By David Futrelle
Rudy Ferretti was known in the male-dominated retro gaming community as a champion gamer — and as a raging misogynist who ferociously harassed women. He once made a homebrew game in which the goal was to kill women.
Last week, he allegedly gunned down his former girlfriend Amy Molter before turning his gun on himself.
To those he harassed and threatened over the years, this dramatic final act of real-world violence did not come altogether as a surprise.
In a lengthy story on the tragedy, Wired examines his life and his long history of abuse of women online. Cecilia D’Anastasio writes:
Longtime members of the retro and arcade gaming scene say they warned community leaders and even police about Ferretti’s threatening behavior for years. For close to a decade, they say, Ferretti had harassed, stalked, and threatened gamers, particularly women, pushing some out of the niche gaming scene entirely. He flashed guns in tirade YouTube videos, and bragged on Facebook about bringing one to an event at the Museum of Pinball in 2017.
Arcade game collector and researcher Catherine DeSpira and video game historian and storage auction buyer Patrick Scott Patterson—two of Ferretti’s most public targets—say they collectively contacted police in different states a half-dozen times to report Ferretti’s threats against themselves and others. They say those attempts ultimately had no effect. All the while, clusters of retro gamers across the country egged Ferretti on in private messages and on forums, leveraging his apparent instability and misogynist inclinations against women they didn’t want in the scene.
It’s a horrifying story from beginning to end; I urge you all to read it.
H/T — Catherine DeSpira (@CatDeSpira) and Rhuu
Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
We Hunted the Mammoth relies entirely on readers like you for its survival. If you appreciate our work, please send a few bucks our way! Thanks!
So, this guy basically was a loaded gun that pretty much anyone could aim at pretty much anyone else? Especially, though, at women?
Almost like a mini-Trump, then.
And of course the police took threatening behavior from a white male about as seriously as they ever do …
@Surplus
Well, you know, it’s an individual problem. It’s not symptomatic of any larger issue. There’s no way to know who’s just blowing off steam and who will be a real threat! Boys will be boys. Now, if he was black, then you know that would be a real threat. There’s definitely a systematic problem there, all the violence in the community, and how terrible those people treat their women… smh. How can we ever figure out a problem like this? There’s just no knowing when someone who has decades of reports against him should be required to stop that shit and, I don’t know, not be allowed to have an easy murder weapon.
Haven’t you heard? The solution to bad guys with guns is good guys with guns! /s
@Big Titty Demon
https://www.theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-nation-where-this-r-1835173950
Meanwhile white male “leftist” bros like Glenn Greenwald and Ryan Grim are vigorously defending this guy
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/19/us/politics/aaron-coleman-kansas.html
Because the one thing every group is in common apparently, is that abusive white men always deserve every chance and women who object are hateful harpy bitches.
I hope they kept evidence that they warned the police. Now would be a good time to publish that evidence and get some cops fired. Hell, the family of the victim might want to sue the police.
@C.S.Strowbridge
Hell, the family of the victim might want to sue the police.
Oh, for fucks sake. Apparently “poverty makes men sexual predators” is the class conscious position now.
https://twitter.com/arthur_affect/status/1296968336627003392?s=20
Continued from my earlier post.
@WWTH
Wow. Way to excuse his behaviour. The weird thing is, girls/women are poor too but somehow don’t threaten boys with their nudes or tell kids to kill themselves or call them fat because of that. Hmm.
To claim that being from a poor or working class background creates a gross view on girls is juuust not right. He clearly did it because of some power trip and because he lives in a society that want naked women everywhere but also want to use their body as a power move. Not because of his background.
I can’t say that I am surprised by this murder, and of course he was a Gamergate supporter. Poor woman, for fucks sake :/
Re: the class argument
This is yet another reason why class reductionism is harmful. The idea that being from a working class background makes someone a misogynist (or a racist, or any other kind of bigot) seems very popular in class reductionist circles, but in addition to excusing bigotry it’s also extremely classist to imply that being poor makes someone hateful. Add that many marginalized groups (racial/ethnic minorities, LGBT people, etc) are more likely to be working class, and it also becomes discriminatory in other ways.
For a group that claims to champion the working class, reductionists sure have a low opinion of them.
It looks like the Intercept is misusing real social phenomena to make a silly, untrue point. It’s quite true that people in areas of concentrated poverty often turn to the so-called “informal economy” (crime) when the formal economy leaves them behind, but sexual predation is not really a symptom of that? We’re talking more along the lines of drug dealing, gang activity, and theft/burglary when we think of the sort of crime we see as a result of structural poverty – the kind of crime that comes with a paycheck, so to speak. Drug use (mentioned in the quote) is a maladaptive reaction to adverse life situations and probable outcomes. Sexual crime that has an economic payoff (prostitution/pimping) is something we see, but your standard not-for-profit sexual assault transcends class lines and as far as I’m aware is not localized to areas of high poverty.
They’re just taking something that’s true (some crime results from structural poverty) and extending it to a sexual predator as though sexual predation were part of the crime pattern caused by concentrated poverty, an elision that hides a lot of assumptions in it that aren’t backed by data.
@PoM
It’s a very common racist idea to claim that neighborhoods in poverty (which often have racial minorities) are rife with sexual assault. This is mostly a method of selling fear and shifting examination away from wealthy white men. By telling white women that poor black men are a threat to them and that they need white men’s protection, society reinforces white supremacy and patriarchy and downplays actual predators.
I admittedly didn’t look up the paper that Intercept referenced, but I’m guessing that it was more referring to property and drug crime that sexual assault. You’d also imagine that a leftist would want to look critically at a study that affirms stereotypes about marginalized and maligned populations because studies can be biased, but I guess if it fits the narrative, it’s just assumed to be true.
Anyway, it always amazes me that the white male dominated class reductionist faction of the left thinks the same thing of women and feminism that men’s rights activists do. That most men are working class, but most women are wealthy and privileged and out to get humble working class men with false rape accusations and affirmative action lawsuits.
I’m a big fan of retro gaming so I was completely aware of this guy. It’s absolutely not surprising.
It sucks a hobby I enjoy is infiltrated by such toxins.
I really hope those he victimized get all the support they need
Some of the advertising of early home consoles and games was misogynistic, I’m old enough to remember that, and while I can’t give chapter and verse, I know I saw advertisements aimed at boys, which depicted girls as undue competition for their attention, which they could otherwise be directing to gaming. Given that, I’m not surprised at such attitudes being rooted in gaming communities.
When it comes to home brew game ideas about unpleasant activities, I think Lynda La Plante beat him to it by about 17 years with crime drama Killer Net, the key mover of the plot being a serial killer selecting victims and framing others for the crimes by distribution of a game containing malware.
@WWTH : my cynic ass would say that poverty is a source of sexual crimes, because if they were richer they would not get caught.
@Kevin : gaming ads have been choke full of sexism of a very long time. It’s hard to say if it’s the ads that created the misogyny or the other way around, but nowaday they feed each other.
@Kevin:
Say what? It sounds like you’re describing advertising aimed at kids young enough to be receptive to the “no girls allowed in our treehouse” message. But the retro gaming community is mostly middle-aged men, who should have done a whole lot of growing up since their first game of Pac-Man. Stop making excuses for toxic male behaviour.
I think one of the people in the twitter thread linked here said it best: they think of working class as noble savages; that need to be gently converted to the faith of Marx.
That, or they are cynically saying to themselves “if the populist right is doing so good by appealing to bigotry, we should be doing the same but for communism!” The end justifies the means, since in their view all bigotry will be magicked away once capitalism is overthrown.
@ Kevin
Just to make us feel really ancient; that was actually 25 years ago!
(My law school dissertation was about the criminal potential of the “DARPAnet“)
I remember reading a book on forensics a very long time ago. One fingerprint expert had her database separated into “sexual predators” and “everyone else” because there was almost no overlap.
@Sheila Crosby : I need more context, because there is indeed no overlap between sexual predators and non-sexual predators, but that seem tautological, so a subtlety probably escape me.
Slightly OT but not by much:
There’s a guy on Reddit who wants to date a Twitch streamer because he’s never met a girlgamer before, apparently. His chosen strategy? Stalk her online to see where she works out and spends other non-gaming time, and try to insert himself into her life somehow. Because IMing her and saying, “Hi, you seem really cool – can we meet?” is a nonstarter for him.
Thanks, Glenn Greenwald, for giving me yet another reason to hate your guts.
Moggie: the middle-aged retrogamers today are the very same people who were targeted with that advertising in the 1980s/90s.
I didn’t read it as excusing their behaviour, just describing the fact that the scene has been toxic for quite a long time.