The Difficult-to-Believe Case of Zak Smith's Innocence

I honestly did not imagine myself to be writing a piece like this on this blog. But I feel morally obligated to do so, given that I previously wrote a piece based on the firm assumption of his guilt.

Yesterday, Jeff Rients shared a link to an article based on an upcoming research paper by Dr. Clio Weisman. I'd encourage anyone who has, or has had, some interest in the OSR community and/or held some sort of opinion on the case of Zak Smith, to read it after reading this one.

tl;dr - The article is about the utterly bizarre lying, harassing and slandering behaviour that has somehow become prevalent in certain sectors of the Rennaisance-Formerly-Known-as-OSR. And Zak Smith sat at the heart of it, as its principal recipient. Dr. Weisman thus chose him as her case study. 

Long story short, Dr. Weisman lays out a meticulous and researched case that shows Smith to be targeted by OSR trolls for many years with a series of slanderous harassment campaigns, and also to be the victim of wholly false accusations of grave serial abusive behaviour towards his then-girlfriend Amanda Nagy. 

I will dwell a moment on formalia and the overall quality of the article before unpacking that bombshell there - The evidence is irrefutable. Recorded conversations obtained with permission where the perpetrators of the slander freely admit their wrongdoings. The research is thorough and though the author strikes me as clearly sympathetic to Zak Smith in all this, it is a sympathy that strikes me as derived from the many incredible facts she uncovered about his story.

On a critical note, I think the article is poorly structured and poorly phrased in places. It continually frontloads extraordinary claims, opinions and interpretive statements throughout in a manner that made my bias&agenda-detector go off and dwells too long on telling the story, before corroborating it with what turns out to be very strong evidence indeed. The piece ends up weaker in its presentation than it need to be, given how compelling the evidence actually is. A less narrative-driven approach would have served the author well, in my opinion.

Likewise, I would have wished that Dr Weisman also dwelled a bit on the question of "why Zak?" What made him the target of all this? It is a pity she doesn't, because I feel it is an important point with regard to the cognitive leaps and distortions such a case creates for people observing and involved, though I acknowledge this was not in scope for her article. 

But that is really what I want to write about - How difficult it is to believe that Smith is actually innocent, when it seemed so evident at one point that he was very likely guilty. 

I don't mean difficult in the sense of "hard to believe based on the facts" but in the sense of "cognitively hard for my mind to perform such a huge shift, even though the facts of the case clearly compel any honest observer to do so."

Let me first just say, in bullet points for clarity

• I think Dr Weisman presents the case for his innocence clearly, saliently and in a way that is very hard to refute. 
• I used to believe he was very likely guilty of Mandy's accusations. This was based on a number of what I call "cognitive persuasions" (more on this below).
• I now believe it is highly unlikely he is guilty, based on 
• the comprehensive amount of evidence to the contrary that was shown in the court cases and 
• the circumstantial evidence that explains why Mandy would present such false accusations (long story short - this is definitely in scope for someone with borderline personality disorder).
  

I would invite anyone who has not read the article yet, and believe Zak to be guilty, to read it. But perhaps wait till you've finished reading this one. Because I still want to lay out why it is so difficult to believe.

This is where I go into deeper waters than I can righteously manage perhaps. Should Zak show up in the comments section and demand a retraction, I am likely to grant it, since I haven't the necessary zeal to thoroughly back up this claim. But I will posit it anyway, since I think it is likely to hold up (with apologies to Mr Smith, should he happen to disagree):

Zak Smith was, by most accounts, frequently a bit of a dick online.

He has, at various times, demonstrated himself to be abrasive, vindictive, aggressive and condescending.

From what I can tell, Zak's main online crimes were his dogged belligerence and his uncharitable browbeating of those who lacked his rhetorical skills, social confidence and persistence to engage with him on his terms.

Being unpleasant on the internet is not a crime of course, even if he was too unlikeable for someone like Patrick Stuart, who gets referenced in the article, to be able to maintain a friendship with, in the face of his own mental struggles.

This is of personal relevance to my own observation of the case, as I recall reading his denunciation of Zak well before Mandy's accusations came out and basically thinking 'huh, well that fits my diffuse impression and settles it enough for me to steer clear of all that." 

A critical side note on the quality of the article: Weisman summarises Stuart's main problem with Zak as "what amounts to tone on the internet." Which I find uncharitable. Say rather, perhaps, that a person with mental struggles struggled to maintain a friendship with someone who was repeatedly being unfriendly and making demands of him he struggled to meet.

Let me break out my own psychoterapy credentials (I am a certified therapist myself) and quote one of my mentors on the thorny issue of projection: "... All the same, it is also true that people very rarely project on to a blank canvas."

And here we come to the crux of this blog entry. Cognitive persuasions and how hard they are to move. I am not making the case for "well, Zak was a dick and thus had it coming." No, although it perhaps in part explains what made him such magnet for trolls in the years prior to Mandy's accusations (the majority parts of the explanation, and the entirety of responsibility for such actions, must be found in the complicated psyches of the perpetrators). But it does explain why I, personally, found it easier to believe that he could be guilty. And whilst that is very cognitively persuasive, it isn't right.

Over on Jeff's Gameblog, a comment references other commenters reactions to the article who "never liked Z and the SA allegations didn't matter, or that Z's unlikableness was "just as bad" as the SA." This to me is a complete failure of moral conscientiousness. 

It is chilling for me to observe that my image of the case was based on a seed perception of Zak being unpleasant online, passively amplified by persistent directed campaigns of pure slander and falsehood which I was only partially exposed to, further amplified by a variety of causal and vindictive lies amongst other creators I was also only partially exposed to, so that when Mandy's accusations came around, a critical mass of cognitive persuasions, for me and throughout the entire community, all came together to form a near-unassailable position that he was guilty.

The evidence that Zak should be not guilty are not new to Dr Weisman's article. They've been posted in many places and been presented multiple times in a court of law who found the accusations wholly unfounded, based not just on a lack of evidence for the accusations themselves, but on a comprehensive amount of evidence to the contrary.

I didn't read them, though I think I was perhaps invested enough as an observer of the ordeal, that I could have. As I recall, my instinctive reaction was along the lines of "why should I subject myself to the insidious arguments of an abuser?" The power of my cognitive persuasions at work. I simply blanked it. As did many others I reckon, and continue to do so. 

Considering my support of the MeToo movement, there is perhaps also a part of me that would find it very unfortunate in that light, if it should turn out that Mandy did in fact lie about it.

What most struck me most in the moments just after finishing Dr Weisman's article, was how effortful my mind found it to reach the conclusion that the evidence at hand clearly demanded I should reach.

Cognitively it's a long stretch of road for the mind to walk, from

"Zak seemed to be a charismatic a-hole who turned out to be a hard abuser"

to

"Zak was lied about online by a LOT of people for years and years and then his girlfriend lied about him abusing her and all the liars piled on, as did all the people who didn't like him, to create critical mass and get even many people who did like him to believe it".

I found it a hard position to settle into. Surely if I could be that wrong formerly, I could be just as wrong now? Perhaps there's evidence to the contrary just around the corner?
But there's a big difference of course. My belief then was based on a critical mass of impressions that I found persuasive and has now been informed by evidence, critical thinking (critical, I should note, of my own thought processes in particular) and a more structured analysis of the situation. It could still be wrong of course. Perhaps there is evidence of his guilt lying in a cabinet waiting to be uncovered. No knowledge is ever certain. But I think the case is settled beyond reasonable doubt. The courts have agreed multiple times.

Even so, though I have good reasons, moral reasons even, to change my mind, I found it effortful to do so. I had to swim upstream against my instinctive inclinations to get there, so to speak.
I recall even as I read the article, the moment she mentions Zak, thinking "oh, this is going to be a shit apologetic read, isn't it?"
And I don't think I would have even gotten there without the fortuitous circumstance of someone I find to have integrity, Jeff Rients, writing a blog about Weisman's article, and the article itself going through the case so conscientiously.

So I am writing this article for two reasons:

1. As my own apology for writing blog entries wherein I blankly assume Zak Smith's guilt, and thus for my own participation in his unjust de-platforming. It was a failure of scrutiny that lead to a failure of morality, for which I am regretful and sorry. 
I wish Zak the best of luck in clearing his name and any future endeavours.

2. To help others understand why they might find it difficult to change their minds about this matter themselves.

Here's the link to Dr Weisman's article. You should read it.