One of Twitter’s most prominent antifa doxing activists has been accused of blackmail, racism and engaging in predatory behaviour toward underage girls, according to a Medium post made by an alleged former housemate. Additionally, the allegations have brought renewed scrutiny to the “cyber warrior’s” rise to antifa stardom.
By day, Christian Michael Exoo is a 38-year-old library supervisor at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York. However—online—Exoo uses the moniker “AntiFashGordon.” He has gained a large following in left-wing networks for his activism with antifa and by releasing “doxes,” or personal information, of his ideological opponents to his 25,000 followers on Twitter.
Exoo proudly boasts on his Twitter biography that he has gotten people fired from jobs, removed from schools and kicked out of homes.
Before becoming an online antifa activist, Exoo contributed to Salon, Alternet, Truthout, and other left-wing media outlets. Exoo also worked for Weave News, a left-wing citizen-journalist and activist group that was founded at and funded by St. Lawrence University, where his father, mother, and brother are employed as professors. Exoo was also a one-time aspiring actor.
With an undergraduate degree in information science, Exoo teaches doxing training seminars under the euphemism of “open-source intelligence research.” In 2017, he trained students at St. Lawrence at a conference organized by Weave News. In one presentation slide to his class, it read: “In this exercise, we are going to find the Facebook profile of our subject, and find all of the posts he’s ‘liked.’”
Victims of doxing suffer public shaming and often real-word harassment and death threats. Left-wing defenders of doxing say it is necessary to reveal and punish the far-right. But Jesse Morton, a former Islamic radical and now counter-extremism expert, says that victims of doxing are often radicalized further because of it.
“There are certain cases where it has silenced ideologues clearly calling to violent extremism, but the effects are often counterproductive,” Morton says. “It only cements the views of those doxed, can trigger violence and further entrenches extremists in the view that they’re under attack.”
Morton spent three-and-a-half years in federal prison for his involvement with an Islamic terrorist group. Since 2016, Morton has been involved in counter-terrorism work and currently leads Light Upon Light, a Washington D.C.-based counter-hate nonprofit.
“[AntiFashGordon’s] efforts only fuel the far-right’s propaganda,” Morton says. “They provide evidence for the victimization narrative that drives recruitment and thereby make it incredibly easy to replace any member doxed into leaving with several more recruits.”
Under his pseudonym, Exoo has been interviewed and praised in numerous stories for his role in being a powerful antifa “cyber warrior.” But a recent Medium post by “Sora M.C.,” who claims to be an ex-housemate of Exoo, accuses him of frequently using a slew of racial slurs in the course of his “investigative” work and of general predatory behaviour.
The anonymous author writes: “I’m here because I’m a young, Black, transgender activist delivering a warning to organizers once again after having been psychologically manipulated by an egotistical and power-abusing person who has a pattern of inappropriate behaviour on- and off-line.”
The writer continues: “His motivations are primarily to aggrandize himself and make him feel admired by others—to be a white saviour.”
The author describes a time where the two were in a grocery store together, and Exoo allegedly seemed excited that an underage girl had flirted with him.
The author also goes on to state other examples of how Exoo allegedly acted in an abusive or inappropriate manner that left them uncomfortable on multiple occasions, including one incident of alleged inappropriate touching.
“Sora M.C.,” says some of these allegations were previously published on Twitter last summer, but they deleted it after Exoo allegedly held their personal items “hostage.”
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| Christopher Exoo is a hypocrite. He has no room to talk about victimization of trans people |
On AntiFash Gordon: A Communique for Black, Brown, Indigenous Leftists
Note for readers: My purpose in writing this letter is not to attack AntiFash Gordon ([Christopher Exoo]), but rather to warn other organizers, especially POC, who may be in his circles. I understand that many followers of [Christopher Exoo] will deny these allegations or deflect to excuses. For this reason, this letter is specifically addressed to the Black, Brown, and Indigenous community. The first section summarizes [Christopher Exoo]’s abusive, racist, and manipulative behaviors. The following section will expand upon those behaviors and provide proof.
I’m here because I’m a young, Black, transgender activist delivering a warning to organizers once again after having been psychologically manipulated by an egotistical and power-abusing person who has a pattern of inappropriate behavior on- and off-line. I’m not over it, and I’m done being quiet after being let down once already.
I, and possibly others, can tell countless anecdotes of [Christopher Exoo]’s inappropriate, predatory, self-important, casually racist, and generally upsetting behaviors from before and after his gleaming Twitter account. These either demonstrate that he should not be in the prominent and admired position he is in and/or that this white-led and white-dominated project that he has taken up arms in, as evidenced by this latest behavior of breaking bread with White-Nationalists-turned-”Antifascists” is a sham, an ego trip, and increasingly, a liability to our community.
To outline, I want to highlight these key stories, which I expand upon in the following sections.
[Christopher Exoo] gradually manipulated me into dependence and loyalty to him through a combination of calculated verbal praise and “platonic” affection until it became wearisome and inconvenient, at which time he began acting callous, resentful, and mocking, which devastated my mental health, perception of reality, and sense of fundamental safety.
[Christopher Exoo] ignored me for several hours to over a day on more than one occasion when the two of us travelled together on long-distance road trips, causing obvious emotional harm to me, and when I explained why his actions were harmful, he was unapologetic.
When I first told my story, [Christopher Exoo] blackmailed me into removing it by keeping my things, including my birth certificate, hostage.
[Christopher Exoo] has a history of blatantly racist performances in his past infiltration work, including saying the N-word and other racial slurs to appear convincingly racist to active White Supremacists, but he has righteously implied on his timeline that he is opposed to this methodology, and he lashed out at me when I criticized him privately for misrepresenting himself in this way. Now [Christopher Exoo] is outspoken in his comradeship with “former” White Supremacists.
Part 1
[Christopher Exoo] had always, as long as I’d known him, been obsessed with infiltration. The anthropological and sociological aspect of manipulating the interpersonal dynamics of fascists has always appeared invigorating for him; camouflaging himself among them pleased him because he believed he could speak their language perfectly, yet at the same time he was putting in the real work to protect our communities in a way that the state cannot. It’s evident from his Twitter bio that he lives to stir things up. Yet, increasingly, he is peddling the notion that there is still another chance for consequence-weary White Supremacists to be his friends, barely ideologically reformed, and frequently there is evident a pattern of fetishistic behavior with regard to Black, Brown and Indigenous people following this “reformed” period, which is then used as a cover against allegations of continued White Supremacist rhetoric on their part.
And for the time that I knew him, this was his contribution, aside from evangelizing a largely anarchism-influenced philosophy on mutual aid and community self-defense that he professed, and by all indications still professes, to aggrandize himself for being generous and selfless — a Good Ally — all while using his platform to amass popularity, a fandom, and a large amount of admirers. During his Twitter’s nascency last fall, [Christopher Exoo] talked up his enthusiasm for building a reputation and literal “clout” with thin irony over coffee on many a morning. It is for this reason that I use no reservation in considering the entire gestalt a clout chase and a grift: [Christopher Exoo] said so himself from the outset, and his actions have demonstrated self-promotion across a long timeline.
It is well evident that a doxxer is a minor celebrity akin to a digital folk hero more than he is an activist when his “antifascism” itself has demonstrated a pronounced susceptibility to fascist creep over time and that Black, Brown and Indigenous activists are being attacked to uphold “former” White Supremacists. [Christopher Exoo], if he ever had genuine aspirations with his platform, had been increasingly reveling in his publicity when I complained to him in the Spring of 2019 — after I moved out of his home — that the community around his content was becoming increasingly racist, misogynistic, sexually fetishistic, generally emblematic of the “dirtbag left”, and that he wasn’t making good on his repeated lip service while we had been housemates to not condone this kind of culture. He dismissed me with the selfsame contempt he is now beginning to display toward a segment of Twitter’s objections to his endorsement of “former” White Nationalists. After all the negative attention [Christopher Exoo] has attracted from fascists, including death threats, to literally befriend a some if they’re sufficiently defanged and willing to benefit his platform is farcical. And it’s antifascist in name only.
Part 2
I have never recanted my allegations about [Christopher Exoo], which I posted on Twitter this past Summer. I have never apologized, as I have never made false statements. I deleted my tweets because he twisted my arm to do it. And I initially said that I couldn’t say why, fearing retaliation from him, but in other exchanges on my public-but-small timeline I have let it be no secret that I removed those tweets under duress because [Christopher Exoo] was holding my birth certificate in exchange for the erasure of my statements. In [Christopher Exoo]’s own words about himself last winter — and I remember this day like it was yesterday — he “[knows] how to make [his] hands look clean.”
Where my allegations weren’t being outright denied and gaslit by his collaborators like Gwen Snyder (@gwensnyderPHL), a personality so thoroughly enamored with [Christopher Exoo] and his gimmick that she could not entertain the idea that he could be an abuser, or racist, when I approached her privately with my allegations this Summer, they were largely ignored and left to wither. But on August 7th, he contacted me indirectly, to tell me that he thought my tweets were a hazard to his privacy and demanded that I remove them. He had been refusing, for months, my demand for my belongings and my birth certificate that he didn’t send to the hospital after I had an emotional crisis while living with him, so he would agree to mail them back to me, if I deleted the tweets.
[Christopher Exoo] feels threatened by my speaking out against him and his behavior, and his ilk like Scott disingenuously misuse words like “threat” and “defamation” because [Christopher Exoo] & Co.’s “Who protects us? We protect us! ❤️🖤✊” and anti-toxic-masculinity talk are a social justice veneer for their true nature. This is what grifters do.
In public, and on Twitter, [Christopher Exoo] will lie and imply that it is against his ethos to not say racial slurs in his work as in infiltrator, to gain the confidence and trust of his anti-racist and antifascist followers, some of whom may be Black, Brown, and Indigenous. In private, he did not deny that this statement was disingenuous, but instead deflected and tried to imply that he had grown from the experience.
I remember when we were in a small grocery in New England that [Christopher Exoo] felt the need to share aloud unnecessarily that a young Amish merchant had flirted with him, in a performatively coy manner as if to say, “It sure is gross when teenagers are attracted to me! This happens to me all the time, and I hate to see it.” I remember all the times before he created his Twitter that he tried to be endearing and disarming by talking about his genitals in a self-deprecating way, or talk to women (or me) about his sex life, or preferred bedroom roles and experiences in a “progressive” or “feminist” way as if this was in any way a demonstration of appropriate boundaries, especially for a man approaching his forties in work with activists often much younger.
I observed [Christopher Exoo] frequently supply affection, and even just attention, to his “comrades” in a calculated fashion. I didn’t know what to make of this because my perception of appropriate boundaries was being severely warped by [Christopher Exoo] and my material dependence on him for survival. He would often observe or compliment my gradual weight loss, even though when we first became friends, he talked up his feminist ethos as being fat-positive. He would occasionally use “platonic” physical affection and verbal praise, but again in a highly calculated fashion and always in a way that seemed slightly jarring and opportunistic. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was a kind of pet. Once in 2018, we had painted a room, and when I thought I’d gotten paint in my hair, he inspected it, gazed down at me and stroked my hair for several moments, as one would a dog. I didn’t know how I was supposed to feel.
I remember there were several times I had felt the need to confront [Christopher Exoo] about something he had done that made me uncomfortable — something everyone should be able to do safely and with dignity — but he would subtly intimidate me by staring me down and making it as awkward as possible until I would just drop the subject. I’ve seen him do this to other women, too. Once, I tried because he casually mentioned prison sexual violence in a way that made someone else in the room uncomfortable. Another time, it related to something else I’m choosing to keep confidential, but it reminds me that he won’t be challenged on anything remotely in wheelhouse of consent politics because he considers himself untouchable on the subject. That’s his bread and butter. He’s so much of a feminist that he’s seethingly resentful about the lengths he’s gone to be a good feminist, the money he’s spent on people who don’t even appreciate him. Nobody will ever pat him on the back enough for all the things that he’s truly done for women.
Last year, [Christopher Exoo] had deliberately ignored me, via texts and calls, and gone MIA from a range of nine hours to 25 hours on two separate occasions that we had traveled together. It was callous, and terrifying. On both occasions I became despondent because it bore similarity for me to past trauma, once in the company of strangers in an unfamiliar city who did not understand why I was withdrawn and crying. On the second occasion I explained to him that this behavior upset me so much that I couldn’t bear to go through it again, but he was fairly blasé about it, and said casually that he was just busy taking care of a friend, but that he was sorry, and did I want a hug?
[Christopher Exoo] performed giving and or as he refers to it, “mutual aid” in a manner that was destructive and abusive. His motivations are primarily to aggrandize himself and make him feel admired by others — to be a white savior. The supposition is that he is doing allyship, providing capital, or allowing a space for healing, before he becomes resentful, contemptuous and weary and begins a pattern of devaluation that wreaks havoc on the receiver’s mental health. Anyone sorry enough to have gotten in really deep with [Christopher Exoo] can attest that he’s extremely fond of lovebombing: he talked about me and to me like I was brilliant, but he treated me like yesterday’s scraps as soon as he decided that all the money he decided to spend on me of his own volition without my asking was far too much. He bought me a million things for Christmas in 2018, but now he’s letting his racist friend refer to me, a long-out trans person, as a “TERF”, which he knows is virulently transphobic and cruel. [Christopher Exoo] considers himself a trans ally, benevolent to the vulnerable, even though he knows that he turned from doting and excessively attention-giving to cold and even mocking on a dime out of weariness and boredom, toward someone who was dependent on him for literal survival. This is abuse. Not everyone will acknowledge abusive people and their abuse of social capital for what it is, but what’s important is that we focus our efforts now on building power around those who will.
A comment to this expose that proves that he has a history of using his fame to be a predator,
