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 2 — Escalation of stalking behaviors by my accuser
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.
Grace Carnes and I did not continue our physical relationship. We became friends. Or, so I thought.
Stalker
October 16, 2014
Carnes forwarded me a personal message from her work email account to say she was thinking about me on a day that I had parenting mediation. Why? We were friends. This was more than three (3) months after the first night we slept together. In this message, she cheers me on as a fellow single-parent headed to a mediation meeting with my ex.
Grace would later use the hashtag #hustle to troll and harass me online. Hustle was a popular hashtag that I used regularly, one that I had become at least a little identified with.
March 8, 2015
Unsolicited, Grace posted a picture of my son to her personal Instagram account.
This was an outing at Hank Anderson Park in Carrboro, NC. This was eight (8) months after our short-lived consensual relationship. Again, this is mere months after I supposedly assaulted her. We had made plans to hang out as friends and we spent part of the day together with my child in the park.
Incidentally, Vinny Valdivia used the Instagram "like" feature on this photo.
March 17, 2015
Grace was offered a spot to co-host our monthly Spelling Bee on March 27th, April 24th, June 5th and August 21st. She accepted. The Spelling Bee was a community event which DSI presented in partnership with the UNC Humanities Department. This was an event which Grace regularly attended and told me she was enthusiastic about.
April, 16, 2015
I had posted publicly on Facebook to see if anyone I knew had seats for an upcoming concert by Dave Matthews Band. Grace contacted me with a Craigslist link for Dave Matthews Band concert tickets, and suggested that she buy one for herself as well. I contacted the seller and paid for the tickets. Grace bought one.
May 22, 2015
Grace Carnes and I attended the Dave Matthews Band concert together. We met at DSI, where Carnes picked me up and drove to the concert. She drove us drove back to DSI after the show and Carnes dropped me off in the Chapel Hill Tire parking lot. I went inside to help close the theater and she went home, as far as I know. This was nearly 11 months after we had slept together for the first time.
Grace had started to date a comedian that spring. Any suggestion that I became jealous or harassed her because she dated someone are false. I had zero romantic interest in Grace Carnes. I was thrilled for someone who I believed to be my friend.
July 14, 2015
In a sexually explicit and extremely uncomfortable set of text messages, Carnes texted me personally that there was no sound on the livestream of a show at the theater.
Carnes told me she was still able to “touch herself shamefully in the privacy of her own home” watching another DSI performer kiss her comedian then-boyfriend on stage. Explicit content from Grace was not new. I did not engage her as she discussed her masturbation. Rather, I asked her to stop. This incident was only 10 days after the anniversary of the supposed assault.
July 19, 2015
Five days after the uncomfortable masturbation messages, Carnes texted me unprompted about new issues relating to her own custody battles.
She would regularly BCC me on emails clearly intended as private communications with her former spouse, or send screenshots of what should have been personal messages between her and her son’s father. I got the impression she was trying very hard to connect with me over issues surrounding divorce and co-parenting, just as she had before we first had sex, with her first messages in 2014.
In 2014, as she had in 2015, Grace Carnes sought me out as a fellow single parent, and mixed messages of sexual innuendo with routine parenting concerns.
At first, the parenting information she shared made me feel like a trusted friend.
But the more messages she sent, the more they started to feel like something else.
July 25, 2015
Six days after I refused to engage Carnes' explicit messages, Carnes was at the center of a sudden, strange incident at DSI.
Carnes had signed up for an improv class that I was teaching. While she would have known I was the instructor when she signed up, it's likely I would have received the roster for the class only that week, not long before the first class session. This was a full year after we had slept together, and after a full year of friendly interactions, parenting time at the park, and concert attendance together.
Higher level classes in improv comedy at DSI involved a fair amount of what is known in the improv comedy world as “side coaching.” In it, a comedy instructor will actively engage with students while they are performing a scene, offering ideas and suggestions and probing why and how students make the scene choices they make. It is intended as a process between those students and the instructor.
During the class, nearly from the start, Carnes publicly challenged me as the instructor, aggressively inserting herself into my coaching of other improv students. Her outbursts in class appeared to be personal and targeted directly at me. There was zero warning.
The outburst continued after class, with Carnes lecturing fellow students outside of that class, trolling me with comments and posts on Facebook and generally running down my name to the community at the same time.
Following the in-class outburst, I contacted Paula Pazderka, DSI’s comedy school director.
We discussed the options if Carnes was unhappy in the class, but I left the decision to Paula, as comedy school director. Carnes accepted an offer to transfer to another DSI class. Grace also publicly announced online that she would be starting additional classes at another theater.
Despite her outbursts and public anger toward me, Carnes — during the entire outburst and its aftermath — continued texting me privately. She suggested "dinner and drinks somewhere to reset," and suggested that future debates about coaching “should happen in an office where we can at least have angry makeup sex.” She told me "I still love the hell out of you as a father, comedian and a human being."
I was flabbergasted. If I was such a monster, where on earth did this supposed affection for me and solicitation of "angry makeup sex" come from?
COMMUNICATION BETWEEN CARNES AND PAZDERKA
July 22, 2015
Following Pazderka's attempt at a resolution to Carnes' complaints, Carnes replied to Pazderka that I had respectfully delivered feedback to her.
“It should come as no surprise that he and I butt heads,” she wrote. “That said, at no point have I felt intimidated by him.”
But the public trolling continued, despite Carnes’ private claims to be satisfied with the resolution and private statements of affection and respect for me.
I reached out to Pazderka as soon as Carnes started to troll me publicly on Facebook, while she continued to send suggestive private messages to me at the same time. I disclosed everything about our relationship — especially the recent charged messages, which Pazderka had not known of before. Pazderka then took over, stating that she found Carnes' behavior "REAL CREEPY."
July 28, 2015
“This is real creepy. REAL CREEPY. And I'm sorry about it,” Paula Pazderka wrote in a July 28 email. “I'm glad you're numb because if you explode that's exactly what she wants because then she can call you out to EVERYONE for being a prick. I'd block her on Facebook.”
So many times during these past few years, I have been asked why I didn't fight back, asked why I had seemed cold, or unemotional, or unapproachable.
This was the only way I had successfully managed to create distance between me and Carnes' destructive behavior. Paula Pazderka had encouraged me to not engage with Carnes and to impose boundaries so as not to encourage someone we had agreed was "a terrorist."
I BLOCKED GRACE CARNES ONLINE IN JULY 2015
Pazderka informed me that Carnes emailed her as soon as she noticed I had blocked her.
Carnes continued to post inflammatory messages that twisted and mischaracterized improv principles that we taught at DSI. Carnes accelerated and intensified her online tirades and attacks on me and my character — she publicly labeled me a community Bill Cosby.
I no longer replied to her messages or even acknowledged her actions.
Here, Paula Pazderka acknowledges that Grace Carnes had been stalking and trolling me online. While informing me that Carnes knew she had been blocked, Pazderka compared Carnes' behavior to that of the murderous protagonist of the book and movie ‘Gone Girl.’
ONE YEAR AFTER BLOCKING GRACE CARNES
A full year after I had blocked her, Carnes continued to play diametrically opposed versions of herself in public and private interactions. Publicly, I was a monster. I was Bill Cosby. Publicly, she took my public tweets and intimated I was a sexual abuser.
And yet privately, she continued to try to engage with me in friendly terms via text message. I cannot call this behavior anything other than what it felt like at the time: stalking. Privately, she was trying to engage with me on friendly terms. Publicly, she launched invective at me — at one point she says she “grabs popcorn” as she encourages others to launch invective against me.
To me, the message was implicit: You can still be my friend, and all this public abuse will stop if you just engage with me privately. I felt as though my private life, my public life, my livelihood and my ability to provide for my child were being held for ransom.
June 11, 2016
Although Carnes was blocked and should not have been able to see my social media posts, she texted me a screenshot of a Twitter post of mine that read, “I’m sure you don’t give a flying fuck what I think, but fwiw, this is the most self-aware you’ve ever sounded and I’m happy as hell for you.”
I did not respond. I was not going to engage with her.
August 2016
Carnes next lashed out again, posting a screenshot on Facebook of a tweet of mine.
I had booked Emo Philips, a veteran, successful standup comic, for the upcoming 2017 comedy festival. I was excited about his appearance, and I posted a joke of his that I thought was innocent enough, a joke about bicycle theft.
Again, though she was blocked, she somehow found and used this tweet to imply, in a tortured and circuitous fashion, that I did not believe in the practice of sexual consent.
She further implied that I was trying to exploit my recently diagnosed cancer (which she dismissed as “a broken leg”) as an excuse to abuse women.
She also suggested that I was “embroiled in sexual harassment allegations” — the same bogus allegations Ashley Melzer and Mettlesome were spreading Summer 2016 to convince performers and faculty to defect to Mettlesome Comedy (see that section for a more detailed discussion).
December 2016
And yet, despite her professed horror at what she says occurred at DSI, in December 2016 she had a cast member testify during a custody hearing that DSI was a safe space for her son. (Messages below. I have chosen not to identify this cast member and others who I believe have made a sincere effort not to publicly participate in this series of events.)
At the same time Carnes ramped up her (public, at least) attacks on me, she had also become more connected to Mettlesome socially and creatively. Two screenshots below are of personal texts sent to me by a DSI cast member in July 2017. They connect Grace with Mettlesome.
TWO YEARS AFTER BLOCKING GRACE CARNES
July 12, 2017
Even after having publicly disparaged me with her untrue story, Carnes continued to try and find ways into my life. Only a week after her Facebook post had gone viral and spiraled into a #yesandwebelieveyou hashtag, she found via Facebook and contacted my sister privately.
She told my sister she was "heartbroken" and “truly believed” that what had just destroyed me was “the best possible thing that could ever happen to Zach," as though one day I would be grateful and regard her as someone who had helped me.
That week, Carnes performed at a comedy show and did a set which centered around her successfully taking down what she described as her rapist. She posted that set online.
Then, a few days later, Carnes also filmed herself crying and screaming outside of a rape crisis center in Durham, NC, which she made public on Facebook, a public post in which she begged the news media to leave her alone.
Even the closing of DSI was interpreted as a secret message from me to her: When the closing of DSI was announced, Grace commented that the closing date of the theater was her birthday, suggesting I had chosen the date intentionally, as a gift to her.
And yet, through all of this, a period in which I had functionally gone into hiding, paralyzed by fear of strangers and terrified of leaving my home, a period in which Carnes was still trying to contact my friends and family, Carnes insisted that it was she who felt unsafe, threatened by me:
“I’m literally in the midst of a character assassination attempt by a man who knows where I live. His life has crumbled in front of him. He has no career. No future.”
Despite claiming to want to be left alone, she continued to post on social media about me and DSI, recording and posting a Facebook Live outside of a crisis center and engaging directly with at least one member of the media.
Grace Carnes also claims that she had been “naive enough not to know she had been sexually assaulted.”
Carnes, — the same adult who messaged me about sending explicit photos of herself to me, using a number she searched out, who had messaged me about masturbation while watching DSI live feeds, who had joked with me about erections and who should “come” first, who sought the opportunity for “angry makeup sex” in the same office where she claims an assault happened — now asserted the reason she had come to believe our first sexual encounter was assault was because she had been sexually “naive enough to not know she was assaulted.”
GRACE CARNES WAS NOT NAIVE
I believe that Grace Carnes intentionally approached former DSI employees with a story they had reason to believe was untrue. Pazderka said as much in her messages characterizing Carnes as a "REAL CREEPY" and dangerous person, in the mold of the protagonist of "Gone Girl."
Reitz and Melzer had similarly dismissed Carnes’ account to me privately.
Now, however, Jack Reitz, Paula Pazderka and Ashley Melzer stood to benefit if Carnes shared a story she had “not felt comfortable sharing” while they were employed at DSI.
They had reason to pause and question Grace’s credibility — credibility each of them had previously criticized. But they did not. Why? Only they know, but the spread of this story was inarguably convenient for Mettlesome Comedy as a new organization that stood to benefit from the death of a competitor.
I believe Ashley Melzer, Paula Pazderka and Jack Reitz participated behind the scenes in an aggressive whisper campaign of serial abuse and encouraged Carnes to run with her story. They knew her story was not credible, but they allowed it to spread anyway, to their own benefit. They also welcomed Vinny Valdivia into Mettlesome, giving him a new comedy home and a purpose (The Platform).
A SINGLE PRESS STATEMENT
I stated that the encounter in the Facebook post on July 4, 2017 did not take place as Grace described. Period.
Following my statement to the press and rejection of the accusation, Grace told the internet “I am in danger. Real danger" — from me.
Why?
I never once engaged in any of the public shaming conversations online in 2017. I didn’t retaliate. I froze. I never suggested anything, in my statement or elsewhere, that could remotely be construed as dangerous or threatening. I made precisely the same statement to the press and to my company.
Then I retreated. I had never defended myself online against Carnes' private overtures and public trolling in 2015 and 2016 and I didn’t publicly respond to the online attacks in 2017. She continued to contact me after I blocked her in 2015 while I never engaged. Not once.
I also never knew where she lived, but she knew where I lived.
The false accusation by Carnes was the perfect lightning rod for the year-long Zach Ward smear campaign orchestrated by Ashley Melzer and Paula Pazderka.
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.