A Brief History

It’s been almost a year since I wrote a piece about how my girlfriend and I got together, and how it probably wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for voice actor Vic Mignogna grabbing a woman without her consent.

I wasn’t the only person who witnessed his behavior during the incident, and I wasn’t the only person who had witnessed similar behavior from him in the past. Other people started speaking up, including Vic Mignogna’s former co-workers and convention staffers.

It’s been nine months since Vic Mignogna sued Funimation, Monica Rial, Jamie Marchi and Ron Toye for defamation, tortious interference, civil conspiracy and vicarious liability. Roughly seven months ago, the defense attorneys for Monica and Ron asked if I would be willing to provide sworn testimony detailing the incident I witnessed. I agreed.

It’s been just over three months since every single claim in Vic Mignogna’s lawsuit was dismissed with prejudice.

The Present

Obviously, Vic Mignogna’s fans are unhappy about this. I can respect that — I would also be disappointed if these details came to light about someone whose work I respected. Fans are fans and will tend toward the fanatical, but I don’t consider their frustration as uniformly irrational, especially since Vic Mignogna’s legal fees were crowdfunded; A lot of Vic’s fans have skin in the game.

I can understand their anger and frustration toward me, and I’ve certainly tried to be as respectful as possible in addressing their concerns.

The Campaign

If only it were that simple.

A narrative of abject nonsense surrounding this situation has been built and broadcast by people with a financial interest in generating and maintaining drama via traffic to their YouTube channels, livestreams and websites. Their narrative has found purchase with Vic Mignogna’s fans and others, even though a considerable amount of what they have said is easily dismissed as deceptive with an exceedingly small amount of research.

The website ‘Bounding Into Comics’ posted a story that included a lot of the nonsensical talking points around my statements. To their credit, they later updated the story with some of the facts that they should have researched in the first place.

The YouTuber Hero Hei posted a twenty-minute video calling my career into question, misrepresenting it to an extreme degree — Including the farcical notion that I’ve somehow been unemployed for the past decade. The video, unsurprisingly, is no longer online. I have made several attempts to speak to him about it, even offering to fly to his location and have a conversation about it on the record. These attempts have been consistently rebuffed.

There are countless examples of this behavior, far too many to explore in detail. There are a significant number of opportunists happy to engage in this nonsense, including disgraced attorney Nick Rekieta.

For the past eleven months, my honesty and integrity have been assiduously besieged by people that are willing to lie for money or attention, or by people foolish enough to believe them.

The Final Round

How has this affected me over the past eleven months? I got a promotion at work. I got another radio license from the FCC. I’m planning a great vacation for later this year to see my favorite band, and my relationship with my girlfriend has only gotten better. I have suffered zero negative effects from the maelstrom of noise.

I remain devoted to expressing myself truthfully, but I don’t get to choose what other people believe. As long as bad actors and opportunists have a product to sell — even if that product is abject deception and/or ridiculous legal theory — my continued engagement simply doesn’t matter.

They’re being paid to provide this nonsense to a willing audience, but I’m not being compensated to continuously expose their deception. I can only hope that critical thinking skills will win in the long run.

Epilogue: A Curious Regret

The defendants and the affiants have gone through a lot over the past eleven months. It has been extraordinarily rough. I’m not trying to minimize the pain they’ve gone through, but that’s off-topic for the moment.

I feel a tremendous amount of regret that the anime community is being used by artists of performative outrage and spin. I think about how much time they’ve spent fighting online, and how they could have been using this time to learn something new or find a way to succeed doing something they love.

I have extraordinary gratitude for the life I have been able to create. I’m a high-school dropout that’s paid very well to do work that I love, in an industry that’s better known for breaking hearts than it is for fulfilling life-long dreams.

I didn’t get here by winning arguments on Twitter, and neither will my detractors. I have a sincere hope that they’ll be able to emotionally disengage, step away from the nonsense and create something wonderful.