Transcript from that rather uneven BuzzFeed article.

Can You take me through, really clearly, and in as much detail as you want, why and how you made your decision to write down and make public your acrimonious breakup with Zoe Quinn?

I wouldn’t call it acrimonious. The tone of thezoepost is there primarily to keep things entertaining. There’s no point to writing something no one will read. But, for reasons I won’t get into, angry isn’t really a thing for me. I certainly felt betrayed and aghast for about a week. But there’s wasn’t really any emotional anchor to keep me feeling those things much later than that. It was too surreal – to have been dating this person with this relentless drive to present themselves as some paragon of virtue, committed to ethics and behaving with utmost empathy – only to find out that this was entirely an act. I felt betrayed at first, but, couldn’t really keep up feeling betrayed by someone I never really knew.

But I’m still curious, why did you think it was your personal responsibility to warn people about Zoe Quinn? I’m also interested in why you think her personal failures—given how common such failures are—have a bearing on her standing as a “Social Justice Warrior”.

That claim of commitment to ethics, and empathy wasn’t in any way limited to our relationship. It was also her public persona. It’s what people looked up to her for before this whole debacle. She claimed to be an activist. She believed in and advocated for things I personally found important. It’s why her fans looked up to her, and why her co-workers trusted her, and why I fell in love with her. She was lying to the colleagues who trusted her [she’s ruined or greatly harmed people’s careers on, I think, at least four occasions that I know of], to the fans who looked up to her, and to the communities whose ideals she represented. And I certainly recognized the possibility that what I felt at her having personally betrayed me with respect to those ideals was not necessarily indicative of how others would feel, because they lacked the personal element. I didn’t want to do anything brash out of a personal grievance, so I decided to ask around.

I consulted with a bunch of people – over a dozen [which approaches statistical significance]. Most of them women, most of them in tech fields, a few in games. We thought through the risks, the potential fallout, I made flowcharts of probabilities and possibilities. We debated, we considered, and we came to consensus. From strictly utilitarian terms, the probabilistic risk she posed to those around her was greater than the probabilistic risk posed by the situation turning toxic. The deontological problem of a false idol struck us as more grievous than the deontological problem of potential for a false idol to be harassed.

I spent weeks writing and rewriting, and as a group we debated what to leave out, what to put in – each thing weighed on an individual basis in terms of harm it could cause vs harm it could prevent or benefit it could bring. I dropped in that one of the people she cheated on me was her boss – who she in essence fired me to work for – partially because that is a legitimate industry grievance, but largely because it allowed me an anchor to divert discussions into issues of nepotism in the indie dev scene, which I figured were important largely because Zoe found them important.

I dropped in that one of the people she’d cheated on me with was a journalist because of a vague discomfort with my observations of how close journalists were to devs in the scene. I’ve had to deal with ethical issues in journalism before, but games journalism had always struck me as too trivial to bother with, so it wasn’t in any way a primary concern at the time. More importantly, it allowed me another anchor to refocus discussion toward if things got too toxic. I knew it would be important to gamers, even if it wasn’t important to me. But I hadn’t anticipated just how bad that problem was, I don’t think anyone did.

When you were writing the Zoe Post, did you have any inkling that what you wrote would cause anything near the kind of reaction that it has?

You don’t spend weeks making flowcharts and discussing probabilities with a bunch of people without accounting for the loudest possible outcomes. So yes, I’d considered it possible that things would devolve this way, but I’d assigned it an extremely low probability. Because the model I’d based my predictions on was that of Temkin and Mattingly.

Journalists seemed to be more than happy to quickly report on the first signs of faults in the personal lives of those two, and Wardell. But when it came to Zoe’s faults, they rushed to protect her. When Wozniak spoke out about Zoe sexually harassing him, they protected her. When Van Keenan spoke out about the hypocrisy of her consent claim, they ignored it. When fans spoke out saying that they did in fact want to know if they were supporting someone who did things they wished to not support, they repeated the private matter party line. When Nasrallah spoke out that back when Zoe was doing porn, she would routinely make false rape claims, even murder claims, they turned a blind eye. It wasn’t so clear at the outset just how broken that system was. It made its self clear in the wake of the debacle. It was literally a bunch of her friends trying to protect her image – a courtesy in no way extended to Temkin, or Mattingly, or Wardell.

Readers were outraged at the hypocrisy – that despite massive public outcry through revelation after revelation painting a single picture of a person more toxic than Mattingly or Temkin, or Wardell combined, discussions were censored, and journalists deemed themselves the arbiters of who should be protected, and who should be scrutinized. People didn’t look to them to mold culture, they looked to them to inform, so that culture could mold its self. Things naturally escalated from there, and people were increasingly compelled to vent their frustrations on their own. Until the only thing journalists reported on was the harassment – again refusing to scrutinize the reason behind it. The story became that she had a right to speak out against harassment. I had no right to speak out against abuse.

The seething anti-SJ sentiment you see running through parts of GamerGate [and I say parts, because there are actually SJ activists who are partial to it], is in some sense a result of this. People who had this anti-SJ views saw an SJ hypocrite and felt vindicated. People with no strong opinion either way saw games journalists trying to mold the conversation to protect a very obviously bad person, and decided the anti-SJs had a point. Heck, even people in SJ communities decided the anti-SJs sort of had a point. Specifically, SJ seemed to be protecting an abuser, because it was more important to send a message than to address a legitimate problem in its own circles – they ignored that someone was co-opting very important ideologies for personal gain. One of those SJs was booted from a community they’d been quite active in for making a series of educational videos on emotional abuse based on the logs in thezoepost.