Substack Writer “Worst Boyfriend Ever” Has Assaulted Multiple Women, At Least One of Whom Filed a Police Report

Unambiguously.

Content note: This post discusses rape and includes direct descriptions of sexual assault from the perpetrator’s perspective.

This post has a specific, narrow purpose: I want it to be established, on the record, from someone other than the participants and in a frame with no plausible cover of fiction or exaggeration, that Substack writer Worst Boyfriend Ever attempted to rape a woman who subsequently filed a police report, nonconsensually pinned a second woman down while she was shouting at him to stop and let her go, and has confessed to other activities that—by his own description—qualify as rape by any standard definition and which he defends by invoking his own theory of women’s sexuality.

These are serious allegations, but as far as I can determine, no parties substantively dispute the core facts. WBE himself confirmed them, in fact, in response to my direct questions. Rather, the core defense, including from a filmmaker who spent a month with WBE to shoot a documentary, is something approximating this: many women want nonconsensual sex on some level, he meets up primarily with readers of his blog who reach out and who know he intends to have sex with them, all parties leave satisfied, and the only people complaining about it are simpering men who orbit these women and can’t handle the truth about their real sexuality.¹ That defense, such as it is, holds only as long as all participants agree that’s what’s going on.

They do not.

In writing this article, I do not mean to imply that these are the only, or the most serious, actions he has taken. I focus on them because they are unambiguous and visible: the women he assaulted have openly confirmed that he assaulted them, forcing sexual actions that they did not want before, during, or after the interactions. There are many reasons others may not wish to speak publicly. Cairo Smith, who inspired me to write this when he stated publicly that he believes WBE is probably a rapist, notes that the spaces WBE travels in are male-heavy, women pay a price in retaliation, and those who chose to interact with WBE may be met with accusations of having invited assault. I hope that by placing some stories on the record, I can reduce the risk for others he may have hurt, or to reduce the need for them to come forward if they prefer to stay quiet. If you would like to share further information, please reach out to me.²

In my conversation with Cairo, he noted that WBE told him that the only things he fears are police and assassins, not reputation. In writing this, then, my intent is not to target his reputation per se, but to provide information that event organizers and individuals can use to remain safe.

Worst Boyfriend Ever and His Readers

Worst Boyfriend Ever is a sort of gonzo journalist of self-conscious debauchery who has, for the past several years, chronicled what he presents as almost comically over-the-top sexual misadventures as he travels around the world living in a van. His blog started with his stories of repeatedly cheating on his girlfriend, then continued—animated largely by encounters with his readers—after she dumped him. He first came to my attention in January this year when he posted about running a crypto meme coin rug pull after one of his sex stories went viral, making $30,000 from his followers. More recently, he surfaced again with a description of having been banned from Berkeley event venue Lighthaven after sneaking in, threatening to fight several guests, and staying overnight without authorization. He tells all of these stories in self-deprecating, over-the-top prose, presenting as a sensitive young man looking for his way in a thorny world.

It’s not hard, in theory, to understand the reader appeal of such a blog. “One man breaks out of the mundanity of everyone else’s day-to-day life and embarks on an adventure of debauchery that allows others to live vicariously through him as he does things they are too sensible to ever do” is a staple genre at this point. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Wolf of Wall Street, On the Road—people who do interesting and unusual things find audiences, even or especially if most readers balk at the morality of those things. For a lot of readers, there’s a sense in particular that if most of the destruction is self-destruction or involves others who saw the train wreck coming—then yes, of course it’s all bad and they would never do or endorse any of it, but there’s a certain art to it. This was, in fact, my own reaction when I saw his crypto rug pull: crypto is a den of scum and villainy, meme-coins are scammy get-rich-quick gambling in the best of circumstances, and milking the horde of crypto-bots for all they’re worth before bragging about it is terrible-but-funny behavior that is easy to read, when you’re seeing the author’s account of it, as a sort of winking, roguish devotion to artistic chaos.

That is the atmosphere WBE aims to cultivate, and it is to readers drawn to that atmosphere in particular that I hope to write: people tired of the “longhouse” of contemporary progressive morality and who read his blog in the intended tone of self-deprecating messiness, knowing that they would never do any of the things he describes but seeing them as sort of venial sins that, as long as everyone knows the game being played, are—not fine, exactly, but compelling: mapping out the dark underbelly of society and of the human psyche.

There is a secondary audience, with some overlap with the first, who were horrified by what they saw as a wave of false accusations against men in the wake of MeToo, and who have seen too many stories that appear to be clear-cut in accusations turn into something ambiguous and messy. They oppose sexual assault, but they do not want people’s lives ruined over false accusations or situations that only curdled into regret down the line.

I believe someone can be in one or both of those groups and still draw clear red lines. For Cairo, who had previously met WBE in person and had run guest essays about him, that red line came after WBE, having told him in person that the stories he wrote were factually accurate and that he only changed identifying information, published a detailed account of raping a woman.

I aim to provide a straightforward factual account, with details acknowledged by all parties, of where and how WBE has crossed the lines reasonable people should draw. For those who prefer to read WBE’s perspective on these events in his own words, I will link his full responses to my questions below.

San Francisco: “Sheila”

You can read WBE’s account of these events here. In it, he describes the following facts:

He invited a woman over to his motel room to watch a movie, initially not intending to “make a move” of any kind. He claims that because at some point they agreed that “rape isn’t real” and she called him a “really nice guy actually,” he “decided to just hold her down and use her body for my pleasure.” As soon as he did so, she pulled out a lighter and lit his hair on fire. He describes several minutes of struggle in which he “let her get all the way to the door” because he was worried she might kick his laptop over. He held her body back while she reached the door as she was saying, “You can’t do this.” When she reached the door, she screamed, “HELP!! HELP!! HE’S TRYING TO RAPE ME!! I NEED HELP!!” into the motel hallway. When motel guests responded, she said, “Oh, don’t worry, I’m fine, it was just a social experiment!” and left.

When I asked him about these events, he responded that they “did wrestle around on a bed in a hotel room for a while like two twelve year old boys might, laughing and playing until she escaped to the door,” and that she “kind of lost my trust” when she started shouting about rape, because he realized they “weren’t playing the game I thought we were.” He notes that they continued to text after that, asserts that from her face, he could see that she was having fun, and says that she joined him on a drive to throw a copy of his book at Sam Altman’s house the next day.

“Sheila” subsequently posted, then deleted, public confirmation of the attempted rape.³ According to WBE, she then filed a police report against him and continued to tell others he tried to rape her. In his reply to me he notes that he is not afraid of her, because he did not penetrate her or even kiss her, that he’s written her off as a sort of “squawking schizophrenic,” and that it would be “a lot more of a headache” if any of the women he actually penetrated “were to come to a similar post-WBE clarity.” But, he adds, “who wants to deal with all that shit? Not me, not them, so far, really just ‘Sheila.’ As far as I can tell.”

New York: Ava

Ava is a painter who initially met WBE as part of a long-running project in which she would reach out to, as she puts it, “extremely niche chronically online micro-celebrities within or around a very specific NYC-centric ‘scene’” and ask to paint their portraits. In her initial post, she provides a thoughtful, thorough analysis of him alongside a portrait. She observes “a sort of power play going on - a push and pull” in which he would repeatedly push boundaries in plausibly deniable ways. “Maybe this was all unconscious on WBE’s part, and I am just reading into things,” she notes, “but much of his writing and the way he discusses the perceived fundamental differences in the minds of men and women (mostly informed again by manosphere/incel-adjacent ideologies) makes me feel like it might not have all been in my head.”

It was not.

worst portrait ever

In May of this year, both WBE and Ava shared their accounts of a later encounter they’d had, on the night of Ava’s 24th birthday, in which he physically assaulted her. You can read his account here and hers here; both accounts agree on the fact pattern. She explains that she had attended an event of his earlier with a friend, partly due to the friend’s morbid curiosity and partly because she wanted to interview him more about the portrait. Before the night, they had spoken several times in, as Ava puts it, “exclusively platonic contexts,” with her viewing him from professional distance. Ava ended up in an involved conversation with him when there was only one other person left in the house, who had fallen asleep. As Ava describes it, the conversation was “good and interesting and even vulnerable on his end,” which made the rest worse for her in retrospect. “I thought I was breaking through. I forgot who I was with.”

Sometime after the conversation turned to love and Ava began talking about a boy she was interested in and asking for advice, WBE “made the executive decision to start to scare her.” He put his arms around her and his legs locked over hers and locked her in a bear hug, restraining her while she struggled to break free. She responded, “No, no, no, no wait no” and told him to stop repeatedly. He told her that he had warned her many times (which, she notes, “is empirically false, but in WBE’s mind his deluded truth is the only one that exists or matters”) and told her it was not fun for him unless she was scared. Ava tried to break free repeatedly and shouted at him to stop. When the other man briefly woke up, she shouted at him to get up and help her. Eventually, after some ten to fifteen minutes, he let her go, noting that “I was having less and less fun trying to make her smile.” She describes the conclusion:

I feel his grip weaken momentarily and take the opportunity to squirrel away. I grab my coat and go for the door and then I u-turn because I realize I forgot my fucking phone on the ground. He’s lying on the bed still, looking at me with this smug emptiness. And he says, come back. I want you to stay. Why are you so upset? I think I try to reason with him, try to break through like I thought I did before. I did not want that, I say. Or something like that. He says something like, then leave if you want to. I say something like, I think I want closure from you for what just happened, but I know I won’t get it. God. Are you going to write about this? He looks at me. He looks at me. Ok. Bye. And then I’m out on the street. And I’m thinking. It’s my birthday. I’m 24. It’s cold. I have to call my mom.

The next day, in what he describes as a rare moment of regret, WBE texted her, “I’m sorry I scared you.” He then wrote and published his account of nonconsensually pinning her down and refusing to let her go, concluding with, “What did you expect, [Ava]. In retrospect I feel nothing at all. And I’m not sorry, I take it back. I have done so much worse to so many other girls, in that month specifically, and you read about it every week. Cry me a river.”

To me, WBE describes the event as follows: “With the large girl in New York, there was no more context, I just hugged her really hard for about 10 minutes and wouldn’t let go. She whined and I laughed. We had met several times before, and felt comfortable in conversation. There was nothing sexual about it. The end.”

When I contacted Ava about the events of the night, she politely referred me to her public account and declined to comment further.

WBE’s Firsthand Account of Raping a Woman

In response to news about the Cornell 7, WBE posted a journal entry of his on X under the header “Those Cornell Guys Probably Didn't Rape Anybody. Here’s how it might read if they actually did.”

In it, he describes spending time with a married woman who, per his account, enjoyed “taming” guy friends who wanted to have sex with her, inviting her to his place for ketamine. He describes picking her up, jumping her onto the bed while she told him that she did not want this and that he should stop, and penetrating her without her consent, noting that “I’m at the point where womens’ words to me are like sand in a sieve,” and that she kept saying stop as he continued. He notes that he smothered her with a pillow partway through, and that she started to cry, at which point he pulled out and she asked, “What the fuck is wrong with you?” After that, he grabbed her again, held a hand over her mouth, and finished raping her.

When I asked him about this and the other two interactions, he confirmed that “they are all actual events I am describing literally as they occurred,” then states the following:

for the last one, I’m not going to give any more info because 1) i’m getting tired of justifying myself right now and 2) she doesn’t want to be identified and it’s hard to tell the truth without going there. How about until that girl Speaks Up we just let words be words, fiction be fiction, enjoy my stories or don’t.

WBE’s Approach, In His Own Words

I asked WBE the following question:

Your documentarian and others note that you mostly interact with readers of your blog who proactively seek out experiences with you, and that many of them genuinely want you to test the boundaries of consent. I’ve heard that at least in some specific instances, the women involved were happy with how things went, and I could see that being true for the majority. But it seems like an approach destined to create false positives, where women genuinely, no-kidding, do not want the contact you initiate and you persist anyway. Could you tell me more about where you draw the lines and why? Do you think you’ve crossed your own lines before, or no?

In response, he agrees that it’s “an approach destined to create false positives” and states that “there are no lines.” At the same time, he encourages me to “open your mind a little bit” on it, describing “women who, at first, genuinely, as far as I can tell, no-kidding do not want the physical contact I initiate,” but that when he persists, he notices they stop resisting and start making indications of pleasure, such that “[I] would never touch you in a million years, [I] mean it,” becomes “please rape me again.”

His line is one of his own intent: “As long as I don’t knowingly act with intent to cause someone else pain, I never have anything to be ashamed of.” He notes that “[I] don’t feel bad about any of it, I have no one to apologize to, because my intentions were never to cause harm. And in most cases, given that I’ve met probably over 50 girls through this blog now, and you’re just hearing about the histrionic squawkings of just 1 or 2 of them, and I walk the streets free, I usually succeed, at picking my battles.”

A Few Words on Consent

In his defense of WBE, the filmmaker I reference claims that “around 62% of women report having erotic rape fantasies” and that “the consequence of the dissonance between what women actually want biologically and what women are told that they ought to want socially results in a sexual landscape riddled with landmines.” As he sees it, WBE believes women want rape, and in order to be sexually successful, he will give them what they want, and that he is broadly right to do this. As evidence, he notes that many women go out of their way to encounter WBE and enjoy the experience afterwards.

He also notes that WBE “isn’t a person i would ever rely on or invite to any event of significance or introduce to people i care about” and believes people are totally justified in barring WBE from events.

I think it’s a mistake, here, to argue about how frequent rape fantasies are or to speculate about how many people are genuinely into WBE’s approach. I am not easily scandalized or surprised by sexual interests,⁴ and I think it’s a reasonable guess that many of the people who want to meet with a blogger who tells stories of debauchery that makes the rest of us clutch our pearls want to experience some part of that debauchery. In fact, while Cairo was discussing with me why he believes WBE is a rapist, he noted that he’d met a woman who was happy with WBE. I have no trouble believing some such women exist.

None of that matters.

That is: when evaluating allegations of physical and sexual assault, it does not matter how many people enjoyed their encounters with someone. The only questions that matter are whether the person is willing to coerce people into unwanted physical contact or sex, and whether some of those people really, truly, genuinely, actually did not want it. Many of WBE’s meetups end platonically. Many people, like Ava with her painting, have perfectly lucid reasons to meet an online writer without that transmuting into consent for assault. As Cairo noted in our interview, even if some women did meet him hoping to be assaulted, WBE cannot tell them apart from ones who do not.

Faceless Francis asks:

“If he actually thought that he was committing legal, criminal, put me in federal fuck-me-in-the-ass prison-type rape, do you sincerely think that he would publish detailed accounts of him doing so?”

My answer is this: Worst Boyfriend Ever has published a detailed account of him committing actual physical assault, corroborated by the woman he assaulted. He has published a detailed account of him attempting rape, corroborated by a police report the woman filed against him. He has published explicit statements that he accepts no behavioral lines and that he agrees that his approach is destined to create false positives.

And at the end of his response to me, WBE notes that social media algorithms reward outrage, incentivizing him to post “the most horrific shit I can” and that the pressure to get attention is “causing me to act more heinously/selfishly than I otherwise would,” and he sees himself in a “downward spiral which may end in prison.”

I believe everyone of good faith should take WBE at his own word: he is in a downward spiral, incentivized to do and post horrific things, he has committed physical assault and attempted to sexually assault a woman who filed a police report against him, and he has a serious chance of ending up in prison. If you invite him to an event, the women there are at risk of being sexually assaulted. If you are a woman and you spend time alone with him, you risk being sexually assaulted.

You can view my questions and his full answers (with only a woman’s name redacted) here.

1. I am a happily married, monogamous gay man who, like almost all gay men, would have access to approximately all possible debauched and degenerate sex revealing the true nature of human sexuality if I wanted it. I do not know whether this spares me from the beta cuck allegations.

2. I can be reached at tracingwoodgrains@gmail.com, by DM on Substack, or on Signal by request.

3. Out of consideration for her privacy, I include only the details from WBE’s public account. I believe his story, with the confirmation that she did not consent and considered it attempted rape then and subsequently, is sufficient.

4. Occupational hazards of being a gay furry.