Very early on in the history of Off the Cuffs: a Kink and BDSM podcast, we had on a guest henceforth referred to simply as “Redacted Name.”  A self-published author, he was one of our first call-in guests, as he lives in our neighboring state of New Jersey and didn’t want to drive all the way out to Long Island for the interview.  During the recording, he was very personable and fun to chat with, and we kept in touch afterwards, quickly becoming internet friends and even inviting him to be on another episode of our show, taped in front of a live audience.  It was at this live taping that we met in person for the first time, but our communication and friendship was more or less exclusively online, via social media or our private OCP-fan Discord community. 

In our Discord chat, we’re always open to our listeners promoting projects they themselves are working on, as long as it follows our chat rules, which can be summarized basically as: 1. Don’t spam the room, which we’ve essentially never had to enforce, as folks rarely do that, and 2. Don’t PM anyone without first asking for (and of course receiving) consent in a public chat, e.g. asking “Hey, soandso, may I PM you?”. 

We always allowed Redacted Name to post about finding contributors for articles he was working on, as he had recently been hired by the Take Back Your Sex blog and needed content.  He was able to use our resources to write multiple articles for that publication, and we were happy to see more community involvement spreading the gospel (so to speak) of kink and BDSM.  This is, however, also unfortunately where the first red flags began to appear. We received a few complaints about Redacted Name being a bit pushy with folks that were on the fence about contributing, and once or twice were told that he’d directly PM’d folks without asking first.  Minor rule violations, which we forgave and only warned him about, as nobody felt endangered by his presence; there was just a need for him to back off a little or be a little less eager/pushy.

As time wore on after our warning, he seemed to behave better, and things went on pleasantly in our group chat.  Then, on 8/21/2017, everything changed. I was notified by one of our chat moderators that Redacted Name had posted someone’s personal info, name, location, IP address, and email (i.e. “doxxed” them), in our public chat room, because apparently this person had written a bad review of one of his Take Back Your Sex blog posts.  He posted this info with the intent of recruiting our listeners to “Go get him!”; to internet stalk and bully this random person who’d left the review. The info was quickly removed by the moderator in question, but she took a screenshot of the post before deleting it, presented below. (I’ve obscured Redacted Name’s personal info in black and the private information of the person he was doxxing in red.) 

This was, of course, unacceptable, and we were necessarily forced to remove Redacted Name from our Discord community.  It was a gross violation of someone’s privacy and, although the post was removed quickly, we did receive some (understandable) complaints that people no longer felt safe with him in the chat room.  While it was necessary to remove him, we did feel somewhat bad for it at the time, but while we sympathized that someone may have been trolling him, this was an incredibly irresponsible reaction on his part, and we had to place the safety of our listeners and community above our sympathy for his situation.  When we removed him we did make a public post in the chat about it, in order to assuage the concerns that had been expressed about safety, but we never humiliated him or tried to rally folks against him in any way. Presented below is the post in question:

At this point in time, we didn’t cut Redacted Name out of our lives completely, but we definitely distanced ourselves.  Then, a few months after the incident in November of 2017, he was let go as a writer from the Take Back Your Sex blog. Megan Ashley, one of the creators of the blog, informed me that during this process Redacted Name had been trying to take over the blog and move it in a direction she wasn’t comfortable with.  She also informed me that, in the days and weeks following, he’d persistently bullied her via text message. I shared with her the experience with him we’d had in our group chat and why we’d had to ban him, which shocked her. She told me he’d never informed her of the event and had told her that the reason he’d left was because he was being harassed.  At this point, I severed all connection with Redacted Name by just stopping replying to his messages. I didn’t want to further associate/involve myself with someone who was lying about how they’d been treated by me/us, and Megan’s account of his bullying her was the final straw.

After he was let go, Megan sent back all of his writing and told him to start his own blog if he wanted to run one so badly.  He did, and so now Redacted Name runs a blog named after one of his books. He republished all of his articles that had previously been published on Take Back Your Sex and also began doing interviews with kinky folks and sex workers via a YouTube video chat, posting those on his blog as well.  For a long time, everything was fairly quiet, and we had little to no interaction with Redacted Name, though on occasion, a colleague or sex worker would contact us, saying that they were being bugged by our friend to be on his show, and we’d then have to inform them privately that we were no longer associated with him and couldn’t understand why he’d still be using our name in an attempt to get interviews.  We never said anything bad about Redacted Name publicly but did feel obligated to privately inform folks of our experiences with him since he was using our name to vet himself, and especially after he’d been so aggressive and bullying toward Megan. 

Skipping ahead to July of 2019, I was driving to a large annual kink event in New Jersey, and my co-host, max (who was already at the event and happened to be volunteering as a security for the vent), saw Redacted Name being removed from the premises by police.  We later found out that this was due to Redacted Name trespassing at the event, but this led to Redacted Name sending max a slew of messages on Facebook, asking why max had gotten him kicked out of the event. It should be noted that we do not have any authority or influence over this organization whatsoever, so even if max had hypothetically wanted to have him kicked out for some spiteful reason, it wouldn’t have been possible. They would, of course, need some kind of proof of wrongdoing; they don’t just kick folks out willy-nilly.  The reason, it turned out, was that Redacted Name had already been banned from the event. 

As max continued to ignore his messages, Redacted Name moved on to me.  I got several DM’s on Twitter accusing me of getting him kicked out of the event as well, going so far as to falsely claim that the organization had told him it was me who had done it.  Knowing that this was a lie, because I wasn’t even there when this all went down, I finally reached my breaking point and replied to him by saying:

“That’s a bold faced lie. When I got there, it was after you were removed, so I don’t know what you mean by “why did you do that?” I wouldn’t have even known about it if max hadn’t told me you started harassing him via facebook after the fact, just because he was a volunteer security person. I think you should stop looking to blame people for situations you put yourself in. I can’t answer why you weren’t supposed to be there, because we’re not part of that organization. However, when we had to remove you from the OCP chat a long time ago for posting someone’s personal information in an attempt to dox someone that wrote a bad review or whatever, we didn’t make a huge thing of it. Just told you you fucked up and we had to boot you. But now, whatever you did to get yourself kicked out yesterday, on top of what went down in our chat, this is showing a pattern of unsafe and irresponsible behavior. On top of that you’re harassing max, and I guess you’re attempting to harass me by asking what I did, when I wasn’t even there. I don’t know what you did, but if you continue to harass us we will be passing all the above info on to the NCSF.”

We argued back and forth for a little while, and I immediately sent an inquiry to the event organization about any possibility validity to his claims, just for my own peace of mind.  Presented below is my email to the event organization, and then their reply. I have redacted all the names of events and people, as I don’t wish to draw unwanted attention to them publicly, but we’ve of course filed away the originals, as with all the evidence.

My Email:

Their reply:

I continued arguing with Redacted Name on Twitter, but he refused to see reality even though I now had evidence from the organization itself; he tried twisting my words and saying things like “see you did know” (even though I was getting this information in real time, some of which I was asked not to share publicly).  Eventually, the conversation disintegrated into his making making vague threats like “this is gonna be fun,” which of course resulted in an abrupt end to communication and a mutual blocking on Twitter. He’d been a bit of a pain in my ass for a while, but I hoped that this had all come to a head and was finally over, now that we were officially not communicating anymore.  And, indeed, all was calm and peaceful for me for a little while.

On Saturday, January 18, 2020, I received a phone call from Ken Melvoin-Berg, of the American Sex podcast.  He told me he’d just received an alarming phone call from one of our mutual sponsors, who had apparently received an anonymous email from an account that contained some wild and ridiculous accusations about us.  While they seemed like bullshit, the sponsor had hit up Ken, knowing that we had worked together in the past for confirmation that this was what it looked like, namely someone just trying to personally attack us.  Ken said the company preferred to keep their name out of it, so he couldn’t send me a copy of the email, but he read it to me.

A few days later, I was contacted by one of our other sponsors.  They received an email from “a group of people that would boycott the company if they continued to affiliate with us.”  They also told me they thought it was bullshit, and they had even tried playing along with the person to get more info about them, but they didn’t provide much.  This company was willing to actually send me a copy of this email, and the account name (rebbieli@protonmail.com) presented below:

Before I move on, I would like to specifically address the witnessing ignoring safe words claim.  I only brush this off in the context of all of the other evidence here. Normally, if anybody has ever felt I’ve violated their consent, I would be open to being called out and would hope to have a mediated discussion about it through proper channels.  In this instance, however the bogus claim seems to allude to my either killing or castrating someone…? I’m not exactly sure what the logic of the wording is there, but ultimately, while I would never take a serious accusation lightly, this as you can clearly see is not a serious accusation. 

Moving on, just from the language used, as well as even some of the claims, the message had the metaphorical fingerprints of Redacted Name all over it, but there was of course no proof.  I started looking up old messages from him, as well as a fake twitter account that is also run by him. I felt like that meme of Charlie from Always Sunny (the Pepe Silvia meme), seeing unprovable conspiracies everywhere, and I was pulling the curly, beautiful, lustrous, hair out of my head.  I could see all the connections, but they were circumstantial at best. What could I do? Looking at it, though, it all makes sense to me:

1. It’s from an “anonymous” third party; there’s nobody who can actually back up these claims.
2. The doxxing claim can of course be traced back to Redacted Name himself, not us, and we dealt with him appropriately in that situation.
3. Redacted Name is supposedly a sex-positive blogger and interviews sex workers all the time and yet is willing to use SESTA/FOSTA claims to try to personally tear us down, only adding validity to that cause in the process.  That is, to be entirely candid, fucking twisted.
4. The way our show title is misquoted directly matches the way Redacted Name has referred to our show on multiple occasions (we have the receipts, so to speak).
5. The severely ableist claim about max shows just how little Redacted Name understands not only about people but also about actual kink and consent, something he shows he knows less and less about the more unhinged he becomes. 
6. His claim that we attempt to sabotage other “audio-only” podcasts seems like simple misdirection, as he himself runs a video podcast.

I have a long list of other sex ed podcasts who would all say that I’ve been nothing but supportive of them.  I’m not a bragger by any means, but I’m certain that if you reached out to other sex podcasts like American Sex, Fetish World, The Dildorks, The Bed Post, A Hairy Prone Companion, Queers Next Door, Disability After Dark, The Candy Kinkdom, or any other that’s personally interacted with me, they would say that I’ve been nothing but supportive of their shows and of them personally.  I don’t look at podcasting as a competition at all; I love and support so many other shows and every week recommend other shows to listen to on Off the Cuffs. I know we’re not everyone’s cup of tea, so I always want to point folks looking for answers in directions that may help them, even if that’s turning them on to a “competitor’s” podcast.

A long time ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing a journalist that had been targeted for online bullying due to a story he was working on at the time.  I knew he had some experience here and so I sent him a 33-page document, outlining all of my evidence and asked, “Do I seem like a crazy person?” He assured me that I did not and told me that I should make it all a bit more cohesive and send it to a lawyer. 

I took his advice and have spoken to a lawyer, who presented several options for what we can do moving forward; I’m not going to get into specifics at this time, because I’m not one hundred percent sure which option is best for us.  I’m not looking to file a lawsuit, as I don’t really want anything from Redacted Name other than for him to leave us alone. But at this point, I would like to officially warn the public about him, as he’s shown patterns of bullying, lack of consent knowledge, cyber stalking, catfishing, and desperate attempts for recognition through the hard work of others.  I believe him to be a danger to the kink community and a danger to society as well.

In the midst of deciding what to do, our lawyer suggested we make a public post about this and the timeline of events.  I’m still being presented with more evidence nearly every day from other sponsors that Redacted Name is sending these emails with threats of boycotting them if they continue working with us, though they are now they are coming from another fake and anonymous email address (blaureux@hotmail.com), presumably as some attempt to “prove” there’s more than one person behind this all.  One such e-mail is presented below (once more, the podcast name is incorrect in the exact same way):

After weeks of stressing out about this but not having any solid proof, I’m very happy to say we were finally able to directly connect one of these email addresses to several online accounts that directly point to Redacted Name.  There is now photographic evidence that our stalker and Redacted Name are, in fact, one and the same, that this entire post is about a single person. While I am not comfortable sharing Redacted Name’s information in a public forum, I will be sending an unredacted copy of this blog post, along with all of the evidence not posted here with absolute proof, to every sex toy company, sponsor, sex ed podcast, blogger, colleague, and even our close sex worker friends to warn them about this abusive behavior. 

This type of behavior can not be tolerated, not only for what Redacted Name has done to us, but to what he might potentially do to you all and to the kink community as a whole.  My hope is that he quietly shuts his site down and goes away, because if we keep being harassed, the one thing I do know is that he will be hearing from our lawyer, this will most likely all go public, and he will end up outing himself.  I know there is not a shred of actual evidence he can come up with that backs up any of his claims, and I’m hoping that by posting this, he’ll see we are not afraid of the full truth coming out.

Sincerely,

Your “Stressed Out” Friendly Neighborhood Dick Wound