On Tuesday, a Twitter and YouTube user who had spent months posting disturbing content under the alias "Jace Conners" revealed his true identity, but not to apologize for the nasty, GamerGate-related stuff he'd sent to game makers such as Brianna Wu. Rather, 20-year-old Maine resident Jan Rankowski came clean with a statement that would make Alanis Morissette's head spin: his videos had been a "joke" all along, and now he's the one suffering a wave of anonymous Internet harassment.

Rankowski confirmed his identity to Buzzfeed in a lengthy interview, in which he alleged that he's been subjected to the types of messages and nuisances common to recent online doxings. According to Rankowski, that activity has included "nasty things" being said in phone calls to his old high school and his current place of work, along with "a letter in the mail with a picture of me from my high school yearbook… It said I shouldn’t have fucked with 8chan.”

He claimed that the harassment began after he posted his weirdest GamerGate-related video to date, in which Rankowski kicked and shouted—complete with racist epithets—at a Prius that had flipped over on a road. The video concluded with a text-loaded slideshow that alleged that game maker Brianna Wu, a frequent target of recent anonymous harassment, was somehow responsible for the car flipping over—and that she had done so to prevent Rankowski from driving to her house "to expose her as a corrupt gamer." The video went on to announce the beginning of an effort known as "Wu-pocalypse" to "discredit the [social justice warrior] people online."

Rankowski said that once members of online forums figured out that he wasn't who he said he was, negative attention began coming his way.

Wu spoke to Jezebel in February, confirming that this same harasser had sent private, threatening messages to her that included brandished knives and guns and that she had filed police reports about those threats. As the Jace Conners character, Rankowski appeared on a GamerGate-affiliated podcast in January to dispel those accusations by saying that any weapons in his videos were "Airsoft replicas."

Is it a joke or a threat?

Buzzfeed's article combed through and posted examples of Rankowski's many online videos over the years; his brand of "humor" could be described as acerbic at best—and, quite frankly, low-rent Tom Green at worst. He pointed to these videos as proof that he was not actually sending threats to Wu and other game designers and critics: "The Jace character was just a lens through which I do satire. YouTube streamers, Call of Duty gamers. GamerGate was the next in a long line."

In its follow-up article on the Conners videos, Jezebel reached out to Brianna Wu, who made it clear that she was not laughing. "If this person thinks they can throw up their hands and say, 'Whoa, whoa, this is just a joke, people, I'm sorry,' this isn't Grand Theft Auto," Wu said. "You can't threaten to murder people and think there are no consequences and you can take it back. My suggestion to him is to lawyer up."

Further Reading Supreme Court social media rap-lyrics case brings Eminem into the fold When does online speech become a "true threat" unprotected by the US Constitution? Beyond her ability to match prior police reports to a known identity, Wu—and other targets of online commentary and harassment—could also have the Supreme Court on her side by the end of its current term. Last year, the Court elected to hear a case regarding whether hateful or harassing speech is somehow buffered when posted as an online comment or message.

It's not entirely clear whether any potential prosecution brought against Conners—none has been announced thus far, we should note—would enjoy one-to-one correlation with the Supreme Court case. That case asked a deeper question about the perception of a threat—particularly whether an online commenter merely "negligently misjudges how his words will be construed and a 'reasonable person' would deem them a threat."

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