About the Curtis Yarvin "New Yorker" Profile

I always hated the dark elf post, and said so at the time

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.