Veteran esports journalist Richard Lewis, winner of the 2016 Esports Journalist of the Year award, has revealed a previous interest in creative writing and fictional work in order to stop the material being used to blackmail him.
In a stream on October 16, Lewis spoke about how he was made aware of a group of journalists who were going to use this material out of context to attempt to do the most damage to his reputation. The stream was focusing on showcasing the abuse that he had received having blocked over 100 members of the Overwatch community.
During the stream, Victoria Rose from Fanbyte tweeted the message “Get off my feed or we’ll share your old WordPress”. This WordPress blog is a platform that Richard used to develop his passion for creative writing, and display segments of a novel to share with friends. Having had no audience since 2011 Lewis noticed a spike in traffic to the site around August this year. The intent of those who would use the material would be to take this fictional work out of context and present it as truth that Lewis believes. The blog contains segments of a novel called The Romantic.
“The Romantic, was about a chauvinistic, bitter drunk who worked in a call centre and was miserable and the only way he could feel a connection to real life anymore was basically by seducing women but doing it with really horrible cynical means, and it was an ironic title because obviously there’s nothing romantic about that.”
During the stream Lewis showed screenshots of emails to publishers, published writers and previous girlfriends sharing sections of the work as evidence that it was indeed fictitious. In the interest of full disclosure and to remove the threat of blackmail, Lewis then read aloud the “most incriminating” sections. He did so to remove the power anyone had over him in using the material for blackmail stating;
“I always believe that, when people are blackmailing you and doing it so brazenly, that you have to neutralise the power. You can’t let people blackmail you for things, especially things, that you do not have to be ashamed of.”
Lewis shared the link to the already publicly viewable blog and encouraged viewers to read the entries for themselves. In order to get to the extracts mentioned, a user will have to scroll past journalistic works on the same site. This change echoes the change in direction of Lewis’ career moving more into journalism away from the creative writing. Any user can see therefore, the change in style dictated by the differing purpose of the work be it fictional or journalistic in intent.
In making all this public, Lewis has been clear that he will not be blackmailed and has gone on the record to prove that this material is fiction and should not be used as direct quotations from the author himself.
“I’ve got e-mails from the time proving they are fiction, I can put you in touch with fellow writers, publishers that reviewed and assessed this fiction, I have the original manuscript over there, I can release original unedited copies of the work, I can release the novel as it is to this day, which is, you know, a good ten-thousand, maybe twenty-thousand words, so you can even see the reason it was abandoned.”
At time of writing there has not been any pieces released by journalists using this material as direct quotations. Richard Lewis has urged fans to share an article he has written for Dexerto detailing the position he is in, regarding routine abuse and harassment he is subjected to by people who claim to share in his profession.
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