In October 2006, Arrington landed the scoop that changed everything. He reported a rumor that Google was going to acquire YouTube. The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, other blogs, all did a double take. Just like that, Arrington had “journalistic” cred. What’s more, TechCrunch had so much clout that if Arrington wrote favorably about a start-up or product it was almost guaranteed venture-capital interest. Aspiring entrepreneurs literally banged on the door and windows of his ranch-house office. Venture capitalists wanted to stay in Arrington’s good graces. Arrington had become a one-man nexus of ego, money, and information in the Valley. A month after Arrington broke the Google-YouTube story, The Wall Street Journal ran a story headlined: TECHCRUNCH SITE MAKES ARRINGTON A POWER BROKER.

A week after exchanging numbers at the TechCrunch Meetup in 2005, Arrington and Allen went on their first date to the bar in the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco. Allen ordered a bottle of Veuve Clicquot, Arrington a beer. He drank his beer. She drank a single glass of the champagne, and they decided to call it a night. Arrington picked up the tab. Before they left, Allen opened up the little leather folder with the signed bill inside, to make sure Arrington left a decent tip.

A relationship blossomed, or, perhaps, erupted. It was volatile throughout. On again and off again, from 2005 until at least 2010, when Arrington called on Allen at the Berkeley lecture. At an officially unofficial annual gathering of Silicon Valley players in Hawaii, called the Lobby, a friend of Arrington’s, Cyan Banister, says she spent a lot of time hanging out with Allen because Arrington was so busy being Arrington. Banister remembers Allen and Arrington constantly texting. “It was like a high-school relationship,” Banister told me. “I was surprised that this was the kind of girl Mike was interested in.”

Not long after Allen and Arrington started dating she was let go from her job at Eurekster, according to the company’s C.E.O., Steven Marder, who said Allen had been “dropping the ball.” From what Marder recalls, it got to a point where her colleagues were coming to him and saying that something had to be done because “she seemed a bit lost.” Allen declined numerous requests to comment for this story.

Arrington’s Meetups evolved into a traveling Silicon Valley Super Bowl trade show called “TechCrunch50.” At these days-long conferences in cities around the world, investors, entrepreneurs, marketers, publicists, and tech journalists gathered. Featured attractions were panel discussions, one-on-one interviews conducted by Arrington, who abrasively poked his subjects, and a contest called “Startup Battlefield,” which is pretty much just what it sounds like.

For the first three years of the conferences, Arrington’s partner in planning, hosting, and executing was Jason Calacanis, a serial entrepreneur with a track record of success and relentless self-promotion. It was Calacanis who persuaded Arrington that they should unite and launch TechCrunch50. They struck an agreement wherein they split the revenue 50-50. In 2007, Arrington hired Heather Harde away from Fox Interactive Media to be C.E.O., and she began to expand the TechCrunch conferences globally. As the TechCrunch brand grew, and its staff was doing much of the work in organizing, the terms of the deal with Calacanis were revisited. The negotiations became acrimonious and fell apart, as did the partnership with Calacanis. Soon TechCrunch50 was dead, and the newly christened TechCrunch Disrupt Conference was born.

In early 2010, Tim Armstrong, the C.E.O. and chairman of AOL, attended a Disrupt and asked if Arrington would be interested in selling TechCrunch. Within a matter of months there was a deal memo, finalized in September 2010. As part of the $30 million sale, Arrington would remain at TechCrunch, which he believed would retain editorial independence from AOL. A year later, in September 2011, Arrington launched CrunchFund, a V.C. firm. In other words, Arrington would be a major force in an industry in which he himself was now even more financially invested. AOL would invest $10 million in CrunchFund. At some point, Arrington added a disclaimer to his bio on TechCrunch: “Sometimes I have so many financial conflicts of interest that I can’t even keep them straight. So when you read what I write … understand that I’m conflicted. A lot.”

What Arrington was doing with CrunchFund was only more of what he had been doing all along: from virtually day one of TechCrunch he had been an active investor-player in the Valley. But in early 2011, AOL had bought the Huffington Post and made its founding owner-publisher-editor, Arianna Huffington, the editor in chief of all AOL content. Upon learning of Arrington’s CrunchFund side pursuit, Huffington demoted him. Within 48 hours, Arrington wrote a blog response to his demotion in which he demanded that Armstrong honor TechCrunch’s editorial independence or else sell TechCrunch back to him. According to a Forbes story, Huffington counter-demanded that Armstrong support her, as she wanted to “make an example of Arrington.” Huffington won, and Arrington got the boot.

Furious, Arrington did two things: He started his own blog, Uncrunched, and he helped one of his former TechCrunch editors, Sarah Lacy, launch her own tech blog, PandoDaily. CrunchFund invested $100,000, and, according to Lacy, Arrington agreed to write and work exclusively for her site in exchange for a seat on the board. Shortly thereafter, representatives of the new AOL TechCrunch reached out to Arrington. They wanted him back. Or at least back onstage. In the wake of his departure, TechCrunch had hemorrhaged many of its best-known staffers; the AOL TechCrunch team realized the main event, the lucrative Disrupt conference, needed Arrington’s master-of-ceremonies cachet, not to mention his own abrasive star power. According to AOL TechCrunch sources, Arrington got the sort of offer he couldn’t refuse, and agreed to sign on for the May 2012 Disrupt in New York. Lacy was furious and felt betrayed. She fired him. Six months later Arrington returned to TechCrunch as a writer.

TECHCRUNCH FOUNDER’S EX-GIRLFRIEND CLAIMS HE PHYSICALLY ABUSED HER. That was the headline on a story that broke last April 1 on the Web site Gawker. Under the headline, there was a picture of Arrington and Jenn Allen, both smiling, with a text overlay of the catchy pull-quote: “It hurts when you love someone and they threaten to murder you.”

When Heather Harde, Arrington’s friend and former TechCrunch C.E.O., saw it, she thought the post might be the site’s idea of an April Fools’ joke. The main source material in Gawker’s scoop by Adrian Chen was a Facebook status update. Three days earlier, from her mobile phone, Allen had posted this status update to her Facebook page:

Last post on someone i’m completely over. I’ve never been lonelier in my entire life. To all my friends who loved me for who I am—thank you. Power hungry people, I loved Michael Arrington for 8+ years starting when i implemented Eurekster search at the time on Techcrunch in 2006 and throughout the years i didn’t know he cheated on me multiple times, then tells people it was me immediately after he did it. It hurts when you love someone borderline and they can’t feel anything at all for you, and threaten to murder you if you told anyone about the physical abuse—all for keeping his reputation. The emotional abuse was equally bad. On a positive note, it can’t get any worse than this and I can’t get myself of [sic] this bed.

Neither Allen nor Arrington was quoted in the story. As Gawker reported, they “did not immediately respond to requests for comment.”

Within minutes, there were dozens of comments, well on the way to more than 100. It was in the comments section that the Allen-Arrington story escalated. Allen herself posted three times, something she confirmed in her response to Arrington’s lawsuit, accusing Arrington of even more despicable crimes. Posting under the name “JennNella,” she alleged that five months earlier he had raped a friend of hers, whom she did not name. Someone going by “DisgustedByJennAllen” claimed to know Arrington and wrote, “First you accuse the man of abusing you and now you accuse him of rape? Really Jenn? You are truly a disgusting human being and a disgrace to the thousands of women who actually HAVE suffered such horrific tragedies.” Switching to the handle “youreinthemovie,” Allen went further and accused Arrington of raping her: “He did rape me, on March 5 last year … ”

Opinion and judgment of Arrington and Allen spread like a World Wide Web virus.

On April 5, Gawker published a follow-up report. Nick Denton, the founder and owner of Gawker, tweeted a link to the story with this rather definitively phrased tease: “Two more women roughed up by Michael Arrington, the Silicon Valley kingmaker.” This second story, once again reported by Chen, unearthed a decade-old accusation of sexual abuse made by a former co-worker of Arrington’s at RealNames, a start-up he had worked at. (The company shut down in 2002.) And Chen offered a more recent allegation that Arrington had physically abused another former girlfriend, New York-based blogger Meghan Asha.

According to Gawker, the alleged Asha incident occurred on September 12, 2009. Asha had flown from New York City, where she lived, to San Francisco. As Gawker reported it, “This coincided with the start of the TechCrunch50, a Bay Area tech conference that Arrington organized with his former business partner Jason Calacanis.” Gawker reported the allegation that Arrington attacked Asha on the last night of the conference, throwing her against the wall in a hotel room.

The day after that report, on April 6, Asha not only issued a blanket denial of everything Chen had reported but also gave her statement to Arrington’s former home team of TechCrunch:

None of the claims made on my behalf over the past week are accurate. I’m not inclined to comment on my personal life, Mike and I remain friends. I’m focused on business and my career. I hope we can all get back to the business of building innovative companies in the spirit of what makes this industry great. I wish everyone well who is involved. I have no further comment on the matter.

As far as the incident with the co-worker, Gawker’s lone named source was Cecile DeSmet Sharp, who had been the director of human resources at RealNames.

Shortly after the story was posted, the former C.E.O. of RealNames, Keith Teare, also a co-founder of TechCrunch, posted a comment on Facebook: “Mike was indeed the subject of an accusation at RealNames. . . . An outside party was hired to conduct an investigation The investigation concluded that there was no behavior to answer for. Mike was never reprimanded in any way. Both parties asked for confidentiality and to date this has been honored.”

On April 7, Arrington responded to all the accusations in a—what else—Uncrunched blog post: “There have been some extremely serious and criminal allegations against me over the last week. All of the allegations are completely untrue.” He went on to say that he had hired a law firm to pursue legal action.

Six days after the second Gawker story, on April 11, Eric M. George, a Los Angeles–based attorney representing Arrington, sent a letter via e-mail and U.S. mail to Jennifer Allen. George demanded she retract her statements or Arrington would pursue litigation against her for making “false and defamatory statements that caused significant harm to his good name.” Along with the letter, George sent Allen a packet of material: e-mails, photos, text messages, and Facebook postings. In keeping with the digital media circus/virtual trial, Arrington published the materials on his Uncrunched blog.

Included was a document noting the date and location in San Francisco that Allen presented in her accusation where she claimed Arrington raped her on the evening of March 5, 2012. Arrington’s attorney offered as one of the “provable facts” that Arrington was in Washington, not San Francisco, at that time.

Furthermore, George alleged that Allen herself was out with friends late that very same evening, into the early morning. George’s Attachment A is a photo of Allen taken at 1:05 A.M. on March 6, which a friend of Allen’s had posted to Facebook. In the photo, Allen is standing in the center of four friends at a San Francisco bar. That photo has since been removed.

In the third of the three comments Allen had posted to Gawker following its first report, she wrote that the last time she had seen Arrington was March 5, the night of the alleged rape, and that since then she had attempted to contact him only once, to request that he return a painting. “In fact,” George alleged in his letter, “you attempted to repeatedly communicate with Michael—by telephone, text message and tweets.” The very day following the alleged rape, Allen e-mailed Arrington three photos of herself, according to George. In at least one, she appears to be lying on a bed, and wrote, “The others are showing too much to email. Maybe if you beg. :)”

George’s letter included several examples of messages that Allen had allegedly sent Arrington from late March through the late summer—weeks and months after the date she claimed he had raped her. The letter and accompanying materials were later included in the defamation suit filed by Arrington. George wrote that the communications “do not portray you as a victim of abuse or murder threats, but rather as a person who is distraught at a break up and angered that her ex-boyfriend entered into a new relationship.”

On March 22, for example, 17 days after the day on which she alleged that Arrington had raped her, Allen e-mailed Arrington asking him to invest in her business.

Then, on April 21, 2012, Allen wrote to Arrington that she was “feel[ing] betrayed and slighted by you and, wish I wasn’t alone since you decided to be with someone else so quickly. Not sure how I’m going to teach myself how to love and trust again.”

And on July 21, she wrote, “You, Mike, seem happy with the most boring fake personalitied [sic] person on the planet, who you treat the way I should have been treated. If you can’t treat me with respect publicly, still, then you fall into the selfish whorish male prostitute category that will always hurt me during and in the end. Hope you’re enjoying the weather.”

In August 2012, Allen tweeted at Arrington for all of the world to see: “Mike @arrington last chance to reconcile. I [sic] you’re not feeling what I’m feeling, with the same heart, than [sic] fuck you.”

George also included some earlier correspondence between Arrington and Allen. On May 18, 2011, just about two years before Allen made her rape claim, and less than a year before the alleged rape had occurred, she e-mailed Arrington to say, “I’m getting an abortion tomorrow. On my birthday. please don’t contact me ever again. I can’t imagine you care—but if you do—just keep flirting and fucking. and dating the … meghans of the world. anything that might help your image, to make yourself feel better. and then fake a relationship like you did with me to make your parents happy. have a nice life and fuck you.”

Three months later, according to the material included in Arrington’s suit, Arrington and Allen had the following text exchange:

Arrington: do you want to see me?

Allen: Im open to talking to you but i’m dating someone if that’s what you mean. I’m in a relationship. it’s “facebook official”—so I could meet you for coffee. somewhere or at your office. but please don’t be last minute if you still want to meet.

Arrington: I wanted to talk about this pregnancy. I never really understood if it was real or not. or if you were still pregnant. I’m assuming there’s no chance of that. I’m happy for you that you’re dating someone and can talk about it online. I know how much that means to you. If you aren’t pregnant with my child, then we don’t really have anything further to talk about. Be well.

Michael Arrington refused to speak to me on the record for this story. Jenn Allen ignored at least a half-dozen of my requests to be interviewed for this story. One morning, I rang the buzzer of her apartment building in San Francisco, and a nice landlady, Shirley, relayed to me a message from Allen that she had received my voice mails and e-mails. Shirley said, “When I told Allen you were here, that’s all she said; I don’t think she’s coming down to talk with you.”

Another address I found for Jenn Allen is that of her childhood home, where her parents still reside. The house is in a gorgeous, idyllic, old-money neighborhood of San Francisco. Allen’s father was a successful attorney. He’s now retired and, according to a neighbor, does Tai Chi in the park across the street from their home.

On the afternoon I knocked on the door, a modest white sedan was parked in the driveway; a sticker from Mills College, which is where Allen went to school, was in the rear window, faded it seemed, like anything resembling childhood innocence. It was hard not to imagine Jenn’s mom and dad driving their little girl off to school in that car.

After several knocks, Allen’s mother opened a window above me. I recognized her from a photo that Allen had posted online. It seems Allen documents a lot of her life on the Web. Including photos of her only sibling, a sister who is in an elite Ph.D. program, and who also politely declined to speak with me. Looking down at me from the window, Allen’s mother said, “My other daughter warned me you would probably try to contact me. We can’t talk to you.” In her eyes there was an exasperation, an anguish, an agony—a mother’s petition for mercy and privacy. I nodded and started down the steps to leave, and she closed the window.

On May 7, 2013, Michael Arrington filed suit against Allen, seeking damages for defamation. In her answer to Arrington’s complaint, filed in June, Allen did not retract her statements, though she did revise at least one major aspect of her allegation. She said that she had been mistaken when she said he had raped her on March 5. Later she would tweet that it actually happened on March 30.

According to her answer, Allen is represented by two law firms, one of them, Allred, Maroko & Goldberg, the firm headed by feminist superlawyer Gloria Allred, who herself was a victim of rape. To date, Allen has not filed a criminal charge against Arrington. Nor have the two other women. A trial has been set for next October.

More than two dozen sources I spoke with were quick to point out the intensity of the rivalry that existed between Michael Arrington and Valleywag, which is essentially a Gawker dedicated to Silicon Valley. Gawker’s Nick Denton launched Valleywag in 2006, shut it down in 2008, then relaunched it this year. Arrington had called Denton “evil” in the San Francisco Chronicle around the time Valleywag launched and “a total dick” in Portfolio in 2008, and he wrote a TechCrunch column that same year lambasting the site for being irresponsible: “Today I read all the sordid details about the alleged sexual encounter between a notable technology visionary and a woman who appears to be looking for as much publicity as possible. Where did I read it? On the Silicon Valley gossip blog Valleywag. The posts include private IM chats and various rumors, all designed to make the person mentioned look like as much of a fool as possible. That’s not new, of course. Valleywag is making a business out of digging into people’s personal lives and publishing it for all to see (me included, regularly).” (Denton didn’t respond to numerous requests for comment.)

In his column, published in March 2008, Arrington noted that a business executive had recently committed suicide after being written about in a blog (not owned by Denton), and then asked:

So how long will it be before Valleywag drives someone in our community to suicide? My fear is that it isn’t a matter of if it will happen, but when. Valleywag and Nick Denton, though, will likely look forward to the event, and the great traffic growth that will surely follow. There’s a market for this kind of content, obviously. And nothing can stop it except significant changes to our libel and defamation laws. That isn’t something I support. But the valley was a much nicer place to live and work before the days of Valleywag.”

There are just as many people in the Valley who would say it was a lot nicer place before the days of Arrington. The allegations lobbed at him are the result of the very same blog/social media/Silicon Valley “innovative journalism” that he himself has championed. In 2009, Arrington wrote a blog post on TechCrunch in defense of his site’s practice of publishing rumors as part of the process to get to the “absolute truth.” Digitally savvy journalists have academically dubbed this “process journalism.”

“Some people ask why we don’t just wait until we have the whole story before posting,” Arrington wrote. “The fact is that we sometimes can’t get to the end story without going through this process. . . . When a story is up and posted, it’s amazing how many people come out of the woodwork to give us additional information. . . . And readers love it. The only people who don’t like it are competitors who like to point out that a story was partially wrong, and that they got it right later. But the fact is that they didn’t even know there was a story to begin with. Our original post kicked off the process, and they, like us, started digging for the absolute truth.”

You might say process journalism was applied to the accusations against Arrington, and this sordid mess is the necessary by-product of a pursuit of the absolute truth. Regardless of the absolute truth of what Arrington did or did not do to Jenn Allen, the whole affair makes this much clear: while the Valley is busy incubating a lot of shiny new start-ups and promising innovations and social networks that generate all kinds of value propositions and tremendous revenue possibilities, behind the scenes of that eco-system there’s another part of the culture, where someone is always trying to screw somebody over, where it’s crunch or be crunched. The big question the luminaries of the Valley might want to ask themselves is the question Arrington himself posed that day at Berkeley: Does the Valley want to solve the problem, or does it want to pick on Mike?
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(G.H.- See More About GAWKER, HERE>>>)

(F- LAT- Payback’s a Bitch, VC’s)

(F- Daily Caller- The Silicon Valley VC’s are the DNC‘s bankroll. When they go, the DNC goes.)

(FGH- Here’s the problem with the Venture Capitalists character assassinating someone clever and entrepreneurial like Arrington. When you end someone’s life with a character attack you create a highly motivated enemy. They, and their friends, will come after you forever. When you do it to a publisher with lots of friends you double your pleasure/payback. When you do it to someone who is clever, a publisher and you do it on the internet where all of the other kids, adults, etc. who got attacked, themselves, can catch some affinity; you (VC/illuminati) pretty much shoot yourselves in the foot. Combine doing it to Greenwald, Assange, Arrington, Manning and the others at the same exact historical time-span and you are pretty much fucked, you VC’s. Good luck with a pissed off Arrington, Silicon Valley. You were better off with just a blabby Arrington. You should have let sleeping dogs sleep.)

(SD- The Arrington/D. McClure/R. Conway payback scheme will be Epic)

(GH-j- Elon Musk hit Martin Eberhard, and most of Musk’s enemies, with most of “The Full Monty” in order to force a settlement from him. According to his ex-wives and ex-girlfriends, he also threatened them with “trouble” if they didn’t accept a quick settlement, too as discussed HERE>>>)

(MA- Gawker is a stealth front for Jay Carney and Robert Gibbs in the WH Press Office. If it is too dirty for a WH press syndicate release they have Nick Denton do the hit on somebody (usually the GOP) and, in exchange, avoid looking at his overseas accounts)

(G- Per the quote in the article about waiting for “Valleywag to drive someone in the -Silicon Valley- community to suicide..” It Has!!! Silicon Valley Has Committed Suicide in Self-Disgust. Goodbye Silicon Valley and the Arrogant Hipsters and Douche Bag VC’s.

MARTIN EBERHARD, of Tesla, got the FULL MONTY.

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(DFG- THIS LINK has Arrington’s big blow-out disclosure on the VC’s.)

But once in awhile, Reporters win! See the Movie: “Big Boys Gone Bananas”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IckPHuuNIYc

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Option #2: “Actual” Death-

Known as “Wet-Work” and done by hired mercenaries, who mainstream news calls: “Contractors” (See George Clooney’s movie “Micheal Clayton” to see how it is done). Killing you dead with, formerly, untraceable creepy technology… Internet lore holds that Brietbart is thought to have been taken out this way.

…they can actually, ACTUALLY, kill you like THIS!>>> as shown in THESE ARTICLES

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Option #3: “The Come On”-

They ask to look at your technology, then steal it, then they say: “Ha! We are going to give it away, or just use it without paying you, to kill your market. What are you going to do about it, Sue us? Ha! Suckers…“

Except, …now you CAN sue them, and win!

.. they can sabotage your business like THIS!>>>

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Option #4: “The Poor Boy”-

Political operatives hack into, or pay friends to access, each of the career databases and credit reporting companies to falsely crash your background and credit checks so you can’t get a job. The companies they mostly use are:

TalentShield
BeenVErified
GIS BackGround Checks
CVCertify
Social Intelligence
Dun And Bradstreet
EquiFax
Infortal
Kroll Backgrounds
Onesource
Checkpeople
and others…

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Option #5: “The Honey Trap”-

They send somebody to sleep with you, or charge you for sex, or get pregnant or all of the above and cause all kinds of hell in the media…

The creepiest Honey Trap system is the one we heard about at ProPublica where the owners of Match.com/OKCupid.com are closely connected to certain political “interests”. A source claimed that they allow those interests to scan their database with photo-comparison software. If the dating profile picture you posted on Match.com or OkCupid is a match for a person the “interests” want to run a Honey Trap on, the “interests” send in a fake date person to try to get info from you or get you in a compromising situation. Very often the hot blonde you think you are writing to is some hairy fat male political operative in New Jersey. Both sites already have a number of legal actions for fake profiles. If true, and you are controversial, I suppose you can’t date anymore… bummer!

Ed- PP
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To see some of the HONEYS. CLICK HERE>>>

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OR, just Bully Them To Death with “Swiftboating”, “Character Kills”…

(This is why good candidates don’t run for office, nobody wants to get character assassinated except the ones that are so dirty they just don’t give a damn– GH)