5 Reasons You Shouldn’t Stand with Sarah Nyberg
Content warning for post and any external links in this post for pedophilia and CSA.
I read an interesting post today. No, not the one by Milo that largely just reiterates what we already knew (though having been looked at by lawyers gives it more credibility than my own blog, which is nice) but instead a piece entitled “5 Reasons I Stand With Sarah Nyberg” by Margaret Pless. I at first didn’t want to respond to this piece without much more than just linking to the master post on my blog, srhbutts-truth.tumblr.com, because I didn’t think there was much more to say. My tune changed once I saw Chris Kluwe retweet the piece rather aggressively:
Since he is fairly well known as a gamer and former NFL player, and has 188k followers, I thought it was pretty irresponsible to let this spread of misinformation go unquestioned. I’m just one voice but hopefully others will help me in spreading this piece or anything else that factually supports it. I have a “master post” on tumblr that gets to the heart of most of these points quickly and with more sources than this piece that you can check out here.
1. The Accusations of Pedophilia have existed since 2007
“The accusations against Sarah Nyberg keep changing” says Pless, and she cites instances of #Gamergate supporters and others touting claims of bestiality or other rumors alongside the claims of pedophilia. This tactic is also used to disguise pedophilia talk in the chatlogs by claiming “it was roleplay” by citing two lines of chat from the years of logs, while ignoring hundreds of lines of logs posted without a hint of “RP” or irony. Example:
The truth is this: the claims of bestiality are unfounded, and Sarah did post excerpts of “ageplay” livejournal communities on occasion in the logs. Such posts are easily distinguished from the rest of the candid logs because they are in quotation marks or directly cited as being from an outside source almost immediately after they are posted in the chat. To say the entirety of the logs are fabricated or “roleplay” is to ignore all common sense and the context of the chats in which members of the chat all talk back and forth openly about particular subjects including pedophilia, age of consent, and so forth. I discuss this particular topic in further detail on my blog here.
To address the second point of these accusations only springing up since @srhbutts was revealed to be Sarah Nyberg in 2014, this is simply untrue. Individuals calling out Sarah for being a pedophile date back to 2007 and Sarah herself admits to being a pedophile in other places outside of the IRC chats as far back as 2006. As to whether the Sarah mentioned there is the same Sarah as @srhbutts, yes, she is, but I will cover this more in depth on a later point.
“The accusations against Sarah Nyberg keep changing.”
In fact, the defense against Sarah Nyberg is what is continually changing. The first reactions I saw to the log leaks were “these logs are faked and Sarah did nothing wrong” which then became “the logs are real, but that’s not really Sarah” which then became “Okay, the logs are real, and that’s really Sarah, but she’s only roleplaying or being edgy” which became “at worst in 2015 she is a closet pedophile who no longer publicly supports CSA in which case we thank her for her restraint” while still sticking to the “roleplay” angle. An even weirder defense of Sarah is that all of her inappropriate talk about children (and linking to photos of nude children) was merely a byproduct of “the complexities of a trans woman’s relationship with the idea of childhood.”
2. The evidence is from Sarah’s website and was not tampered with, “hacked”, or fabricated
This claim of the logs being fake irks me more than any other claim because it involves deliberate manipulation of the facts. I go into much more detail in this post if you’d like to read more, with additional sources. The chat logs referenced in the infamous LeoPirate video and Milo’s Breitbart article were not obtained through hacking. They were originally hosted directly on ffshrine.org’s servers. Sarah’s website is ffshrine.org. Additional chat logs were leaked by another user from the chat logs, Roph, who owns the website slyph.org and who uploaded the logs in 2015, making the files look as if they were “new”, when they are not new at all.
The slam dunk evidence to prove that the years of chatlogs were hosted on ffshrine’s servers in the first place were webcitation.org links that, thanks to Izzy Galvez, have been hidden from the public. This is a screencap I took of one such webcitation link before they were hidden, showing that the source of the logs was directly on ffshrine.org’s servers:
Izzy pulled some rather shady tricks to make it appear as though ffshrine.org never had a “logs” folder/directory archived, but his screencaps obscured the fact that he was pulling up wayback machine links for Roph’s website, slyph.org, and NOT ffshrine.org, being deliberately deceitful. He also failed to mention that ffshrine.org was later removed from the Wayback machine. I will link to my more in-depth post on this topic here.
No logs were ever “hacked from Sarah’s computer”. All logs were obtained directly from website servers, or backed up on the personal computer of Roph and later uploaded to his personal website. Therefore the “since these logs were hacked from her computer, why didn’t they find anything else incriminating” bit is completely ridiculous.
If you need additional proof of the content of the logs, even the unsavory bits, being from ffshrine.org, please see this post made by Roph. To summarize, Sarah’s website is ffshrine.org, which also hosts a video game music download site called Galbadia Hotel. On the front page of Galbadia Hotel, there used to be a section of the page that would post snippets of the latest lines from the IRC chatroom. These snippets are undeniably true as they are archived directly from Galbadia Hotel, gh.ffshrine.org, and they match up line for line from the leaked logs uploaded by Roph. One such snippet shows Sarah describing her cousin (then 8 years old) as her “lgf” or “little girlfriend”:
In short, the logs are undeniably from ffshrine.org’s archives, no matter what attempt there has been to cover this up or hide it.
In regards to the Sarah in the chat not being the same Sarah throughout the chatlogs, I had this to say in my blog already, but I’ll restate it in a shorter bite-size piece here: to say that Sarah in the chatlogs was being imitated ignores the full context of the logs and has nothing to back it up. I have read the logs extensively and have not yet found one instance of someone taking the name “Sarah” and being called out for being an imposter, but if you find such an instance, please show it to me.
The fact that the same Sarah talks to the same people in the chatroom on a regular basis with the same opinons and writing style tells me that it’s all the same individual.
3. All of the testimony attributed to Sarah Nyberg is in fact written by Sarah Nyberg.
First things first. The logs were hosted on ffshrine.org. Sarah owns ffshrine.org. Sarah Nyberg is @srhbutts. Here is proof that @srhbutts is the owner of ffshrine.org, a forum post on ffshrine.org by the admin account Sarah talking about herself, in regards to this very topic.
“It seems very possible that Ralph (and many other #Gamergaters) are simply screencapping some pedophile on the Internet and simply attributing these comments to Nyberg. That would explain why a lot of Sarah Nyberg’s “”confessions”” sound like they were written by someone else.”
@srhbutts is Sarah Nyberg, the owner of ffshrine.org, retrogradesnowcone, and Sarah of thepriceislol forums, without a single doubt in my mind. Within the archived thepriceislol forum post discussing age of consent Sarah links to her website ffshrine.org. The venusenvy forums archived post by retrogradesnowcone is in the context of a discussion about the owner of ffshrine (Sarah) being a pedophile. The user retrogradesnowcone discusses running the website and using it to host her own pictures. If someone who isn’t just blatantly ignoring context clues, basic reading comprehension, or common sense can provide a compelling reason that these are not in fact the same individual, I would love to hear it.
4. #Gamergate may be the catalyst for the new wave of scrutiny, but facts are facts.
This idea that anyone calling out Sarah’s behavior is a part of #Gamergate is largely why I have chosen to remain anonymous here, on my blog, and on my twitter devoted to this topic. I would probably lose followers with green and purple avatars faster than you could say “Vivian James” if my real identity was tied to this. I’m a very left-wing cis woman with a short trendy haircut and big ol’ thick rimmed glasses, and I don’t even play video games let alone give a damn about any sort of mob or activist movement that’s spawned around gaming news site coverage.
I am fully aware that Sarah has been in #Gamergate’s line of fire for a while due to her habit of screencapping the worst things said by gators and riling up said gators by engaging in debate. I am fully aware that the loudest voices condemning Sarah are part of GG. My point is this:
I don’t see how the identity or politics of anyone criticizing Sarah matters when the facts remain the same.
I linked to this already, but calling out Sarah for pedophilia predates gamer hashtag movements by nearly a decade. I don’t see how any accusations of whether 8chan advocates child pornography or not, whether gators have a track record of falsely yelling “pedophile” at those who don’t warrant it, or anything else has any bearing on what is the truth about this particular individual. I don’t understand the original piece’s attempt to discredit the accusations against Sarah by attacking these unrelated issues. Sarah’s logs aren’t fake just because you learned about the logs through a source you personally dislike or disagree with.
5. The source of the information is irrelevant when you can verify everything for yourself with neutral third party evidence
This is just reiterating point #4, because the original piece kind of did that as well, by going off on a tangent about how awful gators or Milo are, as if that has any bearing on the accusations against Sarah Nyberg.
Don’t like gamergate? Me either. Don’t like Breitbart? Me either. Don’t trust these sources? Fine.
Do you trust archives of webpages that are unedited? Do you trust chatlogs and forum posts from a decade ago that you can download and read for yourself? Do those sources have an inherent agenda? Do you think someone who deliberately misleads you with hidden sources is unbiased just because they’re anti-gamergate?
Conclusion
It’s not a “smear campaign” when the accusations come directly from the accused’s own words. It’s not a #Gamergate campaign when the accusations predate the movement. I think jumping to defend a self admitted pedophile just because they’re in your circle of twitter friends while denying evidence is repulsive. And since tumblr has a history of outing abusers, thieves, predators, and other creeps, I’m carrying on that tradition by using my blog to alert others of who they are dealing with when they interact with @srhbutts.
My initial goal when starting my blog was to bring all this to light in the hopes that Sarah would admit what she said, come clean about it, and seek help, and that others would encourage her in seeking help for her pedophilia. Instead I have only seen people jumping to her defense either blindly or after twisting evidence to suit their point of view, all in the name of proving gamergate wrong or whatever their own agenda is.
Sarah Nyberg has no credibility as a critic of anyone’s behavior until she can come forward and admit her own wrongdoing, and shame on those who still rush to her side despite the truth.
