I’ve been reluctant to publicly talk about the Hax ban for a number of reasons. For one I do not want to bring further negative scrutiny to Leffen who has been the subject of a relentless harassment campaign, or to Hax who understandably is having a difficult time coping with his ban from the community. Additionally, having written and publicly justified the initial ban document, I did not want it to appear as if I was primarily or single handedly responsible for banning Hax. Both the initial indefinite ban and the current permanent ban are virtually unanimously agreed upon by tournament organizers. In the absence of public discussion on behalf of TOs, most of what people have seen has come from Hax himself and, unfortunately, drama Youtubers who are exploiting the situation for their personal benefit while making next to no effort to understand anything about it.

That seems to have resulted in many misunderstandings about the case. I’ve seen a number of people who, because of Hax’s constant public pleading for an unban, believe that his ban is still indefinite rather than permanent. I hope that offering a clear TO perspective on the situation might give people a better idea of why organizers arrived at the conclusion they have.

To be clear, Hax is permanently banned from Smash tournaments for defamatory claims that he made about Leffen, including alleging without any evidence that he conspired to make false allegations of sexual misconduct against Zero for his personal gain. These allegations were made in the framework of Hax’s quack, armchair psychoanalysis of Leffen, who he alleges is a malicious psychopath. Hax publicly released multiple hour long videos with accompanying documents, using his platform to incite harassment towards Leffen and encourage TOs to take action against him.

Since Hax’s initial indefinite ban he has aggressively lobbied to be allowed back at events, and for much of 2023 he was allowed to attend New York local tournaments, as well as some larger tournaments.

I understand that a part of the discussion about this case has been about the community’s conduct process more broadly, and the regrettable amount of time this partial ban was in place, and I do think some of those criticisms are legitimate. There is nobody whose job it is to collect evidence about cases or recommend ban lengths. Even Panda had no conduct process in place. Most bans can be handled by local TOs and communicated more broadly if necessary, but highly public cases like the Hax ban will continue to be more difficult. In November of 2023 there was a more structured attempt at reaching a consensus, but TOs ultimately disagreed on the ban length, and so Hax continued to be banned from some events and unbanned from others.

As I mentioned, TOs have not communicated much about the ban publicly, which I understand has been frustrating because everything else about this situation has been very public. On one hand I think there’s merit to the idea that not everything needs to be known by everyone in order to make a correct decision. Especially when there’s reason to think that there could be negative outcomes from fanning the flames of a situation. On the other hand it isn’t a given that the community at large should trust tournament organizers. I think that trust is important because some conduct cases really do need to be handled privately. For example, in instances where someone involved doesn’t want their identity publicly known. Proper communication is how TOs earn that trust. Nobody knows anything about this case, so I think there’s clearly been a breakdown there.

There was a stipulation from New York TOs that on paper disallowed Hax from speaking publicly about his ban. This has been criticized heavily, and I do disagree with it on principle,  but in reality he posted multiple times about the wider ban without consequence. The local ban was not reinstated until he repeated his claims about Leffen.

In my opinion Hax, throughout this situation, has done whatever he believes is most expedient to get him unbanned. Initially he attempted to double down on his claims. He realized that wasn’t working, so he apologized. He then began reaching out to individual TOs, many of whom allowed him to attend their events. In early 2024, while he was still banned from most majors, he attempted again to justify his initial defamatory claims about Leffen, and has privately told TOs that he still believes them to be true as recently as early May.

Hax has persistently tried to discuss his ban with me and other TOs. I personally haven’t spoken with him despite his numerous attempts to contact me on Discord, where I blocked him, and now on Twitter. I believe there is nothing for us to discuss. I do not have final say on any ban decisions for any tournaments except Smash Camp, and again I do not want to give Hax or anyone the impression that I am primarily responsible for his ban when dozens of other organizers signed onto it. I believe the permanent ban is the correct decision and that decision has been clearly communicated to him.

Throughout all of this process I’ve tried to be very careful about not pathologizing Hax or trying to make any claims about his mental state in the same way he spoke about Leffen. I think it’s much more productive to primarily consider people’s actions and their effects. I believe when bans are handed down they should be for the purpose of mitigating future harm, and not strictly for punitive reasons. This is a pretty easy standard to reach, for example, in cases of sexual misconduct. I think abusers being allowed in the same space as their victims is a form of harm in and of itself, and I think people who have already been found to engage in sexual misconduct once are justifiably banned for fear that they may cause similar harm in the future.

Hax’s case is a bit more complicated, in my opinion. I believe the main harm that arose as a result of Hax’s actions did not come from him directly, but from his following. For that reason I initially believed that it could be possible for Hax to be unbanned as long as he did not do anything to incite further harassment.

Shortly after his initial videos he asked me to have a conversation with him. He expressed remorse for the public shitshow he had caused, but when we spoke he basically took me through an outline of his claims about Leffen. I told him that many of his claims, because they were based on psychoanalytic assumptions about Leffen and not concrete evidence, could not be taken seriously.

For instance, he alleged that because Leffen spoke to Jisu about her allegations against Zero before publicly talking about them. Zero and others have claimed that these allegations were false but there’s no evidence to suggest that Leffen helped fabricate any allegations, knew Jisu was lying, or even had any reason to believe the claims might be false. I asked him whether he believed there was any chance Leffen believed in good faith what Jisu had to say and he responded that he was “99% sure” that Leffen had colluded with Jisu to lie about Zero. For him the lack of evidence is offset by his dogmatic belief that Leffen is a fundamentally evil person, and for that reason he cannot be charitable towards him.

This was evident when, earlier this year he again publicly repeated the claim about Jisu and Leffen, and privately told TOs that he believed the claim to be true as recently as early May.

In the interim he has had countless conversations with TOs and other community members, who have tried in good faith to explain to him why they believed he was wrong. In many cases, just as with my conversation, he would express remorse when asking to talk, and then fixate on asking what he could do to be unbanned, or gish gallop through his talking points about Leffen again.

What I’ve come to believe is that Hax is throwing everything he can at the wall in order to be unbanned. Any remorse he claimed to have in his public apologies is belied by what he’s said privately, and most importantly publicly to his audience that he knows has a history of malicious harassment. He’s positioned any conversation he’s had almost entirely on what he needs to do in order to be unbanned.

I cannot speak for everyone, but Hax will never be unbanned from events I run. Even now I’m hesitant to even discuss how he might best go about mitigating the harm he has caused. I’m worried he will frame it as some sort of hope for an unban, but the fact that he’s so singularly focused on that, seemingly without even considering why he may have been wrong about the substance of his claims, to me indicates that he’s not and may never be willing to address the root of the issue at hand.

In a document he sent to TOs on May 20, Hax mentioned as a reason why he should be unbanned, that his Youtube comments and replies on Twitter are largely supportive of his unban, and anecdotally it seems a large amount of the support is not from people who agree with his initial claims, but rather from people who believe he is reformed. Given how he’s used his platform before I believe he is trying to use that public support as leverage. I hope this document can help to make it clear why a permanent ban is appropriate.