About the Curtis Yarvin "New Yorker" Profile

A statement on my ex-fiancé

Yesterday, a profile of my ex-fiancé Curtis Yarvin was published by The New Yorker, and I was quoted in it. I have numerous thoughts about how this article turned out. I will try to concisely cover the most important elements.

For years, I have been stuck between a rock and a hard place, in terms of how I talk publicly about Curtis. He is, of course, my legal coparent, and has partial custody of my toddler, so there’s that. Curtis is also quite wealthy and litigious.

Therefore, I am extremely constrained. While truth is a defense against defamation lawsuits in the United States, it’s easy to come up with an excuse to file a defamation lawsuit, and getting hit by a lawsuit can destroy a person, even if the lawsuit is blatantly unfair. I know this on a visceral level from when Curtis pressed his previous lawsuit against me; I had to marshal everything I had to fight that lawsuit immediately after giving birth to Curtis’s son; the process resulted in severe stress-induced health complications, among other problems. Maybe I will get my legal fees back eventually, but I am not currently under the impression that anything resembling justice exists for how people like Curtis exploit the legal system.

Additionally, things often work out badly for people who go on the record. Often, it isn’t worth going on the record with a reporter unless you have a really clear sense of what you want to communicate, or some other specific and well-thought-out reason. For this reason and others, I’ve rejected many requests to do so over the last few years.

When Ava Kofman at The New Yorker contacted me, I finally agreed to go on the record for several reasons. One was that Curtis actually suggested that I go on the record with her; he said that he would not press a defamation lawsuit if I did. (I can’t say I understand his reasoning on this, but that’s what happened.) Another reason is The New Yorker has a stellar reputation for fact-checking. Furthermore, Ava has a good résumé. She worked previously at ProPublica, which is arguably the best outlet for investigative reporting, before she got the New Yorker staff job. When Ava originally contacted me, she told me that she had already pulled my Family Court file with Curtis, so she already had a very large amount of information about what had happened. Finally, as Ava pointed out to me, this might be the only time Curtis ever allows an in-depth profile to be done with his cooperation.

So I agreed to go on the record because I hoped that Ava’s reporting skills combined with the legendary New Yorker fact-checking apparatus would bring some accountability to this mess.

The article that resulted is effective on its own terms, but it’s far from what I hoped for. I almost regret going on the record for it. This is not because I think the article is false. Generally, the article seems to be composed of true facts. There is at least one fact printed in that article that I contested during fact-checking, because it is important to me personally; The New Yorker printed it anyway. (To be fair, this fact could be construed as broadly correct if it had been contextualized properly, but the necessary context was not provided.) I’ve also expressed some other methodological concerns to Ava privately. On their own, however, these concerns would not be big enough concerns for me to write this post.

Ava is a good writer. Many of the ways she limned my ex-fiancé’s character were on target. Yet her profile of Curtis covers almost none of what I think is most important about Curtis. The article fails to communicate how Curtis can be compelling and brilliant, and also, almost unfathomably ruthless in concrete ways, which were largely not mentioned.

I find this puzzling. Perhaps Ava and her employer left out that material because they feared a lawsuit — but if The New Yorker isn’t willing to risk spurious defamation lawsuits from people who don’t want certain facts in the record, then who will? Or perhaps we just have very divergent senses of what matters.

There are quotes in the article about Curtis’s “class clown” traits, which, I have often thought, are a distraction. They are real traits, to be sure. But that is not the deeper truth. When we talk about Curtis Yarvin, we are talking about a man who made millions of dollars, from scratch, with his tech startup; while simultaneously inventing himself, from scratch, as one of the most famous and influential political personas in the United States of America; who has multiple lawsuits with people he used to be close to, all of whom are afraid to give details about their history with him.

An interesting and relevant fact, perhaps, is that I was diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder after Curtis sued me. This diagnosis was made after our Family Court mediator referred me to a psychologist with significant knowledge of the Family Court system. The psychologist has clearly and repeatedly stated that she believes my relationship with Curtis was the primary cause of my PTSD. And this diagnosis was not mentioned, at all, in the New Yorker profile, although Ava had a lot of information about it.

Now, my PTSD diagnosis can be contested in various ways. That’s probably what would happen if I brought it before a judge; in other words, if I tried to make my PTSD diagnosis a persuasive element of my case before Family Court, then it would make my diagnosis an acceptable target for litigators’ arguments. This would obviously be exhausting and hellish, not to mention expensive, and furthermore, from what I understand, it would be unlikely to increase my custody. (Even if Curtis was found guilty of abusing me, then from what I understand, his on-paper custodial time would be capped around where it is now.) And so, like many mothers in my position, I haven’t brought this diagnosis before a judge.

When I asked Ava why she didn’t mention the diagnosis in her article, she said the diagnosis is too easy to contest, and also, that the choice of what to mention in a profile is more art than science.

So it goes.

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Lately I have been in an ironic position. I am currently working on an investigative article for New York Magazine that I believe could have a huge positive impact, if I do it right. The article is about an organization called Leverage Research. Some of the people I interviewed for the project are my friends, including James Dama (who was quoted in the New Yorker article about Curtis). Other sources on the Leverage article are not my friends, but I’m in community with them, and I perceive myself to have a social responsibility to them. And then, of course, there is also the broader responsibility to the public critical to any story in the national media.

Many people who went on the record with me for the Leverage story have told me that they wouldn’t do it with another writer because they trust me in a way that they don’t trust other writers. I have been trying very hard to be worthy of their trust (which is one reason the story is taking forever, sorry y’all). And it’s been interesting to experience close media scrutiny myself while working on the Leverage story. In recent years a lot of people, including reporters, have tried to get close to me, exhibiting varying levels of honesty in their attempts. I’ve been learning quite a bit about how reporters make the choice to connect with, or to manipulate, sources.

One thing that impressed me about Ava during her reporting process was her boundaries, which are formidable. I would say that my own boundaries while reporting on Leverage have been different, perhaps more permeable, and it’s interesting to think about why. Obviously it will make sense to talk about this more after the Leverage article is published, so I won’t get into it too much right now. But in the meantime, I would propose that a person in the role of journalist occupies what might be the closest thing to widely-acknowledged spiritual authority that our society has. I also think it is quite different to consider this role when the journalist thinks of herself as a community member with the people she is covering, versus when she does not.

The journalist Nellie Bowles gestures at this in her excellent post, “Learning How to (and How Not to) Kill: On being a reporter and following the Jewish law against gossip.” Another great piece that approaches this question from a different angle is Tanner Greer’s “The Framers and the Framed: Notes On the Slate Star Codex Controversy.”

What are the responsibilities of framing a journalistic story? As long as you’re telling the truth, what other responsibilities does a journalist have? I don’t know if I’m the right person to be asking these questions. I sometimes do freelance articles, but I’ve never had a staff journalist job at someone else’s publication, so I’m kind of an outsider, or at least it feels that way. Still, these are questions that I think have potentially enormous structural and spiritual implications for journalism.

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A final note. Anyone who’s familiar with my work will already be well aware that I feel both the big political teams are terrible right now. I’m not saying any of this because I side with Red or Blue, and inasmuch as I might be interpreted as doing one of those things, it’s discouraged me from saying anything at all. I’m writing this now because I think, as pretentious as it might sound, that there are larger truths at stake.

If you’d like to read more about my history on the so-called “dissident right,” I have a recent post here. You can learn more about my other recent writing here.

Oh, actually! I have one other final note:
I always hated that dark elf post, and I said so privately at the time.
So there.