William Amick is a pedophile that tried to be the new Q; infiltrating and terrorizing the WikiLeaks community and AssangeDAO
Trigger warning: This article includes discussion of abuse and sensitive topics including sexual assault, pedophilia, and CSAM.
Note: The following account is constructed from court documents, public records, archived posts, chats, and media. Some people involved in various events agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity. Several charges are pending and untested in court. Of special note is information from the first hand accounts and media publicly posted by Hopester777 (AKA Michaela), esmonkey_cat, and others. If you are going to have read this article, please read the Metalogue before, during or after.
William Guy Amick III is not a name known to many, though the moniker “E” and the call that “E Sent Me” may be more familiar. Under the E persona, and numerous others, he both drove and defrauded mobs on the fringes of the internet, impersonated Julian Assange and years later became a nominal community manager for WikiLeaks’ AssangeDAO. Along the way, he used generative AI to conceal his identity and churn out content, Amick was also caught stealing content from others – whether leaked information and more creative work, and even vacations. To varying degrees, he befriended notable figures like Jim and Ron Watkins, and Bill Binney. At one point, Roger Stone’s campaign manager was convinced Amick was Q. Under various personas, he was repeatedly denounced by both Q and the Assange family.
He currently faces at least 17 charges in two states related to the sexual abuse of children from newborns to pre-teens.
The earliest records of Amick date to 2009, when employment data and his contemporary blog indicates he was working as a model. He had recently attended the California University Of Pennsylvania, where he says his courses included theater, public relations, and business ethics. While it’s unclear if Amick graduated, he claims to have found at least some success in modeling. Despite listing his address as St Clairsville, Ohio, old blog posts written by Amick give vague descriptions of working as a model with IMG Artists in Paris. He returned home to the United States in late 2009 despite describing himself as “somewhat constantly estranged” from his family, with plans to leave again in January 2010. Whether he did or not, and the next several years, are not currently documented.
Amick reappears in records in October 2013, when he seems to have begun uploading music to a Soundcloud account which matches his name, appearance, and voice. His last upload was made on April 6, 2017, when he uploaded a cover of King of the Road. That same day, he was arrested by the Weirton Police and charged in West Virginia for domestic battery. A criminal judgment was entered in August, and the case (17-M05M-00636) was dismissed. An online version of his arrest information indicates that he had lost about 40 pounds since his modeling days. According to Michaela, who later knew him for two years, that was when Amick “started posting BS on Twitter” to make money because “he had no legit job.” He allegedly collected cash and thousands of dollars on venmo through an unofficial secretary.
In April 2018, Amick created a Twitter account called BackChannel17, a name which was supposed to be meaningful for QAnon supporters. “17” referred to “Q,” the 17th letter of alphabet, with the unstated implication being that Amick’s persona had a back channel to, from or about Q. Soon, his account was successful enough to be an example on Know Your Meme. Despite (or perhaps because of) the divisions in the QAnon community, the attention Amick was able to gain as BackChannel17 was enough to prompt Q to try to debunk theories that they were also Amick’s persona (archive). Many QAnons saw Q’s comment that it was “Fake” as a broader indictment of the persona, but others saw it as something more specific.
Among them was Jerome Corsi, of InfoWars, Seth Rich, Pizzagate and Podesta infamy. About a day after Q’s post, Corsi went onto at least one livestream to talk about the BackChannel17 debate. While the video has since been deleted, contemporary comments which describe Corsi’s stance survive. According to various comments, Corsi believed that Q and BackChannel17 were different people, but that BackChannel17 was reliable supporter of Q. Using the BackChannel17 handle, Amick immediately began promoting this theory.
Soon Amick began making changes to the BackChannel17 persona and moving onto new personas, including the notable “Eye The Spy”, which first appeared in May 2018. By the end of May, Amick’s posts under the BackChannel17 handle began promoting the idea that something would happen on June 11, while also admitting to posting disinformation about his identity. By the 11th, Amick changed his BackChannel17 profile to impersonate Julian Assange, who according to Amick’s narrative had supposedly been freed. (Interestingly, Assange’s voice was one that Amick would use AI to mimic on phone calls, although he was not attempting to impersonate Assange.) The attention Amick’s disinformation gained once again prompted Q to respond, pointing out that they hadn’t mentioned the 11th and claiming that “those with an agenda to discredit are pushing false information.” Aside from a brief appearance on Gab later that year (and an argument with himself), this seems to have been the beginning of the end of the BackChannel17 persona.
By early March 2019, Amick’s then-primary persona, Eye The Spy, was explicitly denounced by Assange’s legal team on Twitter. According to Assange’s legal team, Amick’s account was targeting QAnon followers with disinformation that was “laying the ground work to prevent a back lash in Trump’s base over Assange’s prosecution and extradition and to discourage submissions to WikiLeaks and other CIA goals.”
In September that year, Amick’s life – and web of deceit and abuse – began to unravel. According to the Observer-Reporter, at this time Amick lived on Beau Street in East Washington, PA. Investigators reportedly downloaded a video showing sexual abuse of “numerous children” aged 3 to 12 from Amick’s IP address. On November 13th, the attorney general’s office, East Washington Police Department and Department of Homeland Security searched Amick’s home, and found at least three CSAM images on his computer.
Amick allegedly confessed to searching for CSAM, but insisted he did it in order to report it to FBI. According to the criminal complaint, Amick “was not able to explain what information he sends to the FBI or articulate what, if any, logs he had of the information he has sent to the FBI.” He was arrested and charged with three counts of possession of child pornography and a count of disseminating child pornography. Amick discussed a version of the incident publicly, calling his hypothetical project “Compendium” and claiming that “a drugged, coerced narrative” had been created. At the time of this writing, Amick’s plea hearing for these charges has been scheduled.
According to documentarian Cullen Hoback, by late December 2019 Jason Sullivan, an aide to Roger Stone, was convinced that E and Q were the same person. Cullen also theorized that it was Sullivan’s constantly referring to Amick as “our friend, mister E” that inspired Amick to rebrand to “E The Friend” and “E Will Help You.” It was reportedly the first time that Jason Sullivan spoke with Bill Binney and Ron Watkins and through Sullivan that Amick became acquainted with Binney and Watkin. When Sullivan seemingly created Binney’s create social media accounts, one of his first followers was Amick’s E persona.
Over time, Sullivan introduced Amick/E to more people who wanted to help Assange, people who Amick was quick to claim as his “longtime friends.” However, screenshots appear to show that Amick’s relationship to those people was often limited to going through Sullivan. Sullivan declined to comment. By that August, Amick was working with Jim Watkins on a QAnon video project, a collaboration that was publicly mocked by people like Frederick Brennan. As late as 2022, Jim Watkins continued to promoted Amick’s E persona. In mid-2023, he still defended E, saying “He is what he is. People were entertained by him and some really felt his message.”
For many of Amick’s followers, questions began to arise in late December, 2020 when Amick posted that he was stranded in Chester, WV and needed someone to get him and help ‘rescue’ him. Ultimately someone using the handle “CocaineInTheUkraine33” picked him up and posted a picture of himself and E, with the latter’s face blurred out. Sometime in the next few months, Amick moved to Minnesota where he lived in Mabel and Rushford.
By mid-January, Amick had created a new Gab account for “E Will Help You,” and was actively trying to embed himself with the WikiLeaks community, posting screenshots of Twitter DMs he had exchanged with the accounts for WikiLeaks and Stella Assange. One of the screenshots showed Amick sending Stella a video in support of Assange, which she then posted in a tweet that was boosted by the WIkiLeaks account. Amick also began creating Telegram channels, giving him new reach and a new audience.
That same month, he posted an article at the fake news website The Goldwater, where he described himself as a whistleblower and “enemy of the state,” and almost immediately claims without evidence that Joshua Schulte was “framed for child pornography possession.” (Schulte has since been convicted.) Amick then claimed, again without evidence, that his own history included:
[L]eaking military strike plans in order to prevent mass-casualty events, detailing false flag events orchestrated by intelligence agencies, to prevent mass-casualty events, and finally; exposing and removing a Ukrainian server that had served as an IC/Pentagon playground for nearly two decades, and funneled child pornography into the halls of our government on a disgustingly regular basis. I particularly irked them for bringing public eyes to not just the server, but the mechanisms of its existence, and the people and companies responsible for its continuation; then pushing the Stop Network Abuse Act through Congress and getting it attached onto the National Defense Authorization Act.
This explanation, in addition to coming with no evidence, contradicted both stories provided by Amick (to the authorities and as Eye The Spy) at the time of his 2019 arrest for CSAM charges.
It’s currently unclear how Amick’s ingratiation with the WikiLeaks community proceeded. However, in the coming years his Twitter accounts drew attention from various people and groups associated with WikiLeaks, including Stella Assange and the Don’t Extradite Assange Campaign (DEA Campaign). On July 30, 2021 when the DEA Campaign Telegram channel was created, Amick was one of the first to announce it through his E persona. Almost immediately, he joined a chat dedicated to the channel, and was referenced by others in the chat even more quickly.
On December 10th, the first public AssangeDAO telegram was created in the wake a court decision to extradite Assange. Using an invitation link Amick joined under his E persona the next day in one of the first waves of people joining the group. By the 16th, a private group for DAO organizers had been created alongside the public one. On the 24th, E was making his way into the DAO’s inner circles, and was invited to the chat by Amir Taaki. According to Amir Taaki, Amick had contacted the DAO and offered to help, saying he was a pro-Assange activist. The DAO had not yet begun turning people away, and was unaware that “Eye the Spy” and “E” were both actually Amick. Messages in the group chat appear to confirm that Amir wasn’t familiar with E at the time. The group’s need for a community manager was already under discussion, and Amick’s large audience and meme team seemed impressive. Amick would soon abuse their perceptions.
As a result, Amick made his way into what looked like a position of authority that brought him close to the Assange family. It took less then two weeks for Amick’s E persona to gain admin privileges on Telegram. Amick pointed out that he had no official position within the community and was only given admin rights. Stellar Magnet asked him to “be the de facto community manager” and E said he “unofficially” agreed. Today, AssangeDAO doesn’t remember Amick’s E persona as a community manager, but as a source of discord in the community and chaos for its supporters.
On January 18th, a day after group held a meeting, Amick began working to get more control of the DAO’s community and chat in 2022. His tactic involved calling for the removal of depictions of violence, “even memes,” justifying it to the group by saying it was a liability factor. Whether there was any truth to this concern is unknown, but Amick’s real problem can likely be gleaned from the surrounding the chat and his proposed solution – the E persona wasn’t a moderator for the group’s Discord. While fellow mod and Discord creator McKenna agreed to make Amick a moderator, they cautioned him about overreacting to a Home Alone meme, and told him not to police the Discord or to just delete content others had posted. Amick responded at length.
In paragraphs of text, Amick accused the group of insinuating he was incompetent even though, as he repeatedly claimed to the group of DAO moderators and multi-sigs, he “was elected to do this job.” McKenna responded bluntly, telling Amick “it’s a mod position & basically minimum relevance to the DAO”, that Amick was acting in an extreme manner and his vibe off, and that no one had voted for him or vouched for him. After a few days of silence, Amir Taaki apologized to E about the “misunderstanding” and said he would be sharing community management responsibilities.
Amick went silent in the chat until the auction launched in February. In his internal posts, Amick continued to strongly encourage everyone else to let him fiercely moderate the chats, but also encouraged everyone to constant boost the auction. He regularly asked people in the chat to get WikiLeaks to tweet about the auction and retweet people who had, and to flood the AssangeDAO chat with positivity. When The First Step Toward AssangeDAO Governance was published, E was one of the twelve people who were “a de facto set of AIP submitters, whose sole responsibility will be submitting proposals related to establishing AssangeDAO’s governance.”
In mid-February, Amir Taaki mentioned a “hit piece” coming from Bloomberg because “people are angry [because] they didn’t know this was a fundraiser for lawyers.” While discussing how to respond, Gabriel Shipton said that Bloomberg would focus on division, and that they had spoken with Benjamin Barber, who used the handle endomorphosis. When Amir asked Gabriel to tell the Bloomberg reporter that Barber had been in prison for revenge pornography, Gabriel asked if they could put that next to his name on the forum.
While Gabriel’s question received no reply, Amick’s E persona replied to Amir saying he thought it would be “a great line of defense” after the article came out. While he was a fugitive from multiple CSAM charges against him in Pennsylvania, Amick explained that “considering the history the [Intelligence Community] has of hiring convicted sex offenders to undercut Assange (Siggi *cough cough*) it gives us a very solid defense, in terms of PR.” The article was never published. It should be noted that while Amick repeatedly conned his way into the proximity of the Assange family, he was repeatedly found out and disavowed by the community and Stella Assange.
In April 2022, Amick created one of his most seemingly legitimate and quietly influential social media accounts – Belmarsh Cat. The account was Amick’s personal successor to the genuine Embassy Cat account, and was ostensibly written from the cat’s perspective and included pictures of the cat. According to a senior member of the DAO, Amick was reportedly given the pictures by Kelly Kolisnik.
Kelly had been a member of the Don’t Extradite Assange campaign who had run the official WikiLeaks Shop for years before becoming one of the developers involved with AssangeDAO. Kolisnik did not respond to requests for comment, but at the time he wrote publicly that he had “never met [this] E person in real life.”
At the same time, his role in AssangeDAO was coming under scrutiny in the community. Members of AssangeDAO (including Benjamin Barber/endomorphosis) complained that Amick had a tendency to ban people who disagreed with his E persona, often accusing them of being “an IC plant” or a “controlled asset.” The thread also brought up Amick’s secrecy and self-described “borrowing” of a Pentagon employee’s identity, seemingly Ezra Cohen. According to Amick, he was kicked off Twitter by a court order obtained by Mark Zaid, who represented Cohen. Zaid has denied this, and says the courts were never involved. (Note: Zaid has represented the author in FOIA matters, including a successful lawsuit against the FBI and the FBI’s unsuccessful attempt to ban the author from FOIA.) In response, Amick claimed that he was “more transparent than probably anyone.”
Over the coming months, he continued to make numerous claims, both about the future and about what he had done. He frequently sent his followers to various places on social media, encouraging them to tell people that “E Sent Me,” a hashtag that would flood the replies of whatever target Amick picked. In January 2023, his constant slew of claims drew attention from conspiracy websites like The Post & Email. However, by February 12 Amick’s relationship with Jason Sullivan had deteriorated sharply. Amick was apparently upset with Siuan, and demanded she be removed from Sullivan’s channel. Not getting the response he wanted, Amick began threatening Sullivan. In a pair of messages sent to Sullivan, Amick wrote
“I have archived each word you have ever said to me. A meticulous record of years of conversations, calls, emails etc. Each preserved moment. Each urging, each revelation of association. Do keep that in mind ahead. It is this simple. If you refuse to remove an individual I see as a threat to this movement, I will remove both of you immediately from play.”
Sullivan was not impressed. He quickly began mocking Amick’s E persona on social media, posting taunts and screenshots of Amick’s rapidly developing/changing allegations. Amick was spinning a narrative that Jason Sullivan, Lara Logan and others were part of a secret Mossad plot to undermine and silence Assange.
Amick’s new mantra became Let Julian Speak/Let Assange Speak, though the allegation that WikiLeaks and the Assange family was trying to silence Assange was not new to Amick’s disinformation campaigns. Amick went as far as claiming Stella Assange was part of the plot, launching an harassment campaign that included alleging she was Swedish intelligence and doxing the address of Stella Assange and her children. According to a senior member of AssangeDAO, the stress and chaos caused by Amick’s harassment of the Assange family contributed to Kolisnik’s time in the hospital, which Amick also spread false conspiracy theories about.
Amick was fiercely denounced by Lara Logan, and prominent members and commenters in the WikiLeaks and Assange support community. In DMs, Stella Assange denounced not only E, but the narrative he had recently created that he had said and done all those things to infiltrate the alleged “real” source of the harassment campaign. In Amick’s narrative, Stella had been in on it with his E persona. Elsewhere, he denied that it had ever happened or blamed “General Sands,” another prolific WikiLeaks-centric conspiracy theorist.
A screencapture of DMs with Stella Assange which were posted online
In March 2023, Amick’s host Michaela discovered that he was a pedophile, immediately contacting the FBI and local law enforcement and cooperating with them. At about the same time, Siuan also discovered evidence of this. In April, he was kicked him out of the house he was staying in and the electronic devices he’d left behind were given to law enforcement. Almost immediately after, Amick left the area. The same month, the AssangeDAO Forum went down without Kolisnik available to maintain it, in part due to the effects of Amick’s harassment campaign.
At around the same, Amick was using the AI image generator Midjourney V5 to create a fake image of Assange that appeared to show his eyes closed, with his skin bruised and swollen. As E, Amick later said that he meant to show Assange’s “documented suffering” and “to evoke a visceral response.” Marked “Property of E,” the image appeared to show Assange in prison, with his face swollen from injuries. It was shared widely on social media not just by Amick’s supporters, but by the wider Assange community including celebrities, many of whom later deleted when they discovered it wasn’t real. The image was also shared by a Russian embassy, in the first known instance of an AI-generated image used by a Russian embassy to (perhaps unknowingly?) spread disinformation.
The viral AI-generated image of Assange created by Amick
In August 2023, Amick announced that he was making an AI-generated documentary called A Man Named Julian Assange. Amick solicited contributions over Bitcoin, and the wallet received 0.00443283 ($249.06 at the time of this writing). Promising a Fall 2023, Amick posted two rudimentary trailers on August 23 and 24, in which AI-generated figures pop in and out of existence. After posting the trailers, Amick abandoned the account except to argue with an allegedly fake E in January.
In April 2024, Amick was charged with 13 felony counts related to child sexual abuse. At this point, the allegations against Amick must be more directly addressed, and so the content warning about sexual assault, pedophilia, and CSAM must be repeated.
The charges against Amick were “13 felony counts related to child sexual abuse material including using minors in sexual performance, soliciting a child to engage in sexual conduct, and possession of pornographic work involving a minor.” According to the authorities, the children were as young as newborns. The press release noted that Amick used the “E” persona, but also used an AI-created female persona while inducing men to record themselves to sexually abusing their children.
According to the State of Michigan’s Statement of Probable Cause, they obtained Amick’s devices after he abandoned his host’s home. While reviewing them, they identified Amick as E, and found numerous videos containing child sexual abuse, including videos in which Amick was “catfishing” a man in Washington state using AI to alter his appearance and voice. Using the name Alice and while recording video chats, Amick encouraged the man, named William Thompson, to sexually abuse his daughter. In multiple videos, Amick (as Alice) directs and encourages the child in her interactions with William Thompson.
The videos between Amick and Thompson spanned at least three months, from July 6 to October 6, 2022, while the child was between the ages of 6 and 7. In mid-September, Amick insisted that the child participate and said that he would play Fortnite with her if she did. Amick grew frustrated and the child briefly gave in before leaving and saying “I hate you Alice,” referring to Amick’s AI-created persona.
On April 30, Amick was captured after being seen in a friend’s apartment in Milan, Michigan. His photograph had been distributed widely on the news, and a maintenance man recognized him and called the police. Shortly before he was arrested, Amick sent a message to his followers: “Brace yourselves. -E.”
Police found him “hiding in a back bedroom closet” and arrested him without incident. That same day, he was charged in Michigan as a “fugitive from justice.” On May 22, Amick agreed to extradition to Pennsylvania to stand trial for his 2019 charges without bringing up any of the conspiracy theories he previously alleged on social media. At the time of this writing, his trial is still pending.
How will Amick be remembered? By some he will be remembered as a fraud and a thorn, while his some of his followers remain devout and ever certain that, in E’s words, “Babylon will fall.” Some of his disaffected followers say that even a broken clock is right twice a day, while other current and former members of the community say that he simply stole other people’s ideas and work.
By many, he will be almost deliberately forgotten. If he is mentioned today in AssangeDAO chats, it is met with disgust over his harassment and disinformation campaigns, and even contention over his unofficial role as community manager. Members of the DAO are currently attempting to revive it, and there is unanimous agreement that he be removed as a snapshot proposer and not be welcome back in AssangeDAO.
Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated his connection to Michaela, and has been corrected.
Note: For reference, much of the research that informed the article can be found here (13 GB), and a partial list of his known handles from various social media etc. platforms can be found below:
- BackChannel17
- FollowThe17
- SilentWarRoom
- TrustfulAlice
- HatterLivesHere
- Eye the Spy
- TrueEyeTheSpy
- BelmarshCat
- EmbassyCatComic
- TheRealCheshCat
- TrumpsFriendE
- EWillHelpYou
- ECanHelpYou
- EHereToHelpYou
- ETheFriend
- ETheFriendly
- YourFriendE
- YourFriendlyE
- FriendlyLetterE
- TheOfficialE
- ETheServant
- TheErrantFriend
- AManNamedJA
- jennisQueen
- Jennifer Carizimo
- thestateofdavid
- AvyTPara/AdamEatsCereal/AdamLikesAnime
