Adult Film star discusses her plan for upcoming live stream
[Image provided by Mercedes Carrera.]
A few hours ago, I wrote a story about how the AbleGamers suffered a DDoS attack after pulling out of a collaboration with adult film star Mercedes Carrera on a charity live stream. Some of you thought I implied that Mercedes was responsible for the DDoS. That wasn’t my intention. I reached out to Ms. Carrera to make that clear, and to ask her if she had any comment on the situation. You’ll find her comment below in quotes.
Omitted with her permission is a link she provided to findings from an anonymous internet source who believes that he has evidence that AbleGamer’s was not DDoS’ed. While this anonymous internet user may very well be correct, I do not feel confident enough in this source to link to it at this time.
Thanks again to Ms. Carrera for her comment.
…several network engineers did some research and concluded that the AbleGamer site was not under DDoS attack as stated- rather it seems it was more likely simply down/slow due to an uptick in traffic as a result of this unfortunate media event. I am sorry that they have had network trouble, and hope they remedy it in short order. After reading your article it did seem to imply there was a malicious DDoS attack (likely misinformation from AbleGamer’s ISP) and I appreciate that you realize I had and have no hand in this nor would I have motivation. I have had websites overload personally due to too much web traffic and I understand it can seem to be a result of malicious attack when it’s nothing more than a web traffic error. I’m sorry if they thought they were under attack in any way, by myself or others. I would never endorse such a thing.
As for AbleGamer’s decision not to accept money from the livestream- to be honest it was not surprising nor did I take it personally. (Hence my decision to not speak on the matter until it became public, and people asked me about for comments about it and comments on your article). Being in the adult industry, it is more common than not to be declined regarding charity donations, although usually for different reasons. The emails between AbleGamers and the coordinators for the livestream were cordial and as for any inference about ‘weaponizing porn’; I had nothing to do with such statements. Unfortunately it is not within my realm of control what is said on Reddit. The stream was simply a coordinated effort and became inadvertently controversial due to my personal opinions and politics.
As for opinion/motivation for choosing AbleGamers: the live stream porn fundraiser was already in the works, and I was given several choices of charity which our watchers might support. Due to having been in contact with several disabled gamers in the last few months on twitter, I chose AbleGamers as they have a mission statement I support and would feel good about donating to given my new friends and their challenges. The coordinators of the stream actually wanted to keep ‘GamerGate’ out of the conversation altogether as it was never the initial intention for the fundraiser at all.
Unfortunately my outspoken support for GamerGate’s mission of ethics in journalism and resistance to censorship became problematic and conflated with the stream itself. It was an unfortunate miscommunication and was never intended to mislead anyone. It was an error on my part but never an attempt to leverage their organization for PR or any other purpose and I’m sorry they felt they were being used. At this moment I am doing research on other charities with a similar mission statement as it is still a mission I stand behind, although this time the identity of the organization may be kept proprietary to prevent this kind of occurrence again.
