Claire Lehmann's dubious priors.

Pre Quillette, Claire Lehmann attacked and destroyed a male friend who criticised feminism by accusing him of misogyny. Quillette then went on to defend James Damore for exactly the same thing.

Darwinian Gender Studies (DGS) was a closed (secret on FB) academic online salon I created in 2008. Many of the world's top researchers in evolutionary psychology were members, including David Schmitt and Geoffrey Miller. I created it because I foresaw the culture war. Claire Lehmann was one of my admins. The only female admin. I kept the group small, under 1k, to maintain trust & the quality of the debate. I trusted my admins implicitly, like family. Which admin ended up being the one to try and destroy the community? The woman.

Claire developed her ideas & met a huge amount of her future contacts in DGS, while she studied at uni. I gave her free rein to promote her writing & she often came to us for ideas as her career grew. I was extremely happy for her and believed she could take the ideas we were discussing further. I was a working-class single mother of a child with Aspergers, and I too also had Aspergers. She often said she would mention DGS in interviews, but never did.

Then something very odd happened.

Claire's uni supervisor posted something about female intrasexual competition with the comment, "This is evidence in favor of your hypothesis that feminism is an arena for female competition, Claire"

I laughed reading it & immediately posted:

"Are you confusing me & Claire? This is my hypothesis."

The man replied, "No. This is the subject of Claire's dissertation."

Claire liked the comment

Now I was pissed off. I replied that this was my original hypothesis and posted links to published articles to prove it.

Silence.

Soon after this, Claire Lehmann dropped out of university.

She then also announced the launch of a project called Quillette which was modelled on the academic, critical thinking and feminist critical style of DGS. She asked members to contribute, which they did.

Unbeknown to me at the time, Claire had also started undermining the group via back channels. She focused on one of her fellow admins discussing his character and his “misogyny”. After she'd secured allies she made her move which is documented in screenshots here

Quillette then went on to defend James Damore (quite rightly) after he was accused of misogyny for criticising feminist ideology in the now infamous Google memo.

She flounced from the group but later requested to join again. In the spirit of goodwill, I allowed it and the man she had defamed was the one to approve her request. I was naive, as little did I know she only returned to delete many of her posts.

After Quillete launched, it was clear that Claire wanted the world to believe that Quillette sprang from her mind alone and was not a product of her many years in the group.

Now, for that misogyny claim - screenshots below:

The screenshots show the beginning of a discussion about feminism within DGS. Studies. In the discussion, another mod is very critical of feminism and Claire joins the conversation accusing him, not only of misogyny in this discussion but of being a misogynist personally. This man had been a good friend of Claire’s for years and this attack came out of the blue. This was in 2015, just before she left to launch Quillette. Claire could just have left with everyone’s blessing, instead she went scorched earth. Decide for yourself. That’s what this is for.

Endnotes:

• Peter was in a bad mood that day. He’d recently split up with his girlfriend.

• This occurred 17th October 2015. Claire had just announced she was setting up Quillette.

• Claire had been a member for around five years, I cannot say exactly as she came back after this flounce and deleted alot of her posts. She was one of my moderators for most of that time. Peter too was a moderator and we were all (we believed) great friends. I believe she caused such a drama in DGS as she left in an attempt to destroy it so she would not have to tell people that this was the place that inspired Quillette. Indeed, in a later interview with Jordan Peterson, she was asked where she had been and what her inspirations had been. She lied bu commission, telling Peterson that she’d just been on Twitter.

• Peter was devastated by this attack. He withdrew from academia. The DGS forum was a small community with many of the world’s top academics as active members. He has, I think it is accurate to say, never recovered. He had thought Claire a friend before this.

• It's fair to say I was pretty heartbroken too. I loved and trusted Claire. She had offered to be my and my son’s sponsor should we move to Australia, as I was trying to escape a toxic relationship at the time…

  

  (I’d deleted the post above as I didn’t want my estranged partner to see it)

  …But I loved all my admins. We were a family and I could not throw Peter under the bus. Holding up to that principle has cost me dearly in terms of a career as a writer. I’ve removed personal chatter from the following.

  

  

  

  

  from this, to…

  

• One post that is missing (deleted by Claire I imagine) is one that, with hindsight, I should have seen what was coming. Her then PhD supervisor mentioned “Claire’s hypothesis about feminism being the arena for female intrasexual competition. I jokingly responded, asking if he’d mixed us up because that was my hypothesis. He said no, he hadn’t got us mixed up. I posted an essay in which I'd outlined this hypothesis and said, as magnanimously as possible, that I did not mind anyone picking up my ideas & running with them, but to please not simply erase me from the algorithm. Because I felt I’d dealt with it well, I assumed no hard feelings. Claire dropped her course soon after anyway. Looking back this was supremely naive of me. I want to add here, I was also (or so I thought) friends with Jamie, who was working in a cinema in London at the time. He once told me, “People like us need to stick together.” …It’s all very Prince Myshkin, or maybe in my case, more like Maria. In this sense, I was, and still am, an idiot.

• I haven’t checked yet but I think this was around the time of the movie Suffragette and I did notice Claire became quite militant at the time, even changing her Twitter profile blurb to say “pamphleteer”. I’m aspie: massive hard drive, minimal RAM.

• What’s especially ironic, is that one of the first things Quillette did was to (rightly) defend James Damore after he lost his job at Google for criticising feminism.

• I revealed the screenshots in 2020 on Twitter & Lehmann responded saying she had no regrets and would not hesitate to do the same again.

• My personal thoughts/analysis is that this - and whst came after- was an almost perfect example cf covert female intrasexual competition. The actual target was not Peter at all, but me and the forum as a whole. I don’t Claire wanted to have to have to admit that Quillette had an antecendant. This is supported by what she told Jordan Peterson in one of her first interviews with him. I’ve not personally watched it so this is only what I’ve been told which is: Peterson directly asks her where she had been before Quilette & she says something like ‘On Twitter” and then says she doesnt want to talk abour it. This may not count as a direct lie, but it's certainly a violation of one of Peterson's 12 Rules to, “just tell the truth.”

• She did take a lot of people with her. People who I'd also thought of as friends, such as Geoff Miller.

• Miller was referring to Milo’s hair in the last post.

• Quillette remains a great publication that, declaired (sic ;) or not, embodies the ethos of the Darwinian Gender Studies intellectual forum, re free speech and intellectual heterodoxy. An ethos its founding editor does not personally have.

• Claire is a good business woman.

On 3rd October 2015 (2 weeks before the above occurred) Claire announced she was launching “a commercial project” which was to become Quillette. Everyone was supportive. For the “many years” (In Claire’s own words) she had been on the forum, I had without reservation had allowed her to promote her Wordpress blog, where she quickly grew influence - which had led to media requests.

I thought we were all on the same team. As an aspie, I’m not a great business person, and I loved that the ideas and ethos of the forum could (see screenshots below) be promoted by her.

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A few more interesting screenshots just for fun (and the record) - she seems to have deleted all posts up until March 2014)

FYI: About the Darwinian Gender Studies (DGS) forum.