Thread by @AntiFashGordon

1/ Let’s talk.
torchantifa.org/concerning-ant…
I’m being stalked by Elizabeth King and “Codi,”an abusive ex-girlfriend who stole $4000 from me in Sept. 2020, then started claiming I was abusive in Nov. when I wouldn’t get back together. These allegations are literally made up.

2a/ I hate talking about my personal life, so I’ve always demurred to speak publicly. But this has reached the point where I’m getting death threats from leftists, and one of them tried SWATting an old address of mine, hoping the police would murder me.
I can’t live like this.

2b/ It’s worth noting here that @TorchAntifa has known all along that they were provoking death threats against me and others based on completely invented allegations.

2c/ I offered to prove that none of what they were saying was true, but they refused to talk to me, read a statement I prepared, or even investigate the claims they were touting.

2d/ If @TorchAntifa wasn’t willing to take down the lies they printed about me, which were provoking death threats and harassment against me and my friends, or even to talk to me, I had no choice but to send them a Cease and Desist letter.

2e/ Additionally, I should add that @TorchAntifa is misrepresenting this. I sent a letter to from me to the people stalking me and my friends. I did not involve the legal system in any way or dox anyone. The activists I mailed this to use their real names in their activist lives.

2f/ They were the ones who handed their blog post to Nazis and sent the police to my home.

https://twitter.com/TorchAntifa/status/1457026842393825287

2g/ After @TorchAntifa’s blog about me appeared, they were given legal notice by the far-right activists suing me, demanding they preserve all communications about me. They did not challenge this notice in any way, and their blog subsequently appeared in court filings against me.

3/ Here’s the backstory.
Elizabeth King started stalking me in Sept.2020 after she falsely tweeted that journalist Hilary Sargent was unqualified to cover the far-right and secretly working with the police.
Liz told me she didn’t want to discuss it, so I blocked her and moved on.

4/ Elizabeth then spent the next 10 days tweeting a bizarre conspiracy theory where Hilary Sargent, Nick Martin, and I were secretly collaborating to undermine her.
Elizabeth reached out to at least one antifascist crew she saw retweeting me, and to my editor at It’s Going Down.

4a/ No one was engaging in a smear campaign against Elizabeth King.

She was engaging in a smear campaign against me, Hilary Sargent, and Nick Martin.

4b/ Elizabeth also repeatedly tried calling a number she thought was mine, multiple times, which belonged to a Canadian private investigation firm.
Liz posted screenshots of this to Twitter, claiming I was avoiding her calls.

6/ @mxtaliajane saw this and reached out to Liz, offering to help.

https://twitter.com/mxtaliajane/status/1381299943378448384

7/ @mxtaliajane has a history of exposing predators, and genuinely wanted to investigate me.
taliajane.medium.com/an-open-letter…

8/ However, it quickly became clear that Liz was inventing a conspiracy theory, and Talia tried to get Liz some help.

https://twitter.com/mxtaliajane/status/1381298741538390020

9/ This is obsessive behavior typical of abusive personalities like Elizabeth King, and is classic DARVO-- Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender.

10/ This is exactly what @TorchAntifa is doing, too.

A letter I mailed to the address publicly listed on their WhoIs information becomes them publicly accusing me of doxxing antifascists.

11/ Elizabeth invented a bizarre conspiracy theory in her head that I’m trying to smear her, then proceeded to attempt to smear me with it, doing exactly the thing she was accusing me of doing.

12/ Most people would recognize this as stalking. Repeated attempts at unwanted contact, trying to privately smear me to people I work with, tweeting conspiracy theories that I’m engaged in a secret cabal of people to undermine her-- these are not the acts of a sound mind.

13/ The instant you become a public figure, people have a strange parasocial relationship with you. People stop seeing you as a human being.

If someone’s obsessively tweeting conspiracy theories about you, people don’t see it as stalking and harassment.

It’s just “discourse.”

14/ Here’s where things get interesting. Elizabeth then connected with “Codi,” a recent ex-girlfriend who broke up with me in September 2020, shortly after it was announced that I being sued in federal court by a New Jersey Neo-Nazi.

15/ When she left, “Codi” took $5000 from me that I was counting on to pay my legal defense fees, then gave me back $1000, and told me that she’d pay back the rest.

16/ At the time, “Codi” told me that she had approximately $20,000 in savings, so she had the money. She just didn’t want to pay me back. I was being sued, and needed the money to pay legal fees.

17/ This is classic financial control. It was my money. I needed that money for a lawyer, and she was using the promise of it to try to keep me in her life.

18/ I gave “Codi” the “This Week in Fascism” column, which I had created in March of 2019, and built into a weekly readership of 10,000 by the time she started co-writing it with me in May 2020, and encouraged her to start a Patreon for the column.

https://twitter.com/AntiFashGordon/status/1364056495218958342

19/ Even as late as February 2021, I routinely promoted the Patreon so that she would have a source of support while she was unemployed.

I was in no way financially controlling her. Quite the opposite-- I gave her a weekly column with a readership of 10,000 people that she used to support herself.

20/ In November, I finally told “Codi” flat-out that I had no interest in getting back together, and she began telling people that I was abusive.

21/ When I asked “Codi” to pay back the money she took from me, she contacted a mutual acquaintance to have them tell me that she was “feeling intimidated.”

Here’s a screenshot of the way I asked her to set up a payment plan. Nothing intimidating about it.

22/ At this time, I asked her affinity group if they’d be willing to hold an accountability session.

I asked her crew, so she’d feel comfortable, not like she was being set up. They told me to “fuck off” and I dropped the matter.

23/ In December, “Codi” began displaying obsessive behaviors, two months after we broke up, saying she wanted to have my baby, and it would be the “end of the world” if we stopped talking.
She was aware I still responded to her texts because I was worried she would badjacket me.

24/ In December 2020, I noticed that several mutual acquaintances had blocked me on Twitter.
I assumed that “Codi” had been badjacketing me, so I messaged her saying that I didn’t want further contact, and that I would contact her in April to talk about setting up a payment plan.

25/ I never got the chance to contact “Codi” about setting up a plan for her to pay me back.

Instead, in April 2021, an anonymous blog post about me premiered. I suspect it was written by Elizabeth King and “Codi.”

26/ This post was accompanied by a “Statement of Separation” from the Torch Network, despite the fact that I’ve never worked with the Torch Network.

27/ No one from the Torch Network ever reached out to me to verify any of the claims, or to ask me to participate in any kind of process-- fact-finding or otherwise-- prior to publication of this document.

torchantifa.org/concerning-ant…

28/ The post contains a number of distortions and outright fabrications. It’s clear that there was no fact-checking process, as a number of accusations could have been dismissed with a simple Google search.

29/ “Wealthy”
Actually, I’m a union member who makes $20/hour. I don’t have an inheritance, trust fund, or even a savings account. “Codi” knows this. We dated, and I was always transparent about my finances.

30/"Romancing journalists”
This is purely the invention of a jealous ex. After we broke up, “Codi” became obsessed with the idea that I was flirting with a particular journalist whose work I promoted on Twitter. She claimed she sat on the stairs and listened to me talk to her.

31/ Not only did I not flirt with that journalist, but I checked my phone records, and in fact, I never even spoke to that journalist on the phone until after “Codi” and I broke up and she moved out. Codi’s “memory” literally did not happen.

32/ Inhibiting the work of other crews
Again, I have never inhibited the work of other crews. Quite the opposite, actually. I’ve spent quite a bit of my time serving as a go-between to connect crews with each other.

33/ Relying on info from Andy Ngo, CV Vitolo-Haddad, and Light Upon Light:
The post about me relies heavily on disinformation from Andy Ngo that can be easily googled.

33a/ Lying about how I was doxxed:
The post claims I was doxxed as AntiFashGordon in August 2018. Except that I didn’t even start this account until September 2018, as noted in my Twitter header.

33b/ However, this claim was originated by Andy Ngo in an article for The Post Millennial:
thepostmillennial.com/notorious-anti…

33c/ Ngo claimed that “A crowd-sourced investigation found the site’s domain was purchased through Bluehost by Christian Exoo. After that revelation, Exoo temporarily locked the '@AntiFashGordon' account and deleted his personal Twitter and Facebook accounts.”

34/ Malinformation:

Disinfo researchers call this “malinformation”-- when facts that are technically true are used to support an entirely invented narrative.

35/ I did offer to mediate a conversation between two crews that had fallen out. But that was out of not wanting to see rifts in the movement, not out of any malice.

36/ Seeking to be a leader, title being "Senior Researcher"
In fact, everyone’s title at Deplatform Hate is “Senior Researcher.” It’s a horizontal organization that I’m not the head of. The website could have told you that. Any money I make from it goes to organizing projects.

37/ Posting a link to a free webinar is not trying to lead antifascist researchers into a Fed honeypot.

People can decide for themselves what kind of privacy model they wish to follow. If you don’t want to use your real name, you don’t need me to tell you that.

38/ "Before he started publicly using his government name in association with his antifascist research, AFG dropped many hints about his identity."

38a/ This allegation is supported by three screenshots. In the first, I note that the J.L. Van Dyke of the Proud Boys had offered a bounty on both “Dox Savage” and “AntiFash Gordon,” the two names by which my Twitter account had been known.

38b/ In the fall of 2018, I changed my Twitter handle from @DoxSavage to @AntiFashGordon so as not to run afoul of Twitter’s anti-doxxing policy.

This is not a hint about my identity, and would have been readily available to anyone who followed my Twitter account.

39/ The other two screenshots refer to an interview with the Washington Post that I gave in January 2020, when my identity was already public.

40/ In September 2018, a friend told me and my then-fiancee that they were unhoused, and sleeping in a shelter. We offered to let them stay in our guest room until they could find a job and save enough money to get a place of their own again.

41/ During this time, we financially supported them, buying them food, winter clothing, a new phone to replace theirs (that had been stolen), provided them with a laptop and whatever else they needed.

42/ During this time, they were initially optimistic, as my fiancee and I helped them apply to college (and they got in), and planned on attending in the fall of 2019.

43/ However, they began to struggle with depression and mental illness. In January 2019, they checked themselves into a mental hospital for a short-term stay, and resumed living with us after they got out.

44/ By February 2019, they had only applied for one job, and had begun drinking heavily during the daytime.

45/ My then-fiancee and I were getting ready to move to an urban area that summer, so that she could pursue grad school, where we wouldn’t be able to afford an apartment with a guest room for our friend.

46/ So I talked to our friend and explained the situation, and said that we should spend at least two hours a day looking for jobs for them, so that they could build up a savings account, have some financial security, and get an apartment before we wouldn’t be able to house them.

47/ After that conversation, they went to a scheduled doctor’s appointment, where they texted me that they had checked themselves back into the mental hospital, and not to contact them, so we didn’t.

48/ Several weeks later, I received a call from them telling me that they were being moved into public housing, and that I needed to pack up their room and drop the boxes off at the hospital with only a few hours notice. I packed up their room and dropped off the boxes.

49/ In early summer of that year, they called me with a bizarre series of allegations, including that I had “fetishized” my fiancee (which my fiancee did not share, obviously), demanding money as “reparations.”

50/ I discussed this with my fiancee-- an Advocate at a domestic violence shelter-- and she told me that our friend had been exhibiting obsessive behaviors toward me for some time, and that we needed to treat it like a stalking situation and go full no-contact, so we did.

51/ I blocked their number, and they contacted a number of prominent Twitter antifascists-- including Molly Conger, Gwen Snyder, and Spencer Sunshine-- to argue their case against me.

52/ Each one of these people listened to them and ultimately decided that I hadn’t done anything wrong. They’ve had the chance to litigate their case to many different people, but each time they get an answer they don’t want, they renew their allegations.

53/ However, in January 2020, shortly after I exposed Light Upon Light’s collaboration with hate group The Clarion Project, they published a blog post about me on Medium, claiming that I was “abusive.”

54/ They had been encouraged to write this by Light Upon Light’s CV Vitolo-Haddad, a white person who was exposed in the summer of 2020 as having spent years pretending to be Black. (They claim that @notcolloquiall-- CV’s Twitter handle-- encouraged them to write the post.)

55/ The fact that this former friend’s claims continue to escalate, and their close association with Light Upon Light, a PR service for the far-right, shows that this is not a good-faith critique.

56/ This is an ex-friend, bitter because my fiancee and I wouldn’t financially support them indefinitely, running a smear campaign out of anger, not because they’re seeking any kind of justice.

57/ This is a smear campaign coming from Elizabeth King, who has attempted to similarly smear other journalists and activists in the past, and “Codi,” an ex-girlfriend who began claiming I was abusive after she stole $4000 from me and I refused to resume our relationship.

58/ I have endured months of harassment and death threats, trying to work this out privately with the Torch Network, who has refused any attempt at communication, so as not to cause public infighting and damage the antifascist movement.

59/ Friends of mine-- who know that I didn’t do anything wrong-- have endured similar harassment, inhibiting their organizing and damaging their mental health.

60/ This is not okay. This is stalking. Anyone who harasses me or any of my friends over this smear campaign is participating in a campaign of stalking and harassment, the Torch Network included.

61/ As an example of how fucked-up this is, they're using this to harass an ex-girlfriend of mine who refused to play along with them.

If I was abusive, she'd be a victim, too, and they're harassing her.

They don't even believe what they're saying.

62/ This is the kind of thing I've been dealing with.

An obsessed man in Chicago began issuing death threats to me, calling me a “rapist,” saying that I would die on August 20, 2021.

63/ After discovering his identity, I checked his Medium account, where he had issued similar threats, saying “You fucked with the wrong Liz.” One of his six followers is Elizabeth King.

64/ This is the kind of violence and threats that the smear campaign against me is inspiring. @TorchAntifa knows this, and they don't care.

65/ Days after receiving these threats, several cars of police arrived at my house as I was about to walk my dogs. They told me that someone had called the VA hotline, given my legal name, and claimed to be armed and ready to kill themself and others.

66/ The online outrage machine is resulting in death threats and SWATting. The police believed I was armed and homicidal, and were ready to kill me.

This is what stalking does. It has damaged my organizing and mental health, and damaged the mental health of my friends.

67/ I am publicly calling for accountability from the Torch Network members involved in the publication of this statement, and from anyone who signed.

You are helping an abusive ex-girlfriend stalk me, damaging my organizing and mental health, and putting my safety at risk.

68/ If you participated in this, then you have an obligation to help undo the damage you have caused. I am asking you to share this statement, and apologize for the harm you have caused me and any of my friends who were harassed by the online mobs you galvanized.

69/ The complete lack of process-- or even fact-checking-- by the Torch Network, as well as the refusal to communicate or hear the facts, is shameful.

It flies in the face of all leftist ideals. It doesn’t seek truth or accountability, just harassment and stalking.

70/ To finish-- please don’t attack anyone mentioned here, or anyone who was part of the stalking campaign against me. Online harassment is neither accountability nor justice.

If you want to share this thread with anyone, you can politely DM them, not tag them.

71/ I never wanted any public infighting, and I have spent months enduring stalking, harassment, and threats to my life while pursuing a private resolution to this matter, but the Torch Network has rebuffed all attempts at communication.

72/ Don’t let that be for nothing by creating public infighting. If you want to share this, please do so, but please do not use this information to attack anyone.

73/ Finally-- just to get ahead of the discourse-- none of this means that #MeToo has gone too far.

It hasn’t gone far enough.

74/ In general, we’ve only embraced the language of #MeToo, not the actual lessons, leaving the community open to baseless charges of “abuse” for actions like blocking Elizabeth King on Twitter, or asking “Codi” to pay back the money she stole from me.

75/ “Believe survivors” means to set aside your initial biases, not to blindly believe that anyone who calls themselves a “survivor” has actually suffered any harm.

I get to block someone on Twitter. I get to ask someone to pay me back. None of that is “abuse.”

76/ There’s been no allegations of physical or sexual abuse against me. The allegations are that I (1) blocked Elizabeth King on Twitter, and (2) asked “Codi” to pay back the money she stole from me. None of that constitutes “abuse,” no matter how you frame it.

77/ I’m not against anyone investigating this, but there was no process or fact-finding. Instead, baseless smears from Andy Ngo were taken as truth, jealous delusions about me romancing female journalists were stated as fact, any good actions I did were reframed as insidious.

78/ For teaching OSINT workshops, I was accused of “resource bombing.” I don’t believe there’s anything special about me.

My goal is to make myself redundant, less important to the antifascist movement. I even teach how to replicate the kind of success I’ve had on Twitter.

79/ None of this is an attempt to control the movement. It’s an attempt to distribute the knowledge I’ve gained by studying OSINT, for free, and with no asks in return from the groups that take my workshops.

80/ This is a baseless campaign of stalking and harassment. There is no “accountability” or “justice” in this. It’s inspiring death threats and harassment against me and anyone who associates with me.

81/ By making this public as a first step, rather than seeking any internal resolution, @TorchAntifa's goal is clear-- to disrupt my work and attack me, personally.

82/ My stalkers have gone so far as to simply lie about me.
Someone contacted @shane_burley1, saying that I had been accused of sexual assault, and asking if he thought I should face accountability. He said yes, and his name was added to the statement against me.

83/ When he learned that wasn't the case, he asked for his name to be removed. They did not remove his name, but instead, left it up there, hoping to use his credibility to inspire others to harass me.

84/ I won’t be commenting further on this. I need to focus on my work, and the threat still posed by the far-right, as well as the personal threat I face from unhinged personalities on the left.

85/ If you want to help mitigate that threat, please share this thread, but do not attack anyone. When petty infighting becomes public, the only winner is the far-right.

86/ I’ve conducted myself with integrity and adherence to leftist principles throughout this campaign of stalking and harassment. Don’t let that be for nothing by letting this descend into infighting that damages the movement.

87/ My goal in sharing this is to stop the harassment directed against myself and my friends, not attack anyone else’s organizing or spur any harassment campaign against anyone.

Please respect that wish. ❤️🖤✊