The purpose of this site changed over time. It was first created in July 2020 only to share the first two posts, The Crucible and The Fallout. They were an attempt to clear the air with many of my longtime friends in competitive Scrabble about the ways in which Evans and Jennifer Clinchy had been disparaging me and reducing my opportunities to play Scrabble since 2017.
Nearly two years after those posts, the Clinchys revealed that they were much worse humans than I originally thought. They launched an all-out assault to get me banned from tournament Scrabble worldwide based on massive defamation. I first attempted to seek justice with the boards of various Scrabble organizations and in the court of law. However, after the Clinchys got both unscrupulous Scrabble leaders and an unethical lawyer to abet them in their crusade against me, I began in June 2023 telling the stories here of all of the different parties who contributed to screwing me over.
It is not an exaggeration to say that there has been an international conspiracy against me. This is not paranoia. I have all of the facts to prove what I say. There is now a video on YouTube which summarizes some of the outline of the story as well as its connections to the larger world of international Scrabble politics.
Here is a chronological summary of all posts. To help those outside of tournament Scrabble in understanding this, at the end of this post is a short blurb about the different organizations that I originally wrote for my lawyers.
A two parter that details how the tension between the Clinchys and me began, around the January 2017 New Orleans tournament, shortly after they had started dating, as well as the first three years they spent gossiping about me and turning mutual friends against me.
This was written on August 30th, 2021 as a private post to myself only, but I later published it in unedited form on June 25th, 2025 to demonstrate what my mindset was and the amount of wrongdoing perpetrated by the Clinchys and by Chris Lipe that I was already aware of, more than half a year before the campaign to get me banned from Scrabble began.
I consider this nonessential bonus material for most readers, as several of the stories in it are told in more compact ways in later posts, (especially in The Conspiracy.)
A summary of the campaign to get me banned from Scrabble conducted by the leadership of the North American Scrabble organizations, based on the false accusations that had been brought against me by the Clinchys and Lola McKissen in April 2022.
A document dump of all of the communications with the Scrabble organizations that corroborates the entire story in The Scapegoat. Includes the accusations against me and the documents I provided, which prove the falseness of those accusations and the intentional wrongdoing of my accusers.
These two and the next one were released on consecutive days as a three parter. They detail my attempt to seek justice in the court of law against the Clinchys and Lola McKissen for defamation.
Includes the North American Scrabble Players Association’s (NASPA’s) long overdue response to my appeal of my suspension, and summarizes the wrongdoing of all parties who had contributed to banning me from tournament Scrabble in North America to that point.
Details my attempts to get the World English-language Scrabble Players Association (WESPA) to handle an appeal of my NASPA suspension, and WESPA’s own wrongdoing in handling the matter, which hinders my ability to play Scrabble even outside North America.
The aftermath of the court case: Defense attorney Michael Fuller’s attempts to squeeze extortionate legal fees from me, the malpractice claim against my former attorney Marc Mohan, and the ethics complaints about both of them.
The audio recording of the court hearing described in The Circus, analysis of the contents of the recording, and the new case for contempt of court that the Clinchys and Michael Fuller brought against me.
The Oregon State Bar’s decision to proceed with the ethics complaint against Marc Mohan and to dismiss the ethics complaint against Michael Fuller. My appeal of the Fuller decision. The upcoming hearing initiated by Michael Fuller to attempt to get me held in contempt of court.
How WGPO Board Member Will Anderson covertly threatened me before the overt political campaign to get me removed from Scrabble began. How several people in Scrabble leadership knew that the attack on me was a hoax before I submitted my defense. Includes audio of an interview between my former attorney Marc Mohan, Sue Tremblay, and Jason Broersma, in which Jason strongly states that the campaign was a “witch hunt” orchestrated by the Clinchys.
The audio of an interview between my former lawyer Marc Mohan, Stefan Rau, and Shelley Stevens, in which both Stefan and Shelley lied. Includes a full explanation of what they lied about along with all of the evidence to disprove their lies.
After much needling from people in the Scrabble community for me to show contrition for what I have done wrong in the saga between me and the Clinchys, I have finally done so.
The short history of my interactions with the new WESPA Executive Board at the end of 2025. Includes the revelation that WESPA President Lukeman Omo-Owolabi threatened to withhold justice from me.
Organizations
World English-language Scrabble Players Association (WESPA)
WESPA is an international umbrella organization for all of the different national Scrabble associations around the world. A small number of tournaments are run by WESPA directly. Most are run by the member associations. WESPA’s primary power and function is in recognizing what is the official Scrabble association of a particular country. Generally, WESPA does not make disciplinary decisions resulting in suspensions or bans of players. The member associations do that. However, WESPA notifies the other national associations around the world of these decisions, and they are generally respected reciprocally. So if a player is suspended from tournaments by their own national association, they are suspended around the rest of the world.
WESPA has its own rating system, but historically a small number of tournaments were WESPA rated.1 The majority of tournaments are rated by the individual rating systems of the member associations. When there are international events which require qualification of a limited number of players from each country, the process has generally been to delegate the qualification procedures to all of the WESPA member associations. For example, NASPA would determine the qualification procedures for Team USA and Team Canada at an international event.
North American Scrabble Players Association (NASPA)
NASPA has been the official national association for tournament Scrabble in the United States and Canada since about 2009, and is the only association in these countries which is a member of WESPA.2 I have been competing in tournament Scrabble in the USA and Canada since 2002, both under NASPA and its predecessor organization. The USA and Canada are often considered as a single entity in Scrabble politics, and when the term “North America” is used, it usually refers to these two countries.
NASPA has organized the official National Championships in the USA and Canada since its inception, including the 2022 Scrabble Players Championship in Baltimore, Maryland in late July.
Word Game Players Organization (WGPO)
WGPO is a renegade Scrabble organization which was founded by a group of American tournament players and organizers who were disaffected with NASPA in the early 2010s. It has never had WESPA recognition, and for almost all of its history it was a significantly smaller organization than NASPA and primarily a regional one, with most of its tournament activity concentrated in the Twin Cities, Reno, and Arizona areas. Many prominent Scrabble players in other areas, including me, did not take it seriously, did not play in its tournaments, and did not recognize it as an official Scrabble association. For many years WGPO has organized a tournament called the Word Cup, which is their alternative US national championship, and it generally happens earlier in the summer than the NASPA organized US national championship. In 2022 the Word Cup was in Naperville, Illinois in early July.
In late 2021 a Scrabble player Jon Shreve pledged to donate $100,000 per year to WGPO over several years, which immediately increased its prominence. This led to the 2022 Word Cup having a larger prize fund and a bigger turnout than the 2022 Scrabble Players Championship, including a higher number of prominent international players attending. Some prominent North American players who had not previously been involved with WGPO also got involved organizationally, including top worldwide Scrabble Twitch streamer Will Anderson, who is now on the WGPO Board of Directors.
I have never intentionally played in a WGPO tournament. At an informal tournament in New Jersey several years ago, one of the players said that he was going to get the tournament rated by WGPO after the fact. I did not care, and I paid no fees or dues to WGPO that I am aware of.
Collins Coalition (CoCo)
CoCo is a second renegade Scrabble organization which was founded by Evans and Jennifer Clinchy at the end of 2019. CoCo only organizes Scrabble tournaments using the international English Scrabble lexicon, called Collins Scrabble Words or CSW. Evans and Jennifer were the preeminent Scrabble tournament organizers in the states of Washington and Oregon, running their tournaments under NASPA from late 2017 until the end of 2019. A significant reason for the founding of CoCo was specifically to ban me from their tournaments. Much of the history of how Evans and Jennifer behaved as unethical tournament directors under NASPA and how it resulted in them forming CoCo is documented in The Fallout and The Conspiracy.
CoCo in its short history has primarily consisted of a few dozen of the top CSW Scrabble players in North America, mostly concentrated around the west coast of the USA, almost all of whom were longtime good friends of mine until Evans and Jennifer poisoned their minds about me. After WGPO got its large donation, CoCo struck a deal with them to have the CSW division of the 2022 Word Cup carry the CoCo label. CoCo listed the entries to the CSW division of the Word Cup on their website and said that everyone who played in it would automatically be added to their membership rolls. Essentially, CoCo sucked on the teat of another organization that got a large donation and used their connection to WGPO to inflate the size of their own organization.
I have never played in a CoCo tournament nor attempted to sign up for one.
Association of British Scrabble Players (ABSP)
ABSP is the official national association for tournament Scrabble in the UK and is a member of WESPA. It also rates some tournaments in Europe, such as the Continental Scrabble Championship. All tournament Scrabble play in the UK uses CSW, as does almost all tournament play everywhere outside of North America.
Footnotes
WESPA has more recently changed its policy and begun rating many more tournaments, including many CSW tournaments run in North America by any organization. See the next note also. ↩︎
After the Clinchys and Lola McKissen made their false accusations against me and before I submitted my defense, WESPA began rating CoCo and WGPO tournaments too, although as far as I know neither CoCo nor WGPO has been recognized as an official member association. I have gotten no explanation for why WESPA has been willing to rate tournaments of these unsanctioned organizations. ↩︎
Recapping from the last few communications included in The Conspiracy, on June 8th, 2023 I sent the entirety of the communications I had with NASPA and everything I received from WGPO and CoCo to both ABSP and WESPA. From the beginning, ABSP President Wayne Kelly was supportive of me, telling me in an informal conversation that my “standing in the UK was beyond question and that we would allow you to play in the UK,” and then informing me that he had delegated Chris Harrison to write up ABSP’s official stance.
Meanwhile, WESPA was unhelpful and downright obstructionist, refusing to take any action to counteract NASPA’s wrongdoing and dragging their feet in responding to my requests for them to handle an appeal.
The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.
Elie Wiesel
On June 17th, nine days after Mina had forwarded my email to the WESPA Executive Committee, she told me that I should hear from formal WESPA channels that day, but I heard nothing for several more days. Furthermore, I had no way of seeing who was even on the WESPA Executive Committee, as the website was out of date and there were no email addresses for reaching the committee members who were listed.
I knew who some of the committee members were, and I asked around to gather what information I could about who else was on the committee. Some committee members were helpful in giving me names and email addresses, but one person was completely unhelpful: the Treasurer Jason Broersma. On June 20th, I flat out asked him, “Can you tell me who exactly is on the WESPA Executive Committee currently, since the website appears to be out of date?” and he evasively answered, “The committee is about to disband anyway – new committee at BGM.” (The BGM is the Big General Meeting of WESPA that happens at the World Championship, which was about to take place in Las Vegas a month from then.)
When I followed up with, “Thanks, I’d still like to know the current membership,” he ignored my request and just said, “Your communication will come from the secretary (Carol). Instructions were sent – I assume she’s just busy.”
What Jason did not know was that a source on the WESPA Executive Committee had already sent me the full one sentence text of the email that the committee was supposed to send me, along with that source’s own exasperated comments about me not getting it yet, as apparently the President Chris Lipe had already days earlier put instructions in the WESPA mailing list telling the Secretary Carol Johnsen to email me exactly that text.
Over the next couple of days I continued to inquire with more helpful Executive Committee members, who confirmed that Carol was already supposed to have sent me the email. I eventually learned that the supposed story in the mailing list was that Carol’s computer had been hacked and sent in for repairs, which was why she could not send the email. When I asked one committee member why the email had to come from Carol rather than anyone else on the committee, the response was, “I was wondering too.” Another member commented that there was grumbling among the committee about why it was taking so long to email me.
After I showed the communications from the WESPA committee members to Marc Mohan, who was at that point still representing me, he sent a litigation hold email to the Executive Committee on June 22nd, and a few hours after that Chris Lipe finally sent me the official WESPA response. The email itself was of course completely obstructionist and unhelpful. Even if I had gotten it a few days earlier without my lawyer having to email WESPA first, it would not have changed any outcomes for me.
So why were there several days of delays, interspersed by nagging of multiple Executive Committee members, in sending me an email that had already been written and shared on their mailing list? I can only think of two reasons: pettiness and intentional bureaucratic delay to reduce the chance that I could get any motion on this issue before the upcoming World Scrabble Championship.
There was a significant change in the message I got from Chris Harrison on July 1st from the previous communications I got from ABSP. Though Chris attempted to phrase it in a politic way, the letter was bad news. WESPA had interceded and told ABSP that I could not play in WESPA rated tournaments in the UK.
This was ridiculous, of course. NASPA had given WESPA no reason for my suspension, and the WESPA Executive Committee had even complained to NASPA about that and told me so. Yet WESPA was still enforcing a reciprocation of my NASPA suspension for tournaments outside of North America.
Frankly, I could have included the WESPA Executive Committee on the list of The Abusers for that, but I decided to hold back since I was still hoping to eventually get a fair appeal from them.
Two months later NASPA finally provided a “rationale” for my suspension in their long overdue response to my appeal, which I believe they never would have sent me if not for pressure from WESPA. They had already been ghosting me for more than a month before they sent it.
A few days after I published The Smokescreen, The Circus, and The Abusers, I then followed up with the WESPA Executive Committee to ask for them to finally hear my appeal, since they could no longer use the excuse that NASPA had not finished their appeal. There had been some changeover in the membership of the Executive Committee since the election at the World Championship, and I diligently tracked down the email addresses of the new members to add them to my list of recipients.
There were others who I was aware were no longer voting members of the committee but who were still active members of the mailing list discussions, according to one of my inside sources. I decided to include everyone who I believed to still be on the mailing list even if they were not technically a current voting member. A couple of them responded individually to my email asking to be removed from future emails and even volunteering the information that they were removing themselves from the mailing list or from other WESPA committees.
I already explained in The Abusers how unacceptable NASPA’s response to my appeal was. I will never accommodate any of the abusive conditions that NASPA put on me. Furthermore, the terms of NASPA’s decision included that I would be permanently on probation, limiting the period during which I could sign up for tournaments and requiring me to notify directors of my status. I will only accept a full reinstatement with no conditions on me to achieve that reinstatement nor thereafter, since I have done nothing wrong.
I then wrote back to the WESPA Executive Committee requesting that they proceed with my appeal of NASPA’s decision,1 and I further requested that both Jason Broersma and Chris Lipe be recused from the process. I cited evidence from the court case showing that Chris was not an objective third party.
On December 18th Carol told me that the Executive Committee was voting on a recommendation made by a committee of disinterested New Zealanders and Australians.
Five days later, I received an email from Carol’s account which purported to be from her daughter, telling me that Carol had been in a car accident and Lukeman would be taking over as my contact person.
WESPA specifically told me half a year earlier that they had to wait for NASPA’s appeal to finish before they could handle an appeal of the decision, and then appointed a separate committee, which took about a month to review the case and make a recommendation, and then the Executive Committee took three weeks after that, only to tell me they were not allowed to adjudicate my case in the first place.
If WESPA has the power to overrule ABSP from letting me play in WESPA rated tournaments in their country, they certainly have the power not to do that.
Later that same evening, I wrote my response to WESPA:
Dear WESPA Executive Committee:
This is not acceptable. WESPA is pretending that it is not taking action, but it has already taken action against me.
Wayne Kelly told me on June 11th, 2023 that my “standing in the UK was beyond question and that we would allow you to play in the UK.”
For events which are rated under both ABSP and WESPA systems – typically those wanting to attract a more global field, WESPA will not sanction the participation of any currently banned NASPA player and so an organiser who applies for ABSP rating for one of these events will be informed of the ban and you will not be able to participate.
WESPA has strongarmed ABSP into disallowing me from playing in WESPA rated tournaments in the UK, even though ABSP recognizes that I have done nothing wrong and wishes for me to have unencumbered access to their tournaments.
The neutral sounding tone of your statement belies the complicity of the WESPA Executive Committee in supporting the abusive behavior toward me that has already been done by the leadership of the NASPA, WGPO, and CoCo organizations.
Since there is no higher authority to appeal to in the world of tournament Scrabble leadership, I assure you that my next steps will be to escalate this story to the press. I promise you that this entire story will be told in the news, and possibly in written literature and film.
Every person who continues to support this abuse of me will have the full details of your behavior on display not only to the few thousand competitive Scrabble players in the world, but also to millions of other people around the globe. I believe it is likely to get a lot more media attention than our World Scrabble Championship and other major tournaments. This will be your legacy in this game. You will be remembered by history not for anything good you did for Scrabble, but for your abuse of me.
This is not just about playing Scrabble to me. My morality and character have been besmirched by people who have behaved massively worse toward me than I have ever behaved to any person in my life. If you do not relent and apologize to me, I guarantee that all of your immoral characters will be exposed to the world for what they are.
If you had any morality, if you were decent human beings, you would not only remove all punishments from me, but you would also at very least publicly censure Evans Clinchy, Jennifer Clinchy, and Lola McKissen for the massively damaging lies they told about me. Your failure to take such a course of action is a moral indictment of you.
Sincerely, David Koenig
Email from me to Lukeman Owolabi, january 7th, 2024
The next day I had this conversation with Wayne Kelly:
There you have it. The President of the Association of British Scrabble Players is concerned that if he stands up against this injustice WESPA may revoke ABSP’s membership or refuse to rate UK tournaments. These are the thugs that are running tournament Scrabble.
I sent my appeal to NASPA’s Executive Committee on May 26th, 2023. On June 4th John Chew refused to give a date by which the appeal would be reviewed. More than two months later I had still heard nothing from NASPA, and on August 16th I wrote back to John Chew and Judy Cole asking “What is the status of my appeal to the Executive Committee? When will it be heard?” They did not respond.
After WESPA started putting pressure on them, I presume their stonewalling tactics became untenable, and John Chew finally sent me an email on September 18th, 115 days after the appeal had been submitted.
Dear Mr. Koenig,
The NASPA Executive Committee (EC) has concluded its review of your case, in response to your appeal dated 2023-05-26 of a decision by the NASPA Advisory Board (AB) on 2022-09-23 to suspend your NASPA membership for three years and to impose several other conditions, after the AB concluded that you had violated Section 2 of NASPA’s Code of Conduct.
Following that Code of Conduct, the terms of the review were that it was conducted de novo, but that clear and convincing evidence would be required to overrule the AB’s decision.
With regard to your violations of the Code of Conduct, we did not find clear and convincing evidence that the AB’s findings were incorrect:
Concerning the New Orleans tournament in 2017, you have not disputed that you threatened Jennifer Lee before the tournament by writing to her in email: “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.” and you confirmed your malicious intent toward her in your public statement “I saw that saying nothing and maintaining the tension would be the way for her to experience the most agony.”
Concerning what you describe as “angry thoughts” and “off-the-cuff venting” in your private conversations with Lola McKissen, which she described with words such as “Once it was a whole random tournament of Scrabblers he wanted to shoot down”, we find that the AB was exercising an appropriate degree of concern for the safety of our members in imposing additional conditions on your suspension.
Concerning your threats on Facebook in 2020 to “beat the living shit out of” Darrell Day and “bash [his] fucking skull in”, since you mentioned them in your appeal, we reexamined them, and found that they also supported the conditions that the AB imposed on you.
Concerning the emotional conversation you had with Lola McKissen at New Orleans in 2022, given your long and thoroughly documented history with Ms. McKissen, it’s impossible for the EC not to find that it was a case of harassment at a NASPA tournament.
We therefore uphold the decision of the AB, but in consideration of the above, we add to it as follows.
Before you may be reinstated, you must take down all publicly accessible information about your private interactions with the complainants, not just the two documents originally identified by the AB. Posting similar content in future will be deemed a violation of the terms of your reinstatement.
EC decisions such as this are normally final. In this particular case however, given that you have already served close to one year of your suspension, and since you have expressed a strong desire to return to competitive play, the EC is willing to consider shortening the three-year term after you have complied with the AB’s other conditions. We hope that you will take advantage of this suggestion.
Sincerely,
John Chew Chair, NASPA Executive Committee
I have already explained in my appeal to NASPA all of the conditions that would be required for me to take down the postings on this blog. Those conditions have not changed, and they are not negotiable.
NASPA has completely refused to address the abusive, defamatory, hateful, and immoral actions of Jennifer Clinchy, Evans Clinchy, and Lola McKissen towards me. It continues to intentionally ignore the fact that I am a reliable witness who has never lied in the entirety of these disciplinary proceedings, and that all of the complainants’ statements about me have been full of lies, deception, and manipulation. It continues to intentionally disregard the fact that the members of NASPA’s Advisory Board and Executive Committee, including John Chew himself, have behaved disgustingly unethically and immorally during these proceedings, as have many other North American Scrabble leaders, while my behavior has been beyond reproach.
John’s claims that NASPA needed so much time to do a de novo review of my case are nothing but lies. You did not do a de novo review of my case, nor do you have a clue what that means in a real legal setting. You had two people, who were on the Advisory Board that had already made a decision against me, stonewall me and run bureaucratic interference for as long as possible to avoid accountability for your actions, and when you finally had to say something, you gave a ridiculous interpretation of things that in no way justifies a ban of a single tournament game, let alone three years. You continue to attempt to bully me into silence, which will never succeed.
You said “the emotional conversation you had with Lola McKissen at New Orleans in 2022… was a case of harassment at a NASPA tournament.” Spell it out for me. Where was the harassment? What did I do or say that was harassing? You know that Lola is a proven liar and completely unreliable witness, so you avoid saying anything that affirms a belief in anything she said about our interaction at that tournament. Instead you just wave your hands and claim “harassment” even though you cannot name a single harassing thing that I said or did. There is a reason for that: because there was no harassment, and you too are lying.
The words that I wrote to Jennifer on January 5th, 2017 (and apologized to her for on September 17th, 2018) did not threaten her. The only thing I “threatened” to do was to use my First Amendment right to speak my mind.
The second passage that you quote says nothing about my intentions at the time that I wrote those words. It was me describing, three years later in July 2020, my inner thoughts at a time when I decided not to engage in conversation with her across the board on January 14th, 2017. Would you have preferred it if at that moment I did engage her in conversation about our past history? Certainly not. If I had done so, you would now be claiming that that was harassing behavior. Was keeping quiet, not engaging her, and just playing Scrabble not the ideal behavior in such a situation?
What you are doing is using thoughtcrime as a justification for suspending me. I do not care if you do not like my inner thoughts and they cause you to hate me forever. They do not give you license to keep me out of Scrabble tournaments.
Oh, I wrote down those thoughts, and that is why you think you can punish me? What about all of the disgusting, hateful, lying thoughts about me that the complainants wrote down? What about all of the disgusting, hateful, intellectually dishonest thoughts about me that the leaders of North American Scrabble organizations, including your organization, wrote down in your decisions against me? Shall I go over in detail how so much of the phrasing of your statements gives away your massive hatred toward me and bias against me? How about you start punishing your own Advisory Board and the complainants for all of your bullying and nasty thoughts about me?
Let us remember that back in July 2020 when I published The Crucible and The Fallout, I admitted to everything I wrote to Jennifer prior to the 2017 New Orleans tournament. Undoubtedly many people on the NASPA Advisory Board read all of those details then, as did many other people in the Scrabble world. What was NASPA’s official reaction at the time? I did not receive any word from NASPA that I had done anything wrong, and there was not one single official statement about harassment at the time. Instead, Heather McCall of NASPA spoke up about bullying. The general takeaway at the time was that the Clinchys and their clique had engaged in bullying behavior toward me, and that was what needed to be curtailed in our Scrabble community.
Let us also keep in mind that the Darrell Day episode and NASPA’s review of it had already happened a few months earlier in April 2020. Even with NASPA having full knowledge of both of those events, NASPA had no problem with me continuing to compete in tournaments for the next two years.
The exact reason you changed your position toward me and have retroactively reevaluated those things and used them as excuses for suspending me is because of the smear campaign of the complainants against me that included the April 2022 incident report.
We have already established that Lola is a completely unreliable witness. Her descriptions of our private conversations are not accurate, and they were intentionally and maliciously written in order to get you and the rest of North American Scrabble leadership to hate me. Explain to me how a person who has never held a gun, let alone fired or owned one, is any kind of threat for gun violence at a Scrabble tournament. Explain to me how you justify using the defamatory statements of proven liars to punish the victim of their defamation.
Once again, you are trying to punish me for thoughtcrime, only this time it is not even my thoughts. It is Lola’s dishonest recounting of her opinions about my thoughts, which was revisionist history that came two years after we lived together. Lola has obviously massively changed her story about me and blatantly contradicted a mountain of evidence about what our brief 2020 dating relationship was really like.
―
That is all I have to say about your latest letter. I am not writing this to defend myself, nor to try to change your mind. I am writing this to identify the real abusers in this story, and to catalog the full extent of their abusive behavior toward me. John Chew, you are one of the abusers. Any intellectually honest outsider will be able to see that you are guilty of far more wrongdoing than I am in this story, and you are far from the only one.
You will never have any right to judge or punish me for anything, because you have proven through your actions that you lack any moral authority whatsoever, and that a great deal of your abusive behavior toward me has been motivated by trying to save face for you and your organization and to cover up your own wrongdoing.
I am disgusted that the case I brought against the Clinchys and Lola was thrown out prematurely so that you were never held in contempt of court for refusing to abide by a subpoena. I am disgusted that whatever records you are hiding have not come out and seen the light of day, preventing the Scrabble public from seeing the full details of your and NASPA’s contemptible behavior.
Lola claimed in her April statement that I have “absolute certainty that [my] moral judgment is infallible.” That is definitely not true. I am far from a perfect person, and when I have made mistakes I have been very willing to admit those mistakes. However, what I am certain about is that in this particular story I have behaved more morally than every single person who has played any role in obstructing me from playing competitive Scrabble. We will now go down the list of all of the people who have played a role in this conspiracy and enumerate all of your sins against me.
Evans Clinchy
Evans Clinchy has cheated at Scrabble by circumventing proper NASPA procedures, giving his friends privileged access to register for tournaments and denying many others equal access to those same tournaments. Since 2017 he has repeatedly disparaged me to many members of the community. In 2022 he defamed me in writing with intentionally damaging statements that he knew were false. In addition to many examples of libel per se, including unsubstantiated claims that I abuse women, he falsely insinuated that he and Jennifer were directing the Woogles CoCo club in January 2021 so that he could further falsely insinuate that I broke his vindictive rule banning me only from events in his organization that he and/or Jennifer directed.
Jennifer Clinchy
Jennifer Clinchy has cheated at Scrabble by circumventing proper NASPA procedures, giving her friends privileged access to register for tournaments and denying many others equal access to those same tournaments. In 2022 she defamed me in writing with intentionally damaging statements that she knew were false. In addition to many examples of libel per se, including a completely made-up story that I sexually coerced her while we were in a consensual relationship six years earlier, she also made many false insinuations about me, including:
She insinuated that I followed Lola to Portland, even though I moved there a year before Lola.
She insinuated that she was writing about me in her letter to Jason Idalski about the 2018 US National Scrabble Championship, in sentences that were about the man that raped her before her first marriage and about Sam Kantimathi.
Additionally, Jennifer filed a false police report against me with the Seattle Police Department in March 2022, which is a criminal offense. She also submitted an additional statement against me to NASPA on September 9th, 2022, in defiance of their rules for handling disciplinary procedures.
Lola McKissen
Lola McKissen defamed me in writing in 2022 with intentionally damaging statements that she knew were false. She coordinated her attack on me with those of the Clinchys, and she demonstrated clear intent of writing false pictures of our interactions at the January 2022 New Orleans tournament and of our entire dating relationship in early 2020.
Despite all of this, I chose to take no offense from Lola and assumed the best intentions, writing a thorough refutation of her statements that was also forgiving to her. I also structured my September 6th, 2022 response to the incident report in such a way so that I could remove the sections that gave detail about our relationship and thereby protect her privacy while only impugning the Clinchys, if she had been willing to admit that her earlier statement was a lie. Up until November 15th, 2022, I would have excluded her from being a defendant in the case, if she had been willing to recant her statement in the incident report.1
However, I then learned that Lola had doubled down on her lies in her September 9th, 2022 statement, demonstrating a clearly malicious intent against me, and choosing to make a massive stink about the Darrell Day story, which she had not complained about at all previously. The only reason she became a defendant is because of that September 9th statement and her inability to back down from her proven lies.
Peter Armstrong, Becky Dyer, and Geoff Thevenot
Peter Armstrong, Becky Dyer, and Geoff Thevenot put their names on an egregiously offensive and unprofessional letter banning me from the Woogles CoCo club,2 a letter which said nothing about any actions that I took to deserve such a ban, but just made a bunch of vague insinuations of harassment. They did this even though the only reason I went to the Woogles CoCo club was because I wanted to play Scrabble specifically with Peter, Becky, and Geoff. Perhaps they did not intentionally put their names on this email, as it came from an anonymous email address associated with CoCo. However, now that I have made it public, none of them has come forward and disavowed their involvement with this letter nor apologized to me. I will continue to consider them guilty of intellectually dishonest disparagement of me and of abetting the Clinchys in banning me from Scrabble until they issue a personal apology to me and a disavowal of the letter.
Peter, Becky, and Geoff, on a personal note: if you had any backbone and ethics and were capable of seeing this situation correctly, you would have said to Jennifer and Evans, “F— no, I’m not signing that. If you want to kick Dave out of the club, you put your own damn names on that letter.”
Zach Dang, Mary Goulet, Scott Jackson, and Mike McKenna
The CoCo Conduct Team that contacted me in April and May 2022 comprised Zach Dang, Mary Goulet, Scott Jackson, and Mike McKenna. Considering that I was not a part of CoCo and never had any intention to be, all of their communications to me were harassment. They conducted a kangaroo court against me, when they had no right to pass any judgments on me, and they made a defamatory decision against me based only on the testimony of other people.
Furthermore, in the first paragraph of the first email that CoCo attempted to send to me, they wrote:
These attachments are provided to you “for your eyes only” (including your own attorney, if any) and are NOT to be published or publicly distributed in any manner.
The only people who mistreat you and tell you that you cannot tell other people about it are abusers. Those words have zero legal impact and are solely an intimidation technique. Two parties can only be under a nondisclosure agreement if both parties agree.
Keith Hagel, Will Anderson, Jan Cardia, Laurie Cohen, Helen Flores, and Bennet Jacobstein
The WGPO Board of Directors (less President Steven Pellinen) comprising Keith Hagel, Will Anderson, Jan Cardia, Laurie Cohen, Helen Flores, and Bennet Jacobstein also had no right to contact me about any of this, and all of their communications to me were harassment. They conducted a kangaroo court against me, and they made a defamatory decision against me based only on the testimony of other people.
Steven Pellinen
Steven Pellinen coordinated this entire attack of Evans, Jennifer, and Lola against me. He also had no right to contact me about any of this, and all of his communications to me were harassment. Furthermore, he repeatedly harassed both me and NASPA regarding my case, including attempting to intimidate the NASPA Advisory Board. He pretended to be an objective third party until he revealed his disgusting hatred and bias in his September 9th, 2022 statement, which was submitted against NASPA rules for handling disciplinary procedures. He used my gracious inclusion of him on my September 6th, 2022 email responding to the incident report to get his September 9th statement in to NASPA, and to abet Jennifer and Lola in doing the same. He also never showed my response to the incident report to the rest of the WGPO Board of Directors, making it obvious that his intent was to aid the complainants in their crusade against me, rather than to see justice get served.
Michael Tang
Michael Tang created a new rule targeting me and no one else in the world, preventing me from signing up for the 2024 Alchemist Cup based only on the kangaroo court decisions of CoCo and WGPO, before I had said a word in my defense and before NASPA had passed any judgment on my case. The rule was written in such a way that even if NASPA had correctly judged that I had done nothing wrong and deserved no punishment, I would still be denied access to the tournament.
Michael, on a personal note: I have no beef with you, and I have always found our social interactions and our Scrabble games very pleasant. I am sure that you were deceived about me, and that is what led to you passing the rule that you did. I would gladly instantly forgive you and take your name off this list, but I need you to revoke that rule first.
Furthermore, I would love to know who in the Scrabble world approached you or influenced you to create that rule. If you are as interested as I am in having a fairer and more ethical world of competitive Scrabble, which I think you might be, you might be holding one of the keys to unlocking and revealing this conspiracy entirely.
John Chew, Judy Cole, Rich Baker, Lila Crotty, Josh Greenway, Andy Hoang, Jason Idalski, Ezekiel Markwei, Stefan Rau, Heidi Robertson, Peter Sargious, and Portia Zwicker (except for any who voted for no punishment of me)
John Chew, Judy Cole, Jason Idalski, Stefan Rau, Josh Greenway, Andy Hoang, Peter Sargious, Lila Crotty, Heidi Robertson, Portia Zwicker, Ezekiel Markwei, and Rich Baker comprised the NASPA Advisory Board that suspended me in 2022. They lied to me over text message, passed a judgment about me based on statements that they did not allow me to see or respond to, and made disgustingly invasive demands on my life, including them approving my medical care. They used their influence with WESPA to interfere in my ability to play Scrabble tournaments around the rest of the world, even though they could not identify to WESPA a single thing that I had done wrong. They also refused to abide by a court-ordered subpoena to turn over their documents related to this decision.
Furthermore, the reinstatement conditions they put in their decision against me demonstrate a clear intent to bully me into silence and to cover up their own wrongdoing by creating circumstantial evidence of a false narrative that I did something wrong. They continue to insist that I take down the blog, because it irrefutably shows that I have done nothing wrong and that both the complainants and the North American Scrabble leadership have done a massive number of things wrong. And they wanted to get a signed statement from me about the Code of Conduct so that they could use it as false proof that there is any substance behind their reasons for suspending me.
The WGPO Board of Directors said that they unanimously voted to ban me. The NASPA Advisory Board said no such thing. It is entirely possible that some members of the board had an ounce of sense and ethics and opposed any and all punishment for me, and if so they are not on this list of abusers. However, any NASPA Advisory Board member who favored in any way any punishment for me, any conditions on my reinstatement, and/or any probationary restrictions on me after reinstatement has abused me, just as every other person on this list has.
If you completely opposed any punishment for me and recognized this charade of injustice for what it is, I need you to speak up now. Say it out loud and publicly:
David did nothing wrong, and the Clinchys have been abusing him for seven years. Every single person who played any role in obstructing David from playing in Scrabble tournaments added to that abuse and punished the victim while rewarding the abusers. Every one of you is a far worse person than David if you cannot admit your wrongdoing, apologize to him, undo all of the unethical decisions you have made against him, and start punishing the actual abusers, namely Evans Clinchy, Jennifer Clinchy, and Lola McKissen. They did not just abuse David. They abused you, by lying to you, manipulating you, and influencing you to abuse an innocent person, who was doing nothing to you or them.
Some final words to John Chew. It is laughable and disgusting that you gave the weak justification for banning me for three years that you did, when the record clearly shows that your behavior has been much, much worse than mine. You have no need to worry about me trying to force my way into tournaments in your organization or pressing charges against you for what you have done. I have no interest in playing Scrabble for any organization whose leaders behave so abusively to me and are unable to correct their behavior in the face of overwhelming evidence of their own guilt and the innocence of the person they have punished.
However, we still have a massive problem, because your decision against me affects WESPA policy, and it affects the ability of other national associations who recognize that I have done nothing wrong, such as ABSP, to let me play in all of their tournaments. Is the fact that you got an entire other WESPA-recognized national association to stand up and call out your misbehavior not enough evidence of how much you are egregiously in the wrong?
John, I do not care how much you hate me. I do not care how much you cling to your weak justifications for your behavior. Regardless of whether I ever play in a Scrabble tournament again, stateside or anywhere else, I am making you a lifelong promise. If you do not relent and fix this, I will continue for all time to expose to the entire world all of your wrongdoing toward me or toward anyone else. I will do everything in my power to make sure that your reputation as a Scrabble leader is ruined and that you are permanently ousted from ever having a job in this community.
And that will be a completely moral and heroic action, because I will never lie. I will only indict you in the court of public opinion with the truth of your abusive and unethical behavior. Because I need to protect my ability to play Scrabble on other continents, and because your behavior has been so terrible as to interfere even with that. As such, your continued role in Scrabble leadership is a threat to me, and a threat to anyone else the Clinchys or their ilk decides to abuse in the future, since you have proven beyond any shadow of a doubt that you are a sucker who falls for their manipulation and that you will not back down from abusing their victim, no matter how obvious it is that you are in the wrong.
To everyone on the list of abusers, you all owe me an apology and a public statement disavowing your involvement in any decision that obstructed me from playing competitive Scrabble. If you do that, you will instantly be forgiven, because unlike the Clinchys I do not hold grudges. However, every day that passes in which you do not apologize and disavow your involvement in all of this I will consider to be a day that your abuse of me continues. As such, I will continue to do everything in my power to shine a light on this story and your involvement in it. I will also continue to expose any further wrongdoings you do to me.
To everyone else in the Scrabble community, thank you for reading. If you are motivated to do anything to help me, please speak up! Even just a comment on a Facebook post or in private message letting me know that you read it all is meaningful. Even better would be a post or comment with the text in the last quote box above, or your own reactions. Even better than that would be you saying something to the people on the list of abusers. Make sure that they know you also believe they owe me an apology. Best would be you saying something to them and letting me know what you said. I hope you all know that if you were ever treated this badly, I would be the very first person speaking up on your behalf—social cohesion with unethical people be damned.
Footnotes
In the narrative that I gave to my first lawyer Clifford Davidson back in October 2022, I included the following:
I would like to make the incident report submitted against me and my response to it public to the entire Scrabble world, as part of holding the corrupt leaders of our North American Scrabble organizations accountable for their wrongdoing.
I believe that Brianna “Lola” McKissen’s testimony played a large role in damaging my reputation and causing a groundswell of sentiment against me, but I would be willing to forgive her role in all of this if she is willing to give me a signed statement recanting her entire statement against me and admitting that my depiction of our relationship in my response to the incident report was entirely true.
If I obtained such a statement from her, I think that I could publicly release all of the incident report with the exception of her statement, as well as all of my response except for the second part of section (C), all of section (D), and all screenshots that are referred to only in those parts, which would provide all of the necessary political accountability to other parties while minimizing any exposure or embarrassment to her.
If Lola were willing to provide me with such a statement, I would be willing to grant her immunity from any damages in this case. ↩︎
Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.
Hannah Arendt
On Friday, July 28th, 2023 I officially became my own lawyer. The senior lawyer had sent me his delayed but expected refusal two days earlier. I had made no attempts to find other representation. Marc submitted his withdrawal to the court, and passed along his computer files related to the case. I traveled up to Seattle that weekend and did not get back until Tuesday, so I did not start digging into things until later in the week.
I saw for the first time the letter that Michael Fuller had sent Marc on July 6th, the one that almost caused him to withdraw on July 7th. Marc did not initially include the “attached email, currently designated confidential and attorney’s eyes only.” I emailed him back, and he finally sent me the email, confirming that it was from Terry Kang to Jennifer and Evans. It did not seem particularly earth-shattering to me. Terry had chosen her allegiance to Jennifer and Evans, and was now claiming that everything I had written in the blog that mentioned her and Stefan Rau (back when they were married) was a lie.
How this stupid email got Marc to panic and want to leave my case is mind-boggling. Mr. Fuller must have supplemented it with a bunch of cockamamie rhetoric and lies and totally pulled the wool over his eyes.
It was not clear from Marc’s disorganized records what had been filed and what had not. I learned that I had to go to the courthouse kiosk in order to see all the public filings from the case. So I spent an entire day there reading through them, and that was illuminating.
I learned that requests for production and their responses are not generally filed in the court, just served to the opposing counsel, but that most other things are filed in the court, including the requests for admission and their responses. I wrote out a timeline by hand that included all of the filings from both sides and what the attorneys had served to each other, as best as I could tell, by cross-referencing both the court’s records and the files I had from Marc. I found approximately ten documents that I didn’t have a copy of anywhere, neither in previous emails from Marc nor in the trove of files that he shared. I got a court clerk to send me electronic copies of them.
I spent the next day at home looking through the responses to requests for production to see what evidence had been served. Marc had sent over 400 pages of evidence, which he had tagged with Bates numbers. I cross-referenced it with the timeline I had produced in The Conspiracy and made a spreadsheet cataloging exactly which page of which document every Bates number referred to. What I quickly discovered was that Marc had labeled Bates numbers on documents in a haphazard order, including accidentally using the same number as the final page of one document and the starting page of another document, and that there were nearly twenty pages of documents that I had given him that he had never submitted as evidence.
When Michael Fuller first accused me of withholding documents on June 16th, 2023, he specifically named Jason Idalski, Stefan Rau, Eric Kinderman, Mina Le, and Wayne Kelly as people whose communications we had not handed over.
As I already explained in The Smokescreen, as soon as Marc showed me that letter, I had specifically told him to submit the June 8th, 2023 email and all of the files that were in its attached zipfile. Guess what: all of those other missing documents were in that zipfile. And I told him twice, repeating myself on the phone, because he hadn’t followed my directions in the email. That was in mid-June. Marc was still my lawyer until July 28th, and he never submitted any of those documents. I only learned this in the first week of August, because while Marc was representing me he never shared with me most of the responses to requests for production that he made. (He also did not share with me the vast majority of other things he served and filed, but that is getting ahead of the story.)
In the last month and a half of Marc’s representation of me, he had contacted me a few times in a seeming panic, hounding me to give him any irrelevant text messages from some of these people, possibly believing accusations from Mr. Fuller that I was hiding things from him. I was baffled about why this was still an issue, as I of course had assumed that he had already sent along the documents I had twice told him to submit. Marc did not realize that the reason he kept getting protests from Mr. Fuller about documents was not because I was withholding anything relevant, but because of his own failure to follow directions.
If I had ever even been in one of those conversations between Marc and Mr. Fuller, we might have sorted that out. But they only talked behind my back, which I am sure is the way that Mr. Fuller preferred it.
After I had accounted for all the missing documents and sent them in a supplemental response to requests for production, I had a phone conversation with my now former lawyer Marc in which I briefly broached the subject of the gaps in discovery. I gathered from the call that he did not know what he had or had not submitted and was only interested in making excuses to cover his own ass.
It took me two days of diligent bookkeeping to get caught up on the case and to figure out where the gaps were and what I still needed to file and submit to discovery. Meanwhile, both Ms. Vaughn and Mr. Fuller had filed anti-SLAPP motions in that same week. Ms. Vaughn’s motion on behalf of Lola was not a surprise. This was something that she had communicated to us that she would do if we could not agree on a settlement. Mr. Fuller followed in her footsteps and filed motions on behalf of the Clinchys as well. I am not aware that he had any plans to do this beforehand, and I think he probably did it mostly because he smelled blood while I had no lawyer representing me. In those first couple days, I also read through both of their motions and got the gist of their arguments.
By the time I had reviewed Marc’s materials and learned how to do my own electronic filings in the case, it was Friday, August 4th, and the defense attorneys had already succeeded in getting a hearing for the anti-SLAPP motions scheduled for August 16th at 2:00 PM. So I had twelve days to prepare for it. I am not a lawyer, and it might seem like a ridiculously bad move to try to handle this hearing myself, especially considering that if the defendants succeeded in their motion, not only would all the charges be dropped, but also there would be a mandatory award of the defendants’ legal fees.
However, I do not think I had a better option. I had already failed to get an experienced lawyer to work with me, and the idea of dropping a big sum of money for another retainer to someone else was nerve-racking anyway. Furthermore, I knew this case and all the documents better than anyone, for sure better than my own previous lawyer to whom I had already paid a boatload of money. If I had spent time over the next week or two scrambling to find another lawyer, who knows if I would have been able to find anyone good, and even if I had, how much would they be able to get up to speed on what was going on in the case?
And what if I did put a bunch of time and effort into trying to find a lawyer and did not come up with anything? As things turned out, it took me almost all the time I had before the hearing to get everything filed that I wanted to. I never would have been able to get it all done if my attention had been divided between doing the lawyerly things and trying to find someone else to take over for me.
After doing my two days of reading up on things, I felt like I already had a good idea of what I wanted to file in the court and of the arguments I would make of why this case should go to trial. Also, it was fun. I had not had a job in more than two years, and the way I was able to jump into the deep end of a set of documents and figure out what was going on was reminiscent for me of a lot of work projects where I had jumped into a chaotic and poorly managed code base and turned it into something much better.
I was not planning to represent myself all the way through trial. This was a single hearing, scheduled for an hour, simply to decide whether the charges should be struck down by the anti-SLAPP motions. I am no expert in law, but on the surface it did not seem to me likely that the motions should succeed.
SLAPP stands for “Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation” and refers to frivolous lawsuits that are made to chill free speech. For example, someone says something you do not like, and you threaten them with a scary sounding defamation lawsuit. Even though they have the First Amendment right to say what they said, they might be too intimidated by the prospect of an expensive lawsuit and back down. The purpose of anti-SLAPP motions is to be able to knock those kind of lawsuits out of the courts quickly and make sure that they cost the plaintiffs money, to discourage them from being filed in the first place.
However, there was nothing frivolous about my lawsuit. I have a ton of evidence that the defendants did commit defamation, that it damaged my standing in the Scrabble community, and that it did result in me being diagnosed with PTSD. Furthermore, the defendants were not “publicly participating” by saying the things about me they did. They were doing just the opposite, bad-mouthing me to a cabal of corrupt Scrabble leaders in order to oust me from the game, while trying to keep what they were doing as out of the public eye as possible. I have been the one this entire time trying to blow the whistle and make what they are doing visible to the world.
I thought that if I succeeded in dismissing their motions that would buy me more time to find a lawyer. It might also incentivize the defendants to want to settle sooner, since I would show the opposing counsels that I could not be bullied even while I was representing myself.
When I read the parts of their motions that quoted prior legal decisions and discussed this or that precedent, I did not know what to make of them, and I did not have time to learn the intricacies of the law or to do my own research on previous legal cases and write something lawyerly along those lines.
The defense lawyers wrote many things in their motions about how my former attorney had not followed proper procedures in delivering the complaints and summonses, which I believe was quite possibly true, because he was absolutely clueless, had no previous trial experience, and was a one-man law firm with no experienced people helping him, not even a paralegal.
The defense lawyers also wrote things about how some of the claims my lawyer wrote in the complaint were not supported by Oregon law, and again I had no idea if their arguments were true. However, I definitely was not going to make the mistake that Marc made of just uncritically accepting whatever the opposing counsels told me.
Without time to educate myself about Oregon law, I decided to just focus on what I did know, which was the truth of my story. I figured I would just show in as plainspoken a way as I could what the defendants had done to me, and dismantle all of the lies and deception in what the defense lawyers had written.
What the defense had written was full of lies, because it had to be. Because the truth is on my side. Because the only way that the Clinchys and Lola and their lawyers could try to justify their behavior was by pouring more dishonesty on top of the massive amount of dishonesty they had already written. Because in reality there is no justification for their disgustingly abusive behavior.
So I got to work. The first thing I had to do was respond to a bunch of requests for admission that Mr. Fuller had filed on July 7th about the non-existent tampering story, so it was just a simple “deny, deny, deny…” down the line. Back when Marc was not willing to tell me about the letter from Terry, he had showed me these requests for admission, as if they somehow explained what this whole hubbub was about. Because he was so gullible that he believed all the inanity that the opposing counsel Mr. Fuller threw at him instead of believing his own client.
I was about to hit the 30 day deadline to respond to them, and so my first filing in the case was on August 4th, 2023, denying all of these spurious requests for admission.
My next priority was meeting the 30 day deadline to responding to the additional requests for production that Mr. Fuller had sent on July 9th, as a follow up to his accusations on July 6th and 7th. Mostly this was just a matter of filling in the gaps of documents that Marc had failed to submit. I downloaded PDF editing software that allowed me to add Bates numbers. I numbered all of the evidence I had, for which Marc had not already done so, and I updated my spreadsheet to include all of these documents to the catalog. I then served a supplemental response to the requests for production on August 8th.
I learned from Ms. Vaughn’s assistant that Marc had not sent most of the previous responses to requests for production to her after she joined the case late, so I also served electronic copies of them to her.
Now that I had met the pressing deadlines, I could finally start taking the initiative. Mr. Fuller had made many accusations against me of bad faith litigation conduct both in his nasty letters and in his anti-SLAPP motion. That was rich. I had done nothing wrong, while he had repeatedly lied and manipulated my former lawyer behind my back. I was going to make sure the real story of who actually behaved unethically was filed in the court record, which would also have the secondary benefit of documenting Marc’s failures to represent me competently, which could be helpful if I had to sue him for malpractice down the line.
So on August 10th, I filed the unassumingly named “Declaration of David Koenig,” in which I spilled all the tea about how Marc had failed to submit many pages of evidence and I showed the proof that I had sent him those documents.
I then explained all of the falsehoods in Mr. Fuller’s threatening letters, including the email from Terry Kang. I gave the screenshot of the real three message conversation that Terry and I had, and I also gave her previous communications with me about the situation with Jennifer and Evans going back to 2020, showing the complete inconsistency of her new position. I even included a quick email from Stefan Rau confirming that I was telling the truth about the stories that Terry had suddenly claimed I was lying about.
I followed that up with the story of how Marc, Mr. Fuller, and the judge had all signed the protective order while I was kept in the dark about its existence. Next was a laundry list of all the ways that Marc had represented me incompetently, and I made clear that these were the reasons that we had stopped working together, not because of anything to do with nonexistent witness tampering.
Finally, I said that I was reporting both Marc and Mr. Fuller to the Oregon State Bar to investigate potential ethics violations, and that I was including this declaration in the report. Indeed, I submitted complaints about both lawyers to the bar immediately after filing the declaration.
That declaration was the main thing I wanted to get done that day, but I ended up having enough time and energy to file a couple more things that called out Jennifer’s dishonesty and bad faith litigation conduct.
The Clinchys had avoided answering many of the requests for admission with ridiculous and frivolous excuses, including complaining that we had not defined terms adequately because we had not cited a particular source dictionary. Marc had made motions requesting a hearing to determine the insufficiency of their responses, but he had never followed up with the court staff to actually schedule that hearing. He also never told me about that motion nor shared many of the relevant documents with me. I only learned most of the details of this after I had started represented myself, while I stood at a court kiosk reading through all the public filings.
It was immediately obvious to me what Jennifer had done when she evaded answering our request for admission number 9: “Prior to 2022, you had never contacted law enforcement in any way regarding Plaintiff.” She first claimed that the term “law enforcement” was vague, and when later pressed into more explanation, she wrote a disingenuous excuse that said law enforcement could mean “federal officials,” not just “a local police department.” She said she had contacted federal officials about me, trying to get the reader to infer that she had complained to the FBI about me, or some boloney like that. I knew exactly what she was talking about. She had talked to federal officials to get strings pulled at the White House to do nice things for me on dates. Fortunately, I still had lots of physical evidence from several of those dates.
Months earlier, Marc had asked me to do an accounting of how much money I had made playing tournament Scrabble and an estimate of how much financial damage was done to me by the defendants interfering with my ability to play in tournaments. However, Marc had gotten so distracted by all of the sand that Mr. Fuller was throwing in his eyes, and I had mostly focused on my appeal and the continuing communications with the Scrabble associations, so it had gotten put aside. On Friday, August 11th, I finally finished it up and filed the “Plaintiff’s Declaration of Estimated Scrabble Prize Winnings,” which I figured was important, because one of the claims that we would be discussing in the anti-SLAPP hearing was for Intentional Interference with Economic Relations.
That was as far as I got in the first week and a half of being my own lawyer, and I thought I had made pretty good progress in starting to straighten out my case and prep for the hearing on the following Wednesday. But I came up against another obstacle. From Sunday, August 13th to Wednesday, August 16th, the high temperature was at least 100º every day, and I had no air conditioning at home. For most of those days, I got up at 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning so that I could get a full day of work done before it got too hot out. I also worked from the library in the courthouse a few times.
There was one more preliminary document I needed to serve the defendants before I made my arguments in response to the motions. One of the arguments that Ms. Vaughn had made in her motion was that the plaintiff had only alleged that two or three sentences in Lola’s statements had constituted defamation. That was ridiculous. Lola lied over and over again throughout those documents. I thought the problem was that when Marc had been representing me and he had been asked in responses to requests for production to “produce any statement by [defendant] which, according to plaintiff, constitutes libel per se” and to “produce any statements to third parties by [defendant] which, according to plaintiff, [defendant] knew were false,” he had given a short list.
This is something I had argued with Marc about a number of times. He only wanted to focus on a few sentences of the most egregious reputation-killing things they had said about me. But I protested that many of the most provable falsehoods in what they wrote were in the details of other sentences. And the cumulative effect of all of those big and little lies was to defame my character and to get the Scrabble associations to ban me. So I took out my highlighter and combed over the defamatory statements. Then I updated his incomplete responses with a much more thorough list of all of the instances of libel per se and of knowingly false statements. On Monday, August 14th, I served that as the “Plaintiff’s Fourth Supplemental Response to Jennifer Clinchy’s requests for production.”1 (Duplicated with Evans’s name on it too, of course.)
Meanwhile on Monday there had been some emails between the lawyers and the court staff about preparation for Wednesday’s hearing. The last one sent on Monday was from the judge’s assistant saying, “Please note, all motions and subsequent filings must be sent to the Judge in hard copy form.” Damn, I thought, I guess I will need to run to a copy shop on Tuesday.
Interspersed with that email chain were some emails from Mr. Fuller to me, sometimes copying only the other lawyers, sometimes copying the court staff too. Mr. Fuller was, of course, irate about the ways I had exposed his wrongdoing and reported him to the Oregon State Bar. He threatened to get me held in contempt of court for including the Terry Kang email, which he had labeled “Confidential – Attorney’s Eyes Only,” in my public filing of August 10th. In his typical fashion, he also made up a cockamamie story that I had put malware on one of the documents I filed, because he or someone in his office had had trouble downloading and opening it properly.
I am not a lawyer, even though I played one for a couple weeks, but I do not think I did anything illegal by including the Terry Kang email in my public filing. If anyone did anything illegal, it was potentially Marc Mohan, by giving me the email when he was no longer involved in the case and I had not signed the protective order myself. I also figured the judge and the Oregon State Bar would rather know about the way Mr. Fuller had used the protective order to undermine my relationship with Marc, and that getting that truth out there was more important than whatever slap on the wrists someone might get from technically disseminating this short email improperly. I did not worry about Mr. Fuller’s empty threats, and no one else in the email chain paid him any heed for his attempts to intimidate me.
I finally got the whole response to the anti-SLAPP motions finished on Tuesday, August 15th. The main response is 22 pages, with about 200 pages of exhibits, which are mostly things you would have already seen if you have read through The Conspiracy, though I did add highlighting of a few key passages in some of the exhibits. Then, there is a supplemental response to the Clinchys’ motions to strike, which is 7 pages plus exhibits. The supplemental response completely dismantles all of their arguments about my supposed bad faith litigation conduct and shows that the only people who committed bad faith litigation conduct in this case are the Clinchys and Mr. Fuller.
It is my opinion that the main response to the motions also completely dismantles their arguments in the motions, maybe not in a legal sense, but in a layman’s sense of logic and justice. I did not quote any other cases or respond to their legal analysis that did so. I did not defend any of the procedural mistakes that Marc had made in representing me and simply apologized for them. But I believe I clearly and conclusively showed that the stories the defendants and their lawyers wrote in their motions were not good faith representations of what actually happened, that there was ample evidence for this to go to trial, and that in the big picture general sense of what anti-SLAPP motions were supposed to be about, it was unsuitable to use them to remove this case from the court, because I was not doing anything to chill the defendants’ free speech. In fact, they had been trying very hard to chill my free speech and criticizing me for exercising it.
It was just past midday when I got the responses to the motions to strike filed. I called a bunch of copy shops until I found one that was able to print color copies of all the documents that I needed in a hurry. I needed to print both the main and supplemental responses of the motions to strike, the August 10th declaration, and the August 11th declaration of Scrabble prize winnings. The whole thing was 310 pages, and I got two sets of copies made, one for me and one for the judge.
I rushed to the copy shop on a 102º afternoon to pick them up and discovered that the printout hadn’t been done properly, so that the “Exhibit 1”, “Exhibit 2”, etc. stuff didn’t show up on the pages, nor did most of the highlighting that I had added. I didn’t have time to sort it out with the printers and get them to print out a better batch, so I took out a pen and highlighter in the copy shop and labeled the first page of each exhibit with what number exhibit it was, and I went through by hand, adding all the highlighting I could remember, just on the judge’s copies.
Even with the discount they gave me for screwing things up, I still paid about $200 for all the copies. At least they were nice enough to do a smaller last minute job the next day for free.
I hustled over to the courthouse and delivered a box with all of the copies to the judge’s chambers, finally meeting the judge’s assistant in person. I do not think the judge was in that day, so she probably would not get the hard copies until the next morning, which was the day of the hearing, though she had gotten all the electronic copies. The assistant explained to me that by law all filings were supposed to be submitted to the court electronically and in print. Some judges made exceptions and allowed filings to only be done electronically, but this particular judge liked to have hard copies of everything and they were the primary ones she tended to read. It would have been nice to know this all sooner, but I had no training program. I had just jumped into the deep end of the pool representing myself pro se for the last two weeks.
That evening I organized all my sections of my paper copies of the responses, declarations, and exhibits into separately paper-clipped sections. In retrospect, it would have been nice to deliver the judge’s copies in that form. I also added all the highlighting and exhibit numbers that didn’t show up properly on the copies.
On the morning of August 16th, Mr. Fuller sent me another nasty letter, escalating his empty threats against me for failing to put the Terry Kang letter under seal. I fired back a quick letter of my own explaining that I had done nothing wrong, to which he responded with another letter distorting what I had written.
As I reviewed all the documents that morning to prepare for the hearing, I suddenly noticed a gap. As medical evidence of the emotional and physical distress that the defendants had inflicted on my life, I included summaries of visits to three different medical professionals: a psychiatrist, an otolaryngologist (ENT doctor), and a speech-language pathologist (SLP). One of my exhibits, the ENT summary, only included the first page, even though it was a three page document with the doctor’s diagnosis on the second page. I looked back at Marc’s responses to the requests for production and he had also included only the first page of the ENT visit summary. I had copied the Bates-number-tagged pages of the medical notes directly from those responses, so I had inadvertently repeated his error of using an incomplete document.
I had also noticed a day or two earlier that Marc had never previously submitted the psychiatrist summary as evidence, which forced me to assign it new Bates numbers and add it to the evidence list when I was writing up the responses to the anti-SLAPP motions. I had distinctly remembered emailing Marc the summaries of all three medical visits together.
These irregularities got me to examine the email I had sent to Marc with these doctor visit notes more carefully and to understand what had happened. Gmail’s preview functionality did not work properly on the psychiatrist and ENT attachments, so if Marc only clicked on the attachments and did not actually download them, he never would have seen beyond the first page. This explained why he never included the psychiatrist summary (because there was nothing useful on the first page) and why he only included the first page of the ENT summary, while he still included the entirety of the SLP summary, since Gmail’s preview functionality had no problems with the last one.
In short, the problem was that Marc could not figure out how to fully download the attachments that I gave him. Now, I understand that Marc was dealing with a lot of paperwork and emails in this case. I can sympathize with anyone in the heat of the moment making a mistake and not noticing that he had accidentally truncated a three page document to one. Plus, the SLP visit note reconfirmed the dysphonia diagnosis, so missing the ENT diagnosis was not that big a deal.
But imagine for a moment that you were a lawyer representing a client who was suing people for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Imagine then that your client gave you a note from a psychiatrist that included his PTSD diagnosis. Do you think that you would perhaps consider this an important piece of evidence, or maybe even the most important piece of evidence in the entire case? And if you clicked on the preview of the PDF and did not see the explanation of the PTSD that you were looking for, do you think you might have tried downloading the entire attachment to see if you were missing something? Or if you could not figure out how to download it and thought the diagnosis was not there, do you think you would have said something to your client, like, “hey the attachment does not appear to be there” instead of just omitting it from evidence?
What kind of moron not only cannot figure out how to download attachments properly, but also does not even bother to follow up with his client when the attachment does not appear to be complete? Apparently the kind who bills me over $14,000 for his legal work.
I quickly wrote up an additional declaration pertaining to medical records, which I filed just two and a half hours before the hearing. Then I got dressed up in my nicest suit and picked up printouts at the copy shop on the way to the courthouse.
I got to the courthouse a bit early and hand wrote out my main talking points from the response to the motion in my notebook while I waited. After the judge wrapped up a previous hearing and retired briefly to her chambers, I set up at the prosecution-side table, laying all my paper-clipped sections of my documents and exhibits in front of me, and plugging in and opening up my laptop, just in case I needed to search for anything else on it.
We were technically supposed to have the brief hearing about whether to grant Jennifer a protective order to answer the one request for admission before the main hearing about the anti-SLAPP motions, but it never happened. Instead we briefly talked about the existing protective order that Mr. Fuller had tried to criticize me for breaking. He said something to the judge about how I had taken the confidential letter and published it widely. I clarified that the only way I had published it was putting it in the court filing and reporting it to the Oregon State Bar. I also explained that Mr. Fuller and my former attorney Mr. Mohan had agreed to that protective order behind my back and that I never knew about it.
The judge did not seem to care about that particular letter, but she was insistent on me understanding that the protective order did apply to me going forward. Just as the associate lawyer had done on the phone with me a few weeks ago, she normalized the protective order as something that happens in these kinds of cases all the time. She also had no sympathy or patience for me separating what my former attorney had done and what I had done. If there were ethics issues about either of the lawyers, that was not the business of this courtroom. I did not argue and confirmed that I understood what the judge said about the protective order applying to me. Mr. Fuller never brought up a new protective order for the response to the request for admission, and I certainly was not going to bring it up for him, so we moved on.
Before we gave any oral arguments about the anti-SLAPP motions, the judge explained that she had read the entirety of the defendants motions and that she thought they were very well written. She had only skimmed my response, because it was very long and I had only gotten it to her the day before. Then she said that she was inclined to approve the motions. So much for objective justice.
Since the judge was more familiar with their arguments than mine, she let me go first. She quickly made clear that she had no stomach for any arguments about bad faith litigation conduct by either side, and I said that is no problem, that is why I put those arguments in the supplemental response. We can just focus on the ones in the main response.
I ended up taking the floor for somewhere between 30 and 45 minutes. I was the most calm, cool, and collected I have ever been in my life while talking about this story. For the last many years, it has been an enormous problem for me to explain the story of what the Clinchys have done to me without getting angry and raising my voice, even to close friends whom I know are on my side. The last time I had talked about some of these things, less than a week earlier to a friend on the phone, my friend had expressed concerns about how I was going to come across in the courtroom. But I mentioned to my friend that I can do better if I plan a script of what to say ahead of time and stay on that script. Plus, I knew that I absolutely had to do better. Losing my cool in front of the judge would have been the death knell for my case, and now the judge had already told me she was inclined to decide against me before I even started. If I was going to pull off a miracle comeback, I was going to need to be nearly perfect. Fortunately, I thrive under pressure.
I walked through my talking points one-by-one. I spoke slowly, clearly, and assertively yet gently, while they all listened quietly and attentively. My speech essentially went in order through the main ideas of each of the sections of the main response to the motions to strike.
I first dismissed the defendants repeated claim that my writings were a “manifesto,” pointing out that they contained plenty of evidence and lots of communications and points of view of other people. I explained why the charges were all filed within the statute of limitations, and why I thought anti-SLAPP was unsuitable, since it was the defendants who were trying to chill my free speech, not the other way around.
I talked about all of the claims against the defendants: why there was plenty of defamation, a repeated pattern of infliction of emotional distress, interference with my demonstrated pattern of making money with Scrabble winnings over many years, and evidence of conspiracy not only between the defendants but also with Steven Pellinen and possibly other Scrabble leaders. I mentioned that the only reason Steven was not a defendant was because he was eighty years old and had Parkinson’s and brain cancer and probably less than a year left to live.
After addressing all the claims, I then went through all my arguments that dismantled the criticisms the defendants had made in their background and introductory sections: how NASPA’s statement that it decided I had violated the code of conduct based on my own submissions was not plausible, given their later communications and behavior; how—contrary to the defendants’ claim that I had an “already-tanked reputation” based on one quote from one fifteen year old article—there was plenty of evidence that I had a positive reputation as a Scrabble player in the media; how the Darrell Day incident was not just irrelevant to my relationship with the defendants, but also how Lola’s increasing use of it in her later statements showed clear malicious intent against me; and how despite the cries of bad faith litigation conduct from the other side, I had already served 460 pages of evidence to them in discovery, and they had served zero.
When I was done, the first words out of the judge’s mouth were, “you just said a lot,” and I knew I was done for. All that time and energy and all that perfect presentation did not make a lick of difference. The main takeaway of the judge was essentially, “that’s a lot of words, and I am not even going to bother to process all of them.” She gave the defendants’ counsels time to respond, but they did not make very long arguments. They knew they did not need to, as it was clear the judge’s mind was already made up.
There were a few things that came out of the discussion afterward that made clear to me the fatal flaws in my case. It seems to me that the most crucial ones all related to the writing of the complaint itself, something that was only done by my former lawyer Marc Mohan.
The biggest by far is that civil conspiracy is not a claim in Oregon law. There is criminal conspiracy in Oregon, and there is civil conspiracy in some other states. My former lawyer had literally written a complaint that had invalid claims, and even though he had amended it twice, he never fixed this issue. The judge even acknowledged that there might very well have been a conspiracy against me in the Scrabble world, but that it was not a valid legal claim in civil court in Oregon.
I still have not gotten my head around where Ms. Vaughn got the idea that the claim for defamation rested on only two or three sentences in Lola’s statement. I thought I was properly addressing that by my supplemental response to requests for production that gave a laundry list of defamatory statements, which I also included as Exhibit 15 in the main response to the motions. (p. 186-198) But the judge told me that what mattered was what was in the complaint itself, not the requests for production.
Another problem with the complaint is that my lawyer asked for attorney’s fees, and this is not the kind of case where you can do that. The associate lawyer I had spoken to a month earlier had mentioned something like that on the phone. As best as I understand, the anti-SLAPP motion that was about to be granted was the only way that a case like this could result in an awarding of attorney’s fees. If it had not been approved and this had gone to trial, neither side would have been awarded any attorney’s fees, regardless of the verdict.
It seemed to me that the only way that I could have avoided the case being struck down was to make another amendment to the complaint that fixed all the problems with the first three versions,2 and gotten it and new summonses delivered to the defendants in the two weeks between them making their motions and us having the hearing. Notwithstanding the fact that I still do not have the legal knowledge to write the complaint correctly, even if I had done that I do not know if it would have saved the case. Mr. Fuller had already written protests in his anti-SLAPP motion that the number of amendments to the original complaint was evidence of my attorney exercising bad faith litigation conduct. If I had scrapped the old complaints and written a new one at this point, four months into the case and after the defendants had written their motions specifically tailored to the way the old one was written, it would have looked unprofessional to the judge, especially because she did not care to distinguish what came from my previous lawyer and from me representing myself pro se.
In short, the complaint was written so badly that my case was DOA. The truth of my story and the falseness of the defendants’ stories did not matter. The oral arguments I gave in the courtroom did not matter. There was nothing I could have done, because Marc had screwed the pooch so badly. For that matter, even if I had dropped another big retainer to get another lawyer to take over the case for the last few weeks, it is unlikely that they would have been able to overcome Marc’s mistakes enough to keep this case going. I am glad that I represented myself for the last two weeks, because if I had just handed it off to another lawyer, I likely would have lost even more money, and I never would have known about a large amount of Marc’s incompetence and malpractice.
I could see the way the wind was blowing and that there was no point in putting up much resistance in the rest of the hearing. There were a few little things in the remaining discussion that annoyed me. At one point Mr. Fuller tried to use the litany of nasty, dishonest letters that he had sent me and my former attorney as “evidence” of our wrongdoing. This guy’s entire playbook was obvious to me. Practically every word he put in writing was false and accusatory, making ridiculous assumptions and interpretations of things that have no basis in reality and are just fabricating a bad story about his opponents, but his way of speaking was nothing like his writing. He spoke in a gentle, nice-sounding voice, and weak-minded people like Marc Mohan, who judge others based on emotional affect rather than the veracity of their statements, fall for his lies.
Right near the end of the hearing, I even saw Mr. Fuller flat out lie to the judge’s face, but I was too resigned to even complain about it. The judge had already said her decision at that point, and I knew that my pointing out the lie would not help me in any way. The lie was exactly what he had written to me in his second letter that morning, that I had said that I do not intend to comply with the Judge’s protective order. I simply said that I had not signed the order. I made no statement about my future intentions.
Mr. Fuller also tipped his hand to me a couple of times during the hearing. I am telling you right here and now what I believe he is going to do. He will try to get my August 10th “Declaration of David Koenig” put under seal, by arguing that it needs to be, because of the “confidential” letter from Terry Kang. And he will try to get my other declaration filed that day removed from the court record by arguing that the photo of me and Jennifer in it is an inappropriate invasion of privacy. His real motivation is removing as many things from the public records as possible that show his own bad faith litigation conduct.
I am somewhat optimistic that the attention I have drawn to this case by the complaints I made to the Oregon State Bar have meant that enough people in the state legal community will have already seen these filings that Mr. Fuller will not mitigate the damage much, even if he succeeds in getting these documents hidden. Furthermore, it is possible that attempting to hide the documents now might just make him look worse. But just in case, I am going to keep a copy of these documents up on my website, so that Mr. Fuller cannot escape scrutiny for his actions.
I have almost no bones to pick with Lola’s counsel, Ms. Vaughn. She was completely professional in all of her dealings with me, and her correspondence was polite, even though we were not able to agree on a settlement. Her representation of Lola in the courtroom gave me no cause to complain, except for one thing she said. She remarked that she saw a clear pattern in me of blaming other people: the defendants, the leaders of the Scrabble organizations, and even my own former lawyer.
Come on, Ms. Vaughn, you already knew you were going to get your motion granted and did not need to say that. And you know it was dishonest. I am sure that you came into the courtroom much more prepared than the judge did, having actually read all of my statements and all of the evidence I presented. You know your client and the other defendants lied over and over again about me, and you know that every word I have said is true, even though it is your job never to admit those things. You know that I have thoroughly demonstrated both an absurd amount of corruption by the Scrabble leaders and an absurd amount of incompetence by my former attorney. When you read the stories about my former attorney, you were probably horrified at the thought of anyone who was representing you in a legal matter ever doing their job that badly.
I get that it is your job to get the judge to go against me emotionally, but again this was not even necessary. Congratulations on finding a way to send a personal insult to the one person who has behaved morally better than anyone else in this story.
Finally, I have a few bones to pick with Judge Kelly Skye’s handling of this hearing. I have to admit that I was at the time fooled by Ms. Vaughn’s phrasing in her motion that the plaintiff had to “to establish a probability that he will prevail on every element of every claim.” I assumed because my complaint had invalid civil conspiracy claims that continuing to fight for the other claims was a lost cause. It was not until two months later, while I was writing this, that I realized this was a misinterpretation, possibly an intentional one by Ms. Vaughn. The statute never uses the phrase “every claim.” The way it is written seems to me to indicate that the anti-SLAPP motion applies to each claim in a complaint separately. In other words, the judge could and should have just struck down the civil conspiracy claims and allowed the case to proceed with the other three claims.
I wish I had been aware of that at the time and presented that argument to the judge, although I am doubtful that it would have made a difference. I think the fact that the judge had not thoroughly read my arguments against the motions on paper, because I was so late at getting them to her, doomed me. I did the best I could. I thought I did a helluva job for an inexperienced fake lawyer in writing up and filing everything that I did and getting it in the day before the hearing, but I only learned in the courtroom that for this judge that was not soon enough.
In my opinion, Judge Skye had already decided prior to our oral arguments that she wanted to knock this whole case out of court. She gave me some post hoc rationalizations of why the other claims would not have succeeded, and the most annoying thing she did was bring up qualified immunity, i.e., that because the defendants made their statements about me in a quasi-judicial context, “the Scrabble courts,” they were immune from defamation claims.
The defendants did not say a single thing about qualified immunity in any of their motions to strike or their oral arguments. I and my former attorney expected that the defendants might bring up qualified immunity in the trial, and there were good legal arguments to be made about why the defendants’ behavior should not be protected by that.3 But this case was not on trial yet and this was just a short hearing to address their anti-SLAPP motions. What was I supposed to do, bring up a new argument for them and then present my argument against it? But what the judge did was produce a new argument for the defendants’ side on her own, after we had all concluded our arguments. I saw a look of surprise on Mr. Fuller’s face when she mentioned it.
I thought that the judge might have thought she was being nice to me, by trying to present some reasons why I would not have won this case anyway, rather than just telling me the cold hard truth that the reasons why this case were being thrown out were procedural, because my former lawyer did not know how to write a valid complaint.
Along similar lines, she argued that all of my evidence that the defendants were lying about me was just hearsay. At the end, I told her that I accepted that there may have been procedural problems with how the complaint was written that made this decision inevitable, but I did not understand this hearsay criticism. I told her I had presented hundreds of text messages of Lola’s that showed she was lying about our entire relationship. I stunned the judge, and I could read it in her face. I am sure that she previously did not know what I had just told her, because she had never read my documents to NASPA demonstrating the defamation. She simply said, “your objection has been noted.”
That is the most tragic part of this whole thing. The facts of my case never got a fair trial, and instead the whole thing was booted out in a short hearing by an apathetic judge who did not read everything I gave her.
So I lost, and now I was on the hook for all of Mr. Fuller’s and Ms. Vaughn’s attorney fees too. It was the worst possible legal outcome for me. But after it was all said and done, when I packed up my box of 300 pages of documents and headed out of the court, I just had to laugh. It was the first time in the seven years of this horror show that I could laugh at the absurdity of it all.
I am proud of everything I have done. Of the dignified way I carried myself through this Scrabble community even while the Clinchys and Lola were gossiping and disparaging me for years, of how I told the story of what happened in as clear, objective, and fair a way as I did, of how I have now spent years diligently combing through documents and revealing every one of their lies, of how I did not succumb to panic and continued to represent myself strongly no matter how bad a hand I was dealt, of every word I wrote in my statements to NASPA, in the documents I filed in the court case, and in the posts on this blog, of how much complicity and corruption I have revealed in our Scrabble leadership.
But the result of it all to this point is that the people who told disgusting lies about me are not being punished at all by either our Scrabble community or the law, and I am being punished by both. I am banned from playing Scrabble, and—let us be clear—it is a lifetime ban, because I will never accommodate any of the insulting conditions that the Scrabble leaders have tried to put on me, least of all taking down this blog. I am about to owe more than all of my remaining savings to the lawyers who helped my abusers get away with it. I have still got PTSD, and I still have not worked in over two years. And all I wanted was to play a board game and be treated with the respect that I deserve.
Mr. Mohan had amended the original complaint twice and still had not fixed the fundamental problems with it. What is worse is that he never told me about those amendments while he was working on them, only casually mentioning it once a month later when I was considering including the complaint in my public statements on this blog. He wrote in a June 14th email: “Instead of the initial complaint, you should attach the second amended complaint, which corrects a couple small factual errors and is the current operative complaint. I’m attaching a copy here.” ↩︎
For one, Cesar del Solar told me that Lola read her statement from the incident report about me to the Woogles team. So the defendants were not solely using their defamatory statements about me in a quasi-judicial context. ↩︎
This is a “one strike” warning, and we advise that you be extremely cautious about your communications with other Scrabble players, lest your words or actions be construed as harassment.
The leaders at NASPA have shown that they have no interest in dealing with me with any semblance of fairness or intellectual honesty. They have lied to me, hidden documents from me, (though I did not know about that part yet,) and sided with obviously dishonest bullies who have abused me for years. From that moment I decided that I needed to talk to NASPA through a lawyer, so that they could not spin any communication from me as harassment.
Before I found a defamation lawyer, I collected and organized all of the documents telling the history of how I had been mistreated by people in Scrabble, namely everything in The Conspiracy up through September 2022. Then I wrote a narrative explaining how it all linked together, which eventually became The Scapegoat.
I did a Google search for defamation lawyers in Oregon, and the one I found ended up being mostly a corporate lawyer. He reviewed my whole packet and told me that he believed I had legal claims against the Clinchys, Lola McKissen, and Steven Pellinen, though he never got around to specifying exactly what those legal claims were.
In the short time we were working together in late October and early November 2022, my highest priority was using him as a conduit to communicate with NASPA to see if I could get any information from them about why they suspended me. I did not think it was necessarily even worth trying to appeal to them, since I had already written a defense against the false accusations that was about as well stated as I could possibly make it, and I had zero expectation that they were going to suddenly start acting justly toward me. However, my lawyer thought that I should go through NASPA’s appeal process, as it might look questionable if I escalated to a lawsuit without doing so.
I drafted up a list of questions for my lawyer to send to NASPA, but when he sent me back a draft of the letter that he was going to send them, he had modified them slightly so that they were not in my opinion quite precisely targeting all of the information that I was trying to glean. When I tried to point this out, he became somewhat argumentative on the subject. I don’t want to exaggerate the problem. In the end, the letter he sent didn’t have exactly the wording that I had originally wanted, but the difference was minor. It just seemed like an unnecessary annoyance for something that should have been a simple task. It gave me a bit of doubt about whether he was going to be the best person to work with.
I also generally got the sense from working with him that my case was low on his priority list, as he was working with corporate clients that were a much bigger and easier source of income. To be fair, he was charging me a lower individual rate than he charged his corporate clients, and I had not asked him to do much beyond the initial evaluation of the case and sending out litigation hold letters to the relevant parties. There was no particular reason for him to be that invested in my case yet, especially because we had just gotten into a limited financial engagement and had agreed that we would renegotiate a new contract if he was going to file a case in court for me.
In short, we just weren’t vibing. I was getting the feeling that if I did file a lawsuit, I was probably going to want to do so with a different lawyer. He and I were in the middle of a Zoom call on November 15th, which I had requested in order to address some of my concerns about him potentially representing me in court, when John Chew unexpectedly emailed us both with the September 9th statements from Jennifer, Lola, and Steven Pellinen that they had never shown me before suspending me two months earlier.
That email did not just derail my meeting with the lawyer. It derailed me mentally for the next few months.
I had spent six months of my life, from April to September 2022, in psychological agony on account of the horrendous and false attacks on my character. It took a massive amount of strength and willpower to get my entire defense written down, and then a helluva lot more than that to edit it down and filter out all of the emotion in it. My initial draft was 75 pages, which I cut down to 17. And those pages were mostly just what turned into section (C) of the document. By the time I filled it out with the rest of what it needed and edited it down again, the final product was 36 pages, with another 53 pages of screenshots thoroughly corroborating it all.
During that six month period, I dealt with the further abuse of WGPO deciding to rush ahead and make a decision against me based only on the words of the other side and to send me an absolutely scathing and insulting email. It was also during that period that my relationship with my sisters and my son just about completely fell apart, due to family tensions that had already resulted in me cutting my mother out of my life in January. I have had almost no communication with anyone in my family for well over a year now.
Things were not all bad. In spring 2022 I spent a month in Mexico City and then went to the UK and Germany, on trips that had been planned before I received this incident report in April. Though I did do lots of fun things on those trips, I spent almost every weekday in Mexico City writing my defense, at least until I got COVID. By the time I got back to the States, I only had those 17 pages I mentioned earlier, and I decided to give myself a break entirely from working on the writing while I was in Europe.
On both trips, when I was alone in my hotel rooms, I sometimes found myself screaming at the top of my lungs. This was something that had started much earlier, due to the stress and anger I had about all of the people who were wronging me on account of Evans’s and Jennifer’s abuse. For most of the first year after I published The Crucible and The Fallout, there was only one person in the Scrabble community at whom I was angry: Chris Lipe. I might have occasionally stewed in anger about him, but it wasn’t a frequent thing until February 2021, when the names Geoff Thevenot, Peter Armstrong, and Becky Dyer showed up on an email banning me from the online Woogles CoCo club and insinuating that I was a harasser.1
In July 2020, I had proven beyond any shadow of a doubt that I had done nothing wrong to Jennifer and Evans and that they were abusing me. Yet all of these people decided to ignore reality and pile on their own abuse. And every one of them—Chris, Geoff, Peter, and Becky—had been someone I had considered a good friend.
Ever since that Woogles banning, I found myself occasionally getting into angry yelling fits when I was alone because of the complicit and abusive behavior I was receiving in the Scrabble community. In April 2022 it became much worse and much more frequent after this smear campaign was launched on me and then the leaders of all these Scrabble organizations started piling on too. The worst part was that the first four names on the “Notice of Action” I received from WGPO were Keith Hagel, Will Anderson, Jan Cardia, and Laurie Cohen, people I had known and liked for a long time in my tournament Scrabble career.
The first time I completely lost my voice due to the yelling was in January 2022, just a few days after I had gotten back from my victory at the New Orleans tournament, which may end up being the last Scrabble tournament I ever play in the USA. At that tournament Dave Wiegand had added his name to the list of Scrabble players who were mistreating me on account of Evans’s and Jennifer’s abuse, but I had no idea of the tidal wave of abuse that would start three months later.
I was yelling in the car when it felt like something snapped in my throat, and I was not able to speak for about 48 hours afterward. I had a therapy telehealth appointment in which I had to communicate with my therapist almost entirely by typing.
At that time it seemed like just a one-off thing, but after the smear campaign started and so many other people jumped on the bandwagon of abuse, it happened many more times. For many months my voice became perpetually scratchy, because I could not give it enough time to heal after the last damage before I started screaming again.
There was a long stretch of weeks in summer of 2022, after I had gotten back from Mexico and Europe, when I could not get myself to work on writing the response to the incident report at all, even though it was well underway. I got stuck in a mental avoidance loop, and that made the yelling much worse. The only way I was able to calm myself down was to get back to the writing.
Yet in spite all of the terrible experiences, by the first week of September I somehow managed to compose a comprehensive defense against all of the lies and attacks that had been thrown at me, with thorough proof that all of the complainants had defamed me and were the actual wrongdoers, with a great deal of objectivity, contemporaneous evidence, and reasoned analysis. Friends predicted that there was no way NASPA could let my suspension stand after reading the document.
Getting back to November 15th, when my lawyer and I saw John Chew’s email, it suddenly hit me that after six months of these accusations tearing my life apart, it took Jennifer, Lola, and Steven only three days to pile on a huge amount of additional defamation and hatred. They got my defense on September 6th and then gave all that garbage back to NASPA on September 9th. They can lie so much faster than I can tell the truth.
After six months of writing my defense in the worst agony, I was going to have to do it all over again, in order to respond to all of these new accusations in the appeal to NASPA that the lawyer wanted me to submit.
I completely cut off all communication with the lawyer for months while I worked on round two of the defense, and this time I was a lot angrier, because so many people in the Scrabble associations had piled on so much of their own abusive behavior, including Steven Pellinen’s hateful screed about me and NASPA hiding documents from me for two months. There was again a stretch of weeks in late 2022 to early 2023 when I couldn’t get myself to work on it at all, which made me madder and yell more, just as my previous avoidance loop in Summer 2022 had.
I finally got on antidepressants around the end of 2022, which helped a little bit. I cycled through a bunch of therapists, none of whom helped much at all. But somehow, I powered through again and got a draft of my appeal to NASPA written by mid-March. Only this time it was way too angry, and I could not edit out all of the anger by myself.
Back when I wrote The Crucible and The Fallout in 2020, I had a bunch of eager readers in my Scrabble community who gave me great feedback and helped me refine the posts before I published them to the world. It was a lot harder to get editorial support for writing the response to the incident report in 2022. And in 2023, it was near impossible to get any for writing my appeal letter.
My repeated attempts to refine the appeal were having diminishing returns. I needed to do something else to move forward. So in mid-March 2023, I finally reached out to my lawyer again and sent him the appeal letter to NASPA. I mentioned the possibility of filing a lawsuit at the same time as sending the letter, but I wasn’t really writing about the lawsuit. I was mostly looking for help with the document.
Of course, the lawyer was knee deep in a bunch of other work and wasn’t able to get to it right away. But when he did get back to me a week later, a surprising thing happened. He offered me all of my money back to get himself untangled from the case. Who ever heard of this? A big law firm completely refunding money they had already billed a client. Granted, they actually hadn’t billed me that much yet, since we’d only worked together for a few weeks in October and November 2022, before I reached out again four months later.
This was great news to me, as I had already decided months earlier that I probably didn’t want to take this case to court with this guy, and now I had my money back to start with a new lawyer.
I get why the lawyer wanted to pull out, though I don’t know how he managed to convince his firm to refund my money. The time that I first wrote to him in late 2022 had been shortly before I had gotten on the antidepressants, and my mental duress surely came out in a lot of my emails. Also, serving as an editor for my appeal letter to NASPA was not in his wheelhouse at all. He was looking at the angry writing in that draft as an unchangeable reality of a person he had to decide whether to work with, rather than as something that he could help me mollify and adjust. Finally, I had already given him hints in our last Zoom call back in November that I was unsure that I wanted to continue working with him.
Even though he did not give me any detailed editorial advice, his email ended with a single sentence that was just the help I needed:
I recommend that you cut out everything but the factual details (which I think are persuasive).
That is what I needed to hear. For so long my Scrabble community had been gaslighting me, pretending that it was not plainly obvious that I was in the right and that the Clinchys and their accomplices were in the wrong. I needed this reminder that for an outsider who was not biased by liking them or hating me, just telling the facts was enough.
That one sentence was enough to help me make a much calmer revision of the appeal letter, but I decided that I should make sure my next lawyer approved it before I sent it.
While the lawyer and I were cordially wrapping up our working relationship, he was supportive of the idea that I might hire a publicist to help me with the communications to the Scrabble community. Though that did not end up happening, it was instrumental to how I ended up finding my next lawyer.
I started reaching out to PR firms in March 2023. Most of them were not interested, but I had a friendly phone conversation with a guy who led one of them. He recommended a couple of lawyers that he thought would be a good match for my case.
One was a high-powered lawyer who had represented a bunch of celebrities such as Patrick Mahomes and Snoop Dogg. I knew he was likely to be very expensive but he also might have the expertise in reputation management that I needed.
The PR guy also recommended Marc Mohan, whom he described as a “long-time friend who worked as a film critic and movie store owner before going back to law school. I use Marc and what makes me think he could be a fit is that I think he would understand the world well. His father, who recently passed, was a prominent author in the world of competitive gaming.”
Despite being in his fifties, Marc was inexperienced in this career field. He even had “baby lawyer” on his LinkedIn profile at the time. But shortly after we spoke on the phone, the PR guy told me that Marc was very interested in talking to me and learning more about my case. I figured that he might be hungry enough that he would make my case a high priority, and that it could be a good résumé builder for him. He would also be a lot less expensive than more experienced lawyers.
Still, I was unsure if I wanted to go with someone so inexperienced, so I reached out to both lawyers the PR guy recommended. I kept looking for other lawyers too, but without any success. I did not know how to find other people who would be a good match for my case, and multiple lawyers told me they had too full a caseload to take on additional ones right now. However, one of those unavailable lawyers alerted me that there was a one year statute of limitations on defamation in Oregon. I learned this on Monday, April 10th, 2023.
Steven Pellinen, Evans, Jennifer, and Lola had launched their defamatory attack on me with the Scrabble associations on April 14th, 2022. That meant that I had until that Friday to get charges filed against them. I called back the celebrity lawyer, but I found out that there was no way he was going to be able to take my case and get charges filed that quickly.
I had no other choice than to go to Marc. I decided to trust in the universe, and I pressed him to review all of my documents as quickly as possible and to get the charges filed by the end of the week.
To his credit, Marc busted his ass that week and got it done with a couple hours to spare. However, there was one major red flag. After he had already comprehensively read all my documents, he wrote up his initial draft of the complaint with the North American Scrabble Players Association acronym misspelled as NASPLA, despite the fact that I had referred to it as NASPA at least fifty times in the documentation I had given him. We quickly fixed it in the first round of proofreading, but it was an omen.
I believe that Marc is dyslexic, not just because of this particular typo, but also because of many other similar errors with spelling and details that he made throughout our time working together. I even saw a document where he typed his own phone number wrong, despite having it correct on the previous page.
Once we got the charges filed and the summons sent, it was not long before we heard from Michael Fuller, the lawyer the Clinchys retained and someone whom I quickly discovered was cut from the same immoral, bullying, dishonest, and manipulative cloth as Jennifer. Just about every letter he sent to my lawyer was filled with grotesque lies made to sound like we were doing something terribly wrong to the defendants and in the courts, even though the only side who made a mockery of justice was them.
I learned a lot over the next several months about how an immoral lawyer can represent guilty defendants and create a massive amount of distraction and bureaucratic interference to bring the wheels of justice to a grinding halt.
The first thing Jennifer and Mr. Fuller did was send us a barrage of requests for admission, inspection, and production. Requests for admission are supposed to be straightforward fact-based questions with a simple “Admit” or “Deny” answer that can help both sides establish some of the baseline facts about the case. I was suing Jennifer for defamation, and she seemed intent on proving to the world that she was doing exactly what I was accusing her of. She went straight for trying to drag every irrelevant thing into the case just to tarnish my reputation.
The entire first set of requests for admission were about my short Facebook interaction with Darrell Day. Never mind the real story of what has happened between me and the defendants. Let’s just make this entire thing about Dave’s short online interaction with a completely different person whom none of us are close to.
A day later we received another single request for admission, “David Koenig has a reputation as being the most despised person in Scrabble,” which was based on a single line from a trashy article written about me in 2008, before I ever met any of the defendants. Never mind that after that article was written Evans and I became friends for several years and both Jennifer and Lola dated me, when they all had already read the article beforehand. Let’s just pull out any irrelevant fifteen year old trash journalism we can to try to damage Dave’s reputation more, thereby demonstrating that we are doing exactly the character assassination that has made us defendants in the first place.
Some of the early requests for admission also tried to insinuate that I was lying about my medical diagnosis of PTSD, and the early barrage of paperwork also included a demand that I be evaluated by a psychologist at the cost of the defense. After I started producing paperwork that actually mentioned my PTSD diagnosis, this mental examination was put off and never rescheduled. I guess the defense decided it was not in their interest to pay to produce evidence that I was telling the truth about the damage they did to me.
Mr. Fuller also sent along requests for inspection, which tried to get me to turn over my cell phone and computer to the defendants, so they could search it for all communications related to them. I will tell you exactly why they did that. It is because Jennifer and Lola both surely deleted all of my text history with them a long time ago. Every time they keep telling made-up stories about our past, they keep running into me pulling out old text conversations that prove they are lying. They wanted to see the full record of those conversations so they could stop shooting themselves in the foot and instead make up new lies that I could not contradict and in which they could distort or twist actual conversations between us to give their falsehoods more believability. They had no right to inspect my devices. When my lawyer refused, they backed down on that one.
Mr. Fuller also sent us requests for production. These are requests for evidence related to the case, which are a normal part of the discovery process, but Mr. Fuller’s style was to make a zillion spurious requests to keep the prosecution overwhelmed with filling out paperwork. The first document had 253 requests for production from Jennifer Clinchy written over 49 pages. Sent at the same time was a document with 253 requests for production from Evans Clinchy written over 49 pages. That is a tactic Mr. Fuller continued to use throughout the case. He would send the exact same documents in duplicate, once with Jennifer’s name on top and once with Evans’s name, just to double the amount of paperwork and printing costs for the case. His tactics had the combined effect of keeping the prosecution so occupied with busy work that it was difficult to do proactive things to move the case forward, and driving up the legal costs for everyone, so that all the lawyers would make more money.
One day later Mr. Fuller sent supplemental requests for production. This one was 189 pages and had 644 additional requests. Of course, it was sent in duplicate.
I gave Marc the information he needed to respond to the requests for admission, and I also told him several questions that I wanted him to put to the defendants in our own requests for admission.
I wanted Evans to admit that he jumped up and down, pumped his fist, and yelled loudly after an adjudication in his favor in a game against me at the New Orleans 2017 tournament, an event that I wrote about in The Crucible. I wanted him also to admit that he said something in an online forum about breaking Cesar del Solar’s kneecaps so that he would have to crawl to the challenge computer, an event that Mina Le attested to in a 2020 Facebook conversation.2 Finally, I wanted Evans to admit that he had frequently used the catch phrase, “Fuck you, you fucking fuck!” both in person and online.
I wanted Jennifer to admit that the two highlighted sentences in her letter to Jason Idalski that she included in her September 9th statement referred to other people and not me. I also wanted Jennifer to admit that, while she was working for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, she said on a date with me that it would be smarter to assassinate a Supreme Court Justice than to assassinate a President.
I wanted them to admit those things, because they are all true.
I admitted in my statements to NASPA that I said some violent things in private conversations with Lola, but that does not change the fact that Lola exaggerated, distorted, and in many cases completely fabricated things that she alleges I said. It does not change the fact that I have never done a violent thing in my life. And it does not change the fact that any story Jennifer tells about me using angry or violent-sounding speech with her is a total fabrication, intentionally and maliciously designed to resonate with secondhand reports she has gotten about how angry I was in interactions with other people, years after I have had any interaction with her.
I never thought there was a realistic chance that Evans was going to break Cesar’s knees, nor that Jennifer was going to do anything to assassinate a Supreme Court Justice. We all talk shit sometimes. I just wanted to point out their hypocrisy in trying to twist everything they thought I might have said—based on the testimony of an extremely unreliable witness, I might add—into an argument that I was a violent person, when I knew for absolute certain that they had said violent things themselves. I also wanted to point out Evans’s hypocrisy in painting me as someone who would disrupt a Scrabble tournament, when the only one of us who had behaved disruptively in a tournament room was he.
Meanwhile, I did not just want to proceed with a legal case against the Clinchys and Lola. I also wanted to proceed with my appeal to NASPA, to hopefully get the unjust suspension of me lifted before the National and World Championships happening in Las Vegas in July. The PR guy was too busy with a crisis of another client to work with me, so I asked Marc to review my writing. Marc was understandably swamped with paperwork in the first weeks after Mr. Fuller got involved in the case, but he eventually helped me make another big revision of the appeal letter. We cut it down from about 35 pages to 20, and the end product was much more dispassionate than earlier versions. I sent it to NASPA right before Memorial Day weekend.
As explained in The Scapegoat and The Conspiracy, the month of June saw both NASPA and WESPA running bureaucratic interference to make sure nothing was done on my case to prevent me from being able to play in either the National or World Championship. At this point I decided I had to make a public statement. If they were going to keep me out of the World Championship, the Scrabble leaders were going to have to pay the price of the entire world seeing their corrupt behavior.
On June 16th, 2023, a day after I published The Scapegoat, Marc received a nasty letter from Michael Fuller accusing that “plaintiff either withheld or destroyed relevant responsive documents that were in his possession.” I was baffled, as the summary of events and communications that I gave in The Scapegoat was completely corroborated by the zipfile full of documents that I had given to Marc when I first started working with him. There had been a few more recent relevant communications since the case had been underway, which I usually cc’ed or bcc’ed to Marc or forwarded him after the fact. But even if I had missed anything, I had given all those files in a zipfile to NASPA (and cc’ed Marc) when I emailed them the appeal on May 26, 2023. And then I had given all those files and then some to both WESPA and ABSP (and bcc’ed Marc) when I emailed them on June 8, 2023, by way of Wayne Kelly and Mina Le.
Furthermore, Marc had told me that Mr. Fuller had subpoenaed NASPA, and I assumed at that point that anything I had sent to NASPA would also be seen by the Clinchys.
Part of the problem is that Marc was not making transparent to me what he had submitted as evidence for discovery nor anything about his communications with Mr. Fuller, aside from the occasional angry letter. He did share a Google Drive with me with the first batch of discovery requests that he received from Michael Fuller in late April, before he had responded to anything, but he never updated it later. He never shared with me many of the responses that he made to their discovery requests nor many of the discovery requests he made to them, nor many of their inadequate responses, nor many of his attempts to follow up.
I was vaguely aware that Marc and Mr. Fuller had had a number of voice conversations in the course of the case so far, but I never was invited to any of those conversations. I also never got anything but a very scant report of what was talked about. Furthermore, I was disturbed by the fact that the little I heard often made it sound like the lawyer on the other side was a nice guy and that they had a good professional relationship. Marc seemed to like the Clinchys’ lawyer, even if he did not like them very much.
This did not jibe at all with the letters I saw from Mr. Fuller, and when I pointed this out to Marc, he mostly dismissed it as just the nasty way lawyers tend to write to each other. I do not buy that at all. Lola’s attorney, Ms. Vaughn, did not get involved in the case until later, but nothing that she sent to us had the same kind of intellectually dishonest and unfounded accusations that were found throughout Mr. Fuller’s letters.
I even pointed out to Marc that Mr. Fuller’s interests were directly opposed to his, and that if Mr. Fuller was being nice to him, it was probably because he was willingly doing something that was more in Mr. Fuller’s interest. I told him, make sure you don’t get played by a more experienced attorney.
On Saturday, June 17th, 2023, I wrote to Marc, shortly after I had heard from him about the Fuller letter from the previous day. I told him:
I think they’re just referring to the documents of communications that I’ve already passed to NASPA. I would think they’d be able to get them all from NASPA through discovery, but I’m happy to hand them all over directly too.
All of those documents are included in the attachments of the “David Koenig’s status in international Scrabble, including the upcoming WESPA Championship” that I sent to Mina and Wayne to forward to WESPA and ABSP and bcc’ed to you. So I think you should just forward that email with all of its attachments to them, and that should cover all the bases.
Marc went ahead and had a meeting with Mr. Fuller at the beginning of the following week, which—I thought—was supposed to be about getting clarification of what documents the defendants were missing. However, when he talked to me on the phone afterward, he still did not give me any clarity on the subject. Furthermore, I then asked him specifically if he had given the defendants the same June 8th email I mentioned in the quote above. He told me he had not, and I assumed he had not read my June 17th email carefully. I then pointed out to him on the phone that I had just spelled this out in an email that weekend, and asked him to look specifically at the June 8th email and its attached zipfile. I reiterated verbally that all of the documents were in that zipfile.
It came out in our conversation around that time that NASPA had apparently refused to comply with the subpoena, which should be illegal and put them in contempt of court.
I was frustrated not just because I assumed that Mr. Fuller should already have all the relevant documents and was just fishing for more nonexistent documents to waste our time, but also because it was plainly obvious to me that the focus of the discovery process in this particular case should have been revealing communications that happened between CoCo, WGPO, and NASPA and within those organizations about disciplinary processes related to me.
For a period of five months from April to August 2022, I had had almost no communication with anyone in the Scrabble community, while many community leaders across multiple organizations were talking about me and causing a tidal wave of administrative decisions to be made that in some way related to me, including suspensions from three organizations and a rule applying to only me by a Singaporean director, and including an admission from a NASPA Advisory Board member that the WGPO President was pressuring them. Why was my lawyer not working proactively to get discovery to reveal all the relevant communications that must have happened in and between those organizations, and instead just responding reactively to every little thing that Mr. Fuller hounded him about?
In late June 2023, Marc finally attempted to subpoena NASPA, WGPO, and CoCo. I would not learn until much later that those subpoenas were never issued.
Meanwhile, Lola’s attorney Ms. Vaughn only started working on the case in early June, and other than a notice of representation we did not hear from her at all until late June. When Ms. Vaughn finally did reach out to us, it was to attempt to arrange a settlement. In particular, they wanted to get Lola removed as a defendant with neither side owing any money or legal fees to the other and opened the door to considering “other non-monetary demands you want to propose.” Both Marc and I read this as Lola being willing to put something in writing walking back her statements about me.
I was thrilled by this news. I would gladly have removed Lola as a defendant and not taken a penny from her if she would just admit that her statements about me were lies. In the last week of June, I wrote up a proposed statement by Lola that I asked Marc to pass along to Ms. Vaughn. Marc told me later that day that Ms. Vaughn was concerned that the proposed statement admitted too much liability and that she was going to run it by Lola. I assumed they might want to rework the statement, but that it was just going to be a matter of finding a wording all parties agreed to before we settled. However, it was also almost July 4th week, and Ms. Vaughn communicated that there might be a bit of time before she could get back to us.
I was feeling good about the case on the week of July 4th, but terrible otherwise, as I got a very bad illness. I did not talk to Marc for nearly a week, nor much of anyone else, because I was so out of commission. But I assumed it was just a matter of time before we heard back from Ms. Vaughn with a new proposal for the statement.
On Friday, July 7th, I received an email from Marc Mohan with three attachments. One was a letter from him to me stating that he had to withdraw from the case because he believed that continuing to represent me would
result in a violation of law or of the Oregon Rules of Professional Conduct. Based on the history of our interactions and the information I recently received, I believe that continuing to represent you in this matter would likely involve me in activities that could constitute witness tampering, fraud, and harassment.
He went on to say that he strongly recommended I voluntarily dismiss the entire case, and “your chances of obtaining a judgment in your favor have been seriously tarnished.”
Along with the letter he also attached both a motion to withdraw and an order granting withdrawal that he said he was going to file with the court on Monday.
There was nothing in his letter that specified what in the world he was talking about by “witness tampering, fraud, and harassment.” I was completely mystified. The last I had heard from him, we were on the verge of getting a settlement from a defendant, and this suddenly came out of nowhere on a Friday afternoon while I was sick as a dog.
I frantically called Marc after reading the email. When I finally reached him, my voice was too hoarse to say much, and he did not have much time to talk. In our short conversation, I tried to glean some information about what it was he thought I did, but he said he had received something confidential that he was not allowed to share back with me.
What in the flying hell? I had already experienced the leaders of my Scrabble community deciding to suspend me based on statements that they did not show me, and now my own lawyer, whom I had already paid a truckload of money to be my advocate, was telling me that he believed terrible things about me based on something that he was not even allowed to show me.
I did not believe the law worked like this at all. There was no way that he had to keep from his own client whatever he was sitting on, and I was certain that bullying and deceptive behavior from Mr. Fuller had cowed him into believing some horseshit about me and that his own career was in jeopardy. But all he was willing to tell me was that it was about some recent communication I had.
After the phone call, I searched through my recent text and message history, and I figured out what this must have been about. I had hardly talked to anyone in the last week because I had been so sick, so it was pretty obvious. It was a three message Facebook messenger conversation that was so inconsequential that I had forgotten about it right after it happened.
Terry Kang, with whom I had had barely any communication in the last year, messaged me out of the blue to tell me to drop my case against the Clinchys. Her presumptuousness and my crankiness from illness caused me to reply impolitely but briefly.
Terry: Hey Dave. I’ve been wanting to say this to you for a while, but didn’t know if you’d be open to it, and frankly nervous about your reaction. I realize how awful everything has been for you, but I strongly advise you to drop the lawsuit. For one, I think you’ll have very little chance of prevailing, and it’ll only further alienate you from the community. From experience, I can tell you that being in litigation is ten time more emotionally draining and stressful than you can imagine. I’m only trying to save you more distress. I really do wish you the best, and hope things get better for you.
Me: You’re completely wrong, Terry. It was way worse enduring the bullying and not being able to stand up for myself. On what basis do you think I have little chance of prevailing? Multiple lawyers have reviewed my case and deemed that I have a very strong case.
I’m frankly disgusted by you continuing to run a tournament under CoCo after I showed you how awful their behavior was.
facebook messenger conversation, july 6th, 2023
I immediately emailed Marc with a screenshot of that conversation3 and gave him some context about it, including that that was the entirety of our recent communication, that I was sick as a dog when Terry decided to bother me to drop my case, and that the last sentence referred to brief communication a year earlier, long before this had become a legal case.
In July 2022 I shared the accusatory documents from the incident report with Terry and temporarily gave her access to a Google document with an early draft of my defense document that eventually became the September 6th, 2022 response to the incident report. I did this because Terry had just announced that she was going to run a tournament under the CoCo banner, and I wanted her to know how evil these people were before she supported them.
I don’t even know how much of the defense document she read, but she wrote me back one email that just talked about how implausible Lola’s story sounded.4 I sent her a quick thank you. That was the entirety of our communications at the time, and I removed her read access from the document a while later.
I did not yet have confirmation from Marc that his reasons for withdrawing were related to this Terry Kang interaction, but I spoke to another lawyer friend over the weekend and gave him a quick rundown of what happened. He told me that interpreting my short conversation with Terry, which she started, as witness tampering was absurd.
I sent one more email to Marc over the weekend, pleading with him not to withdraw from my case until we had a chance to talk face-to-face on Monday. The problem is that it was obvious to me that my lawyer had been completely manipulated by the opposing lawyer. So even if I could convince him that he had misinterpreted this story, how could I trust him to continue representing me? My other lawyer friend had even said, “this is a problem with your lawyer, not with your case.”
By the time Marc and I met in person, he realized that he had been had. He started out the conversation admitting that he was deeply embarrassed, and that he was not a good enough lawyer to represent me. He had already reached out to the office of a senior lawyer with forty years of experience that was interested in taking over my case. The problem was that the lawyer was on vacation that week. There was an associate at the firm who started to review my case, and he was willing to be a point of contact until the senior lawyer returned. But the associate was leaving the law firm a couple of weeks later and would not actually be involved in representing me.
Later that week, I had a long phone call with the associate. He mentioned that this was going to be an expensive case, with probably at least $50,000-$70,000 of legal costs on my part. He mentioned in passing a protective order that Marc had made with the other lawyer to keep certain documents private.
Hold the phone! The only thing that Marc had said to me about a protective order was that Mr. Fuller had made a motion for a hearing to grant a protective order for Jennifer to be able to respond to one particular request for admission under seal, that she had said it would be smarter to assassinate a Supreme Court Justice than to assassinate a President. (Obviously she did say it, or else she would not be trying so hard to keep her response out of the public court record.) But that protective order had not been granted. The hearing about it was scheduled to happen in the next week or two.
The associate was talking about something else. A protective order that the lawyers on both sides had already agreed to and had been approved by the judge. I had zero knowledge of this. Marc had never told me it was under discussion, nor that he agreed to it, and he had never shared the document with me.
On the phone, the associate tried to diminish the importance of this protective order, saying that they were a common thing in cases like this, which would protect the privacy of sensitive information on both sides from the public court records.
I did not buy any of that. I had zero to hide in this case, because I have not done anything wrong. It is only the other side who wants to hide things to mask their own wrongdoing. And I had a feeling that the protective order explained why Marc thought he could not share the communication with me that had almost caused him to withdraw from representing me. I got the associate to email me a copy of it a few days later.
In the meantime, the law firm was willing to take me on board and sent me the paperwork. However, I pushed back and said that I wanted to talk to the senior lawyer who would represent me before I put any money down. So we planned for me to talk to him the following week, and in the meantime I sent my trove of documents over to his firm, since I did not have vision into what exactly they had seen in the court records nor what exactly Marc had shared with their firm.
My mental state had already started to degrade ever since Marc threatened to withdraw, but it became much worse after the conversation with the associate. I was angry at Marc, not only for his incompetence but also for making deals with the opposing counsel and not letting me know what was going on. Also, I was becoming more and more panicked about finances.
I have not worked in over two years. Though I made a lot of money as a software developer for many years before that, the PTSD I have been suffering as a result of the complicity of my Scrabble community to the abusiveness of the Clinchys toward me has had a massive effect on my ability to keep calm on my jobs and to maintain good relationships with most people in my life. In mid-2021 when I stopped working, I was in a good financial position, with no debts and enough liquid assets not to have to work for a while. After two years of living off my savings and starting to rack up legal expenses, those funds had dwindled. I could afford an initial retainer to the new lawyer, but I could not reasonably afford the money to see this legal case all the way through.
I probably would not have been able to afford all my legal expenses even if Marc had continued to be my lawyer, but with his low rates it was a slower bleed. It had been easier to stay in denial about the way my finances were heading.
I knew that regardless of who my lawyer was, I was going to have to go back to work sometime soon, and that prospect scared me. I was not any less traumatized than I had been when I stopped working. Heck, I was significantly more traumatized because of this smear campaign and all of the additional abuse toward me it had triggered.
Everyone like Terry who thinks that this lawsuit is a stressor for me has it exactly backwards. For so long I have been in deep trauma specifically because I have received so much disgusting abuse from this Scrabble community and have been unable to fight back. The only thing that calmed me down in the last year was taking this case to court, making progress on having my story heard, and on holding all of the abusers accountable. (Not just the defendants, the Scrabble leaders too.) But now that I was looking at the prospect of not being able to keep moving forward on it, all of the trauma was rushing back.
The senior lawyer was not able to schedule a meeting with me until the Friday of the following week, July 21st. So Marc Mohan had been my lame duck lawyer for two weeks already. In that time, I learned that Lola had apparently been so offended by the statement that I proposed that she was no longer willing to make any statement in order to settle.
Also in that lame duck period, Marc had mentally checked out of representing me in any useful way. He was so eager for the senior lawyer to take over, that he started doing everything he could to delay having to do any real work on the case, including agreeing to an extension of the deadline for the anti-SLAPP motion that Ms. Vaughn was considering filing and postponing the hearing he was supposed to have with Mr. Fuller to decide on whether Jennifer could answer the request for admission under seal.
I barely talked to Marc during that time, because I was so angry at him for agreeing to the protective order behind my back, but I thought it might make sense not to bring up that conversation until I had other representation.
It also did not help my calmness that during this entire mid-July period, two other events were happening in the background that I kept getting reminders of over social media. One was that my sister in New Jersey, her family, and my son all traveled to California for a vacation with my other sister and her family over there. This was the second year in a row that they all had a vacation together that I was not invited to. It was precisely in the leadup to the previous year’s vacation that my relationship with my sisters had disintegrated.
The other event was the 2023 NASPA Scrabble Players Championship, in Las Vegas, which was going to be immediately followed by the World Championship. Almost everyone in the Scrabble universe was descending on Vegas, a short distance from where I lived, and I was getting constant reminders of their excitement and the fun competition and the after-hours socializing. On July 21st, the day that I talked to the senior lawyer, I still have penciled in my paper calendar the letters LCQ, for the Last Chance Qualifier at the World Championship. When I submitted my appeal to NASPA in late May, I had maintained a bit of optimism that there was still a chance they would relent from their unjust ban, allowing me to win my way into the World Championship at that qualifier.
The fact that I was not allowed to compete in the World Championship, the first one I missed since 2009, even though none of the people who contributed to the incident report against me were even in Vegas, is yet another testament to the disgustingly abusive and immoral behavior of our Scrabble leadership toward me.
When I finally talked to the senior lawyer, it was a disaster. I was such an angry mess, that I could not avoid yelling for a significant portion of the Zoom call. I gave him a lot of useful background on the story, but I probably also convinced him that I was a hazard to put in front of a jury. I explained to him that Marc had coedited and approved both the appeal to NASPA and The Scapegoat blog post, but the senior lawyer demanded that I make no more public statements if we worked together.
After we talked, I knew there was just about no chance the lawyer was going to want to work with me. Furthermore, I was not sure I wanted to work with him. The entire reason I was taking this to court in the first place was not just to get a legal decision in my favor, but to help me in my battle with the Scrabble associations. I literally went to a publicist first and had him refer lawyers to me, so any lawyer who was expecting me to make no public statements about this was misguided. I had no desire to make public statements that were not approved by my lawyer, but I wanted to work with someone who could help me craft the right statements, or at least work with a publicist who would help me do so. Never mind that I could not reasonably afford a lawyer or a publicist at this point.
The senior lawyer told me at the end of our conversation that he was going to take the weekend to think about whether he was going to take my case. He ended up taking nearly a full week before he said no, but I never expected him to say yes. Meanwhile I had no backup plans for any other lawyers.
I dealt with the trauma the best way I could that Friday evening. I went out to socialize and drink with a group of friends. At the bar I met a friend of a friend whom I found out had also been a plaintiff in a defamation case. She was jaded about the legal system, even though she had won a small settlement from her case. She mentioned that both the judge and her lawyer had done things wrong, and that she eventually ended up representing herself pro se. She also said that if you have particular things you want to make public, you should go ahead and do that immediately. The lawyers will always discourage you from putting things out there and try to argue that it is a bargaining chip to hold against the other side, because they want to drag things out as long as possible, so that all the lawyers make more money. But if you put the things out there immediately, then it incentivizes the other side to resolve things more quickly, because they don’t like that painful information being out there.
I felt like the universe was speaking to me right then. This was just the nudge I needed to work up the bravery to publish The Conspiracy. I had wanted to put all of those documents out in public for a long time before that, but the only reason I held back was because the lawyers were telling me not to. Nothing in that document dump was a big secret anyway. It had already been shared with dozens of people, including the full executive committees of NASPA, WESPA, and ABSP. All I did was democratize the information, so that a cabal of corrupt Scrabble leaders would not have a monopoly on it.
I realized that a big part of the anxiety, anger, and upset I had been feeling over the last few weeks was out of pain that I would not be heard. I wanted to win the court case, because a legal victory would be a good tool for me in my battle with the Scrabble associations, but what was most important to me was getting my story out there. I decided right there and then that if any lawyer did not want to work with me because of my need to tell my story publicly, I did not care. Heck, if a judge wanted to throw my case out because I published those documents, I did not care either. No one was ever going to silence me. I had screamed at the top of my lungs for so long because I desperately yearned to be heard, and this was the exact story that I wanted people to hear.
I was right. Publishing The Conspiracy was exactly what I needed to do to calm myself down. And there was no better time to publish it than right in the middle of the first World Scrabble Championship on North American soil in 22 years.
I was in a much better place emotionally for the next several weeks. The trauma was far from over, but people were reading my story. (I see the metrics every day. I know they are.) And I know now that I will never let anyone shut me up from telling the real story again. I mostly did not feel a need to yell at anyone during the continued pursuit of the legal case, with one exception, and that exception is Marc Mohan.
The exact motivation for writing this post and its sequel, which will be published 24 hours later, is so that I can get off my chest how Marc failed me. If you think what I have told you about Marc so far demonstrates gross incompetence, I have news for you. You ain’t seen nothing yet.
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.
My response to incident report (beginning)(end) (Addresses the statements seen by me on April 14th, 2022.)
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.
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.
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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
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.
except for the ways in which it influenced Lola’s change in attitude toward me, which I will explain later
Walker Willingham sent most of these emails, but I occasionally filled in for him.
Figures 32-35. A more complete list of evidence that Evans has disparaged me is in section (E).
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.
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.
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.
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.
I had moved to Portland in October 2020, and I mentioned I was living there in the conversation.
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.
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.2I 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!”5and then two days later: “❤️ Wish I were there”6and 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:
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
A more detailed letter from Steven Pellinen
A statement from Lola McKissen
A statement from Evans Clinchy
A statement from Jennifer Clinchy
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.1I 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
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.
On November 11th, 2022, litigation hold letters also went out to Evans Clinchy, Jennifer Clinchy, CoCo, Steven Pellinen, WGPO, and Lola McKissen.
This is the third post that I ever made on this blog. It was first posted on August 30th, 2021, but it was posted so that it was only visible to me and no one else for the last four years. Prior to it becoming public in June 2025, the only person other than me who has read it is my former attorney Marc Mohan.
I was considering posting this publicly at the time that I wrote it, but by the time I finished it I did not feel a need to do so. At the time it was solely for my therapeutic release. Thus I never edited out the intense emotionality and the redundancy. It is raw. It is not politic. I openly curse in it, much more often than in any of the other writing on this blog.
This was written at a very different time in the story and in my life than when I am publishing it. It is not reflective of my emotional state now, but I believe that all of my analysis in it is right on the money and has only been proven to a greater degree by the actions of the Clinchys and Chris Lipe in the four years since it was written.
Keep in mind that this was written over a year after the initial blog posts The Fallout and The Crucible (which are referred to as Part I and Part II below). This was still more than half a year before the Clinchys and Lola would begin their campaign to get me removed from tournament Scrabble beyond their cliquish and dickish CoCo organization.
A significant amount of the stories in this were used in my September 6th, 2022 response to the incident report that I sent to NASPA, so there is some redundancy with stories told in other parts of the blog, in addition to redundancy within the piece itself. Nonetheless I have opted not to edit it down and to publish it exactly as I left it at the end of August 2021. The reason I am doing this is because I want it to stand as unadulterated evidence of where my mind was at that time.
As I make very clear in this writing, it was obvious to me already at that time that the Clinchys were attempting to ostracize me from Scrabble and assassinate my character, and that Chris Lipe was extremely complicit with them in many of their actions, not only to wrong me but also to help CoCo gain in political importance in the Scrabble world. I also point out that there were many hints I gave in the first two blog posts that allowed astute readers who were familiar with the world of Scrabble politics to pick up on these things, and that a number of readers did.
Part of what offends me so much about this story is that I gave the entire Scrabble world an almost two year head start in warning them that the Clinchys were trying to assassinate my character, (in July 2020, when they did not begin their political campaign to get me removed from Scrabble until April 2022.) Despite this warning, a whole lot of people in this community were still too manipulable or dishonest that they bought into or were complicit with the campaign against me.
Also keep in mind that all of this was written before Lola had started spreading any defamatory stories of me being any kind of threat of violence, and neither the Clinchys nor Chris Lipe nor any of their friends would have made any such accusations about me at the time. Furthermore, as I’ve said a few times before, Lola, whom I dated more than a year before I wrote this, is not even mentioned in it, which is a testament to how little she was on my mind and how she was not part of the story until she started inserting herself into it many months after this was written.
I was very angry when I wrote this, and as I think comes out in the piece, almost the entirety of that anger was directed toward Chris Lipe. I am no longer as consumed by anger, but I still feel very strongly that he must be held accountable for his wrongdoing, both his personal insults toward me and his corrupt behavior as WESPA President.
A little over a year ago I told the story (in twoparts) of how Jennifer and Evans Clinchy have continually been mistreating me and attempting to blacklist me from the Scrabble community since 2017. As Evans and I have both represented the USA in World Scrabble Championships and are among the top ranked players in the country, much of the community gravitated to the story and read the posts very quickly. I did not allow feedback on this site, but I linked to these pages in a few friends-only posts on Facebook, which received hundreds of comments. Furthermore, many other people reached out to me via private messages and phone calls.
I was anxious about how the story would be received. I thought that getting it out there might make things better or worse. What I have found in the long run is that both of those things are true. It depends whom you ask. Within the first couple of days of publication, it was clear to me that I had made the right decision, and that my words had landed the way I wanted them to. I got plenty of positive and negative feedback, but in general people read it and they believed me.
I understand well, of course, that people who are already my friends on Facebook and who are going to take the time to read my writing and talk to me about it are a biased sample. I am sure there were people who read all of it, or just a small part of it, who had enough distaste for it and for me that they didn’t say anything at all, and I might have more awkward interactions at future Scrabble tournaments on account of that. There were also a few people who unfriended me on Facebook almost immediately after I put out the writing, but only a tiny number. I could count them on one hand without using all my fingers. There were others who were openly critical of my behavior in the story and my decision to publish it, some of whom reacted harshly or emotionally.
I welcomed all feedback, positive or negative, and I was grateful for all of it. I didn’t have the mental wherewithal to read all the feedback, but I probably read about 90% of it. For once, I felt very little need to argue with those who said things I disagreed with. At the same time, I was beyond grateful that some friends took my story especially to heart and argued vociferously on my behalf against some of the ridiculous things that were said.
I don’t want any of the negativity or conflict to obscure the fact that the positive feedback I got overwhelmingly outnumbered the negative feedback, by more than a two-to-one margin. Not only were people personally supportive of me in the face of the troubles I bared, but I also got many compliments about the quality of the writing and the effectiveness of the storytelling. Some people also said that it was better for the Scrabble community as a whole that all of this got out there.
I thought that I was clear about my intentions and goals in writing and publishing the piece, but the degree to which readers accepted that message seemed to vary. Even after reading the whole thing, some people still clung to the idea that I was hopelessly trying to improve my relationship with Jennifer and Evans or to get into their tournaments. Some warned me against publishing on the grounds that it would torpedo any hope of fixing our relationship. They were wrong on both counts. I was not trying to get into their tournaments, and there was already no hope of fixing our relationship long before I told the story to the world.
I wrote what I wrote specifically because there were many mutual friends of mine and theirs, some of whom I have had relationships with for the better part of two decades, who I believed were complicit in their mistreatment of me and in the shitty ways they were transforming our Scrabble community. As they formed a cliquish and dickish inner circle, a number of my long-term friendships were eroding, without those people ever talking to me or hearing my side of the story.
However, if this had all been only a personal matter, I never would have felt the need to tell the story to the world. I might have written a letter to the pertinent people and tried to start conversations with them.
Jennifer and Evans transformed a personal grudge into a Scrabble political matter that had repercussions not just for my circle of friends but also for all of CSW Scrabble in North America, and to some extent internationally. It was because of the political import of the events that I felt the need to publish the story on the internet. I was not the only person who felt this way. Other early readers of mine encouraged me to publish, because they also deemed that the story was in the public interest of the Scrabble community.
My writing in the first two parts focused on my personal story, because there was a lot to tell and there were heavy emotions. I did not think it would be helpful to water it down by getting too far afield into Scrabble political matters, though I did touch on some, but not all, of the issues near the end of the piece. I also knew that the readers who were plugged into the politics would be able to draw the right conclusions themselves, and they did. Many of the conversations on my Facebook posts among Scrabble players focused on these things, and many of the insights were right on the money.
Jennifer and Evans are not the focus of this part of the story. This is about my relationship with some of those other Scrabble players who were between us, and the ways in which they responded to the first two parts of the story, as well as how they have treated me in the year and a half since that time.
The Ostracism
Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.
At the end of 2019 when Evans and Jennifer announced their new Scrabble organization, they had recruited several friends to start running tournaments in several other places in the country under their new banner. Prior to this they had only run events in Washington and Oregon, close to where they lived, with the lone exception of the 2017 Nashville tourney that happened before they moved to Washington State. They had designs on converting what had previously been a very localized series of events into something resembling a national organization.
In early 2020 the Coronavirus pandemic put a halt to those plans just before they were able to get moving. All tournaments were put on hiatus for most of two years, and even now in late 2021 they are only slowly and tentatively starting to come back. Without opportunities to play in person, the competitive Scrabble community flocked to the Internet Scrabble Club (ISC) to get games with each other online. ISC goes back to the 1990s, but it had faded in popularity over the last few decades, until Coronavirus gave it a resurgence.
We competitive Scrabblers had never taken the online game very seriously. Since there is no way to tell if the opponent is using an anagram program or looking up words in a paper dictionary or even using an engine like Quackle to find plays, you can’t know if it is a fair fight. I think many other high rated players had a similar attitude about and approach to the online game as I did. I did not play that often, and I tended to only play people I knew from real-life tournaments who could give me a good match and whom I trusted to play fair. The results were unimportant. It was just a chance to get a little bit of extra practice in between the times we got to play in person, which is what really counted.
During the pandemic, online tournaments have not been sanctioned by the national associations and they have not been rated as our in-person tournaments are. They are usually played for no cash prizes. It has been a free-for-all, with anyone who wants to run a tournament and having enough connections and influence to draw the people doing so.
In mid-2020, stymied from running in-person tournaments under their new banner and eager to increase their organization’s prestige within the Scrabble world, Evans and Jennifer ran an event they called the Virtual World Cup. This tournament was intended to be a replacement for the Alchemist Cup, an event that had been planned for December 2020 in Malaysia by super-organizer Michael Tang but had of course been canceled.
Michael had run this event for the first time in 2018, and at the time the plan was to make it biannual. The tournament was structured as a series of matches between teams of five of the top players from each country. Just as happened with prior World Championships, Michael delegated the work of deciding who qualified for each national team to the respective national associations. Going into both the 2018 and 2020 events, there were seven top American CSW Scrabble players who had qualification ratings close enough to be within striking distance of participating in the event, but only five of the seven would get in.
In 2018 I was the seventh highest rated of the group, so even after one of the qualifiers, Rob Robinsky, dropped out, I just missed the cutoff. The team was Dave Wiegand, Evans Clinchy, Jesse Day, Conrad Bassett-Bouchard, and Will Anderson. My qualification rating was 12 points behind Will’s for the last spot.
The process for qualifying for the 2020 event had started more than a year beforehand. I busted my ass studying hard and competing frequently in late 2019 and early 2020 with hopes of participating this time. I had a great run of tournament success and reached my highest rating ever. This time it looked like the top 5 qualifiers were going to be Dave Wiegand, Will Anderson, Austin Shin, me, and Conrad Bassett-Bouchard, with Evans Clinchy and Jesse Day both narrowly missing the cutoff.
By June 2020 Michael had canceled the event, and Evans and Jennifer quickly jumped in to try to fill the void. Evans had played in several World Championships and had a lot of international Scrabble connections. He and Jennifer weren’t working with Michael Tang and it wasn’t practical to try to hunt down all the national associations and find out who would have qualified for their national teams. It is likely that with nearly half a year still to go before what was originally planned to be a December event many countries might have not had their qualification procedures as ironed out as had already been the case for team USA.
Jennifer and Evans made the reasonable compromise to declare that the qualification criterion would just be the players with the highest WESPA ratings from each country. (WESPA, the World English-language Scrabble Players Association, is the umbrella organization for all of the national associations.) There are philosophical reasons why this might be better or worse than the more complicated criteria that had been used for Alchemist Cup qualifications, but they are not important to this story. Given the quickness with which Evans and Jennifer were throwing together their event and the need for a simple and immediate solution that didn’t have to go through all the national associations, what they did made sense. They reached out to many of their international friends and were able to assemble a field of sixteen national teams for the Virtual World Cup to begin in July 2020.
Because the Virtual World Cup was using a different formula for qualification for team USA than the Alchemist Cup had been planning to use, the race shook out slightly differently. The top five players in the USA according to WESPA rating at that time were Conrad Bassett-Bouchard, Jesse Day, Austin Shin, Will Anderson, and Dave Koenig. The five players who ended up representing the USA at the Virtual World Cup were Conrad Bassett-Bouchard, Jesse Day, Austin Shin, Will Anderson, and Dave Wiegand. Why was there a discrepancy?
Long before this time Evans had completely blocked me on social media. I had blocked Jennifer even earlier than that, so I had no vision into what they were posting about. I only found out about the creation of their cliquish and dickish organization through the grapevine from other Scrabble players and had to go through the contortion of using a separate Facebook account to see Evans’s public post about launching the organization in late 2019. I was not in the habit of hunting more news and announcements about their organization after that. They created organizational pages on Facebook and Instagram, and I probably saw them pop up on my feed once, but I quickly pressed the button to remove those recommendations. I had no desire to get broadcasts of regular reminders of what they were doing.
I did at some point see a social media post from someone else announcing that the Virtual World Cup was happening, but only very shortly before the start of the event, after the team USA lineup was announced without me in it.
I have obviously never spoken to either Jennifer or Evans about this, since there has been literally no communication between us for several years. However, after I published parts I and II, several of their friends who have been complicit in their passive-aggressive game of fucking me over attempted to justify what they had done and create plausible deniability that they had intentionally snubbed me. Those people pointed out on my Facebook posts that there was a website that I needed to sign up on to be considered a qualifier for the event, and that they took the highest WESPA rated players among those who had signed up.
There is so much that is wrong with this. Although I cannot prove it, I am sure that Jennifer and Evans personally reached out to all five of the people who did represent team USA and made sure that their names got onto the qualifier list ASAP. I do not even know how long that website was up. Michael only announced the cancellation of the Alchemist Cup at the end of June, and Jennifer and Evans started their replacement event within a few weeks. They clearly were in a frenzy to recruit people for the event and didn’t hesitate at all to reach out to all corners of the globe to build teams. If they were really interested in putting together the top team USA, according to the qualification criterion that they themselves chose, they easily could have reached out to me as well.
Furthermore, as I already showed in great detail in Part II, Evans and Jennifer had spent several years attempting to frame me for harassment. Keep in mind that the time I am talking about is literally in the last few weeks before I published any of this story. Since January 5th, 2017, the date of the last email I sent Jennifer before the New Orleans tournament that year, I had been living my life and going about my business while ignoring their insanity. I included them on a few group emails to the Seattle area Scrabble players for our pub get-togethers in mid to late 2018, shortly after I moved to town. Walker sent the first few of these emails, but I sent a few later, and we both ended up removing Jennifer and Evans from the email list when they were unresponsive. I then sent one quick email to Evans in October 2019 when I signed up for the Hood River tournament, and then a short apology email to Jennifer, copying Evans, in response to her email to me which made the unsurprising charge of harassment. As I already explained, I did not even want to play in that tournament. I signed up solely because it opened up a small window of opportunity for communication to try to ease the situation, which they quickly slammed shut.
In the three and a half years of essentially no communication with them, Evans had behaved furiously angrily and uncivilly toward me on every one of the very few occasions when we were in the same place, and Jennifer had gotten herself elected to the Advisory Board of NASPA and fought for rule changes specifically to give them more leeway to ban me from tournaments on the basis that I made her uncomfortable. They broke the rules of NASPA by signing up their friends in advance of public registration for literally every single event that they ran, with the express intention of trying to keep me out. They did this for multiple years even though I wasn’t even trying to get into their tournaments! When they were not satisfied with all of this, they split off from NASPA and created a renegade association, so that they could continue to ban me and treat me like shit while not having to answer to anyone else. They literally told my personal friend that they were preemptively banning me from tournaments they directed in their new organization, even though I never indicated any interest in supporting it or playing in any of its events. And now they corrupted the qualification process of their own Virtual World Cup specifically to keep me out.
All of this happened over a three and a half year period during which I wasn’t doing anything to them. I was not trying to be in their lives. I was trying to just work around them and play Scrabble as much as I could. I knew that any attempt to contact them in any way would be twisted into charges of harassment. All of this was a grudge based on two emails and two text messages I sent to Jennifer over a three week period between December 19th, 2016 and January 5th, 2017, at a time when I was going through the worst mental anguish of my life, as I explained in excruciating detail in Part I. I had literally not behaved in any untoward way to either of them in any way from January 6th, 2017 onward, even in the face of disgusting, insulting, and abusive behavior from Evans literally every time we were in person after that. (Okay, one exception: calling him “Child” at the May 2018 Portland one-day tournament, but give me that. He deserved far worse.)
Even if I had known about the Virtual World Cup early enough to sign up for it, there is no guarantee that I would have. It would have put me in an awkward position. As far as I am concerned, what Evans and Jennifer are running is not a legitimate Scrabble organization. It is a couple of assholes who do not want to have to answer to anyone else while they arbitrarily exclude me from their Scrabble world, and while they desperately try (and fail) to hide that that is exactly what they are doing. If I had played in their event, it would have effectively lent my endorsement to it and caused their organization to seem more legitimate than it is. Nevertheless, it would have been nice to be asked and been able to make that choice for myself.
I do not feel empowered to reach out to either Jennifer or Evans. They made clear long before I published anything related to this that they would read all of my words and intentions in the most negative possible light, and that they had no interest in any kind of healing or restorative dialogue. All that they were interested in doing was excommunicating and ostracizing me. They do not have the right to call any of their events a World Cup or a World Championship. Anytime they use the word World, it should be read as World* (*Except for Dave Koenig).
Of course, their treatment of me was invisible to the rest of the Scrabble world as they organized the Virtual World Cup and the event began. The rest of the international Scrabble community perceived it as the biggest event in the game while we were all confined to our homes in the early pandemic months. This was good PR that would likely help them grow their cliquish and dickish organization into something more nationally and internationally relevant when in-person tournaments resumed.
What they did not count on was that only a few days into their Virtual World Cup, I would publish the entire story of their outrageous behavior toward me to the world, causing them a huge PR black eye. They had turned a three and a half year old personal grudge into something that affected the qualification of an event they were passing off as a Virtual World Cup of Scrabble. Through their own escalation, they had made a personal issue relevant politically to the entire international Scrabble world. They preemptively snubbed me from representing team USA at the event that they were billing as the replacement for the Alchemist Cup even though I would have qualified both for the Alchemist Cup by its qualification criterion and for their Virtual World Cup by the criterion they chose.
As I mentioned above, a lot of people received my story well and rallied to my side. Some of them just wanted peace between all parties, but more than a few were also critical of Jennifer and Evans and the way they ran their new Scrabble organization. I didn’t even mention anything about the Virtual World Cup in Parts I and II, and I didn’t bring it up in the online discussion. Other people did, because they understood the implications of Jennifer’s and Evans’s behavior and were able to read between the lines. It was only after they brought it up that I pointed that I should have qualified over Dave Wiegand. My good friend Mina distilled the issues very well in this post.
Here’s my distillation of my friend Dave Koenig’s posts, along with my responses to the criticisms: There was a messy breakup, with bad behavior on both sides. Evidence is presented so that you know he’s not a monster. No, it’s not ideal to publish private communications, but he could see no other way to clear his name, and truly intimate details about the other party have been omitted. No, he’s not still hung up on the events of 2016-17; he’s just going into this level of detail in order to set the record straight. Now that we’ve established in Part I that Dave is not a monster, we get to the meat of this story in Part II, namely that Dave has paid disproportionate social consequences in the Scrabble world as though he were some kind of monster. It is because of these disproportionate social consequences that he wrote these essays, aimed at the Scrabble community. CoCo has monopolized Collins Scrabble play in his part of the country, and they have crystallized a rule that he may not play unless neither Jenn nor Evans is organizing or directing. How could this rule possibly be justified? We know, from reading Part II, that Jenn is no longer afraid of Dave. If she can come up to him unbidden at the cocktail hour for a mutual friend’s wedding, when she could have just remained on the other side of the beach, then she can tolerate him at a tournament. It is also evident, from reading Part II if from nothing else, that Dave would pose no plausible threat to Jenn or Evans at future tournaments. So the only reason for his express exclusion would be Evans’ personal resentment. Is this reasonable? Do you like the premises of such a Scrabble organization? Dave was excluded a priori (meaning, whether he would have liked to join or not) from CoCo’s Virtual World Cup. (Edit, after the comments below: maybe not excluded in an ironclad sense, but extremely discouraged from signing up.) This online tournament has been touted as a replacement for the Alchemist Cup. But Dave would have qualified to represent the U.S. at the Alchemist Cup. You can’t argue with a straight face that he could possibly poison the atmosphere at an online tournament. Now do you want to support the Virtual World Cup?
Mina le, facebook post july 16th 2020
Conrad Bassett-Bouchard, a close friend of Jennifer and Evans who has helped organize their cliquish and dickish organization and designed their website, specifically commented on one of the Facebook posts in a way that tried to cast doubt on the idea that I didn’t know about their replacement event in time on the basis that he had posted it about the event many times on Facebook and that I used the site a whole lot. I laughed to myself and did not tell him at the time that even though we were connected on Facebook, I had removed his posts from my feed long before that, not even because of anything related to Jennifer or Evans, but just because I found him to be an annoying twat.
Conrad’s voice was one of several, as I’ve already mentioned, that tried to undermine the story of how Jennifer and Evans had screwed me over regarding Virtual World Cup qualification. Most of the people I heard from saw it my way, but seemingly everyone in Jennifer’s and Evans’s clique could only see it a different way. They were in damage control mode.
This was according to the larger pattern of the responses to my posts. The majority of the criticisms I received were all from the same circle of friends who had been attending Jennifer’s and Evans’s events. I understand well that they perceived my publication of the story as an attack upon their friends, and that they turned on me in a way that was at least in some cases driven by the shock of the story coming out how it did. Jeremy Cahnmann was the most emotional, and he made a long and often incoherent and illogical rant on one of my posts before promptly unfriending me.
At the time I was not hurt by Jeremy’s response, nor by just about any of the others like it. I was truly grateful that people were letting it out and giving me honest feedback about how they felt about things, and I felt no need to argue with them. I hearted Jeremy’s comments and just about everyone else’s. What had hurt me for so long before I published was that people were refusing to talk to me about these things. I wanted the dialogue regardless of whether I agreed with people. I also felt no particular pain about losing Jeremy as a friend. I understood now that he had always judged this situation poorly and had always judged me poorly on account of it, but he had held back his true opinions before. I was glad to have that bullshit out of my life, but I also have no hard feelings toward him. I recognize that he just doesn’t get it in certain ways and never will. He is too intent on trying to fit a #MeToo type structure on this story that just does not fit it very well and fundamentally misunderstands a lot of the dynamics. I believe he was being totally honest with me in his reactions. Though I think he is wrong about a lot of things, all I can ask for is people’s honest best.
I heard from over one hundred people in response to the story. Out of all of the responses I got, there was only one person whose response hurt me, and that person was Chris Lipe. Chris and I had been good friends (or so I thought) and traveled to many tournaments together even after the fallout with Jennifer and Evans, including Stockholm in 2017 and Edinburgh in 2019. He responded to the publication of my story in a disingenuous way that threw away a friendship of well over a decade for political reasons that tens of people care about.
You see, the Virtual World Cup angle was not the only reason that my story was politically relevant to the Scrabble community, nor was it even the primary one. Chris is the President of WESPA, the umbrella organization for all of the national associations, as mentioned earlier. Historically, most events are organized and rated by the individual national associations, not by WESPA, but the primary function of WESPA has been recognizing and connecting all of the different national associations. Before I ever published, I suspected that Chris was in cahoots with his friends Evans and Jennifer and wanted to try to get their organization recognized as an official national association for North America. This would be an unprecedented move, as North America already has an association recognized by WESPA, namely NASPA, the North American Scrabble Players Association, and WESPA has never allowed two different organizations to be recognized for the same geographic area.
However, North America (which means just the United States and Canada here) has always been a special case, as it is the only part of the world where Scrabble is owned by Hasbro, while Mattel owns the game across the rest of the globe. For this reason tournament play on the continent is divided between two different English language lexicons, TWL, the word list specific to North America, and CSW, the word list used across the rest of the world. In just about every other part of the world, all competitive play uses only CSW. Given that North America is in a unique situation and that the majority of tournament play sanctioned by NASPA uses TWL, while Jennifer and Evans were creating a new organization intended just for CSW play, I was worried that they might try to use this situation as a rationale for getting multiple national associations recognized. It does not help that NASPA has been saddled with ineffective and unpopular leadership for years, and that its base of tournament players has been shrinking for over a decade.
Essentially, I thought that Jennifer and Evans were trying to hijack all of CSW play on the continent to run under their own banner. This is a massive threat to me. I have been one of America’s leading CSW Scrabble players and proponents of using the international dictionary for the last decade. A tremendous amount of my sense of identity, my life energy, and my free time has gone into mastering Scrabble played with the CSW dictionary. I have strong aspirations of winning the World Scrabble Championship, as well as uniting North America with the rest of the world in playing CSW Scrabble. And now these people who have an irrational hatred of me and have given more than ample evidence that they want to exclude, ostracize, and mistreat me are trying to take over all of the North American tournaments that use the only dictionary I’ve played since 2011. And they quite possibly have the President of WESPA attempting to pull strings to make this happen.
When I first published my story, Chris wrote a long comment on my Facebook post about it. Here is the most relevant passage:
I honestly don’t believe that you were a motivation in founding CoCo. Evans has been clear, and you admit in the OP, that he’s wearing two hats. As a tournament organizer he excludes you due to your threats against Jen in 2016/7. As the head of the organization there is nothing preventing you from participating. I think your characterization of his organization is unfair.
Was their response to you non-proportional? Sure. But Evans is fiercely protective, and sometimes in life, you don’t get forgiven. Somehow, against all that, you have to persevere and struggle to heal, heal yourself, heal relationships, all of it. Maybe time can heal. Maybe someday we’ll all be in a home, waving our fists and toothlessly shouting at each other about injustices fifty years prior. I don’t know. Healing a wound is hard, but after it’s festered is harder. Sometimes impossible.
I have to say after reading this, I’m a bit horrified. Not at the story, but that you posted it like this. It’s a classic pattern of abusers to claim victimhood after consequences of their abuse come back on them. I know that’s not you, but the pattern is so common that I find this missive very problematic. I also think it makes it harder for everyone in Scrabble, you included, to find a peaceful path forward from this. I get that you feel a need to defend yourself and you find this cathartic, but ultimately it reflects poorly upon you as a person. I urge you to withdraw this essay and find a better path forward.
chris lipe, facebook comment july 15, 2020
He repeated the word “honest” from earlier in the comment, which is a crock of shit, because all he is trying to do is distort reality. First of all, he claims that my characterization of their organization is “unfair” but he says absolutely nothing to dispute what I said about the organization, because it all is 100% true. He cannot dispute the reality that they signed up all of their friends secretly in advance for 100% of their events, and he was one of those friends who had advance access. Instead, he tries to sweep it under the rug and distract from the issue.
He also does not deny at all that this is entirely driven by Evans’s hatred of me, not by Jennifer’s fear. Essentially his argument is, Evans’s behavior is over-the-top hateful and disproportionate, and that’s okay with me.
But the worst part is that he makes a completely untrue statement that I made “threats against Jen”. I literally shared every word of every communication I made in this period to show that that was not the case. There is literally nothing I said that was a threat against her, and saying that it was is a flat out lie. The only thing I “threatened” to do was to use my First Amendment right to speak my mind.
Neither she nor he nor anyone else has any right to freedom from embarrassment about what other people say. Not only that, but I had no desire to embarrass Jennifer publicly. I wanted to have a private conversation with her before we were in the tournament room together in New Orleans, specifically to avoid that possibility. And in the end when she didn’t give that to me, I found a way to make peace within myself, such that I was calm, relaxed, and didn’t speak or behave in any untoward way the entire time we were in the tournament room. Meanwhile, both she and especially Evans went apeshit in the tournament room, because they were so tense from misunderstanding where I was at.
What I wanted was the same thing as what she wanted, the ability to play Scrabble in peace. And I saw her behavior of refusing my request to take a picture down that she would have no reason for wanting to still have up—and then immediately taking it down after I told her I could no longer see it and didn’t care about it anymore—as twisting a knife in my back. I saw her behavior of giving me the silent treatment, refusing to meet with me beforehand, and insisting that the first time we meet in person in months is in the middle of the tournament room when we are about to compete against each other in a game, not as being afraid but as trying to make me uncomfortable. I had no way of being able to detect any fear from her, because she had cut off all communication. And the moment that I saw her in person and found out that she was afraid, I had no need to say anything at all. Because I was only feeling a need to speak up to protect myself, not to hurt her.
Chris, you and every other friend who was around her for all of that time before I saw her thinks that I should have already internalized what she was going through when I had no access to that information. That is exactly why it was important for us to talk ahead of time. You even admitted to me in a private conversation shortly after you posted that garbage on Facebook that she was stupid to not talk to me ahead of time. I am not saying she should have done it for me. She did not owe me anything. It would have been a better outcome for both her and Evans if she had actually had a conversation with me ahead of time and they had not gone into this situation in the tournament room raging with emotion and bouncing off the walls. We were all there to play Scrabble for Chrissakes, and none of us wanted to have bullshit happening in the tournament room. But the bullshit that did happen was entirely perpetrated by them, not me, because they could not be grownups enough to have a conversation with me ahead of time.
But as I said in Part I, I have already forgiven them for that. I understand it was an emotional time for all of us. I understand that they had so badly misunderstood me from my frazzled writing that a blowup from them right then in the tournament room might have been inevitable. And they handled the situation badly, but that is okay. We all easily could have moved on. I saw them two months later in Charlottesville, and we were all able to sit down and play Scrabble without drama spilling over. But the fact that they have continued to hold this grudge and behave hatefully and unethically for five years now and never once in all that time were able to even talk to me and find out they had gotten it wrong? That is all on them, not on me.
And if you continue to argue that two emails and two text messages that I sent in a three week period that ended more than a week before the New Orleans tournament outweighs the years of terrible behavior that they have perpetrated, then your head is so far up Evans’s ass that you’ve forgotten what bullshit smells like.
I should also point out, Chris, that after you made the comment above, you sang a different tune in that private conversation we had. You admitted that Jennifer was stupid not to talk to me about New Orleans and that both her and Evans’s behaviors were not good. You said, “you can’t control their failures, only how you respond to it.” And then I wrote the following:
The inability to have the hard conversations is exactly why we are still in this mess. It’s fine that they weren’t ready to have the conversation by New Orleans and that we had that blowup. It was contributed to by the defect in their personalities of not talking things out, but there were a lot of other factors and I made a lot of mistakes and made a lot of contributions to bad things happening too. But the fact that they still couldn’t talk to me to iron stuff out for the next three and a half years. That’s on them.
And you’ve got the same fucking defect in your personality in not being able to talk to me about this sooner.
We’d all be in a better place if we could just confront the problems head on and talk about what needs to be talked about.
My private message to Chris Lipe on facebook messenger, july 15, 2020
Your response to that was “Yup. This I think is a learning moment for me as much as anyone on here.”
For a few minutes you sounded like a reasonable friend, someone who was willing to admit that Jennifer, Evans, and you were all wrong, and that you had something to learn from me. I was willing to look past what you had just publicly written on my post, trying to frame me as an abuser claiming victimhood, to see it as your initial emotional reaction to a story coming out in a way that you weren’t prepared for. I thought, maybe I’m making a little progress here and you’ll be more reasonable, respectful, and charitable to me in the future.
But the very next day you doubled down on your character assassination of me. On July 16th, in the comments on Mina’s distillation of my story (quoted above) you wrote this absolute garbage:
Chris Lipe: The statement that Dave was excluded from the VWC is flat out false. Mina, please correct this factual error in your post.
Mina Le: Chris, my evidence for that statement is a face-to-face (Google Hangouts) conversation I had with Jenn and Evans a few months ago in which they stated that Dave could only play CoCo events if Jenn and Evans are not organizing or directing them. This conversation is documented in Dave’s essay.
Chris Lipe: This restriction only applies to in-person events, and given the extensive violation of Jenn’s boundaries helpfully documented in Dave’s post — and demonstrated by Dave’s post — the restriction is, to any reasonable person, eminently justifiable. It does not apply to virtual events where Dave’s physical presence cannot be interpreted as threatening to Jenn.
Dave Koenig: Chris Lipe, are you representing CoCo?
Chris Lipe: Absolutely not. Just correcting the factual record.
David Koenig: Your statement above is not just a fact. It sounds like a justification for a policy decision.
Chris Lipe: We already discussed my feelings about your statement. My personal opinion is that what you have documented (and the pattern of behavior continued by making the post itself) is an obvious justification for Jenn and Evans’ policy as directors. Where that reason doesn’t apply, the policy clearly should not apply, and does not apply, as has been stated elsewhere. This is all common sense.
David Koenig: Chris Lipe, I’d hardly call your interpretation common sense.
Chris Lipe: You also thought it was a good idea to post what you did.
David Koenig: Chris Lipe, I did. And you’re reinforcing my belief that I was right.
Michael KM: Chris Lipe…would you describe Dave’s behavior as “predatory”? I’m asking because I’m seeing that word used in Scrabble circles today and you’re alluding to it too. Is it fair?
Let’s focus on “the extensive violation of Jenn’s boundaries helpfully documented in Dave’s post”. First of all, fuck you. Literally the only thing in the entire story that you have to criticize me for is two text messages and two emails in a three week period that ended eight days before the tournament began. I didn’t misbehave in any way in the tournament room at 2017 New Orleans. I was calm. They did misbehave, and they were not calm. Then I spent the next three and a half years not bothering or responding to them in any way shape or form, while Evans was psychotically angry at me and they were both plotting against me, and you knew it the entire time. There was no way at that time or later that my “physical presence” was “threatening to Jenn”, and you knew that perfectly well. If you thought I was any sort of physical threat to Jenn, you never would have invited me to your wedding.
In this whole thread, you don’t sound like the same person at all who had that private conversation with me the previous day. That’s because you’re a dishonest, disingenuous piece of crap. You don’t care about the truth. You don’t care about how horribly your friends and you have behaved. You just decided that you had to make me the bad guy in everything you said publicly, because you thought it was the only way to save face for the bad things your friends and you had done over the last several years.
Let me be clear about that. They broke the rules of NASPA for literally every tournament they ran by giving their friends advanced registration access to those events, and you were one of the beneficiaries of that. And this shit makes a difference. There are only a small number of people playing CSW Scrabble in North America, and an even smaller number who have chances of qualifying for things like the Alchemist Cup. And the NASPA tournaments they have run are a very significant percentage of the ones that get most of those top competitors. When you’re already rated in the 2000s, it’s hard to move up in the ratings, and your few best chances to do so are when you can play in tournaments with a lot of those other top players. I was at a significant disadvantage when it came to qualifying for the 2020 Alchemist Cup (that never happened) because I didn’t have equal access to those tournaments that you, Dave Wiegand, Conrad B-B, Evans, etc. had. And I wasn’t the only one. There were other players, like Jason Keller, who might have had a better chance of breaking into the top echelon of qualifiers if they had access to more of those games with the other top players. What Jennifer and Evans did was unethical. It made for an unlevel playing field. And it was specifically forbidden by NASPA rules.
You and every player who used early access to register for Evans’s and Jennifer’s tournaments are complicit in this unethical behavior. And you know it. And that’s the main reason you don’t want this story out there. Because you know it undermines your and their credibility to run anything in competitive Scrabble. Because you too are a cliquish dick who is okay with your friends doing shitty things to favor their friends.
But you know what, even with the deck stacked against me, after narrowly missing out on qualifying for the 2018 Alchemist Cup, I still found a way to qualify for the 2020 edition, bumping your asshole friend Evans out in so doing, I might add. How did I do that? By flying all over the continent, to Chicago, Austin, Niagara Falls, Albany, and New Jersey, getting every CSW tournament game I could against the strongest competition I could, even though there were a bunch of strong players and tournaments right in my neighborhood in the Pacific Northwest that I didn’t have access to. I could hardly get those strong players for practice games, let alone tournaments, because Jennifer and Evans had poisoned their minds against me. So I also flew all over the world to England, Scotland, Sweden, Malaysia, and Thailand to get every game against top level competition that I could. I’m very lucky that I had the resources to be able to do that, but it was also exhausting, in terms of both finances and energy. I regularly had to get on a nine hour flight just to get some games in against competition around my level, because I was being blacklisted from the local scene. What I would have given just to be able to get some casual games against a top player in on an every week or two basis.
I found out through social media posts of other friends the weekend that Jennifer and Evans got married. And I was sad. Do you know why? Not about them getting married or me not being there. I didn’t care about that in the least. I was sad because a whole bunch of the other top CSW Scrabble players came to my neighborhood in Seattle, and not a single one reached out to me. Nobody even wanted to see how I was doing or get a single game in with me.
If Jennifer and Evans want to run “house events” for themselves and their close friends, that’s fine. They don’t have to invite anyone they don’t want to. But they don’t get to call them rated tournaments. They’re not tournaments at all. They’re a bunch of cliquish and dickish friends. And in my opinion they’re not even the most dickish ones there. You are.
Most people who read the first two parts of my story probably weren’t able to read between the lines of it enough to know this yet, but you’re a smart guy. You might have already figured out that Jennifer and Evans aren’t the real bad guys in my story. You are.
You’re the asshole who saw how much pain I was in for three and a half fucking years before I said anything to the rest of the Scrabble world about this. You’re the asshole whom I tried to talk to about this but got zero fucking empathy from. I got nothing but you shutting your brains and emotions down and barely interacting with me while I tried to pour my heart out to you on numerous occasions. You’re the asshole who didn’t want to know anything about the story, as I understand now, because you must have already made up your mind that I was the bad guy based on Jennifer’s and Evans’s insane overreactions over the period of several years. You pretended to be my friend, but you were never my friend. And you were happy to maintain that status quo even though you knew it was absolutely torturing me. I told you long before I published the blog that I would eventually have to tell the story to the whole world, but you just didn’t take me seriously.
You didn’t take seriously that I was actually wronged here until I literally proved it by putting the story out there. And that made your fucking head implode, to the point where you became obsessed with trying to keep a cover on the story and stop people reading it, because you knew it proved me right and did massive damage to you and your friends. You were then willing to lie through your teeth and twist things to try to make me the bad guy, because you couldn’t stand the fact that you and your asshole friends actually are the bad guys in this story.
What kind of asshole invites one of his supposed best friends to his wedding of about 20 people but refuses to make seating arrangements and intentionally sets up the seating so that the number of seats at the Scrabble table is one short of the number of Scrabble players there? The kind of asshole who is fine with permanently treating me like a second-class citizen. Let me remind you that your wedding was a year and a half after 2017 New Orleans, and in all that time in between I hadn’t done or said anything to Jennifer and Evans. I hadn’t even attempted to sign up for any of their tournaments. The only time I reached out to them, about the Hood River tournament, was a few months after your wedding. You knew perfectly well that I wasn’t doing anything to them and was just living my life, while Evans was going full-on psychopath about me.
And you made that asshole your Best Man. Let me be clear, I’m not jealous. I didn’t care about being your Best Man. I cared that you knew one of your closest friends was massively mistreating another one of your closest friends, and somehow that wasn’t a disqualifying condition. That you were happy not to make waves, maintain the status quo, and condone his repulsive behavior. And now that it’s become public, you’ve swung so far away from sanity to the point of openly supporting him and tearing me down, when I proved beyond any shadow of a doubt how he has been an asshole to me for years while I wasn’t doing anything.
Your behavior makes you an even bigger asshole than he is. Because you should know better. You spent years still being my “friend” and traveling to tournaments with me after 2017 New Orleans. You had more than ample evidence and experience to see that I was the only person being an adult in this situation, while your friends and you behaved like high schoolers, and you were all too cowardly to ever talk things out.
I never needed or wanted his forgiveness. I wanted you, and the rest of the people between them and me, to treat me like a decent human being, as I deserve. I wanted you to not penalize me for their psychotic behavior. I wanted you to stand up to them, to call him out for being the horrible fucking human being that he is. Your failure to do that is a moral indictment of you.
And when I wrote out a long email that could have provided Jennifer and Evans precisely the information they needed to understand that they had been misperceiving this situation for years, you discouraged me from sending it. You had me edit out all of that and just give a quick apology. You wanted their misperception of reality to continue to live on forever, probably because you mispereceived reality in similar ways and couldn’t believe that you all had it so badly wrong about what I had supposedly done all those years ago.
And when I proved to you that I did nothing wrong, you didn’t even argue with that. You literally said in our private Facebook conversation that I shouldn’t be “emphasizing the moral rectitude of the original situation.” Which is no surprise now that I know you better. Because you don’t care about right and wrong. You don’t care about the objective truth of the situation, that I did nothing wrong and that you and your friends were the assholes. You just care about saving your face and theirs.
Well, guess what, you don’t get to save face, and neither do they. That’s called accountability for your actions. And I have published everything that I have said or done related to this, and it’s staying up there. I welcome full accountability for everything I have done, as long as the rest of you have to endure full accountability as well. Because I know full well, that anyone who looks at the story objectively and with an ounce of compassion, sympathy, and charity for all involved parties cannot come to the conclusion that my two emails and two text messages sent in a three week period of mental agony come anywhere close to outweighing the years of bad behavior that Evans and Jennifer have perpetrated, and the ways that you and many others have been complicit.
And the reaction to the publication of my story vindicates that. Did you notice that almost everyone who was not part of your cliquish and dickish group saw things my way, and that it was the same handful of assholes over and over again who were trying to me tear down? Because you’ve been living in Evans’s and Jennifer’s bullshit unreality for so fucking long that you’re incapable of seeing things with any objectivity.
And what happened when Kene Mezue, a Scrabble player I had never even met or talked to, read my story and had the takeaway that there was too much bullying in the Scrabble world? He made a heartfelt post on the Facebook group called NASPA Member Concerns on the anniversary of the suicide of his friend, a young Scrabble player who had complained about bullying behavior within our community. Kene linked to my story and wanted people to read it, because he saw a similar theme of bullying in it, and because he wanted the bullying behavior in our community to stop. So what happened? First, your friend Cahnmann went on the post and started verbally bullying Kene and insulting and degrading my reputation. Then you took the post down, even though there was absolutely nothing inappropriate in the post and it was completely appropriate for NASPA Member Concerns. You did this even though as President of WESPA you don’t have any position of authority in NASPA anymore, but you were able to do it because you were still a moderator of the group from long before.
Your behavior was unethical. You should have separated yourself from anything to do with official NASPA business. It is a conflict of interest for you to still be acting as a moderator on that group when you are WESPA President. And your claim that my blog violates Jennifer’s privacy is a complete crock of shit. Sorry that you and she and Evans don’t like having accountability for what you all actually did, but you do not get to escape it. I violated no laws nor ethics in publishing what I did, and it was completely necessary in order to hold all of you accountable, since you all are trying to make yourselves internationally relevant in Scrabble and your actions have political impact on the community. If you and they don’t want me talking about it, then fine. Get the fuck out of running in anything in Scrabble, and I will not need to say anything about it again. But as long as you and they want to head Scrabble organizations, I will continue to hold you and them accountable for every thing you do that has political impact on my ability to compete in tournaments. And if you do not like that, go fuck yourself.
After Kene complained about the post being taken down, you demanded that it only be put back up without a link to my blog, because you were obsessed with trying to limit the damage and stopping people from seeing the blog, because you knew it proved me right and proved what shitheads your friends are. So you then jumped back onto the conversation with Cahnmann and started trying to bully Kene into taking down the post. How do you live with yourself, you horrible piece of monkey crap? You lie that I am the bad guy because of two text messages and two emails from four years ago when I’ve done nothing but be a good person since, while your friends have been psychotic assholes. Then you become the psychotic asshole who bullies a guy who is mourning his friend who committed suicide due to bullying and who made a post with no other message than “let’s end the bullying and all play Scrabble nicely together.”
You lie that me telling the story makes me worse and is further attacking your friends. No it is not. It was absolutely necessary to defend my reputation, and it was politically relevant. I made no ad hominem attacks on them in the first two parts of this. Literally the only criticisms of them were things that were politically relevant. But you and Cahnmann just kept proving that you were the bullies here, degrading me and attacking Kene. Because you cannot stand your friends facing accountability for what they actually did.
Let us not forget the email exchange we had around that time:
From: Dave Koenig To: Chris Lipe Date: July 18, 2020
Dear Chris,
Evans’s outsize reactions over three and a half years from 2017 to 2020 to my admittedly subideal behavior in three weeks from December 2016 to January 2017 endangered my health, safety, and reputation. I had no choice but to tell the story to the world. If you cannot come to a place of accepting that, we will never be friends again.
Every time you attack my character, you reduce the chance of any reconciliation between us.
My story is 100% true and accurate from my point of view. If you read it and accept my point of view, you should see I had no malice, either in the lead up to and time at New Orleans 2017 or in any time thereafter. I fucked up and did inadvertent damage.
Can you say that Evans’s behavior in the three and a half years since then has been without malice?
I suspect that you have chosen sides and are saying the things publicly that you do for political reasons, not because they are what you believe are an accurate view of the world.
You don’t have to agree with me. You can point out to me where I’m missing things. But if you doubt or smear my honesty or character, you cross the line with me.
Sincerely, Dave
From: Chris Lipe To: Dave Koenig Date: July 18, 2020
Dave,
The more I think about your post, the angrier I get. Publishing someone’s private communications without their consent is far outside the realm of normal, acceptable human behavior.
I think before I can address anything else with you, I need to know that you have basic respect for other people and their boundaries. You need to delete the post and publicly renounce and apologize for it. You need to find respectful, healthy ways to address your grievances.
I send this knowing that you may someday excerpt it and publish it publicly. I do not consent to this but I now realize that does not matter to you.
C
screenshot in appendix
Oh, you do not want me to publish your email? Fuck you. Welcome to accountability for your actions and words. By the way, I showed your email to Mina, and her initial reaction was laughter, because it is fucking absurd. Jennifer wrote a policy decision of why she was not allowing me into the Hood River tournament. That is in the public interest of the entire Scrabble community, and it is my goddamn right to tell the world. Claiming that people should be able to write shitty things and decide to keep other people out of their tournaments on shitty grounds and then the other person is committing wrongdoing by telling the world how they have been treated? That is victim-blaming, you son of a bitch.
Jennifer and Evans besmirched my character by falsely painting a picture that I harassed her to the point where you and many of our other friends believed it and massively mistreated me for many years. I revealed private text conversations that only contained embarrassing information about me, not her, to prove that I did not harass her. And the reason you hate that communication being out there is because it actually does prove that I was in the right and that there was no harassment. If you say that I harassed her, you are a fucking liar, and you are harassing me and degrading my reputation. I literally have accepted full accountability for everything I have said and done. I have given all the evidence in the world. And the evidence proves me right, and proves that you and your friends are shitheads. And that is why you want to keep it bottled up. And you lose. It is out there, and it will continue to stay out there forever, because you and your friends cannot escape accountability. GO FUCK YOURSELF.
If you are fighting against true information getting out there, you are on the wrong side. Keep fighting with reality. Keep losing. Every single way that you fight this makes you look worse. All your friends had to do in response to my blog was apologize. If they had just made a public statement saying something to the effect of “We misunderstood Dave’s words and actions, and we overreacted. We apologize, and he is welcome to play in our tournaments anytime,” this would have all been over. No one in the Scrabble community, myself or otherwise, would have held a grudge about it. I am not saying they should have done that for me. If they were truly interested in giving themselves the best possible reputation in the Scrabble world and growing their organization as much as possible, that would have been the way to do it. But Evans is not capable of that, because he is a child who cannot get over himself and his psychotic hatred for me.
Note that I did not even read, let alone participate in, the NASPA Member Concerns conversation, even while you and your asshole friends were doing everything you could to disparage me. I was taking a Facebook break at the time, and I only found out about it because other friends of mine saw it, spoke up to defend me, took screen shots, and told me about it. I’ve never gone back and read it either, and I have no intention of doing so.
Six Months Later
Meanwhile, my life went on, as much as it could in pandemic times. I moved from Seattle to Portland near the end of 2020, which brought me closer to Dave Wiegand, Pete Armstrong, and Conrad Bassett-Bouchard, but considering that we didn’t have vaccines yet and it was still the middle of a dark, wet Pacific Northwest winter, I was not in a rush to reach out for games.
We of course had no in-person tournaments, but I got a few online games in here and there on ISC, until my friend Cesar unveiled Woogles, a brand new and much nicer website for playing Scrabble online. With the whole competitive Scrabble world confined to the internet for the foreseeable future, there was an initial surge of excitement for Woogles as many Scrabble clubs started setting up weekly meetings on the website. Of course, these clubs did not require people to be in the same geographic location, but the biggest limitation was time zones. It was still hard to mesh schedules with players in places like the UK, Australia, and Asia, and there was not as much of a concentration of Scrabble players playing CSW in time zones close to me. Still, I got some regular games on Wednesday nights at Laurie Cohen’s Valley Virtual Scrabble Club and on Thursday nights at Mike Johnson’s Channel 275 Club. Jennifer and Evans put their cliquish and dickish organization’s name on another club that ran games on Tuesday evenings and Saturday afternoons. I did not initially play at their club, as I saw putting my name on there as effectively giving an endorsement to their organization. Other people might assume that we had made some sort of peace and that I was cool with their organization thriving and growing, when in fact we had zero communication after I published the story and still have not.
However, in early 2021 I had a schedule change which made the Wednesday night club harder to attend and was itching for more games. I did a bit of introspection and soul searching and told myself that my desire not to play in their online club was an ego reaction. Though I definitely did not want their in-person tournaments to supplant in-person NASPA CSW tournaments, for the time being there were no NASPA tournaments, so the point was moot. Several of the best players at Mike Johnson’s Thursday night club, with whom I was always eager to get games, were Geoff Thevenot, Pete Armstrong, and Becky Dyer, and they directed the weekly online events for Jennifer’s and Evans’s organization.
The first time I hopped over to their club page on Woogles was at the end of the night on a Tuesday session, just before the final round started. As I logged on, I saw another player in the club chat window who had joined late and was looking for a game. I spoke up simply to offer myself to play as an evener if I was needed. Pete Armstrong was directing at the time, and he told me that they were even, as when the other player had joined, Cesar had dropped out, so he didn’t pair me, which was no big deal. However, Cesar then saw I was without a game, so he offered to join back in and play me.
Anyone can play against anyone else on Woogles without doing it within a club. The interface is the same regardless of whether you’re playing in a club or not. You’ve got a chat room with all of the people online from which you can hop into games with other individuals. The only differences in a club are that you are at the website woogles.io/club/nameofclub instead of woogles.io, that only the people who are in that particular club share the same chat room, and that the lists of ongoing and completed games only include the ones started from the club page. It is purely an organizational thing to allow for communication within subdivisions of the website users and to allow the directors to see the results of only the games relevant to them.
Cesar and I could have played our game from the main Woogles page or from Jennifer’s and Evans’s club page. It would not have made any difference to me either way. But we happened to play it within their club subdivision, and no one objected. In fact, they had set up a separate website outside of Woogles to track their online club results, and after I beat Cesar they even added my name to their list of players, with a 1-0 all time record.
I came back and played for the full duration of a couple of Saturday sessions without incident. Neither Jennifer nor Evans were even at these sessions, which were generally directed by either Geoff Thevenot or Becky Dyer or both in tandem. They welcomed me graciously, and they continued to track my results all the other players on their club website.
I am a talkative person and my personality can fill a room. As I got comfortable playing at their online club, I chatted frequently in the club chat room, and my chats were totally benign. I just talked about Scrabble, sharing excitement for interesting words that were played, complimenting people on nice moves, occasionally telling an anecdote about how a particular word that just came up had been played by so-and-so at some event so many years ago. I didn’t speak about Jennifer or Evans or about their treatment of me at all, and nothing I said was even personally about me. My chatter could have come from many other Scrabble players and no one would have known the difference if not for the fact that my chats were prepended by my username dewk, which are my initials.
After a few Saturday sessions, I played on a Tuesday night in late February 2021, at a session which Evans and Jennifer did attend. When I first logged on, the director Becky asked everyone who was playing to say hello in the chat window, which was the common method to determine who should be paired. I and the other players indicated our intention to play. However, Becky then said that a player was missing. Someone else said something in the window suggesting that Evans was there, even though I did not see a chat from him. The interface showed a count of the number of people in the chat room but did not by default give a list of names, until you clicked on the number of people. So I clicked on it, and I did not see Evans’s username. (I did not see Jennifer’s either, but apparently she was running late and did not join until a later round.)
The Woogles website was still at this point very much in its beta stage. The team was adding new features all the time, but there were many things that were not fully developed yet. I did not even know if they had built a capability for Evans to block me yet, and if so how well the feature worked, or if Evans had a way to opt out of the chat room entirely. Meanwhile the director was saying the player count was off and another player was saying something confusing about Evans’s presence. I simply made a one line chat saying, “I don’t see Evans. Is he blocking me?” Director Becky responded that she didn’t see him either. Shortly afterward, a different player confirmed that Evans was playing.
I didn’t say anything else about it, and I never addressed or mentioned either Evans or Jennifer in the club chat room in any way. I did later make other comments in the chat room that were of the same benign nature as the stuff I chatted about at the Saturday sessions.
I played for the rest of the evening, except for a couple of games when I had to take a phone call. I opted out for those rounds, as was allowed in the club rules and was commonplace for players to do. I simply notified the director in the chat room when I had to leave and when I was back.
I did very well at the club night, winning all but two of my games. My only two losses were to wunderkind Noah Slatkoff, who was the only player to finish ahead of me. I was never paired with either Evans or Jennifer. Late in the evening when I was leading the pack and Evans was one of the few players who could have caught me, it would have been a logical pairing for me to play Evans, but they instead assigned me a repeat pairing against David Whitley. I said nothing in the chat room and didn’t care.
That Friday morning, I received the following email:
From: Collins Coalition (info@cocoscrabble.org) To: Dave Koenig Subject: CoCo Club Participation
February 26th, 2021
Dave,
We are sending this email on behalf of the CoCo online clubs. After discussion, it was unanimously decided that continuing to allow you to participate in CoCo online club play would not be consistent with our organization’s commitment to providing our players a safe and harassment-free environment.
You will no longer be permitted to attend any CoCo online clubs, specifically the two occurring on Tuesday and Saturday. If you do attempt to attend any CoCo online clubs, the director will not enter you into the pairings. This goes into effect now, and is effective indefinitely.
One of the CoCo’s founding principles is the importance of creating a welcoming and harassment-free environment. As stated in our mission, we are committed to fostering a safe community. That commitment means that we take action to protect members of our community from harassment and threats made by other players. See the CoCo website; specifically, sections titled “Who We Are” and “Policies.”
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.
Sincerely,
Becky Dyer, Geoff Thevenot, and Peter Armstrong
Online club directors for the CoCo
screenshot in appendix
I immediately took the step of forwarding this email to Cesar, the founder and creator of the Woogles website, and his wife Mina. I asked Cesar if he could look over all of the chat records of my time in their club sessions and check whether I had behaved in any untoward way. Cesar only had a limited amount of the chat history to look back on, but he also had been at most of the online sessions that I had been at. He looked at everything he could, and his verdict was, “I’m sure you have not done anything untoward at club, this whole thing is messed up – I really don’t like this. In the email they specifically say ‘all relevant information’ and not just events that happen during club, so I’m sure it’s still from the grudge.”
My response was, “I don’t want to force them to let me play in their club. I don’t want to play in their club specifically because they have done this. I just want everyone to know what they have done.”
Recap time. Jennifer and Evans have never contacted me to tell me about any of their preemptive policy decisions to ban me. I only found out because they told Mina and Cesar privately. Even from what I found out, they specifically forbade me only from playing in CoCo tournaments that they themselves directed. In fact, after I published the first two parts of this story, I had a phone call with Conrad Bassett-Bouchard in which he emphasized to me that I would be welcome at CoCo tournaments that he directed. When the conversation in response to the first two parts turned to how they had shittily excluded me from the Virtual World Cup, I never heard anything from Jennifer and Evans either. But their friends, especially Chris Lipe, tried to paint a picture that I was not banned from participating in the Virtual World Cup, and that I had not been on the team simply because I had not signed up. He was strenuous in emphasizing that the ban I was under only applied to in-person tournaments, not online events. Furthermore, the online club sessions that I was playing in were not directed by either Jennifer or Evans, but only by Becky, Pete, and Geoff.
It is funny how they keep escalating how shittily they treat me, and they keep being obsessed with trying to hide what they are doing and create plausible deniability that it is not real. Does anyone with any goddamn common sense think that I had a fair shake to play in the Virtual World Cup or their weekly club sessions or anything else with their cliquish and dickish organization’s name on it? And their defense mechanism is to besmirch my character and reputation by calling me a harasser when all I am trying to do is play Scrabble with several of the other best CSW players in the world.
Mina was so infuriated by their behavior that she personally wrote a letter to Becky. I did not ask her to do this.
From: Mina Le To: Becky Dyer Subject: Unjust exclusion Date: Feb 28, 2021
Dear Becky,
I was aggrieved to learn that Dave Koenig has been banned from CoCo club in perpetuity, presumably because he and Jennifer Clinchy had a bad breakup and Evans continues to hold a grudge about it.
The circumstances that led to Dave being deemed a “harasser” have been publicly published. What is clear to readers of the full story is that his actions — those of an angry, desperate, spurned off-and-on lover — did not meet the legal definition of harassment. He does not deserve to be branded as one or treated as one.
I have trouble imagining how anyone could feel unsafe while sitting in the same online club room as Dave, where he could not so much as broach anyone’s physical personal space or look at them askance. His behavior in CoCo club to date has also been spotless, and as his personal friend I can vouch for his character.
Won’t it bring CoCo PR trouble, as well, when people learn that the directors are banning players simply because they personally dislike them?
Thank you for your consideration, Mina
From: Becky Dyer To: Mina Le
Hi Mina,
Thanks for your note. The discussion within our directors’ group is considered confidential; therefore, I can’t comment on it. It’s interesting that you are taking it upon yourself to make assumptions about this matter. We understand that there are people who have already chosen to disparage our organization, and therefore are likely to continue to do so. I’m sorry that you feel that is a good use of your valuable time. I would respectfully ask you to consider whether there might be better activities to undertake.
Sincerely, Becky
screenshot in appendix
Would you listen to this crap? They want to ban me from their online club forever without sharing the justification with me or anyone else, and they consider anyone else speaking up about this to be disparaging their organization.
Look, they’ve already made it clear that they are complete dicks. I don’t want to play Scrabble with anyone who treats me like this. But it is absurd to pretend that this is in any way a legitimate Scrabble organization, let alone one that claims to be inclusive and welcoming. This is a group of cliquish and dickish friends who want complete control over who can and cannot play with them and do not want to justify themselves to anyone else. This is a group of cliquish and dickish assholes who have no problem accusing another player of harassment on a completely false basis and attempting to assassinate his character, because he dares to show the world how they are treating him.
I have no problem with Jennifer and Evans and all of their asshole friends having their private little Scrabble parties in person and online and not inviting me. But they don’t get to call them tournaments. They don’t get to rate them. They don’t get to call what they are doing a Scrabble organization. I hope that there are enough people in the Scrabble world who have some actual backbone and morals, who will speak up and say, “These people are pieces of shit, and I will never participate in anything with their name or their organization’s name on it, because of the disgusting ways in which they have been treating Dave Koenig for the last four years, while he has been the only one behaving like a sane adult.”
It is funny how it was no problem for me to play in CoCo online clubs for the first few weeks, and how I never did anything in any way harassing to Jennifer or Evans in between that and them banning me. I never even addressed Jennifer or mentioned or suggested anything about her in any way. But the sheer mention of how Evans might have been blocking me was enough to push him over the edge.
The guy is a complete psychotic asshole toward me, and he is obsessed with hiding that from the entire rest of the world. Guess what. He doesn’t get to hide it. It is called accountability for your fucking actions.
I have never been upset at all, not from day one, that Jennifer and Evans banned me from their online club. I am happy about it. I already did not want their organization to succeed. I preferred not to tear it down, but to let them do so by their own actions. And that is what they are doing. They just can’t help themselves and keep demonstrating to the world how terrible they are toward me. I am glad that they are through their actions making it so clear that I never had a fair shake of the tiles when it came to the Virtual World Cup or anything else involving them.
But I am truly appalled that Becky’s, Pete’s, and Geoff’s names are on this letter disparaging me. I came to the online club not because I fucking cared about Jennifer or Evans and their absurd campaign of hatred against me at all, but because I wanted to play Scrabble with the three of you. Literally, you three were the people I was most eager to get games with. And I figured it didn’t matter if we met at woogles.io or woogles.io/club/thisclubname or woogles.io/club/thatclubname. I just wanted to play the fucking game, and I was just a civil human being the whole time that I joined you online to play.
I have proven that this entire mess is 100% their fault and 0% my fault. That I have not done anything but be a civil human being since January 6th, 2017. And if you think that two emails and two text messages sent in a three week period of extreme agony before that outweighs all of the absurd wrongdoing of these assholes in the five years since that time, you are fucking idiots.
And don’t try to argue that my language and tone in this third part of the story is uncivil. Because fuck yeah, it is, and I wear that proudly. I’ve learned that being a civil human being doesn’t work with you fuckers. You, Becky, Pete, and Geoff, have now graduated to not just being complicit in their asshole behavior, but to actively participating in besmirching my character. You have called me a harasser, and in so doing you have burned your bridges with me.
If you had any kind of moral clarity or backbone, you would have said to Jennifer and Evans, “No, fuck you, I am not putting my name on this garbage letter disparaging Dave’s character. If you want to ban him from your online clubs, you do it your damn selves and put your own fucking names on the letter.”
I do not give a shit what Jennifer and Evans do and what they think of me. The only reason I am still talking about this is because they have warped the minds of other people who I used to like and care about. Pete, I stayed at your home in Baltimore and hung out with you and your dog when we played in a tournament over a decade ago. I hung out with you in NYC when you visited too. Becky, you came to my home in Virginia and I made you dinner while we played lovely Scrabble games together. Geoff, you were my roommate and travel buddy when I went to my first ever World Scrabble Championship. We romped through London, Warsaw, and Krakow together and had a blast.
I gave you all more than enough material evidence to clear my name, and you still allowed your names to get on this fucking letter. Now I don’t know for sure who wrote it, and the wording sounds to me like Jennifer’s. It came from an anonymous account from their organization, so it is possible that she just wrote it and put your name on it. But now it is out there with your name on it. So you’ve got one opportunity left to not permanently burn your bridges with me.
You owe me a fucking apology. I want you to personally apologize to me and to publicly recant ever having your name on this letter. I’m not holding my breath for that to happen, but if it doesn’t, you are permanently on my shit list.
Look at your fucking selves. Look at the wording of Becky’s response to Mina. Do you know what you sound like? A fucking Trumper. Your fearless leader just keeps behaving more and more hatefully and ridiculously, and all you want to do is keep in line and keep covering his tracks.
But what happened after that letter came out? I didn’t say anything publicly about it for almost the next year. Meanwhile, you all stopped coming to Mike Johnson’s Thursday night club, so I couldn’t get games with you there either. Cesar spoke up about the treatment of me in the online club to the Woogles team. I hope he was not going to insist that they let me into the club, as I told him not to do that, but there was the question of whether to censure their cliquish and dickish organization for their behavior. When Cesar brought this up, the only person who vigorously objected was Conrad, who wears two hats as a member of the Woogles team and one of the organizers of their cliquish and dickish group. He said, so I am told, “Dave can play in any other online club.” So it’s separate but equal. You admit that there’s no valid excuse for your repugnant behavior. You just don’t want me around.
Conrad blocked me on Facebook within the next few weeks after the letter was sent. There was no communication between me and him leading up to this, not on Facebook or in-person or any other way. I only heard about him crusading against me in the Woogles meeting through Cesar and Mina. The irony of this is that I had only recently readded him to my feed when he did this.
There is another thing that Conrad did, that he does not know that I already know. Literally one day after he and I spoke on the phone back in July 2020 and he acted nice and emphasized that I was welcome at his tournaments, he got on the phone with Marsha Gillis, who had retracted her cash donations to their cliquish and dickish organization in response to the first two parts of my story coming out. And he told her that I have done things to make other women uncomfortable, as a way of justifying their treatment of me. He even used the phrase, “I’m not trying to disparage Dave’s character,” to which Marsha responded, “That’s exactly what you’re doing.”
I am not trying to win anybody back. I just want the entire world to see you all for the assholes that you are. I live in Portland now, and I could easily meet up with Pete or Conrad for Scrabble games, but I haven’t reached out to them. Why would I, after they have proven from afar what assholes they are? Here’s a hint, if you haven’t gotten it from the last fifty of them I’ve given you. Your attachment to the emotional world of Jennifer and Evans has completely interfered with your moral clarity. They built up a false story in their heads over the last five years that I was harassing them when I was literally doing nothing. I wasn’t signing up for their tournaments. I wasn’t bothering them. I was just living my life, while they kept escalating against me. They kept poisoning your minds and trying to rebuild their Scrabble world so that I was excommunicated. And you lived in that world and bought their bullshit, while I’ve been a better human being than them the entire fucking time. You’ve aligned yourselves with horrible fucking people and participated in the character assassination of a person who not only has had the moral high ground the entire fucking time but hasn’t retaliated in any way.
It is true. I have not done anything to them. All I have done is tell the true story of how shitty their behavior toward me has been. That is not attacking them. That is holding a mirror up so that they and you and the rest of the world can see how shitty their behavior toward me has truly been. And that makes me a whistle-blower and hero, warning the rest of the Scrabble world about how bad these people are, based on what they actually did, and warning the rest of the Scrabble world about how badly you all have fallen into Trumpist groupthink.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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 nearly 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.
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.
I wrote that short speech so that if I was under distress while facing Jennifer at the tournament and too flustered to come up with something to say, I would have it to fall back on. I had made no decision about whether I was actually going to say it to her in the tournament room. I figured I would know in the moment what I needed to say, which—as I mentioned before—might be something or might be nothing. I had even edited it down so that I could say it in less than two minutes and tried to write it in such a way that if I did have to deliver it in front of other people, only Jennifer would understand most of it.
At the end of our conversation, Jason told me that Jennifer was afraid of me making a scene at the tournament. Since she had completely ghosted me, I had no idea what her emotional response was to any of the communication I had sent her. The reason I wanted to talk by voice or in person in the first place was so that I could gauge her reactions.
It didn’t make sense to me for her to fear that I would make a scene. If she was concerned about that, the logical thing to do would have been to have a conversation with me before the tournament, which is exactly what I was trying to do all along. It was only because she was hard-set on not meeting with me ahead of time and instead insisted on creating this situation of us seeing each other for the first time in months across the board at the tournament that we were in this mess.
Prior to that moment, I had only conceived of the attitude in her refusal to talk to me or take the picture down as twisting the knife in my back, not as acting out of fear. Understanding to anticipate her being fearful when we met the next day was helpful.
On Saturday morning the tournament started, and fate would have it that Jennifer and I were paired to sit at the same table for the first three games in a row, playing each other in the second round and playing other opponents at adjacent boards in the other two rounds. I sat down to play my first game and did nothing out of the ordinary, but Jennifer was so afraid to even sit at the same table as me that she ended up convincing her new boyfriend Evans to switch tables with her. He sat right next to me, but we had no interaction. I didn’t worry about it and just played my first game, winning easily.
In round two, I sat at the board where I was going to play Jennifer, and Jason Broersma sat at the adjacent board. In retrospect, given the way the pairings were, he also must have pulled a switcheroo to put himself there, a fact I only realized now as I’m writing this three years later. He even at one point put his hand calmly on my back, surely from his point of view to stop me from shooting my mouth off, but it was completely unnecessary. He didn’t understand that there was zero chance of me doing anything untoward in this situation.
Jennifer delayed sitting down across from me until moments before the round was supposed to start. When she finally did, she started bagging up the tiles as quickly as possible to try to start the game without a conversation. She was visibly shaking and scared. I sat in silence as she bagged the tiles up. When she finished and we were about to start, I said, “Oh, I just remembered I wanted to say one thing to you. Let’s play Scrabble.”
Jennifer was a mess during the game. She got the better of the tiles, but she made a suboptimal bingo in the first few turns, missing a triple word score when she could have hit it with one of its anagrams. Later she lost a turn playing a phony bingo, allowing me to block her real one. I triumphed in an ugly low scoring game only because she fell apart.
She would end up again switching tables in the third round to avoid sitting near me, and that was the end of our interactions in New Orleans. We never ended up sitting near each other again in the rest of the tournament, both kept to ourselves in the tournament room, and never crossed paths outside of the tournament room.
Jason thought I did the classy thing by minimizing the conversation with Jennifer before our game. That’s not how I saw it. I saw that Jennifer had gotten herself so worked up and afraid because of how much she feared me saying something. What in her imagination might have been about to happen was so much worse than anything that I could or would have said in the moment—including the speech I had written. If I had said something, it would have pulled the bandaid off. Maybe there would have been some tears shed in the moment, but the tension would be over.
There’s a common saying from chess that went through my head while I sat there facing Jennifer: “Sometimes the threat is stronger than the execution.” I saw that saying nothing and maintaining the tension would be the way for her to experience the most agony. And as a bonus, Jason—and possibly anybody else nearby who had some idea of what was going on—would think that I was being above it all. The entire time that I was trying to make a conversation happen I was doing the good thing. Then I stopped trying and instead let Jennifer torture herself, and that was the evil thing. But Jason sees it exactly backwards, as probably do several other friends in Scrabble.
I delighted in watching Jennifer suffer in front of me. She punished herself for her behavior in a better way than I ever could have. I saw it as karmic justice for how much pain she had caused me in the last couple months. But at the same time, I did not do it to her. She did it to herself. She did it by coming to a tournament where she already knew I was going to be, by insisting on not communicating with me prior to the tournament, by avoiding a conversation that would have made things better, by building up so much tension in her own head that just being there with me was such a terrible experience, even though I wasn’t doing anything.
I didn’t end up playing against Evans until the following afternoon. Up to this point, he was a nonissue to me. My concerns about getting closure with Jennifer and making sure that I could have peace of mind at the tournament weren’t about him at all. I had no jealousy of him and wished him no ill will.
Furthermore, I even liked the guy. In fact, when I had been at home in the last month crying my eyes out with hatred and sadness toward Jennifer, I had worked to keep a positive image of him in my mind. I had had a few situations earlier in life when a girl I previously had been involved with got into a relationship with a guy I knew. I always found that a lot easier to handle when it was a guy I liked, because then I thought, “Of course she likes him, he’s a good guy.” It was when the girl got involved with a guy who was an asshole that it was a lot harder to take.
I don’t think he liked me though.
I’ve known Evans since we played in a Philadelphia tournament together in 2008, and in the early going we were chummy friends. Several years later, mostly—I believe—because of the way I comported myself in a number of online discussions with other Scrabble players in TWL/CSW arguments, Evans’s opinion of me had seemed to cool off, but nothing about my opinion of him had changed. Evans’s negative attitude about me had come out in little ways earlier, but there was one particular interaction on Facebook that I think is worth mentioning.
This was probably in 2013 or 2014, well before anything was going on between him and Jennifer, possibly before I knew her. I got into some explosive arguments on Facebook about the TWL/CSW divide. Evans wasn’t even participating in these discussions, but he observed them.
Evans commented in a different place on Facebook, I believe on a post by our mutual friend Marsh Richards, about what an asshole I was. This wasn’t an oblique mention, as in the link above. This time he specifically named and attacked me. I commented on Marsh’s post saying that I was going to respond to him but wasn’t going to do it there so as not to pollute her post.
I then made a post directly on his Facebook timeline telling him multiple times to go fuck himself and calling out his hypocrisy. From my point of view he often engaged in very similar argumentation to what I did online, but for some reason he was eager to criticize me for behavior that was much like his own. He neither responded to nor deleted my post or the ensuing comments. Several other friends spoke up and argued with me further. In the course of that argument, I also revealed that years earlier he had made some anonymous insulting posts on another Scrabbler’s Livejournal, and a lot of other people had assumed the posts were from me. He had never spoken up to admit the anonymous posts were his, and he allowed other people to go on thinking that they were from me.
The post on his Facebook timeline was an ugly moment, but the argument soon ended. Tempers calmed, and we all went on with the rest of our lives. I personally held no grudge toward Evans about it. My feeling was that I would not let an attack stand without a response, but once I said my piece I was done. In retrospect, I definitely could have used nicer language and not come down as hard on the guy as I did, but I still feel I was justified in attacking him and standing up for myself, because he initiated the encounter by attempting to talk behind my back, naming me, and insulting me.
For the next several years—right up until the New Orleans 2017 tournament—Evans and I continued to hang out in the same social group at Scrabble tournaments and go to group dinners and other events together. He never brought up anything about the Facebook incident in real life. If he had mentioned it and told me anything about how much it bothered him, I would have unhesitatingly apologized for my language and how hard I was on him. I would have communicated clearly that it was water under the bridge to me, but that if he still held a grudge I didn’t blame him. Then I likely would have asked him what I could do to make things better. But actually confronting interpersonal issues and improving the situation is not Evans’s style, as you will see much more of later in the story.
From that point forward, Evans pretty much never initiated conversation with me directly. I was often at the center of conversation with our mutual friends, and it seemed to me that whenever I was talking, Evans was very interested in what I had to say. I often felt like he was the person in the room who was most paying attention to every word from me, but he minimized any direct interaction with me. I didn’t like him any less than before, and whatever antipathy there was was completely unidirectional from him toward me. I didn’t worry or care about it, but I noticed it. I figured if he ever needed to resolve something with me, he needed to speak up and deal with me directly. Otherwise, it was his own issue.
When Evans and I sat down to play in New Orleans, after we put the tiles away I reached out my arm to shake his hand, as I am always in the habit of doing before games. However, he startled me when he refused to shake my hand. He didn’t say anything and just angrily shook his head. I had been oblivious until that moment to the fact that his body language was showing a massive amount of anger toward me. When we played, he spoke the minimum he had to, just to announce the scores. Other than that, he never said an intelligible word. He didn’t want to look me in the eye, and the only other communication I got was guttural noises.
Evans has been pretty much the same every other time I’ve seen him in the three years since. While I think that Jennifer’s fear of me has calmed down over time, his hatred of me has seemingly only hardened.
Evans got ahead early in that game and might have won anyway, but I made a crucial error of playing a phony bingo. Evans immediately shouted “Challenge!” before stopping the clock. While this is the correct thing to do in the game situation, he said it much more loudly than was necessary. We walked over to the challenge computer and got the verdict that the word was unacceptable. He immediately jumped up as if he were doing a touchdown dance, pumping his fist and bursting “YESSSSSS!” in the middle of the room. He was childishly gloating over besting me on a challenge.
I said nothing and went on to lose by about 100 points, but on the inside I was amused. He won the battle, but he lost the war. I could tell that I was in his head. I owned him now. Winning or losing against him was the same as it was against any other opponent, but he hated me so much that he was likely to go on tilt if things started going poorly against me in future games.
Something else started happening at this New Orleans tournament too, and my first observation of it was during my arrival at the airport, a few hours before I met up with Jason on Friday night, though I did not initially understand that it was related. When I got to the luggage carousel, I saw Rob Robinsky waiting for his bag. I walked up to him and tried to give him a friendly greeting, but he immediately flinched and reacted to me very coldly. I didn’t understand this at all, as he and I had always gotten along well before that, but I just assumed he might have been having a bad moment and didn’t worry about it.
It wasn’t until I started interacting with other Scrabble players at the tournament that I gleaned what was happening. Jennifer must have told a bunch of our mutual friends that I was harassing her, and they were turning on me, without ever telling me why or asking me what happened. I realized this when I spoke to other friends in the evening about dinner plans and started getting evasive answers. I immediately sensed what was happening. My friends were having a group dinner including Jennifer and Evans, and I wasn’t invited because they didn’t want me there. I didn’t fight it or try to explain anything at the time. On a couple of occasions out at bars, I tried to start telling a few Scrabblers a little bit of what I was going through, but I got shut down quickly. It was clear my friends were in no mood to talk about it, and I could see this wasn’t going to be the time and place to get the sympathy I needed.
The social awkwardness I faced in New Orleans with other Scrabble players who were mutual friends of Jennifer, Evans, and me was only the beginning of a change in the tenor of my relationships with many people that has persisted for over three years, from January 2017 to the present day. Many of my relationships with people I had known for the better part of two decades—far longer than any of us knew Jennifer—became strained. Some dropped out of my life almost entirely. Most often, I still interacted with people in a quasi-normal way, but I could just tell that they felt differently about me, though they never had the nerve and directness to discuss what was on their mind with me.
Epilogue
The night before the New Orleans tournament, when I tried to explain to Jason Broersma that the reason I wanted to talk to Jennifer was for closure, he said that she didn’t owe me that. I agree with that. I think it would have been wise of her to have that conversation with me ahead of time, as it would have relieved the tension for her and not made the scene in the tournament room so uncomfortable for her. However, there is no sense in which she had any moral obligation to do so.
But there’s another moral issue colliding with that one. Just as she has the right not to say anything, I have the right to say something. No one gets to treat me like shit for two years in a relationship, and then get involved with a guy I’ve known far longer than I’ve known her, and then ghost me, and then put herself in a position where she is literally sitting down at a table in front of me—nobody gets to do all those things without getting a piece of my mind. That is a matter of me setting my own boundaries. You don’t get to sit in front of me without seeing the emotional effect of your actions upon me. I have the right to speak my mind to whoever crosses my path. What I did in that email was assert that right.
I believe that I did nothing morally wrong, both in my communications to Jennifer before the New Orleans tournament and in my behavior at the tournament. My communication was ineffective in bringing out the desired result of a dissolution of the tension between us prior to meeting at the tournament, and the emotional state I was in at the time definitely affected my ability to communicate as calmly and effectively as possible. But my ineffectiveness was not a moral failing. That is an important distinction in my mind.
I have serious doubts that we would have reached a better resolution even if I had been able to communicate better. I think that Jennifer’s insistence on not talking to me ahead of time and in bringing herself to a tournament where we would have to sit across the board in a disastrously tense situation was probably inevitable, regardless of how much better I might have written those emails.
At the same time, I recognize that it was an extremely tough time emotionally for both of us and that we were both more reactive because of it. Although Evans undoubtedly behaved in the most inappropriate way in the tournament room, I understood that his reactions came from a place of pain in seeing Jennifer in distress, and I had no way of knowing how she had depicted the situation to him. I would hope that a person in Evans’s position would talk to me about what had happened in a reasonable way before jumping off the rails with anger, but it is easy for me to forgive his behavior in the heat of the moment.
I do not hold any grudge whatsoever for anything that Jennifer or Evans did up to this point in the story. That includes both the way Jennifer behaved before the tournament and the way Evans behaved at the tournament. In my head, I’ve already completely forgiven her for ghosting me and not taking the picture down, and him for his hateful behavior toward me during our game.
However, what I have not forgiven is all of their behavior toward me and affecting me in the more than three years of time since the 2017 New Orleans tournament, which I will address in the next part. I have been very angry and distressed over the last three years because of the social fallout I have experienced and the opportunities that I have been denied to play Scrabble, all things that were precipitated by the events I have described so far. These emotions have been apparent to many around me and have undoubtedly exacerbated my problems. My emotional response was not to what you have read already, but to what is coming.
You may judge my actions in this part of the story differently than I do. However, it will not even be the slightest bit controversial in the rest of this story, covering all of the time from after the New Orleans tournament to the present day, that my behavior toward Jennifer and Evans has been beyond reproach. I believe the historical record will vindicate that I have gone above and beyond by being understanding and reasonable even while they have behaved in hateful, cliquish, and destructive ways. Furthermore, they have avoided any communication with me, preventing this situation from getting fixed. As you will see, the path that Jennifer and Evans took from here would end up having negative effects not only on me but also more widely on our Scrabble community.
My relationship with Jennifer and Evans is not, however, the main reason that I am writing this. It is instead my relationship with the rest of the community, both how people have responded directly to me and how they have not stepped up in the face of odious behavior by Evans and Jennifer.
For a long time I haven’t wanted to bring up anything about the situation with Evans and Jennifer to other Scrabble players, for many reasons:
I truly wasn’t holding an emotional grudge, even though they were, but I thought that if I spoke up to complain about what they were doing and how they were treating me, it would come across like I was also holding a grudge.
Jennifer painted an image in other people’s heads that I was an angry harasser. I knew that if I spoke up and showed any anger at all about her or Evans that it would play into this perception and undermine people believing me.
Most of the time when I crossed paths with other Scrabble players was at a tournament, and I didn’t want to dig up an emotional subject at a time when I needed to focus and play Scrabble well.
I believe that good friends would have asked me what happened and listened to my side of the story instead of treating me differently while never talking to me about what happened. I don’t think the onus should be on me to win back people who have treated me in such a way, nor do I necessarily want to win them back.
I spent more than a year after the New Orleans 2017 tournament saying nothing about these events to almost everyone in Scrabble. I only started talking to other people in the community about these events much later because of other actions that Jennifer and Evans took. There were several longtime close friends with whom I never broached a conversation until 2019 or 2020. There are many others with whom I still have not discussed these matters.
After I first wrote out the entire story, I realized that it bifurcated at this point into two mostly separate plotlines: the continued interactions I have had with Jennifer and Evans, which have been very limited, and the interactions I have had with the rest of my Scrabble community, which have been plentiful. I believe that some of the context of my stories with other Scrabble players is necessary to fully appreciate what has happened, but I cannot bring in that full story without making what remains to be told significantly longer. I have edited and condensed the next part to include only a few anecdotes between me and other Scrabble players, either because they are important to the story or particularly emblematic of the problems I have dealt with.
On the other hand, I have judged that it is important not to omit any of the major details of the interactions I have had with Jennifer and Evans, because I do not want to give any possible appearance of a lopsided or biased depiction of events. The story will include every communication I have had with Jennifer or Evans and every time that we have been in the same place. In the appendices, I will also include screenshots of all of our communications, starting with the full history of text messages between me and Jennifer in November of 2016.
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.
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.
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.
