Northeast Kansas Ravaged by Hellish Porn Ring

An attack on psychiatric medicine

It wasn’t an accident that Matt’s suicide came immediately after starting psychiatric medication. The porn ring deliberately waited until that moment to push him over the edge. It used the Millers to attack pharmaceutical companies and undermine public trust in psychiatric drugs. That was the plan all along. For details, see The Millers’ Other Pfony Vendetta.

See also Doctors, Counselors Severely Compromised.

Lucrative mock-vendetta porn

More precisely, the plan was always to publicly blame a pharmaceutical company and secretly blame another child. (The particular company and child were incidental.) That’s because the porn ring’s specialty is producing mock documentaries about vendettas and vigilante justice, the raw footage of which is highly lucrative as cruel underground porn. See also The Millers’ Phony Vendetta.

Intentionally a monumental disgrace

The vendetta mockumentary is intentionally a monumental disgrace. The raw footage, much of which is sexually explicit, is very depraved and highly damaging to the people and institutions involved. It’s used as blackmail and sold as cruel underground porn to clients who know the truth and understand how twisted it is. In other words, it’s lucrative precisely because the participants are being scammed, mocked, debased, and damaged.

But to the priests in charge, wreaking havoc and proving points are just as important as money. They despise everything about documentaries, the Millers’ vendetta, and the culture that makes their scam possible. Furthermore, they have a distinctively harsh view of disease, suffering, death, and especially suicide; Shannon told me all about it while we were spending time together in late 2006. It sometimes seemed like she was trying to be an asshole, but it’s all based on the underlying belief that our lives belong to God, not us. (In contrast, I’m the very last person who would fault someone for taking their own life.)

For details about the porn ring and mock vendetta, see The Porn Ring.

Harmony Middle’s webmaster

I worked on our school’s website in seventh grade, when the porn ring would have been communicating with Matt. That may well be why I was targeted: Given the nature of the bullying, it would have made sense to pick someone known for “computers” to frame. I had also worked on Harmony Elementary’s website back in fifth grade. (This was not a cool thing in the mid-’90s.)

The website work was an independent study (scheduled like a normal class period). Soon after Matt’s death, I believe the supervisor of that independent study also committed suicide. I can’t remember her name or whether it happened before or after I graduated from Harmony (roughly a year after Matt’s death). There’s a good chance that the porn ring was somehow involved. See also the note about the two-year delay before the Millers filed their lawsuit.

The porn ring had other “friends” at school

The porn ring, under various disguises, likely chatted online with many of our classmates both before Matt’s death and for many years after. The point would have been to spread rumors, extract porn, perhaps impersonate me or force others to make claims about me, and generally wreak havoc. The possibilities are horrifying. Someday, the full story will be told.

Matt’s death came after seventh grade at Harmony Middle, which feeds into Blue Valley Northwest High School in Overland Park. My sister Pam and his sister Jenny were a grade ahead of us; they started high school only weeks later, in 1997. There were undoubtedly others at Harmony and BVNW who ran into webcam sextortion, which notoriously targets adolescent boys far more than any other group.

So the same guys who killed Matt Miller have literally been jerking off to all of this?

Yes, it would appear so. Still waiting for confirmation from Mark, Cheryl, or Jenny. If you see them, be sure to ask.

The kicker is that anyone could have stopped it at any time over the past 27 years simply by telling me, my parents, or my sister. (Sadly, the same cannot be said of my extended family, the Stingos, who were utterly steamrolled by the porn ring.) Some kept it secret because they wanted to play the heroes in the vendetta mockumentary. But most did so for the opposite reason: They were terrified of being villainized along with us.

Church of the Resurrection

My family went to the same church as the Millers, the Leawood megachurch Resurrection, for many years after Matt’s death. Leaders there played a major role in the mock vendetta, told their congregation, and kept everything secret from my family. Pause to appreciate how sick that is.

Resurrection is the largest United Methodist church in the country. Its leadership, including senior pastor Adam Hamilton, has been severely compromised for nearly three decades by the same militantly Catholic porn ring from Hell that killed Matt. The damage to the region’s United Methodist Church will be catastrophic. See Church of the Resurrection for more.

Forced to act out?

I don’t mean to imply that Mark and Cheryl already knew about the porn ring when they took Matt to see a psychiatrist (although truly nothing would surprise me). Rather, I suspect that Matt was highly controlled by sextortionists for months before his death, and that they forced him, using the normal threats, to act out until someone put him on meds. (I doubt they cared exactly which kind.) The one conversation I remember us having in seventh grade, he mentioned that he had put a gun in his mouth.⁴ But that was nothing. From the Times Magazine article:

Chad Brownel, Matt’s only close friend at Harmony, said that Matt mentioned suicide “hundreds of times” during the six months that they’d known each other. And toward the end of the school year, when [HMS teacher] Roxana Rogers asked Matt about his plans for the summer, Matt said that if his parents sent him away to camp, he would kill them and then kill himself. Rogers considered the remark and his behavior problematic enough to call his mother and schedule a meeting.

The meeting with Ms. Rogers was seemingly the most direct reason Matt saw a psychiatrist over the summer. It’s obvious that he was crying out for help, and believe me, I’d give anything to go back and help him. But I think it was more twisted than that. I think Matt was desperately trying to get on medication to satisfy sextortionists’ demands. Maybe they promised him they’d finally leave him alone once he could prove that he had a prescription. It would have been their final cruel lie to him.

For the purpose of suing a pharmaceutical company, and especially of influencing public sentiment, the timing of Matt’s suicide was crucial. The porn ring wanted it to happen within hours or days of him starting medication, to establish a causal link that would be impossible to ignore.

More harm than good

Furthermore, the Millers only pretended to believe that Zoloft was a major factor in Matt’s suicide. Their part in the lobbying was disingenuous at best and nothing to be proud of. Psychiatrists have never warmed up to the warning label, with many still saying that it does more harm than good. Just last month, Harvard Medical School researchers published a study strongly supporting that view (emphasis mine):

The sudden, simultaneous and sweeping effects of these warnings—the reduction in depression treatment and increase in suicide—are documented across 14 years of strong research.

They conclude:

The overwhelming evidence suggests that the ongoing use of these warnings may result in more harms than benefits.

The black box is going out of style, Jenny. Let’s work on having regular, human thoughts again. Remember? The kind you had before the porn ring climbed out of the family computer in eighth grade? Try for Matt?

See also Church of the Resurrection, Blue Valley Northwest High School, Brent and Kristin Morris.

The original scapegoater (OSG)

I only knew that Matt and Shawna were friends because of Logan, which is odd. He randomly made a big deal about it one day, then it never came up again. The memory is hazy—again, this was seventh grade—but I think we went somewhere, saw them on a trampoline together, and left. (This would have been Logan’s idea.) In hindsight, something was off. And it rings alarm bells because Matt’s mom, according to the Times Magazine article, blamed his depression on other boys’ jealousy.

One of the porn ring’s favorite games is to make people perform degrading tasks in my presence so they can scapegoat me in the vendetta mockumentary. It’s a sick metaphor having to do with biblical sacrifice rituals. In this case, the point would have been for Logan to attribute his own jealousy to me, likely in a filmed interview, to establish a bullying motive. (Whether we’re 13 or 40, it’s simply an overpowering fantasy for Logan to play the good guy on camera at my expense.) But it was important to the producers that I witnessed Logan’s jealousy before he pinned it on me, which is why our little errand was required.

A depraved, profitable spectacle

While the reasons for the scapegoat ritual are symbolic and strange, the true motivation is simply that it’s sick and degrading—it gets the porn ring off. Guys like Logan will build their lives around pretending I’m a bully, clown, and pervert on camera so they can play the clever good guys at my expense. There are lots of them—even my cousins and uncles can’t resist—and they’re uniformly terrified of me finding out. The porn ring hands them their role simply to mock them, and it sells the whole spectacle as cruel underground porn. (To the priests running the show, it’s human-sacrifice porn. It disgusts them. They’re proving a point about our society.)

The truth is in there

Logan, who I last saw around 2003, knows better than almost anyone outside the porn ring what really happened to Matt. Nevertheless, he anchored his identity to blaming me and pretending to be a hero behind my back. His role was designed to be comically pathetic.

N is for nauseating opportunism

Church leaders went to truly bizarre lengths to target my family, but not because they actually cared about us or the Millers. Resurrection is so large that they see countless people who actually are guilty of the things claimed in the mockumentary, and they couldn’t care less. (Keep in mind that my record is spotless.) If there hadn’t been a film crew “documenting” it, they would not have lifted a finger. Actually, that was a big part of the joke.

C is for complete mockery

Every single thing Resurrection did for the “documentary” was intentionally disgraceful and ridiculous. There are parts of the film that I’m dying to see, but the self-cheerleading doofuses at Resurrection are going to be unwatchable. Just pure cringe.¹

V is for very, very stupid

Resurrection is a massive church. As a matter of fact, it’s the largest United Methodist church in the United States. Its leadership has been severely compromised for nearly three decades by the same militantly Catholic porn ring from Hell that killed Matt Miller. The ultra-orthodox priests in charge despise nothing more than Protestant megachurches. It’s actually horrifying to consider the sort of twisted things they would do to one they controlled. The place is utterly radioactive.

Everything that happened is on film. There is no chance that Resurrection will survive the humiliation. The damage to the region’s United Methodist Church will be catastrophic, which was exactly the intent.

Authority figures

Lots of authority figures abused their positions on behalf of the porn ring, including K-State computer science professor Daniel Andresen, Checkers owner J.R. Lewis, Leawood megachurch leader Adam Hamilton, Allen Press senior manager Kevan Meinershagen, Aquent lead Brennan Lietz, campus minister Mitch Todd, and the Vedocks, at whose family business I interned back in high school. That list barely scratches the surface. In every single case, they could not have been prouder of themselves—truly the defining characteristic of the mock vendetta participants.

How the Devil deals with boardrooms

Moreover, it’s everyone versus one, and the whole point is that I’m oblivious. Everything happens behind my back, and I’m always portrayed by others who are literally being directed, never myself. In fact, it’s immediately obvious to everyone that I’m nothing like the person portrayed in the film, and that makes them more confident, not less. The message is clear: The truth does not matter. Nothing matters except the film, and it’s always edited to look like a party where everyone “knows” that I’m a pervert and gets laughs and applause at my expense. It’s a risk-free, courage-free proposition. Turns out, that’s how the devil deals with boardrooms (and churches).

Conform or be Bernie Madoff

Everyone around me is instantly invested in the film and its portrayal of me. For anyone to tell me what’s going on would mean blowing it for everyone. Crucially, it would also mean being villainized in the mockumentary right along with me. Don’t underestimate the power of that implied threat. It terrifies people, and it underlies much of the bizarre control the producers have over their behavior. Keep in mind that a thousands-strong, bloodthirsty audience follows the mockumentary and surrounding vendetta spectacle. Moreover, everyone is bracing for the day it hits Netflix and becomes world-famous. Imagine being the person who spoiled the vendetta and pervert-humiliation. You’d be public enemy number one, right along with me. Think Bernie Madoff. You’d be throwing your life away, truly.

In fact, much of the film’s power derives from the fact that it’s blatantly cruel and unfair to me. Deep down, everyone knows that it could just as easily be them.

The film crew calls all the shots, even at large institutions. What the mockumentary truly “documents” is people, including business owners and megachurch leaders, desperately trying to please the producers. That’s genuinely what the film is about. The scenario both demands and allows the people on camera to disregard their own morals and common sense. It creates a behavioral short-circuit that the porn ring exploits to shocking effect.

I was repeatedly, perhaps even routinely, drugged and humiliated on camera over the years. Many people knew about it, including management at Checkers, the Lawrence grocery store where I worked from 2014–2019.

Masters of human behavior

That’s just a tiny example of the porn ring’s effect on people. The priests running the show are masters of human behavior and social psychology. They have an astonishing ability to not only induce but normalize any behavior they want, no matter how disgusting or illegal. I’m no expert, but some well-known phenomena are being exploited. See scapegoating, dehumanization, compliance, moral disengagement, the Milgram Experiment, and the Stanford Prison Experiment.

The humiliation fantasy

More importantly, keep in mind that the mock vendetta is set in a fictional world where hurting my feelings is the ultimate status symbol, and where everything hurts my feelings, especially people having sex. It’s intentionally ridiculous, and it works like a charm.

Much of the vendetta porn is, ostensibly, sexual humiliation porn. It typically involved women filming porn behind my back while we dated or after, often with acquaintances of mine, and often at my house. All were recruited before we met. All were told countless horrifying lies about me. All were paid. Except for a brief moment at the end of 2018, I never suspected it.

In reality, the “humiliation” porn has nothing to do with me—not for its true, underground audience. The porn ring gets off on mocking and manipulating the participants. The appeal is that they’re being tricked into filming weird, depraved porn for a ridiculous, made-up reason. In fact, the humiliation is by design a pathetic fantasy—comically, it has to be kept secret from me so folks can pretend that it hurts me.

In general, I don’t think the porn ring bothers with any pretense that the “humiliation” porn serves any practical purpose other than perhaps to fund its operations.

The non-sexual humiliation

The mockumentary is designed to be a ridiculous fantasy for each and every person around me. Everyone fantasized that the humiliation porn hurt my feelings. But many people—hundreds or even thousands of them—also fantasized that abortions hurt my feelings. No joke. Women were paid—at least, I hope they were—to secretly conceive while we dated so they could get abortions as a form of vendetta porn. I was completely oblivious.

Mind you, not one of my girlfriends truly doubted that I would have supported her getting an abortion. I’ve never in my adult life identified as pro-life. The ultra-orthodox priests behind the mock vendetta porn, on the other hand, are militantly pro-life. The point of the abortions was to mock and utterly debase the women and the large audience that cheered along. See Abort Mission, Ladies.

Abortion was one of dozens of mock vendetta causes that people fantasized I was humiliated by. Progressive politics was another. Some even fantasized that their stereos or movie posters hurt my feelings. It was all a joke—in every case, I couldn’t have cared less. The fantasies existed only to mock those who indulged in them, and only could exist because they were kept secret from me. It simply doesn’t get more pathetic, which was the whole point.

The girlfriends

Every one of my girlfriends was casual. (Except my first, Katherine Goodman. That relationship—effectively a grueling, two-year sewer-crawl to adulthood—taught me how not to date a porn-ring girl.) We had great sex and they were always respectful to my face. It’s comical how much effort went into selling the fantasy that I was being humiliated, and especially into hiding it from me. It amounted to a glorified porn plot for my neighbors, employers, and extended family, all of whom were being ridiculed by the porn ring from start to finish.

My girlfriends were well aware that I outclassed most of the people laughing at me. They often did things out of obligation that they knew were unfair to me. It’s not just that they were paid—they faced overwhelming pressure. Their employers sponsored and profited from the porn. Their schools, too—even their sororities. They had a large, bloodthirsty, porn-hungry audience to appease. An entire community of morons followed the mockumentary and surrounding spectacle—easily thousands of them. My girlfriends were seen by that community as heroines who went undercover to punish an abuser. They carried that pressure every step of the way and still do.

Ultimately, my girlfriends were cogs in a large and very dangerous machine. It’s not like they could have just said, “Wait, guys, he actually seems cool.”

The Porn Crusades

I strongly suspect that the porn ring views its work as a crusade of sorts for the Modern Age. In other words, the people it scams and targets aren’t neighbors but an external heathen enemy. Thus, the damage inflicted is glorious, not sinful, and the porn extracted is the spoils of victory—a little treat from God. And the money made from that porn is very real.

Scapegoat therapy, Bob

The scapegoating became comically routine the past couple of years. Women I barely knew, like Brooke Kaul and Shannon Marie, were coming over and serenely listing off things that other men did to them. Like I was Santa Claus. I was likely blamed for much of it in the mockumentary. When I started raising alarms about the harassment in 2022, I think women were told that I was scapegoating Jerynn Lindbloom,² and so they should all get in line to do the same to me.

Celebrity worship

The behavior of countless people around me for the past three decades—it’s as if something was turning them into mean, smirking children—starts to make more sense as a cult-like devotion to celebrities who were counting on them to validate the film’s (intentionally ridiculous) portrayal of me. To the producers, they were quite literally sacrificing me to their gods. The masterminds are priests who hate celebrity worship more than almost anything else. (Which is really saying something.) In fact, they’re fighting a holy war against the celebrities they scam.

In other words, simply because we cross paths, the mockumentary puts ordinary people backstage with genuine idols working on the same film, with powerful and intentionally disturbing effects.

False idols

Shannon Awerkamp talked about modern society’s love of celebrities, whom she regarded as false idols. Understand that the SSPX does not use that term lightly or metaphorically. It takes false idols very seriously. From the Society’s handy dialectic against religious liberty:

The saints have never hesitated to break idols, destroy their temples, or legislate against pagan or heretical practices. The Church—without ever forcing anyone to believe or be baptized—has always recognized its right and duty to protect the faith of her children and to impede, whenever possible, the public exercise and propagation of false cults.

A major theme of the mockumentary is that the truth about me is not what the audience, including celebrities, wants to hear. My acquaintances, desperate to keep them happy, are allowed to lie about me as long as they follow a weird scapegoat ritual. And they do, all the time. My bosses (and professors) do it more than anyone. To the producers, they’re quite literally sacrificing me to their gods.

Any celebrities involved must have realized long ago that something was seriously wrong with the “documentary” and “vendetta.” But they probably didn’t realize that the porn ring and its producers are waging a holy war against them. They also didn’t realize that the clowns they had reporting to them from Lawrence, K-State, and elsewhere were just telling them what they wanted to hear. If it isn’t already obvious, I thoroughly outclass most of those folks. That’s been the case all along.

Medieval motives

The porn ring is controlled by ultra-orthodox priests likely associated with the Society of Saint Pius X. Those priests aspire to have the same worldview as the medieval Catholic Church, and they are militant about it. The porn ring is a weapon in a crusade of sorts against modern society, including medicine.

Mechanism of action

The priests behind the mockumentary portray my family as having their own hatred of modern medicine, and they compromise medical professionals by baiting them to treat us, including punitively, based on blatantly fraudulent claims in the film. Andrew Stingo, my mom’s brother and a nephrologist, was likely coerced into supporting and providing many of those claims. The porn ring has had Andrew in a vice since the late ’90s. Its goal is to wreak havoc—the more sick and depraved the scenarios, the better. (Andrew’s niece Christina Stingo is also a doctor; she’s been compromised by the porn ring her entire career. See also Medieval Motives and My Uncle, the Porn Ring.)

The consequences, especially for others in my family, have been profound, and I suspect in some cases genuinely shocking and horrifying. It will be a legendary disgrace in the medical profession.

Heartland Community Health Center

Around mid-2017, the porn ring convinced doctors at Heartland in Lawrence that I was hiding dangerous delusions from them. That’s when my primary doctor, Jeffrey Mincher, whom I was seeing for depression, referred me to Dr. Dagoberto Heredia, a psychiatrist at Heartland. He prescribed Abilify, an antipsychotic, as an off-label depression treatment, along with sedatives. I only took the drugs for a few days because of side effects. I never saw Dr. Heredia again; he abruptly left Lawrence a few months later. I saw Dr. Mincher sporadically over the next few years until he too left Lawrence in mid-2021.

I assume that such blatantly malicious outside influence could get Heartland and the doctors into serious trouble, opening them up to extortion and further manipulation.

Counselors, too

Of the women in Lawrence recruited to make underground humiliation porn while we dated, several are counselors. That’s not an accident. The ultra-orthodox priests behind the porn ring aren’t big on secular approaches to mental health. They portray me as having their own callous, archaic views about mental illness, and they compromise mental health professionals by baiting them to punish me for those views on camera, including by savagely gaslighting me.

An ecstatic vendetta-porn bubble

You’d think that professionals and aspiring professionals would recognize such a foul scam. But the mockumentary is set in a fictional world—an ecstatic cultural bubble where vendetta porn is the ultimate status symbol and is always celebrated. In that world, there’s no such thing as being wrong or getting into trouble for sucker-punching me in the name of “mental health.” The porn ring makes that world so immersive that the participants feel invincible—somehow exempt from basic rules and norms. Doctors, corporate executives, police, and celebrities are just as susceptible as counselors.

I definitely wasn’t a patient

Some of the counselors may have been coerced into creating fraudulent records that I was a patient with severe mental illness. I met them all on dating apps except one, who slipped me her number at Henry’s. I definitely wasn’t a patient. The only counselor I’ve seen as a patient was Karin Denes-Collar, around 2016 at Heartland. She, too, was compromised, along with at least two doctors at Heartland.

See also Matt Miller’s Suicide.

To catch a Catholic

The Society of Saint Pius X priests behind the vendetta mockumentary are well aware that their traditionalist Catholic worldview and values are unpopular. They mock the participants by letting them think they’re punishing me for those values, which are not mine at all, in ways that can be sold as underground porn.

Unsurprisingly, the SSPX’s stance on abortion is very Catholic. The point of the abortions was to mock and utterly debase the women and the local audience that was cheering along. What they thought was justice porn was actually twisted baby-killer humiliation and eternal-damnation porn. (Apologies, but to the true audience, that’s exactly what it was.)

The IUD incident

In Redacted’s case, around 2012, I actually accompanied her but was told that she was getting her IUD removed. (It had been removed earlier, but she told me that she had merely “lost” the string.) The medical staff was probably told that I insisted on being present but that I didn’t know, and couldn’t find out, that it was an abortion. It was not an abortion clinic; if it was illegal or otherwise compromising to the practice then they’ve been getting extorted ever since.

As an aside, Redacted was genuinely upset that I went to Burger King during the operation.

Her toxic gym and training business

The porn ring has controlled Redacted since I met her in 2010—it has truckloads of damaging footage that would destroy her many times over. She now owns a gym and training business, which can only mean that the porn ring wanted her to own a gym and training business. Maybe there are some nice porn rings out there—I don’t know. But this one is not. This is the one that killed Matt Miller and blamed me when I was a child. This one films sexual assault and humiliation during anesthesia. And this one utterly despises Redacted and her business. It’s horrifying to consider the ways her facility, staff, and clients could be exploited.

Bottomless opportunism

Redacted understood very early that her assignment was to have a normal relationship with me and simply lie about it on camera. The first rule of porn ring is that it’s impossible for me to understand what’s wrong, because what’s said about me on film is not only unfair but intentionally false, perverse, and insane. That’s why the scam works, and how it stretches on indefinitely.

I couldn’t have been nicer to Redacted (or her dog, or her ex-husband). But here’s the kicker: After we broke up in 2014, she kept up the lying and vendetta porn for ten years while we had almost no contact. It’s her brand, and it made her a celebrity among the large community of morons (easily thousands) following the mockumentary spectacle. That celebrity was supposed to skyrocket when the film was released. Therein lies her motivation, and the only reason anyone financed her business.

Plot twist

Of course, the vendetta and mockumentary are no more than a sick joke. To the producers, Redacted is beyond disgusting; the whole point was to extract porn while mocking her ridiculous vanity and bottomless morals. Comically, they even encouraged her to identify with Natalie Portman’s priest-killing heroine in V for Vendetta. Needless to say, that was a joke. (There were many others.)

What’s special about Redacted is that the sicker things got, the more she enjoyed them. She gets off on scams, on cruelty and humiliation, on getting away with things, on being the only one who knows the twisted truth. She’s trash. Someday, people will hate-watch true crime shows about what Redacted did to me and to Lawrence.

See also The Girl Who Mocked Anne Frank, Amélie, the note about Jeremy Farmer, and the mention of Redacted’s disturbing obsession with my grandparents.

Mariah

Around 2016, David dangled his “little cousin,” Mariah, in front of me for months. Practically every shift we worked together (several evenings per week), she followed him around for hours. I barely even acknowledged her. The porn ring undoubtedly had access to the store’s cameras and was laughing the whole time.

Moreover, if Mariah was in fact a minor, then there’s a 100-percent chance that David, owner J.R. Lewis, and other men at Checkers were complicit in her exploitation for extremely illegal porn. To the porn ring, that was the whole point of involving her, and David and J.R. don’t say no to the porn ring. Nice work, fellas.

Just perverted

Mariah and David may have believed they were working for an organization like (a really messed-up version of) Perverted-Justice, which trained adults to lure sexual predators by posing online as minors.

Icky David

I always saw the good in David, but sadly, his role in this saga is truly disgusting. Since we met nine years ago, David’s identity has been “the good guy in the documentary.” He’s known from very early on that it’s a complete scam, yet he relentlessly exploits it to manipulate others, especially women. Those who thought highly of David because of the mockumentary are going to feel sick when they learn the truth.

The producers handed David his role and encouraged him to abuse it, not because they like him, but because they were mocking him. It was intentionally disgraceful and pathetic. Every single time David played the smirking good guy—always behind my back—he and the audience were being mocked.

See also Joseph Stanfill, Logan Wineland, Mitcher Barnes.

The ultimate ego trip, a parody of

Playing pervert-catcher for a naive audience is an irresistible fantasy for guys like David. The mockumentary is littered with them; see also Christian, Kevan Meinershagen, and Randy Radosevich. Think of it as the ultimate ego trip. Perversely, it’s also the ultimate creep-enabler: The guys who are drawn to this role always abuse it to manipulate and access women. Like clockwork. The porn ring doesn’t so much find them as wait for them to instinctively show up, like hyenas at a wildebeest carcass.

What were they thinking?

Thousands of people followed the vendetta spectacle. Did nobody think, “Why is this guy being investigated by grocer’s son J.R. Lewis, college dude-bro David Tah, and his dumbass uncles? Why not an investigator? How did this start when he was a child, yet his record is spotless? If everyone knows he’s a predator, why is he working with the general public at Checkers?” I don’t know, maybe people were saying those things. The whole thing was beyond absurd—beyond parody.

The jokes were the joke

Over the years, several folks, including David, have invoked Doug Compton’s name in staged scenarios as a lame taunt. It was undoubtedly recorded to spice up the vendetta porn. Imagine being proud of helping Doug Compton secretly flex on your coworker from the safety of his country club. The porn ring loves to watch people like David degrade themselves so thoroughly. See also Confused Warfare.

The ‘minor’ incident

Around 2020, I matched with a woman in her early 20s. She immediately gave me her phone number, unsolicited, so we could text. A few days later, she sent unsolicited photos that were clearly of an adult. Another few days later, she casually mentioned that she was 14. Needless to say, I immediately blocked her.

Of course, it wasn’t actually a child, nor was it the woman I thought I was texting. At the time, I figured it was a scam and quickly forgot about it. Now I realize that it was my employer trying to get me in trouble. How pathetic was it? The off-Tinder version of her age was buried in the middle of a long, rambling message. Whoever it was knew that I had no interest in underage girls and hoped I wouldn’t notice. A cop, or even a real producer, would have laughed in their faces. The porn ring was laughing, but nobody ever caught on.

The ‘SD’ incident

Around that same time, I matched with a woman who was looking for an “SD.” I had to look it up: “Sugar Daddy.” I told her that wasn’t really my thing, but that if she visited (she lived out of town), I’d make it worth her while. Almost immediately, my account was reported and banned. Not because I had done anything remotely predatory, but simply because Tinder’s terms of use forbid discussing arrangements of that nature, which it considers commercial.

Years later, I was taunted about this incident—which nobody would know or care about if I wasn’t being stalked—by Chad Smith from Allen Press and Stefanie Wingebach from Checkers. I demolished Chad on Facebook, but I’m guessing that didn’t make it into the mockumentary. Moreover, he had already learned that he was losing his job because the Kansas Department of Labor didn’t find the harassment at Allen Press funny. And Stefanie I’ve never even met, but if not for her stupidity, I might never have figured any of this out.

Clara Bicker and Sarah Salzman

Clara had a severely abusive ex—a supervisor at one of Lawrence’s public pools. She once showed me a horrific photo of her body covered in bruises. At the end of 2023, Sarah showed me a similar photo of herself. It’s virtually certain that others were shown the same photos and told that I was the abuser. In fact, I suspect that both women were recruited specifically for the photos, which were very upsetting. (They were shown to me simply because the porn ring loves to play sick games.)

In August of 2023, after months of silence, Clara suddenly asked me for the private videos we had made. The porn ring likely published or sold the videos and claimed that I had done so without Clara’s consent. Not coincidentally, it was just after I sent letters to dozens of Allen Press customers about the scandal there. (And just before the company’s decision to permanently close.) The porn ring was rattled, and it was definitely up to something.

Nicole Martin and Brooke Kaul

In mid-2019, Nicole told me several stories about obsessive and abusive men. Once, when she was a pet sitter, a client threatened to hurt his own dog if she rejected him. In the spring of 2023, Brooke described a harrowing sextortion ordeal she was put through by a man she met on Tinder. It’s very likely that the women gave mockumentary interviews claiming that I was the abuser. The porn ring and its documentary producers like having people scapegoat me because it’s sick, twisted, and degrading.

Justification

To motivate and justify using their stories to hurt me, victims are likely told that I’ve abused in exactly the same way and gotten away with it. The producers exploit their frustration over the lack of consequences for their own abusers. Finally, understand that many reputable folks in Lawrence encourage women to do business with the porn ring. (Suffice it to say that the full story will be extremely embarrassing to a sizable, affluent segment of Lawrence.)

Kevan is a great project manager

In early 2022, Allen Press senior manager Kevan Meinershagen searched my personal computer. He was fired a few days later. Brett Scott, my manager, thought I was tricked into giving Kevan access by an intentionally ridiculous, weeks-long ordeal that the mockumentary producers walked them through. At the end, Brett twice taunted (emphasis his), “Kevan is a great project manager.” (You can’t make this stuff up.) In reality, I was using my personal computer for work because I wanted to. I’d have joined it to the company domain without hesitation if they’d simply asked.

I suspect that Kevan had earlier tried to physically access my computer—coworkers regularly entered my house to film porn—and was preoccupied with the fact that it was encrypted, as all Windows PCs have been for years now.

My private life is squeaky clean. I used my computer for work, hobby software development, and nothing else. I hope Kevan lied on camera, because I expect him to be the subject of a rather thorough state or federal investigation. He frequently played police officer with much younger women under the ridiculous pretext of investigating me. To understand the sort of depravity the porn ring has in mind when it enables creeps like Kevan, see the strip-search phone scam. See also Jenna Anderson.

Boudoir photos

Coworkers at Jimmy John’s (6th & Kasold) in mid-2019 made a big deal about having seen a female coworker’s boudoir photos on the store’s computer. You couldn’t have paid me to look. But if the producers bothered to set it up, then they also had my coworkers lie about it on camera.

House sitting

I was asked to house sit on a few occasions for people who were already involved in the mockumentary and highly controlled by the porn ring. Rachel Toll was one; Ashley Estrada was another. It’s nauseating to picture them lying on camera that I was creepy, which they likely did. In reality, I could not be more honest or respectful of others’ privacy.¹

Cowed cowards

From day one in 1997, my uncles were terrified of the vendetta against my family and desperate to prove that they were loyal to it rather than us—in other words, to impress the porn ring that killed Matt Miller and blamed me. They accomplished nothing themselves: They handed their families over to the porn ring and did whatever it said, all while pretending nothing was wrong to my family’s face. That’s it.

The porn ring has now had Ralph, Andrew, and Chris in a vice for nearly three decades—since I was a child. For fun, it convinced them that my death or demise would set them free. It was just toying with them. Trust me, they were never getting out of that vice.

They’re radioactive

My mom’s brothers hurt countless people outside our family by lying about us. Moreover, they were compelled to abuse what little power and influence they had for the sake of the vendetta porn, much of which is shockingly depraved. The point was to damage as many people and organizations as possible. The fallout will be considerable.

See also To Catch a Nephew, and a little something I’ve been working on, The Chris and Kelly Stingo Institute for Mockumentary Studies at Kansas State University.

V is for vile

Here’s roughly how these stunts worked, using Adam as an example. The producers had him pretend to almost die and then claim on camera that he cleverly exposed my family’s cruel views about suicide and/or death. (Admittedly, I never lost any sleep over the incidents.) The point, ostensibly, was to validate the vendetta against my immediate family that’s the focus of the “documentary.” By pretending the stunts worked, Adam scored a lot of points with the large community following the film’s progress, including some big names. Moreover, he genuinely thought he was going to be famous when it hit Netflix—a national spokesman for “being chill about suicide and stuff.”

In reality, the film is a mockumentary, and the vendetta is intentionally a monumental disgrace. The producers know for a fact that my family doesn’t have cruel views about suicide and death: They were attributing their own views to us as a joke. To them, the whole thing was a joke—especially Adam savagely gaslighting his aunt and grandparents to be in a movie.

It was everyone

I’m picking on Adam—a film that has him teaching moral-philosophical lessons could only possibly be a scorching parody—but to varying degrees, most or all of my cousins, aunts, and uncles have been pulling these stunts for over two decades. In every case, it was to please the mockumentary producers, and in every case, it was intentionally disgraceful—that was the whole point.

See also Medieval Motives, The K-State Party Bus Tragedy.

This ain’t Leviticus

Of course, we’re nobody’s scapegoats or sacrifices. No more than any other family. Every single thing that happened will be accounted for.

This is not a drill

The porn ring has been scamming Lawrence Jews into participating in its mock vendetta since I moved here 13 years ago. They were being exploited by an organization that truly hates them. One that calls them Christ-killers. One that genuinely believes Jews are secretly behind all of the Catholic Church’s problems. One that was founded by shameless Holocaust-deniers. This is not a drill. This is genuinely militant antisemitism. The porn ring’s SSPX puppet masters are as bad as it gets.

The SSPX itself has taken steps to clean up its image, including by eventually expelling a founding bishop who publicly denied that the Holocaust ever happened. But the priests who control the porn ring clearly aren’t in the Society’s mainstream (which is really saying something), nor do they have a public image to worry about. More to the point, they spread rumors about antisemitism and pretend to produce justice documentaries as a means to mock and target Jews specifically.

L’affaire Michelle

Around 2015, I met Michelle, who then owned a boutique in downtown Lawrence, at the community garden that sits between Reuben Hamilton’s house and mine. We only talked once or twice, but she grew close to Reuben. I don’t remember her last name or the name of her store.

Michelle criticized other gardeners—after mentioning that they really were Jewish—for taking too much topsoil by calling it “Jewish.” It was blatantly gross and I’m certain that it was staged. I think I laughed uncomfortably, which is embarrassing, but Michelle was just a random lady to me. (I’m the very last person who would know or care which of my neighbors were Jewish.) In hindsight, it seems obvious that I was scapegoated for this in a mockumentary interview.

The girl who mocked Anne Frank

When I first met Redacted in 2010, she had just returned from Amsterdam where she visited a porn ring operative or client named Graham, who sexually assaulted her. She told me that they’d seen the Anne Frank House museum. She mocked it as phony, which she apparently picked up from Graham. I was surprised; I hadn’t been aware of any such skepticism. Although her ridicule wasn’t explicitly antisemitic, the severity of it felt strange and off-putting—worse than Michelle’s blatant stereotype.

I’d be shocked if Redacted didn’t give an interview saying that it was me who mocked Anne Frank. I would never do that. Moreover, I suspect that her mockery may have been sincere, and that Graham is genuinely a raging antisemite.¹

Mitcher Barnes

I worked with Mitcher at GTM Sportswear (Manhattan, Kan.) for around a year starting in 2006. It eventually came up that he’s Jewish, and that he was teased about it while growing up in Salina. I grew up with Jewish friends in a staunchly pro-Israel family. To me, finding out someone is Jewish is no more scandalous than finding out they’re Nebraskan.² It had no effect on the way I viewed Mitcher or treated him. Nevertheless, I assume Mitcher appears in the mockumentary claiming that I was somehow exposed as antisemitic, which is untrue.³

Mitcher blew it, big time. He repeatedly lied about me in service of the film and its secretly antisemitic producers. (He couldn’t have been prouder of himself.) Lina, our boss, did exactly the same thing, as did Daniel Andresen, one of my professors at the time. Pathetically, the mockumentary continued to be a major part of their lives over the past 15 years while we had virtually no contact. They saw their screen time as the opportunity of a lifetime and figured there was nothing I could do about it—it’s that simple.

I ran circles around Mitcher at GTM. It’s actually hilarious that he built his life around a mean documentary about me that turned out to be a mockumentary about him, our employer, and our university.

See also David Tah, Joseph Stanfill.

An overpowering fantasy

The porn ring knows that it’s an overpowering fantasy for certain white people to have their racial enlightenment showcased in a documentary. Mel is transparently one of those white people.⁴ So are Ashley Walker and Julie Pearce Valladares, other K-Staters who weaseled their way into the “documentary.” So are John Thompson and Jim Fisher, my managers at KU Dining and Checkers, respectively. In their fifties, John and Jim were even more desperate than the aforementioned college girls to get screen time at my expense. It was jaw-droppingly exploitative—again, they were my bosses. (See also the note about Jim’s disturbing obsession with my grandparents.)

An elaborate hoax

Of course, the major documentary was actually an elaborate hoax. The producers despise people like Mel, Ashley, Julie, John, and Jim. And that’s a small sample of the folks who appear in the mockumentary posing as ludicrous white heroes. First, the porn ring let them prove that they were motivated entirely by vanity and not at all by justice. Then it let them brag about it for ten or 15 years just to compound their humiliation.

Women of Color mural

In the summer of 2018, Alexis Smith spoke with great self-admiration about attending a packed Lawrence city commission meeting that advanced the approval of a downtown mural celebrating local women of color. Alexis knows I’d never oppose the mural, but her job was to make me look racist for a “documentary,” so she did her best to antagonize me. (Both Alexis and the audience were being mocked by the producers.)

Alexis, who is devastatingly cute, was deliberately obnoxious about her participation until I took her down a peg. I said it sounded like a bunch of white academics interrupting ordinary city business to grandstand and take credit for something that was going to pass anyway. (I might have even been right about that.) It was a dumb incident; I only mention it because I’m certain it’s brought up in the mockumentary.

Really, Mike?

One busy Christmas Eve, perhaps 2016, Mike Smith, then store manager of Checkers, vented to me that it was always Black people who waited until the last minute. In hindsight, it was an obvious scapegoat incident: He undoubtedly appears in the mockumentary claiming that I made the remark. The producers get off on making people scapegoat me—especially authority figures like Mike—because it’s sick and degrading. He did it because the screen time was a major opportunity and because he didn’t think there was anything I could do about it. Also, was already in lots of trouble; he’d been accommodating the film crew for years by then.

Really, Ashley?

Ashley Walker was a fellow K-State student who worked in my department’s office. Around 2008, we were walking on campus when we passed a large group of Black students. Ashley wondered aloud why “they do that” (hang out together). I figured she was just cranky. Now, it’s obvious that this was a scapegoating incident: Ashley appears in the mockumentary claiming that I made the remark.

Ashley is transparently the sort of person who would stab you in the back to be “documented” as a white hero. That she has more sophisticated social views than me is a blatant joke—not a single person would think that if not for the mockumentary.

International students

When I was in graduate school at K-State from 2007–2009, most of the other grad students I worked with were in the U.S. on visas. All were told—by our own department—that I hated immigrants. Because of a mockumentary. (Pause to appreciate how truly bizarre that is.) And since the film crew was in complete control, nobody at K-State had the decency or courage to simply tell me what was going on.

My cohort knew me for two years and never once saw a reason to believe the mockumentary’s portrayal of me. You’d think that would count for something, no? At no point during grad school did I talk or think about immigration or academic visas. If not for the mockumentary, it simply would never cross someone’s mind that I have a problem with those things.

The ultra-orthodox priests behind the mockumentary fiercely oppose globalization of any kind. They despise the culture of academia. (On the other hand, I genuinely liked it.) I don’t know exactly what role my international classmates had in the film, but I do know that it was designed to be a major embarrassment to them and others in the U.S. on academic visas.

Really, Nidhi?

Everyone was so starved for material that a classmate from India, Nidhi Tare, made a derogatory comment about Mexicans just so that she could lie on camera that it was me who said it. (I don’t remember what it was, exactly, but I remember being shocked.) Nidhi and I worked and traveled together, and I never once gave her a reason to believe the mockumentary. Unlike the other international students in our cohort, Nidhi was a pain in the ass, but I was always nice to her.

Really, Dan?

Of course, my international classmates were also being used by self-serving faculty—mostly white men for whom the “documentary” was a chance to look cool for the first time since deciding to pursue careers in academia (if not much earlier). Unsurprisingly, one of those white “heroes” was Dan Andresen.

In one of Dan’s classes back in 2007, there was a stretch where we gave presentations during scheduled time slots. On the day of my presentation, a group that was scheduled before me didn’t show up. In front of the whole class, Dan addressed me and referred to that group as “the Indians.” It was awkward enough that I still remember it, which was exactly the intent.

In hindsight, our class, which included many international students, had already been introduced to the mockumentary crew and told that I was racist and hated immigrants. (Again, pause to appreciate how weird that is.) Dan’s offensive remark was just a degrading, scapegoating-related task the producers made him perform so that he could smear me. The film is truly about people like Dan slithering on the ground to appear in it.

Dan’s vibe is a serial killer who works at Best Buy. If not for the mockumentary, nobody would ever mistake him for being cooler than me—not about international students, disabilities, or anything else.

Jerynn Lindbloom

Jerynn identified as queer for most or all of our relationship, which began in mid-2016. But I suddenly sensed tension about it near the end, in 2018, even though she knew it didn’t bother me. The reason was simply that Jerynn’s job was to portray me as a bigot for the bloodthirsty audience that followed the mockumentary. (All of them were being mocked, of course.) Antagonizing me without my participation was the best she could do.

Pride and pronouns

Shannon Awerkamp’s homophobia was textbook, yet she managed to be friends with classmates who likely were gay. In other words, she was content to ignore an individual’s homosexuality as long as he let her. What she couldn’t tolerate, on the other hand, was gay pride. At least once, she told me that God himself was repulsed by it. She never mentioned pronouns in 2006, but it’s a safe bet that she feels similarly about pride in, and the open acceptance of, non-normative gender identities.

Many dozens of people over the years thought they were taunting me about pronouns and gay pride. The idea that I’m bothered by those things, or that I’m an enemy of LGBTQ people, is literally a sick joke—one created by ultra-orthodox priests specifically to wind folks up, mock them, and extract revenge porn from them.

Sad!

The producers choose arbitrarily how to portray me; it has nothing to do with my behavior. If not for the mockumentary, it simply would never cross someone’s mind that I’m intolerant. It’s truly sad to consider the time and effort wasted on the vendetta porn over the past 27 years, the damage done to folks who participated, and the profit made by people who genuinely despise the LGBTQ community.

Amelia Neuhaus

The last time I saw Amelia, in mid-2022, she told me that she’d brought a group of adults with mental disabilities to a restaurant, and that a man had snapped at her to keep them away from him. He used shockingly degrading language. It was the first time I’d seen Amelia in over a year, and she acted very strange. I’m virtually certain that she scapegoated me for the incident in an on-camera interview.

Jimmy John’s

In mid-2019, a Jimmy John’s (6th & Kasold) coworker and I had a normal, friendly interaction with a regular who appeared to have Tourette syndrome. Afterward, my coworker launched into a speech about how much he loved the guy. I think it included a story about someone being cruel to him. I liked that customer, too; any claim that I was rude to him is completely untrue. (This is the same coworker who heroically played loud music before the store opened—which I also liked.)

The disabilities theme

I don’t have many nice things to say about the priests behind the mockumentary, but one thing they likely aren’t is ableist. I say that mainly because I know Shannon Awerkamp. It bothered her deeply that our society places elderly and disabled people in group homes like the ones where Gantt and Amelia worked. She likened it to abandonment. (See familialism, a central tenet of traditionalist Catholicism.) It infuriated her to see someone being impatient with an elderly person at the store.

So while the mockumentary was clearly mocking something with these stunts, I doubt the target was people with disabilities, or compassion for such people.

Clearly, a point was made about the sincerity and motivation of those who lied about me on camera. They would have loved to find that I was cruel about disabilities. They were promised such cruelty—that’s what their appearance in the film was going to be about. Eventually, they were allowed to lie about it, and that’s what they did.

But recall that lying in the mockumentary isn’t so straightforward. Some or all of the stories of cruelty—Gantt’s, Amelia’s, and my coworker’s—were likely actual, staged events. In other words, a disabled person was put through some humiliating ordeal just so that someone could scapegoat me for it on camera. That’s exactly the sort of behavior the porn ring thrives on. For one, it’s what diabolical perverts want to watch. But just as importantly, it seriously damages the participants, and it proves a point about them.

Dan Andresen

The producers of the mockumentary were well aware that the demonstration wouldn’t bother me. But they told the professor, Dan Andresen, that it would—and that it had better, because that’s what his segment in the film was about—because what they’re documenting is people like Dan throwing away their dignity for flattering screen time. (Well, flattering in jest.) The mockumentary undoubtedly has footage of Dan all the way back in 2007 taking credit for shaming or teasing me about accessibility in his class.

Dan’s vibe is a serial killer who works at Best Buy. If not for the mockumentary, nobody would ever mistake him for being cooler than me—not about disabilities, immigration, or anything else. Which probably has something to do with the potency of the fantasy for him.

Sadly, the full story of Dan’s involvement will be a major embarrassment to him, his profession, and his university. He almost certainly remained involved in the mockumentary for many years after I left K-State, perhaps until very recently. He viewed his role as the opportunity of a lifetime, and he figured there was nothing I could do about it—it’s that simple. Of course, it was all a sick joke. The porn ring was making a mockery of Dan from start to finish. He knowingly staked his identity to a scam.

Alt text

At Aquent Studios, where I worked from 2022–2023, I pointed out that my team was using alt text incorrectly. On the web, an image is replaced by its alt text for people who can’t see it. In general, captions make for poor alt text because they’re irrelevant and confusing to someone who’s reading a text-only version of the page. I knew that because I read about it in the HTML specification, simply because I cared. (I lost the argument, so when a blind person visits a Marriott site, they just hear a surreal litany of inane descriptions of photographs they can’t see and don’t care about.)

Amélie

When I first met Redacted in 2010, she was fresh back from Amsterdam where she visited a porn ring operative or client named Graham (who sexually assaulted her and taught her to mock Anne Frank). She repeatedly talked about how much she loved the scene from Amélie where the protagonist grabs a blind man on the street and leads him down a Paris sidewalk, describing the everyday sights to him. Some sample English subtitles:

In the bakery window, lollipops!
Sugarplum ice cream!
We’re passing the pork butcher. Ham, 79 francs. Spare ribs, 45!
Now the cheese shop!
A baby’s watching the dog that’s watching the chickens roasting!

Don’t get me wrong, I like that scene, too. But what’s funny is that it reads exactly like bad alt text. That’s exactly what it’s like for a blind person trying to book a hotel room on a site built by Aquent.

In fact, I’m 100-percent certain that the porn ring put Redacted up to showing me the scene, ostensibly to taunt me, and that the mockumentary is full of people like Dan Andresen cheering along. In other words, 13 years before I worked at Aquent, the porn ring was already using this scene to mock bad alt text and, more generally, vain and clueless attempts to “help” disabled people.⁵ (See The Disabilities Theme.)

This was far from the only joke that Redacted thought was on me but actually was on her. See also the note about V for Vendetta.

Cody

I met Shannon Awerkamp when we were assigned to the same group for a semester-long class project in the fall of 2006. Another guy in our group, Cody, gave a couple of tedious lectures late in the semester about his family being fat. In hindsight, it’s obvious that the mockumentary was already portraying me as a fat-shamer and that Cody was attempting to say something about it.

Cody’s weight would never cross my mind, nor would anything else about him or his family. His whole personality was that he was from Pittsburgh and wore trench coats. I sense that much of his adult life has revolved around taking cheap shots at me in the mockumentary, which really gives me the ick. I treated Cody well and never once gave anyone at K-State a reason to take the film seriously. His role is an intentionally pathetic fantasy, and he’s a joke to the people who handed it to him, including Shannon.

See also Chad.

Step 1: Lie on camera

At times over the years, it felt like I was being lectured about rudeness to people in the service industry. I knew that couldn’t be it—I’m never rude and I always tip well—but in fact it was.¹

Lina’s freak-out at McDonald’s was planned. The mockumentary producers told her that she was going to scream at the cashier and then claim in an on-camera interview afterward that it was me. (Any server could easily tell at a glance that Lina is a pain in the ass and I’m not.) Her lie is probably one of many on the topic to appear in the mockumentary.

Step 2: Extract revenge porn

The motivation behind this particular scam is transparent: to extract revenge porn from service industry workers, who are disproportionately young women and girls looking for money. (Finally, a porn ring that encourages high-school and college girls to stand up for themselves by filming weird, illicit porn.) Often that means having sex with acquaintances of mine under some pretense that it would hurt my feelings if I knew. Over the years, some of the women have dated me to enhance the “humiliation.” (Manipulating them is what gets the porn ring off—it has nothing to do with me. The appeal is that women are being tricked into filming depraved porn for a ridiculous, made-up reason. See also: Finally, a Porn Ring for Taylor Swift Fans.)

The truth is lava

Again, I’m never rude to workers. That’s the opposite of who I am. The porn ring deliberately portrays me in ways that are clearly false to mock the participants, their sense of justice, and their complete faith in an intentionally ridiculous documentary produced by pornographers who openly use it to recruit people to film cruel porn.

In fact, I feel certain that if I had body parts in my freezer, the porn ring wouldn’t bother telling anyone. Truthful portrayals of me are antithetical to the purpose of the mockumentary, as is anything resembling justice.

See also Mitcher Barnes.

Comrades of cringe

My team at Aquent Studios turned communism into a running gag to tease me. I thought it was cute. But in hindsight, they did take it suspiciously far. Imagine being a manager and everyone finding out that you spent countless man-hours “teasing” a member of your team to impress a mockumentary crew, and he never even noticed. That’s Brennan Lietz at Aquent, and it’s not even close to the weirdest thing he did. And it’s all on film because he thought he was showcasing his intelligence and virtue for a documentary.

Royalty

That same Aquent team also apparently believed that I have a thing for the royal family. I’m the last person on Earth who would have a thing for the royal family. This joke probably references traditionalist Catholicism’s true ideal form of government—not fascism but Christendom. The producers were clearly toying with my coworkers—daring them to recognize that it was a joke.

Ope, you got me — I’m a Dark Ages guy

In hindsight, people thought the Renaissance (and Renaissance Festival) bothered me. This joke references the fact that the Dark Ages were the Catholic Church’s golden age. I recall that Shannon Awerkamp was aggrieved by the term “Dark Ages” and the narrative that’s taught in history class.

At this point, the producers are just showing off. The mockumentary gives them god-like power over people’s behavior. Countless people over the years honestly believed that I was triggered by the Renaissance—literally the historical period—and that “tormenting” me about it made them look cool. Let that really sink in.

See also The Culture Club.

The acid trip continues: enter Mr. Brown

In fact, the porn ring undoubtedly involved my high school Western Civilization teacher, Jeff Brown, whom I mentioned to Shannon when she spoke about Church history. I get the feeling that appearing in the “documentary” as a “scholar” was going to be the highlight of his career. I can’t wait to see the footage.

See also Making Up the Grade, with Eric Punswick.

David Tah

The porn ring is run by some of the most religious people in the world. As a joke, they told David that being the atheist guy would make him look smart, especially if he pretended that it hurt my feelings. He knew much better—we talked about religion and our admiration for outspoken atheists. But David embraced early on that our roles in the film were fantasies.

Johnson County Freethinkers

When I moved to Johnson County, Kan. after college in 2009, I attended a handful of “Freethinker” meetings at a Lenexa cafe. (I had identified as non-religious for a couple of years by then.) It turned out to be a bunch of bachelor uncles griping about religion with no particular skill or insight. By the last couple of meetings I attended, I’m certain that the mockumentary crew was in complete control. That crew, and the ultra-orthodox priests behind it, would have feasted on these guys.

There were two or three distinct groups that I met. Actually, they may have been told that I was a religious spy. It’s hard to even type something that stupid, but it truly might be what happened. They, along with Joseph Stanfill, were among those most motivated to believe that I was religious simply because, along with the rest of the mockumentary, it validated their hilarious self-image as brave heretics who understand that religion is the root of all evil. In general, the mockumentary is designed to validate folks like them in jest by being intentionally absurd, false, and disgraceful—a sort of tainted rye fever dream for secular humanists.

See also Church of the Resurrection, Joseph Stanfill, Brent and Kristin Morris, K-State United Methodist Campus Ministry.

Neighbor’s cat near-fatally shot

See To Shoot a Neighbor’s Cat.

Hattie♡

When I met Emily Overland in 2015, her little terrier named Hattie (who looked like Bambi) would reflexively pee whenever I walked in the front door. Emily told me that her ex had accidentally traumatized Hattie while playing, causing her to react that way whenever she saw men. It stopped happening within a few weeks. I loved Hattie. Emily occasionally played rough with her, but I never did and never could. Nevertheless, her ex’s screw-up has the feel of something the mockumentary producers had Emily blame me for.

Former neighbors’ poor pit bull

Around 2013, a family that bred pit bulls rented the house behind me. They pampered the puppies and the female but left the male out in extreme summer weather and hardly acknowledged him. I brought over water whenever his bowl was dry. He was very pitiful and very sweet. I eventually called the city. He was gone soon after, and the family moved away not long after that.

I suspect that the mockumentary somehow twists this story into me being a snooty neighbor who dislikes pit bulls. Redacted is likely the only person I told what had happened; unfortunately, she might be a clinical psychopath. Reuben Hamilton undoubtedly found out; he constantly spreads vicious rumors about me.

This incident is the only time in my life that I’ve reported a neighbor for anything. In hindsight, many people have lobbed taunts at me for it without ever telling me why. As always, they were being mocked by the porn ring—it was intentionally pathetic.

John Thompson

Within the first minute that I met John Thompson in 2015—he showed up at KU Dining as my manager to help the porn ring exploit my mostly teenage coworkers—he told me that he and his wife were ZPG-ers: zero population growth-ers. I thought it was cool. As usual, John thought he was getting under my skin, and as usual, I was oblivious. He’s not even on my level: In my early 20s, I was awestruck by the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. That’s negative population growth, John, you chump.

Revs. Mitch and Jan Todd

See Kansas State University.

Sterilization

Over the years, several women brought up their frustration with medical ethics that discouraged or prevented sterilization. In hindsight, it’s obvious that I was supposed to be bothered, which I wasn’t at all. In every case, I was fully supportive.

A blatant joke

The notion that I have conservative views about family planning is truly bizarre. The preoccupation of many participants with this topic had nothing to do with me; the porn ring was winding them up and mocking them.

Welfare reform

The Kansas House created a new welfare reform committee in 2023, chaired by Francis. The committee is mainly concerned with restricting access to federal money that’s already been allocated to needy Kansans, sometimes running afoul of federal regulations in the process. In February, Francis introduced a bill that would have prohibited the state from participating in a federal program providing subsidized meals during the summer to children who qualify for them during the school year. (That bill died in April.)

Francis was called out in a May 2023 op-ed piece in the Topeka Capital-Journal by Rev. Jim McCollough. First, for admitting that he’d lived in Saint Marys his whole life and had no idea that the town had a food pantry. (If you’ve been to Saint Marys, that should give you a chuckle.) Second, for leading the effort in April 2023 to override Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto of a bill opposed by that food pantry, along with 159 other organizations, who argued that it would further increase food insecurity in Kansas.

Just Food. From now on.

Among those who participated in the mockumentary were leaders at Douglas County’s food bank, Just Food. They were undoubtedly recruited by attributing Francis’s food assistance politics to me. That was a joke. If you were to rank all three million Kansans by their degree of antagonism toward Just Food and its clients, Francis would be at the top;² the mockumentary producers—if they were Kansans—would be tied with him; and I’d be near the very bottom. And do keep in mind that I’m actually a random guy whose politics are nobody’s business. That was part of the joke, too. See also Confused Warfare.

Jeremy spoken

The porn ring might also have had a hand in the Just Food scandal that made headlines years ago. I still recall Redacted’s smirk when she talked about former Just Food executive director and Lawrence mayor Jeremy Farmer. And how quickly that smirk vanished when he fled town in 2015 under federal investigation for embezzlement. The porn ring, which has controlled Redacted since I met her in 2010, compromises guys like Jeremy in its sleep.

See also Brent Morris.

Perspective

Go easy on Francis. As much as my life has sucked since meeting Shannon in 2006, I’d still pick what she did to me in a heartbeat over being married to her and serving on the Saint Marys city commission for the past 15 years. (I now realize that the porn ring targeted me long before I met Shannon, but the point still stands.)

It’s a mockumentary

The mockumentary producers invented the notion that I dislike homeless people. They’re well aware that it’s untrue. The point of having Gantt and Heather try and fail to expose me was to prove that they knew better when they lied about me on camera to promote themselves—that they’re motivated entirely by vanity and not at all by justice. That’s what’s being documented.

The film is very truly a vendetta mockumentary. Not because I think so, but because the producers think so. It’s about people like Gantt and Heather behaving like mean children to get credit for their hilarious “virtue.”

To catch a Redditor

The weird thing is that it’s not hard at all to find people in Lawrence, including progressives, who do gripe about the homeless population, unprompted. (I saw it often in the Lawrence subreddit late last year.) I just don’t happen to be one of them. But it makes you wonder exactly what point Gantt and Heather thought they were making.

Weird flex

I strongly suspect that the porn ring used this scam to film women I know having sex with guys off the street to “humiliate” me, and that a sizable local audience cheered along. To the porn ring, it was just a big, disgusting joke. It knows with certainty, and has reams of proof, that it completely invented the notion that I dislike homeless people, and that it can make my neighbors and coworkers cheer for anything it wants simply by telling them that it’s for a movie.

Confused warfare

For most of my time in Lawrence, I’ve made near-poverty wages and lived like a non-celibate monk while being viciously targeted by a powerful porn ring through guys like Doug Compton and J.R. Lewis. Comically, the people they recruit to make vendetta porn at my expense are frequently the type who proudly espouse (to the extent that posting memes is truly “espousing”) class warfare. The irony is not lost on the porn ring, which both encourages and frequently mocks them. It regards their politics as a vulgar fashion statement and, just for fun, proves it over and over without them noticing.

See also Francis Awerkamp.

Amanda Brown

Amanda and I briefly dated in 2019. She was (and might still be) a Spanish teacher at McLouth High School. In 2011, Amanda took a group of students to Costa Rica, where one of them, a 16-year-old boy, was shot dead by a security guard in the middle of the night while running back to the hotel. I vaguely knew the story. I think we only talked about it once, and of course I was fully supportive. I felt truly terrible for Amanda and everyone else involved. The story struck me as a sequence of tragic mistakes, including the shooting itself, which I assume is how it struck most people who heard it.

In hindsight, the whole reason Amanda dated me was for screen time in the “documentary” promoting her career, her cultured worldview, and her side of the Costa Rica story. Of course, the opportunity depended on her promoting the film’s cartoonish, completely fabricated portrayal of me. Although we only dated for a few weeks, she knew much better. It also likely depended on her adding to the lore—that I’m somehow an enemy of Spanish clubs and Costa Rican hotel guards. (Nothing is too ridiculous for the mockumentary.)

Amanda would have done anything to appear in a triple-A documentary playing the cool Spanish teacher whose career was derailed by racism and P.T.A. Karens. Truly anything. So lying about me certainly wasn’t an issue for her. But it turns out that the whole thing was a sick joke. (It’s hard to imagine how that wasn’t obvious.) The point of the film is to make a complete mockery of people like Amanda, and it seems to work every time.

The premise behind Amanda’s appearance has Julie Pearce Valladares written all over it.

The Postal Service

In early 2023, my team at Aquent attempted to tease me about mail carriers. I don’t know where this one comes from. I’m not someone who gripes about the postal service. But similar to the claim that I gripe about homeless people, it’s such a common occurrence that you wonder how anyone could have taken the “vendetta” seriously. (At Aquent, I did crack a joke about Amazon expecting my USPS package to be delivered around or after 8pm, which is objectively funny. My team undoubtedly thought they’d outed me as a domestic terrorist.)

I’m nearly certain that this claim has been prominently featured in the mockumentary for many years. Once you know who’s behind the film, the motivation is transparent: to compromise postal workers and extract weird mailman revenge porn, much of which was likely filmed at my house with women I know. Everyone involved, including the local audience, was getting skewered by the porn ring for failing to recognize that it was intentionally disgraceful, dystopian, and asinine.

Public schools

The priests behind the mockumentary loath public schools. Shannon Awerkamp viewed them as a dystopian state instrument of mass brainwashing. In contrast, my mom was a public school teacher, my sister and I attended public schools, and so did my dad. In fact, we were staunch supporters of public schools. If that support has weakened over time, it’s a direct result of the hellish, incomprehensible effect of the mockumentary on our lives since 1997. Nevertheless, I strongly suspect that we’re portrayed as enemies of public schools in the film. See also Making Up the Grade, with Eric Punswick.

Student loans

Tiffany Cooper, whom I dated in 2007, fiercely resented that she had more debt than me. Later, Redacted and Alexis Smith were coached to behave the same way to get under my skin. I told all three of them to get a life, which any self-respecting person would have done. I paid for grad school with a research job while being targeted by a vicious porn ring and its Silas-from–The Da Vinci Code puppet masters. I’ve been through vastly more than those women and gotten by with far less. And I never criticize the financial situations of others.

The porn ring encourages people to feel self-righteous about their participation to mock them; it’s intentionally asinine. Many of them were coworkers who I worked next to, and usually harder than, for the same pay. In hindsight, many of my Allen Press and Aquent coworkers thought they were teasing me about loans. What an embarrassment. See also Confused Warfare.

Finally, a porn ring for Taylor Swift fans

I suspect that the mockumentary portrays me as a Taylor Swift hater, which is a transparent ploy to trick women into filming weird revenge porn. (The porn ring despises celebrities, and it gets off on mocking the women it recruits. See also: Finally, a Porn Ring for the Service Industry.)

I’ve never once hated on Taylor Swift. I think it’s adorable how much women my age love her, and I always have. Any claim to the contrary is a blatant lie. The mockumentary producers enjoy proving that they can make people believe, say, and rally around anything they want.

Just relax

In 2006, Shannon told me—repeatedly I think—about an incident from high school where she was persistently pressured by an older boy to kiss another girl, even after repeatedly declining. He was driving them around and kept telling Shannon to “just relax and have fun.” More than 15 years later, Heather Torpey repeatedly referenced that same phrase in our Facebook chat, which was filled with similar taunts. The story undoubtedly appears in the mockumentary with me as the bad guy.

This might be Shannon’s villain origin story. Unless it’s the cat thing.

Dress for men’s success

Like most women in SSPX communities, Shannon dressed very modestly. She holds a strong conviction that women are culpable in sins that men commit out of temptation. She brought it up repeatedly because she disapproved of the way college women dressed. In contrast, I did not. I’m about the last person who’d have a serious opinion about how women ought to dress.

I’m certain that the mockumentary scapegoats me for this one by claiming that I think women are responsible for men’s behavior. I’ve never once expressed that sentiment. In hindsight, Redacted made a very tedious, gross attempt to make this stick to me; she undoubtedly appears on camera lying about it.

Loud music

Shannon believed that all popular music has a secret agenda. She hated the sound of booming car stereos. She’s more of a Gregorian chant gal.

In hindsight, my shift lead at Jimmy John’s (6th & Kasold) in mid-2019 thought he was flexing on me by playing loud music before the store opened. He likely lied about my reaction, along with a few other things. Ethan Payeur, a coworker at Checkers, also thought he was making a heroic contribution by sitting outside and thumping his car stereo. The mockumentary producers were laughing at them—I couldn’t have cared less.

Finally, a porn ring for sex workers

I suspect that I’m portrayed as prude and anti–sex work in the mockumentary, which is a joke. Nobody who dated me as an adult seriously doubted that I was sex-positive and open-minded.

As with the portrayal of me as rude to service workers, the motivation here is transparent: to recruit women with ties to sex work, who are being mocked, to film revenge porn. See also: Finally, a Porn Ring for the Service Industry.

The shame here is fat-free

Soon after Aquent hired me in 2022, Chad joined our team. One of his first weeks, we were told that he had a big reveal for us. A few days later, he turned on his camera and told us that he used to be obese. It was kind of weird. I remember hoping he didn’t feel too embarrassed. In hindsight, it’s obvious what was happening. Chad was hired to make vendetta porn on the premise that I had a problem with obese people. As always, the porn ring just made that up. The point was to mock Chad—not his former obesity but his vanity—and especially Aquent for throwing its reputation away in the name of blatantly silly and degrading “vendetta” porn.

I’d guess Chad was recruited directly from an online forum where guys like him obsess over gains and losses. (I suspect that the porn ring finds amateur cop enthusiasts the same way.) For reference, Shannon Awerkamp, a porn-ring-connected traditionalist Catholic I knew in college, regarded exercise as an evil waste of energy. It disgusted her to see people jogging and going to gyms.

Chad likely traveled to Lawrence, from Kentucky I believe, to make porn with women I know. It was arranged by a cruel porn ring that despises Chad and Aquent. (On the other hand, I genuinely liked them.) The point was to mock and seriously damage Aquent and my coworkers for the amusement of rich perverts. In other words, it was intentionally disgraceful, and it’s all on film.

See also Cody, The Humiliation Fantasy.

Phillip Chavez

Phillip also joined my team at Aquent after me. We both worked remotely. Around March of 2023, for the sake of transparency, I showed Aquent a letter I’d written to law enforcement about the scandal at Allen Press, my previous employer. Almost immediately, Phillip was laid off. (My letter had absolutely nothing to do with him.) Over the next couple of months, several others on our team, including myself, were also laid off. I didn’t suspect that anything was amiss at Aquent until a year later.

In hindsight, my coworkers were incredibly weird about Phillip’s dismissal, which makes me think that I’m somehow blamed for it in the mockumentary. (Phillip isn’t an immigrant, but see also J.R. Lewis fires a Mexican person to set up a porn plot.) Phillip and I got along great. We started the Kevin James meme. Swear to God. The idea that I would or could have gotten him fired is bonkers, as is the fact that my coworkers went along with it.

By that time, my team at Aquent was well aware that the “documentary” was a sham and a disgrace. They knew that my treatment of Phillip was beyond reproach and that every stunt they pulled was nothing more than a sick game—I was going to be portrayed the same way on film no matter what. (See also Beck Fife.) They knew. All of them. But they understood by then that the truth didn’t matter at all, nor justice. Only the film. The same thing happened at Checkers and at Allen Press. It’s actually pretty horrifying.

What they didn’t realize is that the producers were never on their side. The cut they expected everyone to see was just a joke. In fact, the film crew was there to document all of the gory, dystopian details of what happened.

Beck Fife

Beck identifies as non-binary, which my team at Aquent tried incredibly hard to prove bothered me. Diana Malmstrom pretended to hate Beck. Said that Beck was deliberately cruel to her about her dead cat. (No, it’s not a coincidence.) She took countless cheap shots at Beck’s gender. (Diana is kind of trash.) I think the best she ever got from me—long after we were laid off, and after she “helped” me find another job—was, “Yeah, they were a pain in the ass.” Which is exactly what Beck was told to be so that I’d criticize them.

Consider our managers’ stupidity and opportunism to fall for this scam: “If all twenty of you working together for months could get this guy to say in private that Beck is annoying, boy, that’d sure prove he’s a bigot. You’ll be heroes!” For the producers, the whole point was to make a complete mockery of our team and Aquent, which worked brilliantly. Given the amount of effort that went into it, the mockumentary is undoubtedly littered with lies about it.

I liked Beck from my first week, when they did a great job training me. We called every minor inconvenience our villain origin story. I did initially misgender them on accident, but I quickly corrected it. Outside of the bizarre justice-porn ritual of our team meetings, we got along great. What an embarrassment and a cruel thing our team did to us.

See also Gender and Sexuality.

Aquent flexes pet culture while flushing it down the toilet

From the moment I started at Aquent in 2022, the mockumentary crew had my coworkers make a huge deal about their pet-friendly culture to “taunt” me. The producers knew I’d eat it up—they know for a fact that I love animals as much as any of the clowns at Aquent. They invented the notion that I don’t love animals. Which, of course, made it impossible for me to understand that I was being taunted.

My team expended truly incredible time and effort showing off for the film crew, which was making a complete mockery of them from start to finish. When the full story is public, I doubt they’ll need to worry about their pet policies anymore.

Gift from Aquent

In light of the laptop incident at Allen Press, it feels suspicious that Aquent didn’t want my monitor back after my assignment in mid-2023. I still have the email where the company specifically told me not to send it back. In real life, you don’t have to worry about your employer blatantly lying in a documentary that you stole a monitor. But the porn ring could snap its fingers and end many careers at Aquent. This is exactly the sort of thing that companies like Aquent lie about in the mockumentary.

I never even took the monitor out of the box, and I was annoyed that Aquent didn’t want it back. If anyone wants a mediocre 24-inch monitor, let me know. Gift from Aquent.

Randy Radosevich, CEO through 2019

Randy was the CEO of Allen Press when I was hired. A few months later, at the end of 2019, he was abruptly dismissed from the company. There’s a 100-percent chance that the porn ring was involved in Randy’s firing.

Randy’s vibe is a bulldozer that spits out inane press releases and LinkedIn posts. To the porn ring, he’s a joke. Like Kevan Meinershagen, Reuben Hamilton, and Christian, he practically has “Fake Porn Ring Cop” stamped on his forehead.

After he was fired, Randy moved to my parents’ neighborhood in the Kansas City suburbs, an intentionally disturbing gesture. See also my article from September of 2023 about “The Hub” debacle.

Senior managers Kevan Meinershagen, Jenny Scott, and Carlos Calderon

Kevan, Jenny, Carlos, and likely others were fired in early 2022 after gleefully overseeing the harassment. I suspect that the mockumentary producers finally showed the company a sample of the unflattering footage they had amassed. Carlos was the head of HR. (Let that sink in.)

See also Kevan is a Great Project Manager.

Brett Scott, manager

Brett was my supervisor at Allen Press. My original department was split in the summer of 2021 so that he and Jenny Scott (no relation) could oversee the harassment. Brett long ago lost his marbles and his dignity trying to “catch” me.

Dude, we both got Dells

In 2021, Brett took a strange interest in my personal laptop, which had been connected to the company’s network during the COVID-19 year that we worked remotely. He asked me to confirm that the model number matched the company’s records. It didn’t, so I told him the correct one. He never responded. It felt like maybe he was implying that it was the same model issued by the company. (It wasn’t.)

I took Brett at face value when he dropped the issue. I figured he was probably embarrassed. That was the last it came up. In hindsight, of course he was implying that my laptop was company property. For no reason except that a mockumentary film crew said so. And it’s a safe bet that the producers, using intentionally ridiculous reasoning, convinced Allen Press management to never admit nor accept that it was wrong.

One of the jokes here is that Allen Press could’ve easily verified for itself that my laptop wasn’t the kind it issued—coworkers regularly entered my house without my knowledge (to film porn). In other words, the company either knew the truth and lied, or it knew that the truth didn’t matter in the mockumentary and didn’t care. In fact, the only thing Allen Press really cared to know about my laptop was that it was a Dell. (Let that really sink in.)

Another joke is that nobody is less likely than I am to steal company property. That’s the opposite of who I am. (Recall that I quit Allen Press voluntarily, with severance pay.)

See also Gift from Aquent.

COVID-19

Like everyone on Earth, I talked at length about COVID with my coworkers in 2020. I wore masks everywhere. I got vaccinated when I was supposed to. I was dating Lindsey Fisher, who knew all of that first-hand. I never gave a single person a single reason to think that my views about COVID were anything but thoroughly mainstream. And yet in hindsight, Brett Scott, my supervisor at Allen Press, thought he was teasing me—for applause or screen time, I guess—as if they weren’t.

It goes without saying that the priests behind the mockumentary aren’t big on masks or vaccines. For them, it’s a riot turning managers like Brett into full-blown goons who bully a subordinate—bully is really too flattering a word for how silly and cowardly it is—over made-up and often trivial personal views. The same thing happened with John Thompson at KU Dining, Brennan Lietz at Aquent Studios, and many others. All of them were showing off for the camera, and all of them looked horrible. (The day-to-day workplace harassment documented in the film is going to be very famous. It was brutally pathetic.)

As an aside, Kevan Meinershagen—the creep at Allen Press who pretended to investigate me for the porn ring—apparently tried to reinvent himself as the guy who gives corporate “talks” about COVID-19. I wonder how that’s going.

See also Doctors Severely Compromised, Handwashing.

Inclusive tagging

Allen Press was traditionally a printer of scholarly journals. I was an XML specialist, which involved “tagging” author manuscripts for typesetting. In 2021, a manager, Kasey Embers, told me and Chris McConnell, who ostensibly did the same job as me, that we’d gotten feedback from Brazilian authors that their names were getting jumbled during tagging. Those names often consisted of four or more words, which, for tagging purposes, had to be divided into a surname and given name. Chris and I couldn’t tell a Brazilian composite or second given name from our own asses, making that division error-prone. Our tagging was also the basis for XML that was published online and from which author metadata was extracted downstream, so the errors were getting noticed.

I considered it a high-priority issue. We obviously needed to give authors a way to make the distinction themselves in the manuscript. I did some research into our process—which happens to be the sort of thing I like doing—and made some suggestions. That’s exactly what anyone in their right mind who knows me would expect me to do.

My email response to Kasey seemingly wasn’t noticed, so I tried again. Crickets. Chris sat at his desk smirking, which very truly was his job under the mockumentary regime at Allen Press. The reason nobody responded is that it was staged as a joke and a setup. The point was for my coworkers to trash me in the mockumentary for being culturally insensitive. (The porn ring uses these scams to recruit people, who are being mocked, to “punish” me by filming underground porn.) I have no doubt that it was a real problem, but the very last thing Allen Press wanted was for me to fix it.

See also Accessible Software.

Jenna Anderson

Jenna has spent years impersonating me on dedicated devices that others—mostly Kevan Meinershagen, I suspect—can access remotely to pretend to monitor me. She’s disturbingly devoted—she left the office practically the same day as me in January of 2022 to work remotely long-term. (If you know Jenna, you know that disturbing is very on-brand.)

Remember the astronaut who, in a jealous rage, drove across the country wearing diapers so she wouldn’t have to stop? That’s Jenna’s vibe. It’s harrowing to know that she’s been obsessed with me and my family for the past five years. I very truly don’t want to know the details.

Justin Zaruba

In November of 2023, Justin posted to Reddit claiming that Allen Press was shut down by a Russian state-sponsored hack. He was likely being disingenuous, but it’s true that he and others were locked out of their computers while Allen Press (then Sheridan Kansas) was winding down. Not coincidentally, it started in late August, a few days after I wrote to dozens of their customers about the company’s scandal. The decision to close the plant came a week later.

When Jenny Scott made Justin an account manager in the summer of 2021, his only recent work experience was bussing tables and (apparently) writing novels. He was hired because the porn ring controlled Allen Press and he’d been helping target me for years by then. Guys like Justin can hear the porn ring’s dog whistle—cruel porn in the name of justice, ’cause chicks dig justice—and they hang around for chances to participate.

Chris McConnell

Chris and I were effectively a two-person team, which made his role automatic. He could have been a chimpanzee and the porn ring would’ve given him exactly the same role, which was to act like a piece of trash while I good-naturedly pretended not to notice. I did both of our jobs while management cheered him on. As Chris would say, it was super weird. It was also junk.

Chris, who looks perpetually like someone’s 6th-grade yearbook photo, undoubtedly filmed “humiliation” porn with women I know. Those women worked for a criminal porn ring that despises Chris. Everything about it was intentionally pathetic and disgraceful. In fact, Chris’s true role, like that of company management, was to fatally damage Allen Press on film while smirking like a moron about it, all for the amusement of rich perverts.

Micah Hirschler

I dated Micah for a few weeks in mid-2020. Her role was similar to that of Kelli Gore at Checkers. We were supposed to date seriously so that Micah could make humiliation porn, but apparently the porn ring wasn’t cool with our status. So instead, people were likely told that I had sexually abused Micah, and work became a surreal nightmare of harassment.

The last time I saw Micah outside of work, she asked if I wanted to make things serious and I said no. I told her from the bottom of my heart how great she is; she said that it was one of the nicest things anyone had ever said to her. That was it. Within days, she was already acting strange in our department chat. (Our office was remote at the time.) Whenever I told other coworkers what had happened between us, the response was very strange—even by Allen Press standards. I can only imagine what they were told.

It’s possible that Micah was told I had done something to her without her knowing. Whatever she said about me, keep in mind that she was being used, lied to, and compelled by not only an extremely dangerous porn ring but also her bosses, from Jenny Scott all the way to the top of Allen Press.

Sherry Rohn

Sherry and I worked together fairly closely at Allen Press. After the company’s demise in late 2023, I tried telling an earlier, comically incorrect version of this story on Reddit (horrible idea). After getting pushed around for a bit, I sent a plea for help to some former coworkers that I respected. There were only a few, and Sherry was one of them. I have reason to think that Sherry actually did stick up for me, though I’m not yet sure exactly how (it didn’t happen on Reddit). Doing so would have taken enormous courage—far more than I realized at the time. (Which explains why nobody else ever did.)

Someday, this full story will be told, and I’m eager to recognize and reward acts of courage and humanity. Maybe that sounds melodramatic, but there were so few, and they mean the world to me.

J.R. Lewis

Checkers owner J.R. Lewis (picture Ferguson Darling) has a resume with two bullet points. One, he inherited his father’s grocery store. Two, he fumbled it away to an underground porn ring that’s feasted on his employees for a decade now while he—in the most literal sense—watched.

While I worked at Checkers from 2014–2019, my coworkers filmed a staggering amount of porn at my house during my shifts, much of it with girlfriends or ex-girlfriends of mine, who were recruited before we met. David Tah and Simon Cowart did so for years while we were fairly close. J.R. was heavily involved. (I was easily one of his best employees.) All of it was meant to humiliate me, which it didn’t at all.

The involvement of J.R. and his employees continued long after I left Checkers. It probably didn’t even slow down until late 2022, when I got the attention of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation.

J.R.’s role was to allow the porn ring, which has targeted me since middle school, to use his business and his employees; as always, he accomplished nothing on his own. Dozens of his employees have been exploited over the years. Many were teenagers. Some might well have been filmed as minors. The porn ring has effectively controlled Checkers for a decade.

J.R. Lewis fires a Mexican person to set up a porn plot

Around 2018, Checkers owner J.R. Lewis fired a Mexican coworker that everyone, including me, loved, and somehow blamed me. I don’t know the details, but I know it was all a porn setup: They told the poor guy, along with the mockumentary audience, that it was my fault and then had him (or perhaps someone else) “humiliate” me on camera with my girlfriend, Jerynn Lindbloom. Neither she nor my coworkers actually believed that I had anything to do with the firing; every one of them smirked when I brought it up. In fact, I suspect that the porn ring first got the idea when I told Jerynn how much I liked the guy.

Pause to appreciate how predatory and disgusting J.R. Lewis’s role in the porn ring is. He uses scams like this one—that he fired a Mexican person because I’m racist—to endear himself to his youngest employees and have them film weird underground porn to “punish” me. It kept happening long after I left Checkers in early 2019. The porn ring intentionally, for its own amusement, makes J.R.’s role as pathetic as possible, because it knows that he’s a spineless little bitch.

See also Phillip Chavez.

Jim Fisher, assistant manager

Jim bet it all on the documentary. His role was to fatally damage Checkers while throwing away his dignity on camera for the amusement of ultra-orthodox priests, which is exactly what he did. The full story of his involvement will be shockingly disgusting.

See the note about Jim’s pathetic white hero fantasy. And the one about his disturbing obsession with my grandparents.

Shoplifters

Around late 2017, Dan, a Haskell student from the Dakotas, joined my department at Checkers. Once, he told me that owner J.R. Lewis (picture Ferguson Darling) had banned a Black former coworker from the store over theft. Mind you, Dan said asinine things all the time. (Picture a hyperactive 6th-grader.) I hardly acknowledged him after his first month. Moreover, I had far too much pride to kick Black people out of Checkers for J.R. Lewis. That simply wasn’t going to happen. Yet, in hindsight, there’s no doubt that the mockumentary producers set this up and had Dan, and likely others, lie about it on camera.

In general, my Checkers coworkers were preoccupied with catching shoplifters whereas it almost never crossed my mind. (Not coincidentally, I worked much harder than most of them.) Any claims to the contrary in the mockumentary are blatant lies. The producers took care to document those lies, too.

Dan meets me, promptly gives up

Speaking of Dan, the first shift we worked together, he told me a story about getting pulled over and searched by a cop. Unexpectedly, he started getting confrontational, ostensibly because I hadn’t shown enough outrage. (Really, he was following a script.) I saved Dan the trouble and made it clear that I didn’t care what anyone, including the police, did to him in the past, present, or future. From that moment on, Dan was a sweetheart, which says everything about his sincerity and courage when it came to “exposing” me.

I don’t argue about the police. When someone complains about a traffic stop, I don’t stick up for the police. It’s just not a thing that I do. So when people get snippy like Dan, all I know is that they’re tripping. Sadly, they never have the courage to simply tell me what’s going on.

Of course, behind my back, Dan said and did whatever the mockumentary producers asked. His role, like that of dozens of his coworkers, was to fatally damage Checkers and thoroughly disgrace himself, all on camera for the amusement of rich perverts.

Kelli Gore

After I broke up with Jerynn Lindbloom in late 2018, Checkers owner J.R. Lewis dangled Kelli Gore in front of me until we started dating. Her initial role was to replace Jerynn as the girlfriend at my house while I was at work. But I kept her at arm’s length, and after a couple of months, work became a surreal nightmare of harassment. J.R. likely told my coworkers and neighbors that I had sexually abused Kelli, among other horrible things. I wasn’t meant to survive it. (The explicit goal was for me to kill myself.) Incredibly, police weren’t involved until I contacted them more than three years later.

Once, at work, Kelli did something to my hand that slowly, over the course of hours, developed into a minor chemical burn—like a scratch, but in a distinctive shape. Later that day, she took a photo of it. It was either a kind of branding, purely for the porn value, or else an identifying mark that could be used to implicate me in other staged photos.

Saturday scaries

My last Saturday afternoon at Jimmy John’s, there was a bizarre episode that started when a man stumbled out of the restroom, red-faced and breathing heavily—I thought drunk, perhaps—and stared right at me as he walked out of the store. Soon after, Kelly was in the men’s room taking photos of a mysterious bloody mess. She talked a lot about calling the police but never did. A coworker later suggested that it may have been child abuse (and that the child left out the back door), which made me feel sick for days.

Given the overwhelming influence of the mockumentary on our workplace, the incident was almost certainly staged. (I never saw the blood, but I assume it was fake.) Again, it was my last weekend at Jimmy John’s—the producers’ last chance to exploit their control over the store while I was in it. I have no idea what the point was or what was said about it in the film.

Imagine otherwise-normal coworkers staging something so revolting and then viciously lying about your role, all while you stand there politely doing your job. That’s what the mockumentary does to people. It’s been happening non-stop for almost three decades.

See Dishonest Ableism, Boudoir Photos, and Loud Music.

Now we’re old and gray, Fernando

In hindsight, Fernando’s name was used to taunt me on several occasions, especially and most gleefully by our manager, John Thompson, at work. That’s because Fernando was recruited to film humiliation porn—likely at my house with my ex-girlfriends—on the premise that I was racist. It was a perfect microcosm of John and me: He pretends to score points on me and smirks, snarls, and scowls about it while I’m oblivious and unfailingly good-natured.

Consider that Fernando, then probably a teenager, was pornographically exploited through KU Dining, because of his skin color, to realize a porn ring’s sick racial-sexual humiliation fantasies. All because his bosses wanted some screen time in a fake documentary that existed to mock and damage them. Moreover, I was easily one of their best workers. Nobody treated their coworkers better.

I suspect that dozens of employees and students were exploited for underground porn through KU Dining, most of them teenagers, and that it continued long after I left in mid-2015. There were people far higher up than John who bent over backward for the porn ring. I wish I knew their names. They likely appear in the mockumentary posing as heroes. As an employer, KU Dining will be a punchline for a generation of students.

John Thompson

John has now spent a decade exploiting the justice porn and harassment to promote himself and his political piety. The fact that he became my boss to do so, and that he extracted porn from teenage subordinates to do so, is jaw-dropping.

That John’s politics were more sophisticated than mine in the first place was a joke. I don’t mean that metaphorically—the mockumentary producers created that fantasy for John as a literal joke. If you took my politics and added yard signs, senility, and frantic virtue signaling, you’d have roughly John’s politics.

Fraternities

Faculty even promoted the bizarre scam that I snitched on fraternities. Shannon Awerkamp herself played a central role in that scam, using another classmate who actually did report his fraternity for hazing. In hindsight, I was likely taunted about it during class by Ruth Miller, a professor whom Shannon despised, in the spring of 2007. The porn ring’s motive was to film the resulting “vendetta,” which was designed to mock and severely damage the Greek system at K-State while being imperceptible to me. For details, see Fraternities and Snitching. At least two sororities, Kappa Kappa Gamma and Chi Omega, were also infiltrated by the porn ring.

Don Gruenbacher

I was sitting next to Shannon in class when our professor, Don Gruenbacher, announced the graduate research position that I ended up filling. Before my first semester of grad school in 2007, Don was promoted to department head, a position he still holds. (Officially, the George J. and Alice D. Fiedler Distinguished Chair in the Mike Wiegers Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. You can’t make this stuff up.)

Don involved other students in the mockumentary, plus his office assistant, Ashley Walker, all of whom were instructed to lie about me on camera. His ethical and mental lapse—coma, really—spread to K-State alumni and others at Sandia National Laboratory, where I interned for two summers in grad school. The fallout at K-State and Sandia, though delayed, will be considerable.

Caterina Scoglio

Part of Caterina already assumed that her Kansas-native students were like the immigrant-hating buffoon portrayed in the mockumentary. Her whole personality is that she’s Italian, which doesn’t impress me. I’m a couple of generations removed from Sicilians—I have way more fierezza than Caterina. That she had anything to say to my family about immigration was a blatant mockumentary joke—one that was designed to make her look silly, arrogant, and unprofessional on film.

The ultra-orthodox priests behind the mockumentary are anti-immigration not because they like Americans more than Italians—they don’t—but because they fiercely oppose globalization of any kind. They despise the culture of academia. (On the other hand, I genuinely liked it.) Sadly, Caterina’s role will be a major embarrassment to Italian researchers in the U.S., which was exactly the film’s intent.

See also International Students.

University of Kansas collaborators

Our department collaborated on a regional network testbed with other area universities. There were a couple of guys at KU we worked with, including James Sterbenz, a professor, who definitely got their clocks cleaned by the porn ring.

The damage is severe

Don, Caterina, Dan, and others at K-State have likely known for a long time that they’re in serious trouble and that the group behind the mockumentary is a terrifying porn ring. They just didn’t have the courage to do anything about it. While they stayed mum—they very truly were probably waiting for me to kill myself—the porn ring has continued its rampage unabated. The consequences are beyond devastating; dozens of businesses and many hundreds of people have since been damaged by the very same scam.

See Accessible Software and International Students for examples of Dan, as my professor, shamelessly smearing me to promote himself in the film.

A priestly fraternity

The ultra-orthodox priests behind the mockumentary have a special disdain for organizations, usually fraternities, having secret activities, rituals, or oaths. The most notable example is Freemasonry, with which Shannon was comically preoccupied, but she was even scandalized by the Greek houses at K-State. Devotion to anything but the Church was perverse to her. Note that the Society of Saint Pius X itself is a priestly fraternity: while over half a million people worldwide attend SSPX Masses, the only true members of the Society are priests.

Tau Beta Pi

In fact, Shannon strongly disapproved—in her quiet, lobotomized way—when I joined Tau Beta Pi, an engineering honor society. I was initiated at roughly the same time that she told me about our classmate reporting his fraternity. It’s possible that I was blamed for reporting Tau Beta Pi over the initiation ritual, which is laughable. I can’t remember what the hell we did, but it certainly wasn’t anything that could have gotten them in trouble. Frankly, I completely forgot about Tau Beta Pi after I was initiated.

Oh, brother

The practical motivation for this scam is transparent: to involve fraternities and their members in the vendetta porn, which of course is designed to mock, compromise, and humiliate them. It’s a devastating scam. As you can imagine, the porn ring used it to turn lots of people against me. They’re going to look awfully silly. The notion that I go around blowing the whistle on fraternities is certifiably insane. It makes no sense, and it should have made no sense to anyone who knew me in college. It’s like finding out that hundreds of people think I’m Banksy and cannot for the life of them, even after decades, figure out that it’s a joke.

While I was never in a fraternity myself, many in my family were and are, including my dad, who has far more honor than any of the clowns targeting us.

At least two sororities, Kappa Kappa Gamma and Chi Omega, were also infiltrated by the porn ring.

Cowed cowards

It’s nauseating to picture Chris and Kelly telling everyone for the past 27 years: “We’re John’s aunt and uncle, and we have three girls, so if we’re saying he’s a pervert then it must be true.” What they didn’t mention was that they’re in very serious trouble. From day one in 1997, they were terrified of the vendetta against my family and desperate to prove that they were loyal to it rather than us—in other words, to impress the porn ring that killed Matt Miller and blamed me. They’ve been smearing me behind my back, viciously, since I was a child. Nobody does that. It only happened because they were afraid to tell the porn ring no. Neither of them ever once let on that anything was wrong. (They’d never condescend to me in real life.) My record remains spotless to this day.

A catastrophe for K-State

This is a genuine catastrophe for K-State that Chris and Kelly should and could have prevented. They were undoubtedly consulted by top administrators before the university signed on with the mockumentary. They were undoubtedly very flattered to be in that position. They must have imagined what it would be like to be at the center of a project that brought the university fame and fortune. They blew it. They were even better positioned than the Goodmans—who also blew it but who nobody takes seriously anyway—to warn the university that something was terribly wrong.

The “documentary” was never supposed to take a lifetime to finish—not as it was sold to K-State, at least. By the time I left in 2009 (I stuck around for grad school, believe it or not), the university must have seen it as a complete disaster. As the project fell apart, I suppose Chris and Kelly thought their best hope was for me to either kill myself or get into serious trouble before I figured out what was happening. (In reality, they and K-State were screwed no matter what happened to me.) What’s hardest to fathom is that it was just as cruel to my parents and grandparents as it was to me.

All they had to do was give me a chance

Ultimately, my mom’s family was scammed by some of the weirdest and worst people on the planet. It was a freak incident that’s going to be famous. Nevertheless, I’ve been the same person all along. All they had to do was give me a chance. In fact, if anyone in my immediate family had been given even a tiny chance, the entire catastrophe would have been avoided. It’s that simple.

The girls

The group behind the mockumentary is a diabolical porn ring. Chris and Kelly have three daughters, now grown women with families, who’ve lived their whole lives in a family compromised by said porn ring. I won’t speculate as to how they were exploited for the amusement of paying clients, but it definitely happened throughout.

To catch a nephew

Around 2008, Chris and Kelly bugged me about visiting them in Wichita until I caved one weekend. In hindsight, it was a mockumentary stunt: I was supposed to do something creepy while I was there. That realization is no less surreal for me than it would be for anyone else.

Growing up, I routinely saw my younger cousins at holiday gatherings and never once acted weird around them. I’ve never once gone out of my way to see or talk to them. I’ve never shown any kind of interest in underage girls, period. In general, I avoid kids like the plague. I don’t even act a little bit like a pervert. Had it been up to me, Chris, Kelly, and their girls would’ve seen less of me, not more.

The mockumentary is deliberately as asinine as possible. It was on purpose that the porn ring created a three-decade pervert hysteria around a blatantly normal person—mainly to prove that it could, and to ridicule the vain morons in its vendetta porn, including Chris and Kelly.

The Chris and Kelly Stingo Institute for Mockumentary Studies at Kansas State University

Just floating this idea. Hear me out. It’s a bona fide think tank that asks the really tough questions stumping mockumentary researchers, like, “I sold my soul to a porn ring from literal Hell for a documentary and now it’s running my alma mater and constantly filming my daughters. Could it be a scam? Is letting it play out indefinitely (Stingo et al.) the optimal solution?”

Maybe Francis Awerkamp could divert some of that unused federal money to Shannon’s alma mater? Hell, it’s the least he could do, and he wouldn’t have to worry about it putting food on anyone’s table. But the name is non-negotiable.

The kicker is that I loved K-State. Even though I grew up a KU fan, and even though I followed Katherine Goodman to K-State—the worst possible introduction to any school—I never regretted ending up there. My parents, both KU alumni, grew to love K-State, too. We easily outclass the Stingos and especially the Goodmans. The university blew it.

See also Fraternities and Snitching, The Stingos, McKenzie Grace, Bill Snyder, K-State Party Bus Tragedy, The Goodmans.

Persona non cat-a

If you know anything about K-State, you know exactly what Shannon and the porn ring had in mind when they tacked “anti–Bill Snyder” onto the mockumentary’s portrayal of me. Imagine being at a Taylor Swift concert where everyone has seen “documentary” footage claiming that you hate her. That’s basically what this was. If you ever wanted to manipulate K-State—the whole university—this was how you’d do it.

I’m the last person on Earth who would care about Bill Snyder’s private life. (I barely cared about his public one.) Everything about Shannon’s viewpoint is comically unlike me.

The Chris Stingo Family Storage Closet at Bill Snyder Family Stadium

It’s hard to imagine anything more pathetic than my uncle Chris and his posse, decked out in purple polos and tactical phone holsters, scheming for decades to get their revenge for something a mockumentary said that I said about Bill Snyder. They were getting skewered the entire time by that same mockumentary. The joke, basically, is that they’re losers—they’d sacrifice a nephew to have a closet named after themselves at The Bill.

This one, weird trick

Wherever there’s pain or anger, the porn ring can direct it at me using this one, weird trick: by having people lie about me on camera. The practical reason is to extract vendetta porn from the people around me—in this case, the entire K-State campus and community. (Much of that community was following the mockumentary and surrounding spectacle.) But to the priests behind it all, the non-practical reasons are just as important. They’re always playing sick, symbolic games, and they’re always proving a point about modern society. Always.

Foul play?

Because the party bus accident was so bizarre, and because the porn ring is like something out of dystopian fiction, I can’t help but wonder if it was somehow set up. Apparently, folks had climbed onto the roof of the bus, which was strictly prohibited while it was moving.

Cue montage

The best part is that McKenzie and I had a blast. We dated on and off for more than a year. Our relationship was semi-sexual but wholesome and pressure-free. I adored McKenzie. She was a proud Newsweek subscriber. She thought Olive Garden was a fancy restaurant (her hometown only had a Pizza Hut). She had a bunch of other endearing quirks. I had zero interest in her sorority house—she always came over to my apartment. She often came over just to nap between classes. Years later, she thanked me for being such a good boyfriend.

If not for the mockumentary, it simply would never cross someone’s mind that I might be a pervert or predator. As a joke, the film has people “catch” me doing blatantly normal things, like dating McKenzie when she was 20 and I was 23, so they can be applauded for their contribution to predator-justice. It’s intentionally ridiculous.²

Kelly handed Kappa to a porn ring

The ultra-orthodox priests behind the mockumentary loathe sororities as much as they do fraternities. The whole point of involving girls at Kelly’s old sorority was to damage and humiliate them on camera for the amusement of paying clients—including by having them film weird porn to “punish” me. (See The Humiliation Fantasy.)

Thanks to my aunt Kelly, every sorority is now going to have a chart next to the phone:

Really, McKenzie?

McKenzie was under enormous pressure to please the “documentary” crew and promote the film’s portrayal of me—her sorority and K-State were depending on her. Consequently, when she was instructed to lie about me on camera, she did.

But recall that lying in the mockumentary isn’t so straightforward. It’s a sick, symbolic game for the priests in charge to have people scapegoat me for the actual faults of others, especially themselves, and to make sure I’m aware of those faults.

McKenzie-isms

When we dated in 2008, McKenzie was a religious, anti-government libertarian trapped in the body of a sorority girl. It was during the peak of the national debate about same-sex marriage, to which she was staunchly opposed. I assured her that she was on the wrong side of history and that she’d be embarrassed of it someday.

McKenzie was charming and intelligent. She was also 20 and changed a lot during college. I only mention her unpopular politics because they’re seemingly attributed to me in the mockumentary. (See Gender and Sexuality, Public Institutions.) Another McKenzie-ism for which I was likely scapegoated was her skepticism of handwashing. (I wash my hands 100 percent of the time I use the restroom, whether at home or in public.)

See also Chris and Kelly Stingo, Chi O-mockery, Religion and Its Discontents, The White Hero Fantasy, Drama in the LHC.

Two creationists walk into a bar

One of the guys at the table next to me said that he hoped the LHC would blow up and kill the scientists in attendance. I was shocked. A moment later, they got up and left. In hindsight, it was obviously staged, and I’m obviously scapegoated for it in the mockumentary. (The priests behind the mockumentary play a sick game where they make me aware of the things that I’m blamed for in the film, which are arbitrary and typically have nothing to do with me.)

I have no idea who the two guys were. (Everyone will find out soon enough.) They may have been religious students, as they appeared. I was dating McKenzie Grace, who definitely knew those types, and who scapegoated me herself in the mockumentary. (Interestingly, I was sitting in the exact spot where I met McKenzie when it happened.) Or maybe they were traditionalist-Catholic seminarians or priests. Or physics students who were told I was a religious nut. Or even fraternity members who did it out of spite. Hell, they could easily have been two random guys in Aggieville who were handed a script and fifty bucks each.

Higgs morons

Countless people over the years believed that I was out to get the LHC. Many of them took credit in the “documentary” for “teasing” me about it. (Inspiring, no?) It likely became a running taunt in my own extended family, who knew much better. All were being mocked for somehow failing to recognize that a film showcasing their scientific virtue could only possibly be a joke.

I’ve never once in my life expressed anything remotely resembling anti-scientific sentiment. It’s beyond embarrassing that faculty at K-State, managers at Sandia National Laboratory, and countless others allowed a mockumentary film crew to dictate how they handled this rumor for the past two decades.

The Manhattan, Kansas Project

Sandia’s precursor was established for the Manhattan Project, and the lab’s historical mission was nuclear weapons development. (My job was to dick around in a trailer outside the security perimeter.) You might assume that the engineers and managers at Sandia would be too smart to fall for the mockumentary. But in fact, Sandia is teeming with exactly the sort of pompous douche-nozzles who eat it up:

We need men of honor like yourselves to “investigate” this pervert for our documentary. Yeah, that’s right, just like secret agents. For sure. It’s the Manhattan, Kansas Project. You’re gonna be legends, boys!

Actually, Sandians were likely also told that I was some kind of anti-American infidel who intended to steal secrets. That it was certifiably insane is what made it fun for the porn ring.

Sandia National Laughingstock

The ultra-orthodox priests behind the porn ring and mockumentary have no special regard for the U.S. government, the military, law enforcement, or any other American institution. Shannon Awerkamp regarded the national monuments as false idols. To the porn ring, scamming and humiliating Sandia was no different than scamming and humiliating the Jimmy John’s on 6th Street.

For two summers, I went down to Sandia and acted like a normal grad student. I’m about as far from an enemy of the United States as a person can possibly be. Everyone I came into contact with likely had been told that I was an infidel in their midst. (Sandians would have felt extra proud of keeping it secret from me.) Because of a mockumentary. The whole scenario was designed to be as dystopian and disgraceful as possible.

See also Drama in the LHC.

The Bill and Tina Goodman Joke-Detection Research Scholarship at the Chris and Kelly Stingo Institute for Mockumentary Studies at Kansas State University

Katherine and I continued dating our freshman year at K-State, where her parents, Bill and Tina, are alumni. (That year was spent listening to their 1970s-era homophobic KU stereotypes.) K-State will inevitably suffer major damage that the Goodmans were perhaps best-positioned, besides Chris and Kelly Stingo, to prevent. If only they had any guts or character, they’d have warned the university that I wasn’t the person depicted in the mockumentary. Like the Stingos, the Goodmans will be a major embarrassment to K-State. (Also to families everywhere with high Neanderthal DNA.)

Chi O-mockery

Katherine was briefly in Chi Omega, a sorority at K-State. Our first semester, in 2002, we were on a chartered bus filled with Chi Omegas and their dates when several of them started yelling taunts at our non-white driver—I shit you not—about him looking like a terrorist. I felt physically sick. It was like they were trying to be the partying douchebags in a slasher movie whom you don’t mind seeing butchered. In hindsight, it feels a lot like something the porn ring set up and then had others scapegoat me for on camera. (See To Catch a Bigot.)

Or perhaps they were told it was a ploy to get me to snitch (see Fraternities and Snitching), which I don’t do. Had I ever complained about Chi Omega or any other house, it would not have been a secret—I’d have signed my name and crammed it right up their asses. (Sort of like this, actually.) Clearly, someone should’ve put a stop to the abuse when it was happening. I felt complicit, not righteous.

The ultra-orthodox priests behind the porn ring despise sororities as much as they do fraternities. Everything Chi Omega and K-State did for them was designed to be as embarrassing and disgraceful as possible, and it’s all on film. The full story will be absolutely brutal. True to form, Katherine could not have been prouder.

See also Fraternities and Snitching, Chris and Kelly Stingo, Kappa Kappa Gamma.

2001: A Scapegoat Odyssey

The Goodmans’ backwardness, in hindsight, was all likely attributed to me in the mockumentary. The producers love having people like them scapegoat me for their own embarrassing traits, for a few reasons: it proves a point about them, about documentaries, and about our society; it gets the porn ring off by virtue of being sick and degrading (it’s human-sacrifice porn); and it scams others into participating in the mock vendetta.

Katherine’s dad is, according to her, a Holocaust-denier. As mentioned above, her sorority was abusive to service people and blatantly racist. Her family thinks progressive means drawing the line at constantly making fun of homosexuals. Obviously, I shouldn’t have dated someone like that, period. (Believe me, it wasn’t worth it.) But the sucker punch is that the Goodmans appear in the mockumentary attributing all of that (and much more) to me. And the porn ring has been showing the footage to everyone in my life for over 20 years.

The mockumentary is everything to the Goodmans and has been since I met Katherine our junior year of high school. It’s their identity. They did whatever the producers asked, no matter how disgusting, because the film made them significant (sort of). It was never more than a sick joke.

See also The Stingos, Blue Valley Northwest HS.

Openly gay clergy

The issue of openly gay clergy has been incredibly divisive in the United Methodist Church. The Todds have long supported lifting the ban on such clergy.

A blatant joke

Mitch and Jan knew me—and knew me well—as honest, hard-working, respectful, tolerant, and thoughtful. Nevertheless, they’ve been desperately trying to impress a mockumentary film crew at my expense for two decades. They undoubtedly were told that I opposed their activism and their decision not to have children. They exploited it, but I doubt they really believed it.

The notion that I have conservative views about family planning or LGBTQ issues is truly bizarre. The preoccupation of the Todds and many other participants with this topic had nothing to do with me; the porn ring was winding them up and mocking them.

See also Gender and Sexuality, Children and Population Growth.

A complete mockery

As counselors, leaders, and activists, Mitch and Jan have encountered countless people who actually are abusive, bigoted, or dishonest. But they didn’t pick on those people. Instead, they picked on me. That’s because they were given prominent roles in a “documentary” where it was fashionable to do so. Sadly, they were and are a complete joke to the people who handed them their fantasy. The point was to make a complete mockery of them.

The ultra-orthodox priests behind the mockumentary utterly despise the Todds, their progressive values, and especially their Church. Shannon fumed when I spoke admiringly of them and their activism. Predictably, that activism became their whole identity once they had a film crew “documenting” it. They’ve now spent two decades pretending that their frantic rainbow-armored self-promotion blitz somehow hurts my feelings. The porn ring was mocking them from start to finish.

The damage will be severe

Mitch is currently a pastor at Grace UMC in Olathe, but the Todds have also been in Lawrence, Manhattan, and elsewhere in Kansas while compromised. Additionally, Andover UMC pastor Ryan Lynch, who worked on Mitch’s staff with me at K-State, has been compromised for his entire career. It’s actually horrifying to consider the sort of twisted things the porn ring’s SSPX puppet masters would do to a Protestant church they controlled. Keep in mind that they’re the same people who killed 13-year-old Matt Miller and blamed another child.

The Todds are the tip of the iceberg. My family’s former church, the Leawood megachurch Resurrection, also United Methodist, was utterly steamrolled by the porn ring. The damage to the region’s United Methodist Church will be catastrophic.

The Mitch and Jan Todd Library of Cringe Photo Ops at the Chris and Kelly Stingo Institute for Mockumentary Studies at Kansas State University

The Todds have a hilarious self-image as mavericks who speak truth to power. They’ll be remembered as the polar opposite of that: opportunists who said absolutely anything for the porn ring. (Picture the Culps if they were complete pieces of shit.) They saw the harassment of my family as the photo op of a lifetime, just like leaders at Resurrection did. And they saw what we were up against and figured there was nothing we could do about it.

In a way, Shannon was right about Mitch and Jan, except the problem isn’t their professed values—it’s their actual ones. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And thanks to the mockumentary, a lot of people are going to see it.

See also Brent and Kristin Morris, Religion and Its Discontents, Church of the Resurrection.

Ryan Lynch and Julie Pearce Valladares

It’s poetic that Ryan and Julie, who were on staff with me in 2004, bet it all on a mean documentary about me that was actually a mockumentary about them. They’d have sold their souls to look good at my expense in a movie. That was one joke; another was that they actually looked terrible but honestly couldn’t tell the difference. Yet another was the fantasy that somehow I was the one being humiliated. The producers find it hilarious that people like Ryan and Julie will build their whole lives around that fantasy. (It’s eerily reminiscent of Katherine Goodman, who introduced me to UMCM.)

To the porn ring, Ryan and Julie are effectively an irritating cartoon. Their vibe in college was toxic in-group mind games mixed with baby talk and VeggieTales quotes. Ryan, to convey gravitas, would often throw on a bandana (think Prison Mike, but you’re not supposed to laugh). They are tools of the highest order. If not for the “documentary,” nobody in my life would give them the time of day.

Julie’s absurd white hero syndrome

Julie has the most precious fantasy that people, especially me, have a problem with her marriage to a Hispanic man. That fantasy is a mockumentary joke—it has nothing to do with me. (It would be impossible to care less about something than I do about Julie’s marriage.) In fact, the producers likely involved Julie in several intentionally ridiculous attempts over the years to expose that I was bothered by interracial and interethnic couples. I was oblivious and good-natured as always. In the process, the couples were fetishized, mocked, and exploited for degrading porn—that was the whole point.

The mockumentary pretends to celebrate Julie’s racial enlightenment, and pretends that it hurts my feelings, because those are overpowering fantasies for her despite being intentionally pathetic. If you know her, you already get the joke. The producers can crank up the pathetic to absurd levels, and Julie doesn’t flinch. The joke is that not even Julie can tell the difference between herself and a savage parody of herself—not even after giving it 20 years to sink in. Admittedly, it’s pretty funny.

The common thread between the Pearces, the Todds, and the Goodmans, aside from their being the type of dorks who wear Powercat pajamas, is that their concept of grit and character is the Disney version—the last 20 minutes of a Tim Allen movie. They’re awfully proud of that version, but they have no concept of the real thing. Which is how they took the mock-vendetta bait and ran with it for two decades without ever realizing that it was a joke.

See also The White Hero Fantasy, Laura Harrington, Amanda Brown.

Kat Lindholm

Kat and I met in 2004 and dated until she moved to Dallas in 2006. Her family is evangelical and shamelessly anti-Catholic. The porn ring, which is militantly Catholic, would have taken special pleasure in scamming Kat. See also the note about Kat’s creepy porn-ring bodyguard, Christian.

Eric Pritz

Eric was my roommate for a couple of years in college, beginning in 2004. Dude never could understand that not everyone enjoys constantly sanding and lacquering weird furniture, day and night. Even though I was glad to move out, I’ve always had only good things to say about Eric. Nevertheless, he undoubtedly has a prominent role in the vendetta mockumentary. It’s hard to imagine the angle. Isn’t it kind of embarrassing to know firsthand that a “documentary” about someone is a complete farce but pile on anyway?

Tragically, Eric dated Julie Pearce Valladares for many years, starting around the time we met. That explains a lot.

Caroline

Caroline once told me she felt called to the ministry, but that she didn’t think women belonged in leadership positions over men. I was bemused but open-minded as always. I’d bet fifty bucks it was a scapegoating stunt—she claims in the mockumentary that I said women don’t belong in the ministry. As an aside, it was often hard to tell whether Caroline was trying to be quirky or having a stroke. Her screen time will be brutal.

Laughable indignation

I strongly suspect that this story appears in the mockumentary. I was likely taunted about it on Facebook earlier this year by a random administrator in a nearby school district. To the filmmakers—who despise uppity public school teachers—the joke is that I never complain or ask for help. Never. Until I started writing letters about Allen Press a couple of years ago—effectively the precursor to this article—I had never really complained about anything in my life. Nobody from high school has been through more than I have or asked for less. (Most of the comparisons would be hilarious.) The producers are well aware of that. Anyone who was told to pretend otherwise for the film was being mocked, as was anyone who took it seriously.

O captain, my captain

Meanwhile, Eric Punswick’s conduct as a professional teacher was spiteful, lazy, and dishonest—a disgrace. He’s likely venerated in the mockumentary, which of course is meant as a joke.

Rewarding outrage to attract losers

The reason this topic appears in the mockumentary isn’t that my mom called Eric Punswick. The producers can get people like Eric to say anything they want; that this story happened to be inspired by a real event is practically irrelevant. Rather, it’s in the film because it’s the sort of thing that people like to be seen expressing outrage about. The producers have a keen sense of those topics—tipping, for example—and they pack them into the film at will; it has nothing to do with me.

Truthful portrayals of my family are antithetical to the film’s purpose, as is anything resembling justice. What’s being documented is a bunch of losers clamoring to get credit for their ridiculous outrage. It’s a mockumentary.

A crucifixion metaphor, literally

To the priests behind the mockumentary, my role is metaphorically akin to a scapegoat or animal sacrifice—the same metaphor they use for a sinless person being nailed to a cross. That’s what the filmmakers themselves have in mind when they instruct my acquaintances to trash me and my family on camera. They’re sick, of course, but they dominantly exposed the circus at BVNW, and it’s all on film.

Joseph Stanfill

Joe was incredibly simple for the porn ring to figure out: He pontificates about world affairs on Facebook with all the credibility of Richie Rich. For as long as anyone can remember, the porn ring has mocked Joe by winding him up and letting him think he’s destroying my made-up views, which generally are the SSPX’s own. Imagine thinking you’re John Oliver and then finding out that you’ve spent your entire life getting lapped over and over by these guys.

One of the central jokes of the mockumentary is that if you pretend to make a film about someone’s humiliation and hand out the role of clever good guy to every Joe Nintendo, Ryan Websurfer, and Kevin Bongwater that wants it, a whole army of the guys I knew in high school will show up and do whatever you tell them. My friends built their lives around that fantasy. And despite facing likely-unprecedented harassment from age 13, I did about as well as any of them in high school and college. The only place they ever looked better than me, or dared to act that way, was in a mockumentary that I’m just now finding out about. It was intentionally disgraceful and pathetic, and it’s going to astonish that they and their parents couldn’t figure that out.

See also Religion and Its Discontents, Logan Wineland, Mitcher Barnes, David Tah.

September 11th

September 11, 2001 started out as a regular day at BVNW, where I was a senior. Each classroom had a small (but terrifyingly heavy) TV mounted in one corner, a recent innovation that allowed us to watch the events unfold. One of my teachers shut off the TV just after the towers collapsed, ridiculed the media for thinking it was a terrorist attack, and started class. Almost immediately, she called on me. I politely told her to take a hike. So she called on someone else instead. It wasn’t a huge deal. But I’ve mentioned it a few times over the years in “Where were you when it happened?” conversations.

I’m certain that the mockumentary tells a sensational version of this story and pretends to ridicule me for being overly reverent about 9/11. At Checkers, my coworkers staged an incredibly awkward moment of silence the morning of the 15th (or so) anniversary. It was hard for all of us, including myself, not to laugh. (Checkers is not a serious place.) There may be a running gag in the mockumentary where the producers go, “Ew, it’s so embarrassing to care about 9/11, right?” and then roll the camera as people line up to throw away their dignity by showing off their flippant attitudes. That’s just a hunch.

Heather (Brantman) Torpey

In mid-2022, Heather initiated a Facebook chat that was, in hindsight, remarkably ugly—littered with taunts about, for example, the anniversary of a relative’s death, and the time as a pre-teen when I was the target of a failed sextortion attempt via AOL chat. (See Matt Miller’s Suicide.) The taunts were so cowardly, and were based on such twisted lies, that it never crossed my mind what Heather was doing until early 2024.

This started for Heather in 1998. It’s poignant to think that she’s still bracing for her 15 minutes of vendetta-porn fame.

Megan Dodge

In mid-2022, weeks before I got the attention of law enforcement, Megan Dodge was recruited to be my next porn-ring girlfriend, but I only went out with her once. I didn’t know Megan in high school, but her sister was in my grade and is friends with Heather Torpey. The night of our date, which was interrupted for an hour or two in the middle, Heather taunted me with a picture of a man on a date with a sex doll. Whatever they were up to, I’m sure it truly was humiliating, only not for me.

Reunions

Both Heather and Megan talked a lot about high school reunions. (I guess it was supposed to bother me.) Something tells me that, once this all shakes out, our classes might be kinda done with reunions. Maybe the class of ’04 can return to the cherished Husky tradition of not viciously gaslighting one of their own for an intentionally revolting mockumentary. Come on, ’04—you guys got this!

Reuben Hamilton

Reuben has been my neighbor since I moved to Lawrence in 2011. A few months ago, I realized that, around 2018, he near-fatally shot a neighbor’s cat and secretly blamed me. Reuben might actually work for the porn ring, in which case Redacted already knew him when she “found” me the house I rent next door. At least, he’s incredibly devoted to spreading rumors about me, and I’m not aware of anything else he does.

I liked and respected Reuben and especially his wife, Kathy, for many years. To my face, they’ve always been friendly. Until a few months ago, it had never crossed my mind that they were spreading rumors about me.

See also L’affaire Michelle.

Jerynn Lindbloom

Jerynn was recruited by the porn ring around the time we met in 2016. We dated until 2019. Like many women over the years, her main job was to film porn behind my back, often at my house with my acquaintances.

At the end of 2018, I briefly caught on that something was wrong with all the time Jerynn spent “alone” at my house. I warned her via text that, whatever it was, I would expose it. I’m quite certain my warning was twisted into a threat that I would “expose” private photos of her. (Not that anyone ever told me—I’ve had to learn to infer these things based on nauseating behavior.) It was not a misunderstanding—Jerynn knows I would never do that. The porn ring was angry that I was catching on; this smear was part of its nuclear response. (During happier times, Jerynn and I routinely shared such photos with friends via our Snapchat stories, a practice she initiated and enjoyed.)

I singled Jerynn out in late 2022 when I first understood that Checkers and Allen Press were being blackmailed, but before I remotely understood the scope of what was happening. That was my sincere best understanding at the time. I now realize that Jerynn’s role was unexceptional.

See also J&S Coffee, The Suspicious Death of Ann Lindbloom (Jerynn’s mom, during routine anesthesia in 2021).

Mark and Heather Miller

Mark and Heather Miller (not to be confused with Mark and Cheryl Miller) owned the house I rent in Lawrence when I first moved here in 2011. They were well aware that the porn ring was going to trample all over their house and my life. For the next several years, they cynically profited from the arrangement—from out of town—while the porn ring went to work tearing Lawrence to shreds. The kicker is that they’ve undoubtedly spent the past 13 years taking credit for being heroes. If you took everything the porn ring thrives on—mainly vanity, cluelessness, and opportunism, but plenty of other things, too—and melted it together, you’d get these two.

That’s the tip of the iceberg

Much more has happened in Lawrence, where I’ve lived since 2011. As Doug Compton’s involvement implies, the actual number of Lawrence businesses damaged by the porn ring will be in the double digits; many of them will be destroyed.

Kansas City’s houseguest

Imagine Patrick Swayze’s character in Donnie Darko if he was “called by God” to rely on donations and looked like a bartender at Applebee’s. That’s Brent. He’s spent 15 years running a ministry that he himself considers a joke, mostly for the porn ring’s amusement. His only other “job” has been a gig as my parents’ neighbor’s “growth consultant.” He’s Kansas City’s professional houseguest.

Uh oh

The latest on Brent is that he’s suddenly, as of July, the CEO of a healthcare ministry in Kansas City, Kansas, and it’s suddenly getting broken into on a weekly basis. Here’s a crime tip: Brent getting insurance payouts is a huge red flag. So is Brent getting sympathy in the press, along with free advertisements for “how to donate.” The guy is a con artist. (They sure are “called” to the ministry, aren’t they?) He’s just wired up that way.

Jeremy Farmer vibes

Brent also reminds me of Jeremy Farmer, the former youth pastor who a decade ago embezzled $81,000 from Just Food, Douglas County’s food bank, right as the city of Lawrence fell in love with his “story” and made him mayor. The porn ring definitely knew Jeremy, too, and likely had a hand in his hilarious rise and fall. The porn ring controls guys like Brent and Jeremy in its sleep.

See also Church of the Resurrection, Revs. Mitch and Jan Todd, Francis Awerkamp.

Laura Harrington

Laura and I dated that summer of 2008 in Albuquerque. (Coincidentally, she now lives in Kansas City.) She and her family were pitifully desperate to please the mockumentary producers and the porn ring, who’ve been laughing at them for 16 years. Incredibly, they’ve spent that whole time believing that I’m the one who should be embarrassed. I can’t wait to see the footage. (See also the Goodmans.)

Ten bucks says Laura appears in the mockumentary fantasizing that her interracial marriage hurts my feelings, à la Julie Pearce Valladares. I hate to throw cold water on that fantasy, but it has nothing to do with me. The porn ring created it as a joke—the joke being that it’s an overpowering fantasy for people like Laura and Julie. The porn ring seems to enjoy mocking interracial couples. (Likely a combination of racism and anti-globalization spite.) In contrast, while I have several opinions about Laura, I have none about her marriage. I bet her husband and I would have a blast talking shop about the Harringtons.

Christian

Just before I visited her in Dallas in the summer of 2008, Kat Lindholm was intercepted and smothered by a cartoonishly toxic little guy named Christian (I don’t know his last name). I had dated Kat a few years earlier. Although she had never once mentioned Christian, and although he was leaving Dallas in a matter of days, he acted as a bodyguard of sorts during my visit.

For Christian, playing pervert-catcher for a naive audience is an overpowering fantasy, much like it is for Kevan Meinershagen, Reuben Hamilton, and David Tah. The porn ring may have recruited him from an online forum for amateur cop enthusiasts. As you’d expect from a fake porn ring cop, he shamelessly abused his position to manipulate and access women, including Kat herself.

The mockumentary undoubtedly tells a version of my visit that makes it seem embarrassing to me. To the contrary, I gave Kat a chance to tell Christian to leave us alone, and when she wouldn’t, I bailed and spent the rest of my trip at a bookstore. After I left, we talked about it once and then I dropped it. I could not have handled it more graciously. Christian, on the other hand, was getting skewered from start to finish for failing to recognize that his role was intentionally pathetic.