It’s safe to say that A Voice for Men founder Paul Elam is not really a great judge of character.
Some years ago, Elam hailed the eccentric and obviously unhinged attorney Roy Den Hollander as a Men’s Rights hero, declaring that “as much as I loathe the idea of anyone claiming authority on what a “real” man is, if I had to venture a guess, it would be men like Hollander.” The founder of the Men’s Rights hate site also published an article by Den Hollander calling on MRAs to literally take up arms for the cause.
In 2020, Den Hollander shot three men — the husband and the son of a Federal Judge he had tangled with as well as a rival Men’s Rights attorney — before turning the gun on himself. Only the husband survived.
Before he became (in)famous as the “crying Nazi” after Charlottesville, the volatile white nationalist Christopher Cantwell published a number of articles on A Voice for Men. When informed that Cantwell was harassing people online, Elam defended him (and, while he was at it, suggested to me that I kill myself).
Cantwell is currently serving time in prison for threats and extortion.
Now the man whom Elam tapped as the “Chief of Staff” for AVFM’s somewhat pretentiously named Judicial Accountability Committee has been arrested in Scotland — where he reportedly fled to avoid fraud and sexual assault charges after faking his own death.
Let me repeat that: Where he reportedly fled to avoid fraud and sexual assault charges after faking his own death.
Interpol — the international police agency, not the band — was able to locate the man variously known as Nicholas Rossi, Nicholas Alahverdian, Arthur Knight and numerous other monikers after he was hospitalized with COVID. He had been hiding in plain sight in Glasgow, disguised as a dandyish academic from Bristol, in the south of England, complete with dyed blond hair and a fake “posh” British accent that somehow fooled the Scots.
I assure you I’m not making any of this up. You can read more about the strange case here, here, and here , or just do a Google news search for “Alahverdian.”
The man then known as Nicholas Alahverdian impressed Elam greatly when he came to A Voice for Men in 2013 with his tale of woe — promoting himself as an abuse-survivor-turned-child-welfare-activist whose promising career had been derailed by false sexual assault charges that put him on the sex offenders list for 15 years. In a post introducing Alahverdian to AVFM’s readers, Elam wrote
By all reasonable standards it is fair to assume that he was on his way to being a powerful and effective advocate on behalf of children everywhere, perhaps on a scale much larger than the State of Rhode Island. …
That plan was working till he crossed paths with [name redacted by DF]i … a woman who would file a sexual assault complaint that would all but destroy Alahverdian’s life …
[I]t is the considered opinion of this writer and a team of activists at A Voice for Men that he has not only been unjustly convicted of a crime, but that he is in fact innocent.
This seems just a tiny bit unlikely — especially now that multiple women in multiple states have accused him of sexual assault or other abusive behavior.
Elam, in 2013, concluded with a veritable call to arms:
Nicholas Alahverdian is a fighter, coming by that trait on the honest but unfortunately harsh path of his abusive upbringing.
We aim to stand by his side and fight with him.
In the comments below that post, future AVFM editor Peter Wright declared that
the floodlights [are] all connected up, ready to shine on [names redacted by DF]
These characters may have succeeded in heaping injustice against a demonstrably innocent man, and they may have succeeded in placing Nicholas Alahverdian on an offenders registery that will unjustly taint his reputation for years. However we can return the favour by making your names [names redacted by DF] more infamous than any person you have wrongly accused. Welcome to trial by media.
AVFM social media attack dog Suzanne McCarley added:
Uh, what were those names again? Let’s see [names redacted by DF] three of apparently several people who need to become “famous.”
Deal me in. Some Shit needs to be Fucked Up.
Here comes the cavalry from hell; we have your back Mr. Alahverdian.
That was then. Now the powers that be at AVFM have scrubbed the site of all mentions of Alahverdian. Down the memory hole, as Orwell would have put it.
More on this story as it develops.
H/T — Thanks to Twitter’s @TakedownMRAs for alerting me to this story, and to Wikipediocracy for posting links to self-incriminating AVFM posts.
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Hahahahaha! Guessing he was an anti-vax and anti-mask guy who not .only got hospitalized with COVID to own the libs but got himself arrested because of his lib owning COVID catching. Well, since this guy’s wanting to be a Brit so bad, I’d suggest scrolling up and reading this post again with the Benny Hill music playing in the background!
Im not even a little bit surprise an mra is a rapist.
@ WWTH
Here you go!
@ WWTH
Perfect!
Oops. Duplicate sacrifice to the blockquote mammoth. Apologies.
Still, it’s worth hearing twice. It’s a good tune.
I really can’t add anything more than what @WWTH said. Summed it all up in the first comment.
Nor am I surprised his former friends have disappeared him like politicos and officers got airbrushed out of photos back in the USSR.
But the internet is a little harder to scrub clean, isn’t it boys?
The USA Today story popped up a side video with tips on how to keep your doggo warm in winter, featuring cute smol puppers in adorable outfits. I enjoyed that.
I remember reading the news article about his arrest, but I had no idea he was an MRA activist. Interesting.
Faked his own death? Okay, I’m forced to give this horrible, awful person a point for creativity.
@David F.
“It’s safe to say that A Voice for Men founder Paul Elam is not really a great judge of character.”
I’m gonna have to disagree with you on this one. Paul Elam is a vicious malefactor, and he surrounds himself with people of similar character very much on purpose.
?
Wikipediocracy update: https://wikipediocracy.com/2022/01/24/the-nicholas-alahverdian-story-update/
@David
Forget character, I wouldn’t trust Paul Elam to tell me the time of day.
To be fair to the Scots that knew him, if someone I met was putting on a fake Glaswegian accent I would be extremely unlikely to tell.
On another note, I know false accusations can happen (if rarely), but if you are Paul Elam and assume women do it all the time you are inevitably going to be taken in by people like this. Abusers tend to feel genuinely aggrieved when anyone tries to bring them to account (how dare they!), or believe that they have super special reasons for what they do or that it is not actually assault in their case for whatever reason. So they can be very convincing! Add that to a bias against victims and predispencity to abusive behaviour yourself and you will become extremely rubbish at choosing who you go on to champion.
Heard about this douchebag a while back, but I don’t think I recall any mention of him being a MRAsshole. May he claim a Darwin Award via Covid.
Faked his own death and went on the run, huh? What a distasteful reminder that everybody is the hero of their own story.
In addition to the fake posh English accent, he wore bow ties and panama hats, so I suspect I’d have taken an immediate dislike to him and assumed his persona was largely affectation. I think it’s quite likely that people around him in Glasgow suspected the same, but they probably thought “this is just an average English guy trying to spice up his image” rather than “this is an American fraudster and sex offender on the run from the FBI”.
@Lollypop
I’m going to have to agree with Kat on this one. Paul knows very much he is acting in bad faith. I genuinely don’t think Paul assumes women make up false allegations all the time, but rather he patiently and carefully lays every brick to construct a fictional scenario in which that can be the only interpretation, much in the way every abuser does.
Which brings me to another point. Back during the days of the 2016 campaign I read two women discussing how watching Trumpism felt like watching a party of abusers organizing together, and that’s exactly what this reads like.
As a Glaswegian living close enough to the University, I would like to point out that an eccentric looking guy with a weird, posh English accent wouldn’t stick out all that much.
@ Moggie
‘I think it’s quite likely that people around him in Glasgow suspected the same, but they probably thought “this is just an average English guy trying to spice up his image” rather than “this is an American fraudster and sex offender on the run from the FBI”.’
Slightly makes me wonder how often people who think they have everyone brilliantly fooled IRL just elicit a “this person is being weird on purpose but I’m going to ignore that because I have better things to do with my time than get into all of that” type of reaction.
Then again, until I clicked on the “posh accent” link I wasn’t sure if he’d actively claimed to be British. i assume sounding vaguely British could just make you sound like a foreigner and not seem that suspicious in any case.
Wouldn’t “unhinged” be against the comments policy? If so, you might want to avoid using it in the blog entry itself.
@Snowberry
Just to me, personally, that one feels like a grey area. Someone can be emotionally unhinged without mental health issues having anything to do with it.
I posted a long comment on the “Master Debater” thread a short time ago. When I hit “back” and “reload” the comment appeared, but I had reason to return to that thread just now and the comment was gone, as was one by someone else. I tried reposting it there but it got eaten. So I guess I’ll have to post it here.
It looks like there was an intentional effort to trick me this time. I find it very hard to imagine there could be an innocent explanation for a comment vanishing again after I had verified that it had gone through successfully, or indeed any explanation other than “someone deleted it”. Especially when this incident occurred less than 24 hours after I mentioned in a comment here my habit of reloading to verify that comments went through instead of just trusting it to work. Someone read that and took it into consideration the next time they wanted a comment of mine to be suppressed.
There seems to be a … faction here, or something, who inexplicably don’t want the “quote” button and other post-September-2020 functionality restored, and who are willing to resort to trying to forcibly silence people who are in favor of said restoration. This, needless to say, is illegitimate and will be resisted.
Reposted comment follows.
@David:
It wasn’t unstable and crashing all through 2021. The problem started on January 11, 2022. So, reverting to a configuration from before that date should work. There was no need to (apparently) revert it all the way to before September 2020 … when, as I recall, it had also been unstable and crashing.
In any event, we have several very old but serious problems reappearing here, particularly comments getting eaten, pages coming up out-of-date by as much as an hour or two sometimes, and the like. The layout is in some ways more awkward (more scrolling to get to recent comments, since it’s now below instead of beside recent posts). The quote button and other editing features have gone missing. The site’s become a disaster area for the users, even if it might be more convenient to run at the back end.
Everything was peachy back in, say, June 2021. Why not just put it back to the way it was working then?
At the very least, please give us an ETA on when things will be back to normal around here. “Back to normal” means, at a minimum, quote button, side by side recent posts and recent comments, and pages are all in sync with each other if you load several in different tabs again.
Though really, this partial outage has been ongoing for over two weeks now, and surely that is more than long enough?
@Surplus
You seem like a tech person from your previous posts. You should know your requirement violates the CAP theorem based on what David just told you he chose this current design for (stability and resiliency), and furthermore isn’t something David can guarantee because that depends on so much technology that isn’t even remotely in his control that this seems like some kind of a trap requirement destined for him to fail. Please, stop.
He told you. It was crashing and making it hard to run the site. You don’t run the site. You don’t know what he was dealing with that you call “peachy”. Please stop.
I’m quoting fine. It’s not a disaster area for me.
There’s no outage.The comments and posts are there. The purpose of the changes are to keep them there.
@BTD:
The CAP theorem only applies to distributed systems (e.g. the web as a whole), not to monolithic ones (e.g. a single web server).
The requirement in question was met from September 2020 through early January 2022, so it certainly can’t be argued with a straight face that it is somehow unfeasible.
As people may know there’s quite a political kerfuffle here at the moment. All to do with awaiting a report; that might end up with a number of politicians, including our PM, having to resign.
But this is my favourite headline on that so far.
So, BoJo might soon be out of a job?
Excellent.