Hypocrisy is an homage that vice pays to virtue.
François de La Rochefoucauld
A new Executive Board of the World English-language Scrabble Players Association (WESPA) was formed in November. Herein is the short history of my interaction with the new board.
From: Dave Koenig
To: Lukeman Omo-Owolabi
Date: November 26, 2025
Subject: RespectDear Lukeman,
I need to follow up with you to address directly a number of things that we talked about in our meeting in the lobby of The Palms by Eagles in Accra.
As I said then, I was grateful that you gave me the time to talk about my banning from Scrabble. As I stated shortly afterward, in my blog post The Reckoning, I was not upset at you for not advocating more strongly for me to participate in the tournament1 and to attend the WESPA BGM2. However, you were not yet WESPA President at that time.
I strongly disagree with your characterization in your recent Facebook message to me that “you and I had a comprehensive meeting in Ghana” (about my ban from tournament play) and that “the meeting was conclusive enough and there was a clear understanding between us.”
This letter is the first time that I am talking to you about the issues related to my banning with you as the sitting WESPA President. Therefore you are now in a position of greater responsibility and power, and you are accountable for the actions of the entire WESPA Executive Board, not just your own.
I believe I showed you a lot more respect in that conversation in Accra than you showed me. I disagreed strongly with some things that you said, and I believe that some of them were insulting and disrespectful to me. However, I remained completely nonconfrontational and did not call you out on these issues at the time for two main reasons:
(1) I was still hopeful that you would advocate for me to be at the WESPA BGM, even if I was not allowed into the tournament.
(2) I did not want to embarrass you in front of Limo Kipkemoi, who was also present for our meeting.
I specifically asked for a video chat in lieu of this letter for an important reason: Because I needed to address your suboptimal behavior and I wanted to give you an opportunity to change tack before I produced any written evidence of it.
You still have an opportunity to change how you are dealing with me in this situation, and if you do treat me with more respect and justness moving forward, this letter and the recording of our conversation will probably never need to be read or heard by anyone else.
However, I may still need to pursue legal action related to this in the future—not necessarily against you personally or WESPA, but possibly. Accordingly, you are hereby notified that you should preserve all documents relating to me and my suspensions and bannings from tournament play. This includes not only official WESPA communications but any private communications you have had related to this, and it specifically includes the recording you made of our conversation. Both Limo Kipkemoi and I observed you making that recording.
———————
Before I get into the specifics of what you said in that meeting, I want to remind you of a number of things you wrote in the WESPA Manifesto that you produced when you announced your candidacy for WESPA President.“WESPA must improve how it connects with players, fans, and partners. Under my leadership, we will make communication clearer, more engaging, and more accessible.”
“Clearer communication to build trust and increase engagement.”
“Ensure leadership is based on merit and a commitment to global Scrabble growth.”
“Focus on inclusive membership criteria and more transparent governance.”
I took your words at face value, and I wanted to believe that you were committed to turning WESPA into a more professional, trustworthy, and transparent organization.
You also suggested to me in our video chat many months ago that you were unhappy with the leadership of Chris Lipe, Carol Johnsen, and Jason Broersma and that you wanted to advocate for a rehearing of my situation once you were President.
As I explained to you in our meeting in Accra, though I was glad that you wanted to advocate for me later, that was not sufficient for my needs. I am 48 years old and will probably be 50 by the time the next WESPA or World Scrabble Championship happens. I believe that I am at the prime of my playing ability right now, and this year was my best opportunity to win the World Scrabble Championship. I might still win a World Championship in the future, but my chances are likely to diminish with age, and also with the sustained mental duress of Scrabble leaders such as yourself continuing to do me wrong by obstructing me from playing in tournaments and getting justice.
———————
You made three requests of me in that conversation in Accra:
(1) Leave the premises and not come back.
(2) Stop naming people in social media posts and videos.
(3) Write an apology on social media, not to anyone specific, but for my general behavior over the last several months. (To my best understanding the “general behavior” you were referring to was publicly naming, and thereby attacking, people who had committed wrongdoing against me in Scrabble politics and in my fight for justice.)
All three of these were inappropriate and insulting requests to ask of me, but the one that I found most outrageous was number (2).
If you want to build professional, trustworthy, and transparent Scrabble governance, then accountability is an extremely important part of that. The people I criticized on social media were Scrabble political leaders. It is outrageous to suggest that Scrabble political leaders should not be named and held accountable for their actions that disadvantage and abuse a tournament player. Your desire to spare these people embarrassment runs directly counter to your proclaimed goal for professionalism in our leadership.
Everyone I criticized on social media was a Scrabble political leader who played a role in obstructing me from playing Scrabble with two exceptions: Elie Dangoor and Shelley Stevens.
In the case of Shelley Stevens, she was directly influencing her partner Stefan Rau, who is on the NASPA Advisory Board that treated me terribly, and she inserted herself into this situation by choosing to get involved uninvited with a conversation that was supposed to be between my former lawyer and Stefan Rau about my court case and then telling outright lies to my lawyer in that recorded conversation, as revealed in my blog post The Sycophants.In the case of Elie Dangoor, he is no longer an elected official, but he is still a former WESPA President and significant donor to tournament Scrabble. Chris Lipe warped Elie’s mind to the point where he believed false things about me which led him to repeatedly attack me in private messages over a long period of time, even after I clearly communicated to him multiple times that I did not want to speak to him anymore. It was only by publicly shaming Elie that I was able to get him to snap back to reality and to stop harassing me.
The larger lesson from the Elie story is that the Clinchys and Chris Lipe built a campaign of hatred against me which only continued to escalate until I started fighting back against all of the people who kept piling on more abuse.
———————
Regarding (3) on your list of requests, I am going to give you a quote from an email I sent to Peggy Fehily not long ago:
All of my very limited communications, to the Clinchys since January 6th, 2017 (the day after I sent the offending email that I later apologized for), to Lola ever since we stopped living together in June 2020, and to the Scrabble association leaders from April 2022 when I first received the incident report up until at least the end of summer 2023, were exceedingly polite and gentlemanly, despite ongoing abusive, dishonest, and immoral behavior toward me that the Clinchys had been perpetrating since early 2017 and that the Scrabble association leaders had been perpetrating since mid-2022.
That’s right, the Clinchys had already been abusing me for six years, and the Scrabble association leaders had already been abusing me for well over a year, and my behavior in response had been perfect.
My documentation that showed the entire set of accusations against me was false was perfect and comprehensive, and the only honest interpretation of it was that I had done nothing wrong, and that it was the Clinchys, Lola, and Steven Pellinen who had abused and defamed me.All of the social media communications from me that you and other people in the Scrabble world have criticized me for and think that I should apologize for only started well after the end of summer 2023.
I am not sorry for any of those communications, and I never will be. Everyone who has been shamed, hurt, or embarrassed by those communications deserves that, and the ways that I criticized and attacked people publicly were entirely virtuous acts. Being classy and keeping the communications only between myself and the relevant Scrabble leaders did not work with any of you. The number of people who wronged me and the number of immoral things they were doing only kept increasing. The only way to take the power back and make progress in ending this abuse of me was to start humiliating all of you and holding you publicly accountable.
It is very obvious that there are many people in Scrabble leadership who know how badly they were fooled by the Clinchys, Lola McKissen, Steven Pellinen, and Chris Lipe, and how much all those Scrabble leaders overstepped against me. I see that many of those people have continued to pile on more wrongdoing and interference out of fear for the legal trouble that they might be in if they admitted to their wrongdoing. John Karris, who has been involved with both NASPA and WGPO, essentially admitted that in a Facebook comment he wrote to me. I have no desire to pursue legal damages against anyone who stops doubling down, who publicly admits the lies and wrongdoing, and who makes public statements to restore my reputation.
———————
Your request (1) for me not to come back to the tournament was a personal insult, but it was frankly the least outrageous of the three. That is why it is the only one that I granted.
Let me remind you though that the only purported reason for me continuing to be banned from NASPA or WESPA now, and the only reason I was banned from the premises in Accra, more than three years after my initial ban began, is because I allegedly threatened the life of Chris Lipe. You and Chris know perfectly well that that was a bad faith interpretation of my words. If I was any kind of serious threat of violence against Chris Lipe, he would not have met me by himself at the Marina Mall food court, a block from the tournament hotel, the day before you and I talked in Accra.3
Yet you further insulted me by making a justification in that conversation that NASPA and WESPA had done a reasonable thing in banning me for those words. This lifetime ban was not anything resembling a professional or reasonable disciplinary process and was instead an attempt at writing a false narrative that NASPA was rejecting me when I had already rejected them.
Now NASPA and WESPA can argue that they were going on the best information they had at the time when you all made those decisions to ban me for life, but you all refused to ever have any dialogue with me about what I wrote to Chris and just made those decisions behind my back with me having no voice in the matter. What NASPA and WESPA did then was an attempt to control me.
What you did in our conversation in Accra was also an attempt to control me. You threatened to withhold justice from me if I did not obey your requests.
Justice for me is not a bargaining chip. It is not something you get to decide to withhold. It is not a means for you to get apologies that you do not deserve nor to end the embarrassment that you do deserve. I am not asking nor negotiating for justice. I am demanding it.
You are not in control of this situation, and you are not in control of me. What happens when the WESPA Board and Ghanaian Scrabble leadership continue to live the lies that Chris Lipe and the Clinchys have been spewing about me?
You get the Ghanaian Association President unnecessarily spending a bunch of money on security guards. You get video of one of those guards rushing at me and attempting to seize my phone blasted on the internet.4 You get further erosion of the faith of the Scrabble tournament population in the job that the WESPA Executive Board is doing.
You said to me in that conversation that I had done something wrong by attempting to sign up for the tournament online and then by flying to Accra to attempt to play in it. What I did was entirely virtuous and heroic. What I did was tantamount to Rosa Parks sitting at the front of a bus in 1955 and black protestors sitting at whites-only lunch counters at Woolworth in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1960. I made injustice visible.
You could have told a different story about me coming to Accra. I am one of the best Scrabble players in the world, and I have been extremely eager to come to Africa and play in a tournament there for a long time. I was so desirous to compete in the WESPA Championship there that I flew all the way from the west coast of the USA not knowing if I would be allowed to play. How many other top Scrabble players, such as David Eldar and Dave Wiegand, did not even bother to come to Accra?Despite all of the insults of that conversation in Accra and despite the implicit threat to withhold justice from me, I still wrote the prologue of the blog post The Reckoning in a way that made you look good and was supportive of you as WESPA President. I treated you with more respect than you deserved, even though you treated me with less respect than I deserved.
You have one opportunity to get back on a video chat with me, apologize for threatening to withhold justice from me, and begin a good faith dialogue about how we make justice happen. If you do, I will forgive everything you said to me in that conversation in Accra, and I will hold zero grudges toward you. I will keep this letter private, and I will not push for you to release the recording you made of our conversation. If you continue to obstruct me from having access to Scrabble tournaments, I can make no such promises.Sincerely,
Dave
There were two reasons that I gave Lukeman a large opportunity to save face and to backtrack from his implicit threat against me. It was not only because he said a lot of the right things about transparency and good governance in his campaign for WESPA President, and I optimistically hoped that he would live up to his words. It was also because he had shown me a lot of respect in our limited private communications prior to our meeting in Accra.
From: Lukeman Omo-Owolabi
To: Dave Koenig
Date: December 1, 2025
(via Facebook message)Dave,
After our meeting in Ghana, I have been very clear that I shall not be engaging you in a personal capacity on this matter going forward.
Please direct all your enquiries, comments, suggestions or questions to the WESPA Committee via info@wespa.org.
Thank you.
I immediately heeded Lukeman’s advice by contacting the WESPA Board. I even gave them a further opportunity to save face by starting the process of fixing the injustice done to me, so that I would not have to publish either the email above or this one.
From: Dave Koenig
To: info@wespa.org
Date: December 1-2, 20255
Subject: Ending my ban from ScrabbleDear WESPA Board,
On Tuesday, November 11th, Lukeman and I spoke in the lobby of The Palms by Eagles in Accra, Ghana. Limo Kipkemoi was also present for the entirety of the conversation. He participated a little bit but mostly observed. Lukeman recorded the conversation on his phone, as was observed by both me and Limo.
The previous time Lukeman and I had a verbal conversation was over video chat, and he had expressed a desire to rehear my banning from Scrabble in a more just way. However, in the conversation in Accra, Lukeman made an implicit threat to withhold justice from me if I did not obey three requests of his.
I attempted to give Lukeman a chance to reconsider his position and change tack both by asking for a follow-up video chat and by sending him a private email, in which I thoroughly outlined most of the contents of that conversation and called out Lukeman’s suboptimal behavior. Lukeman is now refusing to have any more personal discussion with me about my banning and has told me to follow up directly with the WESPA Board.
I am attaching a PDF of the email that I sent to Lukeman last Wednesday. The email doubled as a litigation hold letter, with instructions for Lukeman to retain all documents related to my banning, including the recording of the conversation. Erasure of that recording or any other relevant documents could result in legal penalties if there is another court case related to this.
On June 22nd, 2023, my former lawyer Marc Mohan already sent a similar litigation hold letter to the entire Executive Board of WESPA. Let this email stand as a reminder that that litigation hold is still in effect.
If members of the Board read my email to Lukeman and listen to the recording of our conversation, they will discover that my recounting of that conversation is completely accurate.
Please note that there are several live links in that PDF, including to the blog posts The Reckoning and The Sycophants and to public Facebook posts I made revealing Elie Dangoor’s repeated harassment of me over private message and the complete unjustness of the procedures by which NASPA and CoCo arrived at their “lifetime bans” of me.
I promised Lukeman that I would not share that email nor push for the release of the recording if he was willing to talk to me again and apologize for threatening to withhold justice from me. Alas, he has chosen a different course. That is why I am sharing the email with the entire board now and requesting that Lukeman let the entire board listen to the recording.
As I mentioned in the letter, I am not asking nor negotiating for justice. I am demanding it. I have a set of specific demands that the WESPA Executive Committee must meet, both to see that justice is served and to atone for its prior wrongdoing toward me.
(1) Give a fair hearing to my appeal to WESPA to strike down all bans of me from NASPA, which can only result in an immediate termination of all bans from me playing tournament Scrabble.
(2) Make a public admission that my banning was 0% my fault and 100% the fault of my accusers, who all bore false witness against me, and the leadership of CoCo, WGPO, NASPA, and WESPA, who defied the truth in order to make and enforce those bans. The reason that the WESPA Board should do this is not because I am demanding it, but because it is the only honest interpretation of the facts.
(3) Make a public apology to me for participating and being complicit in the defamation of my character.
These are not my only demands, but let me pause here and reiterate what I said in the email to Lukeman. I intend not to pursue any legal action against anyone in Scrabble leadership who agrees to all three of those demands. Furthermore, I am happy to work collaboratively with anyone on the board and their lawyers on coming up with a wording of the public admission and apology that minimizes their legal liability while still repairing my reputation.
(4) Remove Chris Lipe from the Executive Board of WESPA because of the massive number of unethical things he has done, not only in the story of my banning but in several other areas as well, all of which is outlined in The Reckoning.
(5) For doing more than anyone else in the leadership of WESPA to deceive the rest of the Board and other Scrabble leaders about my story, for abusing his power and influence to convince WESPA to uphold unjust suspensions and bans of me from other associations, despite there never being a good reason for suspending me for a single game, suspend Chris Lipe from holding any Scrabble leadership position and from directing or playing in any tournaments for a period of double the length of time and number of World Championships that I have been banned for.
I will be forgiving in accounting for that time in not starting the clock until the first day of the 2022 Scrabble Players Championship in the USA (July 23rd, 2022) since I had no plans to play in tournaments after my banning and prior to that. I will also be forgiving in accounting for that time by ending it on the last day of the 2025 WESPA Championship in Ghana (November 16, 2025), provided that WESPA expeditiously removes my ban so that I am not prevented from playing in any more tournaments. If there is a single future tournament that I am prevented from playing in, the count starts anew from July 23rd, 2022.
What this means is that Chris Lipe must be suspended for 2424 days and the next four World or WESPA Championships.
If Chris Lipe himself is willing to meet my first three demands, then that penalty can be reduced to the undoubled length of time and number of World Championships that I have been banned for, which is 1212 days and two World or WESPA Championships.
If the WESPA Board does not meet all of these demands, I will move forward by releasing the email I sent to Lukeman to the entire world and by calling publicly for him to release the recording of our conversation. Note that even if he is not willing to release the recording of the conversation, future litigation related to my banning (which does not need to be against Lukeman or WESPA) may compel him to give a copy of that recording to discovery. I will also continue in many other ways to hold WESPA publicly accountable for its continued obstruction of justice.
It is my sincere hope that the WESPA Executive Board will have a good faith conversation with me about getting justice for me (and for Chris Lipe) without the Board’s public reputation being damaged further by it forcing me to continue escalating this situation in the public eye.
Sincerely,
Dave Koenig
Despite my revelations about Chris Lipe’s massive misconduct in The Reckoning, he was reelected to the WESPA Board and now serves as its Secretary. Sudhir Kamath is the new Treasurer. Carol Johnsen and Jason Broersma, the former Secretary and Treasurer, are no longer on the board.
From: Chris Lipe
To: Dave Koenig
Cc: Lukeman Omo-Owolabi, Sudhir Kamath
Date: December 2, 2025
Subject: Re: Ending my ban from ScrabbleAcknowledging receipt. The message has been forwarded to the WESPA Committee
Respectfully,
C
This is still the only message I have received from the new WESPA Board. A week later, I sent one more email.
From: Dave Koenig
To: Chris Lipe
CC: Lukeman Omo-Owolabi, Sudhir Kamath, Limo Kipkemoi
Date: December 9, 2025
Subject: Re: Ending my ban from Scrabble(Adding Limo Kipkemoi to recipients)
Dear WESPA Executive Board,
It has been a week since I emailed the WESPA Board, and I have not heard anything back other than the acknowledgment of receipt of the emails.
I am going to need action by the WESPA Board this month to assure me that we are on a path toward justice, atonement, and repair. I am expecting full transparency in dealing with this.
Limo Kipkemoi messaged me on November 25th saying, “With the new committee in place, I will move that a team be formed to investigate this matter impartially.”6
In 2023, Carol Johnsen told me that a committee of Australians and New Zealanders was being formed to examine my case.7 However, the WESPA Board’s later communication and behavior was inconsistent with this messaging. I was never told who was on this alleged committee nor if they produced anything in writing to the WESPA Board.
If a new committee is formed, the membership of this committee should be public information and all findings of this committee should be shown to me in writing.
I would like to hear back from the WESPA Board no later than December 31st with an explanation of how we are moving forward toward justice and a deadline by which the process will be complete, preferably one that is expeditious as possible so that I can start playing in tournaments again.
If the WESPA Board does not satisfy me that it is making progress on this, on January 1st, 2026 I will publicly release my November 26th, 2025 email to Lukeman and publicly call for him to release the recording of our conversation in Accra.
Sincerely,
Dave Koenig
Lukeman, consider this my request to release the Accra file.
Footnotes
- The meeting was on the afternoon of November 11th, the day before the main event of the 2025 WESPA Championship began, in the hotel that was hosting the tournament. The WESPA Championship is the closest thing the competitive Scrabble community has to a World Championship, ever since the corporate owners of the game stopped allowing us to use that name. ↩︎
- The BGM is the Big General Meeting where the election of the new WESPA Board took place. Lukeman Omo-Owolabi, a native Nigerian who lives in Ireland and who has long been a tournament organizer and supporter both in the British Isles and in Africa, was running unopposed for WESPA President and would be elected a few days after our meeting. ↩︎
- I talked about the meeting with Chris Lipe in this video recorded earlier on the day I met with Lukeman. ↩︎
- The incident with the security guards is detailed toward the end of the video in the previous footnote, and there is a video and a photo of one of the guards in the comments. ↩︎
- I made an error in my calculation in the length of days that I had been suspended in my December 1st email and I sent a small addendum on December 2nd correcting my error. I have edited the original email and the correction together here for better readability. ↩︎
- Limo’s message was in direct response to me drawing his attention to the part of The Obstructionists which includes the documents linked in the next paragraph. I wrote to him: Specifically, I’m interested in (a) whether the picture that the rest of the Board got was consistent with the picture Carol and Lukeman were giving me over that correspondence, (b) whether the Board was told anything about this committee of 1 New Zealander and 2 Australians, including who was on the committee, and (c) whether anything in writing from that committee was ever presented to the WESPA Board. ↩︎
- The November 20, 2023 email from Carol Johnsen linked above was the first time she mentioned this committee of Australians and New Zealanders. She also sent a later email on December 18th, 2023 telling me that the committee had made a recommendation to the WESPA Board and to “expect the result within a couple of days.” That was the last I ever heard from Carol, and it took until January 7th, 2024 for Lukeman to email me WESPA’s refusal to admit my appeal. (Linked in the following sentence.)
The links in this paragraph and all of the footnotes were added to the emails for this blog. All other links in this post were part of the original emails. ↩︎