Ten days ago, author ​S. Jane Gari wrote an explosive blog post (which I wrote about here) about the now notorious pickup artist Roosh Valizadeh. In the post Gari relayed what she said was the story of an Icelandic woman who claims that Roosh raped her several years ago after following her home from a Reykjavik bar.

Now Roosh is threatening to sue Gari for defamation, claiming that the story Gari tells is “completely fabricated” and suggesting that the accuser herself, whom Gari calls “Susan,” may be nothing more than a figment of Gari’s imagination. In a post on his website Return of Kings, Roosh not only denies raping “Susan,” he declares flatly that he’s never “[f]ollow[ed] a girl home.”

As Roosh tells it,

[t]his is not a case of a girl I know making up an encounter, but a girl who I’ve never met and who I believe doesn’t even exist inventing a situation after skimming through publicly available excerpts of Bang Iceland.

In a letter evidently sent to Gari, and later posted on Return of Kings, Roosh’s lawyer, Marc Randazza, declares “Susan’s” story as “a complete work of fiction” adding later that

The story on its surface does not even sound credible. There is no possibility that if you examined this story with any amount of rigor, that you could believe it to be true.

These denials — from Roosh and from his lawyer — strike me as frankly bizarre.

The story that Gari tells, and that Randazza evidently deems so incredible, matches in most of its key details a story that Roosh tells in his book Bang Iceland, and which is also posted on his blog.

Roosh’s claim that he’s never followed a “girl” home is even more bizarre, because in Roosh’s version of the story he describes in detail how he followed this “girl” home.

In an excerpt from Bang Iceland posted on his blog, Roosh describes how he approached a drunken woman outside of a Reykjavik bar after her

friends had ditched her and left her all by her lonesome. She desperately looked for them, fiddling with her phone, but they were all gone. I couldn’t believe my luck. “I guess I’ll walk you home,” I said. She didn’t say anything. Once she started walking I followed her.

Roosh doesn’t know the woman; by his account he had “barely exchanged three words with her” on a previous evening. Unsurprisingly, the woman makes clear she doesn’t want his “help.”

“Fuck you!” she said. “You don’t have to walk me home!”

But Roosh continues on anyway. As they make their way to her house, Roosh writes,

She kept telling me to leave and I kept saying it was my duty as a man to make sure she got home safe.

When they get to her house, Roosh insists he needs to use her bathroom; she says “yeah, whatever,” and lets him in.

Remember, this is Roosh’s account I’m relaying here, not “Susan’s.” I have no idea how Roosh squares his account of following a “girl” home with his current claim that he’s never followed a “girl” home.

What’s makes this claim even more remarkable is that he has written numerous times before about following women.

In his book 30 Bangs, a collection of Roosh’s putatively true sex stories, he describes two instances in which he followed (or tried to follow) women into taxicabs. In one account he says that when the taxicab a woman called arrived, he “hopped in with her like a stray dog.” In another account, he describes how he tried to follow a different woman “into the cab without her permission, but she was too quick for me and escaped into the darkness.”

Following women isn’t just something that Roosh sometimes does; it’s actually one of the key “techniques” he teaches his readers. In Day Bang, in which Roosh lays out his strategies for meeting women in the daytime, Roosh urges men to “trail behind” attractive women they see walking down the street.

The best method for street approaching is to pick a street with medium traffic, hide behind a bush or utility pole, and then emerge from your spot to start following any cute girl that walks by until she hits a Don’t Walk signal.

While she’s waiting to cross the street, you see, she is a captive audience for whatever pickup like you want to try on her.

Roosh offers similar advice on his blog, telling his readers that “[w]hen a cute girl walks by, follow her until she hits a Don’t Walk signal. This may take a few blocks of stalking.”

In another post on his blog, Roosh declares that “[s]ometimes the best way to get into a girl’s place is to say nothing and just follow her in.”

And while we’re talking about Roosh’s standard operating procedures, Roosh regularly uses the excuse of having to use the bathroom as a way to get into a woman’s house or apartment. He describes this “bathroom weasel technique” in some detail in his book Bang, and uses it so often that it becomes something of a running joke in his later works.

In Roosh’s post responding to, and flatly denying, the accusations set forth in Gari’s post, he makes several other blanket denials that are similarly problematic.

In an attempt to rebut “Susan’s” story, in which she claims Roosh raped her after determining that she was home alone, Roosh declares that he’s never had “sex in an Icelandic girl’s home while she was alone.”

But in Roosh’s version of “Susan’s” story, he simply assumed that her parents were in the house with her, sleeping — even though she was acting as if they weren’t.

She was talking loud, as if no one was home, but I did notice a shut door that I assumed was her parents’ bedroom.

The next morning, in Roosh’s account, he snuck out of the house shortly after waking up “in case her parents woke up early.” But at no point did he ever encounter the parents, and the woman he says he had consensual sex with never mentions them being in the house either.

In “Susan’s’ account of that night, as described by Gari, she says that shortly before raping her, he asked her to touch his penis. When she refused, Roosh grabbed her.

In his Return of Kings post, Roosh says he’s never asked “a woman to ‘touch my penis.'”

Perhaps, but in his book Bang, Roosh describes something he calls the “hand-on-crotch move, the most important bedroom move we have.” This “move” is as straightforward as it sounds. Roosh explains:

At this point you have been doing most of the touching, but what you want to do now is open the floodgates and give her permission to be the sexual being that she really is. When one of her hands is near your waist, gently grab it and place it right on your cock over your clothes.

This is evidently a move Roosh uses on a fairly regular basis. In Poosy Paradise, his latest collection of putatively true sex stories, he describes one encounter in which he made use of this not-so-subtle technique,

“I’m tired,” I said. “Let’s lay on the bed.” After a couple minutes I did the move. It’s the best move I have and I remember when and where I learned it 13 years before. I grabbed her hand and gently placed it on my penis, as if setting a teacup on its saucer.

Several pages later, Roosh recounts how he used the exact same technique on another woman, complete with the same phony complaint about feeling tired:

“I’m a little tired,” I said. “I want to lay down.” I lay on my bed and told her to join me. She did with her shoes hanging over the side. I kissed her and then unzipped the boots and took them off. She did not resist. Then I put her hand on my dick, and within five minutes that dick was inside her.

Elsewhere in the same book Roosh describes how he “tried to press my boner into [yet another woman’s] body but through our coats I don’t think she felt it.”

So it may well be technically true that Roosh has never asked a woman to touch his penis. By his own account, he prefers to place a women’s hand on his penis without asking first,

In “Susan’s” account, as told by Gari, she started crying after Roosh grabbed her, but her tears did not convince Roosh to back off.

In his Return of Kings post, Roosh claims that he’s never attempted “to make physical advances on a crying girl.”

Perhaps, but in 30 Bangs, Roosh describes how he has sex with a reluctant young woman who whimpered the whole time.

After dinner we went upstairs and I eased her onto my king-size bed. It took four hours of foreplay and at least thirty repetitions of “No, Roosh, no” until she allowed my penis to enter her vagina. No means no—until it means yes. The sex was painful for her. I was only the second guy she’d ever had sex with. I didn’t think she was lying, because pumping her was like jamming my cock through a medieval keyhole. She whimpered like a wounded puppy dog the entire time, but I really wanted to have an orgasm, so I was “almost there” for about ten minutes. After sex she sobbed for a good while, talking about how she had sinned in the eyes of God, but in an hour she got horny again and we went at it once more.

According to Gari, “Susan” also claims that Roosh, shortly before raping her,

laughed and overpowered her with force, saying, “All girls like this. It’s every woman’s fantasy. You don’t even know what you’re saying. You’re drunk, but I like drunk girls.”

Roosh says he’s never told “a girl that rape is ‘every woman’s fantasy.'”

I haven’t found an example of Roosh doing this in the writings of his I’ve searched through, though in one blog post he talks about his love of rape scenes in movies and declares that both men and women “have rape fantasies and that’s normal.”

As for using force to overcome female resistance, Roosh has admitted doing that in at least one instance. In Bang Ukraine, as I’ve noted before, Roosh describes how he used “some muscle” to hold a woman down after she told him she wanted to change positions during sex.

And I need not remind most of you of the many times that Roosh has described other sexual encounters that have led many people to describe his books as “rape guides.” (If you do need reminding, I have examined many of these instances in a post you can find here.)

So, far from being the literally incredible story that Roosh’s lawyer insists that it is, one so implausible that no one who “examined this story with any amount of rigor … could [possibly] believe it to be true,” “Sarah’s” story not only matches Roosh’s own version of events in many key details but it also describes Roosh using tricks that are consistent with his MO, as spelled out in his books and blog posts. What’s more, most of Roosh’s specific denials, as I’ve shown above, are contradicted by his own writings.

In Roosh’s version of the story. he follows a woman he’s only spoken to very briefly home from a bar even though she tells him repeatedly not to; he uses the excuse of having to use her bathroom to get into her house, after which she thanks him for walking him home and then has consensual sex with him.

In “Susan’s” version of the story, as told by Gari, Roosh follows a woman he’s only spoken to very briefly home from a bar even though she tells him repeatedly not to; he uses the excuse of having to use her bathroom to get into her house. After learning that she’s there alone, he tries to get her to touch his penis; when she resists he grabs her and rapes her.

Again, I ask you which seems the most plausible.

There is one detail to “Susan’s” account, as Gari tells it, that seems to me to add to the plausibility of her account: As he follows her home, he tells her that she has “a beautiful but sad walk.”

This detail is not in Roosh’s version of events, and might seem a bit strange, But, as one of my readers pointed out to me, Roosh has actually been filmed using a variation of that line in an attempt to pick up a Romanian woman.

In 2013, you see, a Romanian news program did a brief feature on Roosh, and Roosh posted two versions of the story that aired on Romanian TV. Neither is translated, but in both versions Roosh can be seen telling a young Romanian woman, in English, that “I couldn’t help but notice the way you are walking. It is very sad walk.”

You can watch the clip here; it should start right at the point Roosh approaches the woman.

You can find a slightly different version of the TV segment here.

I don’t know if “Susan’s” story is true, but Roosh’s defense, so far, is not exactly enhancing his own credibility.

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