Thanks everyone. @JustDiana and I would love to know if there are any users SPECIFICALLY you want to call out (or call in)? @NicoletteLee mentioned @SmokyMountainHeartOpener. Anyone else? When you think “white privilege,” who do you think of?
Within minutes, @Allison had shared a screenshot of Devin at a charity gala, wearing a sheer dress with a plunging neckline and a VR headset, looking like the physical embodiment of a flute of champagne. So grateful to @MarcMoulin for using tech to transport us to Mogadishu. So blessed to be one of the first to experience this transformational tool for compassionate journeys, Devin had written in the caption to her post.
Allison
You mean like this @KhadijahWalker?
Felice
@Allison A DEVIN AVERY CLASSIC
The_s_is_silent
@Allison This is incredible I’ve never seen it before
Gili
@Allison Eat the rich
Aja_dontgothere
What about this
It was a photo of Devin wearing a pink hat at the Women’s March, standing next to Amy Schumer, as they both took big bites out of street vendor hot dogs. Hashtag white feminism, @Aja_dontgothere said. At least she’s eating something! lol, replied @The_s_is_silent. Hashtag not all hot dogs, @JustDiana added. This is why that man is in the White House right now, @Gili typed. Devin represents the 53 percent.
They were gleeful at the game. It was so easy—anybody could play. There was a post of Devin bragging that her blowout was on fleek; a profile of her in New York magazine accompanied by a photo of her posed in bed in a vintage silk kimono; a pic of a steaming hot bowl of pho, captioned “I’m starving,” dated the same day that two boats of Syrian refugees capsized off the Italian coast. There were layers of offense to unearth here, and everyone was on an archaeological dig.
Devin made Richual for you, I wanted to tell them. She’s the reason we’re even here talking about this. But I felt frozen, unable to type anything in her defense. Couldn’t we talk about users who wore so much bronzer it bordered on blackface? Or what about how all the influencers opening up about their eating disorder recovery were white, as if EDs didn’t also impact WOC? If I said, Not Devin, name someone else, they’d call me Uncle Tom.
I was back inside The Panopticon. There was a whole subset of our users who were on the platform to surveil the elite.
Wait, @Gili posted. Has anyone seen this? She shared a link to a news article with a photo of Evan wearing a white T-shirt that said “Control the Guns” on the left and “Not Women’s Bodies” on the right, his arm around grinning bare-shouldered Devin, at the Richual launch party in October 2016.
I took that photo for the About Us page.
Former Bachelorette Contestant Evan Wiley Accused of Inappropriate Conduct by Three Women in Bizarre Fairy Tale Sex Scandal
Entrepreneur, angel investor, self-described feminist, and former Bachelorette contestant Evan Wiley has been accused of inappropriate sexual conduct by three women. Fans will remember Wiley as the bachelor who made it to the fantasy suite episode in the Kimberly Hartsong season, shocking viewers by asking Kimberly the question, “What turns you on?” to which she responded, “No one’s ever asked me that before.”
Wiley was a fan favorite to win Hartsong’s heart, but he got into an aggressive confrontation with contestant Brad Bellingham III at the cocktail party just before the rose ceremony, the two trading jabs about who respected women more, until Wiley left the cabana in protest, ranted on camera about the show’s culture of “toxic masculinity,” and then rode off into the night on a motorbike belonging to hotel staff at Playa Escondida.
For the first time, Hartsong is coming out about what really happened in the fantasy suite. In a post on the website Richual, a social network for women interested in “self-care,” Hartsong writes:
The fantasy suite is supposed to be a night where two people can be intimate with each other. Evan was very gentle. He always asked me what I wanted or what I liked, even though we weren’t actually doing anything. It was getting later and later. The camera guys were gone. I was getting tired and I kind of wanted him to take the lead more, to feel wanted, I guess. Finally I must have gotten in bed because it was time to go to sleep and that’s when he started. I felt weakened. He said you don’t have to do anything, just lie there. I felt tricked when he left the show. Your mind is always going to be like, Was it me? Did I do something wrong?
Wiley is on the board of Richual and the highest equity stakeholder in the company, aside from the cofounders, Devin Avery and Maren Gelb.
One of Wiley’s ex-girlfriends, who has asked to remain anonymous, describes Wiley’s sexual preferences more explicitly: he prefers sex with women who are “near unconscious.”
“At first, it was like a game,” she says. “He called it Sleeping Beauty. He asked me to wear a blond wig he had and pretend to be asleep until he, you know, penetrated me. And then I was supposed to wake up.”
But Wiley’s game turned sinister.
“We went away to this house he had in the country,” the woman said. “It was in the spring and I had bad hay fever. I know my sneezing was ruining what was supposed to be this, like, romantic weekend, and he gave me something for my allergies. The next thing I remember, I’m in this dark kind of basement, wearing just a tank top. I went through a couple doors, looking for the bathroom, and when I peed there was blood. Then Evan opened the door, standing there, like, ‘You were so hot last night.’ We still had another whole day together, and we went to the farmers market and he got me a bouquet of daffodils.”
The woman says she never reported the alleged assault to authorities, and stopped responding to his text messages shortly after the weekend, even though he had promised to get her an interview at Richual.
Another woman, Rachelle Tanaka, says she met Evan at a mixer for female entrepreneurs and angel investors around Halloween in 2015. The mixer was a costume party, and Tanaka was dressed as Snow White.
“My company is using VR to disrupt the fitness industry and Evan seemed really interested,” Tanaka says. “He was like, ‘My place is nearby. Can you show me a demo?’ And I said, I can show you a demo right now . . . I had a Google Cardboard viewer in my purse. But he said he couldn’t stay much longer, and so I went with him.”
Tanaka says that Wiley asked her how much funding she was trying to raise, and when she told him the number, he said, “The number one thing that holds women back is their own limiting beliefs.” He suggested she dream bigger.
“Maybe this is naive, but I genuinely thought he was interested in investing in me, in what I was doing,” Tanaka says. “He asked really smart questions about the app I was developing and my marketing plan.”