Published March 10, 2020
I am the former owner of a theater whose comedy career was ended in 2017. I was falsely accused by a stalker who was encouraged and used by a business competitor.
Page 6 — The never-ending impact of being canceled
Background
Mettlesome Comedy owner Ashley Melzer conspired with other former DSI employees and Grace Carnes, a former friend willing to share an untrue allegation of sexual assault. As a new business rival, Ashley Melzer weaponized an accusation she knew to be false made by someone she knew to be a stalker, leveraging a cultural moment, mental illness, fear, disgruntled performers, credulous local media, and just enough truth to destroy me and dismantle DSI.
The initial smear campaign began in Summer 2016 and was nurtured semi-secretly over the course of a year fueled by a story which was demonstrably false. The public campaign was scheduled to land like a bomb the day after the last group of performers left DSI to join Melzer's new company.
Comments on Facebook quickly turned into a collective defamation of character to end Zach Ward and drive justice for Grace Carnes. When DSI Comedy was forced to close, under the unbelievable pressure of what happened, Mettlesome Comedy was in position and ready to profit off the chaos.
I was canceled. A stalker became a hero. And Ashley Melzer saved comedy.
I cannot lie: It is hard to tell this story. The details feel deeply personal, uncomfortable and embarrassing, but I want to share the story of what happened as objectively as I can, backed up by the words and actions of the people involved. As much as possible, I have tried to let their own words — in the form of personal correspondence and public social media posts — speak for them. I want you to draw the conclusion you feel fits verifiable facts.
As much as possible, I have tried to mask the identities of people who communicated with me but who did not publicly comment on the story. Those who conspired to ruin me made no such consideration, and their texts, tweets and public comments are full of anonymous complaints and innuendo.
Life Since 2017
I have struggled to provide for my child while a group of people barely out of college has tried to destroy my ability to do so. There have been campaigns to get me fired, threats of violence and cyber harassment, and efforts that have prevented me from finding reliable childcare.
Care.com
The reason that I need to tell this story has been the lasting impact on my ability to provide for my son.
I am a single parent. I had to declare bankruptcy and was unable to find professional work in my chosen field on a consistent schedule.
Eight months after I retreated from public life, on March 20, 2018, I posted a job on Care.com for a babysitter with reliable transportation. I needed someone to help pick up my son from after school on the regular occasions that I was scheduled to work late. I work retail hours.
I registered for a premium membership so that I could communicate directly with potential caregivers.
Within 24 hours of posting a job as “Zach W in Chapel Hill, NC” and paying for a premium membership, my job was flagged by someone in the community and my account was deleted by Care.com. I was not able to appeal this decision. How would I get childcare? I was lost and alone.
But let's step back: The Care.com decision was one of dozens of incidents, some minor, some terrifying, that continue against me to this day.
Life since the bell rang
July 2, 2017
After the initial post seeking complaints about DSI, which seemed to come out of nowhere, I was deeply concerned.
I was aware of the Facebook smear campaign launched by Vinny Valdivia and was considering a response. I sent a personal message of acknowledgment to my company immediately. I believed the online hate would crest and fade and that I would be able to address any and all concerns in person with our current cast and staff once the new DSI season started. At this time, I was not aware of the concerted effort behind the scenes.
The artistic season scheduled to begin days later, on Friday July 7, would never happen.
July 4, 2017
The false allegation posted by Grace Carnes on July 4th was a lightning rod.
Showing that Carnes’ allegation was demonstrably false seemed impossible (at that time).
I had addressed the core content directly with DSI and with Jack Reitz on behalf of Mettlesome in a conversation on September 5, 2016. Recorded audio clips of that conversation are elsewhere on this site.
The previous year, we had acknowledged possible concerns and made significant changes in response to slanderous complaints made by people who had already left DSI. We publicly addressed even the most vague issues presented by DSI’s former employees — people who had started a competing business — but this was absent from the 2017 conversation. In the face of an active takedown effort, it seemed impossible to stand up for myself.
The sheer volume of vague and outrageous content on Facebook made engagement impossible. I felt like I was in quicksand and that struggling against the inevitable would only make it worse. Addressing each comment would have been like filtering the ocean one glass of water at a time.
July 5, 2017
I contacted a lawyer on Wednesday July 5th.
I was genuinely afraid for the security of my family.
I was unsure how to safely address a false claim on social media. I had evidence, but the charges kept morphing and changing, becoming more vague and more ominous and less specific. The truth seemed irrelevant online. Good people asking questions were themselves attacked.
I was contacted by INDY Week on Wednesday July 5th.
I sent a straightforward statement about the allegation Grace Carnes posted online.
That statement was cut up and used to further the narrative the INDY Week apparently wanted to write. The statement I made to the press was leaked and published in full on Facebook and twisted by the people who mounted the campaign. It seemed as though further engagement with the press would serve only to give the mob more things to twist and mischaracterize. No one anywhere seemed remotely interested in the truth.
I was labeled a sociopath. I was ordered to “just admit what I had done.” I was categorized as a narcissistic serial abuser and victim blamer.
There were multiple death threats.
I started to feel more like a shadow than a person.
The safety and security of my immediate family and my health were my only priority at the time.
I had survived cancer nine months earlier. At 39 years old, in 2016, I thought I might die. One month after surgery, I met with local leaders to consider how DSI might survive and continue to serve Chapel Hill and Carrboro, if I were to step down. I was already researching steps for DSI to transfer assets to a new 501(c)3 organization so the theater and NC Comedy Arts Fest could belong to the community.
But stepping back from daily operations in 2017 was an admission of guilt for an internet who had already become invested in the story. No evidence was needed other than my stepping aside.
DSI made the commitment to stay open for summer camps. As a parent myself, I knew the struggle of coordinating summer camp schedules for parents, many of whom make summer plans months in advance and rely on the stability and consistency of that schedule.
DSI instructors who stayed to teach camps were also attacked online. DSI’s faculty was gutted.
Parents who had read the articles online, or who saw and believed what they read on Facebook, started to contact DSI and pull kids out of camps. They didn’t want their kids to be in the building with a rapist. They did not want to support a business run by a rapist. They were terrified for their children because of the lies told about me online.
And since I no longer had much help at DSI, I was left to anonymously respond to every email. I read every single piece of hate-filled invective that came my way, every panicked response from caring parents, every pile-on from a Twitter stranger.
Struggling to stay present and process what was happening as we closed the theater, I emailed dozens of replies about camp refunds when parents contacted the theater. Parents were explicit and less than kind as they empathized with whom they believed a frontline DSI employee who had just lost everything “because your boss was a rapist.” I said nothing, was professional and processed all refund requests.
DSI had scheduled a new comedy festival for women that was set to take place that summer. The Like A Girl Comedy Fest was meant to highlight female comedy talent in North Carolina in a celebration of women in comedy, featuring touring acts traveling internationally to Chapel Hill.
Comics had already booked plane tickets. I worked to refund every single flight. DSI no longer had theater staff. I was left to respond to every email again. These messages were hard to read. Comics assumed they were communicating with the nonexistent DSI staff and were not kind.
I wrapped up business and closed DSI with as much integrity as the internet would allow.
I had no public allies. I was radioactive.
July 17, 2017
Chapel Hill is my hometown. To me, community involvement was at least as important as the work DSI did on stage and in classrooms.
I trained with some of the most successful and talented comedy performers and improv teachers in the world. I spent years honing my craft and working to learn both performance and teaching. When the time came, I didn't go to New York to seek a career in performance. I didn't go to Los Angeles.
I didn't pursue comedy on a larger stage. I started the NC Comedy Arts Festival in 2001 and returned home to Chapel Hill from Chicago in 2004 to open a comedy school in my hometown.
But in 2017, after being cancelled online and after closing the theater, I started seeing the fallout in this side of my professional life, too.
First, I agreed to step down from my seat on the board of directors for the Chapel Hill Downtown Partnership.
I did this without hesitation. I didn’t have any fight. Also, I understood. Chapel Hill has meant everything to me.
I had also been an active board member for Kidzu Children’s Museum during its move to its current home at University Place. I had made a personally significant donation in 2013 to fund an interactive theater exhibit.
The Forest Theater exhibit at Kidzu was funded in DSI’s name. The donor plaque was removed after the events in 2017. When I found that it had been removed, I was upset, but I understood. The plaque could be a trigger and ruin the museum experience for a parent, which could impact children.
I would never want that to happen to any parent. But personally, it felt like another way the world was trying to pretend I had never existed. This was just a donor plaque, but this was another way that I had been (and was being) erased personally.
July 22, 2017
The week before Valdivia rang the bell online, I sent out invitations for my son’s upcoming 5th birthday party.
My son loved the theater. Some of my fondest memories with him are of his running up and down the aisle during performances, interrupting me, interrupting performers, and taking part in spontaneous shows.
He had asked to have his birthday at “Dad’s comedy theater.”
He wanted his friends to get on stage and play on the microphones. We had performed on stage for his friends at our family improv show before. Hosting my son’s birthday party just weeks following the most destructive event of my life, inside a theater that had been actively ripped apart, felt impossible. Celebrating birthdays are an important part of our life, at least for me.
As a working-class child of sometimes inattentive parents, my birthdays had become some of the most difficult and painful memories for me. I had promised myself my child would never know that kind of disappointment. I rallied and tried to make the party a success. When I wasn’t just completely numb, that was one of the hardest days of my life.
But birthdays, holidays and family celebrations have not felt the same since. I think it's hard to explain if you're not a parent, but having one of your child's birthdays being tainted by a sense of having disappointed him is crushing.
August 6, 2017
Ashley Melzer announced her “Allies in Comedy” event shortly after the closing of DSI was announced.
This event galvanized the Triangle comedy scene against a common enemy (Zach Ward) and set Mettlesome up as community saviors, which INDY Week acknowledged in its arts award profile some months later. Every article about comedy that year was written in context of DSI’s disgrace and allegations against Zach Ward, “the debacle at DSI Comedy,” “as the community heals from DSI,” etc. There was no escape.
August 12, 2017
DSI performers started producing indie shows at The Varsity Theater.
These new weekly shows would start Saturday August 12 — while I focused every ounce of energy I had on staying alive.
Professional future
I lost my theater and comedy school. I lost what had been my creative outlet and livelihood for more than 25 years.
I had been able to find joy and meaning in performing comedy weekly since August 1993. The last show I have performed was Friday June 30, 2017. The last comedy class I have taught was on June 28, 2017.
Yes, I lost my job running the theater. But I also lost every other job remotely associated with the theater.
I had been contracted as adjunct faculty at UNC Chapel Hill for Fall 2017 — that was cancelled
I was scheduled as a featured speaker at the 2017 Hopscotch Design Fest — that offer was rescinded
I was booked to keynote the 2017 Alamance County Community Leader’s Retreat — my hiring was cancelled
I was confirmed to keynote the New Student Welcome for Saint Mary’s School — that job was fulfilled by another speaker
I was scheduled and at the contract phase for AIA NC’s 2017 Design Summit — I was ghosted
I had been an annual speaker for UNC’s School of Government Leadership Programs — Mettlesome swooped in to seize this job
I lost work with dozens of corporate clients and professional conferences.
I had recently emceed and delivered programs for Creative Mornings, TEDx, Women's Economic Development Network, High Five (AMA), ComSciCon, Cisco, Citrix, Club Nova, Orange County Habitat for Humanity, Chatham County Habitat for Humanity, Arc of the Triangle, several chambers of commerce, the town of Apex, McKinney, Piedmont Health, The Redwoods Group and Nourish International.
I could also not slip into the backdrop of our small town and just “get a job.” I had been named young professional of the year in 2016 by the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Chamber of Commerce. I had a recognized name. So was DSI. — DSI Comedy had been named medium-sized business of the year in 2016 by the Chamber of Commerce. We had been named new business of the year in 2006 and small business of the year in 2010.
I also couldn’t move to escape the story. I have shared custody of my son and we had just enrolled in kindergarten. The last thing my son needed was any sense that anything catastrophic was going on. The stability and safety of his life are and were my top priority.
But I had to put food on the table and pay bills, and I needed to do so quickly. In addition to my impending bankruptcy and liquidation of DSI assets, I still had medical debts to pay. I applied for over 70 professional jobs between July 2017 and September 2017.
I was able to secure one phone interview. I was not called back.
I became unemployable in my life's work. I no longer had professional currency. With the story that was published online, employing Zach Ward would have been an organizational liability. I was also not someone friends could take a chance on in recommending me for a job, even friends who knew I was innocent. A smaller company couldn’t handle the potential social media consequences and larger companies were able to screen me out.
Cyber harassment
I shut down all related social media feeds in July 2017.
But, at that time, I was unaware that Twitter only allows you to deactivate an account for 30 days before that account gets deleted.
The accounts were deleted in August. When I reregistered the accounts they became suggested to people based on my email address. People invested in the takedown and whose identities had become defined by the heroism of taking down a predator, started following these accounts to harass me.
September 8, 2017
Encouraged by Vinny Valdivia, people wrote that I was peeking “out from under the rock.” Facebook was told to “[b]an him,” and the mob of familiar media sources appeared to want to make sure Zach Ward himself had not survived the coordinated attack that had forced me to close DSI.
November, 19, 2017
In October 2017, I finally was able to get an interview for a retail sales job at Crabtree Valley Mall in Raleigh.
Very shortly after I was hired, people found out where I was working. The mob informed anyone who might be interested.
There was an effort led by Katie (Shutrump) Mayo and her husband Chris Mayo to alert the store where I had found work, which led to a difficult and uncomfortable conversation with my manager.
On Monday, November 20, I was asked to sit down for a conversation with two members of store leadership. I was asked if I knew why they might need to talk to me. I could not stop the tears. What else could they need to talk about?
On the Monday before Thanksgiving 2017, I was told that there had been several emails sent over the weekend with links to Facebook posts and news articles.
I was not fired, but I left that conversation terrified, which of course was the purpose. Stick your head up, Zach Ward, and we will never let you forget why you shouldn't have.
The mob did not appear satisfied that I had been forced to close the theater, or that my life had been so completely destroyed. The mob wasn't satisfied to see my name consigned to the memory hole as it and DSI were erased from plaques and awards and sponsorships. I had not yet suffered enough, they decided.
People wanted to have me fired from a part-time job at the mall. This job was now my only source of income and health insurance for myself and my son.
What would have been acceptable for them? Was I literally supposed to die? If having a part-time job to put food on the table was cause for an all-hands alert, the message was clear: My life, my existence was not to be allowed to continue. Feed your child at your peril, Zach Ward.
March 2018
This was around the time my then-girlfriend decided to leave North Carolina and our relationship ended.
I was overwhelmed and sad, but I understood. Life in Chapel Hill had become a waking nightmare.
She's a gifted comedian, and she had lost her own creative outlet. She had moved to Chapel Hill from LA for me and DSI, but Chapel Hill was not her home. She was there when I was diagnosed with cancer in 2016, shortly after we had started dating. She had seen me through that particular nightmare. That was already a lot. But now her boyfriend had been thoroughly broken. She had to feel like she would never escape this story.
At this point, I was a fully solo single parent and needed to find regular and reliable childcare. I struggled to reach out and find support when I needed it. I had lost my community and I felt like I was failing my son. The account on care.com being flagged and deleted within 24 hours was preventing me from finding a babysitter — and was the start of a severe downward spiral.
April 2018
My son and I moved into a small apartment. I had filed bankruptcy and could no longer afford the 3-bedroom house where we had lived for almost 5 years in Southern Village — the house where my son celebrated his first birthday.
I donated to charity everything that wouldn’t fit into our small apartment. The downsizing was dramatic. My son had a garage full of stuff before.
Now, I'm delighted I could afford to finance a couch last month. No, we did not have a couch for almost two years. Don’t get me started. This was depression and bankruptcy.
Spring/Summer 2018
I spent almost everyday focused on staying present and alive.
People ask why I did not share what I have then or why I never spoke out.
I cannot adequately explain what public shame does to a person. It is crippling. It is paralyzing. It is terror. It is walking into every coffee shop, every gas station, every public library afraid of the potential for public humiliation.
I knew the truth, but could not share what I had. It was as though I had no mouth to speak. There was no platform. During the initial crisis, I had made personal statements that were cut up by the media. My hometown radio station, WUNC declined my offer to participate in a conversation where I could have addressed the allegations on air. What reason was there to expect it ever to be different?
I had little hope that any other story would ever come out, that anyone even cared to see it come out. In fact, between the anonymous online messages, the calls to my employer and the blacklisting of childcare, the message was clear: Stop existing, Zach Ward. If your existence is noticed in any way, they will announce your presence and make you pay.
I began to organize my thoughts for myself. I had to compile everything so that I knew what had happened. I collected all my old email, all my old messages. I combed through old DSI footage and news reports of the theater.
Then I started to write as a way to heal, but would become severely depressed at the story that started to reveal itself in what I had compiled. The willful destruction and lack of empathy was unbearable. That it came from people I had thought my friends, people with whom I thought I shared a very personal and very affirming vision, was crushing.
I came to spend every day determined that killing myself was the only way out of the story that was manufactured. When your existence is the problem, nonexistence becomes the solution.
Self-hatred and cognitive dissonance can be hard to fight when you’re declared guilty by the internet of a sexual assault that never happened. I considered when would be best, and what I would need to do beforehand, what I should say, why I felt like I needed to do what I had done, and how suicide would work. I was overwhelmed and lost. I felt like I had ruined my son’s childhood.
I knew the truth, but truth felt irrelevant.
August 2018
I focused on therapy and exercise. We had celebrated my son’s 6th birthday at the beach. For him, I wanted to live.
September 2018
I made an effort to reach out and connect with people. I wanted to share my story.
Some have been wonderful and quietly supportive and they are why I am here today.
I’ve had coffee with dozens of people who told me they felt sorry for me, but they clearly didn’t know what else to say or do. I understand. It's baffling to confront all at once.
People I had known from the comedy scene saw what I had compiled and affirmed that my story made a lot of sense. However, since the consequences had “already happened,” they almost always asked me to reflect, as if I should find reasons to help them justify what had happened to me.
Some refused to hear me and replied in ways that were not empathetic, at a time when I was struggling to survive.
The message first delivered by Anita Rao and WUNC in August 2017 was reinforced: "Nobody cares about your side of the story."
December 5, 2018
The hate never stops. In December 2018, someone whom I’ve never met in Minneapolis felt compelled to post the INDY Week article on Twitter.
This was 17 months after I lost everything. Now a single tweet started a new wave of hate during the holidays, as though they wanted to take the Christmas season to remind me that it will never, ever get better.
The person posting as @crankyface was an improviser in Boston. She left a theater where I was working to help start a competing company.
Before this, she and I had only had positive exchanges or mentions on Twitter. But now, more than a year after I was ruined, @crankyface implies that there are dozens more stories of abuse and gaslighting, that I was a “poor manager” and she encourages the internet to “tear me down.”
What else was there to tear down? What was left? I was ruined. I had nothing. I was barely meeting my obligations.
I was forced to close my business. I had declared bankruptcy.
I was given, as a gift, a used car just so that I could drive 45 minutes each way to an hourly job at Crabtree Valley Mall.
(Just to be clear: I am incredibly grateful for my job and for the friends I have made at work. I love my new job and my coworkers are talented people who I genuinely enjoy.)
February 2019
As many parents do in January and February, I had started to register my son for summer camps for summer 2019.
I found that both Jack Reitz and Ashley Melzer were teaching comedy at the same camps where DSI had taught for more than a decade.
As it had in other areas, when DSI fell, Mettlesome Comedy had stepped in. Melzer and Reitz had taken over from DSI at the Levin JCC and Carolina Friends School Summer Programs. These were programs where DSI had introduced improvisation, where I personally demonstrated the benefits of cultivating optimism and creativity for kids since 2003. And again, I was heartbroken. I was frozen and I was angry.
Mettlesome had started booking comedy shows where DSI had performed, including The Levin JCC and The Cary Theater.
The show at The Levin JCC featured former DSI Touring Company members, including cast member Brandon Holmes, who acknowledges DSI’s longstanding relationship with the JCC in an email to myself and Ashley Melzer in 2015.
This was not just salt in the wound, that I would have to consider different summer camp programs. For my health at that time, I had to stop looking at summer programs altogether and regroup.
But waiting a few weeks can have a significant impact on camp registration. This may feel like a first world problem, but — again — what happened was impacting my son. I felt helpless.
Birthday July 2019
It had been two years since I was canceled. My son was turning 7 and he asked to have a rollerskating slumber party.
Normally, this would be a dream. But in reality, I was anxious about party planning as a single parent with the story that was still out there.
The year before, in 2018, we had gone to the beach, just the two of us. But this year, I knew a road trip was not what he was looking for.
The slumber party would be small. This felt do-able and I wanted to make that happen: Wheels Fun Park, air hockey, pizza, cupcakes, The Ninjago Movie, sleeping bags inside a tent we set up in our apartment. Three friends confirmed.
Then one parent reached out to me a couple days after having confirmed his child would come to my son's birthday. He had questions about the party plans.
At first, this felt normal; rising second graders and sleepovers are a big deal. I answered his questions.
Later that week, he told me his son would not be able to spend the night, but that he would drive him to Wheels, drive him back to my house and then personally pick him up after the boys watched a movie together. This felt … less normal.
I stayed focused on hosting the best party possible.
On Saturday afternoon, the father showed up to Wheels with my son’s friend and his siblings. They had decided to stay and skate. There was clearly something else. I offered to get pizza for everybody and would just make sure the kids all had a great time.
Once everyone had skates on and we were all out on the floor, the father confided to me. He apologized for all the back and forth, and for needing to change the plans. He told me that earlier in the week his co-parent had forwarded news articles about the allegations of sexual assault from 2017. As we skated, he genuinely apologized that his son couldn’t spend the night, but he didn’t want to “rock the boat.”
In the same breath, in a scene that could not have been more perfectly shot, his co-parent, who only knew me by the articles she had read, walked through the door. I had no idea she was coming, and she appeared surprised to see the father there. I can only assume, based on what I had been told that afternoon, that she had come to make sure her son was safe. Safe from me.
I FELT PHYSICALLY SICK.
I worked hard to not let myself repeat the downward spiral I had experienced the summer before. The media coverage of an orchestrated smear campaign and an untrue story had tainted yet another birthday.
I knew that I had to keep writing.
This mother did not feel like her son would be unsafe at a sleepover because people had criticized performer casting or comedy school faculty at a privately owned theater in Chapel Hill, NC. This mother didn’t send news articles to her son’s father because a bartender who hadn’t worked at a comedy club in more than a year was frustrated and later complained about the the percentage of tips he took home.
This mother was not worried about her son because of consensual relationships I had in my twenties.
No, an understandably anxious parent came unannounced to a birthday party to check on her child because she believed I might be a sexual predator.
October 1, 2019
Out of nowhere, I receive a Twitter DM (screenshot below) at 3:39pm on a Monday afternoon.
What @3ZKL wrote here implied I should’ve taken my own life (“deleted yourself”) in 2008.
The man here was off by a year, but still more than 12 years had passed since we had spoken. We had a very difficult, but meaningful conversation in 2007 about depression and our personal lives. In 2006, his then-girlfriend and I had a short-lived consensual relationship. This was a wildly irresponsible decision that she and I both came to regret and one that I processed in therapy over a decade ago.
We were young and, while we were on tour together performing comedy in Toronto, his then-girlfriend and I impulsively acted on feelings that we shared. We were both in relationships. I ended my relationship.
I was 29, struggling in my personal life and generally unhappy. The woman ended hers too. However, we agreed we would not continue to see each other. What happened had had a negative impact on our personal lives and professional relationships — I accepted blame in the community for what happened. The woman ultimately dated a different performer at DSI.
I am imperfect. I recognize my mistakes. This was a mistake, but one that had long since been reconciled.
In one of the threads started by Valdivia in 2017 this man — who later posted as @3ZKL — threatened my life, stating that he should have “put me out of my misery” all those years ago on the DSI loading dock. In 2007, he had threatened to beat me with a pipe before our conversation.
I brought this DM to a lawyer. I was scared.
Why at 3pm on a Monday afternoon? What was happening? Why would this man contact me now? This was more than two years after my life had been burned to the ground and 12 years since our last meaningful interaction. I blocked him online.
December 11, 2019
I was tagged in a public Twitter post with a video from the LA Times. The chorus was “The rapist is you.”
This was now 29 months after the smear campaign started, after DSI closed and after I had been forced into hiding.
The woman who tagged me here had been supported by DSI as an improviser, community organizer and poet. I believe she was fed untrue stories and, due to her unwavering commitment to women’s rights and social justice, she was manipulated and used.
This woman supported Grace Carnes in 2017 and publicly called on the media to “respect and listen to survivors.”
Let me repeat: I believe claims about sexual assault made by women are usually true. That core belief paralyzed me and has made processing what happened and sharing this story feel impossible to do without hurting a cause I support.
But that’s life now
I am constantly (consciously, sadly) waiting for the next attack.
Healing cannot be only about acceptance, inner work and moving on if the people who mean you harm never stop. Building a new life is impossible when there are people dedicated to preventing even a tiny bit of self-sufficiency, when even efforts to find childcare or part-time employment are met with a mob response.
I have been blacklisted and handcuffed professionally. I have been outcast personally.
I go to grocery stores, to the movies, and am terrified of who I might see.
I’m anxious and worry — when I do see people — of what they might be thinking.
“Why’s he showing his face?”
“He’s still alive?!”
“Why didn’t he just leave town?”
I see comedy people in public and they act sorry, but also like I could be infectious.
They know now that what happened did not happen by accident, they may even have recognized that at the time, but they don’t know what to say or do.
I understand how they feel. I can't say that I would feel differently if this had not been me. And I have felt contaminated by the story.
For them, watching what happened and then seeing me in “real life” has had to feel like passing by a staged car wreck.
Like driving by an accident and seeing the driver through the open window, upside down, twisted, but still alive — barely.
You want to help, but you’re not sure you even can. Also, something’s on fire, there’s gasoline everywhere, and just publicly acknowledging the content or what happened feels like the spark that could set everything off. It's easier to believe that was just a crash dummy you saw, that the car wasn't on fire, to be thankful that you yourself are not in danger because, well, you aren't that dummy. Or maybe it wasn't a crash dummy.
But maybe, based on what you could read on the internet, this driver’s personal behavior was what caused this outrageously destructive scene anyway — even the stuff completely unrelated to his driving. Driving is unsafe, you think to yourself, and some people just have to learn a hard lesson the hard way.
You know — fire, gasoline … probably best to just let the driver figure out how to survive by himself.
Hopefully he'll have learned an important lesson about gasoline! You’re safe where you are.
Crawling out
I’ve spent the last couple years stuck in the middle of that car wreck — everyday, over and over, fighting to stay alive long enough to figure out how anyone could possibly free themselves and crawl out from a disaster like this. But the car never stops burning, and my seatbelt never unlatches.
HERE WE ARE
Nobody paused to ask for facts or to consider why such an outrageous story about DSI and Zach Ward took off that summer.
Nobody considered the new competitor in the Triangle comedy scene weaponizing troubled people.
Nobody questioned the credibility of people who were willing to speak to the press.
Ashley Melzer, Paula Pazderka, and Jack Reitz offered vulnerable people what they believed would be an idyllic comedy home, and a clear purpose: help “bring to bear” a serial abuser who was a danger to the community.
They profited off a false accusation that ruined DSI and destroyed my life.
(Life after publishing this got better, and worse (mob attacks), then better, but the fire hasn’t stopped.)
If you are struggling with your mental health and suicidal thoughts, please pick up the phone and dial 988 — Trained crisis counselors are available 24/7/365. If you’re outside of the US, please click here for a list of international hotlines.