The already plenty messy MRA divorce between A Voice for Men’s cult leader Paul Elam and his former “Activity Director” Attila Vinczer has just gotten a lot messier.
Taking advantage of his old editor’s account on AVFM, Vinczer today posted a 4600-word screed on Elam’s own site intended to expose the “innards of Paul Elam and AVFM.” In it, Vinczer declares that
I have observed this organization, AVFM, led by CEO Paul Elam, dong things that are in my opinion immoral, unethical and outright criminal. … They are harming people and harming men and boys they claim to be helping. The reckless behaviour of Paul Elam, the founder, and now CEO of AVFM LLB is akin to a cult leader, with followers who may be oblivious to what they are being drawn into.
Elam quickly removed the post from his site, declaring all of Vinczer’s “various allegations” to be false, but the internet does not so easily forget; archived copies of the original post are still available here and here,
Vinczer’s document contains a lot more invective than it does evidence, but he promises evidence will be forthcoming. “This is just the tip of the iceberg,” Vinczer declares, “there will be full disclosure to follow.” He says he will offer “hard evidence about the improprieties found within the innards of AVFM” to any journalist who asks.
I’m going to leave that to journalists who have a bevy of lawyers at their disposal, but what Vinczer has posted so far is … intriguing.
Let’s get the invective out of the way first.
To say that Vinczer is angry at his former boss is a bit of an understatement. Over the course of the long screed, Vinczer describes Elam, variously, as
- an “unabashed maniac”
- “unhinged and wreckless [sic]”
- “an alcoholic trigger happy imbecile”
- “a bully”
- “a cowering coward”
- “A yellow belly poison lipped scoundrel”
- “an utter disappointment”
- “a disgraced perjured individual willing to do anything in a rage of bitterness fuelled by pure anger for revenge”
- “a black hole that drains the life out of people who are anywhere near you”
I have no personal knowledge of Elam’s drinking habits or his mental health, but the rest of that sounds about right to me.
Vinczer’s accusations against Elam are numerous, if a little light on detail. His basic charge is that Elam is
[a] thief, [a] cheat, [a] con artist, who engages in smoke and mirrors refusing to be transparent with handling the massive amount of money donated to AVFM. … [a] seemingly ill minded deviant who it appears may be guilty of embezzling corporate/donated funds … .
Specifically, he claims that Elam may have used AVFM money to “secretly vacation … in Italy with his partner while having others believe he was impecunious.”
He also accuses Elam et al of wasting money they could have been using for activism to subsidize a men’s “retreat” during which, among other things, a drunken Elam led his comrades in a lively, er, discussion of the allegedly smelly vagina of an influential feminist journalist — then put a video of these drunken shenanigans up on Youtube.
AVFM, Vinczer declares,
is incapable of putting on a yearly conference, [despite] the vast amount of money it has received in donations. Instead they pay for flying David Miller aka David King in from the UK so a group of men can get drunk and do stupid things at a retreat putting the MRM into disrepute.
Vinczer demands that Elam fess up about where the money raised by AVFM goes:
I challenge the CEO of AVFM to give full disclosure of … how he spent 10s of thousands of dollars if, not 100s of thousands of dollars donated to AVFM for advocacy work. Without being transparent, we can only guess what the amounts are that you have spent. I know he took a salary from those donations, which is perfectly warranted. Question is how much money did he use for himself and how much was actually used for advocacy work, if any.
Vinczer also posts what he says is a transcript of a Skype conversation amongst AVFM’s top brass in which Elam gleefully announces his plans to put up videos from Vinczer’s financially disastrous Toronto DV conference this past summer without Vinczer’s permission, and with all evidence of Vinczer’s presence left on the cutting room floor.
In the alleged transcript, Elam allegedly says
I am uploading Tanveer Ahmens talk right now, with AVFM branding and Attila cut out of the video. … I am billing this as an AVFM production … and cutting any mention of Toronto DV Symposium.
Given that the alleged transcript is utterly free of the weird malapropisms that clutter up Vinczer’s own prose, I’m thinking there’s a pretty good chance it’s real. It’s worth reading, if only for the mustache-twirling villainy on display. [EDIT: Vinczer has now Tweeted a bunch of screenshots of the alleged conversation, which make me even more convinced that the transcript is real..]
Even if we assume that the transcript is real, the evidence presented so far doesn’t quite live up to Vinczer’s invective. Does he really have more evidence to provide?
Elam, for his part, says no, writing that
Vinczer has nothing to give the media other than his words, which are about as good as his promise to pay people he has conned. The man who is quick to tell everyone of his sleuth-like constant recording and record keeping of everything in his life will produce nothing of the sort.
On Twitter, Elam added an accusation of his own:
https://twitter.com/AVoiceForMen/status/652540990608158720
https://twitter.com/AVoiceForMen/status/652543874615787520
I guess we’ll just have to see where this all goes, huh?
EDIT: Added Elam’s tweets, changed the last line.
A “”Cowering Coward?” Really? Really? REALLY?
@ignorantianescia:
(Digression to make the point)
I read a book several years ago called Civilisation and Barbarism on the Eastern Front, which was an analysis of war crimes committed by German soldiers during the Great Patriotic War. Unlike the Soviets, the German army kept good records which are now open to historians where they’ve survived; and the German soldiers themselves wrote a vast amount, all of which is also open to historians. The book did an analysis of different divisions in the German army, comparing their war crimes records to various factors which could explain them. Could it be affected by the number of Nazi party members in the division? By how fierce and brutalising the fighting had been? By how many conscripts versus professional officers they had? By the age and training of the soldiers?
Interestingly, none of those factors correlated much with it. One factor strongly did, however: incidence of punishment.
It turns out that those divisions which turned a blind eye to war crimes (for example, 4. PzG. Div. saw its monthly number of rape cases drop to zero the moment they crossed the Soviet border) tended to have far more of them; whereas those who kept their discipline strict saw far fewer atrocities occur. Lack of fear of consequences was, the book concluded, the single largest contributor and best predictor of whether a given division’s soldiers would abuse the civilian populace.
(End digression)
In my opinion, this is why the abuse of domestic workers occurs, and why (when the stories get out) they often contain such baffling cruelty. It turns out that having the power of life and death over someone is inherently corrupting.
I spent my childhood in Bahrain, a much nicer place than Saudi; but even there, south Asian domestic workers were almost totally controlled by their employers. Nobody would know what happened to them if they got abused. To all intents and purposes they were already disappeared people. I can’t imagine what it was like in Saudi.
(At the risk of hammering the gender politics issue so soon after the blatant Nazi reference: yes, most domestic workers are south Asian women, but I would be cautious of reading too much into that. After all, most construction workers in Saudi are south Asian men and the way that construction workers are treated is genuinely appalling. Look up the fatalities in building the Qatar stadiums; now remember that that’s Qatar, a much freer and more open society than Saudi, which is why you’re hearing about it at all. Each gender of immigrant workers are abused in their own, horrible, gendered way; and I don’t know enough about intersectionalism to analyse that.)
and with all evidence of Vinczer’s presence left on the cutting room floor
Looks like he’s gonna get “Aurini’d”!
OLDTHINKERS UNBELLYFEEL MRM, UNPERSON RECTIFY
Interesting that most of the comments on this thread take issue with the grammar rather then the subject at hand. Elam is a fraud, using funds or personal gain, an overarching inefficient leader who uses those around him. Who fears the shadow?
As someone who has, unlike her accusers, been near the vagina in question on a rather frequent occasion, I think we can take the “smelly” accusation out of the “alleged” arena and put it in the “discredited” box.
I’ll add that, regarding the larger topic at hand, I am not surprised that men who struggle to get along with women and then blame women, as a group, for their own problems, might also struggle to get along with each other.
EJ beat me to the punch. Middle Eastern states tend to have very, very poor records for addressing the abuse of ‘guest labor’ workers, regardless of gender. (That said, in Saudi and several other states, the women also get the added kick of living under Sharia law, so there is that extra bundle of vile shit to deal with.)
Mind you, the West in general are not saints in this regard. In America, we are notoriously willing to exploit migrant workers from Mexico and Central America. And while we have no Sharia Law, we do have a vile rape culture, and migrant women have to deal with an extreme level of sexual assault. It’s more a difference of degree than kind, sadly.
Ha! What a great Freudian-slip right at the start that perfectly encapsulates AVfM:
“A Voice for Men…dong things.”
If Atilla weren’t such a vile specimen himself – a vindictive serial litigant, and a harasser of anyone he feels has wronged him – I’d almost feel sorry for what Elam has apparently put him through. I do feel sorry for his kids, though. Having been grown up with a fantasist for a dad myself, I know how hard it can be to see through all the bullshit when you’ve been raised with it. It wasn’t until some major, destructive family strife that he instigated in my twenties, that all the illusions shattered and I finally cut the cord. It really can be that hard to see clearly when lies and inventions are all you know.
Oh hey, Amanda Marcotte! (Assuming it’s the real Amanda Marcotte and not some Twitter robot) – I’m a fan…
For the post itself, let me just add this:
OK that didn’t work; once more, let me add this:
That is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever witnessed.
@marinerachel:
Do you mean the MRA SLAPP fight or the single kernel of popcorn?
Cause I definitely agree with the latter, it looks like time lapse of an orchid blooming, it’s amazing.
Popcorn, yo. It’s stunning.
I thought it was some new kind of jellyfish from the abyss.
Took me a while to realise that was popcorn. Looks like snack food reimagined by H.R. Giger.
I thought it was an alien. Ha!
@Amanda, hey, it’s nice to see you here. I’m going through Pandagon withdrawal. 🙁 I hope your first week at Salon went well.
@mockingbird, Yosemite Sam is such a great representation of a PE tantrum.
@Mike, Binjabreel, Auntie Alias
Glad to hear I wasn’t the only one whose first thought wasn’t “Hey, a slowmotion of a single kernel of popcorn popping”!
It was admittedly more along the lines of “Oh darn a new species of spider – wait, it’s an octopus, whew – what no that is what..? O.o -> o,O -> O.o What is that thing? …it looks a bit like a slowmotion of a single kernel of popcorn popping, but why would anyone post something like that on a post like this…? Oh.”
If I ever needed proof that I’m too tired, I guess I found it.
If it makes you feel any better, I thought it was a fish :p
a cage of kittenness pooled by poo rangers for Stonehenge
Paul Elam calling someone ELSE a shit father? That’s rich…..
Interesting how Attila didn’t mind Elam’s “immoral, unethical and downright criminal” ways until he became the target.
@Mike:
That looks like something that could be used for a documentary about popcorn!
“Popcorn: Why we eat it in handfuls as we watch drama unfold.”
(I think it needs a better title, though.)
AVFM is falling apart, Roosh is wearing down and falling apart… can these guys only operate when they don’t have organization to fuck up, like on Reddit and 4chan?