidents Day weekend in 2019. Not having had opportunities to play in local tournaments for many months already, I wasn’t in the habit of checking the listings regularly, but it must have been kismet that I happened upon this shortly after they had advertised the event. Jennifer and Evans had again signed up most of their friends in advance, but four spots out of twenty were still open.

I thought about what to do. I knew that Evans and Jennifer had been waging a silent war against me, but I hadn’t been doing anything. I literally had never contacted either of them since my email to Jennifer on January 5, 2017. We had been in the same place only six times since then: at the New Orleans, Charlottesville, and Niagara Falls tournaments in 2017, and the next year at New Orleans, the Portland one-day in May, and the wedding in Aruba. Even if Jennifer had seemingly gradually calmed down, Evans had behaved distastefully toward me on every single occasion—and even toward my date at the wedding. But neither of them had ever expressed to me what their grievances were. They had simply cut off all communication.

I had already decided that the way to handle them at the few tournaments where we crossed paths was just to ignore their awkwardness and act like it wasn’t happening. That was the classy thing to do, I thought. So I asked myself, what would I do if they weren’t behaving like this? The answer was to sign up for the tournament. They had listed both of their email addresses as directors and given instructions to send them via PayPal a $250 fee, which covered both the tournament fee and lodging cost for the weekend.

I wanted there to be no possibility of them painting this as me harassing Jennifer, so I sent the money to Evans’s email address. It was late in the evening when I did this, and I didn’t want to bother him at that hour, so I waited until the next morning to send a brief email to Evans, notifying him of my entry while complimenting him on some of his other recent achievements.

from: Dave Koenig
to: Evans Clinchy
date: Sep 13, 2018, 8:29 AM
subject: Hood River entry

I paypalled you payment for the Hood River tournament last night.

Congrats on your big win at Nationals, and good luck at the Alchemist Cup.

See you in February, if not sooner.

Cheers,
Dave

screenshot in appendix

Later that same day, I received a notification that Evans had refunded my PayPal payment. He did not respond to my email, but Jennifer emailed me and copied him on the message.

from: Jennifer Lee
to: Dave Koenig
cc: Evans Clinchy
date: Sep 13, 2018, 1:37 PM
subject: Hood River tournament

Hi Dave,

Thanks for your interest in the Hood River tournament. Evans received your $250 payment for the entry fee and lodging. I am writing on behalf of myself and Evans as the co-directors to explain why we have refunded that payment back to your PayPal account. 

I am aware that you have actively disparaged me, my character, and my reputation to several other members of the Scrabble community. You previously sent me harassing emails, which culminated in a written threat from you that you would take action to intentionally cause me emotional distress at a Scrabble tournament in the playing room. Your actions have made me feel threatened and unsafe. 

The Hood River Open takes place in an intimate lodge setting where players share common housing. This format requires goodwill and close cooperation among all attendees. Your actions, behavior, and threats have consequences. As co-directors of the Hood River Open, Evans and I are responsible for providing a safe and positive environment for all attending players. We believe that your attendance would disrupt the tournament and detract from our efforts to provide that safe and positive environment. For these reasons, we are returning your entry fee. We appreciate your understanding. 

Thanks,
Jennifer

screenshot in appendix

My reaction to the email was largely positive. This was the first time they were ever addressing me about their grievance. Regardless of how they felt, a small window of opportunity for communication was opening. I waited three days before deciding how to respond, and then I wrote this email, which I did not send.

Jennifer,

Thank you for taking the time to write this out and give me this explanation. I am not certain how much of what you wrote here you actually believe, and how much what you have written is just what you feel you have to say, to be consistent with the case you would make to NASPA if I were to challenge your decision on this. But let me put your mind at ease in one way immediately: I have no desire to escalate this to NASPA, and I respect your decision. I don’t even really care about whether I go to this tournament or not; what is much more important is resolving the tension in this situation.

I do not have any problem with you or Evans. It is only the two of you who have a problem with me. I completely understand how the two of you have gotten to the point of having the interpretations and feelings that you do, but since neither of you has been willing to communicate with me for the last year and three quarters, you have given me no opportunity to correct the situation. As such, I have felt that the best I can do is just continuing living my life, playing Scrabble, and ignoring your behaviors and the fact that you have been afraid of me and Evans has visually and viscerally hated me ever since January of 2017.

I signed up for this tournament, not out of any desire to make life difficult for the two of you, but simply because it is what I would have done if you two were not behaving the way you were, and I thought it might provide an opportunity for you to actually address your problems with me. I am glad that you have done so.

I am 100% sure that if you and I were to sit down and have a conversation in good faith about what happened between us in late 2016 and early 2017, we could alleviate the misunderstandings and get along fine from this point forward. It’s precisely because we were not having any conversations in person and all our communication was over email, text, and a very limited amount of voice communication via phone that we got to a point of such bad tension and misunderstanding. I do not hold myself blameless in this. There were a lot of things I could have done better, and there were a lot of things you could have done better. But your assumptions about my intentions and attitudes are way off base.

I do not feel like I can have this conversation well in writing, for one thing because I am not clear that you are willing to have a conversation about this in good faith. Part of me suspects that you will refuse to respond to this at all and simply use anything that I say about that time as written evidence to hold against me in the future.

I will, however, explain just one thing about the time before the California Open in December of 2016. Anything after that, we will have to talk about in person. You and I last spoke on the phone in early November of 2016, shortly after Trump was elected. At that point, I do not think you had yet signed up for the California Open, or at least if you did, I did not know about it yet. That phone call ended awkwardly, and I understand that you were probably not that eager to talk to me again after that, but you had not at this point ceased all communication with me.

Shortly after that, when I saw your name show up on the list of entrants for the California Open, I easily intuited that you were going there because you wanted to hook up with Evans, and that you were likely to get into a relationship with him after that. You had given me more than enough hints over the previous year to make this obvious to me. I was immediately concerned, not because I was jealous or wanted to stop you, but because I *specifically* wanted to avoid getting into exactly the kind of situation that we are in now.

Although you had never been willing to label what you and I had a “relationship,” let’s face it, we were in a de facto relationship for the better part of two years. And we had never been good at ending it cleanly and had several times gotten back together after several months apart. Even though we hadn’t been “dating” in a while, you and I had still hooked up in June of 2016 at the Atlanta tournament, and you had still sent me a birthday gift in the mail in October of 2016, with a sweet note that was an attempt to stay somewhat emotionally connected to me. There were still a lot of unresolved threads and emotions between us.

During the rest of November 2016, after I found out you were going to go to the California Open, but before you left for the tournament, I tried to reach out to you for another phone call, because I wanted to break up with you *cleanly*. I wanted to tell you, “It is far more important to me than anything that happens between us that Scrabble is my sanctuary, and I *refuse* to get caught up in a love triangle within the Scrabble world. Once you date anyone else in the Scrabble world, it is over permanently between us. We can still be friends, but we will never be lovers again.”

According to my personal morals, it would have been a shitty thing to have that conversation with you over email. After the better part of two years together, I was intent on being a nice enough person to have the break-up conversation via voice communication. However, you never gave me the opportunity to have that conversation.

I am not your enemy, and I am not Evans’s enemy. The enemy for both of you is the incorrect perception of who I am and what I think, that you both have built up over the last two years. If either or both of you is ever willing to fix this, all it will take is actually having a conversation with me. If you prefer not to fix this and to continue to carry a grudge for years into the future, that’s your problem, not mine.

There is no danger of me making things awkward at your Scrabble tournament or any other one that the two of you are at. The only people who are making things awkward are the two of you, by your refusal to communicate with me and continuing to hold a mistaken impression of me.

Sincerely,
Dave

P.S. Nothing in your email was surprising to me, except the sentence about disparaging you. I have no idea what this refers to. I have spoken about things between you and me to only a very few people in Scrabble, who are close personal friends, and whom I would trust to be discreet about it. If you have a problem with something I’ve said to a particular person, you’re going to have to tell me what it is that you think I said and to whom in order to get me to address it.

screenshot in appendix
SENT TO CHRIS AND JEREMY, NOT JENNIFER.

When I look back at what I wrote, I question whether I should have sent it. I still think I said exactly what I needed to say, but my faith in my own judgment had been so rocked and the social cost to me had been so high for what other people had perceived that I had done wrong over email, that I felt it was necessary to vet my words with friends first. I sent that proposed email to two people who were mutual friends of Jennifer, Evans, and me. The recipients were Chris Lipe and Jeremy Cahnmann.

Jeremy was the only other person in Scrabble to whom I had told the entire backstory aside from Walker Willingham. He had accompanied me on my cross-country drive to move to Seattle, and I spilled the story on one of the last days of the trip. Chris, of course, had vague ideas of my problems with Jennifer and Evans, but I have still never told him the full story. He has not been as receptive as I would like when I’ve tried to talk about it. I saw both of these guys as being more socially savvy and well-liked than I was, and I knew they both had a lot of communication with Jennifer and Evans and would have some idea of what their emotional condition was.

Both Jeremy and Chris thought that sending that letter would make things worse. Based on their feedback, I completely scrapped it and rewrote it two more times until I produced a letter that they both approved of. This is what I actually sent.

from: Dave Koenig
to: Jennifer Lee
cc: Evans Clinchy
date: Sep 17, 2018, 5:49 PM
subject: Re: Hood River tournament

Jennifer,

Thank you for taking the time to write this out and give me this explanation. To put your mind at ease in one way immediately: I have no desire to escalate this to NASPA, and I respect your decision.

Let me get right to the heart of the matter.

I stepped over the line when I wrote the following two sentences: “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 was under a lot of emotional stress at the time that I sent that email, and as often happens in distressed situations, I was much more focused on my emotional needs than the impact of my words upon you. I know it may be hard to reconcile, but I did not intend to threaten you at the time that I wrote that. However, in retrospect it is obvious to me how those words come across as threatening. My mental state at the time seriously impaired my judgment. I am saying this not to defend my behavior at all, but only to explain that the words came out of a mental state that I was in a year and three quarters ago that is not at all where I am at now. I was wrong, and I am truly sorry.

Sincerely,
Dave

screenshot in appendix

Literally everyone I have shown this letter to, including family, other friends, and a therapist, thinks that it was pitch-perfect. I kept it brief. I didn’t challenge their point of view. I apologized for the little bit that I could. I didn’t put any expectation of a response on them. I just threw them some good will.

I hate it. I feel it is fundamentally dishonest. I still believe and will continue to believe for the rest of my life that I did nothing wrong. I fully understand how the second sentence that I quoted could be interpreted as a veiled threat, but it was not. The sense I intended was not “I’m going to make you sorry,” but instead that of a prediction. I was Cassandra in this story, seeing in advance exactly the bad things that were going to happen, but unable to get others to listen to me and thereby avoid this miserable fate.

I understand how in writing my words could be misinterpreted. I understand how Jennifer was also in a fragile emotional place at the time. But clarification was impossible because she forced all of the communication to happen over email and refused to talk to me.

Jeremy thought I needed to “fall on my sword,” to apologize and take the blame even if I didn’t believe it. That’s the wrong metaphor. What I did was sacrifice myself to other people’s demons.

He and Chris might have been right that my initial attempt at the email would have been ineffective and not changed anything with Jennifer and Evans. However, the email I did send was no better. They have never responded, and I have had no interactions or communication with them since I sent it. Furthermore, they have continued to escalate the situation within our Scrabble community in unhealthy ways, as I have learned from other people. If I had sent the first email, at least I would have had the mental peace of saying what I needed to say.

More than half a year later, in May of 2019, I was having dinner and drinks with the Raus in Edinburgh. We had competed in a tournament the previous weekend, and we had spent many days socializing together along with other Scrabble players, who had all left town by this point. I spent a long time telling them the entire backstory, which was now a great deal longer than when I had told it to Walker and Jeremy.

Two and a half years after all of this started, I finally had the experience of telling the story to other Scrabble players and finding the recipients of it completely on my side. It wasn’t just a matter of me being calmed and practiced enough to deliver the story effectively, though that surely helped. It was also because Terry and Stefan had been bothered by the behavior of Jennifer and Evans over the last few years. They were not on the “in group” list of invitees for the events that Jennifer and Evans had been running in Oregon. They pointed out how NASPA tournaments were not supposed to be private parties and by rule were supposed to be open to all comers.

That’s when I realized that Jennifer’s and Evans’s way of running these tournaments was hurting a much wider circle of people than I’d thought. I had already known for a long time that the steps Jennifer and Evans were taking to avoid me had been hurting the entire CSW Scrabble community in the Seattle area. The other players wanted to play with me and them and just have everyone get along, both at casual get-togethers and at tournaments. However, I hadn’t perceived that there were other interested CSW players from further away who wanted to come to these events but had never had the opportunity, because of the cliquish way they had been organized.

After I talked about how Jennifer and Evans kept me out of the Hood River tournament, Stefan spoke up. He had been on the Advisory Board of NASPA with Jennifer. His judgement in retrospect—now that he knew my story—was that Jennifer had used the idea of keeping Sam Kantimathi out of their tournaments as a smokescreen to get the rules changed to keep me out of tournaments. His conclusion was based on what he had heard directly from her on Advisory Board phone calls.

I mentioned above that I had been suspicious about the change in NASPA rules when I saw it in an email newsletter. I did not hint at this in any way to Stefan. He brought this up of his own accord, and the conclusion he came to about Jennifer’s motivation was entirely his own. I didn’t say anything about this issue until after he told me his conclusion.

Shortly before the end of 2019, Evans announced in public Facebook posts that he would not play in or direct NASPA events anymore, and that he and Jennifer were starting a new association called the Collins Coalition, or CoCo for short. The expressed reasons for doing this were problems working internally with NASPA leadership, including their refusal to ban Sam Kantimathi for life. The plan was to keep running their two annual Oregon tournaments under this new banner, and they recruited a number of other Scrabble players around the country to run tournaments as part of their new association.

I started writing this story before Evans and Jennifer started CoCo. It was not what motivated me to speak up about their behavior. Whether they run tournaments under the NASPA or CoCo flag doesn’t have much immediate impact on my life in Scrabble. Either way, they are the only ones running CSW tournaments with any kind of decent turnout in the Pacific Northwest. As long as they continue blacklisting me, I am in a bad situation of not having local opportunities to play. Even before they started CoCo, they were depressing the CSW turnout at the few NASPA tournaments in this area that they did not run by hardly going to any of them since I moved to the area. They had already made virtually the entire CSW scene in the Pacific Northwest a private clique to which I am not invited, even before they decided to put a new label on it.

I do not doubt that Jennifer and Evans have other motivations for starting CoCo beyond just blacklisting me, but I also think that anyone would be a fool not to recognize that I am a nonzero part of their motivation. They do not want to have to answer to anyone else. They do not want to have to worry about me protesting to NASPA about anything they do in the future to keep me out of tournaments.

Using Sam Kantimathi as the sole pretext for starting CoCo was unconvincing. NASPA had been allowing them and other directors to keep Sam out of their events for a few years already. Furthermore, it was odd timing, as shortly before they publicly announced CoCo the California Open in San Francisco had been held with Sam not being allowed to attend. This is the largest tournament in the area where Sam lives, and it is one where he had been allowed to play and sell his wares for the two previous years, after he had returned from suspension and the stories of his abuse and harassment of women had become public.

Evans and I have both been involved with Scrabble politics for a long time, and part of what is so frustrating about this situation is that we are in alignment about almost everything, except for his hatred of me and desire to exclude me. We both are very dissatisfied with the job that NASPA leadership has done for many of the same reasons. We both want Sam Kantimathi to be banned from the game for life. We both want to grow CSW Scrabble on this continent and eventually get the entire continent using the same word list as the rest of the world.

Despite all of my misgivings about NASPA, I have held firm during my entire time in tournament Scrabble that starting a renegade association is a bad idea. A different renegade association named WGPO was started years earlier and still exists, dividing our tournaments and tournament population. The creation of CoCo divides us further. There is no value in a Scrabble association that does not have a relationship with Hasbro and/or Mattel, the corporate owners of the game. There is negative value in having multiple associations in the same country.

The end goal that I have always sought is unity. That means getting rid of the WGPO/NASPA split and getting rid of the CSW/TWL split. We need all tournaments in North America to run under one association with one rating system. We need all tournaments in North America to use the same word list as the rest of the world, so that we can attract the greatest number of overseas players and have bigger events. This creates the conditions for the most growth of competitive Scrabble both here and around the world.

Furthermore, it is laughable that Jennifer and Evans have specifically tried to promote their new association as a welcoming and inclusive one. From the very beginning of them running tournaments together, they have been intentionally exclusive. They have gotten their friends to sign up before they made public postings for literally every single one of their events.

Even if an association like CoCo was a good idea, which it certainly is not, Jennifer and Evans are a terrible choice of people to run it. They have maintained a massive grudge over three years and used their misunderstanding to vilify me.

Although I think that supporting CoCo is a bad idea and hope that other Scrabble players will come to the same judgment, it’s not worth my energy fighting against it. Instead, I believe the appropriate response is mockery. So I’m not going to call it CoCo anymore. Its new name is Cliquish and Dickish.

I stayed for a week in January 2020 at the home of César del Solar and Mina Le. During that stay, I talked to them for the first time about the issues I had been having with Jennifer and Evans. Like Stefan and Terry, they were completely supportive. Shortly after we talked, Mina spoke up on a Facebook post about how hypocritical it was for Cliquish and Dickish to call themselves an inclusive organization when they were banning one of the top CSW Scrabble players in their region from their events. Mina told me that Evans responded in a nasty way, shutting down the conversation and claiming that she did not know what the person had done.

A couple months later, Mina sent me a message:

 we had a sitdown with Jenn and Evans for over an hour this past week to talk things out.  i asked whether you’d be welcome to play a coco tournament where they’re not present, and they responded you’d be welcome to play a coco tournament where they ARE present as long as they’re not organizing or directing.  FYI

screenshot in appendix

I didn’t ask for Mina to represent me in any of these ways, and I have never even tried to enter any of Jennifer’s and Evans’s tournaments, with the lone exception of the 2019 Hood River tournament that I signed up for specifically to open up a line of communication. Yet, Jennifer and Evans are preemptively setting rules to keep me out of tournaments, when they have no valid justification for doing so.

Their behavior has been outrageously offensive and abusive toward me, not the other way around.

I have done everything I can not to make this a conflict. From my point of view, there is no feud between me and them. It only exists in their minds. I haven’t fought to get into their tournaments, even though they have been fighting to keep me out.

There is a specific reason I did not want to protest to NASPA to allow me into their tournaments. In my Facebook post about Sam Kantimathi, I exhorted tournament directors to bar Sam from their tournaments even if it was contrary to the rulings of NASPA. I believe that directors have the right to keep individuals out of their tournaments, and I did not want to take any steps that would undermine that right. However, directors must wield that power sparingly and responsibly, which Evans and Jennifer have not done in my case. I believe that the proper way to address what they have done is not through an appeal to NASPA but in the court of public opinion.

Even if I had appealed and won my way into their tournament, I know exactly what it would have gotten me: all of us sitting in a room terribly awkwardly, with them hating my guts even more than before, and the rest of the Scrabble world believing that I have been harassing Jennifer and making their life miserable.

I have been angry and sad for over three years. Not because they hate me or are mistreating me, but because they are getting away with it. Because I have paid a social cost with the rest of the Scrabble community due to their mistakes. Because I have had so few opportunities to play Scrabble locally. Because many others have been complicit in their exclusion of me. Because so many of those complicit had been friends of mine for well over a decade. Because when I have spoken up, I have too often not been believed and supported. Because I do not trust the rest of my community to stand up to Evans’s and Jennifer’s appalling behavior and do something to improve this situation. Because I still fear that people will think I am the bad guy even after reading this, or that they just won’t care enough to help me.

To me a friend is someone who would have taken the initiative to ask me about what happened and, after learning the full story, would have taken every possible opportunity to get in Jennifer’s and Evans’s face about it. To make them uncomfortable. To make sure that they are the ones paying the social cost of their mistakes, instead of me.

That’s exactly what I would do for one of my friends, if you had been in my place.

Epilogue

Many times when I have started to tell the story of what has happened, people have asked me to give a quick summary, and I have struggled to do so. Now that I have written all of it out, I think I can.

Jennifer and Evans got the impression that I was harassing her based on two emails that I sent to her on December 19, 2016, and January 5, 2017, and two text messages that I sent her in between, on December 20 and December 25. They, especially Evans, behaved disrespectfully to me at the 2017 New Orleans tournament in response to their perception of these communications, and at every time we have crossed paths in the three years since that time. They attempted to blacklist me from the tournament Scrabble scene in the Pacific Northwest, cut off all communication, and avoided even being in the same place as me, preventing any hope of improving this situation. Furthermore, they painted an image in the minds of many other people in the Scrabble community that I was a harasser, leading to bad treatment of me. I have been very angry in that time, primarily not because of the attitudes of Jennifer and Evans, but because of their influence on the rest of my community and the way it has eroded my relationships and opportunities to play Scrabble.

I have explained how my actions between December 19, 2016 and January 5, 2017 were not in the wrong, but were aimed at making a peaceful closure of things between me and Jennifer, even though they were badly misunderstood. Furthermore, I have done nothing to exacerbate the situation in the more than three years since January 2017. Meanwhile, Jennifer and Evans have spent more than the last three years mistreating me and reshaping their Scrabble world so that I am not in it.

Their actions have affected far more than just me. They have intentionally cut out at least one other Scrabble player, Joey Krafchick, and their methods of doing tournament registration have excluded others as well, whether or not it was intentional. They have made the Pacific Northwest CSW Scrabble scene more divisive and less pleasant, and they have denied other Seattle area CSW players the opportunity to play games against me and them at the same gatherings. Jennifer got herself elected to the Advisory Board of NASPA and attempted to change the rules to give them more leverage to keep me out of tournaments, something which would also potentially in the future help them to keep other people out of their tournaments capriciously. Then they left NASPA and created a renegade association, further dividing our Scrabble community.

Their behavior is classic passive-aggressiveness. I’m not denying that they have additional motives besides me. However, they have been behaving for a long time with bad intentions toward me, and they have been doing everything they can to obscure the fact that they are doing these things because of a personal grudge.

I have reflected on why they felt it necessary to start Cliquish and Dickish and to promote it as an inclusive organization. Admittedly, this is completely my conjecture about their motivations. I think that they have seen that their method of registering their friends secretly in advance has had ill effects of excluding more than just the people they intentionally wanted to exclude and that they had to change their modus operandi if they wanted to keep growing. However, they knew that doing so would make it harder to keep me out, and they quite possibly understood that their grounds for trying to keep me out of their tournaments were weak. Even though I never appealed to NASPA about their decision to exclude me, there is a good chance that if it ever came to that, they would lose. They wanted to create their own organization so that they could make whatever capricious decisions they wanted about who was not allowed to play in their tournaments without having to justify it to anyone else, and in so doing be able to make their tournaments more widely available to everyone except for the few they wanted to exclude.

I just want to play Scrabble. If Evans and Jennifer want to hate me forever, I am not going to lose sleep about it. However, when they get in the way of me being able to play and they influence other Scrabble players to be complicit in excluding me, they cross the line. I do not need anything from them, if other players are willing to stand up for me and force them to end this madness. At the same time, I have understood for a long time that the simplest way to fix this situation is to heal my relationship with them.

They don’t need to be my friends, and I don’t need to be their friend. However, it is best for Scrabble, especially CSW Scrabble in North America, if we can all get along well and coexist at the same tournaments. I believe this is easily within reach if Evans and Jennifer can change their attitudes. There is nothing about my attitude that needs to change. I am already happy to compete in events alongside them and play in the same casual get-togethers.

I need to make a big decision in the near future about where I am going to live and work. In the past, I chose my location based primarily on what was good for my career. What I discovered when I came to Seattle was that ostracism from the local Scrabble community had a serious impact on my quality of life. The trauma that I have experienced has often been physical and has had a deleterious effect on my health. I was so reactive and stressed that it left me ill-equipped to handle the challenges of my professional life. Eventually I decided to take some time off of work. While there were also other positive reasons for my hiatus, I made a promise to myself that I would not go back to work until I told this story.

I hope that others, especially other west coast CSW Scrabble players, will consider deeply how complicit they have been in excluding me and whether this is the kind of community they want to build. I still like the Pacific Northwest and would like the opportunity to be connected to its CSW Scrabble community, but Jennifer and Evans have created such a stranglehold on it that I may at some point have to give up and decide that I can only be happy elsewhere. While they might be satisfied with that outcome, is that what the rest of you want? Do you want to drive off one of the ten best players in the country because of a three-year-old grudge held by two people who have twisted a misunderstanding into a character assassination?

Appendix

Figure 7

Chris Grubb first notifying me that Jennifer and Evans were trying to keep me out of Seattle Scrabble get-togethers. This exchange happened nearly two months before I moved to Seattle, while I was on a business trip there and doing an apartment search.

Figure 8

Email to Evans entering the 2019 Hood River tournament. This is the only time I have attempted to enter a tournament run by Jennifer and Evans.

Figure 9

Jennifer’s response to my entry to the Hood River tournament. Evans did not respond.

Figure 10

Email to Jeremy Cahnmann and Chris Lipe including full text of the first draft of my response to Jennifer about the Hood River tournament.

Figure 11

Email that I actually sent Jennifer and Evans in response to her email about Hood River. This has been the last communication of any kind between us.

Figure 12

Message from Mina about Jennifer and Evans. This was in no way solicited by me. I had not requested entry to any CoCo event, nor had I asked Mina to speak to them about it.

Part I: The Crucible

July 14, 2020 /

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 Orleans

Dear 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,
Dave

Screenshot in appendix
“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: Jennifer

Hi 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,
Dave

screenshot in appendix

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:

  1. 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.
  1. 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.
  1. 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.
  1. 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.

Newer posts »

© 2025 Splenetic

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑