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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God-damned shitkicking fucks, the lot of them.
I’m not sure if this is good brain bleach, but I woke up to find that my cat had typed this
into my computer.
I choose to believe it was her way of asking for huggings.
weirwoodtreehugger,
I’m afraid you’re wrong. Your cat was informing the Cosmic Cat Conspiracy that on-planet preparations for the invasion of Earth and extermination of all humans (once they have been forced to open all the tins of cat food) are nearly complete, and the invasion fleet should therefore be mustered as fast as possible.
@wwth
I just tried saying it. Came out like the noise Tak makes when there’s a closed door in her path.
You still got catsgonenip.com under parental lock?
Going to be honest. I’ve followed Gamergate extensively and I had barely any idea who this woman was until this news broke. She was apparently one of the minor hangers-on but as someone who uses KotakuInAction to keep a finger on the pulse of this continued culture war, I literally never saw her mentioned in the past several years or so.
KG,
I’m pleased to report that I was able to appease Dracarys with some breakfast and she is currently napping. We are safe for a few more hours I think.
Mercedes? She’s not even a DeLorean.
@Chris Oakley
Not cool, bro.
Ordinarily I’d agree, but in this case it’s almost certainly a self-chosen stage name, rather than one she was assigned by forces beyond her control, which makes it fair game for mockery.
It is. And I could have quite happily gone the rest of my life without knowing there’s a porn wiki called boobpedia.
It’s funny to see how people look at these selectively edited ‘quotes’ and think they’re getting a ‘gotcha-moment’ in-depth expose’ vis GG & KIA.
But if we’re going to talk bad-behavior, the anti-gamer-gaters have been far worse:
Matt Hickey — Porn agency scam to rape women.
Glenn Fleishman — Open marriage, routinely solicits young women for sex in a pay-for-play career-leg-up way.
Juan Thompson — Five years Federal Penitentiary for bomb threats against Jewish Synagogues.
Matt Perpetua — Abuses women, exploits women, takes credit for what they do as an editor (former?) of Buzzfeed.
Ed Champion — Verbal abuse, emotional manipulation and harassment of women.
Jeb Lund — Former writer for The Guardian, Rolling Stone, and Gawker. Verbal intimidation of female colleagues, creepy DMs, encourages other men to have sex with blacked-out women because “that’s what they’re there for.” (ie, he encourages rape).
Greg Howard — NY Times reporter. He was one of the first three recipients of The Times’s David Carr Fellowship. He also wrote for the Dallas Observer, The Village Voice, and Deadspin. His list of peccadillos includes sexual assault and harassment, inappropriate conversation, groping, and not taking no for an answer.
I can go on. For pages. Rapists. Abusers. Harassers. All anti-gamer-gaters.
But Mercedes Carrera… Please… Get some perspective. Selective quotes and lies to continue the war against gamers and reinforce the ‘bogeyman’ under the bed…
Honestly, I get the feeling the sexual abuse and possibly the right wing activism as well were instigated by that Daemon guy and this is all some Stockholm thing on her part. Not to say she doesn’t bear some responsibility for participating at all, mind you.
This rush to condemn her seems to me like a symptom of the mainstream centre-leftist obsession with “equality”. Everybody wants to say “see, women can do X thing, too!” Even if that thing is horrible. Nobody wants to admit that certain categories of people just don’t do certain things or think certain ways when left to their own devices because in their minds recognizing any differences at all between sexes (not to mention races, etc.) would validate all the nazis and other filth that used those differences to justify their sadistic acts against those groups.
Doesn’t make her appearance up for mockery, which that joke was most certainly doing.
@Michael, Ooglyboggles:
I’d google James Gunn but it’s the internet so I’d likely get 80% results “both sides have a point” and 19% results antifeminist rage-blogs.
What happened with Gunn?
“almost certainly” isn’t certain. Also, let’s not make fun of people’s chosen names, maybe?
Just pointing out that one of the examples given above only claims that she hasn’t been relevant since 2017, not that she was never really part of GG. The tone could easily be read as dismissive, but even if intended that way, it probably isn’t really wrong.
Given that we don’t know how common it is for women to sexually abuse children because of how it’s often overlooked, one wonders if she was only caught because her boyfriend was involved as well.
@Jane Done
Cernovich dug up some old tweets of Gunn’s, featuring some iffy jokes. Astroturfed a campaign to have Disney fire him.
@OxytoSin
No. Carrera is a woman, but she’s also human, and subject to all the same shitty behaviours we all are. Any member of a minority group is capable of just about anything a cishet white guy is capable of. FeMRAs do exist, and they can’t all have been coerced into it.
Warner Bros. (DC Universe) has hired James Gunn to direct Suicide Squad 2, so it looks like Disney (Marvel) only hurt themselves by firing him.
It seems that only the fake outrage anti-SJW crowd, led by people like Cernovich and Ethan Van Scriver cared about ten year and older tweets in bad taste
Particularly as some of the cast and crew of GotG have said they won’t make 3 without Gunn, looks like JG might have the last laugh
Hi, I’m a survivor of abuse by a woman who was herself being abused at the time. Being manipulated into abuse is common, and I’ve seen that too – trying to enforce complicity and then use the guilt as leverage is a STANDARD abuser tactic, used everywhere from households to death camps.
But at a certain point it stops being an excuse.
This is also IMO where a punitive justice system really fails. One of many, many reasons I don’t wish to out any of my abusers publicly, even in cases where what they did was obviously illegal and evil.
(The first person in my life who I can definitely identify as a rapist was a disabled boy of 12 or 13. I was 7 or 8 at the time. How does a system based on punishment even begin to heal this? Answer: it fucking doesn’t.)
I remember her talking about how because she’s in porn, she doesn’t need feminism or feminists fighting for her. All her supporters loved her then because she did porn, “was not like other girls she was the Cool Girl” (insert those pages for Gone Girl) and hated feminism. Now I see everyone scattered. Alot of alt right/gg/that side of things hate things like this, they want to be on the right side of history, ugh.
And I have little sympathy for her. Sorry. Child sex abuse is so sickening and unfortunately so rampant in our society. From incels claiming 12 is when women ‘peak’ on public platforms to religious organizations taking advantage. I know close family memebers and friends personally who were abused. It took one of them to finally come forward over 2 decades later because it was so damaging to her psyche and self esteem. I hope the child is safe and well taken care of
@OxytoSin
Yes, it could be the “center-leftist obsession with equality”. I mean, women have so little agency, they even need men to get them into being predators. They are just adorable, little sheep when we big strong men don’t poke them. Why are there even prisons for women? Just put them into kitchens and all is good!
/Sarcasm
Indeed. REAL women desire to be feminine, it’s just in our nature. This whole independent, strong women thing is totally a forced, artificial construct, unlike heteronomativity.
Are you saying that there is something biologically inherent in women that makes them incapable of abuse except at the instigation of a man?
Where’s your proof?
The truth is I can’t really say for sure who has less agency. Women because certain patterns of thought and behavior don’t occur to them without outside influence? Or men who are at the mercy of violent instincts? All I know is that I believe feminism should be less about seeking equality to men and more about seeking liberation from them.
sniff sniff
I smell troll.