By David Futrelle
Porn actress Mercedes Carrera was enthusiastically embraced by the Gamergate crowd after she spoke out in favor of the journalism ethics movement misogynistic harassment campaign in its heyday back in 2014.
She was regularly celebrated on Kotaku in Action, Reddit’s main Gamergate hub, won lavish praise from prominent Gamergates like Mike Cernovich, and even made an appearance in the star-crossed Gamergate “documentary” The Sarkeesian Effect. She once described herself as “the waifu #GamerGate deserves.”
But it wasn’t only Gamergates who embraced her and her reactionary, antifeminist politics. As Jared Holt notes in an article on Right Wing Watch, Carrera
was the subject of glowing articles from right-wing media at the time, landing flattering features at The Daily Caller and Breitbart, and appearing on programs hosted by right-wing media figures who supported Gamergate, including Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes and Infowars personality Paul Joseph Watson.
The Daily Caller piece was especially effusive in its praise. “Carrera talks fast and thinks fast,” gushed writer Patrick Bissett.
She sees patterns and connections far quicker than the average person, an ability she attributes to her Asperger’s syndrome.
The article concludes by declaring that “wherever the name Gamergate is mentioned, the name Mercedes Carrera won’t be too far behind.”
Now that she and her porn director boyfriend Jason Whitney (known in the business as Daemon Cins) have been arrested and charged with multiple counts of sexually abusing a child under the age of 10, many of the people who became her fans because of Gamergate are channeling Mariah Carey, pretending that Carrera was never really a big part of the movement and “wondering” why anyone is even talking about Gamergate in 2019 anyway?
The charges against Carrera are serious indeed: she and her boyfriend are accused of repeatedly abusing her 9-year-old daughter over a four-month period. Police say they found evidence corroborating the girl’s accusations during their search of the house, alongside meth and two loaded handguns. Police also say there may be more victims.
Carrera, in a statement, has proclaimed her innocence, saying that the accusations are a ploy by the girls’s father, and Carrera’s ex-partner, to gain custody of the girl. “The charges are absolutely false and horrifying,” she wrote, “and a last ditch effort to keep me from contact with my daughter for the rest of my life.”
While many of her longtime fans (or perhaps now former fans) are holding out hope that she’s telling the truth, their support for her has been largely limited to bland restatements of the phrase “innocent until proven guilty.”
They are a little less inhibited when it comes to denying that she was ever really a big-name Gamergater at all. Which is utter nonsense
During Gamergate, and for several years afterwards, the regulars on the Kotaku In Action subreddit frequently celebrated her as a woman “who gets it” in threads with titles like Mercedes Carrera drops a couple of truth bombs and Mercedes Carrera tells SJWs to F OFF!
One of her fans in the latter thread raved:
Another added:
Now, though, many Kotaku in Action regulars are acting like they barely know who she is.
These are all from a single thread; there are more.
Meanwhile, alt-lite conspiracymonger and former Gamergate celebrity Mike Cernovich — a Pizzagate promoter with a long history of baselessly smearing his opponents as pedophiles –has got to be even more embarrassed by his friendship with alleged child sexual abuser Carrera, whom he described in a 2015 blog post as “highly intelligent,” “strong and smart ,” and “thoughtful, intelligent, and fiercely independent.” (Cernovich could probably benefit from an editor, who might have removed a few of these redundancies.)
Now that this “thoughtful” woman has been arrested for allegedly doing the exact same horrific thing that Cernovich regularly accuses his opponents of doing, he has said not a word on the subject — and seems to have deleted any past Tweets he sent her way, though you can still see her side of the extensive discussions they appear to have had.
In his Daily Caller profile of the now-accused porn star, Bissett declared that “[p]ersonal responsibility is a defining motif for Carrera, and one she returns to repeatedly during our conversations.” Apparently Cernovich and Carrera’s many other former Gamergater fans don’t take personal responsibility any more seriously than Carrera herself seems to.
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It’s funny and sad how quickly alt-right pinheads abandon their allies once they’ve been accused of criminal activity. If she was known as SJW/liberal, they wouldn’t be able to shut up about it,
Was she the asshole who recorded the “satirical” porn clip of herself dressed up to look like Anita Sarkeesian? Not harassment at all, nope, something something FREEZE PEACH…
I hope her poor kid gets the support she needs.
Every god damn reactionary movement is rife with child sexual abuse. It never fucking fails.
How sad is it that I’m just pleasantly surprised that the remnants of GG aren’t defending her by saying that nine year olds are capable of consent?
@wwth
that’s just because the perpetraitor is a woman (and maybe because the child is her own daughter) in this case.
Why the fuck did I decide to go ahead and read this. *sobs* Why do people like her even have to exist. Fucking monsters.
I hope the kid ends up with parents who actually love and care about her, and access to some very skilled and patient therapists. The level to which this kind of abuse fucks people up is hard to put into words.
Valkyrine,
You’re probably right.
I hope she goes to jail for a long time. I’d like to qualify this with ‘if she’s guilty’, but ninety nine times out of a hundred people accused of this shit are found guilty. So there’s no point of doing that.
Just as a warning, I’m going to go off on a tangent that’s possibly induced by being sick and that making my mood weird.
So, I just watched a few minutes of a Big Bang Theory rerun. One of the ones guest starring Wil Wheaton. Given Wheaton’s opposition to GG and this thread, it led to me thinking about whether the show’s characters would have been into GG.
I think Sheldon and Howard may very well have been. They’re both pretty misogynistic. Howard in a creepy “nice guy” way and Sheldon in an evo psych way. Raj and Leonard, probably wouldn’t be. Perhaps the show could’ve done a GG episode written or co-written by Wil Wheaton back in 2014 in which the guys start to get drawn into GG and then realize it’s horrible. If the show was actually trying to be relevant to geek culture instead of just going with the tired tropes about nerds being socially inept men who can’t attract women, I feel like they should have addressed it.
People who abuse children should (message redacted by your humble correspondent who doesn’t want to fall afoul of the comments policy, not to mention she’s trying not to violate her own standards of behavior).
I hope the child gets whatever help she needs.
@weirwoodtreehugger
If this had been a male gamer gator you bet your bottom dollar there would be GGers going on about how the 9 year old probably seduced him.
They’re truly despicable misogynists, so they won’t defend any woman on “their side” but they’ll go to the wall to defend a man against a woman, or a girl child in this case.
Years later Gamer Gate still harms.
@Ooglyboggles
It wasn’t that long ago they got two people fired because one was slightly rude on her personal Twitter.
These fuckers. Think they’re so hot because of video games. But they just shamed people with relentless obscene garbage. Let me tell you, I game all the time, and some of them are lucky I can’t see them.
I had never heard of this woman before. A quick search revealed this:
Porn star who accused feminists of supporting child rape charged with sex abuse of a minor
https://www.sacbee.com/news/state/california/article225640895.html
Our society is ride with child sexual abuse. Reactionary movements are ride with justification of child sexual abuse.
National Center for Victims of Crime: (note, I really can’t speak to the qualifications of this source except to say the stats jibe with others I’ve read)
GG-ers, MRAs, MGTOWs, and other neoconservative igno-righties really don’t seem to give two shots about harm coming to ANYONE. They just want to attack “SJWs”, simply for the unforgivable crime of advocating for social justice.
9 years old….Jesus, Joseph and Mary …..what the hell. That’s it I’m getting drunk.
So, I googled “Mercedes Carrera”, and the first three hits were news items, the first WORD in all three headlines was “Gamergate”
Apparently her fascination with misogynistic game culture is not as irrelevant as the GG-ers would like…
The rest of the hits I’m shocked to say, were porn-related.
Surprisingly, there was no mention of an upcoming twin-engined crossbreed of a Mercedes S650 and a Porsche Carrera…. That would be RAD!!!
Too bad Disney handed Cernovich is biggest victory when they fired James Gunn from GotG. Someone would email them this set of connections.
@Michael
I wish Disney would rehire James Gunn but it seems like they’re standing by their dumb decision to be fooled by Mike Cernovich.
As usual, whenever something terrible and stupid happens in the world, Trump has already topped it, because this reminds me of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. They used to be the best of friends and there are pictures of them together and quotes of Trump talking about what a great guy he is and how close they are, but as soon as he became a sex offender for kidnapping young girls, Trump claims he never met the guy and has never heard of him. I guess shitty people with no integrity have learned from him that the truth doesn’t matter anymore, just firehose everyone with lies until nobody bothers to call you on it.
Also, speaking as someone with autism, I’m sick of these bullshit stereotypes that autism conveniently either makes someone smarter when you agree with them, and dumb and wrong when you don’t. The reality is neither. We don’t automatically think faster or more critically, there’s no basis for that claim. We only have a tendency to become intensely interested in specific things that could lead to us learning a lot about them out of interest. And while that can make some smarter on a particular subject, when it comes to things that you WANT to believe, like your political biases, you may choose to only pay attention to the things that confirm your bias and ignore anything that doesn’t. Which doesn’t make you smarter on the subject, it actually makes you dumber.
The only thing I got from being an Aspie is fucked up sensory processing and a memory like a steel trap for useless trivia…
Going by my parents I’d have been smart either way, and since my parents always encouraged my curiosity I’m firmly in the camp of nurture being the deciding factor.
Oh the poor girl! Like everyone else, I hope she gets the love and therapy she needs.
As to the GG crowd, it’s another example of how they were forerunners of trump – they’ll claim whatever is convenient at the moment.
In case this brings out trolls claiming GG is being mischaracterized: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/List_of_Gamergate_claims
My gods! That poor bairn!
So, the left are basically trying to turn this thing around on GamerGate like it’s our fault that Mercedes allegedly molested a child. I admittedly was someone who was quite friendly with Mercedes on Twitter. When I heard the news that she had been involved in this stuff I was shocked, and disappointed, because as the older posts you brought up said, I thought she was one of the good guys. Now she’s been exposed for doing something bad, it doesn’t make GamerGate the bad guys. Most of us have disavowed her, so. This isn’t a gotcha moment at all for y’all, because the anti GG side continued to align with pedos like Sarah Nyberg whilst GG had the comment decency to disavow this woman, so nice try.