Growing up, Bonnie only knew two things about her biological father: his name, which was on her birth certificate, and her mother’s recollection of him as a deadbeat, drug-addicted loser. “He’s probably in jail if he’s not dead,” Susan used to tell Bonnie.

But Bonnie didn’t have an easy childhood without Elam, either. She says she was molested by a neighbor and physically abused by someone Susan was dating. When Bonnie was 26 and pregnant with her second son, she decided to track Elam down for herself so she could learn more about her genealogy.

After his divorce from Susan, Elam became a successful drug and alcohol addiction counselor; he’s said he was the clinical director of three substance abuse recovery programs as well as a private contractor. But by around 1999, Elam said he quit to be a truck driver. He had also been married and divorced two more times.

His second wife did not respond to BuzzFeed News’ repeated requests for comment. His third wife would not speak on the record — because she believes Elam will retaliate against her if she does — other than to say: “I never want to have any contact with him ever again, ever."

Elam has said he was a "zombie" before he read MRA founding father Warren Farrell's The Myth of Male Power: Why Men Are the Disposable Sex, published in 1993 and considered the bible of the men’s rights movement. After reading it, Elam fine-tuned his melodramatic flair for writing about “evil women” in a series of published letters to the editor of the Houston Chronicle about “opportunistic feminism.” “Male-bashing feminists, contemptuous of the patriarchy and the traditional role of women in it, are alive and well and more politically powerful than ever,” he wrote in a July 1999 letter to the editor.

But by the time Elam received Bonnie’s letter, he was still years away from launching his own website. He wrote her back on May 30, 2005:

I was totally shocked to get your letter today, but I am glad to tell you that your efforts have paid off. I am the person you have been trying to find.

Elam went on to explain that he wasn’t sure he was her biological father, despite the letter he had sent Susan’s parents years ago, apologizing for his behavior while under the influence. But, Elam said, he didn’t want to focus on logistics:

If I can divert things for a moment here, all this business is rather sordid and cold, and there is something else on my mind I'd rather be saying. Bonnie, I hope I am your biological father. [Your brother’s] too. I owe both of you a tremendous debt whether I am the man who fathered you or not. There was a time that I held you while you went to sleep and looked at you seeing the most beautiful thing in the world. I just said some unflattering things involving Susan, but the more important truth here is that I failed both of you.

Elam offered to pick up the tab for a paternity test, and they agreed to meet to discuss further. But when the two locked eyes, Bonnie said, Elam wept. “Now we know,” she remembered him saying. They decided it would be a waste of money to go forward with testing.

“It wasn’t even like, do we kind of look alike?” Bonnie said. “I was looking at myself. I saw myself in him from my face to the bend in my elbow. It was weird. Your whole life, you go around not looking like anybody, and all of the sudden your doppelgänger is sitting right in front of you.”

Bonnie and Elam hit it off right away. They didn’t just look alike: They both loved sushi, hated American politics, and shared the same dry, sarcastic sense of humor.

Elam was on the road for weeks at a time and wasn’t around all that often — Bonnie guesses she only saw him for a total of two weeks over six years — which is why she thinks it took some time for “the honeymoon period to end.” The first time Bonnie remembered noticing Elam had anger issues was around eight months in. She took a trip to Houston to visit him on her own without her husband and kids. They planned to eat Vietnamese food and play Rock Band. Bonnie heard Grandmaster Flash was playing at a local museum event, and asked if Elam and his girlfriend wanted to go.

“He freaked out for no reason,” Bonnie recalled. “He said, ‘Absolutely not, I’m not listening to this n****r rap shit.’” ("Of course I didn't say anything like that," he insisted to BuzzFeed News.)

This outburst made her cry. “I was like, wow, it’s only OK to have a relationship with my dad when I’m agreeing with him.” Still, the relationship continued to progress. One night, the Elams went to dinner as a family: Bonnie, Paul, Susan, and Bonnie’s brother, from whom the family is now estranged — he’s been in and out of jail on drug charges for years. Unsurprisingly, it was awkward.

“I looked at Paul and said, 'You accused me all these years of being unfaithful, and I never was; the only time I ever was, was when you put me in a situation where I got raped,'" Susan recalled. "He got up and walked away mid-sentence, and that was that.”

She told Bonnie she wasn’t happy that they were in touch, but said she knew Bonnie had to make her own decisions about her father for herself.

When Elam was on the road, he would entertain himself by participating in what Bonnie called “internet troll wars” about men’s rights. Elam has said that he “started AVFM from a semi truck, with a laptop, driving 10, 12 hours a day.” ("I'm a determined person," he told BuzzFeed News.) By 2008, he was blogging under the name “The Happy Misogynist.” Bonnie was his first subscriber. He wrote to her in August 2008 from his brand-new blogging email address to thank her for her support, calling her “Lonely Girl” since she was not only the first subscriber, but also the only woman.

At first, Bonnie was happy her dad had a hobby; she was interested and supported his passion and was proud when he began to gain a real following. As the mother of two sons, she was concerned about resources for young men, and thought his perspective — he said he was a drug abuse counselor and noticed men were getting abused so he made it his mission to find them resources — was admirable. She said she remembers Elam made thousands of dollars through online fundraising in just days to launch A Voice for Men that year.

“I thought, Wow, this is the culmination of all his hard work,” Bonnie said. “He wanted to be a writer, and now he had a platform. Who doesn’t want something like that to happen for them? He was doing work he loves, he was getting people excited about a topic that needs more light, and I thought he was really going to change things.’”

What she termed her father's “shock jock” rhetoric didn't bother Bonnie in the beginning. But by July 2009, he was penning things like “A Message to Women”:

There is a problem with the women in this culture… And the "freedom" women gained on this frenzied path of vengeance and victimization went to its final end? It doesn't appear to have settled well. Women are growing increasingly violent. They are matching men in domestic violence, blow for blow, and they are causing the lions share of injury and death to children in the home.

None of this quite resonated with Bonnie, who thought of herself as “the antithesis of everything” Elam was describing. She had been abused and molested, and had a tough childhood, but had raised two sons with her husband of 17 years. She didn’t even consider herself a feminist, but “pro equal rights.”

Elam assured Bonnie that he was only being sensational to drive his point home. “He does a lot of stuff just to get a rise out of the public,” she said. “He said there’s no such thing as bad press. He knew in order to get something out in the spotlight, especially something as niche as men’s rights, you have to overblow it.”

When asked how AVFM has grown so quickly, Elam told BuzzFeed News, "By provoking the feminist establishment. The readers come to our site and find out they've been lied to."