I would say that most people will never be able to say they may or may not have been the intended target of a murder plot by a former anime voice actor, and I hope I at least live long enough to write an autobiography about how stupid the entire thing is.
I’m gonna need some context here
All right, cool, let's give some backstory here.
Anybody following me likely already knows what the last four-plus years have been like for me. In January 2019, there'd already been a big discussion amongst people within the anime and anime convention community about actually talking about the people in our community that we quietly already knew were dangerous but haven't done anything serious about them to protect each other. The first of those people discussed was a guy who went by the username of Hazukari who was known to sexually prey on people in the convention circuit. This story isn't really about him, but it's important to understand that that's where the community was at when everything blew up.
The next thing that sort of unintentionally blew up was a much bigger conversation about an extremely popular voice actor, Vic Mignogna. It had already been well known for 15 years through whisper networks that he wasn't to be trusted with his female fans, both adult and underage. Stories were everywhere, even here on Tumblr. It wasn't hard to find people telling stories about their encounters with him across even some of the oldest of social media. Forums and blogs, everywhere. I understand that people really thought, "Oh, it's all just talk," but unless you were there from about the year 2005 on up, you really don't know just how pervasive the knowledge was. I myself had watched behavior from him out of him in 2007 that made me believe it. It was weird to know a guy would hold church service panels on Sundays at anime conventions, but then I would watch him get handsy with a young woman and take her back to his hotel room. It might not have been illegal, but it set off alarm bells in my head.
Now, I wasn't the person who started off the firestorm. Another person entirely who went under the Twitter handle of "hanleia" (and who no longer uses that handle) had made a tweet asking when we were finally gonna hold Vic accountable for his behavior. And although she didn't really intend it, her tweet absolutely blew up. Thousands of likes and retweets. And along with it came hundreds of stories from individuals telling their personal experiences. I took screenshots of well over 100 different people at that time telling their stories of how he was weird or a creep or made them uncomfortable, or in some cases some people talked about their experiences being volunteer convention staff members who had been treated like shit by him. And at the time, that's all it was. It was kinda a repeat of stories, some old some new, that I'd been hearing for 15 years. Where I came in was well after the firehose had already been opened all the way up, and suggested a hashtag to just keep track of all the stories, which I'd called #KickVic. That's all it was intended to do, and it came much later after the whole movement had already kicked off. Unfortunately, as time would go on, it wouldn't matter that I didn't actually accuse him of doing anything to me, or that I wasn't the person who started the movement. Culture war assholes (and seemingly Vic himself) would decide I was the face of the entire movement based solely on the hashtag alone.
As the movement went on, it got WAY worse than I think any of us really knew it was. Like, we knew he was kinda a handsy asshole, but not to what extent. Suddenly, a bunch of members of the industry--voice actors and sound engineers--were liking people's tweets, and even telling their own stories. They were telling their own stories about how he had been handsy with them and pressuring them for sex. As you can imagine, assholes would ask why they waited so long to speak up. But I guess you can't imagine how difficult it is to speak up against another powerful dude in your industry that everybody likes unless it happens to you. But if multiple people in the industry were now saying it was true, that's when I knew for certain this shit was real, and it could possibly be way worse than anyone really knew. If these were just the people willing to speak up, how many more were out there that have never said anything at all, too scared to tell?
By February Vic had lost his working contracts with anime dubbing studios and was quickly being dropped by reputable anime conventions. He was starting to bleed money. Which is probably why he was motivated to, rather than seeking the help and reformation he initially promised he would seek, instead then began suing people for talking about the things he did. Among those he sued were Funimation (the company that ended their contract with him and then tweeted about it), Jamie Marchi and Monica Rial (who were two voice actors who claimed to have had uncomfortable interactions with him), and Monica's fiancé Ron Toye (who had also spoken up in Monica's defense).
2019 was a pretty big shit show, and the legal stuff was a huge mess. It would be difficult to cover the whole thing competently without a whole documentary on how stupid it was. The shortest version I can tell you is that alt-right reactionary YouTuber pieces of shit decided Vic needed a GoFundMe to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars so that he could sue the very women he assaulted for defamation. And his legal team was awful from the beginning. His lawyer, Ty Beard, didn't even practice defamation law. He was an estate lawyer. It'd be like calling AT&T Internet tech support to fix the motherboard in your computer that you physically broke in half. What I'm saying is, you're calling up somebody who's only BARELY tangentially related to the job you need done, and there's no way they have the ability to actually help you.
And basically by the end of the year, that's exactly how that all went down. Even if he'd ever had any hope of winning that lawsuit, there was absolutely no saving him with the disastrous legal team he had on his side. Just an absolute moron running his case for him, fumbling the entire thing. It didn't help that the lawsuit ended up spitting out way more information about Vic's behavior than we ever would have known had he not sued. Now, thanks to that, we know he was hiring prostitutes behind his fiancée's back, having relationships with multiple people on his Star Trek Continues fan film, tried to have sex with twin women at the same time, learned that his reputation was so bad that Funimation had to install locks inside the building to prevent actors from interacting with staff that were colloquially called "Vic Locks"--I mean, the list of fucked up shit we learned went on and on and on. It would have been infinitely better for this man had he not sued, but then I guess we wouldn't have ever known how truly bad everything really was.
If I try to tell every single little step of this story from 2019 on, we're gonna be here forever, so we need to speedrun the next, like, three years here. But believe me when I say, if you were ever either a victim of Vic's or an ally of his victims, you knew no peace. The constant harassment day in and day out was insane. It was to levels you wouldn't believe. I definitely wasn't the only person who got it, but just to give you my own experiences, some examples of things that happened were: I was doxxed, my extended family was doxxed, I was harassed across all social media, sent death threats, my family and my pets were threatened with death, when my cat died I was mercilessly mocked for that painful loss, my marriage certificate was posted online, people (unsuccessfully) tried to mail things to my house and send pizzas, my E-mail was hacked, and it just goes on and on and on. It was especially bad throughout that first year. And although as time goes on there have been lulls in those waves of harassment, they never totally go away. At some point, someone will always decide to make some alt account or make some new YouTube video that will whip up the hate all over again. It comes in waves, but never totally goes away.
But you came here to read about a possible murder plot. So, okay, here we go.
It's 2023.
Vic still goes to some shady conventions from time to time. He hosts livestreams on Twitch every Wednesday. He whips his followers up into a frenzy all the time, even when nobody's talking about him. But then he hides behind the idea of, "Oh, I didn't TELL anybody to hurt ANYONE." Some real stochastic terrorism kinda shit. We can all tell he's very okay with the idea that his detractors get harmed, so long as he stands back far away enough to be able to say he didn't have anything to do with it.
It's April 2023. Out of seemingly thin air, a person I do not know in any capacity or have ever even heard of starts picking fights with me. She goes by the name Farah Fatherless (a porn name--she does amateur porn and has an OnlyFans, etc.). I already have her blocked. I have a lot of people blocked--over 2 million people, in fact. But she's tagged me, super pissed that I have her blocked. Initially, I don't even see it, for that reason. But somebody else replied to her asking, "Why would she block you? You're so cool!" And THAT person, I did not have blocked, so I ended up seeing the conversation. This happens a lot, so I quote-tweeted Farah and ask something to the effect of, "Why do people who don't even like me or even want to talk to me want to have access to me in the first place?" I've done that a few times before. Under most circumstances, it just becomes a big joke we all laugh off. BUT NOT THIS TIME I GUESS.
After this, Farah is on a war path. It had genuinely been four years since I had seen anybody be so unceasingly abusive and aggressive. She attacked anybody and everybody trying to get her to calm down. She just started making shit up, doxxing friends, and she would go on and on for days at a time, even when nobody was talking to her. Eventually she got herself a week-long Twitter ban after using some slurs. So we thought that was the end of it for a while.
NOPE. While she couldn't attack me on Twitter, she made up a Change.org petition with the slogan of "#kickmarsgurl" (she couldn't even spell my username correctly). Kick me from what, I'm not really sure. But it was full of all kinds of wholly untrue things, like claiming I'd been physically removed from anime conventions before (I haven't) or that I had been calling anime conventions to get actors removed from their events (I haven't, and you CAN'T call anime conventions, because anime conventions don't have phone numbers). And you could just tell it was her because it was written incredibly poorly. Just awful spelling and awful grammar, which we've learned happens because she uses talk-to-text to write almost everything she writes on the Internet. Thankfully, we figured out this incredibly stupid ruse very quickly, so that flopped. She was back on Twitter for a while doing a really bad job claiming it wasn't her. Then she got another week-long Twitter ban. So we thought, okay, surely THAT'S over. NOPE. Next thing that came up was a fake news article! It was written supposedly by "CNN-Anime" (a division of CNN that absolutely does not exist), and not only that, but it was published on Medium.com--a blogging web site that literally anybody can write on for any reason. The article suggested I was at some party (I don't tend to go to parties) and that I had been drinking (I don't tend to drink) and that a young boy was there (I don't tend to hang out with children) and that I had been inappropriate with that child. Despite how plainly and obviously fake it was based solely on the fact that it was published by "CNN-Anime"--a division that does not exist--and published on a blog web site that isn't even CNN, it was still being spread around by utter morons that absolutely wished it WAS true. But even all the lawyers I've come to know over the last four years said, "Wow, it's clear these guys never learned what real defamation is, because here they are doing real defamation and meeting actual malice right now." Farah came back to Twitter again. Denied the article was her. Eventually got herself yet another week-long Twitter ban. At this point, we knew this couldn't be the end of the onslaught.
YEP. The next thing I knew, I was starting to receive an onslaught of bot followers, first on Instagram, then on Twitter. Just an absolute barrage of bot accounts following me, maybe two every minute, until before I knew it I'd received something like 12,000 new followers on Instagram. These were followers I didn't want. And it made me mad because I knew the only way to combat this was to take my account private to stop them from being able to follow. I've never had a reason to keep my accounts private before. I've prided myself in staying public and not being beaten back at any point during the onslaught of harassment. But this finally made me go private while I slowly and painfully removed 12,000 bot followers on Instagram. And it wasn't long before whoever was doing this (let's be real, it was Farah) had moved on to sending those follower bots to my Twitter account, too.
In the middle of being followed by bots, probably intended to either shut me up or make my account dirty enough to be reported for bot activity, I am contacted by a stranger--somebody I've never talked to before. They tell me that they actually have more information about Farah that they only just realized they were aware of. They forward me something like 48 screenshots of Farah's Discord server, where she and multiple other people talk about cosplay and meet-ups and who knows what else. In these screenshots from December 2022, Farah is in her Discord describing how she JUST BROKE UP WITH VIC MIGNOGNA.
WELL.
It's weird, it's gross, and they had been dating for about 7 months by that point after meeting at a convention that was local to her. She had lots of screenshots of texts between herself and Vic, proving they were in fact an item. And she found out that Vic had "gone back" to his ex-girlfriend. See, but she doesn't know all the information I already was aware of, that Vic had been dating another person semi-publicly since at least late-2021, and as far as I had been aware, they'd never broken up in the first place. So this other person wasn't an "ex". They were there the whole time, and Vic was cheating on both of them.
SO! Now I had new information. Farah was doing this, FOR SOME REASON, in Vic's honor. Why, I couldn't be sure. Was she trying to get him back? Was she already back with him and just trying to help him now? Hard to say yet.
But I knew that, if somebody was out here trying to attack my Twitter account and get it potentially removed so that I no longer had my voice, then I needed to at least get this information out before my account disappeared. So I spent one evening with my Twitter account protected, removed a bunch of bot followers, then came back out and posted a thread about everything I had learned, up to and including information on the OTHER girlfriend that I knew was still in his life.
And, boy, both Farah and the other girlfriend were having a TIME. After a day of it being public information, Farah started publicly posting on Instagram again, seemingly that this had just been a whirlwind situation, that she and Vic had gotten back together not long after that Discord conversation, that they were together all the way up until this point (May 2023), that she realized now that she'd been lied to and manipulated. Though she still didn't seem to understand that the other woman was not an "ex", and was still mad at her for existing. The other woman meanwhile (Haileigh) was posting on Twitter that none of this was true and that Farah was just crazy and that she was mad at Vic for being somewhat untruthful but that didn't matter because she was going to stay in Vic's life no matter what. Okay, you do you. I can't make you leave, and really, that wasn't the point. The point was just to get Farah to fuckin' stop attacking me for nearly a month straight. But eventually, Haileigh nuked her Twitter account. Bummer.
There were still several days where Farah publicly flip-flopped about how she was feeling. One minute she would be pissed at Vic for doing this to her. The next she would be pissed at me for revealing any of this information at all, threatening to sue me. And finally after several days, she nuked all of her presence off of the Internet entirely. Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, all of it, just gone. Is it possible this was all over? NOPE!!!
I tell this part now only because Farah has basically said this publicly herself, but at the time she wanted it kept just between us. But basically, a few days after she deleted her internet presence, she started sending me E-mails. This was the start of the most unbelievable 180 I've ever seen in my life, and was one I was very hesitant about, but have slowly been warming up to over time. Long story short, she realized Vic really was just as manipulative as he seemed, was a huge liar, and that there were even worse things that she thought I should know about. But she was hesitant to tell me more until she felt like she could trust me. And if I had to be honest, I wasn't yet sure I could trust that she wasn't just gonna report our communications right back to Vic, either. So we came to a truce, and I would just sort of play things by ear. I promised I wouldn't take screenshots of our E-mails or post about them online.
The E-mails I got back after that were pretty concerning. Everything she had been doing for the past month, attacking me on Twitter and writing fake articles and even buying bots, she'd been doing them for Vic. Not only that, but Vic was aware she'd been doing it and was very grateful for it. He didn't expressly tell her to do it, but she was doing it because she genuinely believed I specifically was hurting him and she wanted to do something to help the person she loved. And for that, Vic was very happy. They had talked about this over a dinner date before she got started doing it. Apparently their conversation was something like him saying, "Thank you for doing that. You don't know to what extents I've considered going to make this all stop." Her response was something like, "Like what? Have you considered having her killed?" And apparently his response was, "I have considered it, yes."
So, this apparently was not the only time this topic of conversation came up. After I had leaked the screenshots from Farah's server, Vic apparently pressured her to try and sue me herself. Not only that, but he started putting pressure on moving forward with putting on SOME kind of physical harm towards me. He started asking Farah whether or not she was aware if I was attending Anime Expo this year. She told him that she believed I was. (Spoiler alert: initially, no, I wasn't, because I wasn't even going to be in California that week, as I literally was already a guest at Delta H Con in Houston, Texas that exact same weekend.) Regardless, Vic started asking if she knew what hotel I was going to be staying at for Anime Expo. She told him she didn't know, and she couldn't just go around calling hotels to find out. But she did promise him that if she saw me there, she could at the very least follow me to my car and take a photo of my license plate for him to use later. Obviously, none of this ended up happening, especially because she realized he was using her goodwill and love towards him to get her to do things that nobody should ever do for anybody else.
Now, there are A LOT OF DECISIONS HERE that she was making that, even if it was for somebody I loved, I would have never offered to do. But if she was actually genuinely seriously regretful about how things went down, and she was realizing that the actual bad guy in this situation was Vic, then I was willing to hear her out and give her a chance. The last thing I E-mailed her was asking her whether she had any text proof of any of these conversations happening. More than a week passed. I heard nothing back.
It is now late June, 2023. For some reason, Vic is suddenly on his weekly Wednesday Twitch livestream. And guess what? He's talking about Farah! Well... sort of. Nobody has been talking about this man's weird relationships publicly for a while, so it was not yet clear to my why it was that he was talking about this. But it basically boiled down to, "Don't bother the people in my life. Don't bother Farah! She's been a good friend." And my first thought is, "Friend? That's what you wanna call her, after we have proof that you were more? Friend?"
And that did it! That SET. FARAH. OFF. Apparently, she had asked him to go on his livestream and clear everything up about their relationship. And all he could muster was calling her a "friend", so that he could still sneakily keep multiple relationships going at the same time.
Farah suddenly reactivates all her accounts! Twitter! Instagram! TikTok! Everything is back, and she's LIVID! She promises she's gonna tell the world everything she knows about him and drop a bunch of receipts!
And lo and behold, she actually does it! Screenshots of texts! Recordings of phone conversations! She makes huge public apologies! She apologizes to me! To Jamie! To Monica! To anybody she picked fights with!
And then she drops what she was telling me in her E-mails. She tells EVERYBODY that, yes, Vic had had conversations with her about having me killed. Well, holy shit! From this much alone, I'm told that if we used just her testimony, I could probably have enough to have a restraining order created.
But the question is, does more proof of all of this exist?
So, well, here's the unfortunate thing. In all of Farah's initial hurt and pain, she deleted large chunks of her conversations with Vic, never wanting to see them or interact with him ever again. However, it seems that she did have some clarity of thought afterward, realizing that, YES, apparently they did talk about some of this "murder plot" via text. But that chat log is deleted now. But she's hoping AT&T has record of these texts. Farah has contacted AT&T. She's physically gone into their stores, asking for that backlog. Apparently, AT&T won't hand it over without legal intervention. So! Now she's talking to lawyers, trying to get the phone records subpoenaed. She has made it more than abundantly clear to me (at least, this is how she is making it sound) that she is willing to put herself in harm's way (legally speaking) to prove that, yes, she and Vic discussed physically harming someone over text messages.
For right now, this is all we know. We're waiting to see if she can successfully get her own damn text messages subpoenaed from AT&T. It can be hard to want to put a little trust or faith in someone who tried so hard to hurt you for a month straight, but the amount of receipts that she has already shown publicly so far has been proof enough that there is at least some reason to believe she means well. Also, when she WAS lying about things while trying to attack me, she was VERY bad at it. You sometimes have to read between the lines when she talks about things. Because I often believe she's telling me the truth as of late, but sometimes her version of the "truth" is just what Vic was telling her, so it might not always be true, but she definitely BELIEVES it's true.
I'm sure this is a story that is going to continue to develop. But for anybody who was curious, this is what it's been like for me.
