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So in my last post, I noted that A Voice for Men’s excitable founder Paul Elam was threatening to dig into the lives of alleged “yellow journalists” he thinks have libelled him in an effort to discover the alleged “skeletons in [their] closet[s].”
Unfortunately, he’d deleted the post in which he gave the details of this new, er, initiative, so I couldn’t give more details.
But now one helpful We Hunted the Mammoth reader, Alice Sanguinaria, has dug up the Google cache of his original post, and has conveniently saved an archived version of it.
So here are some highlights of that post — that is, some of the things that Elam decided he probably shouldn’t actually be saying in public.
After starting off his post by complaining that “many, many bloggers, mainstream ‘journalists’ and major publications have chronically lied about and fabricated defamatory stories” about him and his pals, Elam went on to make some highly charged accusations against some of these writers.
The first name on his list: Jeff Sharlet, the author of a highly unflattering GQ portrait of Elam and his AVFM cohorts.
GQ writer Jeff Sharlet recruited a pedophile and inserted him at ICMI 14 in order to cast us in a horrific light. He also brought a young woman in to attempt to sexually entice a member of AVFM’s staff into a compromising position so he could write from that angle. This is not allegation, it is fact.
Elam offered no evidence whatsoever to back up these alleged facts, which appear utterly ridiculous on their face.
He also deliberately took a statement by Dan Perrins way out of context in order to defame him.
Here’s the statement Elam is evidently referring to, as Sharlet presented it in his GQ piece:
For Dan Perrins, one of the security black shirts, it was the day he ended up in jail, after he says he lodged a complaint against his ex, the beginning of a legal battle that led him to a hunger strike. “I should have killed the bitch five years ago,” he tells me. “I’d be out by now.”
I would be interested in seeing the “context” that Elam evidently thinks will make this statement smell better.
Elam continued with somewhat less lurid accusations against two other writers, charging Buzzfeed’s Adam Serwer with “blend[ing the] claimed woes” of former family members “with a pack of lies and us[ing] that to disparage me on Buzzfeed,” and Mother Jones’ Mariah Blake of doing “a complete con job … cherry picking everything she could in order to paint a false picture of myself and Warren Farrell.”
And then Elam, warming to his subject, laid out what he had in mind for these writers and others he feels have wronged him in print and online.
So far, we have only responded to all this treachery with refuting the material written about us on our page. This was far more civil than these people AND THEIR ENABLERS deserve.
In the months ahead we will be teaching some of these people, all that we can, a lesson or three about what happens when you go too far in provoking the wrong people.
So, you can bet right now that if Jeff Sharlet, Mariah Blake, Adam Serwer and a whole lot of other people have dirt in their backgrounds, we are going to dig it up and spread it around like gonorrhea in a whorehouse.
That goes for their family members and embittered exes as well. Two can play at that game and it is our turn.
Oh, but he wasn’t done. He also claimed he would go after
every employee, especially senior management, at publications like Mother Jones, GQ, Buzzfeed, Washington Post, Time Magazine, The Houston Press, Maclean’s Magazine, and many more.
And why stop there? Elam then threatened to bring his crusade not only to “[t]hose who have libeled us, or work for a publication that has libeled us” but also to “everyone they know,” whom he declared “fair game for a fair and certain return of what they have dished out.”
That’s right: everyone they know.
How exactly Elam figures that someone who happens to know someone who works for Time magazine, say, could possibly be held responsible for anything in that magazine is not exactly clear.
Elam went on to promise that “[u]nlike them, we will only print what we can prove,” a claim that seems rather dubious given AVFM’s long and unglorious track record with “proof.”
He then claimed to have connections to “some people with real reach” who would be able to bring his alleged “proof” to the world.
He ended with a virtual declaration of war:
We have tolerated this abuse for far too long. We are done playing nice with miserable, lying hacks.
And this creepy coda:
Now I can go on to have a fantastic day.
Apparently Elam gets quite a boost from threatening to ruin the lives of people who happen to know people who happen to know people he doesn’t like.
But this boost doesn’t seem to have lasted long. With even some of his supporters suggesting he was going too far, Elam deleted his post and replaced it with an apology of sorts, though he didn’t actually take back any of the accusations he had made.
Luckily for us, Google remembers what Elam would like everyone to forget.
I thought of the Scientology factor as well, and mentioned it on the post preceding this one.
I can’t remember or be arsed to check if that particular guy identified as a “pedophile”, and it doesn’t matter. It’s enough that he pretty openly advocated child abuse. If he’s already doing that kind of “activism”, he’s indeed an open pedophile and you could hire him to hang out with the MRAs, if he’s not already doing that too.
Most people probably haven’t actually seen open pedophiles like him, so they would assume you could realistically only hire an actor to play one. However, Elam implicitly grants us that these open pedophiles do exist, it’s just that the MRM has nothing to do with them…
I’m not sure what he hopes to accomplish. The writers who used to spread pedophile accusations against people who did blogs, vlogs & articles on him & his cohorts have all abandoned him.
Without them he’s just left with posting wild accusations on twitter and his website that no one really cares about.
Oh dear Bog. That would explain a lot, including Paulie’s dubious history as a drug/alcohol counselor. Wasn’t one of Scientology’s “anti-drug” strategies the induction of complete mental breakdowns in the subjects, by insulting them in every way and by every means possible?
Elam sure doesn’t look very flattering on that picture, but you should not judge a book by its cover.
Although this book probably should….
If Paulie doesn’t want to be portrayed by the media as a ginormous douchebag, maybe try not being a ginormous douchebag? Journalists aren’t the one ruining his reputation. He is.
Yeah, that should go well. Commit defamation and invasion of privacy against seasoned journalists backed up by large corporations with deep pockets and years of experience.
MRAs aren’t just “an eye for an eye”, they’re an H-bomb for an eye. Except that it usually ends up being an own goal for an eye.
Yep- and Scientology bought out NarcAnon and the Cult Action Network,
Other half of Elamite statement:
“Misogynist:
A man who thinks other men are flighty, biased, arbitrary crabby babies — and expects them to act that way.”
Thank you.
@bekabot – ahaha. Indeed.
@crassenti – I know, right? From what I’ve seen of it, Macleans comes off as rather stodgy and… I dunno, conservatively Canadier-than-thou… not exactly the bastion of cultural Marxist SJWs or whoever Paul Elam thinks his enemies are.
@Fruitloopsie – can I wish you Happy Birthday? I’m rather late, but I saw your post a few days ago. Have a great year! 🙂
@Bina
that wouldn’t work because he both used to be a psychologist and is offering services as one now, and scientology bans psychologist, it sees them as evil or something.
Paul Elam has never been a psychologist. He’s been a counselor for people who have drug problems, but he’s never been a licensed psychologist.
As for his failed project “An Ear For Men”, it’s literally him conning men out of 90 dollars an hour to talk at them.
This part of Elam’s post:
“That goes for their family member and embittered exes as well.” reminds me a bit of that whole Zoey Quinn thing with her ex-boyfriend. Als, I am wondering how he can not (will not) see that his “I was just tired!” excuse doesn’t add up. How many people start to threaten other people and their exes because they are “tired”? Come on, Mr Elam. We see right through you.
No, he wasn’t a psychologist; he doesn’t have that much education. And you’re thinking of psychiatry, in which practitioners prescribe medication for mental illnesses (really, physical illnesses with mental side effects). Scientology holds that this is evil and wrong because mental illness isn’t caused by a physical condition requiring medication, but by invisible alien beings glommed all over your brain, holding you back. Or some such. But really, it’s to keep hooking the vulnerable and the gullible on the “drugs” that Scientology proffers…namely, laughable horseshit theories about aliens, and ridiculous methods to rid oneself of them…for $$$ galore. In other words, not so very different from what Paulie’s doing. Just swap out aliens for women, and you’ve basically got the gist.
Basically, Paulie is a grifter who isn’t good enough to make in the the much more lucrative religious cons like Scientology.
If Elam didn’t want his movement associated with pedophilia, why wasn’t that “ephebophile” turned away or asked to leave. They asked a self identifying feminist to leave.
Also if it is so easy to defame a group with pedophilia, why don’t the MRAs hire some pedophile to infiltrate GQ? They make it sound so simple!
I have always thought the MRA PR an odd thing. They poke and poke people by saying the most vile things possible, and this is their only manner of ‘public conversation’.
But then they blame it on everybody else when they achieve their goal of looking as vile as possible, pretending this is not the case at all.
What? How?
Dean Esmay has a new article on AVfM claiming that Jeff Sharlet laughed at him for being a survivor of sexual abuse (I doubt that happened) and that he brought in a pedophile in order to deliberately terrify rape victims. Or something. Reeks of bullshit like everything else Dean Esmay says.
Maybe Sharlet did laugh at him. If he was doing that thing MRAs love to do. Comparing not getting laid after buying dinner to being raped. Or just in general, framing being turned down for sex as a human rights violation. I too doubt he mocked Dean for being an abuse. I wouldn’t dismiss the possibility that he laughed in that nervous, uncomfortable way people sometimes do. Just because someone laughs, doesn’t mean they find something funny. I’m a nervous laugher.
It bemuses me when people use the excuse of “I was tired” when they have said something horrendous. Being tired doesn’t turn a decent person temporarily into a horrendous person. It just removed the brake that is a little voice saying “other people won’t think that’s a nice thing to think”. It doesn’t make a decent person horrendous, it just reveals the horrendous person they always were behind the public mask.
Not that Paulie had a very effective public mask anyway, of course.
So Paulie gets worn thin and driven to post threats against others because of apparent libel etc in the press… but women like Sarkeesian, who have to leave their homes for safety, are drama queens making the whole online abuse thing up for cash and prizes.
Sounds about right, for their general level of reasoning. Which is the level underneath the sub-level underneath the second basement of reasoning.
If I believed in the David Icke lizard-people thing, I would suspect Paulie was a lizard-person who got the instructions wrong and is now rogue.
“And everyone they know”… I think Paul has been watching re-runs of “The Usual Suspects” a bit heavily. He’s no Kaiser Soze.
Looks like the standard scenario originally seen in the wild at Free Republic nearly twenty years ago: Someone using a conservative site (either siteowner or ally) posts something they shouldn’t – like, say, the SSN and credit card information of the manager at Chuy’s who dared report the Bush Twins for underage drinking – then takes it down (or has it taken down) after a few hours, by which time several dozen conservative activists have already passed it on to all of their trusted friends.
Oh opps, I guess I was giving him to much credit. I just see him mentioned as licensed so much I guess I just beleaved it :p.
Premature Elamulation?
Y’know, when I went to Extortion Summer Camp, we were taught to dig up the dirt BEFORE making the threats. Aidan The Friendliest Counselor said that was because if you had a Premature Elamulation instead, your targets would have time to get you first.
Aidan also said it was a bad idea to let any target know you had other targets because if the targets buddy up, your ass is grass. This could be especially bad if a group of targets is identifiable as a group that others belong to, like, y’know, journalists and publishers. Your ass ends up being crab grass.