Thread by @RobertGReeve

I got doxxed last week, and it wasn’t over my privacy tweets. Someone posted my address on Twitter to harass my girlfriend @ohadelaide, who is defending herself against a libel suit for speaking up during #MeToo. Let’s talk the politics of why I’m a target now too. 🧵

In 2019, Adelaide tweeted about her sexual assault, naming her assaulter, amidst a gaming #MeToo moment. It became a new story covered in several outlets, which you can find easily.

Adelaide is American. Her assaulter is a UK citizen. The statute of limitations on libel in the UK is one year. One year to the day after Adelaide’s tweets, he filed a libel suit against her in a UK court.

Libel in the UK is pineapple-upside-down-land. “In American courts, the burden of proof rests with the person who brings a claim of libel. In British courts, the author or journalist has the burden of proof, and typically loses.” npr.org/sections/paral…

Her assaulter seeks “greater than £10,000 but no more than £15,000” in damages. The Speech Act means it’s nigh-impossible he could ever collect on that. Adelaide could walk away and let him win by default, at no cost.

But Adelaide can’t stomach that. rcfp.org/journals/the-n…

A default judgment could let Adelaide’s assaulter go to Google and coerce them to de-list stories about her assault. Or coerce those media outlets to issue retractions. That erasure of truth is what truly alarmed her. gdpr.eu/right-to-be-fo…

Defending the libel suit brought against @ohadelaide will cost us more than paying damages. Our costs are already over $10k. The solicitor estimates costs as high as $140k. What victim can afford justice? Adelaide certainly couldn’t without her fundraiser. ko-fi.com/ohadelaide

(This is one of the many reasons why the courts are a terrible system for sexual assault victims. We had to talk with our solicitor about how Adelaide could appear in court with barriers to block line of sight to her assaulter. Endless retraumatization.)

You’ve probably considered the irony here. Adelaide doesn’t want to talk about this man. She wants to move on. Yet by bringing a libel suit against her, he’s forcing her to again talk about how he sexually assaulted her. It is the only way she can afford to defend the suit.

So why would some other guy dox me?

I don’t blame you if you dismissed “GamerGate” as a niche story because you’re a non-gamer. But you can draw a straight line from the misogyny of GamerGate to QAnon.

cnet.com/news/gamergate…

According to this breed of gamer, “Social Justice Warriors,” or SJWs, will ruin their hobby by imposing culture war standards over how games are made. These are the folks that were mad that there was a playable woman in the Battlefield games.

The “historical inaccuracies” of a woman fighting in WWI “ruin the immersion” of their games. They reach for any pseudo-intellectual argument to “keep politics out of gaming,” when the omissions themselves are a political choice.
theverge.com/2018/5/24/1738…

One of GamerGate’s biggest targets is feminist icon and media critic @anitasarkeesian, who opened my eyes to many of the problems with how men tell stories about women, especially in gaming. (Thank you for making me a better storyteller, Anita.) GamerGate targets women.

Adelaide, too, is a Woman in Gaming who streams tabletop RPG games. In nerd culture just as in business culture, women endlessly must “prove” their credentials. They are treated with skepticism, not respect. @ohadelaide is now a threat to the status quo who must be destroyed.

https://twitter.com/ohadelaide/status/1407135272500879366

Trolls argue that @ohadelaide made up her sexual assault to get famous. I don’t know about you, but I have never once thought, “but what about the possible financial benefits of being forcibly penetrated against my will?”
huffpost.com/entry/53-sexua…

Even in the solicitor’s letter that Adelaide’s assaulter sent her, it says, “It is beyond comprehension why one would feel it more appropriate to try and instigate a trial by Social Media rather than follow the correct and proper procedures that are in place for such incidents.”

The letter continues: “One can only infer that this is more for personal gain rather than anything else.”

It links to the articles about Adelaide. And claims that she isn’t allowed talk about the lawsuit.

We know why victims don’t go through “correct and proper” channels.

One in 6 women have been victims of rape or attempted rape. One in 10 women were raped by an intimate partner of theirs. For eight in 10 cases, the victim knew the assailant. Fewer than 7% of reports are false.
nsvrc.org/sites/default/…

Less than 1% of rapes lead to felony convictions. So, this letter attempts to shame Adelaide into resolving this conflict the “proper” way, which is to say, the way least likely to achieve anything.
washingtonpost.com/business/2018/…

Adelaide posts sexy, PG-13 photos on the internet. Some men see this as an invitation to say anything. Others suggest a sexual woman must have invited sexual assault. That being openly sexual diminishes the violation. Victims of sex crimes must forswear sex to maintain purity.

So this troll sees a parasocial opportunity here to defend gaming by keeping women out.

He said he contacted Adelaide’s assaulter to tell him about the fundraiser for her legal defense. He calls her fat. He doxes me.

I am irrelevant except in that it hurts Adelaide.

The troll accused Adelaide of making up the libel suit for a payday. It pisses Adelaide off, but this move’s not about her—it’s about sowing doubt for the audience. “Yes, I want to be a good ally who Believes Women, but can you just prove it to me first?”

This onus is always on the victim to prove their victimhood. That is how the UK frames libel defense, and how society paints victims who discuss their sexual assaults.

Adelaide asked, “should I post legal docs to prove it’s real?”

But Adelaide does not use her legal name on the internet. (Me being doxxed is great evidence of why.) So those who want to call her a liar will just say, “see? This scan of the papers she was served is just another lie. Even her name is a lie.”

The cruelty is the point. The misinformation is the point. The control is the point.

In this way, the doxing and the lawsuit have the same goal: they are an attempt to use fear to silence a specific woman; women in general; those who support women.

So now I have to call the police station and file a police report to make sure my address a troll posted online doesn’t get Swatted. This unpaid work takes my attention from what I want to be doing (playing D&D with my girlfriend).
cloudflare.com/learning/secur…

This troll’s dumbest mistake is in thinking that somehow this will bully me out of my relationship. (Adelaide can do that on her own with her rampant TRASH TALK as she SCHOOLS me in every video game we play together.)

This thread is about @ohadelaide, not me. In a bigger way, it is about what the libel suit against Adelaide means for sexual assault victims everywhere.

Please donate if you can. Anything she doesn’t use will go to @RAINN. 🪡

https://twitter.com/ohadelaide/status/1392874974306873346