Zoe Quinn, among others, is speaking up about assault in the game development community, which means it's time to believe women and stand up for them.
As Hollywood continues to come to terms with a long covered up history of abuse and assault, the video game industry seems to be about to face a similar reckoning. Several prominent game developers have been accused of sexual assault by various women, including Zoe Quinn, who was one of the women viciously targeted by the Gamergate movement.
The movement began with Nathalie Lawhead, a game designer, publishing a post titled “calling out my rapist” on her website. She details that she was assaulted by Jeremy Soule, a composer. Lawhead includes multiple emails backing up her allegations and writes about the toxic work environment that also led to her losing her job.
“I realize the consequences involved in sharing this. I know what happens when AAA fandoms go after someone, but I can’t survive not talking about it. Living with this is like a slow death,” she wrote towards the end of her post. “I’m suffocating. I hate how we talk about rapists. I hate how we defend them. I hate how you can share all this, and slowly watch as your sanity gets questioned, and everything about you gets picked apart until ‘did it actually happen to you?’ ‘did you want it?’…”
She continued, “Jeremy said a lot of things about me, to make sure I don’t stand a chance. He controlled my success. He controlled how people view me (both positively and then negatively). He’s good at making people think that he was actually helping, and that you are out of your mind. I worked very hard on proving all this wrong and coming to a point where I could say something and it stands a chance of being heard.”
Following Lawhead’s post, Quinn then posted an account to Twitter about her experiences with Alex Holowka. Her harrowing account, detailing being gaslit, assaulted, and having her career threatened by Holowka, is hard to read, but it’s important to do so.
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