When news broke in April that a rental van had plowed through throngs of pedestrians in Toronto, killing 10 people, Jack Peterson never imagined that it would have anything to do with him.

The 19-year-old Chicago native was single, a college dropout and a self-identified incel. Short for “involuntary celibate”, the term was originally coined for a website support forum for singles. It has since been claimed by an online community of men largely organized around misogyny, with discussions such as how to punish women for not having sex with them.

When media began reporting that the alleged perpetrator of the Toronto attack, Alek Minassian, self-identified as an incel, Peterson thought it was fake, just a trolling effort by some dark-minded prankster.

By the next morning, however, the post was confirmed. Minassian claimed to be part of the incel community. Police would subsequently allege that he specifically targeted women in his attack.

The incel message boards lit up.

“Alek minassian is an incel martyr,” wrote one poster. Another referred to Minassian and to Elliot Rodger – the 22-year-old who went on a killing spree in 2014 in Isla Vista, California – as “true incel heroes”.

The response I got from incels was: 'You’re misrepresenting us: we really do hate women. We’re not joking' Jack Peterson

With incels suddenly thrust into the public eye, Peterson found himself a semi-official spokesman, one of few members of the community willing to show his face to media, and to use his real name. In interviews with everyone from the BBC to Vice to the Daily Beast, Peterson attempted to defend his community while denouncing the violence committed in its name.



Peterson has his work cut out, not least explaining away posts normalizing rape and encouraging mass shootings, which are commonplace on incel messageboards. Some incels have discussed mass rape fantasies and compiled guidelines for stalking. A typical post on Reddit’s incel page from November 2017 calls women “pure and utter evil, who have no thoughts or feelings and should be seen as the malevolent creatures they truly are”.

Despite these overt expressions of misogyny, Peterson said he had always seen them as darkly ironic. He suspected, he said, that the posters were non-violent – merely venting, and frustrated by a lack of social capital that he, too, shared.

He had bad acne as a child and was bullied. “I felt a strong sense of rejection from, specifically, women,” he says. Peterson had grown up without a dad, he says, and was raised by his mother.

He was 11 when he discovered 4chan, the anonymous image-posting site that has served as a petri dish for online culture, memes and, on some of its boards, virulent anti-feminist, racist, xenophobic and antisemitic views.



“That’s where I became immersed, at a very young age, in reject culture,” Peterson says. “It was a place to vent.”

After Rodger’s day-long rampage in 2014, his anti-feminist manifesto blaming women and sexually active men for his own loneliness and celibacy went viral on 4chan, serving as inspiration for a group of men who had adopted the label “incel” from the work of an amateur sexual activist (who has since expressed horror at how the term was hijacked). The fledgling movement spawned dedicated incel webforums, including Incel.me, the board Peterson frequented.

A still of Elliot Rodger from a video he posted on YouTube the same day as the California shootings, on 23 May 2014. In the clip, Rodger says his loneliness and frustration is because ‘girls have never been attracted to me’. Photograph: AP

To many incels, Rodger represented a hero who struck back against a society they perceived as unfair. Posters on incel boards commonly fantasize about “going ER” – for Elliot Rodger – and encourage other posters to do so, inciting them to violence and suicide.

Peterson spent his days in his bedroom, lurking on these forums. Last year, he started actively contributing.

Under the username “jackbud”, he offered support to other members, and in March he recounted to the forum how “in 4th grade some girl found out i had a crush on her, and she started yelling ‘eww’ and almost cried”. In another, he wrote: “That’s why these communities are so helpful, they let you know you aren’t alone.” Generally, when a thread would crop up advocating murder or violence, Peterson would tell them to knock it off. On Incels.me, Peterson now says, he could be “completely open”.

A sample post on Reddit’s incel page from November 2017. Photograph: Reddit/Reddit/r/incels

Unlike others on the forums, Peterson wasn’t terribly political. Even though his birthday in 2016 fell on election day, it was pretty clear, whichever way he voted, he didn’t feel too strongly about it. He told the forum he supports feminism, insofar as he believes in equality of the sexes – though in one post he added, echoing a common belief of “men’s rights” activists, that he doesn’t support the “undertone” of “female dominance or female superiority” in modern feminism.

Soon, with another member of the forum, Peterson started a podcast to discuss incel-related issues. It was a fairly lo-fi production, rife with technical issues, bad internet connections and cheap microphones, but grew popular. The format was a call-in show, where Peterson and a co-host would discuss various topics of interest to the community, and listeners could join in via Skype or chime in through a dedicated chatroom.

It was immediately after hosting a show discussing the Toronto attack that he was thrust into the public eye.

In the recording, Peterson’s tone is somber. “I don’t condone violence,” he says, insisting that “most of us feel that way”. His guests, however, took a different tack.

“This is the result of what happens when people – especially young, ugly dudes – are just isolated from society completely,” said one guest, who uses the username “mikepence”. Another guest, who remained anonymous, blamed the supposed end of monogamy, the dawn of a “polygamous society” and the proliferation of birth control and online dating as the trigger for “genetic impulses” that lead to this type of violence.

Incels.me pinned the podcast to its homepage, and journalists began to reach out. Peterson fielded calls from some two dozen different media outlets who wanted to know about the role of incel culture in the Toronto attack. He tried to paint the movement as not inherently violent or sexist.

The response from his own community shocked him.

The message boards threw the interviews back in his face. One poster wrote that he wasn’t a “true” incel. They called him a “normie”, incel-speak for someone who isn’t. Others said he wasn’t even terribly ugly, nor was he a virgin. One wrote that in Peterson’s media appearances he put “100% blame on incels” instead of focusing on “how women’s behavior has changed”.

Peterson had tried to tell the world that the incels didn’t hate women – only for the incels to cry foul.

“The response I got,” he says, was: “‘You’re misrepresenting us: we really do hate women. We’re not joking.’”

In the midst of this, another unexpected thing happened. Peterson started hearing from, as he calls them, “normal people” – feminists, especially – who wanted to talk, not argue.

“With all this media storm, I’ve talked to a lot of people, a lot of journalists, and I’ve gotten a lot of nice, normal people – you know, not incels – reaching out to me,” he says. “Emails, Twitter, YouTube messages, comments and everything. And it’s kind of proven to me that I don’t always have to be the reject loser who sits inside all day.”

He started seeing the forum in a different light. The posts encouraging mass shootings – “going ER” – began to seem quite real, and quite terrifying. He began to question whether his effort to defend the movement was misguided.

“I always viewed it as very dark humour, and people being ironic,” Peterson says. “Not as ironic as I imagined.”

‘It can kind of just suck you into depression to be constantly looking at forums like Incels.me,’ Jack Peterson says in a YouTube video explaining why he is leaving incels. Photograph: Artur Debat/Getty Images

In early May, Peterson asked the administrator of one of the incel webforums to cancel his account. The next day, he posted a YouTube video entitled “Why I’m leaving Incels”, where he spells out his change of heart. It’s by far the most popular video on his page, racking up nearly 50,000 views in a month.

“I think I actually need to do something with my life,” he says in the video. “It can kind of just suck you into depression to be constantly looking at forums like Incels.me, because of the content, and because of how defeatist some of the attitudes can be.”

The reaction was mixed. Some commenters wished him good luck, others were furious. “We have been betrayed,” wrote one poster. Another subtly encouraged members to dox Peterson – that is, to publish his personal information online, which can results in things like bomb threats being called in to a victim’s home, school or workplace.

“I’ve, more and more, seen the community for the absurd place that it is,” Peterson says.

Others would consider “absurd” a mild criticism of a community that has broadly sympathised with mass murder. Peterson’s analysis of what provokes the posters on these sites/message boards will sound, to many, like an attempt to excuse violent misogyny.

He claims it is a community riven by lack of self-confidence. Many of the posters, he says, are teenagers grappling with social anxiety or depression.

Most seem to be obsessed by their physical appearance: members regularly post pictures of themselves, only to be told how unattractive and ugly they are by other members.

In fact, many of the members are perfectly good-looking guys. Peterson agrees. “Looks are probably not the primary factor, here,” he says.

Peterson says an overarching theme is one of victimization – leading to the anger and frustration expressed by many on the forums, and a central theme in Rodger’s manifesto.

“A lot of incels think they’re owed shit from the world,” Peterson says. “The mindset is kind of like this: ‘I’ve been bullied and rejected my whole life so because of all the suffering I’ve experienced. Now the world owes me sex, it owes me friends, it owes me success, because of all the failures I’ve had.’”

For Peterson, it was simply experiencing the world beyond the message boards that broke this cycle of victimhood. That spate of media interviews, and the new contacts and conversations that resulted, convinced him he can do more with his life.

He hopes others will follow his lead. “Exposure to social situations, exposure to women – stuff like that will probably solve it for most guys,” he says. “It’s not this black-and–white thing you’ve created it to be, in these fantasies and these delusions that are often talked about on the forums.

Incel and violence are going to be forever tied Jack Peterson

“The first thing I’m really trying to do is really to get out there more in the world and become more social,” he says. “It’ll be tough to maintain this level of confidence and productivity if I don’t have a strong circle of friends.”



In the meantime he has kept talking to the media, trying to argue for a wider understanding of the incel community. It’s obvious he still feels protective of his former online home, even if he’s awake to the violent misogyny that plagues it.



“That’s definitely part of why I did all this media, is to say: ‘Listen, I’m not a bad guy, I’m not a sexist person, I’m not a violent person, and I don’t think most incels are,’” he says. “I still don’t think most incels are.”

But he isn’t deluding himself: “Incel and violence are going to be forever tied.”

In the UK, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Canada, the Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention has a list of crisis centre hotlines. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international suicide helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org