BIG OOF: Patreon is enabling an insane stalking campaign
George Ouzounian, a.k.a. Maddox, talks about how big tech allowed an obsessed fan to turn his life upside down
George Ouzounian, better known as Maddox, is an OG celebrity blogger. His Best Page in the Universe influenced me when I was younger, and showed me that online opinion writing could actually be fun.
I still say “back to how much I rule” when I’m with friends and want to change the topic of conversation.
Maddox went on to write the bestselling Alphabet of Manliness and have a successful YouTube career, while still maintaining Best Page in the Universe.
Oh, and he’s also been dealing with a crazed stalker for a number of years.
I highly recommend watching When Fans Become Stalkers, the documentary Maddox recently uploaded, which breaks down, in forensic detail, the stalking and harassment campaign of a man whom we’ll call Fan Boy for the purpose of not giving him undeserved credit.
The film deals with the stalking campaign, how Fan Boy has benefited from it, the sycophants whom Fan Boy has involved, the lawsuit that resulted from this, and the impact this ordeal has had on Maddox.
When it comes to naming names, I want to specifically name Patreon — because it’s Patreon that has fueled the stalking, harassment, and threats against Maddox. Maddox has repeatedly appealed to Patreon to take down his stalker’s account, but Patreon refuses to do so.
Cyberstalking is fascinating to me, as I am frequently a target myself. So much so that I created Safer Dating Now, a project aimed at helping people avoid creeps on dating apps
This is why I recently called up Maddox to have a conversation about the stalker, the documentary, the false perception that “stalking only happens to famous people,” how big tech empowers stalking, and what to actually do about it.
NOTE: The minute I reached out to Maddox publicly about having this conversation, Fan Boy started interacting with me. He watches Maddox’s social media accounts like a hawk, thus proving Maddox right. But if you think that’s weird, it gets a lot worse.
Natalia: I hope it doesn't frighten you to say that I'm a big fan. I think now it's scary to say that, right?
Maddox: Oh, thank you. I appreciate that. No, not at all. I think, having lived through this ordeal, I have a little bit better sense of some of the red flags that I pay attention to.
Natalia: I watched the video that you dedicated to your stalker. I watched it in batches, because it’s a movie, an internet documentary, but it has a style that keeps you engaged and you guys did a lot of skillful editing to keep the reader pulled in at all times. I think it’s great, because it forensically breaks down the problem. So what I first wanted to ask you, what has the response been like?
Maddox: So at first, the response was overwhelmingly positive. In fact, even from people within the stalker mob, some have apologized. They said, “Hey, man, we had no idea it was this bad.”
They had no idea that Fan Boy was supporting neo-Nazis, and they had no idea this guy was stalking me and and harassing me and others, my friends and journalists, and anyone associated with me for this long.
Then, as times gone on, of course, they try to dig their teeth into this thing and try to come up with anything they can to discredit the documentary.
Their one silver bullet, the one thing they're latching on to near the beginning — there's a graph that I show in reverse chronological order, and they're like, “oh, that's misleading.” But it’s not. I show the numbers on the screen, and I also say exactly what you're looking at.
Then the other response I get is shock from a lot of people; shock that this has happened. They didn't know about it, and it's gone on for so long.
Also, as people watch this video, sometimes what will happen is they'll pause it, they'll leave a comment and say, “oh my God, this is the worst thing I've ever seen.”
Then they'll continue watching it. They'll come back and update their their comment later, and they say, “oh my God, it gets worse.”
Natalia: I think shock is necessary. You have to shock people in order to get them to pause and stop and think about how these situations develop.
And oftentimes — and I see this problem again and again with stalking victims — the people who do the stalking are oftentimes so crazy that when you try to explain it to to normal people, you end up sounding crazy.
Which is why I really liked the fact that the movie had a beginning, a middle and end, and it took the form of a narrative. Because if you don't lay it out as a documentary piece and as a forensic investigation, what ends up happening is that you sound looney tunes.
Speaking of looney tunes, after you and I connected over the documentary, your stalker immediately jumped in. He's now contacted me three times, trying to discredit this whole thing. It was incredible to see how he's proving you right with everything he does.
So the goal is to make your supporters in this situation so uncomfortable that they turn away from you, right?
Maddox: Yes. It's harassment as a mode of operation. Anyone who tries to reach out to me, he'll try to create some kind of division. He’ll create this wall of harassment and he's got this small mob of sycophants, and anyone he targets, he knows they all attack on his behalf.
He's asked them to do it in the past, and he knows that they continue to do it on his behalf. You're not the first journalist who's been harassed like this.
A while back, when my lawsuit was first filed, a journalist from Adweek picked up the story because one of the the defendants in this lawsuit works for a company named Webber Shandwick, a PR agency in New York.
They're pretty big, and they’re one of those supposed progressive companies that have DEI initiatives and care about equity and inclusion, and yet they have this employee who's taken part in this harassment [of me] under their watch with their knowledge.
Adweek was really interested in the story. Well, Fan Boy, the stalker, started harassing the journalist, and then his followers started harassing the journalist to the point where the journalist essentially said, “you guys are proving [Maddox] right; this amount of harassment is happening constantly.”
And, by the way, Natalia, when when Fan Boy contacted you on Bluesky, I was so surprised because I preemptively block him everywhere I possibly can. How did he see your communication with me on a relatively small social media platform, like Bluesky?
You tell me, I don't know how — and how quickly did her reach out? Was it within minutes?
Natalia: It was definitely less than an hour.
Maddox: Less than an hour. You reached out to me, and he immediately started harassing you on Bluesky.
When you blocked him, either one of his sycophants or a sock puppet reaches out again. And then he reached out to you on Twitter?
Natalia: He did so very quickly, yes.
Maddox: And this is the pattern. I told another person, who reached out to me and wanted to have a conversation [about the movie], I warned him. I said, “THIS is what happened to a journalist who just reached out to me so just heads up that this could happen to you as well.”
[It’s interesting that] sometimes, when you mention it to people, they have this romanticized idea of stalking, right?
Like, “oh, I wish I was important enough to be stalked,” is something people say to me and it kind of pisses me off because they have no fucking idea how horrible it actually is and how invasive it is, in every aspect of your life.
You know, as awful as this thing is, as horrifying, I still had to do my job and make it as entertaining as possible to tell the story [in the movie], because otherwise people are gonna tune out, they're not gonna pay attention to it.
And one of the best compliments I received pretty consistently is that people say they they only intended on watching 10 minutes at a time, and then they sat down and watched the whole thing in one sitting.
Natalia: I wanted to ask you — and you don't have to be specific, because specifics often give away crucial information —but in general, how would you say your life has changed? How has the stalking changed your lifestyle and your day-to-day?
Maddox: So one thing I'm very cognizant of is not posting anything about my private life online anymore — like pretty much never, with very few exceptions.
I have my close friends group that I post things to, which is just a handful of people.
Beyond that, if I'm going to a public event, I generally don't talk about it until a day or two after the fact, or several hours after the fact.
I never project where I'm going. I don't want the stalker to show up there. I don't want him to send his people there because he's obsessed, and I believe he's capable of violence.
He has assaulted me in the past, when we were friends, by the way, and I know he's capable of violence. And he's a huge gun nut.
He's told people he wants me dead. He uses a code word in his podcast, where I don't know the full context, but he tells people to go to Greenland.
And the reason is because I guess Greenland had one of the highest suicide rates. So when he tells people to go to Greenland, he's telling them to kill themselves.
At one point, he hijacked my podcast feed because he set up the original account for it. He injected a surreptitious message at the start of what my own podcast, telling me to go to Greenland, and attacking my family.
When you see something like this, you know, you're a journalist, obviously you wonder, like, what, what is the other side?
What is this guy's gripe? Well, he's telling people I called them a rape apologist, but you saw on the video — no, I don't even know what that means.
I don't think he's ever told me in those exact words that he thinks rape is okay, but he's definitely a victim blamer. He's definitely told me if if a woman gets raped at a party, she's drunk, passed out, she should expect to get raped. I'm like, that's fucked up. It doesn't matter if someone's passed out, drunk, spread eagle naked, doesn't give anyone the right to touch them.
The second thing is that he said that he got banned from a comedy theater because of that. I wish I could take credit for that. But that's not why he got banned.
[It was because] his followers had attacked that comedy theater and bombed it with negative reviews. And also two women at the comedy theater came out and kind of lightly “me too"-ed him. They didn't accuse him of, like, sexual assault, but they definitely said that he made them feel uncomfortable.
Natalia: If it wasn't these things, it would have been something else. This is what I often tell people. They ask [victims], well, what did you do to provoke this? And it's like, look, some people have a certain mindset, and it actually doesn't matter how you act. Your very existence provokes them. If it wasn’t that, he would’ve accused you of faking the moon landing or something.
With that in mind, I want to go back to your point about your personal life — because this is something I deal with too. Like, having to have a private and public Instagram, even though I have a tiny fraction of your audience.
But [stalking] happened to me to the point where I have tell anyone I’m dating, well, you know, I do have some crazy people out there who follow my every move, so we need to be careful about public posts.
What’s interesting is that people think it can only happen to somebody famous, and that is absolutely not the case, right?
Maddox: A lot of people don't understand. They think that famous people kind of invite this — and it's really not a famous people problem. It's just a people problem.
It’s weird, but some of my friends will say that I’m the perfect person for this to have happened to because I had the wherewithal to coolly and calmly collect all the evidence, document it, and tell the story as well as I can.
Many people say, “I don't think I would have been able to handle even a fraction of what you've gone through.” [But] it can happen to regular people.
[For example], there was a case, where a woman got into an argument. With someone on Facebook. Over a controversial photo that a [teenager] took. The girl was like, 14 years old, or whatever.
And a lot of people criticized [the photo]. Rightly so, I think, because it was kind of a tasteless photo. But she was also a 14 year old girl. That’s what adolescents kind of do.
So this woman got in an argument on Facebook, kind of defending the girl, saying, hey, she's just a kid, like she made a mistake. [And because of that] exchange with somebody on Facebook, an anonymous person then turned this woman’s life upside down.
You could cross some random person, some unhinged random person, who could turn your life upside down, because something makes them snap and they can't get over it, and they become obsessed with you.
What crime justifies this punishment? There are thieves, murderers, rapists who don't get attacked as much — Mike Tyson, who has a conviction, hasn't been attacked like this.
Natalia: A few years ago I was asked to consult on this case where a similar situation happened. These people had a freaking argument with someone at their local rugby fan club page. An argument over rugby. And they forgot about it. But this other person did not.
It got to the point that they had to install security cameras, and change their entire lifestyle. There were places they couldn't go anymore. There were numerous police reports, all because of a random rugby argument.
Most of the time, we just don't hear about it because it's not particularly newsworthy.
I don't mean to say that you were the perfect person to have this happen to — nobody is. But I think that some of us have the tools to document it or fight back or somehow deal with it.
Other people, when they're suddenly thrown into this vortex of complete madness, they don't know what's happening. They don't know how to deal with it, right? It's something that I talk about with my readers a lot. It can happen to absolutely anyone. Nobody's immune from it. It can be so random, like a car accident.
With that in mind, I want to talk about one particular aspect of the documentary, which I found to be so powerful — it was when you called out Patreon for enabling this insanity.
Has there been any change in Patreon’s position since the documentary came out?
Maddox: No. I haven’t had any communication from Patreon.
In a way, [Patreon’s position] is somehow a little bit more egregious.
There's something especially heinous about someone who presents themselves as pure and virtuous and progressive, and then secretly is making money through this hate campaign.
[Patreon] knows what's happening. I've filed probably 9 reports with them, showing them the clips, showing them the evidence, sending them screen shots [of how fan Boy monetizes his stalking campaign via Patreon].
They have done nothing, and they keep letting it happen.
I also launched a website, along with my video, which was very quickly put together, because I was scrambling to get all the pieces done.
The website is called Jack Conte Hate Profiteer. Because it’s literally hate profiteering, that’s what he's doing.
[Patreon] have the statement they've released: “We believe in building safe communities for creators and their fans, which means we do not tolerate hate speech of any kind.” Really? That's super fucking interesting. I'd like to hear more about that.
Meanwhile, one of their top creators is saying things like, likening me to a dog, and saying that when a dog misbehaves, you hit it. What about [the stalker’s] followers constantly posting swastikas everywhere? [White supremacist] Nick Fuentes was on his Patreon-funded podcast. Jack Conte is profiting from this.
Once, I had a sponsor called Candid, they were an anonymous chat app. [The stalker] targeted them. Shortly after he targeted them, his followers started flooding the internet with racist rape and death threats. [One said], “that monkey should be raped.”
The “monkey” he’s referring to is my ex-girlfriend, who's Black.
When [they had] my home address posted online, it took [Patreon] three days to fucking take that post down and take any action.
They just don't care.
Natalia: It's all empty PR because, at the end of the day, they profit off hate because it gets them engagement, right? It gets clicks and the algorithm loves negativity in every iteration.
Speaking of negativity, and this is a more personal question, but but what are some of your coping strategies in dealing with this situation?
How do you take care of yourself so you're able to still live your life and do your work?
Maddox: You have to set up barriers between yourself and this nonstop barrage of hate and and smears that are coming your way. I haven't listened to a single full episode of [the stalker’s] show. The closest I came to listening to a single full episode of his show was his first one. It was too boring. I turned it off near the end. You have to tune it out. That’s number one.
Number two, exercise consistently. It’s usually five or six days a week, exercise helps a lot.
Meditation has absolutely changed my life. I used to hate it. I understand the the purpose of meditation now, it's been super helpful.
And making this documentary has been cathartic.
When you’re being smeared, it’s like the world is gaslighting you. Then you turn around, and look at the path that you came from, and you really hiked up the mountain. I had that point of view after I've finished this documentary. I'm was like, “Holy shit. I climbed a really, really steep mountain here.”
I went through hell — and it's still happening. He hasn't stopped. Which is why Jack Conte really needs to be called the fuck out — and also his investors — if Patreon doesn't give a shit. Everyone's cutting ties with this dipshit, yet Patreon is saying, oh no, we're okay with it.
I'm a big free speech advocate, but you don't have to give people a platform to speak inside your your living room. That doesn't mean their ability to communicate is gone. They can say whatever they want. You don't have to host them.
[It’s the logic of] “If Alex Jones believed in free speech, he would let me publish on his website.” He doesn't, because that's his website, isn't it? He decides what's good to post on there.
Natalia: It amazes me, because these are private companies. They’re not the government.
You guys can make choices about what kind of content you promote, what kind of content you do not promote, what kind of content you host or don't host.
I had this conversation with Hamish Mackenzie at Substack, back when the full scale invasion of Ukraine broke out. I was just saying, can you at least try to mitigate the freaking Glenn Greenwalds and Michael Traceys who are sitting here essentially saying that Ukraine should be wiped off the map? You're talking about a potential genocide of 40 million people. Nope!
But I think that maybe we are turning a corner, or we will turn a corner. I'm a positive person; generally, I think that by specifically making the documentary that you did and specifically calling out the people who are involved, including the Patreon guys, [you made] an important point — the stalkers are not doing this by themselves.
They're aided and embedded by tech companies.
By the way, are [the stalker’s] Patreon numbers inflated?
Maddox: First of all, I don't trust anything that that comes out of that guy’s mouth, because the place he's really “successful” is the one place that nobody can independently verify his numbers, [which is Patreon].
You can easily game the system on Patreon and create the appearance of a loyal community. It’s really interesting to me how people do this and how Patreon allows it.
Natalia: It’s kind of like views on Twitter. People have now started taking the view feature on Twitter as gospel, even though we have seen that they're not real, right?
Maddox: Twitter views are completely not real. We're living in this illusion that then perpetuates these cycles of harassment from people who otherwise would not have that leverage.
And the only time these companies care is when we start hitting them in the wallet.
They’re only speaking money. So let's speak their language.
Natalia: I like that a lot. There has to be more of a holistic approach to this anyway.
What I often tell my readers is that appearances can be deceiving. Look at the online discourse on rape. “Men are rapists,” blah blah. Statistically speaking, what we see is that most men are not rapists.
The rapists that are out there, however, are prolific. They rack up victims. It creates this environment where everybody's afraid of everybody else.
This way, we don't see the reality of the problem. I think if we did see the reality of the problem, we'd be able to fix it better.
I think we have to apply the same logic to to people like internet stalkers who amass these followings — they're not the majority.
Most people online are normal human beings. Most people online don't want to be in a hate cult. Nobody really wants to be the bad guy. If you look at it as a numbers game, most people are not like this.
Step back for a minute and consider that people like our friend Fan Boy are actually rare.
If we recognize that they're rare, [that] they just have an outsized importance within their ecosystems, we can actually see it as a problem that can be solved, as opposed to something that we all have to live with.
Maddox: Nobody really wants to solve this problem until they absolutely have to.
My my approach is, let's make them have to.
I want Jack Conte [to see] the amount of suffering and hate he's allowing to be put out into the world, caused by his inaction and inability to solve this problem, and at least drop the BS, at least drop the progressive bit. You're not a nice guy.
I have blocked people who are giving me money before, because I don't believe in the in what they're espousing. Don’t believe their views? You gotta shut this down.
You know, tech company, you should have some fucking standards.