Hi Folks,
Myself and my friend Zoe Quinn just went through an extremely f’ed up situation with Brendan Frye, editor (and I think owner?) of Comics & Gaming Monthly (C&GM). To put it bluntly I feel he is not someone we want in our communities if we want them to be safe places for women. For this reason I’m emailing pretty much all the prominent organizers and creators I know in comics & games, also a few of the freelance journalists I feel should know. I can tell you that he will not be welcome at any of the indie games events that I organize personally and that Spooky Squid Games will no longer do any interviews for the magazine.

Here’s the details and some background.

Zoe is one of the alumni of the Difference Engine, ironically an initiative the Hand Eye Society put together to encourage more women to participate in indie-games. She also recently started writing at C&GM, so Brendan was until about an hour or two ago, her boss.

Earlier this week he made verbal advances on her, she rejected him and was fired (in my mind this is enough, however it gets worse). Wanting to retain her writing work Zoe went through a drawn out process to talk him back into keeping her on as a writer. She had told me this, however I respected her wishes and kept this event to myself.

Between that time and today he pierced his lip to match Zoe’s piercing and started following several of her non-industry related friends on twitter and facebook.

Today at TIFFnexus and the TOjam Arcade (two big indie game events) he tended to follow her around, and once he’d gotten pretty seriously drunk basically followed her non-stop. He then followed myself Nadine, Zack Kotzer, and Zoe from TOjam to the Site3 Halloween party. We basically hoped he’d eventually give up and go home but he then followed Zoe downstairs when she went to use the washroom which was the last straw. Zoe told Alex Leitch a friend and one of the Site3 organizers what was up and to try to stall him while we left.

After turning onto Bloor we turned around to find he was following us down the street. Alex has told me that she tried her best to stall him but that he basically walked through her. Just to be sure he wasn’t simply drunkenly walking home we strategically slowed down, speed up and stopped in crowds. We briefly lost him in one of these and watched him crane his neck around to spot us when he reached the corner. After a few more stalling tactics in the hopes that he’d give up and leave, Zoe confronted him. He denied he was doing anything. We continued walking and he ran up and grabbed her hard by the shoulder, she yelled at him to never touch her again. He stormed off then stormed back and yelled at her, essentially firing her (basic words were in effect that she wasn’t going to the Montreal Game Summit to report on it, but yeah fired).

We went back to site3 for a bit to tell the folks we know what happened, where he phoned Zoe repeatedly and basically now I’m writing this email. We’re both pretty shaken and upset by this. Remember that all this is what he did when she was accompanied by a male friend.

Having read this I hope you folks will feel the same as myself, that we don’t want people like this to be involved in the comic and indie games community or to support their work by providing them with content.

Thanks,
Miguel Sternberg
Spooky Squid Games Inc.
The Toronto Hand Eye Society (not speaking for the other board members here, just me)