Feminist Champion Randi Harper, in Her Own Words: ‘Stop Making Everything a Gender Issue’

Randi Harper is one of the Internet’s most vociferous, albeit self-appointed, arbiters of morality. But she wasn’t always the glittering paragon of virtue she presents to the world today.

In blog posts long since deleted, but discovered by Breitbart and published today for the first time, Harper spells out in her own words just what a rocky road she has travelled to establishment acceptance.

It is now common knowledge that Harper’s position as a so-called “anti-abuse activist” is a hypocritical fiction: it is she, in fact, who is often guilty of wrongdoing whenever a controversy springs up around her. But these explosive new revelations shine a light into a broken and desperate world of abusive relationships — with Randi as the abuser — misuse of drugs and all manner of other heartbreaking tableaus.

Not only is Harper, according to her own testimony, guilty of rampant abuse of both illegal and prescription drugs, but these extraordinary new confessions also reveal a woman terrifyingly at odds with the family values moral panicker and standard-bearer for digital propriety at the head of the comically pompous-sounding Online Abuse Prevention Initiative.

In a long, self-justifying blog post published in November 2014, Harper anticipated some of these disclosures coming to light. But nowhere has she addressed the yawning chasm between how she treats others and how she demands to be treated herself.

Colourful reports about Harper cruelly dyeing her dog’s hair blue and allegedly impersonating her own son on social media pale into comparison with these new facts, revealed today in Harper’s own words from a blog she published at the website freebsdgirl.com but has since taken offline in an attempt to rebrand herself as one of the Internet’s foremost white knights.

METHAMPHETAMINE, COCAINE AND ADDERALL

Rumours have abounded about Randi Harper’s drug use; she typically denies being a “meth head” on Twitter — or changes the subject. Her supporters dismiss the allegations as made-up lies by trolls and harassers.

Today, for the first time, we can put the matter to rest in her own words, as Harper describes having previously taken the drug during an anecdote about lightbulbs on her deleted blog.

Ok, so, funny story. I don’t do meth. I did it before, years and years ago, but I’m generally drug free. However, Calvin came over and he had some and he wanted to smoke it. I figured, what the hell, I’ll try it once. So we’re at my place, and I’m like, Ok, how do we do this. He says, “Well, we need a pipe.” I didn’t have one. He suggested a lightbulb, so I went and got one. We both sat staring at it for a while, wondering how the hell to get the end off. I left it up to Calvin, but he didn’t have much luck. I think he broke 3 lightbulbs before he managed to do it properly. He tried using scissors, knives, breaking it against a table – any number of things. Anyways, the end result is that I didn’t smoke any meth. It just seemed like too much effort. Drugs are bad.

Harper’s claim that “drugs are bad” runs somewhat contrary to her claim elsewhere in the blog that she did “lines of blow in the bathroom to stay awake” while working night shifts as a programmer and consumed “a little dietary aid I lovingly refer to as meth” for weeks on end. Blow is a colloquial term for cocaine.

She also, in a leaked web chat tied to her “sektie” screen name, admits to taking cocaine in the changing rooms at clothing retailer Banana Republic.  

<sektie> go to banana republic at least if you insist upon shopping at the old navy line of companies.
<ninj4> that place is expenisve
<sektie> i’ve done lines in the dressing room at banana republic too, but i felt kind of dirty doing it there
<sektie> because banana republic is sorta ghetto.
<calib0rx> sektie: when the fuck did you do lines at bananna republic
<sektie> uh
<DigDug> the gap has been pretty good as far as cheap stuff
<sektie> when i bought those really cool pants
<sektie> remember the black cargo pants?
<sektie> i wore them at the party at your house
<calib0rx> you mean that night you fucking disappeared for 2 hours shopping?
<sektie> oh, yeah, that night :)
<issuez> haha
<calib0rx> WELL THAT EXPLAINS IT

In a long post, tagged “self-loathing,” Harper discusses her weight issues and drug use and makes a stunning admission about her use of “meth pills” as a dietary aid.

I had kids, and my weight ballooned even higher still. I think at one point I was up to a size 22. Eventually, I stopped eating. It just seemed like too much effort. Usually depression led to food for me, but this was different. I had just gotten the boot from a terrible relationship, and I laid in bed for weeks. I didn’t eat anything but a little dietary aid I lovingly refer to as meth. Yes, that’s right. Meth. I put meth in St. Johns Wort pills and took them for a few weeks straight.

… I love this time of year because it’s the only time they sell the only chocolate I like: Cadburry [sic] Eggs. I eat the things like I used to eat meth pills.

In the same post, Harper explains how she came to abuse prescription drugs, in this case Adderall.

I have severe ADD, and at the time I was unmedicated for it. My brother was getting adderall, and he started giving them to me. Woah, look at that weight , the basis for comparison that I used on an everyday basis, drop. All I did for months was code and sleep. Food? Who has time for it. Hence I got down smaller than I’d ever been until that point – size 14. Then came another job, where I was working night shift and doing lines of blow in the bathroom to stay awake. Wow, there goes more weight. Size 10.

I’m convinced that few people ever lose an extraordinary amount of weight through anything other than sickness or drugs. Exercise and eating right? Who has the time?

In another post, Harper admits: “I like drugs more than I should,” but complains that she lacks the funds to indulge her habit. She also discusses her battle to quit drugs, in a distressing and emotionally incontinent blog post dated July 2006:

The later part of the evening, I was fighting the violent urge I sometimes get. That insane burst of energy where I just want to throw myself against the wall, throw things at people, twirl, scream, dance, whatever. Once again, Alfred’s great all-encompassing word – ‘thrash’. Tonight was definitely a thrash night. I don’t think it was the lack of nicotine. I think it had more to do with the culmination of events. There’s so much going on right now, not just with me but with everyone close to me. I’m trying to be there emotionally for everyone because there’s not much else I can do. It’s taking a lot out of me. I am stressing about little things, I’m crying so easily, I’m being even more unreasonable than usual. The two week unemployment period was no vacation. I should have enjoyed it while it lasted. sigh.

I was fighting this feeling as I was driving home. I kept thinking that even though I threw away all my cigarettes, I have booze, I have other forms of entertainment and intoxication. I resisted, though. This little internal war made me realize something I’d been refusing to face.

Back in 7th grade English AP class, our teacher used to draw the plot of a novel on the white-board, representing the timeline with little mountains. Each big event would have a peak (climax), and you’d of course have the sloping line with supporting events coming down on both sides. I feel like I’m nearing one of those peaks, but I’ve got two lines to choose from when I get to the top. One is going to end in stability; the other in violence and bloodshed. Violence is generally how most things in my life end. Let’s face it: no one gets out of my life until someone gets seriously hurt. Usually the someone is me, although there’s been a notable exception or two.

ADDICTION, DRUG-SEEKING AND PAIN PILLS  

“If pill popping was an olympic sport, I’d at least get the silver,” admits Harper in a post — somewhat modestly, given what follows. She goes on: “I just took some Percoset/Flexeril/Tinzadine for my back. Yeah, I’m feeling pretty good now. Wooh-wee … I’ll update with what my fabulous medication is later. For now, I will sit back with an Adderall and a Percoset. It’s interesting how Adderall seems to make my back stop hurting. Any ideas why?”

In July 2006, Harper describes “raping” her medicine cabinet for a bewildering array for pain medication.

Oh, and what’s this? My period started today. That explains a lot. I could already see my knees beginning to swell, and I could feel my head starting to ache. As soon as I dried off, I preemptively attacked the medicine cabinet, raping it of it’s midol, excedrine migraine, flexeril, and hydrocodone.

Harper’s habitual prescription drug use may have been the reason why in 2005 her doctor stopped taking her calls. In a furious post published at 9.11am on 26 April 2005, Harper wrote: “Life sucks when even your doctor is screening your calls.”

Today, I get to play angry screaming white bitch. That’s my role in this telephone conversation. It’s going to go something like this:
Doctor’s office: “Hi, how can I help you?”
Me: “RAWWR. RANDI WANTS DRUGS.”
Doctor’s office: “Excuse me?”
Me: “I have been calling you for TWO FUCKING WEEKS trying to get a fucking refill to my fucking medication, which I kind of REQUIRE due to my EXTREMELY PAINFUL degenerative disc disease. MY FUCKING SPINE IS FALLING APART AND YOU WON’T GIVE ME MY GODDAMN PILLS.”
Doctor’s office: “Ok, the doctor will call you back to confirm.”
Me: “Oh hell no you don’t, dumbass bitch. That’s the line they’ve been feeding me every time, if they bother to even answer their fucking phones. I want the doctor on the phone right now, or you better call up Walgreens and give them my prescription information. It’s not like I’m asking for Valium. I’m asking for anti-inflammatories. They aren’t addictive, you’re just a stupid bitch.”
Doctor’s office: *click*
Me: “fuck.”

In response, Harper describes a road trip to nearby hospitals to source the pain medication she wants.

Hitting up another hospital, 4th one in 4 weeks. + severely impaired driving. I really must have been fucked up from those pills.” “So I started crying, saying my back hurt and that the she-wookie hadn’t given me my pills. It’s true that it was starting to hurt quite a bit, but generally I have to be in a lot of fuqn pain to cry from it. They paniced, gave me all the pills I wanted, and finally proceeded to book me. 

… I really must have been fucked up from those pills. As soon as I got home, I slumped over in the car and fell back asleep. I woke up to hear him pulling in behind me, and he woke me up and took me inside. I fell back asleep in the bed, and I remember him laying down next to me with his arm around me.

Harper also describes being “kicked out” of hospitals. In the 2000s she was spending hundreds of dollars on Valium and other drugs.

I need to set up a Disaster Recovery plan for my life. I ended up handing the doctor $350, and in turn he handed me Valium. Fair trade. 

… Valium isn’t what I expected. I wanted something to calm me. I wanted something to numb me, emotionally. I still get upset, but it’s like it’s happening through a thin layer of apathy. I’m angry, but it’s controllable because I just don’t care. I view everything with a detachment that is a bit unsettling. Right now, by all accounts, I should be furious. I should be upset. I should be…something other than this feeling of cold heartlessness. It’s like I’m watching everything unfold in a badly cast movie with a sub-par plot.

There are also more posts from a similar time about Adderall abuse — something Harper has always been relaxed about tweeting, too — excessive drinking, gambling, and driving under the influence of alcohol.

Quite why anyone would advertise such a litany of felonies publicly, on the Internet, on a blog readily connected to the author’s real-world identity is beyond the present correspondent’s comprehension. But these are not even the most hypocritical or extraordinary of the disclosures Harper makes about herself on the deleted blog.

LOOK ON MY WORKS YE MIGHTY

Harper’s exhibitionist prose catalogues a comedy of slapstick and error and, while entertainingly self-deprecating in places, paints a portrait of someone whose life is spiralling out of control. In September 2003, Harper took delight in telling readers that she had almost run over the chief executive of her company.  

I almost ran over the CEO of the company I work for, or so he claims. But then he said he was just fucking with me. Eh, well, I really didn’t realize he was the CEO when I was speeding through the parking garage. Our parking garage sucks. The corners are pretty tight, so you have to take them at just the right angles. After being there for 9 months, I’ve gotten it down to a science, so I can take them at incredibly high speeds and listen to my tires squeal. Because of the shift I work, I don’t really run any danger of running anyone over. He was getting out of his car when I pulled in, so I really didn’t run him over, I probably just scared him with the squealing.

Naturally, you see, the accident was his fault.

Harper may not have had the self-awareness to realise it at the time, but her posts reveal comically terrible job performance on a near-weekly basis. 

Everything went well and fine until the day in question. I woke up, wondering why my alarm had not gone off. I looked over, but to my dismay, it was powered off. I walked downstairs, still confused, only to discover there was no electricity. Yes. The incompetent boyfriend mentioned earlier also forgot to pay the power bill – or the check just got lost in the mail. It really doesn’t matter to me, the end result was the same. I drove to work as fast as I could without fear of being pulled over, only to walk in right as the CEO was walking out. He greeted me, and I gave him a weak smile, cursing my luck. However, I’m usual a model employee, so this hopefully won’t pose much of a problem.

She claims to have worked a “110+” hour work week.

… I finally finished my first project at work. For the past 3 weeks, I’d been putting in well over 110+ hrs a week. It’s almost like I’m making up for the lack of work I’ve always managed to get by with at previous jobs. Being a developer requires such a different mindset from being a sysadmin. I’m used being smart enough to be lazy, but now it’s all work, work, work. I don’t think I mind it that much. I’m finally not bored. I got a break on Thursday/Friday last week, and I realized I didn’t like being bored anymore. Bah.

… I did get to show my boss the project I’d been working on for the past few weeks, today. It’s coming along quite nicely. Getting out of the sysadmin mindset is going to take a while. I totally blame 90% of the bad work ethics so prevalent in the IT industry on the Systems Administrator Mentality. Sit around, play WoW, work on your own projects – until shit breaks. Then all hell breaks loose, and you spend the next 48 hours straight at work surviving off Cherry Coke and skittles.

… I’m taking a temporary job working in my landlord’s water company for a while. It sounds like I’ll be getting paid to sit in the retail office and IRC. Rock on. I’m only taking this to have something to do with my time. I hate sitting at home all day. At least it’ll take care of paying this months rent for me, although not much else.

She also holds nothing back when fired or in one of her frequent, and long, periods of unemployment, during which she appears to be supported by a string of boyfriends.

I went back to work on Tuesday and worked the rest of the week. The following Monday, my boss calls me into HR’s office and tries to fire me. Seriously, worst firing attempt evar. The reason cited was performance. He didn’t actually do any of the talking, he left it all up to the chick from HR. She went on to tell me that I hadn’t been at work on Monday and no one knew where I was.

… When HR read the email, she looked a bit confused, and then almost angry that I fucked up her firing. Cry me a fucking river. So she’s says to me “oh, I guess this is ok. But you can’t wear tank tops or anything sheer anymore.”

Harper often worked from home, enabling her to slack off, though these privileges were always revoked.

 For the past few weeks, I’ve been working from home a lot … I can even go for a quick jog down to the internet cafe to get some exercise and a yummy muffin. I’ve been heading up to the office twice a week.

… My boss decided he didn’t want to be my boss anymore, so he demoted himself to developer, and the CTO took over. My work-from-home rights were completely revoked. Then the shit hit the fan with a company we are partnering with, and I made the mistake of stepping up, so it’s all on me. I’m a project manager now, although I’m supposedly still a developer. I haven’t had time to write a single line of code in the past 2 weeks.

… The CTO managed to completely disregard all the work I’ve done for this company, claiming I have to “earn” working from home. Apparently, sleeping 4 hours a week so I can meet the asinine deadlines set by upper management doesn’t count for much. This is the third time I’ve been hit with retarded “omg now now now now” projects here. I didn’t mind so much until last week. After that drama, I’m just pissed.

The above post is from around the time Harper said she was taking cocaine in the bathrooms at her workplace. At around the time Harper said she was trying to smoke meth from lightbulbs with her boyfriend Curtis, she quit her job at Yahoo! and applied for one at Google.

Some of you may have heard that I quit my job at Yahoo!. Yes, this is true. I put in my year there and I left. You won’t hear me talking any smack about Yahoo!, and although I’ve certainly heard about (and seen first-hand) the “mass exodus”, I don’t really consider myself a part of that. Yahoo! is a great company to work for, and I’d still recommend any of my friends apply for jobs there. I just don’t think I like working for big companies. My stress levels were getting absurdly high, and it just wasn’t worth it. I’m taking some time off from the IT scene for a while. I’ll be doing little consulting jobs here and there, but I don’t plan on entering the real workforce again until December or January. I need a vacation.

She didn’t get the job at Google, so, naturally, wrote a post about it, wondering whether previous public criticisms of the company could possibly have contributed to her failure to secure a job offer.

Yeah, so Google, what’s up with that? Are you angry because I dissed your support team as well as gtalk?

Who can say.

LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS

Harper is, by her own admission, constantly at the epicentre of multiple personal and professional melodramas, often precipitated by her inability to say nothing when a situation calls for discretion. In this post from 2005 she imagines she is the target of a “hate club”:

Someone from the Pennsylvania crew has been posting on my blog and mentioning where I work. The last time this happened (a few weeks ago), I had to get HR involved. I’ve had issues with stalkers showing up at former places of employment, and I really didn’t want to have to deal with that bullshit here. Taking a gun to work isn’t fun, nor is it generally approved of by management. When I took all of this to HR, I asked them not to do anything yet, I just wanted them to know of the situation. I didn’t really want to take it to HR at all, but my boss was CC:ed on an email I was throwing around, and when it was known that the posts had inflamatory remarks about the company I work for, legal had to get involved as well. Comcast has been contacted – oh, did I not mention IP’s on this site are logged? Hi, 67.165.73.109. It’s a big fuckfest here, folks. Pay $5 to see the show.

It’s not hard to tell who might be the cause of the failure, “hate,” “harassment,” and “drama” that seems to follow Harper around. Here she is describing what happened when she attended a job interview at 9 a.m. the day after attempting to smoke meth from a broken lightbulb:

I went to the job interview, and the recruiter met me downstairs. Her reaction? “Oh my god, Beth didn’t tell you to wear a suit?” So, according to her, I already practically had the job – I had so many internal recommendations that it would be hard for them not to hire me. I wore a skirt and a nice shirt though, and she said the guy interviewing me was the type that would get a bad impression if I didn’t wear a skirt. I was feeling like crap from the food poisoning, so we just rescheduled. I had no suit, and I was 3 miles from the mall, so I drove to Bloomingdales and threw myself into the arms of the first gay man I could find. He took one look at me, set me down in the dressing room, brought me water and tissues, and proceeded to find me the best suit ever. I paid $800 for it, but it was totally worth it. Hella Ellen Tracy/DKNY.

Mike came home that weekend and flipped his shit.

Earlier in the same post, she confesses to being “dooced”, Internet parlance for getting fired thanks to inflammatory and embarrassing online postings. But it wasn’t just online: in October 2004 she was thrown out of a datacenter for the second time for unprofessional behaviour after taking Adderall at work.

DID I SAY THAT?

Critics of Randi Harper like to note how dramatically her views about feminism changed when she sensed the opportunity, during the GamerGate controversy, to reimagine herself as a social justice warrior.

They are right to do so. As we explored in detail in Part Two of this series, Harper’s comments about women in the workplace bear no resemblance whatsoever to her current positions, which appear to have been cynically and abruptly adopted for professional advantage.

In the past she has railed against “scenewhores,” women who attention-seek in chat rooms online, accusing them of being “stupid fucking retard females” and “waste[s] of bandwidth.” She evidently saw herself, flatteringly, as atypical of women online for much of her career — but that changed drastically at some point before she assembled a steady monthly income on Patreon for tweeting obligingly about women and feminism.

With her current Patreon pledge rate of $3,307.14 per month, Harper makes nearly $40,000 a year from “patrons” online. She is not expected to work in return: it is free money from admirers.

Those supporters would be surprised to learn that she once wrote positively about sex in video games, as we detailed in Part Two, and that as recently as May 2007 she was writing: “I don’t want to be friends. I just want to see your boobs defy nature.”

In April 2008, she harshly criticised video game critic Jack Thompson for his anti-violence in gaming opinions.

Grand Theft Auto IV came out yesterday, and of course I bought it. I’ve always been a fan of the GTA series.

… It was obvious that this game was going to be controversial. It’s not rocket surgery to draw this conclusion. Just check out the Ladies of Liberty City video. People are already talking about how horrible this game will be for our youth – how it promotes violence. Some fucktard stabbing some other dude in the neck while waiting in line to get this game just gives them more ammo. I doubt we’re ever going to convince Jack Thompson that video games aren’t the antichrist, but maybe I could find him another cause.

Elsewhere, Harper spoke out strongly against women asking for “special treatment”:  

As a female committer, I have to say that you’re asking to be treated differently by proposing  unnecessary changes in such a fashion. While the wording could have been better in regards to being more professional (such as the patch that pjd committed), saying that a female isn’t going to use FreeBSD because of a humorous statement in a man page is ridiculous.

If you don’t want to see prejudice in IT communities, stop making everything a gender issue.

In 2005 she committed feminist heresy by denying that women had it harder in IT:

I don’t often bitch about being a female in IT. I don’t act like I’ve got it harder because I’m the proud owner of two lovely XX chromosomes. 

… It’s not like I don’t disagree with the females running that site. I’ve got to wonder though, do they really help anything? My generation of 20-somethings has grown up being told that females are equal to men. We have special student loans, we get better car insurance rates, and we even live longer on average.

… If you keep repeating a message over and over again, it starts to lose its meaning. The feminist movement used to mean something. People used to take it seriously. Females used to take it seriously. Now, we’ve even turned on ourselves. Either we sneer at feminism, saying it’s for hairy muff-licking bull-dykes, or we go entirely overboard with it and furiously berate any man that dares to open a door for us. The meaning behind the word feminist was lost in translation sometime between the 60’s and now.

CONCLUSION

The remainder of our research into Harper’s binned blog reveals gory detail about relationships that it would be unnecessary and cruel to repeat in further detail. Money problems, breakups, infidelity, custody, child support, drugs and health scares feature heavily in Harper’s car-crash biography, but in most instances they are not strictly relevant to her custodianship of an anti-abuse charity.

What does interest those who watch her relentless policing of others’ sexual mores and opinions is how dramatically she has reinvented herself from the slow-motion car crash seen in these blog entries to a supposed pillar of the online community without ever acknowledging her own sins.

Further, as we explored in Parts One and Two of this series, the worst excesses of her abusive behaviour towards others continues unchecked into the present day. Through all this, she has lied about her drug use, about innocent people and just about everything else at some point in her flatulent online history.

Our research, backed up by contemporary photography from Harper’s own online photo albums against which we have matched our claims, reveals that in almost every conceivable regard she is a hypocrite of the highest order. To give yet another example, she has pontificated about racism while herself publishing sarcastic and cruel remarks about Mexicans: a theme she keeps returning to in her blog.

And the unending narcissism of her online witterings, which we have republished here in the interests of setting the record straight about the real Randi Harper, gives the lie to her claims to work tirelessly for others.

Harper has devoted a lot of time to denigrating the quality of Breitbart‘s reporting. But these are her own words, from her own blog, and they show a dishonest, hypocritical, abusive and unstable individual whose life has been off the rails for over a decade. In short, Randi Harper has quite a lot to answer for before she can possibly ever be taken seriously about online harassment or the abuse of women.

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