Amick first drew my attention under his E persona. I forget how I noticed him, but it might have been the swarms of followers he send to reply to tweets and say that “E Sent Me.” Perhaps it was simply his role in AssangeDAO. Regardless, he was just loud enough and connected enough to be worthy of attention. The similarities to Q were obvious, and curious. So was the mix of fact and ficiton that E spewed.
After his arrest, it became obvious that the article needed to be written, though I had pointed the E persona out to other journalists previously. At the time, I had been unaware of just how much damage he had done to the communities around him, and even more unaware that he was a pedophile. His arrest changed that, and overrode my reluctance to write about it myself.
My reluctance came from several places. First, anything related to QAnon is difficult and unpleasant to deal with. This is a result of there being nothing cohesive, there’s no central repository, secondary content is often deleted and the QAnon community tends to create its own context for things. Second, I carry my own trauma. Finally and least importantly, I was unsure how to disclose that he called me an IC plant in his Telegram channel. (Here? I’ll disclose it here.) But I’m not even sure if this is because of my old job, or because I can be critical of WikiLeaks, or because he calls everyone he disagrees with an IC plant.
But as it became clear that it was necessary to tell Amick’s story in order to understand the damage he did to communities like AssangeDAO, my feelings seemed insignificant in comparison. While the DAO might be constructively criticized for not using a treasury to hire a staff and pay for sustainable servers, Amick’s harassment campaign provides new insight into the sudden disappearance of the forums, and later the entire website. Anyone want to track the case or unravel the web could use a starting point.
That is all the account is: a starting point. There were numerous avenues that couldn’t be fully explored. A combination of nearly seven years of disinformation and the prosecution being in the early stages ensured that.
Many sources were also unwilling to speak, or stopped responding without explanation. One source deleted all record of the conversation, again seemingly without explanation. The struggle is that deleting text doesn’t unring the bell, but it does remove any clarity about what parts were on or off the record. Some potential sources were clear about not wanting to talk. To those, I am thankful. Others refused to read messages, or left messages unread. Some agreed to speak, but only on the condition of anonymity.
Trying to manage all of that was exhausting, but not as exhausting as going through Amick’s history. It’s not the end of the story that there is to tell about him, but I hope that I won’t be telling that story – except to note the results of his hopefully uneventful trials.
May his name be a curse and a warning.
