How an accuser with a grudge was taken at her word despite obvious exaggerations and destroyed legendary video game designer Chris Avellone's career

fuckthisplanetup · 2021-02-17T13:53:44+00:00

This video had a great summary on another sub, so I'm including it here:

Chris Avellone was the lead designer of two of the best-regarded computer roleplaying games, Planescape: Torment and Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II, and has also worked as a designer or writer on Fallout 2, Icewind Dale 1 & 2, Neverwinter Nights 2, Fallout: New Vegas, Wasteland 2, Pillars of Eternity, Tyranny, Divinity: Original Sin 2, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and Dying Light 2.

Robert Kurvitz, the lead designer and writer of Disco Elysium — a game named among Time Magazine's top 10 video games of the 2010s — has said the following about Avellone:

"The two biggest favors anyone's ever done me in my life are the political education from Estonian punk bands and what Chris Avellone did with Planescape: Torment. Punk bands got me through my life until I was 27 or 28, and Chris Avellone's contributions to video games got me past 29. I don't think I would have had the imagination to think you could be so ambitious and literary in video games."

On the evening of the 30th of August 2012, Chris was at a convention named DragonCon where he kept buying drinks for his group of friends and the people they'd brought along. Sometime after midnight, he and two of the friends — fellow game designers David Gaider and Steve Jaros — helped Karissa, a cosplayer who had been showing David around the convention and had joined in the drinking, back to her room in the 4 star hotel across the road. Upon reaching the door of her hotel room, Chris made out with Karissa as David and Steve looked on, without ever entering her room. David and Steve did not realize anything wrong had happened. Karissa's roommate, sleeping in the room at the time, was never told anything about it.

The next evening, after reuniting with the group and being reminded of what had happened, she called Chris "one of the few gentlemen left in the world (that still drink)." As the convention ended, she was asked to list her favorite experiences at the convention and said "every night" was her #1 and her time with Chris and Steve specifically was #4. She referred to Chris as a "wonderful creature" when interviewing him a couple of months later. A year later, she described the night of the make-out session as a "great story" to her friend Jackie and shortly thereafter introduced her to Chris, who became her long-distance boyfriend. In April of 2014, she said she was always surprised by women with stories of harassment and abuse because she simply had nothing of the sort.

At DragonCon 2014, Chris broke up with Jackie, and both Karissa and Jackie mostly stopped mentioning him on Twitter, with Jackie only having a few more friendly exchanges with him.

On the 19th of June 2020, Karissa made a series of accusations against Chris on Twitter, claiming he once got her blackout drunk at a convention and he and two friends then took her back to her room. She made it sound like he was left alone with her there and she was barely able to resist having sex with him. Given the prevailing "believe all women" mood, a giant Twitter mob immediately took her at her word, even as her roommate at the time denied on Facebook that Chris was ever in the room or that she had ever heard that story before.

Instead of trying to rebut her story, Chris realized she was actually still upset about his painful break-up with Jackie and tried apologizing for that break-up, only for his words to be interpreted as an admission of guilt by the Twitter mob. Daunted by the hostility, he stopped using all social media shortly afterwards, but has told his friends that he has never broken consent with anyone in his life.

Three other women decided they believed Karissa and shared their own milder stories about Chris.

One of them, a long-time friend of Karissa's, claimed Chris had groped her at DragonCon 2014 and kept inviting her to his room for sex whenever Karissa and Jackie — who were nearby at the same bar — weren't looking. However, this woman hid her Twitter profile and deleted her accusation once a tweet she'd made on the last night of DragonCon 2014 was uncovered where she claimed men had avoided harassing her because she was unattractive to them. (Additionally, not shown in the linked video, there is a witness who has denied that her story is true.)

Another woman, a long-time friend of Chris who had grown apart from him, posted a dirty message Chris had sent her in May of 2014, claiming it was completely inappropriate because she was in a relationship and because she had never had any kind of romantic or sexual interaction with Chris. This was used as the one piece of actual evidence for Chris' behavior by the Twitter mob. However, old tweets from the woman show that she had previously called Chris her "boyfriend in another life", had joked about the possibility of him sending her dick pics, had started the conversation that led to the dirty message by flirting with him late at night, and was entering an open relationship just then. She had also later allowed her other friends to be as forward as they liked with her, telling them there was a "50/50 chance" she'd sleep with them if they "just asked."

The last woman had a somewhat similar story to Karissa's, claiming Chris had gotten her drunk at a convention and she had woken up next to him with no clothes on the next morning, with no recollection of what had happened, but with Chris telling her nothing had. She made no direct accusation but implied that something may have happened. However, she left out the fact that there was a third person in the room with them until shortly before they went to bed who is also aware that nothing happened. (Additionally, other attendees know the details in her story are wrong, because she was actually staying in Chris' room instead of him staying in hers, and only because she had not booked a room of her own and did not want to travel all the way back home that night.)

No investigation was done at the time of the accusations. Chris was working as a freelancer for multiple studios which all cut ties with him immediately.

The exoneration video is an attempt at helping to clear his name. Soon after it was released, Karissa made her Twitter profile private for a few weeks and used a mass deletion tool to delete 60k of her tweets between 2009 and 2017 — including all of the ones where she had ever been friendly with Chris — before making her profile public again. Luckily, all the tweets shown in the video are archived on multiple archiving services.

Title	How an accuser with a grudge was taken at her word despite obvious exaggerations and destroyed legendary video game designer Chris Avellone's career
Author	shitherewegoagain9
Upvotes	47
Comments	2
Date	February 17, 2021 1:53 PM UTC (5 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/PussyPass
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/PussyPass/comments/lluyvv/how_an_accuser_with_a_grudge_was_taken_at_her/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/PussyPass/how-an-accuser-with-a-grudge-was-taken-at-her-word.1192225 https://theredarchive.com/post/1192225

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