Like all who upset the mediocrities, you have many enemies.
Georges Daniel de Monfreid, Letter to Paul Gauguin
As I already described in detail in The Gaslighting, there has been a current of thought in the words of a number of Scrabble leaders who contributed to the unjust suspensions and bans of me that I need to show contrition for what I did in the stories between myself, Jennifer, Evans, and Lola. I explained there that the entire line of thought was a disingenuous attempt to maintain a false narrative of me, and that the particular phrasing about me needing to show contrition was probably something cooked up by WGPO’s lawyers in order to obfuscate the ways they had attacked me and dodge legal liability for the damage they did.
Furthermore, I believe this line of argument was part of an attempt to discredit me as someone who does not take responsibility for his actions and blames everyone else for his problems. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have a very strong sense of personal responsibility, and I know well that I contribute to every interpersonal dynamic that I am involved in. I am very good, much stronger than most humans, at acknowledging my mistakes and admitting my guilt.
However, the story of my banning from Scrabble is one in which I truly have zero guilt. All of the guilt lies on the shoulders of the accusers who bore false witness against me, with the admitted purpose of getting me banned from the game entirely1, and the corrupt actors in the leadership of Scrabble associations who helped them succeed. I have explained over and over again that my only guilt was in a few emails and text messages to Jennifer in December 2016 to January 2017, and that I apologized for that in 2018, long before this blog existed and even longer before the Scrabble associations got involved in any way. This was not a serious enough wrongdoing to suspend me for a single tournament Scrabble game. No attempts at disciplining me for those words were even started for nearly two years after I admitted and revealed those communications, and I was completely welcome at all Scrabble tournaments except the ones run by Jennifer and Evans.
Furthermore, I have absolutely nothing to apologize to Lola for.
If you read between the lines, John Chew even admitted my almost complete lack of guilt toward Jennifer in his response to my appeal of NASPA’s suspension.
John Chew and NASPA delayed nearly a full year (from September 23rd, 2022 to September 18th, 2023) in giving me any rationale for why I had been suspended, simply citing three mystery violations of the Code of Conduct.
In April 2022, Jennifer Clinchy made an all out attack on my character, falsely accusing me of numerous horrible things and falsely depicting our private life in a slanderous way. Not only was everything she wrote about me a lie, but the vast majority of it was not something that a Scrabble association should have been adjudicating at all. It was a character assassination designed to get people in Scrabble to hate me so much that they would grotesquely overstep their authority and participate in this attack on me, and it worked.
The only thing relating to Jennifer that John Chew cited as a justification for banning me was the exact phrase in the January 5th, 2017 email that I had apologized for. He then intentionally misinterpreted one sentence from my July 2020 blog post The Crucible to ascribe malicious intent to me when there was none. This post came two years after I had ever been in the same place with Jennifer, and it was me describing only my inner thoughts, not my actions, at a time that was nine days later than the only action toward Jennifer that he could find to criticize me for.
Essentially, John Chew admitted that none of Jennifer’s other accusations against me carried any weight at all, and yet neither NASPA nor any other Scrabble association has deigned to hold her in any way responsible for her life-destroying defamation of me. Furthermore, I had already admitted to the one thing I had actually done wrong toward Jennifer almost two years before this campaign to get me banned began. This was not a case of me evading or denying responsibility. This was a case of me proactively taking responsibility long before anyone had taken any disciplinary action related to this story.
John Chew spent more time using Lola’s stories about me as justification for banning me, but every word he wrote about that was deception. He made the assertion that I harassed Lola with absolutely nothing to support that claim. Furthermore, he conveniently ignored the fact that I am a completely reliable and honest witness, while Lola’s testimony and my disproof of many parts of it made it obvious that she is a completely unreliable and dishonest witness.
Then he did exactly what the Clinchys did, which was to drag the irrelevant Darryl Day story into this to further slander my character, only because his arguments for suspending me were so weak that he needed something else to get people in the Scrabble community to hate me and take his side.
My first lawyer Clifford Davidson did his initial interpretation of my documents in October 2022, almost a year before John Chew wrote this document. Though at the time he said I did not have any grounds for a lawsuit against NASPA, that quite possibly might have changed after John Chew sent me this defamatory document, in which he leaned into and further supported the slanderous false narratives that the Clinchys and Lola had written about me.
Furthermore, John Chew’s later actions in banning me for life from NASPA in June 2025 despite me having already made public statements that I would never play for NASPA again as long as he was running it make it obvious that his motive was not to carry out any necessary disciplinary action within NASPA but only to further the false narrative about me and to influence WESPA to ban me.
In summary, John Chew was not just influenced by the defamation of me. He actively participated in it and escalated it.
War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.
William Tecumseh Sherman
More recently, a few Scrabble leaders have voiced the idea to me that I ought to show some contrition for aggressive verbal attacks on social media of John Chew, Chris Lipe, and a few other people in the Scrabble world for the ways in which they contributed to the banning of me, or did not fight strongly enough on my behalf, or gullibly believed defamatory things that were said about me.
All of my social media attacks of this nature started well after the end of summer 2023. From January 6th, 2017 to the end of summer 2023, a period of over six and a half years, all of my behavior toward all parties in this story and all of my communications toward the Clinchys and toward all of the Scrabble leaders who contributed to my banning had been exceedingly polite and gentlemanly, despite escalating abuse and wrongdoing against me. As I have already said several times to the people who have asked me to show contrition for these social media attacks, I tried being civil and keeping my communications with only the relevant people in Scrabble leadership, and it did not work with any of them. They have completely exhausted my good will and they deserve all tongue-lashings that I gave them. Furthermore, blaming me for expressing anger toward my abusers rather than blaming themselves for the abusive behavior that got me this angry is precisely a case of them failing to take responsibility for their actions.
I have made it very clear from my YouTube videos and interactions such as my discussion with Lukeman Owo-Owolabi in Accra, Ghana shortly before he became WESPA President that I am a very rational and honest person who will behave civilly to people as long as they treat me with respect and honesty. I will be civil until I am not, and at that point you should be asking yourselves, “what did I do wrong to incur the wrath of Dave Koenig?”
Quite simply, this is the me that you get when you so drastically wrong me by getting me banned from Scrabble for over three years when there was never a valid justification for banning me for a single game, when winning the World Scrabble Championship is my most important goal in life, and when you literally caused me psychiatrist-diagnosed PTSD through your disgusting actions against me. And let us be clear, the people in Scrabble leadership who banned me did more to contribute to my PTSD than the Clinchys and Lola did, not only John Chew and Chris Lipe, but the two of them most of all.
I am not contrite for anything I did toward Jennifer and Lola, aside from the one thing I already apologized to Jennifer for seven years ago, and I am not contrite for any of the social media attacks I have made against other Scrabble players from late 2023 to the present day. Asking for or expecting contrition out of me for any of these things is insulting and inappropriate, and no one has any right to continue gatekeeping me from tournament Scrabble by seeking contrition they do not deserve.
I do not owe any of you contrition for anything, but I am going to give it anyway. Not to assuage your egos and support the false stories that you continue to cling to. But only because if I take an honest look at the history of my romantic relationship with Jennifer, I can admit that I did make some mistakes that contributed to this whole mess. There is no contrition that I owe Jennifer for this, but there is a little bit of contrition that I owe the Scrabble community as a whole and Evans Clinchy in particular for laying some of the groundwork that has led to this unmitigated disaster in all of our lives.
The trust of the innocent is the liar’s most useful tool.
Bo Dallas
Before Jennifer and I ever took our romantic relationship to Scrabble tournaments, I learned a lot about what a deeply unethical, narcissistic, and dishonest person she is. I protected her from the Scrabble community learning many of these things about her. I influenced her to start playing CSW, which paved the way for her to become a prominent person in Scrabble leadership and tournament organization, and which led to her meeting Evans, whom she eventually married. And that is what I am most sorry for. Evans, your life would have been so much better if I had not caused you to meet her.
I mentioned in my response to the NASPA incident report that Lola helped me edit my first draft of the story between Jennifer, Evans, and me into the first two posts on this blog, The Crucible and The Fallout. That first draft was 125 pages long, and I wrote it for my own therapeutic purposes, knowing full well that there were many details that I did not intend to publish to the world.
I am releasing a passage from that first draft, specifically the first 11 pages, which gives a summary of how Jennifer and I started dating and almost the entirety of our romantic relationship between 2014 and 2016.
Before anyone criticizes me for putting this story out when it should not be the business of the Scrabble associations, I agree with you! That is why I never published these things sooner, even though Jennifer never hesitated to say false and horrible things about me that should not be the business of the Scrabble associations. However, Jennifer has perversely inverted justice, creating a Scrabble community that values and protects her while doing the opposite to me, even though the record will show that I was a highly moral human being, while she was an absolutely terrible person.
You can read through that passage if you want the full details, but I am going to summarize the most important points here.
Jennifer and I first became romantically interested in each other when she was married to her first husband, but we did not get involved until after she told her husband she wanted a divorce. Our first few dates were in Northern Virginia, where I lived. But after our first date in Washington DC, where she lived, she asked me to drive her back to her apartment building. She then invited me up to the rooftop, but not to the apartment, which made me suspicious. Questioning from me gradually revealed that her husband was not as out of her life as she had led me to believe. Not only did he still have things in the house and sometimes come back, when she had previously gotten me to believe that he was entirely moved out, but I also learned that while we were on our dinner date she had texted her husband, persuading him to pick her mother up at the airport that evening.
I stopped dating her for several months after that, but we eventually got back together. Then she refused to be in an exclusive relationship with me, but she told me that she was only going on first dates with other guys and not having sex with them. After I was on the west coast for a week, I came back to DC, and the first time I saw Jennifer was when we traveled up to Ontario for the 2015 Niagara Falls tournament together, where we stayed in a bed and breakfast that Jennifer had reserved for the two of us. On the first night in Niagara Falls, Jennifer revealed to me that she had been cheating on me with another guy for the entire week I had been gone and that she did not want to date me anymore after this trip.
In what became a terrible pattern, we again stopped dating for over a month but eventually got back together. She told me that she had bought concert tickets for an event in Pittsburgh that she had planned to go to with the other guy, but she said that she would not make the trip and was going to sell the tickets. She also was emphatic that she would not ever see the other guy again. This was in late June 2015.
In late July, Jennifer and I decided to travel together to Australia for the 2015 World Scrabble Championship, which was in November in Perth. We bought a number of different plane tickets to travel around Australia together and I also paid for a number of nonrefundable lodgings for the two of us. One day after we put all this money down for this trip, Jennifer revealed to me that she had not sold the concert tickets and was going to Pittsburgh with the other guy for the concert that upcoming weekend.
Despite that hitch, we ended up repairing things between us and going to Australia together. While we were there she flirted with both Jesse Day and Evans Clinchy in front of me, though much more inappropriately with Evans. I had previously only told the part about her flirting with Evans. She did this in a group gathering at which all of the attendees knew that she and I were traveling together and sharing lodgings.
I have been convinced for a long time that the reason Jennifer panicked in response to my January 5th, 2017 email in the days leading up to the New Orleans tournament was because she was afraid I would reveal some or all of those stories in the tournament room. That is what is most threatening to narcissists. Having the world see them for the awful human beings that they actually are and for having done the terrible things that they actually did.
The irony is that I had no desire to reveal those things to the other tournament Scrabble players. My panicked reaction in that email was all about trying to protect myself from mental duress of seeing her for the first time in months when I suspected she was dating my former friend, and to ensure that I could be in my best mental state to play good Scrabble.
There is one more story from that time with Jennifer that I did not write about in that passage, but which I still remember vividly. After Jennifer’s soon-to-be ex-husband was truly out of her apartment completely, on an occasion when I was in the apartment, she said very viciously that she was going to make sure he got nothing in the divorce. This viciousness seemed completely out of place to me, when she was the one who blindsided him by asking for a divorce. It was the memory of this exact moment that caused me to read Jennifer’s ghosting of me in December 2016, her initial refusal to take down a Facebook profile picture of herself at my apartment, and then her immediate taking down of the picture after I told her that I had blocked her and could no longer see it as her intentionally trying to hurt me. I very much thought she was forcing us to see each other for the first time in months in that tournament room without having any communication ahead of time in order to make me uncomfortable.
I did not have any conception that Jennifer was afraid of that interaction until my meeting with Jason Broersma a day earlier. And when I saw that Jason was right and that she was afraid, I instantly readjusted my perspective about the whole thing, and felt no need to say anything publicly at all about our history.
The even bigger irony is that the awful behavior of Jennifer and other people she has influenced over the nine years since that time that has finally forced me to say the exact things that she was afraid of me saying.
Has anyone who has been following this whole saga figured out yet that when I wrote to Jennifer on January 5th, 2017,
So if you do not meet with me before New Orleans, I will say what I need to say2 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 then when I wrote to Chris Lipe on May 29, 2025,
I am going to both Budapest and Accra. There is a 100% chance I will be in both cities during their tournaments. It is in your political best interest to make sure that I play in both tournaments. If you keep me out of either or both, there will be greater damage to your political career and your life.
I was not making a threat on either of them?
I was prophesying. Jennifer surely should regret by now that she never spoke to me before the 2017 New Orleans tournament, as one quick conversation could have easily averted all of this agony, embarrassment, and cost for the both of us and so many others in the Scrabble community. If Chris does not believe yet that the path he took in keeping me out of both the Budapest and Accra tournaments is going to lead to massive reputational damage and political consequences for him, he will figure it out soon enough.
I did not attack either of them by saying these things. I held them accountable for the things they did, and all of their suffering because of this is their own fault.
However, I failed the Scrabble community by not breaking off my romantic relationship with Jennifer sooner. I failed it by helping her befriend so many people in the American CSW community. It would have been better if I had been less classy and gossiped to many of my friends in Scrabble about the terrible things Jennifer had done in our relationship, because it might have stopped her from getting as much influence as she did. I am deeply sorry for contributing to poisoning this community with Jennifer Lee Clinchy.
Evans, I am most sorry to you. You have married a horrible human being, and if you two ever split I am sure that she will do just as terrible things to you as she did to me. There is an important reason that Jennifer married her first husband and you, but that my relationship with her never resulted in marriage. It is because both you and her first husband made less money than her.
When I was with Jennifer, we were both well paid, but I made significantly more money. She was blithely obvious in some of the things she said about how the money I made was not important to her. I could read between the lines and understood very well that she liked having control over a man by making more money than he did. The fact that she could never get that kind of control over me is a big part of the reason that our relationship did not work out.
But I have your back, Evans. If you do divorce her, I will be happy to testify in court on your behalf about what a deeply unethical, narcissistic, and dishonest person she is.
There is now a companion video to this post here.
Footnotes
- Evans Clinchy wrote “I am asking for his banishment for life from our community,” at the end of his statement that was part of the original incident report. ↩︎
- which ended up being nothing ↩︎