To be silent is to be complicit.
Richard Edelman
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.
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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.
- In evasion of a question of whether she had ever contacted the police about me prior to 2022, she said that she “contacted federal officials” about me, when the truth was that she pulled strings at the White House to get me gifts and take me on nice dates.
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.
↩︎ - Figure 2, page 2 of Screenshots of Corroborating Evidence ↩︎