No one is an abuser, because abusers are the victims.

If you’d like to read this essay and more, support this cause, and help me spread the word about dangerous people and the dynamics of sexual assault (knowledge I’ve gained through years of unpaid, mostly uncredited work), $7/monthly or $68/annually (a 20% discount) gets you access, and helps you support anti-rape, feminist writing and work.

I paywall my best essays (the ones with new material and research), for reasons I’ve explained in this essay, this one especially, also this one, and last but not least this one.

If the title is offensive to you…please read the whole thing to learn why I gave this essay this title.

Francisco Goya Saturn Devouring His Son, c. 1819-1823

There is something I say so often that my friends and the survivors I’ve spoken to echo it back to me: it’s as the rapists have a playbook. A script of lines and actions they take after their evil actions to find keep getting away with it. Over and over, it’s passed from old rapist to younger one.

I looked at the names of the tech titans listed in the Epstein files. Not a single one came as a surprise. These are the people who would ruin humanity and the earth itself in their competition for the most power, the biggest yacht and wedding, then hope they can escape to Mars. At least one of them on that list partied frequently with a young rapist I know of. I’m sure I don’t have to spell out why he’s partying a rapist who gives him access to barely legal and not even legal girls and women.

As if they are determined to turn Stanley Kubrick films, Dr. Strangelove, Eyes Wide Shut, and Lolita into their real lives, with a more than a little dash of that one Snoop Dogg song.

I knew of this years before the release of the Epstein files. Another has been accused of sexual misconduct in lawsuits. Another has a history of openly terrible behavior and people who are too afraid to publicly speak out. I’ve seen the name of yet another tech executive, accused of rape by multiple women, including in professional settings, on a list of invitees to a Biden white house dinner.

There are more of them. Their coworkers and employees see all the red flags that warn them of these…tendencies…without the first-hand stories I’ve gathered. I helplessly watched them gain power and access to more young women and girls in near-decade of work against rape.

Between 2021 and 2024, reporters at every major publication contacted me asking for more information. That means, readers, that they knew this industry had problematic men in it before they contacted me. They needed/wanted more names and information.

There was the reporter I talked to, repeatedly, about that playbook until she was repeating the words back at me. She said I was “real thing” after multiple conversations on stopping rape. That the information I have gathered is good and valuable, that there was little doubt to my sincerity and dedication to the cause. She also said that she wanted to report on this because as a fellow Asian-American, she wanted to expose the pattern I’d found of tech dudes targeting Asian-American women in particular. Eventually, she ghosted me.

How does this make you feel, reader? How does it make you feel as someone who likely trusts the news to, you know, actually, bring you the news? How does it make you feel to think about those tech apps you use and directly or indirectly pay for — how does it make you feel to think that the journalists won’t tell you that many of them are built by and funnel more money into the pockets of rapists? Funnel more power to them, which you couldn’t possibly know unless, you know, someone tells you?

It makes me furious. It makes me feel helpless and small. And that feeling makes me feel more furious all over again. It compels me to work to want to change this ugly reality. It makes me feel that you, as a reader, a supporter of journalism and a reader and a user of tech apps, and you know, just a fucking human being, should know which of these men are rapists and problematic.

Like, if you’re using gmail to read this, remember the Google founders.

The last reporter at an even bigger publication who contacted me was the third from that same newspaper. She said it would be different this time than the previous, oh, maybe twelve or more. She said the problem before was that they were tech reporters and didn’t want to report on this because if they did, they’d risk closing their other sources in tech. They’d risk their whole careers, essentially. That’s on top of getting these controversial stories past their editors. After months of conversation going no where, conversations about more powerful rapists not in that paragraph above, I stopped having them.

Now, that last reporter said she refused to reveal my identity or give me credit for the help I was giving. That’s part of problem. Because without credit or making the work financially sustainable, it becomes impossible to continue. There’s the sad reality: that while these reporters are contacting me because I am the best source for gathered knowledge on rapists in tech, that there is no one has gathered so many names — I also need to get my name out there to gather new names, gain reputability that will help me gain access to the spaces and people I need to be in touch with to make an even bigger impact in stopping rape.

This is an increasingly ugly reality: that it is fashionable to write, over and over again, complaints about the behaviors of men. Reading that feels cathartic. It grips emotionally, and there’s followers, subscribers, a network, and money to be gained through doing so. It’s fashionable to be an angry feminist. It’s also very, very fashionable to frame feminism and rape as a binary, of grievances of women and girls against men and boys.

None of this offers up realistic steps to take to change things. None of this tells the reader and feminist who the rapists and problematic men are. All of it just tells girls and women that what we already, intrinsically, have been taught and lived through all our lives. It’s commiserating. It’s not directly pushing forward.

What’s far less fashionable is what I’m doing, which is writing about how to actually do something. Writing about actual rapists instead of vague “men”, and most importantly, the solutions and the work we need to do. It’s very uncool. It lacks that hit of angry and rage that the other stuff brings up. And most of all, it’s hard to read about. The average person doesn’t like hard, drama, too emotional.

Here’s the thing to remember: the rapists? They have that “do something”. They’re doing a lot. They’re assaulting a lot of women. That young rapist I mentioned perpetuates sexual misconduct and rape of girls and women as frequently as a normal person takes a break or a rest. As frequently as he can, in other words.

And they’re learning from one another that playbook I mentioned. They’re witnessing how other rapists gain power. They are supporting each other when one is accused of rape. And they’re learning from each other how to get away with it. That solutions-oriented thing I mentioned earlier? They’re on it already. They’ve memorized the script. It’s worked for generations.

In his memoir Speak Memory, Vladimir Nabokov wrote about an uncle that would take eight- and nine-year old Vladimir onto his lap and fondle him. He wrote of hating it, feeling embarrassed, and relief at escaping it.

Nabokov’s Lolita is both one of my favorite books and one of only three books1 that has touched me so deeply that I cried.