In March 2025 I knew that both Stefan Rau and Jason Broersma had talked to the reporter who was writing about my case. I could tell that the reporter’s attitude toward the story had changed. Some of the questions he asked me were so offtrack that I thought there was a good chance at least one of them had been duping him about the story. I decided it was time to track down the interviews that my former attorney Marc Mohan had done with both of them, to give them to the reporter in order to compare what these people had said two years earlier to what they were saying now.
I already shared the audio recording between Marc Mohan, Jason Broersma, and Sue Tremblay in The Gaslighting. I was very happy when I heard its contents. Although Jason and Sue did not get everything right, I believe that they were being honest about what things looked like from their point of view. I wrote in that post about the few things that they had wrong, but that should not distract from the fact that they got most of the major things right, including that the banning of me was a witch hunt orchestrated by the Clinchys. (Jason Broersma’s words, not mine.)
However, the interview between Marc Mohan, Stefan Rau, and Shelley Stevens was completely different. I was furious when I first heard it, partially because Stefan and Shelley sold me out and lied, but also because Marc Mohan showed his incompetence and lack of understanding of me and the case. Furthermore, though we had not talked about the interview a great deal while I was still working with him, the little bit he told me was a misrepresentation of what actually happened in that conversation.
There was a time when I would have considered Stefan my best friend in the Scrabble community. When I was going through my divorce in 2007 to 2008, he and his then wife Terry Kang were a frequent source of emotional support, and I stayed at their home in Connecticut a number of times. Later, I moved to Washington DC, and they moved to Baltimore, and we stayed in touch. During that period there was a phase when Terry got off her medications, had a psychotic break, and alienated almost everyone in the Scrabble community. I tried to be a source of support to both Terry and Stefan when just about everyone else in the community had turned their back. Once at a lunch just between the two of us, Stefan acknowledged how good a friend I had been. As much as the situation must have been emotionally terrible for him, I was impressed by how objectively and clearly he saw and talked about it.
I told Stefan that I would not blame him one way or another if he stayed with Terry or split with her, and I would do the best I could to support him no matter what. Ultimately, they did stay together at that time. Their divorce did not come until much later. Terry also got back on her medications and rebuilt her life in a major way. They eventually moved to Upstate New York, and for the most part we have not been as close as we were in the previous years.
Eventually Stefan and Terry split up, and afterward Shelley Stevens moved in with Stefan. Regardless of how they felt about each other, I was as far as I knew on very good terms with all three of them. Much later, I would send a bunch of nasty private messages to Stefan and publicly excoriate Shelley Stevens on Facebook, but this interview was many months before any of that happened.
Stefan was on the NASPA Advisory Board that had the disciplinary hearing in September 2022 about the incident report that was filed against me in April of that year. I fully expected that Stefan would have been completely on my side at that time, as I knew him to be a bright, rational guy, and furthermore one who was good friends with me and not particularly fond of the Clinchys, as of our conversation in Edinburgh in 2019. I assumed when Stefan and Jason Idalski gave me contradictory information via text message the day after NASPA’s hearing that Stefan was the one telling me the truth. I also assumed that having Stefan on that board was in my favor and that he would do his best to advocate for justice, which means me getting no punishment and my accusers being punished, because that is the way the facts indisputably point.
This interview was on May 3rd, 2023, the same day that Marc interviewed Jason and Sue. I know this because Marc emailed me in the morning confirming that he was conducting both interviews that day. As previously mentioned, The Crucible and The Fallout were the only things on this website at the time. When Stefan and Shelley talk about the blog, they are only referring to those two posts.
Furthermore, I was not yet making public any of the details of my communications with NASPA and the other Scrabble associations, nor the evidence I had collected for the lawsuit, which had only begun slightly more than a month before, and I had not shared any of those details with Stefan and Shelley.
Importantly, when John Chew revealed to me on November 15th, 2022 the September 9th, 2022 documents that NASPA had received well before my hearing, he copied the email only to the NASPA Executive Committee and not the NASPA Advisory Board. So it is entirely possible that Stefan Rau did not know that I already knew about the hidden documents.
For a long time I tried to give Stefan the benefit of the doubt and thought there was a possibility that John Chew might not have shared those documents with Stefan before the meeting. However, the reporter was later able to confirm that both Stefan and Jason Idalski did see those documents before the hearing about me.
In summary, at the time of NASPA’s hearing Stefan had access to the original accusatory documents of April 14th, 2022, my response of September 6th, 2022, and the additional accusations of September 9th, 2022. I did not have access to that last set of documents at the time of NASPA’s decision, and even at the time of this interview Stefan might have thought my lawyer and I did not know they existed.
Stefan very clearly says at about 22:00 into the interview that he believed NASPA’s process was fair, which is an absurd thing to say about a process in which accusatory documents were hidden from me and reviewed by the Advisory Board, giving me no opportunity to respond to them. That is a process that is the very essence of Kafkaesque.
Furthermore, Stefan later doubled down on this false claim when he spoke to the reporter, likely in or not long before March 2025. According to the reporter, “Rau believes Koenig got a fair hearing.”
What is really funny and strange about this, is that in June 2023 I posted The Scapegoat, which was a relatively short blog post that made very prominent mention of the documents that NASPA hid from me. Then on July 24th, 2023 I revealed those documents in their entirety in The Conspiracy. Only two weeks after that, on August 7th, 2023, Stefan sent me this email:
All parts of the four blog posts that David Koenig has posted on splenetic.net (The Crucible, The Fallout, The Scapegoat, and The Conspiracy, along with the linked documents) which mention me or which I have direct knowledge of are true. As far as I know, David’s recounting of the story has been honest and accurate.
Sincerely,
Stefan’s email to me on August 7th, 2023, which can be seen on p. 22 here
Stefan Rau
A little bit of context: I provided Stefan that exact wording and asked him to send me that email, because I needed his word to counterweigh Terry Kang’s lies that I had said anything false about the two of them in the blog. I did provide him the wording of the email, but he also deliberated for a full day before sending it to me, so he had plenty of time to reread the blog posts and confirm that I was speaking the truth before he sent it.
I was not even trying to catch Stefan in a contradiction of claiming that my disciplinary process was fair. Although this email was a few months after Stefan’s May 2023 interview with Marc Mohan, I never listened to the interview until March 2025. But I think it is fair to say that Stefan’s email to me contradicts his earlier statement to Marc Mohan and his later statement to the reporter that my disciplinary process at NASPA was fair.
Let’s be very clear: Stefan’s statement that he made to multiple people that NASPA’s process was fair is a lie. However, I am not even sure at this point whether Stefan knows he is lying or has become detached from reality enough that he believes his own bullshit. When I asked the reporter for a bit more explanation of Stefan’s and Jason Idalski’s point of view on how they could call the process fair, the reporter explained that they had both told him that the Advisory Board had not been swayed by the extra statements, and that they would have unanimously voted to suspend me with or without them.
This might just be what the lawyers have told them to say to protect their and NASPA’s ass. But if they actually believe that garbage, then NASPA’s process did not resemble justice in any way, shape, or form. As I mentioned in a recent YouTube video, any organization running a disciplinary process of any kind needs to make it about facts, not feelings, in order to be doing their job professionally.
It is shocking to me that Stefan would continue to double down on this lie that the process was fair after he already signed his name to a statement admitting that I had uncovered the documents NASPA hid from me for two months. Even if he believes it, it is still a lie. As I mentioned in another recent YouTube video, “the moral measure of your actions is not measured by your perception of the world. It is measured by how the world actually is objectively.”
Here is the interview between Marc Mohan, Stefan Rau, and Shelley Stevens.
My best guess is that Marc Mohan did this interview before the other one, as he forgot to start recording it at the beginning and only began doing so partially into it. He also starts by addressing one of the Requests for Admission that Jennifer made that I am the “most despised player in Scrabble” because a trashy article from 2008 said so. Both in this interview and the other one, Marc Mohan misquotes the Request for Admission, saying “reviled” instead of “despised”, just to set a baseline of how prepared and competent he is.
At the 10:00 mark Shelley starts telling massive lies about what her reactions to the blog were. It is clear at this point and throughout the interview that Shelley and Stefan have changed their position and are trying to suck up to CoCo so that they can play in its tournaments.
When I first published The Crucible and The Fallout (which, keep in mind, were still the only things on the blog when this interview happened) Shelley reacted in a way that was extremely favorable to me and extremely angry at Jennifer and Evans. Furthermore, she was extremely in support of me publishing the blog in her comments on my Facebook posts around that time.
When Jennifer put screenshots of my Facebook posts in her attachments to the NASPA incident report (pages 8-34), she did not expand all the comments, and the printout had a few other problems. At the top of page 20 of that document is one very strong comment made by Shelley in which she wrote, “I am really proud of you for sharing your story, in case you can’t tell.” Shelley’s name is cut off on this printout, so you cannot see that the post is from her, but I remember well that it was. There is also one dead giveaway: she mentions “juju” in that comment, which was her nickname for Jason Ubeika, who was her husband at the time.
When I first heard this interview in March 2025, I remembered that Shelley had made several very strong comments on those posts supporting me for publishing the blog, so I went back to look at them and take fresh screenshots. At the time that I checked, the comment shown above was the only one that I could not find. Shelley had deleted it sometime after July 2020, probably after she saw it was in Jennifer’s attachments document. She probably thought she could get away with removing it from the public record, since the attribution to her had been cut off of that document.
The fact that Shelley deleted that comment is evidence that she intentionally changed her story and knew she was lying to my lawyer.
Other comments of Shelley’s that were captured in Jennifer’s screenshots were still up in March 2025, so I took new screenshots of them.
Furthermore, there were other similar comments from Shelley that did not make it into Jennifer’s screenshots because the subthreads had not been expanded.
These screenshots speak for themselves. Shelley clearly intentionally lied to my lawyer. This was just an informal conversation, not an official deposition. However, let’s be 100% clear: If Shelley had said these exact same things in a deposition, it would have unquestionably been perjury.
Stefan also distorted the conversations that he and I had when he was an early reader of The Crucible and The Fallout, though I will grant that his statements about that in the interview are not as outrageously false as Shelley’s statements. One thing I will absolutely swear to in court: My depiction of the conversation that I had with Stefan and Terry in Edinburgh in 2019 is completely accurate and representative of their points of view at the time. Terry was also a pre-publication reader of those posts and gave me no feedback about that conversation. If she had thought I was misrepresenting that conversation in any way, she would have said something.
In Stefan’s one pre-publication email to me, he tried to backpedal from what he said in Edinburgh, but he did not say that I was saying anything untrue about that conversation. I took his feedback seriously, but I did not change what I wrote in The Fallout about that conversation, because I considered my original version to be more accurate than the face-saving spin that Stefan was trying to put on it. I have not shared Stefan’s pre-publication email on this blog, but I did share it with the reporter.
At around 17:30 Shelley and Stefan attempt to reframe CoCo, saying it is not as bad as it used to be in terms of being exclusionary, clearly because they want to appease the Clinchys and get into their tournaments.
It is disgusting to me that people I used to consider such good friends have betrayed me, and why have they done it? To suck up to people who are a million times worse than me morally.
That is all I have to say about Stefan and Shelley in this interview, but I need to say a little bit more about Marc Mohan’s incompetence. Marc made a ridiculous comment, for the first time around 19:30, that he had to remind me a few times that I could not sue my way into NASPA. This is a complete untruth that in no way matches any conversation that he and I ever had.
In my first email from my previous lawyer Clifford Davidson, on October 26, 2022, before we had out first video chat about all of the documents I had collected and whether I had grounds for a lawsuit, Mr. Davidson wrote unambiguously:
Assuming that the facts are as you’ve stated, you appear to have claims against Lola, Evans, Jennifer, Steven, WGPO, and CoCo… As WGPO and CoCo are just shills for their founders, I’m not concerned about bringing claims against them.1 However, NASPA is a legit organization separate from any of the people who you allege have conspired against you. Based on the facts I’ve reviewed so far, I think NASPA would prevail were you to sue that entity.
I never once thought that I had a lawsuit against NASPA, and I was never trying to sue my way in. If Marc believed what he said, he was just showing that he was a complete idiot.
I will extend Marc a little bit of grace though. Considering that this was only a first informal interview, and that Stefan Rau at least would certainly have been deposed as a witness if this case went to trial, it is possible that Marc was softballing him and did not want to let him know yet that we knew about the September 9th, 2022 documents that NASPA had hidden from me. I will give Marc the benefit of the doubt that he might have been making me sound like the less reasonable party to Stefan here in order to lure him into being comfortable going into a deposition before he hit him with the hard questions. I still wish Marc had been able to do that without completely misrepresenting my point of view.
But the thing that most offends me about this recording is the way Marc Mohan had misrepresented it to me. He told me later that Stefan was cagey in not wanting to talk about the details of the NASPA Advisory Board conversations. Once I heard the later part of this recording, starting around 22:00, it was clear to me that this was not what happened at all. For some stupid reason, Marc assumed that he could not ask Stefan about NASPA Advisory Board conversations, which was an incredibly wrong and stupid assumption to make, and one that undermined his ability to represent me well.
Footnote
- I believe that Mr. Davidson mistakenly believed at that time that Steven Pellinen had founded WGPO. ↩︎