There are various articles on Gamer Gate in this thread. Now, it appears, the truth is finally coming to the surface.
What if a stalker had an army? Zoe Quinn’s ex-boyfriend was obsessed with destroying her reputation—and thousands of online strangers were eager to help.
-------------------------
The first thing Eron Gjoni said after sitting down across from me at Veggie Galaxy in December was that he would probably violate his gag order if he talked to me. Then he talked for the next three hours, and again and again over the next three months.
Gjoni can be relentless that way. And in others. He maintains incessant eye contact from behind a tangle of dark, wavy hair. He is intensely focused. Just ask Zoe Quinn, the object of his unwanted obsession.
In September 2014, Quinn, 27, appeared in Boston Municipal Court to ask Judge Jonathan Tynes for a restraining order against Gjoni, her ex-boyfriend. In a handwritten affidavit to the court, Quinn tried to explain what had happened over the past month. After their brief romance ended, she noted, Gjoni “wrote and published a long post about my sex life and private dealings to several websites that he knew had a history of harassing me.”
Quinn is a video-game designer and, like many women in the business, routinely receives misogynistic threats from strangers. Gjoni, Quinn contended, was aware that his blog post would result in her being harassed and stalked, and she claimed he had published it in order “to damage my professional reputation as an independent artist.”
What’s more, she told the judge, the results had been particularly severe: Since Gjoni’s initial blog post, “I have received numerous death and rape threats from an anonymous mob that [Gjoni] had given details to,” she wrote. “My personal info like my home address, phone number, emails, passwords, and those of my family has been widely distributed, alongside nude photos of me, and several of my professional accounts and those of my colleagues have been hacked.”
Quinn understated the facts. The thousands of threats, which she continues to receive daily, terrified her. Tweets such as “Im not only a pedophile, ive raped countless teens, this zoe bitch is my next victim, im coming slut” spoke for themselves. Messages such as “could kill yourself. We don’t need cunts like you in this world” preyed on the common knowledge that Quinn struggled with depression; she’d won acclaim for creating an impressionistic video game called Depression Quest. Forced to flee her Dorchester apartment, she spent more than six months hiding in friends’ homes. In her affidavit, Quinn struggled to explain to the judge who was behind these threats: They were anonymous, faceless, and they could be anywhere. “Eron has coached this mob multiple times, made multiple social media accounts to smear my name publicly, and has stoked the fire of this on many occasions and doesn’t seem to be stopping,” Quinn told the court. “I am in fear of him.”
Judge Tynes asked if Quinn had sought help from the police. She had, in fact— numerous times. She told Boston police officers what Gjoni had done, including her allegation that he had turned violent the last time they had sex over the summer, just before their breakup, while she was at a conference in San Francisco. Judge Tynes told Quinn he wanted to help, but stumbled to find the right words as he scribbled down the conditions of a restraining order against Gjoni, barring him from posting any further information about Quinn’s personal life online or encouraging—“What’s the first adjective?” the judge asked. “Something mob—What was the mob?”
“Uh, hate,” Quinn replied.
“Hate mob—all right,” said the judge. “I’ll put that in quotations. Good luck, ma’am. So long.”
And now here Gjoni sat before me. Over the past three months, according to Quinn, he had continued to defy Tynes’s order, divulging further details about her personal life and forcing her to return to court in Boston again and again to address his repeated violations. As of April, the court had formally charged him with four.
There’s a haunting resonance to Gjoni’s choice of location for our meeting. This is where he and Quinn first hung out in person: It’s where his obsession with her began. He’s come back to the beginning, and he wants me to know that Quinn is a “hypocrite,” a “compulsive liar,” and an “asshole.”
Gjoni is a highly cerebral, 25-year-old software developer who was recently fired from Massachusetts General Hospital’s robotics lab. He chooses his words deliberately, spending much of our time together describing the month after his breakup with Quinn: how he extracted details from her Facebook, text, and email accounts; how he tracked her movements and shadowed her conversations. The process he described to me sounded as if he were gathering the pieces of a horrible machine, with each component designed to be as damaging to Quinn as possible. Eventually, the machine would have a name: “The Zoe Post,” a 9,425-word screed he published in August.
But before he emptied the contents of Quinn’s private life into the gaping maw of a bloodthirsty Internet, back before he instigated the most vicious online backlash against feminism in a generation, there was a first date. A date that began, not unlike many other 21st-century first dates, on OkCupid. The algorithms spoke: Gjoni and Quinn were a 98 percent match.
Read the rest of the story here.