Gamer Gate grace lynn.jpg

Grace Lynn, was a member of Gamergate who had a change of heart. When she turned away from the community, some people began harassing her.

(Grace Lynn)

Grace Lynn is used to the online threats. She says her fellow video gamers have been after her for months.



Friday night, the cyber harassment spilled into the real world when a prank sent 20 Portland police officers to Lynn's former home in Southwest Portland.



The prank, called "swatting," likely won't be the last time they target her, Lynn said by phone Saturday. She knows how these people work. She knows, she says, because she used to be one of them.



Friday night's swatting incident is just the latest example of what's called Gamergate.



The movement began in August when the ex-boyfriend of video game developer Zoe Quinn wrote a series of blog posts alleging that she had cheated on him with gaming journalists. He accused her of using sex to secure positive publicity for her games.



What initially began as a quest to ensure ethics in video journalism turned into something more pernicious as Gamergate participants released Quinn's address and phone numbers.



Lynn, 35, joined Gamergate almost as soon as it formed.



"I was a misogynist," she said.



Lynn is a transgender woman. She grew up near Austin, Texas, and had been very masculine before undergoing surgery, she said.



When she came out as transgender, other women didn't accept her.



"I felt degraded as a trans-woman," she said. "I grew up with the stupid, stupid idea that women had privilege. So I joined in. I thought I was punching up at other women who were more privileged than I was."



Lynn is a digital artist who creates video games, and she agreed with the Gamergate folks who called for video game journalism to be more ethical. But as the movement slid deeper into misogyny, Lynn began to feel uncomfortable.



That uneasy feeling came to a head when Gamergate participants began supporting British journalist Milo Yiannopoulos.



He rose to fame within the movement after writing a piece accusing "feminist bullies" of tearing the video gaming industry apart. But he ran afoul of Lynn when he described transgenderism as a "psychiatric disorder."



"It was a sea change moment for me," Lynn said. "I said, 'I need to reevaluate my life.'"



She began urging Gamergate participants to ease up on women. She told others to leave the movement.



This fall, some Gamergate participants joined 8chan, a website dedicated to promoting free speech. Lynn said the site hosted child pornography and threads dedicated to harassing known gamers. The creators of 8chan raised money through the crowdfunding site Patreon. Lynn began campaigning against Patreon.



"I became a target because I am one of a dozen people who is fighting Gamergate in a vocal way," she said. "They try to take us down with doxxing and swatting. And it's all come to a head this month."



Gamergate has been the "most troubling ethics case" of the past year, said Katy Bartzen Culver, an associate director for the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.



"Much of the conversation — if I can even call it that — has been a toxic sludge of rumor, invective and gender bias," she wrote in a blog this week. "The irony comes from people who claim to be challenging the ethics of game journalists through patently unethical behavior."



The phenomenon isn't unique to the gaming industry, Bartzen Culver said in a phone interview.



She pointed to a Grantland magazine story, "The Magical Putter," about a golf club inventor who was transgender. The story outted the inventor, who eventually committed suicide. After it ran, readers threatened the author on Twitter, published his home information and suggested he kill himself, too.



She also referenced Charles C. Johnson, a blogger who falsely accused two New York Times reporters of revealing the address of the police officer in the Ferguson, Mo., shooting. Followers of Johnson's blog doxxed -- published their personal information online -- those journalists.



Lynn is "speaking out and saying things that are pretty measured," Bartzen Culver said. "For that, she becomes a direct target of some pretty vile communication. The question is who has the power to keep this community accountable?"



For Lynn, the answer sometimes feels like no one.



As the harassment became a daily occurrence, she tried logging offline and deleting her Twitter account. But she depends on social media to sell her art and music, she said.



"I tried going silent, but I was tired of being afraid," she said.



Earlier this month, she began proactively searching for her name. On Friday, she found an 8chan thread showing that users were planning to send a police SWAT team to her house. They said they weren't members of Gamergate, but Lynn said they are supporters of the movement.



The 8chan users found an old address in Portland; they didn't know that Lynn had moved to California last year. Friday night, they called the Portland police non-emergency line and said they were holding hostages inside a home on Southwest Capitol Highway.



The bureau sent about 20 officers to the house before they received a phone call from Lynn. She told them what she had seen online.



Police departments across the country faced similar calls before Gamergate. In 2011 a New Jersey police teargassed a home following an anonymous and false tip about a hostage situation.



Portland officers have received one or two similar calls, said Sgt. Pete Simpson, an agency spokesman. But the bureau does not rush to send in a SWAT team. In fact, it didn't even involve the SWAT team in Friday night's incident.



"That's not how we operate," Simpson said. "Patrol officers are going to go assess a scene based on what they see. We don't roll out a SWAT team just because someone calls 911. We need more than a phone call."



Friday's night "swatting" won't stop Lynn from moving back to Portland, which she plans to do in April.



The city has the best health care options for transgender people, she said. Plus, she says she'll feel more protected here. The officer she spoke with Friday night told her to call before she moves back. He promised to check up on her.





-- Casey Parks