Article by University of Wisconsin-Lacrosse student newspaper (The Racquet) posts false police report by Nicole Prause (March, 2019)

This page concerns an article published in the University of Wisconsin-Lacrosse student newspaper: The Racquet Investigates: Fight the New Drug. This March, 17th 2019 hit-piece, masquerading as investigative journalism, targeted Fight The New Drug. Inexplicably, it gratuitously contained a section about Gary Wilson, which featured a baseless April 25, 2018 Los Angeles police report filed almost a year earlier, and supplied to The Racquet, by Nicole Prause.

In the days following publication of The Racquet hit-piece, the section about Wilson was first removed, followed by removal of the entire article. We provide background, details on the bogus police report report, and email exchanges between Wilson and The Racquet and University of Wisconsin administrators. Relevant links:

1. Original URL for the March 17th article, “The Racquet Investigates: Fight the New Drug” – https://web.archive.org/web/20190326190532/https://theracquet.org/5838/showcase/the-racquet-investigates-fight-the-new-drug/
2. The two authors of the above article (who are also the editors of the paper): Karley Betzler and Samantha Stroozas
3. The February 7th Samantha Stroozas article attacking Fight The New Drug
4. Gary Wilson’s Twitter response to Stroozas’s February 7th article – https://twitter.com/YourBrainOnPorn/status/1093585735381176320.
5. Nicole Prause’s Unethical Harassment and Defamation of Gary Wilson & Others
6. Nicole Prause’s Unethical Harassment and Defamation of Gary Wilson & Others (page 2)
7. Is Nicole Prause Influenced by the Porn Industry?
8. PDF Documenting Prause’s Malicious Reporting Pattern

Background #1: Since 2013 Nicole Prause has repeatedly proclaimed that she reported Gary Wilson to the LAPD and UCLAPD

This defamatory assertion was addressed in several sections of the two extensive pages chronicling Prause’s defamation and harassment of Gary Wilson and others (page 1, page 2, page 3, and page 4). See especially this section: Ongoing – Los Angeles Police Department and UCLA campus police confirm that Prause lied about filing police reports on Gary Wilson.

The short version: On March 6th, 2013 David Ley and study spokesperson Nicole Prause teamed up to write a Psychology Today blog post about Steele et al., 2013 called “Your Brain on Porn – It’s NOT Addictive.” Its oh-so-catchy title is misleading as it has nothing to do with Your Brain on Porn, yet it marks the first time Ley and Prause openly targeted Gary Wilson. Ley and Prause were in such a hurry that their blog post appeared 5 months before Prause’s EEG study was formally published.

In late July 2013 Prause’s EEG study (Steele et al., 2013) was finally published. It arrived with an inexplicable abundance of press coverage, including this Prause interview by a Psychology Today blogger: New Brain Study Questions Existence of “Sexual Addiction.” A few days later Wilson published his detailed analysis of Steele et al., 2013 and Prause’s dubious claims put forth in the above interview and elsewhere.

Wilson posted it on his Psychology Today blog as Nothing Correlates With Nothing In SPAN Lab’s New Porn Study. Incidentally, Psychology Today, apparently in response to Prause’s threats, ultimately unpublished not only Wilson’s critique of this study, but the critiques of two professional experts in the field who also wrote about her study’s weaknesses. Prause’s findings and unsupported claims in the media were eventually critiqued repeatedly by various other experts and in 8 peer-reviewed papers: Peer-reviewed critiques of Steele et al., 2013. All 8 papers agree with Wilson’s analysis that Steele et al. arguably supports the porn addiction model, and that Prause misrepresented her findings to the press.

Beginning in July, 2013 (a few days after Wilson published his careful critique of Prause’s first EEG study), various usernames began posting defamatory comments wherever Wilson’s name appeared. The comments were very similar in content and tone, falsely claiming that “Wilson has a police report filed on him,” “Wilson is charged with stalking a poor woman,” and that “Wilson has been reported to LAPD (which agrees that he’s dangerous) and the UCLA campus police.” These same false assertions continue to this day in tweets and comments by Prause and by her many sockpuppets. (Multiple screenshots are provided in several sections of the Prause page, such as: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.) Such defamatory claims are made by no one else.

In the beginning Prause employed dozens of fake usernames to post on porn recovery forums, Quora, Wikipedia, and in the comment sections under articles. Prause rarely used her real name or her own social media accounts. That all changed after UCLA chose not to renew Prause’s contract (around January, 2015). Freed from any oversight and now self-employed, Prause finally began to identify Gary Wilson as the “person” she had purportedly reported to the LAPD and the UCLA campus police. In 2018, she embellished her tall-tale, saying that Wilson was twice reported to the FBI.

The facts? It has been over 6 years since Prause’s harassment began, and Wilson has never been contacted by a law enforcement department. Wilson long presumed that Prause had, in fact, filed fraudulent, groundless reports (which were subsequently disregarded), but it turned out Prause was lying – again. In late 2017 a call to the Los Angeles Police Department and the UCLA campus police revealed no report in their systems on a Gary Wilson, nor any report filed by a Nicole Prause.

While police departments do not provide written documentation confirming or denying the existence of a report (to anyone but the person who files them), the FBI does. In late 2018, Wilson filed a Freedom Of Information request with the FBI and the FBI confirmed that Prause was lying: no report had ever been filed on Wilson. See this section for the FOIA request and other documentation exposing Prause as a liar: November, 2018: FBI affirms Nicole Prause’s fraud surrounding defamatory claims.

As part of her full-service pro-porn campaign, Prause has publicly accused almost everyone who has spoken out about the risks of internet porn of serious offenses and crimes – all without one iota of objective evidence. Thus, she has repeatedly lied about reporting others to governing bodies, the police, and also the FBI. (PDF Documenting Prause’s Malicious Reporting Pattern).

For example, Prause ended her libelous Twitter tirade against Nofap and Alexander Rhodes by tweeting that she had reported Rhodes to the FBI for being “cyberstalker.” (See: October, 2018: Prause tweets that she has reported “serial misogynist” Alexander Rhodes to the FBI). Rhodes, like Wilson, submitted an FOIA request to the FBI. As it did with Wilson, the FBI confirmed that Prause had lied about filing an FBI report on Alexander Rhodes (for defending himself against Prause’s obsessive, and suspiciously persistent, defamation). For documentation see: December, 2018: FBI confirms that Nicole Prause lied about filing a report on Alexander Rhodes.

UPDATE #1: Prause is now embroiled in 3 defamation lawsuits: Donald L. Hilton, Jr. v. Nicole Prause, et al., United States District Court for the Western District of Texas San Antonio Division, Case No. 5: 19-CV-00755-OLG; Alexander Rhodes v. Nicole Prause, et al., United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, Case No. 2:19-cv-01366, and Aaron M. Minc, Esq v. Melissa A. Farmer and Nicole R. Prause, Case No: CV-20-937026 in Cuyahoga County, Ohio.

UPDATE #2: Prause attempted to steal Gary Wilson’s trademark. Legal pressure caused her abandon her trademark-squatting application for the marks “Your Brain On Porn” and “YourBrainOnPorn.com.”

UPDATE #3: (August, 2020): Serial defamer & harasser Nicole Pause loses lawsuits to Gary Wilson; court rulings expose Prause the perpetrator, not the victim. In August of 2020 court rulings fully exposed Nicole Prause as the perpetrator, not the victim.

UPDATE #4: The www.RealYourBrainOnPorn.com URL has been granted to YBOP after its former owner(s), in apparent collaboration with Nicole R. Prause, registered and maintained the URL as part of a campaign to de-platform YBOP.

UPDATE #5 (January, 2021): Prause filed a second frivolous legal proceeding against me in December, 2020 for alleged defamation. At a hearing on January 22, 2021 an Oregon court ruled in my favor and charged Prause with costs and an additional penalty. This failed effort was one of a dozen lawsuits Prause publicly threatened and/or filed in the previous months. After years of malicious reporting, she has escalated to threats of actual lawsuits to try to silence those who reveal her close ties to the porn industry and her malicious conduct, or who have made sworn statements in the 3 defamation suits currently active against her.

Background #2: The February 7th Samantha Stroozas article attacking Fight The New Drug (FTND)

In response to the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse’s chapter of CRU (Campus Crusade for Christ) hosting Fight the New Drug, Samantha Strooza published her first FTND hit-piece: Viewpoint: Fight the New Drug, what exactly are you fighting? Stroozas employed multiple logical fallacies in an attempt to discredit FTND. Yet she failed to cite a single peer-reviewed paper to support various “opinions.”

Not surprisingly her “expert” was non-academic David Ley, who lied when claiming that FTND does not rely on peer-reviewed research. (Stroozas chose not to fact check David Ley.) The other scientific “source” was a 500-word Salt lake Tribune op-ed by four disaffected Mormon therapists, which was thoroughly debunked by this response: Op-ed: Utah students need real sex ed and ‘Fight the New Drug’ (2016). Omitted from the response, is the therapists’ laughable assertion that masturbating to porn is neurologically no different from watching football. This Nicole Prause-spawned talking point, which exposes her ignorance of neuroscience, is refuted in this evidence-based article: Correcting Misunderstandings About Neuroscience and Problematic Sexual Behaviors (2017) by Don Hilton, MD.

Dismayed by Stroozas’s biased, factually incorrect propaganda piece, Wilson engaged The Racquet on this Twitter thread, with several tweets linking to hundreds of studies and literature reviews falsifying claims put forth in the article. Stroozas responded with three non-substantive tweets, and Wilson replied:

Faced with overwhelming empirical evidence, student editors Karley Betzler and Samantha Stroozas blocked Wilson on Twitter. This was a critical event as Betzler and Stroozas later authored the March 17th “investigative” article, using it as a vehicle for retaliation against Wilson.

Background #3: The March 17th Betzler & Stroozas Fight The New Drug article contains a fraudulent police report by Nicole Prause.

As stated, the Karley Betzler and Samantha Stroozas article (“The Racquet Investigates: Fight the New Drug”) was so egregious that University of Wisconsin officials forced the student editors first to remove any mention of Wilson, and, a few days later, to delete the entire article.

Like Stroozas’s first hit-piece, the March 17th article was devoid of peer-reviewed citations or statements from academics. Instead, it featured three non-academics who regularly team up on social media to harass and defame both Wilson & Fight the New Drug: Nicole Prause, David Ley, and Daniel Burgess. These links provide examples of Prause, Ley and Burgess engaging in provable defamation and targeted harassment of FTND and Wilson:

• Libelous claim by Prause & Ley that Gary Wilson was fired (March, 2018)
• Nicole Prause’s Unethical Harassment and Defamation of Gary Wilson & Others
• Nicole Prause’s Unethical Harassment and Defamation of Gary Wilson & Others (Page 2)
• Nicole Prause’s Unethical Harassment and Defamation of Gary Wilson & Others (Page 3)
• Nicole Prause’s Unethical Harassment and Defamation of Gary Wilson & Others (Page 4)
• Nicole Prause’s Malicious Reporting and Malicious Use of Process
• Addressing unsupported claims and personal attacks by Daniel Burgess (March, 2018)

So it’s no surprise that the Betzler & Stroozas hit-piece was little more than cobbled together Prause/Ley/Burgess tweets and Facebook comments interspersed with narrative taken from this 2015 Daily Beast article by yet another “ex-Mormon.” All the signs point to Betzler and Stroozas regurgitating whatever Prause/Ley/Burgess furnished.

Betzler & Stroozas publish a baseless police report provided by Nicole Prause

In apparent retaliation for Wilson’s February Twitter comments Betzler & Stroozas created a section about Wilson, which featured a baseless April 25, 2018 (i.e., a year earlier) Los Angeles police report filed, and supplied to The Racquet, by Nicole Prause. (Screenshot of section & police report to the right.)

The purported editorial justification for the defamation of Wilson was an malicious email Prause sent to UWL’s Chapter of Cru. Prause told Cru that they were “promoting sexual harassment in your selection of Fight The New Drug for a presentation.” Prause moves on to defame Wilson, feigning concern (“I was just floored“) that FTND contained a few links to www.yourbrainonporn.com, run by Gary Wilson. Prause tells Cru that “FTND is promoting a person who is stalking and threatening scientists. Like, that is not a joke.”

Actually it is joke, a bad joke. Because Prause is the perpetrator, not the victim here. These extensive pages (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) document hundreds of incidents where Prause has defamed and harassed Wilson and many others, including Fight The New Drug, researchers, medical doctors, therapists, psychologists, colleagues from her brief stint at UCLA, a UK charity, men in recovery, a TIME magazine editor, several professors, IITAP, SASH, the academic journal Behavioral Sciences, its parent company MDPI, US Navy medical doctors, the head of the academic journal CUREUS, and the journal Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity.

Did Prause provide any documentation for her spurious assertions? Nope. Did Betzler or Stroozas ask Wilson or FTND about Prause’s suspect allegations? Nope. Did Betzler or Stroozas even bother to do a Google search? Apparently not, as the top 3 Google returns for “Gary Wilson Nicole Prause” are three of the four primary pages documenting Prause’s harassment and defamation of Wilson and others (including FTND):

The two “investigative journalists” hadn’t bothered to investigate.

Prause’s baseless police report didn’t report any crime, including “stalking”

As explained, Prause had been claiming since 2013 that “a police report has been filed” on Gary Wilson. However, the police never bothered to contact Wilson, and a call in 2017 to the Los Angeles police and the UCLA campus police revealed no such report in their systems. This was not surprising as Prause is a pathological liar and filing a false police report is a crime.

Perhaps motivated by YBOP exposing her lies, Prause brazenly filed her bizarre police police report on April 25, 2018 – almost a year before The Racquet published it. Wilson was unaware of the malicious report until Betzler & Stroozas posted one page of it in their March 17th hit-piece. In a classic example of yellow journalism Betzler & Stroozas mischaracterized it as a “Stalking report filed by Dr. Nicole Prause.” It was not a stalking report as Prause’s never stated that Wilson was in Los Angeles, stalking her. While it was labeled as a “cyberstalking report” the “Suspects Actions” section contained two incidents that were neither cyberstalking nor a crime. A screenshot of the two alleged “crimes”:

What Prause alleges, followed by reality:

“Suspect posted victim name and pic on his website. Suspect refused to remove pictures.”

While screenshots of Prause’s defamatory tweets and her name appear on YBOP, this is not a crime. To the contrary, the pages with screenshots chronicling her ongoing harassment (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) are documenting her misdeeds: libel, harssment and cyberstalking. As documented here, Prause has attempted to hide her egregious behavior by filing 3 unjustified, and unsuccessful, DMCA take-downs to have the screenshots of her incriminating tweets removed.

For those who may not know, DMCA stands for Digital Millennium Copyright Act. A DMCA take-down notice is used to have copyrighted materials removed from a website. Prause filed a DMCA take-down as a backdoor way to have this page chronicling her harassment and defamation removed or gutted. Prause is claiming that screenshots of her defamatory tweets are copyrighted material. Tweets are generally not copyrightable, and hers are not.

“Suspect traveled to Germany to victim’s conference. Suspect was not invited.”

Apart from the fact that attending a conference is not a crime, Prause is lying.

It’s true that Wilson traveled to Germany and attended the 5th International Conference on Behavioral Addictions, which ran from April 23-25 (note that Prause filed her police report on April 25th). The untrue part is that Prause had no intentions of attending the ICBA conference in Germany. Prause has never attended or given a presentation at an ICBA conference. Prause doesn’t believe in behavioral addictions. Throughout her entire career Prause has waged a war against the concept of behavioral addiction, especially sex and porn addiction. She’s an “addiction-denier.”

There’s no better example of this than Prause spending the last 4 years obsessively posting in the comments section of ICD-11 beta draft, for Compulsive sexual behaviour disorder section (CSBD) – the World Health Organization’s new diagnosis suitable for diagnosing porn addiction. Prause posted about 40 comments, more than everyone else combined, doing her best to prevent the CSBD diagnosis from making it into the final manual (you can’t read the comments unless you create a username). Her attempt failed, as “Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder” is now slated for inclusion in the ICD-11.

There is no way in hell that Prause would attend the ICBA as she would run into several members of the ICD-11 CSBD work-group and multiple other researchers who publish high-quality studies supporting the porn addiction model. In fact, several big name researchers who have formally criticized Prause’s flawed EEG studies and were scheduled to present (i.e. Valerie Voon, Marc Potenza, Matuesz Gola, Matthias Brand, Christian Laier). Put simply, Prause would have been surrounded by many of the people she deplores and attacks on social media and behind the scenes (links to these researcher’s critiques of the two Prause EEG studies: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8). Many of these researchers are keenly aware of Prause’s ongoing unprofessional behavior and behind the scenes machinations.

Then we have the obvious: there is no way for Prause to have known in advance that Gary Wilson was attending the ICBA conference. As noted, Prause filed her police report on April 25th, the last day of the ICBA conference. This means that Prause was told of Wilson’s attendance by another conference attendee (Prause’s former UCLA colleague/roommate also attended).

Update – August, 2020: Escalating her stalking to the next level, on February 12, 2020 Prause sought a temporary restraining order against me in LA, based in part on pictures people (quite obviously not me) holding guns and this fraudulent police report. The judge denied the TRO, but set a hearing for a permanent restraining order on March 6, 2020. Then COVID hit. In June, I filed an anti-SLAPP suit against Prause. Basically, an anti-SLAPP is used when someone is filing a frivolous lawsuit (or TRO in my case) to suppress free speech.. On August 6, the Los Angeles County Superior Court ruled that Prause’s attempt to obtain a restraining order against Wilson constituted a frivolous and illegal “strategic lawsuit against public participation” (commonly called a “SLAPP suit”). In essence, the Court found that Prause abused the restraining order process to bully Wilson into silence and undercut his rights to free speech. By law, the SLAPP ruling obligates Prause to pay Wilson’s attorney fees.

A big portion of Prause’s TRO fairy tale involved my trip to Germany to attend the ICBA. Prause committed perjury in her TRO declaration, falsely claiming she was a scheduled presenter for the ICBA, and that I traveled to Germany to “confront her”. I knew this was a lie, so I asked ICBA organizers to confirm that Prause was never asked to present and was never registered for the conference. Their letter confirming that Prause perjured herself:

Caught in another lie.

Moving on, the second part of the Prause police report is equally factually incorrect, yet downright hilarious:

Even though Prause never claimed that Wilson was seen in LA, she describes his “personal oddity” as “wearing sleeping bag” and his weapon of choice as a “long sleave (sic) sweater.” Sounds like a SNL skit. It’s hard not to imagine the police officer biting her lip, trying not to crack-up, as she jots down Prause’s drivel. In any case, Gary Wilson hasn’t been in either Los Angeles or a sleeping bag in years.

In addition to wrongly describing his attire, Prause’s description of Wilson contains multiple inaccuracies: he’s not 65 years old, nor 5’6″, nor 120 pounds.

Did Betzler & Stroozas fact-check a single word in Prause’s bogus police report. Of course not. They had an agenda to fulfill.

In November, 2019, Diana Davison became the first journalist to do an investigative Prause’s claims of victim-hood. Over a week of communications and Prause was unable to provide any evidence other than Prause’s silly LAPD of me attending a German conference Prause lied about wanting to attend. Davison’s expose’ – The Post Millennial expose’ on Nicole Prause. Diana Davison also produced this 6-minute video about Prause’s fake victim-hood and the defamation lawsuits filed against Prause.

The Diana Davison video provided a link to the timeline of events chronicling Prause’s nearly 7-year campaign of harassment, defamation, threats, and false accusations: VSS Academic War Timeline. Below are very revealing comments under the Diana Davison video (in response to an obsessive commenter):

Davison makes fun of Prause’s ludicrous police report where I was supposedly wearing a sleeping bag and armed with a long sleeve sweater (note that Prause’s report never claimed I was seen in LA or that I was stalking her)

When asked to provide any other evidence, Prause ceased communications with Davison

In the same week another investigative reporter Megan Fox of PJ Media produced a similar article about Nicole Prause: “Alex Rhodes of Porn Addiction Support Group ‘NoFap’ Sues Obsessed Pro-Porn Sexologist for Defamation”.

The email exchanges between Gary Wilson and Betzler, Stroozas, University of Wisconsin-Lacrosse representatives

Reproduced below are the emails exchanged between Gary Wilson and Betzler & Stroozas or University of Wisconsin representatives. Relevant commentary is provided. Note: Wilson suspected that Betzler & Stroozas were forwarding his emails to David Ley and Nicole Prause. This was confirmed in the very last email and in David Ley’s rage-tweeting about The Racquet article being deleted, before all the parties were notified.

Gary Wilson’s initial email to editor-in-chief Betzler and the University of Wisconsin-Lacrosse counsel, chancellor, and vice-chancellor (Sunday, March 17th):

From: gary wilson
Sent: Sunday, March 17, 2019 3:43 PM
To: Noah Finco; Karley Betzler
Cc: [email protected]; Joe Gow; Bob Hetzel
Subject: Article in The Raquet contains a false police report naming me

Dear Editor,

Re: The Racquet Investigates: Fight the New Drug

I was alarmed to read in the above article that a false police report may have been filed about me with the LAPD. I have never heard anything about such a report, which makes me doubt it was actually filed. Do you have any evidence suggesting that it was? My guess is that Nicole Prause is too clever to waste police resources by filing a false report such as this, as that is a crime.

On the other hand, if indeed Prause did file this report, nothing in it is true. The police evidently did not believe the report was worth investigating (dated 4-22-18). I certainly have heard nothing about it.

Please be aware that Prause has, for years, been harassing me (and many others who raise concerns about the risks of internet porn over-use). She has made multiple false claims of reporting me to the police and the FBI, as well as claiming that she has a “no-contact order” against me. See:

• Nicole Prause’s Unethical Harassment and Defamation of Gary Wilson & Others
• Nicole Prause’s Unethical Harassment and Defamation of Gary Wilson & Others (page 2)

Distressed by such reports, which I knew about solely via Prause’s ongoing defamatory social media campaign, I called the LAPD a couple of years ago. They explained that they do not supply formal evidence that no reports have been filed, but the woman I spoke with took pity on me and assured me that no report existed. Again, if this latest effort on Prause’s part had indeed been filed, I believe I would have heard from the LAPD by now.

The FBI was more forthcoming when I checked with them. In response to my FOIA request, they assured me that no reports have been filed about me with the FBI. See: FBI affirms Nicole Prause’s fraud surrounding defamatory claims.

As I have never stalked Prause or attended any conference where she was present, there is no way this can be a legitimate report. Kindly remove the report from your publication, so I don’t have to take legal action.

If you would like to do some serious investigative journalism, I would suggest you start with the above links, and also consider this one: Is Nicole Prause Influenced by The Porn Industry?

Please let me know that you have removed the defamatory police report.

Best regards,

Gary Wilson

Co-author Karley Betzler replied on the same day (UWL is on Central Time)

From: Karley Betzler
Sent: Sunday, March 17, 2019 3:24 PM
To: gary wilson
Cc: [email protected]; Joe Gow; Bob Hetzel; Samantha Stroozas
Subject: Re: Article in The Raquet contains a false police report naming me

Good evening,

Thank you for reaching out to us. I have attached the full report we received from Nicole Prause above.

Gary, we will gladly update the article to include a quote from you stating the report is fake.

Thank you for your time,

Karley Betzler

University of Wisconsin-La Crosse

The Racquet – Editor-In-Chief

Gary Wilson replied saying he would soon follow-up with a more extensive response:

From: gary wilson
Sent: Sunday, March 17, 2019 3:51 PM
To: Karley Betzler
Cc: [email protected]; Joe Gow; Bob Hetzel; Samantha Stroozas
Subject: Re: Article in The Raquet contains a false police report naming me

Thanks Karley. The report certainly looks genuine. The issue is that the allegations are false, and were not even investigated by the police. Yet they still appear in your paper. I will send you a more thorough response shortly.

Had you performed an actual investigation you would quickly have found the carefully documented pages I linked to earlier, and this page where Nicole Prause placed my redacted employment documents (Southern Oregon University) on multiple social media outlets and on porn-industry website (falsely claiming that I was fired). See – Libelous Claim that Gary Wilson Was Fired (March, 2018).

Southern Oregon University lawyers were forced to get involved to respond to Prause’s falsehoods. Documentation and the lawyer letters are posted on the above page documenting Prause’s libelous claim that I was fired.

I will email soon with much more.

Best regards

Gary

A few hours later Gary Wilson provided more documentation of Prause’s long history of harassment and defamation, including Prause chronically lying about having filed FBI reports, and copies of Gary Wilson’s FBI report he filed on Prause:

From: gary wilson <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, March 17, 2019 8:40:05 PM

Dear Karley,

It is disturbing that your paper would publish a police report about someone, endorsing its content, without contacting the person named in it for comment, and without doing a more thorough investigation of the person from whom you received such a defamatory item. I would like you to remove the report.

With respect to the allegations in the report (about which I had heard nothing until your paper published it), here are my comments:

I haven’t stalked Dr. Prause or ever considered it. In fact, I haven’t been in LA, or in a sleeping bag, for many years.

It is true that Dr. Prause’s name appears on my website many times, mostly on the two extensive pages carefully documenting her defamation and unending attacks on others and myself. Again, have a look at them so you understand more fully whom you are dealing with when you print content from Dr. Prause.

• Nicole Prause’s Unethical Harassment and Defamation of Gary Wilson & Others
• Nicole Prause’s Unethical Harassment and Defamation of Gary Wilson & Others (page 2)

The pictures she complains of (and wants removed from my website) are screenshots of her tweets, not photographs of her. They document her ongoing campaign of malicious harassment of people who call attention to the harms associated with overuse of internet pornography, myself included. Screenshots of tweets are not copyrightable images, and are therefore not subject to DMCA take-down demands (which she has repeatedly made to my internet provider unsuccessfully). Her trip to tell the police about it doesn’t surprise me. Nor does it surprise me that they did not follow up on her baseless accusations.

The only conference I attended in Germany is one that Dr. Prause would never have been interested in: the International Conference on Behavioral Addictions. Prause is an avid addiction-denier, who regularly fails to cite any of the research by addiction research experts of the type who attended that conference. I registered and attended as an interested member of the public, not as a gate-crasher as she claims. Nor did I announce my attendance publicly, so how would she even know I attended? I have never attempted to attend any conference where Prause was presenting. Nor would I want to.

For your information, I am the author and co-author of two peer-reviewed papers on the subject of internet pornography, and also the author of a very highly regarded lay book on internet pornography and the emerging science of addiction, so my decision to attend such a conference is hardly surprising. If you would like a copy of my book, I’ll send you one.

• Is Internet Pornography Causing Sexual Dysfunctions? A Review with Clinical Reports
• ADDICTA. Eliminate Chronic Internet Pornography Use to Reveal Its Effects
• Your Brain on Porn: Internet Pornography and the Emerging Science of Addiction

Karley, contrary to your claims your paper’s article was not an investigative piece concerning the current state of the research related to porn’s effects (which can found on this page: The Main Research Page). There’s abundant academic research highlighting the risks of internet porn overuse, and that’s a very interesting story indeed.

Instead your journalists attempted to smear Fight The New Drug – in part by smearing me, then connecting me to FTND. But it makes no sense to smear me without considering the pages upon pages of peer-reviewed research linked to on my 11,000-page website: https://www.yourbrainonporn.com/. I must assume FTND linked to my site because the links to all that research are available there.

I would like you to remove the police report smearing me, and any mention on me. It is baseless and malicious, and part of a long line of such activities engaged in by Dr. Prause and her pro-porn colleagues. Please know that Dr. Prause has been under investigation by the California Board of Psychology for more than 2 years for her harassment of others (while posing as the victim). Your paper appears to be helping her with her defamatory campaign. This is unacceptable.

More on police and FBI reports.

As documented on the two pages, Nicole Prause has been claiming since 2013 that she reported me to the LAPD. In the last few years Prause has tweeted dozens of times that she has also reported me (and others) to the FBI (for what, it was never clear). In the beginning Prause employed dozens of fake usernames to post on porn recovery forums, Quora, Wikipedia, and in the comment sections under articles. Prause rarely used her real name or her own social media accounts. That all changed after UCLA chose not to renew Prause’s contract (around January, 2015).

Freed from any oversight and now self-employed, Prause began tweeting she had reported me to the FBI and LAPD. Just know that I have screenshots of about 500 Prause tweets defaming me. It is Prause who is the cyber-stalker. While I wouldn’t have put it past Prause to file false police and FBI reports, it wasn’t until 2016 that I contacted the LAPD. In a phone conversation I asked if a police report by a Nicole Prause, or on Gary Wilson, was in their database. None were. This is documented in this section: Ongoing – Los Angeles Police Department and UCLA campus police confirm that Prause lied about filing police reports on Gary Wilson

Note: while Prause claimed to have filed a police report all the way back in 2013, she provided you with an April, 2018 LAPD report. Put simply, Prause had been lying for 5 years. While the LAPD will not provide written documentation of police reports, the FBI will. In October, 2018 I filed an FOIA request with the FBI to find out if Prause had ever filed a report naming me. As expected the FOIA revealed that Prause has never filed a FBI report, even though she has tweeted this multiple times and posted this same claim on the FTND Facebook page (see this section May 30, 2018: Prause falsely accuses FTND of science fraud, and implies that she has reported Gary to the FBI twice).

For complete documentation, you can see screenshots of my FOIA request and the FBI’s response confirming Prause as lying here: November, 2018: FBI affirms Nicole Prause’s fraud surrounding defamatory claims. In addition, Prause claimed to have reported Alexander Rhodes of NoFap to the FBI. Given the seriousness of Prause’s allegations against him, Alexander Rhodes submitted a Freedom of Information request to the FBI to inquire about possible reports about himself. Again, Prause was exposed as lying. For extensive documentation on Alex Rhodes’s case see: December, 2018: FBI confirms that Nicole Prause lied about filing a report on Alexander Rhodes.

In talking to FBI agents on the phone I was encouraged to file an official FBI report on Nicole Prause. Which I did. Put simply, while Prause filed a silly police report (its not a crime to screenshot defamatory tweets), I was encouraged by an FBI agent to report Prause to both the FBI and the LAPD. My FBI report, which I have yet to place on the Prause pages, is below in a series of screenshots. The last screenshot is my signature confirming that I am aware that lying to the FBI is serious crime:

———-

———-

————–

——————

————————————

Again, I request removal of the spurious Prause “police report,” and any mention of me. Otherwise, I will seek legal counsel in this matter.

Sincerely,

Gary Wilson

Author of the first FTND hit-piece, and managing editor, Samantha Stroozas immediately replied and retaliated by placing all 3 pages of Prause’s malicious LAPD police report into the published article:

From: Samantha Stroozas <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, March 17, 2019 7:01 PM
To: gary wilson; Karley Betzler
Cc: [email protected]; Joe Gow; Bob Hetzel

Dear Gary,

The article is being updated to include the full police report. We understand your claims, but it is not The Racquet’s job to engage in politics between businesses, but more so, to prove further description to publicly accessed information. That is what the police report serves as – a representation of a publicly assessed document that aided in our research. If there is a true problem with this, that is not in regard to politics of institutions that do not involve us, the Office of General Counsel will contact us and we will take care of it. Until then, we appreciate your concerns, but we stand by our piece.

Sam Stroozas

University of Wisconsin – La Crosse

Communication, English & Women Studies

Managing Editor at The Racquet

On Wednesday, March 20th Gary Wilson directly emails the 3 senior counsels for the University of Wisconsin system. The University of Wisconsin-Lacrosse counsel, chancellor, and vice-chancellor are once again copied. Student editors Betzler & Stroozas are omitted from this and all later emails sent by Wilson.

From: gary wilson <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, March 20, 2019 11:23 AM
To: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]
Cc: [email protected]; Joe Gow; Bob Hetzel
Subject: Baseless, defamatory police report reproduced in “The Racquet”

University of Wisconsin – La Crosse

To Whom It May Concern:

RE: Baseless, defamatory police report reproduced in The Racquet

This email concerns a highly defamatory article that appeared in La Crosse’s school newspaper, The Racquet: https://theracquet.org/5838/showcase/the-racquet-investigates-fight-the-new-drug/. This is another request to remove the groundless and maliciously filed police report about me that appears in it, along with the defamatory and disproven allegations the editors gratuitously included in the article. (The piece is purportedly an expose about a quite different organization that is critical of pornography, Fight the New Drug, or “FTND.”) See email thread below current email.

As explained to The Racquet editors (with much supportive documentation), the person who filed the police report (and who supplied it to the editors in full) is a known harasser who is under investigation by the State of California for similar attacks against myself and many others: Nicole Prause, a former UCLA researcher whose suspect coziness with the porn industry has been documented. For at least 6 years she has been claiming to have filed police and FBI reports against me. When (in 2017) I finally confirmed with the LAPD that she had not, in fact, done so, and made that fact public, she filed this report.

I first learned of this police report, which says it was filed almost a year ago, a few days ago, when I saw it being tweeted twice in one day by Dr. Prause (as well as her colleague Dr. Ley) with a link to The Racquet. This was extremely distressing. Apparently, the police correctly identified the report as unwarranted last year, as their investigation had not extended to even informing me of its existence. A quick examination of what the report contains reveals that it doesn’t actually allege any illegal behavior, but appears to have been submitted solely with the malicious intention of furthering Prause’s ongoing campaign of defamation (and “no platforming”).

The Racquet editors, however, imply in their very biased article that this defamatory report is legitimate – despite the extensive documentation calling into question Prause’s motives and willingness to exploit bureaucracies for her own ends. For example, Prause has made claims for years that she has (also) filed FBI reports about me. Via a FOIA request, I recently verified that she has not dared misuse FBI resources in this way, as filing fraudulent FBI reports could result in criminal repercussions. In light of The Racquet piece, I have now written the LAPD to find out what remedies they offer for malicious misuse of their resources.

The editors of The Racquet did not seek my comment before publishing the defamatory police report, which they falsely characterized as accusing me of “stalking and threatening” Prause. They have apparently made no effort to confirm with the LAPD that this report is in any way merited. They have also refused to remove the image of the report and refused to include my corrective input in their article, implying instead that I believe the police report is fake, as opposed to baseless and malicious. They ignored the years of evidence that Dr. Prause consistently works in the best interest of the porn industry and has repeatedly defamed (and endeavored to “no platform”) various people and organizations who raise questions about the effects of internet pornography use. In fact, the editors’ response to my concerns was to put up all three pages of the report(!), in place of the screenshot of the first page that was originally published.

In short, given their evident pro-porn stance and previous communications with me on Twitter.com where I commented upon their first article, The Racquet editors appear to be acting with malice and recklessness and without attention to basic journalistic standards. I am conferring with legal counsel and intend to pursue all available remedies to address this defamation. I sincerely hope this will be unnecessary, but if the report, and all mentions of me, are not promptly removed from the article, I will have little choice.

Incidentally, this is not the first time Prause has made it necessary for me to waste the time of a university’s administrators and general counsel. See – Libelous Claim that Gary Wilson Was Fired from Southern Oregon University (March, 2018).

Details

On February 7^th The Racquet editor Samantha Stroozas published a supposed investigatory piece attacking FTND. It was devoid of peer-reviewed references to support its few substantive assertions, and like the current piece, most of the article consisted of ad hominem attacks. On Twitter, I politely responded to Stroozas’s February 7th article with several tweets containing substantial research that corrected her article’s research-related claims. My tweets: https://twitter.com/YourBrainOnPorn/status/1093585735381176320. Stroozas and her coauthor blocked me, refusing to address the content of my tweets or the numerous studies I cited. This was their prerogative, although responsible journalistic ethics might have suggested another course of action, such as correcting or addending the article to factually represent the current state of research, the preponderance of which supports the existence of porn-related problems, as well as the addiction model.

On March 17^th, Stroozas and Betzler published their second hit piece on FTND. I am not employed by FTND. I run an independent website (About Us page) with more than 11,000 pages, most of them abstracts and links related to peer-reviewed research on behavioral addiction, and self-reports taken from those who experiment with giving up internet porn. In the interest of furthering the scientific debate, I critique some of the sketchier research about porn, as well as unsubstantiated claims made by pro-porn advocates/researchers. I am also the author or co-author of two peer-reviewed papers, and the author of a popular, highly regarded book on pornography’s effects.

For reasons that are entirely unclear, The Racquet editors “enhanced” their second smear of FTND by including defamatory remarks about me and reproducing Prause’s baseless police report. I can think of no reason to include me in an article about FTND, other than malicious retaliation for my unwanted tweets in February, 2018.

As explained, when I saw the piece with the groundless report, Stroozas and Betzler were informed of Prause’s long and carefully documented history of defaming and harassing me and others (most of it available here and here), including:

• documentation of Prause’s false claims about FBI reports (and years of baseless claims about non-existent police records),
• my own FBI report on Prause’s defamatory use of bogus “claims to have filed with the FBI,”
• information about a California Board of Psychology investigation into Prause’s harassment (in progress), and
• documentation of multiple Prause attacks on others and myself (essentially targeting anyone who dares to inform the public about the risks of internet porn overuse to some users).

Further information

Stroozas made false statements in her email response to me, incorrectly claiming that Prause’s spurious police report is “publicly accessed information”:

“The article is being updated to include the full police report. We understand your claims, but it is not The Racquet’s job to engage in politics between businesses, but more so, to prove further description to publicly accessed information. That is what the police report serves as – a representation of a publicly assessed document that aided in our research”.

The LPAD police report is not public. In fact, it cannot be retrieved by any member of the public other than the person who filed it. It was supplied to the editors by Prause.

The Racquet editors did not contact me to confirm or deny Prause’s assertions. If they had actually performed an investigation (as claimed), or even bothered to Google-search ‘Gary Wilson and Nicole Prause’, the top returns would have been the three extensive pages documenting Prause’s harassment of me and many others (1, 2, 3).

Why didn’t the editors interview independent researchers or mental health professionals doing work with porn addiction and problematic porn use? Why did they only talk to porn-addiction deniers who are not academics and not affiliated with any university? Why did these editors choose to feature Prause, who appears to have a cozy relationship with porn producers and performers; has asked for and apparently received “assistance” from the lobbying arm of the porn industry, the Free Speech Coalition (including possibly obtaining subjects for some of her research via the FSC); has been photographed attending porn industry awards shows (including an exclusive industry-member-only event), and much more.

Why didn’t Stroozas and Betzler discover in their so-called investigation that Prause’s most infamous papers and controversial studies have been critiqued by experts in the peer-reviewed literature no less than 16 times?

Steele et al., 2013: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

Prause et al., 2015: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

Prause & Pfaus, 2015. Letter to the editor by Richard A. Isenberg MD (2015)

It appears that Prause also furnished the editors with her friends/allies to be featured in the The Racquet article. Specifically, Nicole Prause, David Ley, and Daniel Burgess often work together to defame porn skeptics in social media attacks. I have documentation of all three working together to post defamatory comments about me and FTND, among others.

Why were the editors contacted to write these pieces in the first place? Have they considered why Prause’s tiny company is heavily staffed with press experts, and why so much of her focus appears to be on generating positive press about pornography? Have they asked Prause why she is attempting to trademark my site’s URL and the name of my book, almost 9 years after I started using the name? Have they asked Prause why she has falsely accused almost every major porn skeptic of very serious offenses and crimes?

If the editors were eager to investigate FTND and its purported ties to the Mormons, were they equally eager to ask Prause about her potential ties to the porn industry? If the editors are concerned about free speech, have they asked Prause why she repeatedly attempts fraudulent use of the DMCA law to censor the screenshots of evidence about her tweets from the pages where they appear? Finally, why am I gratuitously included in an article that’s supposed to be about FTND?

On a more personal note, given this article remains published virtually as-is, I am disappointed that your university appears to sanction its journalism students not actually conducting investigative journalism, but merely acting as a platform for allies of the pornography industry to publish defamation. I would hope that given this extensive documentation, the editors will be appropriately reprimanded for not following basic journalistic principles, and trying instead to push a particular view while deliberately publishing defamation, opting not to make corrections when presented with documentation, and excluding the preponderance of research which supports the existence of porn-related problems, possibly with the motivation of retaliating because I factually criticized their earlier article about pornography.

I would like a response to this letter within a week. In the meantime, I will continue the initial steps of acquiring legal counsel to represent me in this matter.

Thank you for your anticipated prompt attention.

Best regards,

Gary Wilson

Faculty advisor Lei Zhang replies on the same day, informing Wilson that that story had been removed. In reality, Prause’s baseless police report and any mention of Wilson was removed, but the rest of the article remained. Notice Lei Zhang stating that she hopes we “can move on to more important matters” – implying that destroying a person’s reputation is of little significance.

From: Lei Zhang <>
Sent: Wednesday, March 20, 2019 3:35 PM
To: [email protected]
Cc: Vitaliano Figueroa; Samantha Stroozas; Karley Betzler; Betsy Morgan
Subject: The story published on the Racquet

Dear Gary,

I am the faculty advisor for the student newspaper, The Racquet. I heard about your complaint during the spring break. I have advised the editors to remove the story from the website.

My sincere apologies. I hope we can put this behind us and move on to more important matters.

Best,

Lei

Wilson replies the following day, Thursday, March 21st:

From: gary wilson <>
Date: Thursday, March 21, 2019 at 2:58 PM
To: Lei Zhang <>
Subject: Re: The story published on the Racquet

Dear Lei,

I appreciate your kind apology.

Are you aware that the story has not been removed as you apparently believed when you wrote me? It is still quite misleading, although it no longer defames me personally.

Incidentally, I suspect that most people would consider the publication of a baseless, malicious police report a highly “important matter.”

Best regards,

Gary Wilson

Faculty advisor Lei Zhang replies on the next day, Friday, March 22nd:

From: Lei Zhang <>
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2019 10:06 AM
To: gary wilson
Cc: Vitaliano Figueroa; Samantha Stroozas; Karley Betzler
Subject: Re: The story published on the Racquet

Dear Gary,

The student newspaper is an independent organization. The editors decided to publish the story after removing the section about the police report. If the story contains any more false or defamatory information, please let me know. The editors will remove this type of information. The writers spent a lot of time working on the story. I agree with their decision to publish it.

The story was written in the third-person voice. The views expressed in the story belong to the interviewees, for example, the psychology professor at UWL. If you disagree with the views expressed in the story, you are welcome to contribute an opinion piece. The Racquet welcomes diverse views.

At our next advisory meeting, I will discuss with the editors how to produce a more balanced story and double check information for accuracy.

Have a good weekend,

Lei Zhang, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor

Gary Wilson replies on the same day:

From: gary wilson <>
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2019 3:52 PM
To: Lei Zhang
Cc: Vitaliano Figueroa; [email protected]; Joe Gow; Bob Hetzel; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]
Subject: Re: The story published on the Racquet

Dear Lei,

Thank you for your message.

I would suggest you contact Fight The New Drug about the accuracy of your editors’ claims concerning its organization.

As chronicled in earlier emails, both this article and the February 7^th Stroozas article appear to violate The Racquet’s own guidelines as outlined on the letter to the editor page (“The Racquet reserves the right to deny publication if the story does not address all sides of the issues with accuracy and clarity”). Both articles by Stroozas were one-sided and evidently meant to smear their target (and others), while simultaneously ignoring the preponderance the empirical evidence establishing the risks of internet porn overuse.

My complaint to UW is supported by my Twitter exchange with Sroozas where I countered her incorrect statements and unsupported claims with peer-reviewed studies. In response to empirical research, Stroozas blocked me and then retaliated in the March 17^th, 2019 article by reproducing a malicious police report and Dr. Prause’s falsehoods in an article that had nothing to do with me.

When Stroozas and Betzler were informed on March 17^th of Dr Prause’s long, documented history of harassing and libeling me, and the falseness of Prause’s police report, Stroozas retaliated a second time, spitefully publishing all 3 pages of the report. Despite CC’s to university officials on all emails, the defamatory police report remained online for 4 days.

The internet is forever, and the police report and associated text were likely captured for later defamatory use by some of the unethical people your editors continue to validate in their (still) published hit pieces.

My legal advisors assure me that the University of Wisconsin’s students’ actions have already defamed me irreparably. I’ll have to give further thought to next steps.

Best regards,

Gary Wilson

On Wednesday, March 27th student editor emails the following short note announcing the removal of the entire article. In a break from protocol Karley Beltzer cc’s Gary Wilson’s harassers, David Ley, Nicole Prause and Daniel Burgess (along with several lawyers and university officials):

Karley Betzler <>

Wed 3/27/2019 2:34 PM

Good afternoon,

I hope you’re all having a good day. Sam Stroozas and I have made the decision to remove our article from The Racquet’s website. This was not an ideal situation for us, but we felt as if we had no other choice due to lack of support.

We stand by our commitment to providing a necessary conversation to the UWL public and beyond. The Racquet has forever been changed for the better by this experience.

Best,

Karley Betzler & Sam Stroozas

University of Wisconsin-La Crosse

The Racquet – Editor-In-Chief and Managing Editor

Addendum

Evidence that Betzler and Stroozas had been forwarding Gary Wilson’s emails to Nicole Prause and David Ley. First, Dr. Ley quickly retorted with the sole response, ranting about Wilson:

David Ley <>

Wed 3/27/2019 3:44 PM

indeed. I warned you that wilson regularly intimidates journalists through threats and bully tactics.

He should run for president