Previous: 8 Allegations of the Unnamed Site
In amidst this brouhaha, an alternate story of The Unnamed Site’s (TUS) origin emerges, via tumblr user @donttrythisathome.
@DTTAH— who claims not to know Ziz or any of her friends— writes that a Rationalist named John David Pressman (who goes by the username Namespace) authored TUS. According to @DTTAH, back in September— 3 months prior to the events described— John had begun “harassing” Ziz online. He escalated after she turned him down: after he, in the poetic words of @DTTAH, "failed to get under those robes".
John then (allegedly) became convinced that Ziz was trying to kill him, & began frantically texting @DTTAH at the slightest hints of Ziz's sinister presence. These hints included:
John's mail getting damaged in transit: was Ziz trying to poison him?
The pipes in his house clanging: was Ziz in the walls?
His trashcans rattling: what Zizery is this?
A car honking in the night
Why would lil Mz. Ziz want to kill John? On this front, he (allegedly) provided @DTTAH w/ "evidence" consisting of... 🙄 chat logs where Ziz tells John to cut it out, after he keeps "spamming" her w/ "his increasingly delusional takes": namely, that she wants to control him, & that she wants to send all of humanity to hell.
Ziz finally (allegedly) had to tell John that he seemed "unstable".
Ziz firmly told him to stop, & said that she felt harassed. This clearly, as per John, was proof that *Ziz* was "paranoid and insane".
Yet the *last* straw for John seemed to be when Ziz next turned down his advances— after all this charmery???— *&* called his philosophical positions "bunk".
John then (allegedly) launched a campaign of destruction against Ziz & her friends, ruthlessly scouring chatlogs for any signs of their "dangerousness".
& he (allegedly) shared, among fellow Rationalists, the resulting "evidence" paired w/ transphobic memes!!
Not only did he, w/ associates, (allegedly) send "misogynistic, threatening" emails to Ziz's friends— he also (allegedly) spent "months" telling Discord mods how ~threatening~ Ziz was, so that, if Ziz were to try & report him, *she* would be "dismissed as a crazy person".
Given what @DTTAH (appropriately) calls the "fearmongering and transmisogynistic pearl-clutching... about Ziz" after her conference protest, @DTTAH fears that the public— & perhaps the police— are more primed to believe *John*'s version of reality than they are Ziz's. The stakes, as they point out, are high: John is "now saying that he ‘won't feel safe' until Ziz and her friends are in jail."
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Our Rationalist “Community Alert” poster (ORCAP) (last heard from in pt. 20) points out— reasonably— that @DTTAH could be one of Ziz’s friends ~in disguise.~
To ORCAP, this signifies that @DTTAH’s account could be wholesale zpropaganda (Ziz propaganda). We are less convinced:
1. We do not believe that Ziz's or her friends’ accounts should be wholesale rejected (see pt. 20 for 4 cognitive biases we fear this would belie.)
2. We do not believe that @DTTAH is one of Ziz’s friends, since they apparently do not know about Gwen’s competing theory re: the author of TUS. Why— if this were one of the girls— would they post an *alternate* version of events on tumblr, & not mention Gwen’s theory, which in fact carries significant water (see pt. 26 for the water it carries)?
…By that same token, we couldn’t escape the knowledge:
Gwen, on her blog, documents this period of time extensively, w/ both screenshots & chatlogs showing the pile-on the girls endured. If John *had* been harassing Ziz— we thought— she would prob. have included that too.
For their part, @DTTAH includes Discord screenshots which appear to support their claim. Yet they include no screenshots of John's (allegedly) prolific online activity- no texts, & no chatlogs containing John himself.
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We therefore— for a long time— left the site’s authorship as an open question. We threw up our hands and figured we might never know… UNTIL…
We stumbled upon the account of tumblr user @aflowerbynoothername. @AFBNON provides strong evidence linking the site to John David Pressman— and names Ratheka as one of John’s co-conspirators.
@AFBNON calls John “a serial sex pest and pedophile”, & backs up the claim that he— w/ Ratheka & other co-conspirators— went so far as to fake Signal logs & Discord comments.
A separate Rationalist— 2 months after @DTTAH’s post— will claim that John also called in false police reports against the girls— including one in which he said he “feared for his life”.
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@AFBNON posits that both John’s group & the group surrounding ex-MIRI CEO Michael Vassar* had a shared interest in keeping the rumors not just running, but escalating: both were trying to get ahead of the girls’ potential exposure of their own sexual misdeeds (@AFBNON identifies these as pedophilia on John’s pt., & rape on the pt. of Michael).
*@AFBNON writes that John— like Michael— enjoyed “breaking” ppl: “pushing them towards psychotic breaks, just to see if he can.”
Emma & “a few of her friends” had apparently “personally [known] and cared for some of John David's victims, and he anticipated that they would one day talk about his habit of attempting to coerce people into having sex with him via hypnosis, and his other gross habit of sexting underage teenagers”.
What’s more: @AFBNON alleges that it was John, not Ziz, who pushed Fluttershy to suicide. After some of Ziz’s friends heard abt this, he (allegedly) panicked, & this further motivated him to publish TUS.
@AFBNON will lament that prominent Rationalists, four years after the girls’ protest, are still repeating the dross of TUS. We lament that, seven years after the protest, this dross has gone mainstream: it has been swallowed wholesale by the press.
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About a year after The Unnamed Site (TUS) got posted, a Rationalist named Jamie— who had been, during “the brouhaha”, “a member of John David's inner circle”— defected from from this circle (whew!) They then shared, w/ at least two other ppl, half a year’s worth of text screenshots b/w them & John— which, according to @AFBNON, corroborate @DTTAH’s version of events.
Three years after Jamie’s defection, another member of the “inner circle” will write a series of posts admitting its* role in John’s scheme, & recanting its previous “bad faith” “shit talking” abt Ziz.
*This courageous entity uses it/its pronouns.
It will write, “I legitimately do not think Ziz did anything wrong except speak truth to power in ways that power really really did not like.” At the time, it will write, it had “surrounded [itself] with evil people”.
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A few days later, it will say more:
Ziz saved my life. She's the reason I was able to get away from my abuser and she's the reason I was able to get out of the hellscape I built from my own submission and complicity with evil. She deserves so much better than how I've treated her and I will speak that truth.
Ziz is one of the brightest witches of our generation and a beacon of hope among queer anarchists…. And the oppressors DARVOed her into being a "cult leader" for it.
I know it was DARVO because I fucking participated in perpetuating it, I dated the guy primarily responsible for it. He's the one who started calling them a cult, who got them ostracised from everywhere making them look like a cult, and who weaponized the cops against them.
We owe it to each other to treat each other better than this. This is how trans disposability works, you're helping with the disposal. Fucking stop.
You know what "Zizian" really means? It means "victim of abuse by JD Pressman." It means "anarchist who speaks truth to power" […] and you know? I am a Zizian, and I will not be silent any longer.
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Two days later, it will expand this mea culpa into a long blog post, in which it says:
I was… complicit in immense evil, and I have caused harm that I can never take back, but this isn’t about me, this is about… JD Pressman and his victims, of which I was but one of many.
[…]
I’m doing this for all of his victims, so that there stop being more of us.
[…]
The lies I helped him spread need to be called out as such.
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Next:
If you would like to continue reading this mea culpa: A Mea Culpa
If you would like to get back to the story: By No Means Ask Alice
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Related Bonus Content (w/ possible spoilers):