In late January, law enforcement officials in Rancho Cucamonga, California, received a complaint from a girl less than 10 years old that a local couple had, for a span of some four months, subjected her to regular sexual abuse, including “inappropriate touching, oral copulation, and digital penetration,” according to police. Wednesday, after the couple had been arrested, charged, and arraigned, CBS Los Angeles reported that the two suspects were Jason Whitney, 43, and Melinda Smith, 35, better known as the adult industry producer Daemon Cins and his girlfriend, Mercedes Carrera––the woman once dubbed “Gamergate’s Porn Star Patron.”
Rancho Cucamonga officials charged Carrera and Cins with one count of gun possession and eight counts each of child abuse (both have pleaded not guilty). But Carrera, whose defense of the 2015 harassment campaign known as #Gamergate prompted a fawning profile in The Daily Caller and praise from conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich, has a history of online harassment, attacking assault victims and baselessly accusing people of pedophilia on Twitter. In one especially on-the-nose tweet, the pornstar linked to a video called “Meet the Female Pedophile.”
It’s been four-ish extremely long years, so for those who don’t remember, Gamergate was an online controversy which began, roughly, in August of 2014, when the ex-boyfriend of indie game developer Zoë Quinn wrote a series of angry blog posts, accusing her of cheating on him with a well-known videogame journalist. The posts spawned a smear campaign against Quinn, and launched an exhausting online battle between one side, who claimed to care about “journalistic ethics,” and the other, who basically didn’t want to be stereotyped, harassed, or doxxed while writing about games. The whole thing spiraled into something much larger than itself, filled with conspiracies, side plots, and parables about living in the digital age.
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One of those side plots involved a trans woman named Sarah Nyberg, also known as Sarah Butts, after her Twitter handle @srhbutts. Nyberg, an anti-Gamergate activist, became the center of a controversy when Gamergaters allegedly hacked her server, and leaked 10-year-old chat logs which appeared to catch her admitting to pedophilia. Nyberg addressed the chats in a Medium article, but the logs elicited callout videos, attack pieces, a Milo Yiannopoulos Breitbart article, an Encyclopedia Dramatica write-up, a website called “Sarah Nyberg is a Pedophile,” and a torrent of tweets from now alleged child rapist Mercedes Carrera.
The Nyberg scandal began in earnest in August 2015, but Carrera’s ties to Gamergate go back months before that. In January 2015, she partnered with the Fine Young Capitalists, a gaming group which played a central role in the controversy, to launch a fundraising campaign for a short-lived nonprofit called “The Porn Charity.” Among other things, the campaign sold posters of Vivian James, the Gamergate mascot designed by 4chan trolls. By February 2015, Carrera had become a frequent critic of the women who spoke out against harassment, including feminist writer Anita Sarkeesian. In one rant on YouTube, Carrera seemed to hold Sarkeesian and other anti-Gamergate activists accountable for the alleged rape of a porn actress named Cytherea, a woman who, by Carrera’s own admission, had no relation to her or the controversy.
“What really fucking bothers me is that, for the last two months, I have sat by in Gamergate and I have watched false faux victims utilize the world for their own personal and profit aims, claim victimhood of emails and comments on Twitter,” Carrera said. “And here, you have a woman who’s a real victim of a real rape and real assault, and those same women who care about women’s rights have done nothing, they have done jack shit and that pisses me off.”
By May of that year, Carrera had become a regular feature in Gamergate commentary, chiming in on Infowars correspondent Paul Joseph Watson’s show to talk rape culture, and even filling in for Cernovich on a debate with Gamergate opponent Chris Kluwe, prompting the alt-right pundit to call her “thoughtful, intelligent... fiercely independent” and “everything women who oppose #GamerGate are not.”
Carrera made headlines again in October 2015 when she was kicked out of South by Southwest for cyberbullying an anti-harassment activist named Randi Lee Harper. Both women had been invited to speak at opposing panels—one on online harassment, the other about the culture of video games, which featured more than one pro-Gamergate speaker. After threats of violence and instances of the very harassment one of the panels intended to discuss, both events were briefly cancelled. They were later reinstated, but Carrera continued to troll Harper, posting a since-deleted YouTube rant which, according to Splinter News, included personal attacks against her. Although no announcement was made about the porn star’s involvement, Carrera’s name was deleted from the website, and she told Splinter that the festival “didn’t want me speaking publicly on the fact that our panel was given poor placement and an unpopular day and time as a means to placate Harper.” Carrera later wrote a Daily Caller op-ed comparing the ordeal to The Crucible.
Beyond Gamergate, Carrera harbors many of the same opinions as the movements’ most famous pundits, including a racist suspicion of immigrants, a sympathy for accused rapists like porn star James Deen (she accused Deen’s alleged victim, Stoya, of libel), a distaste for the all-female Ghostbusters, and, hilariously, a conviction in the moral righteousness of manspreading. She also just seems to love calling people pedophiles.
According to local law enforcement, Carrera and Cins are currently being held without bail. Their next court hearing is Feb. 14 at 8:30 a.m. Carrera did not respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment, but, as a Daily Caller writer put it in his glowing profile, “Personal responsibility is a defining motif for Carrera... ‘We all get to make the choice every single day about who we want to be,’” she told him.
