I was extremely unsure which side to believe in all of this when it first came out a couple of days ago, and I’ve been following it closely as I had recently confirmed to play on the show next week in Vegas. I had never met nor knew anything about Jaclynn, but had met Nolan and Todd on a few occasions when I appeared on PNIA in 2014. They were both respectful and very pleasant to me and I had a great experience on the show. As such I wanted her described experiences to not be true, and was keen to see the podcast to get an idea of her demeanour and any hard evidence she may provide.
After watching it yesterday, I was as close to satisfied as one can be that she is telling the truth (or very close to it) about her experiences in Nov 2014. This was mostly due to the text message evidence she provided and also the consistency and relative comfort level she shows under tough questioning. Her mannerisms and recall, when being questioned about those events multiple times, over a 90min live broadcast, are very consistent of someone telling the truth, or at least their subjective experience of it.
It seems most likely that a number of unfortunate events and comments happened, mostly by people under the influence of a lot of alcohol, which left her feeling shocked, angry and very disrespected. I’m entirely unsure about the intentions behind the commentors, and this is obv just speculation on my part, but I could imagine Nolan didn’t intend to disrespect her – his actions were probably a very poor attempt to be funny that maybe seemed reasonable in the moment. But that, in addition to all the other things she heard or experienced, understandably left her with a very bad impression of some people involved. I don’t want to pass excessive judgement on them – we all say and do stupid shit when we’re drunk, tired or having a bad day. But it is absolutely NOT ok for someone who was on the receiving end of it all to then be publicly branded as a liar or crazy person when those things happen.
Also, it is frustrating how many people are massively over-valuing the importance of how Jaclynn chose to deal with this afterwards. The time that passed, the money or additional shows that were asked for in compensation, the way she chose to disseminate the information etc are largely irrelevant to whether or not the events actually happened. Unless those very subjective decisions then concretely add up to making everything she is claiming HIGHLY likely to be utter fabrication, which they don’t remotely do, then they should be considered irrelevant to the issue.
I’ve personally experienced misogyny on countless occasions within my time in the poker world, most of which I would consider mild (patronising comments etc). The way I deal with it now is very different to how I dealt with it when I was younger and less established, but whether it happens to a woman who sighs and ignores it, or actively counters it, it doesn’t make the comment or act any less annoying, offensive and detrimental.
I guess my thoughts boil down to this: I don’t think the TV show itself, which has generally made strong efforts to promote female players, necessarily deserves to suffer any more than it has. But when someone on the receiving end of individuals’ poor drunken decisions decides their actions were bad enough to go public with them, then the onus is on us as bystanders to avoid any knee-jerk temptations to try to discredit the person, which sadly in this case was what a huge number of observers did. The responsibility is on us observers to avoid creating an environment where victims are discouraged even further from reporting incidents, as this then creates a world where bad events are more likely to happen to any one of us.