By David Futrelle
Porn actress Mercedes Carrera was enthusiastically embraced by the Gamergate crowd after she spoke out in favor of the journalism ethics movement misogynistic harassment campaign in its heyday back in 2014.
She was regularly celebrated on Kotaku in Action, Reddit’s main Gamergate hub, won lavish praise from prominent Gamergates like Mike Cernovich, and even made an appearance in the star-crossed Gamergate “documentary” The Sarkeesian Effect. She once described herself as “the waifu #GamerGate deserves.”
But it wasn’t only Gamergates who embraced her and her reactionary, antifeminist politics. As Jared Holt notes in an article on Right Wing Watch, Carrera
was the subject of glowing articles from right-wing media at the time, landing flattering features at The Daily Caller and Breitbart, and appearing on programs hosted by right-wing media figures who supported Gamergate, including Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes and Infowars personality Paul Joseph Watson.
The Daily Caller piece was especially effusive in its praise. “Carrera talks fast and thinks fast,” gushed writer Patrick Bissett.
She sees patterns and connections far quicker than the average person, an ability she attributes to her Asperger’s syndrome.
The article concludes by declaring that “wherever the name Gamergate is mentioned, the name Mercedes Carrera won’t be too far behind.”
Now that she and her porn director boyfriend Jason Whitney (known in the business as Daemon Cins) have been arrested and charged with multiple counts of sexually abusing a child under the age of 10, many of the people who became her fans because of Gamergate are channeling Mariah Carey, pretending that Carrera was never really a big part of the movement and “wondering” why anyone is even talking about Gamergate in 2019 anyway?
The charges against Carrera are serious indeed: she and her boyfriend are accused of repeatedly abusing her 9-year-old daughter over a four-month period. Police say they found evidence corroborating the girl’s accusations during their search of the house, alongside meth and two loaded handguns. Police also say there may be more victims.
Carrera, in a statement, has proclaimed her innocence, saying that the accusations are a ploy by the girls’s father, and Carrera’s ex-partner, to gain custody of the girl. “The charges are absolutely false and horrifying,” she wrote, “and a last ditch effort to keep me from contact with my daughter for the rest of my life.”
While many of her longtime fans (or perhaps now former fans) are holding out hope that she’s telling the truth, their support for her has been largely limited to bland restatements of the phrase “innocent until proven guilty.”
They are a little less inhibited when it comes to denying that she was ever really a big-name Gamergater at all. Which is utter nonsense
During Gamergate, and for several years afterwards, the regulars on the Kotaku In Action subreddit frequently celebrated her as a woman “who gets it” in threads with titles like Mercedes Carrera drops a couple of truth bombs and Mercedes Carrera tells SJWs to F OFF!
One of her fans in the latter thread raved:
Another added:
Now, though, many Kotaku in Action regulars are acting like they barely know who she is.
These are all from a single thread; there are more.
Meanwhile, alt-lite conspiracymonger and former Gamergate celebrity Mike Cernovich — a Pizzagate promoter with a long history of baselessly smearing his opponents as pedophiles –has got to be even more embarrassed by his friendship with alleged child sexual abuser Carrera, whom he described in a 2015 blog post as “highly intelligent,” “strong and smart ,” and “thoughtful, intelligent, and fiercely independent.” (Cernovich could probably benefit from an editor, who might have removed a few of these redundancies.)
Now that this “thoughtful” woman has been arrested for allegedly doing the exact same horrific thing that Cernovich regularly accuses his opponents of doing, he has said not a word on the subject — and seems to have deleted any past Tweets he sent her way, though you can still see her side of the extensive discussions they appear to have had.
In his Daily Caller profile of the now-accused porn star, Bissett declared that “[p]ersonal responsibility is a defining motif for Carrera, and one she returns to repeatedly during our conversations.” Apparently Cernovich and Carrera’s many other former Gamergater fans don’t take personal responsibility any more seriously than Carrera herself seems to.
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