Matt Hickey is a Seattle-based writer who was once an editor for TechCrunch and Gizmodo, and has spent the past three years as a writer for Forbes where, among other things, he threw a journalistic tantrum because Microsoft hired dancers for a party at a gaming conference.

Just hours after hosting its annual “Women in Gaming” luncheon at the 2016 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Microsoft MSFT -0.27% threw a party at a local club that featured half-naked dancing girls on raised platforms. Understandably, this is problematic for the maker of the Xbox.

The games industry has been under scrutiny lately as more and more women gamers have been calling it out on blatant sexism. New research show that the majority of video game players may well be women, yet the games themselves are still seemingly targeted at teenage boys. Female characters — especially in fantasy games — are traditionally clothed in next-to-nothing attire while the male characters are generally covered completely.

That has been changing recently, which is a good thing. 2013’s Rise of the Tomb Raider features its headline character Lara Croft in a sensible jacket and khakis outfit, a far different outfit from the revealing tank-top and short-shorts she was known for.

This is the way the industry should be going, and not just for moral reasons; many women are turned off by the prevalent sexism and thus don’t game.

Oh, “women are turned off by the prevalent sexism”? This is the classic Anita Sarkeesian/Randi Lee Harper anti-#GamerGate feminist propaganda that has been fraudulently foisted on the videogame industry which (a) employs a lot of men, and (b) makes billions of dollars a year. This is all just a scam to impose “diversity” quotas on a successful industry, and also to get giant tech companies to pay protection money to clever hustlers like Sarkeesian who, in return for contributions to their non-profit groups, will vouch for the feminist bona fides of these hugely profitable corporations. The whole “Women in Gaming” hustle is a variation of the shakedown racket Jesse Jackson used to run against banks and other Wall Street companies: “Give us money, because it would be a terrible thing if somebody sued you for discrimination,” basically.

The #GamerGate “ethics in journalism” angle began with accusations that Nathan Grayson, a writer for Gawker-owned videogame review site Kotaku, provided free publicity to Zoe Quinn, with whom he was allegedly involved. Beginning with the Grayson/Quinn scandal in August 2014, #GamerGate became a wide-ranging war against the pernicious influence of so-called “social justice warriors” (SJWs) who were seen as crybaby enforcers of politically correctness in the videogame community.

Matt Hickey sided with the SJWs and in October 2014, when his fellow SJW Chris Plante proclaimed “Gamergate Is Dead” — “a hate group . . . associated with bigotry and cruelty” — Hickey rushed to praise Plante and declared: “Don’t be a part of Gamergate, people. It’s a bad gang.”

Meanwhile, an online character named “Deja Stwalley” was soliciting teenage girls in Seattle who wanted to become porn performers, arranging for them to have sexual trysts with her photographer friend:

In 2013, Deja Stwalley friended 19-year-old Allysia Bishop on Facebook. Stwalley sold Bishop the same pitch she gave Shearer, and Bishop agreed to a shoot with Matt. Bishop says that after working out the details of the audition shoot with Stwalley, she took a cab to Matt’s apartment on Capitol Hill.

“He had a little checklist of things I was comfortable doing in the future, like are you fine with bondage, are you fine with whatever,” she tells me over the phone. Bishop also remembers Matt making vodka screwdrivers. “He checked a little checklist off and said fine, all right we’ll take some pictures. All the while, I was drinking. He was just making me more drinks and more drinks.”

Bishop says she drank so much that she nearly blacked out. And that’s when she claims that Matt said they had to have sex. “He was like, ‘Well, we have to have sex, because if we don’t then how am I going to know you’re for real and you’ll actually be able to do this in the industry? So you have to prove to me you’re not going to bail out.'”

Bishop says that she never would have had sex with Matt if she didn’t think it was for the audition. She wasn’t attracted to him. Bishop left Matt’s apartment upset but didn’t quite understand why. All she knew was that she felt violated.

That same day, Bishop slit her wrists in a bathtub. . . .

According to reporter Sydney Brownstone, “Deja Stwalley” and her photographer buddy Matt were the same person, Matt Hickey, who allegedly scammed at least three young women into having sex with him under the false pretense of auditioning them as porn performers.

It turns out that there is a real Deja Stwalley who “went to middle school with Matt Hickey in Olympia,” and who said of her childhood acquaintance with Hickey: “He had a weirdo crush on me.”

Predictably, when contacted for comment, Matt Hickey made a reference to “my lawyer,” and then shut down his Twitter account. Maybe he could be in a bathtub slitting his wrists, for all we know.

Stories like this almost make it seem as though we need a movement that will call attention to ethics in journalism, or something.

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