Hi, Jake.
I mean we all knew this post was coming, right? Sigh.
Hi, Jake.
We’ve never actually met, or even had any exchange in text.
The situation is a clusterfuck, and you don’t know me. I get it; you already got duped by Steven Jarvis, and for all you know, I’m someone trying to do the same thing. My trust isn’t something come by easily these days, either, as I’m sure you can probably imagine.
I am sorry to hear you have received violent threats. That isn’t something I find acceptable coming from anyone, for any reason.
I have this running theory that irony is the animating force of the 2020s, and here’s our first example: one of the folks Steven Jarvis praises and echoes made a lot of violent threats to people I know. This man, Josh Fidel, has regularly engaged in abuse of various people, myself included, and describes his behavior as heroic, as does Steven Jarvis.
I have a problem with that.
In fact, when Josh Fidel made graphic and grotesque threats of torture, violence, and murder to various and sundry people, he was a part of TTP — ‘The Thinkin’ Project’, Jim Stewartson’s 2021 anti-Qanon volunteer group — and so was I.
I had seen worrying behavior from TTP, and this was the last straw for me. I would not be part of any group that was openly and aggressively condoning this behavior, so I left the group with an explanation of why. I was pressured privately by multiple members of TTP to accept the behavior, with a number of excuses — all different — trotted out in an attempt to justify the threats. This pressure went from guilt trips to “helpful suggestions” that “if I didn’t want drama” I would either remain silent or preferably say I support the threatening behavior and similarly pressure other friends to do the same.
Within the next day or so, Jim Stewartson launched an attack on someone I care about, someone who has been a great friend to me for many years now implying he was mentally ill while employing various slut-shaming and homophobic dogwhistles. This was paired with nude photos of my friend, posted by Stewartson.
Jake? I hate drama.
I really fucking hate drama.
I am reasonably certain I should have been born a manul: I am cranky, very solitary, and can barely stand my own kind. Picture a GenX snark hobbit and you get the general notion here: the gravest sin one can commit against me is to bother me in such a way as it interrupts my general state of minding my own goddamned business and puttering around with art in some form or another.
For me to go from ‘I’m just going to avoid this as much as possible’ to ‘oh no you fucking didn’t’ takes more than effort, it takes behavior so repulsive that I couldn’t live with myself if I remained silent about it.
That is how I feel about what Jim Stewartson did to my friend to this day.
It inspired a thread, and you can find it conveniently condensed here.
I still stand by every single word.1
Needless to say, they have certainly delivered the promised drama if I refused to be silent.
In fact, they weren’t even content with my silence, as I tried to ignore them completely for months at a time more than once, only to have them intrude upon my life in abusive ways including threats, harassment, doxxing, and similar things I think we can both agree are not acceptable responses to being criticized for gleefully and aggressively behaving like an utter rat bastard on the internet.
The harassment, threats, and abuse haven’t stopped since. It’s all escalated considerably, primarily due to Steven Jarvis and his lies that you’ve platformed and lent the authority of yourself as a journalist, The Daily Beast and its editors, and now, to some extent, WIRED and its cohort of excellent staff, which I think we can probably also both agree don’t need this bullshit because they are absolutely getting damned fine work done and should be free to focus on doing that.
Like I said: irony.
I am nobody.
I am not an influencer, personality, or brand. Social media is only marginally less in the ‘bother’ category for me than it was in 2020, when I landed on Twitter to find info to try to prevent my parents from drifting any deeper into Qanon territory2.
The only reason I stuck around beyond that initial plan is that I met some genuinely amazing people that made it worth sticking around. Many I think of as family, which is not something my misanthropic ass says lightly.3
I cannot imagine there are many people who give the first damn what I think…
…which quite honestly I find perfectly reasonable and appropriate.
I’m an internet rando, quite literally a housewife and artist.
That’s it.
I’m not a journalist, researcher, expert, historian, scientist, analyst, hacker, technologist, or… anything else, really.
I’ve never once claimed to be, either.4
If you ever want a laugh, you should see the things they’ve claimed I am over the years. Imaginary me makes Black Widow from the Avengers look like a chump; she’s a real badass.
Again, irony: I was in a car accident at 19, and some days can’t even walk since. I’m 51 now; it hasn’t exactly improved with age. You can read all about this and how it changed my paradigm here, and it’s going to be worth the time to do that — it’s a long story and there’s way too much ground to cover here to write all of it out again.
Even so, it matters. I would imagine there is a lot of blood, sweat, and tears involved in building your career, too — some of it, it sounds like, from this very incident. I’m not running around celebrating that, even if Steven Jarvis has been actively making that claim.
I’m still trying to talk to you like a human being, because I’m a human being.
My life wasn’t great before all of this. I’ve never made any pretense that it wasn’t, and while dealing with all of that ‘not great’, I’ve spent the past four years desperately trying to convince people that I am exactly who I always said I have been… because I am. Steven Jarvis and his abusive following spent two years insisting I was several other different women, and the harassment and false accusations for that were considerable.
His story — read: his lies — evolve as they further delve into my life, many instances of which you will see described here as they happened in other posts on this substack.
I just want to be left the hell alone to do my art, which is now and has always been wholly honest work in every way. I do not fuck around, I do not cut corners; to do any of that would be to spit in the face of all the sacrifices people made to get me to where I am along with all of my own honest efforts along the way, and that is simply not in me.
This will be the fifth year they will simply not let me the hell alone to do my art, all leading back to my refusal to condone threats of torture and violence, and my choice to speak out when they attacked people with revenge porn and all manner of dogwhistle smears against marginalized folks.
I am a silly woman, of course, and don’t actually think either of those stances are at all controversial.5
I am not and have never been a violent person, for one, and I’m also just not the kind of person who thinks being an ally is only a thing when it comes to your friends, and it’s perfectly cool beans to be homophobic, ableist, sexist, racist, etc. the moment it’s someone you dislike. Truly, to hell with that bullshit. You either have principles or you don’t; Jim didn’t, end of story.
Completely uncontroversial take from an absolute nobody.
Yet, here we are.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m sure ten years after all of this bullshit is in the rearview mirror, it’ll be one hell of a story to tell in a diner at 3am. Parts of it are objectively funny, but it’s hard to take consolation in that while the rest is actively happening and, yes, continuing to cause real and escalating harm.
Even so, as you can doubtless tell from my friends… it’s really all we’ve got at this point.
While a number of them will likely be mad at me for writing this at all and trying to talk to you like a person, I’m going to make them even more mad now by saying: there was a lot of that shit I wasn’t OK with. I let people know about it privately and didn’t engage with it.
There’s plenty of that to go around, after all, there is a file somewhere in the archives of the FBI that discusses ‘BallsGang’ and has my ‘there is only one person with this name on the planet’ full legal name associated with it because I had to make that phone call. Does it matter that I thought all of those in jokes were incredibly dumb and ill-advised and said so repeatedly? Of course not.
…yeeeeeeeeeeeah.
On the most basic human level, can we just agree that that is genuinely and depressingly absurd?
Meanwhile, every day I have to defend myself as the simple boring woman with a shitty life that I have always been, and not the list of things they’ve claimed I am, which include:
colluding with the Russian mob
being a famous travel photographer (and a very wealthy target to sue — yeah, I wish)
being various other Twitter accounts, some of whom engage in behaviors I aggressively do not condone in any way
being paid millions by Mike Flynn
in a Satanic Sex Cult
that my best friend has ‘mindfucked me’ and I am just a stupid brainwashed bimbo
that I am having an affair with a journalist I’ve never even met that includes various sex acts described by various people (note: I am a married woman)
got doxxed, endangering me and my family (note: I maintained my anonymity online to protect myself from offline stalkers, one of whom almost successfully strangled me to death; the only reason I am alive today is that he thought he succeeded and freaked out — and the doxxer and all the people releasing it knew all of this when they chose to release my info)
that dox was sent by someone claiming to have ties to the Russian military to ‘harm people supporting Ukraine’ along with several others, asking for support in ending our lives gleefully and in public to the cheers and praise of people who are purportedly on the same political side as I am
Steven likes to claim without evidence — because there isn’t any, as it has never happened — I commit credit card fraud regularly to do things like buy a bunch of copies of books written by people I know on Twitter, which is really a rather enormous problem for a sole-operator art business that has to be able to accept credit cards for my sales. This isn’t merely an issue regarding potential customers googling and finding his intentional search engine pollution, but of financial institutions handling applications and so on. This is an incredibly harmful lie and has a direct and unambiguous impact on my ability to work.
spam calls, emails, etc. spiked, along with various threats and a huge increase in bitcoin scams, signed up for various gross republican email shit, etc. Someone even tried to send in our address for various home repair services that got us so inundated with calls we had to unplug the landline for days — this kind of thing happens at least twice a month, in varying flavors
being a ‘suicide troll’ (note: when this began, I was still having suicidal ideation to a dangerous degree myself; I had made 7 attempts in the previous two years)
whatever the hell ‘MAGA3X’ is supposed to be
tankie, vatnik, groyper, incel, whore, spy, traitor, enemy of America, Flynn shill, DeSantis troll, cryptofash…
creating the ‘sexually abusive meme’ with my full legal name printed alongside that accusation by Steven Jarvis, right beside ‘as verified and fact-checked by Jake Lahut and The Daily Beast’ to give it full authority and credibility to the average viewer
I could go on, because there is a lot more, and none of this garbage is true. Not a single word of it.
It’s that last one we still need to talk about, though, Jake.
Yeah, it’s that time.
Let’s get a few important things out of the way first.
Let me guess: you’re probably thinking, ‘even if all of this is true, I had no idea about any of this at the time I was working on the article’.
And that’s entirely fair.
Even Jim Stewartson is a relatively fringe figure, and Steven Jarvis even more so.
I mean, dude, can we both at least agree that we wish you had at least googled this idiot before diving down that rabbit hole? You don’t have to answer — I’m pretty sure that’s become step #1 when it comes to weird strangers with wild stories. You mention having learned a lot from the experience, which I hope is true, and includes this.
Did you know my father was a journalist? He, too, covered sports — for 33 years he never missed a single day of work. I grew up with it.6 I know a little about what it’s like, and got to go to some cool events over the years, and so on.
It’s just very different from politics.
I know you’d recently transitioned from one to the other when the article was written. I can absolutely understand not fully appreciating the gravity of the potential impact being profoundly different — or at least as different as it ultimately is.
It would be pretty hard to write a sports article that destroyed the life of someone who had no ability to protect or defend themselves, after all.
It’s shockingly easy in politics.
Don’t get me wrong here; I think there’s a really interesting piece to be written some day about how so much of the US treats politics like sports and the parties like a favorite team.
I get the impulse to cover it like that, too.
I can even see how it falls into a temptingly familiar framing: ‘Team DeSantis vs. Team <Whoever>’, and look at all the fouls and dirty tricks Team DeSantis is pulling! Somebody should call the ref, this is too much!
And if what Steven Jarvis said was in any way true, it could have been great.
Welp.
You’ve recently claimed you have no ability to change, remove, or edit the article any longer, and since you’re no longer employed there, I see no reason to doubt that.7
Further, I don’t expect you to control anything Steven Jarvis does in any way. I know that is not within your power. I get incredibly irritated when people make wild demands that I make someone else entirely do or not do something, because… well, that’s not in my power, either. I got doxxed explicitly because I wouldn’t force other people to do things being demanded by the doxxer, to give you some idea, so that’s fun. Having been through that shitty experience countless times I am not about to put someone else in that position — it is nothing but a waste of everyone’s time at its very best.
If you don’t see the amount of grace I am already giving you, well, it’s more than you probably deserve after the harm you’ve caused in my life by validating and platforming Steven Jarvis’ abusive lies.
You seem to recognize that real harm has been done, and you do seem to have remorse for that harm at least on some level.
I want to believe that if you could do something that would not involve massive legal wrangling or bureaucracy or — well, bullshit hassle of some expensive and time-consuming nonsense when those rare resources could be better spent elsewhere, I think you get my point.
Pretty sure that if you’ve actually read this far, that’s true.
And that’s why I’m trying, again, to talk to you as a person.
Steven Jarvis is fully aware that my art is the most important thing in the world to me to the extent that no person or thing or belief comes close, and that is why he is doing everything in his power to tie my — again, unique in the entire world — name to the lies you helped promote and platform, directly in association with my art.
If you didn’t read the piece about that, you really need to do that now, because you need to understand something very clearly here: Steven Jarvis is coming for what I consider to be my soul, and that is completely unacceptable.8 If anyone thinks for a moment I will not die on this hill fighting to the last breath, they are woefully fucking mistaken.
Your silence on this matter is literally a weapon being wielded to destroy not just my career, but put my life in actual danger with his ‘she is abusing children’ lies in a world of ‘pedo hunters’ and similar vigilante lunatics that he actively cultivates and seeks out as an audience.
Those lies are ‘proven’ to the general public by your name and the publication you worked for when you wrote the piece, and so it doesn’t matter to the broader world that it isn’t true, and it never was.
You were on MSNBC the other night.
I still don’t have my pathetic little life back, Jake.
Which one of us is supposed to feel bad for the other here, man? Because you really did sound like we should be the ones pitying you the other day for all the suffering you endured for causing potentially irreparable harm to innocent people, and that’s seven flavors of fucked up. Make no mistake; I have no doubt you experienced trauma over this, but the harm you caused is active, escalating, and ongoing.
That was offensive as hell, dude, from where I sit. You have no idea how much of a struggle it is to not just scream ‘FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU’ until the sun burns out, because, again, you were on MSNBC the other night, and I still don’t even have my pathetic little life back.
I have empathy for you because you are a human being.
What I have seen no indication of whatsoever is that you recognize that I am a human being, too.
None.
Not once since the article came out.
Not one reply.
Not one word.
No apology, not even after you presumably found out that Steven Jarvis was a serial liar and not to be trusted.
Not even when you apologized to other people who are only friends with the people your article singled out for harm, in fact.
Not once.
You’ve acted like I don’t even exist, and am unworthy of notice; as though it is beneath you to even dignify me literally begging you to help stop this nightmare of nonsense that persists in large part because of your insistence on silence.
And that’s how you have behaved toward me for roughly, what’s it been, two years now?
…and you wanted my sympathy? While also painting me as a villain with the inferences about suicide yet again, dude?
Really?
I deserve to be treated like a human being, and all of that? Ain’t it.
I don’t feel like I’m the party lacking in empathy or being remotely unreasonable here.
I get it that you may be worried about being sued but dude, unless I win the lottery there’s no way that’s happening, and — let’s be real — you’d end up a witness in a suit against Jarvis if anything, and literally anything is ‘unless I win the lottery’ level unlikely.
Bluntly: I don’t give a shit about money!9
I JUST WANT THIS SHIT TO STOP.
I don’t sit around fantasizing about taking away the homes of my critics the way both Steven Jarvis and Jim Stewartson actively and regularly do; in fact Steven Jarvis recently celebrated the loss of a journalist’s home in the LA wildfires because he hates the journalist. That’s the caliber of person your silence is emboldening, validating, and actively protecting.
OK, so, you’re probably thinking, “well, what the hell can I do, then?” if you can’t do anything with the article and we both fully understand you can’t control what Steven Jarvis and his fanbase say or do.
It’s actually super simple. I don’t know if it would be entirely painless since maybe it would be sorta embarrassing? I can’t say and won’t guess, but I’m aware that may be a factor and recognize it, but all you really have to do is verify how you ‘verified’ his claims, particularly about the image he claims I created to abuse his child.
Yeah, it’s that simple.
The process he describes is what I have believed must have happened from the start. Here it is in his own words:
Note again how he explicitly ties my real name to your verification process regarding this image — but the process he describes could not possibly verify his claims, which involve considerably more than ‘do you think this resembles my kid?’ Maybe it does — I wouldn’t know as I have never seen the photos he claims I used to make this image, which illustrates the problem.
This simply did not happen. None of it.
I had no part in the creation of it whatsoever, but your name and reputation and The Daily Beast are being actively weaponized as means to do me harm.
tl;dr: If the above described process — which would not actually prove his claims at all,— is accurate, which is entirely within your power to confirm and has already been disclosed — it would go a long way to resolving this issue.
It is still an uphill battle for me, but it has always been that since this nonsense began, and I don’t feel this is an unreasonable or crazy ask, and it’s the right thing to do. There’s absolutely no question about that, and I think you know that, too.
You keep this target on my head with the silence, Jake.
You can end this abuse, and it wouldn’t even be terribly hard.
I might be nobody, but my life still matters.
I still matter, and that is genuinely hard for me to say right now with my whole chest, but I’m doing it anyway because it’s true regardless.
Nobody deserves to have their life ruined like this, especially when there’s a way out.
Maybe you don’t think any reasonable person could believe his wild claims — but you did. Other people do, too.
I’ve been suckered by liars before — I was in Jim Stewartson’s volunteer group, after all — and I know it stings. I know it feels humiliating in a way that can be hard to confront in oneself, because we all think we’re too smart for that. (Spoiler alert: almost nobody’s too smart for that. Hasn’t the world proven that out pretty well over the last few years?) There is nothing more tempting than to never reflect on any of it again if it can be avoided.
I actually do get it.
But, uh, hi! Real person over here.
You, specifically and personally, are being used as a weapon by someone intent on various forms of harm, still — and it is a very damaging weapon.
All I am asking is for you to take it away from him if you do not want that harm to continue.
All that’s required to accomplish that is telling the truth.
It doesn’t seem like this should be hard.
Obviously, you’re welcome to reply here, or contact me privately. Considering the state of things, I doubt I’ll hear anything, because I haven’t seen any indication you even realize I’m even a human being at all yet.
I don’t think any of this is unreasonable or should require any extraordinary efforts, but it would make a world of difference for me and put more of this situation in the rearview for you.
While I wish that wasn’t true, unfortunately for both of us, it is. Whether you reply or not, if you read this, I think you can understand why I can’t let this go, and I would love to be able to do that.
I don’t have much, but this is my whole stupid life.
I want it back.
Notice how nowhere in that thread is there a case of ‘just trust me, bro’?
No complex conspiracies, just blunt common sense criticism of behaviors I find problematic based on observation and real lived experience.
Great pains taken to note that I am not an expert, may be wrong, people should look into these basic principles themselves, not take my word for it, and so on.
Just, you know, think about all of that for a moment. Compare and contrast with Mr. ‘Trust Me, Bro’ with his vaunted expertise in everything from pottery to behavior analysis to nuclear disasters.
I am an only child, they’re in their 80s — my father quite literally went to elementary school with Joe Biden — and I cannot simply write them off as a loss.
I actually mean it when I say, ‘if I win the lottery, I’m dragging people to a sprawling estate somewhere we can all not be bothered together’, so I’m not just being hyperbolic. We’ve definitely been through some shit together at the hands of Steven Jarvis and his cohorts. But, yes, my ‘I will definitely be found dead after two months having been eaten by my cats’-grade solitary ass would invite these people to live in my house, so it is non-trivial.
It’s a long piece, four or five related subjects addressed at once.
You’re looking for the third, but the others are worth some attention, too, and I’m going to hope it becomes clear.
For the same reason, I hope you reported any threats to law enforcement. If not, please do. I’m not kidding; I’ve gotten them as have several others, and there are reports in on various aspects of this mess. I’ve talked to local, state, and a guy on the Joint Terrorism Task Force — it actually is and has been that serious for a long time.
There’s a pretty common belief that there have been a lot of malicious fuckers running around trying to stir shit all around and doing this kind of thing to keep the drama going for their amusement, which… jesus, can we just fucking not? But either way, if there are people out there doing this kind of crap, that might help whoever can do something about it get on with hopefully fucking doing it already if they find some useful patterns.
(In all seriousness, I have a lot of posts on this substack with screenshots and discussing some of the harassment patterns, so you may want to just browse them to see if you spot any similarities that might stand out. There are definitely folks out there who hate both of us.)
Be so glad you aren’t working in the 80s, man, for real; he had to use one of those achingly slow suction-cup modems in a house with a teenage daughter. I don’t know which of our hells was worse.
Further, it blows that they are fucking you around unrelated to any of this. That isn’t good to hear happening to anyone, and it sounds like a lot of people are impacted. No snark, I hope that’s resolved for everyone’s sake.
I take zero joy in people not being paid for work they did in good faith, even in this circumstance.
Again… you either have principles or you don’t, and ‘well I don’t like that person so it’s great if something horribly unfair happens to them’ is a shit way to go about life.
My preference is here, and it’s pretty simple and straightforward.
Make no mistake, he and his cohorts will repeat this and mock me for it endlessly until the heat death of the sun, but I stand by it.
Also, dude. I grew up with a journalist dad, remember? The idea of suing a journalist is gross as hell to me. I know y’all are broke, too. It is just not in my power to be that much of an asshole, believe me, some days I wish it were otherwise, but here we are.