Well, jesus... alright. Simple summary: Female game developer who created the twine game Depression Quest. Later was involved in a bonkers controversy around her personal life that metastasised into Gamergate in 2014. Now works as a comic book writer. That's about as much as you can say that everyone agrees on.
Divisive figure, very very divisive. In many ways the Gamergate... thing divided the online gaming community in ways that are still going on today. You could argue it lead to the split that happened on this site in late 2017 but by then Gamergate was over. Basically to a large portion of the gaming community she's almost a martyr, harassed by a misogynistic hate mob organised by her jilted ex-boyfriend for crimes she didn't commit, this is the view that the people on ResetEra by and large have. To another large group she's a professional victim, grifter extraordinaire and a compulsive liar to boot. As you may be able to tell the users of this site have more the latter opinion and honestly I somewhat agree with them.
Let me explain my view. By the way hi, this is my second post on here. I finally decided to make an account just to reply to this question. Hopefully this post falls under the rules but if any moderators or admins have a problem with it please tell me and I will edit this post accordingly. Also sorry for the novel-length post, I figured if I was going to do this I should be thorough. And before I start: this is not a defence of gamergate. I could write an entire novel about where it went wrong and the problems it had from day one. This is specifically about Quinn because... well, you asked.
Anyway I was never a Gamergator, I was around at the time it happened but missed most of the early drama on 4chan and Reddit so was totally out of the loop when one day multiple sites posted articles decrying the 'Death/End of Gamers'. It was confusing and bizarre that all these sites were running essentially the same story. But I didn't get involved in any way, by that point the gamergate controversy had already become too confusing to get a handle on. Besides more than a few women were apparently being harassed in really vile ways and no one in their right mind wants to be associated with that. Plus I had a life.
Later in 2016 my life fell apart around me for several months and I became unintentionally immersed in the bizarre drama that was raging all over the internet, many of the faces involved (Sargon, Milo Yiannopolous) having been faces in the gamergate controversy that had now basically ended. I learnt a lot more about what gamergate actually was then but the origin was still a mystery to me the more I looked into it.
Basically a pro-gamergator will tell you that the whole thing started when it was revealed that an indie dev (Zoe) had slept with a games journalist and shortly afterwards her game had received a good review from said writer. Only that's completely untrue, says someone else (let's call them anti-gamergate), there was no review for Depression Quest. What actually happened was that said indie dev's 'jilted' ex-boyfriend (Eron Gjoni) wrote a nearly 10,000 word, misogynistic, 'sexual manifesto' detailing his ex's many sexual slights against him and then posted it to 4chan in order to get various anonymous trolls to 'harass her into therapy'. This is where the claim that Zoe Quinn had slept with a games journalist and then got a good review came from and the whole thing was quickly revealed to be a load of lies.
Neither version of the story is exactly true but that's about as far as I dived into it back then, I never read through the 'Zoe Post' to really confirm what was and wasn't true (that thing is goddamn long for a start and by that point gamergate itself was by and large over so it almost didn't matter anymore.) About a year later the internet drama had subsided, Milo Yiannopolous was disgraced. Sargon was increasingly becoming a joke/losing his mind and the whole thing was completely and utterly over.
So one day, late 2017, I was curious about what the hell had happened. I learnt Zoe Quinn had written a book about her experiences,
Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life. I was curious what her perspective on the whole thing was and considered giving it a read. First I looked at the Amazon page for it though, reviews were about what I expected: about half of them were 5 star reviews calling it a masterpiece and the other half were one star reviews calling Zoe Quinn a liar and a whore, with a small percentage of them being 2-4 star reviews by people who seemed to have actually read the book.
But then one review caught my eye. It was on the first page, one paragraph, 4 stars. The title drew my attention, just saying "..." so I read it and was utterly confused.
Here it is. This archive was taken slightly before the title change though so it still has its original title. Just in case the link doesn't work for you here it is in full:
"Removed my houseguest and her review since it was on my account, and had a chance to read the book. Yes, my daughter did take some liberties with her childhood history, but, that is what writers do, a normal childhood is boring reading, the point of her book is well met with good intent and written well. I hope it helps women in the gaming industry as it is meant to.Small minded people can do with this what they may. "
Now I found myself reading and re-reading that over and over and still being absolutely bewildered. So I clicked on the title and found out that Amazon reviews actually have comments sections (I didn't know up until that point) and discovered that the 15 or so people who still gave a rat's arse about gamergate in 2017 (the number is even smaller now) had commented, mocking Quinn mostly. One commenter had something interesting to say though: a link to the original version of that review that had been left a few days prior. The title:
"I initially bought this book optimistic that a brilliant child I watched grow up had prospered and surmounted almost..." The rating: two stars.
Here it is in full. But again in case the link doesn't work for you:
"I initially bought this book optimistic that a brilliant child I watched grow up had prospered and surmounted almost impossible negativity but was profoundly shocked from the onset. The first chapters contained multiple falsehoods regarding her childhood and I just quit reading. Her Mother is a close friend of many years, our daughters grew up together. Nobody deserves the horrors endured at the hands of misogyny rampant in the gaming industry as described, certainly not Chelsea (Zoe) who tried to help those experiencing depression, but ironically in her own words, had little sympathy for her own Mother with depression other than perceiving herself as a victim. Zoe is a talented writer, wish it was more factual because it does cast doubts on the accuracy of the rest of the tale. Also wish she was more appreciative of the small town, morally sound, traditionally rich childhood that she actually had. "
Now I was somehow even more confused but the pieces were starting to fall into place. If you've read some of the previous comments you might have noticed some people joking about how her mother's died twice now. Well, here's her mothers view of her daughters' story. I mean that's assuming that this isn't a house-guest, who logged into her amazon account. And even in the edited version she still claims her daughter lied about her childhood. I don't know am I being an asshole? The answer's probably yes but I saw this with my own two eyes, this was public (at least as far as the internet goes) for a while anyway. Don't try looking for this review, it's been deleted for years now hence why I provided archive links as proof that this was real.
So I dug a little deeper. Before I go on I need to point out to any moderators or administrators reading this: I have made sure that all links I have provided do not contain any information that can lead to possible doxxing of either Zoe's mother or Zoe herself. It's against the rules but I just don't want it to happen regardless. Clicking on the account name on either review archive brings you to an 'error' page as Amazon's account pages do not let you archive them and the account is now long deleted. If it didn't I would not have posted it. I've read through the rules and I think what I've posted is okay but if you have a problem I will change this post accordingly.
Anyway I dug a little deeper and discovered a rather nasty troll-forum which had been a part of gamergate from the start. I'm not going to name it for obvious reasons but I'll just give you the gist. Basically Quinn's mother had been doxxed years ago, although that might sound bad I need to stress that the only thing the trolls discovered was her name... which then lead to her Facebook account which is quite invasive but I digress, I never said that these were good people on this forum. It turned out shortly after the first version of the review (the 'houseguest' version) someone had trawled through the user's account and had discovered Zoe's mother's name on one of the wishlists. This account and the wishlist itself were several years old, predating the events of 2014. Obviously I cannot post links or proof of this, I am afraid you're going to have to trust me on this one. About 4 days later (on 9/11 as well just to add to the surreal humour of all this) the review was re-edited into the 4 star version I posted, her account was made private and her Facebook suddenly locked. Later I went back to check I hadn't dreamt this all up and found everything had been deleted, the review, her account, everything.
But now my curiosity was peaked. How did Zoe's mother find out that a fairly obscure site had found out that her review, wherein she posed as a family friend, had actually been left by her. I strongly doubt that she had discovered this troll-forum for herself, or that they contacted her in any way (it's just not their MO even though it is possible.) A new theory started emerging in front of me. Did Zoe Quinn keep tabs on the people who were gossiping about her? Did she force her own mother to change her review of her book once she found out about it? This is something of a conspiracy theory, but the more I learnt about the actual origins of the gamergate controversy the more it started to be the most plausible explanation. Plus in both cases her mother said that the opening chapters about her childhood are nothing but lies.
So, I started researching, reading through the entire history of the initial Zoe Quinn scandal and the subsequent Gamergate controversy that spawned from it. I now had a weird issue though, I was now mildly obsessed with long-dead internet drama from 3 years ago (5 years now). This story had taken the internet by storm in 2014 and was divisive as hell right from the start, splitting the internet gaming community in two and it still hasn't fully recovered from it. Plus many of the people involved in the pro-gamergate side are now embarrassed as all hell about their involvement. Many have deleted or made private any and all of their public posts/videos about it mostly leaving only the voices of people who are still obsessed with it, some of whom have gone absolutely bonkers in the subsequent years.
However I discovered what I think really happened with the controversy around Zoe Quinn. I could go into details if you want in another post but that's besides the point. What I'd seen on the Amazon review page was basically the exact behaviour that started the whole gamergate thing in the first place. Someone from Zoe's real life calling her out for being a liar in a very public way. It's honestly possible to feel some sympathy for Zoe as it is someone airing dirty laundry out in public. But then something weird happens, in this case it got censored and then later deleted. In other cases it gets memory-holed, articles about it might get pulled from sites and then excluded from Wayback Machine archives, any and all discussion on other forums is immediately deleted including 4chan's /pol/ board, etc. With gamergate they believed that this was some kind of a conspiracy but I disagree (one of my many, many problems with the gamergate movement.) I think, and I believe I'm right about this, that it's Zoe Quinn herself doing damage control in the most obvious and suspect way possible. In the case of what happened after her ex-boyfriend posted his long-ass helldump about her this damage control triggered a massive backlash on several forums and chan boards. However her version of the story was picked up by the media (to be clear here, we're mostly talking about feminist blogs here, not mainstream news sources or even gaming websites... at first. This later changed when it turned into gamergate where both gaming and mainstream sources picked up on the story and found themselves citing those blogs which were in turn citing Zoe's own version of events. ) I would argue her attempts at damage control were what actually set off the internet and caused the massive shitstorm that lead to gamergate.
More than that though, both her mother's review and the 'Zoe Post' written by her ex-boyfriend tell the same story. She lies about everything. That's the actual gist of the Zoe Post. Not only that but Eron Gjoni never claims in it that Zoe Quinn had sex for a good review. In fact the word 'review' never appears once in the text. He did claim that Zoe had slept with RPS/Kotaku writer Nathan Grayson, a game journalist who had in the past written articles about her, and that claim did turn out to be true. However it turned out soon afterwards that he'd never reviewed Depression Quest and all articles written about Quinn were from before they slept together (which is another criticism I could level at the gamergate movement.) However that's not what the Zoe Post is really about, it's about dated someone who turns out to be a compulsive liar, experiencing emotional abuse and discovering everything you thought you knew about your girlfriend was an elaborate lie. I don't like defending Gjoni by the way, I understand why he wrote the Zoe Post but I wouldn't have ever published it anywhere on the internet. Also, one of the big problems is that he decided to write it in a semi-funny relatable way. A sort of Gallows-humour which actually makes the thing quite readable despite its length. Unfortunately it caused many to not take it seriously and also unintentionally appealed to 4chan who turned his joke about how he started calling his ex 'Five Guys: Burgers and Fries' after finding out his girlfriend had been lying and gaslighting him and had actually been cheating on him with five different people, into a meme. Also he didn't post it to 4chan, 4chan found it on its own. Nor is it misogynistic or a sexual manifesto. Even calling him 'jilted' is wrong, he dumped her.
But I'm getting off-topic again. The thing to understand about Zoe Quinn is that anything that she says or writes is likely a lie. Zoe Quinn isn't even her real name, as her mother said, it's Chelsea (I know her last name too but I'll refrain from saying it here lest harassment or doxxing might occur). I'll put it like this: here's her
Wikipedia page. Date of birth: 1987. You might be wondering why it doesn't have a month or day on it. Well, Zoe celebrates her birthday on August 13th. However some legal documents were filed when she took Eron Gjoni to court which showed that isn't real birthday. It's in September. I'd post proof but I'm unsure of whether or not that would be allowed under the rules here, so I won't take chances.
I could go on. There's a lot to say about Zoe Quinn.... well, Chelsea. Basically because everything she says is likely a lie it's quite possible that her claims of sexual harassment are bollocks. This is a fine line to walk on though, it could be true for all we know. But time and time again Zoe Quinn has been shown to be a massive liar. That's the thing that struck me about discovering that review for myself. By the time her book came out Gamergate was long over. Yet there was still this drama surrounding her despite all of harassers having long since moved on. Increasingly I learnt that there is still a drama around Zoe Quinn because there has always been a drama around Zoe Quinn because Zoe Quinn is the drama. Is that to say she didn't get harassed in really nasty, vile ways? No, she did (although one particular famous incident - the hacking and doxxing of her tumblr - does have a lot of asterisks attached to it but I will not go into that here) because the internet is awful and cruel. But as far as I can tell, it always stems from her own lies. And when people call her out about it things can get very, very weird.
Christ, I'll end this here. I could keep going on but I'll stop for now. Hopefully the links I've posted are allowed, sorry if they aren't. I think they're within the rules but if not my apologies.
TL;DR: Zoe Quinn is a divisive figure, many consider a innocent victim of a lot of bad stuff while many think she's a serial liar. I believe the latter more as I think I have seen proof of it for myself, as did many people on 4chan and Reddit about 5 years ago which inadvertently started the gamergate flame-war. As a result I would take her accusations of sexual assault with a huge grain of salt. It might be true for all we know but time and time again Zoe Quinn has shown a very loose grip on the truth and reality thus any statement made by her should be dealt with the utmost scrutiny.
Sorry for the novella.
but jeez
