On August 31st, 2019, game developer Alec Holowka committed suicide following abuse accusations by fellow indie developer Zoe Quinn, and his subsequent removal from the Night in the Woods development team. 

Utilizing resurfaced tweets and audio, The Post Millennial released a comprehensive rebuttal of Quinn’s statement detailing the abuse Quinn alleged suffering while living with Holowka in 2012. The article, released on September 8th, outlined a number of discrepancies and outright fabrications present in Quinn’s August 28thstatement. Likely as a result, The Post Millennial was subjected to a DDoS attack which attempted to shut down access to our site. 

Since the publication of the article, more information has surfaced to contradict the statement many speculate may have led Holowka to take his life.

Speaking to The Post Millennial anonymously due to fears of backlash, a fellow developer of Holowka’s has provided dozens of messages exchanged in 2014, with Holowka speaking about his experience with Quinn. The authenticity of these messages have been verified. 

Holowka had reached out to express fear about telling his story, saying “I’ve been trying to talk to friends about it for a couple of years.” He wrote, “I thought about sharing my story with her a few times but was always scared to.”

In the chat, Holowka also said he was wary of making Quinn angry and often had to look for solutions that wouldn’t upset his former partner.

In direct contrast to Quinn’s statement, Holowka paints a very different picture of their time together in Winnipeg, suggesting that despite problems present in the relationship, he had been so infatuated with her that he had offered to pay for couple’s counselling to keep their relationship healthy.

Holowka also expressed that he felt those viewing what would have been the GamerGate controversy as an issue of simple sexism were mistaken, having first-hand experience with Quinn that contradicted the very public narrative.

However, Holowka’s expressions of dissatisfaction with his past relationship predate Quinn’s 2014 controversies, eliminating the possibility that the conversations stemmed from a bitterness towards Quinn’s public stance or a need to sneakily cover his own abusive past. In simpler terms: Holowka has no motive to mischaracterize the relationship he had with Quinn. His claims in 2013 are consistent with these newly uncovered claims. 

Most tellingly, Holowka is continuously apologetic towards the feminist cause, at multiple points pointing out that he himself is a feminist, decrying sexism, and lamenting the way the 2014 controversy was polarized by ideological interest groups.

These messages corroborate Quinn’s own assertion that Holowka was concerned about the challenges facing women in the gaming industry, and it was his primary motivation for interacting with Quinn’s tweets prior to their connecting through Twitter direct messages in 2012. 

As stated in our September 8th exclusive, this new evidence is not completely exculpatory. It does not provide a complete picture of what happened between Zoe Quinn and Alec Holowka during the time they were living together in Winnipeg in 2012. It does, however, continue to call into question the credibility of the allegations made by Quinn against Holowka, and, more importantly, demonstrates the tragic logic of guilty before proven innocent. 

The Post Millennial reached out to Zoe Quinn but was unable to contact Quinn for comment at this time.