Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Communication issued by Joe Lonsdale via email on January 28, 2015
Friends:
I’m writing because a personal matter that I’ve been dealing with is becoming public, and I want you to hear
the facts directly from me.
For some time now, I have been defending myself against a vengeful, personal attack by a disturbed former
girlfriend. This is a woman that I dated for a year and whom many of you knew. Shortly after I ended the
relationship in 2013, my exgirlfriend began a malicious campaign of lies. Upset that I was not willing to
continue the relationship, she contacted business associates, friends, and others advancing a repugnant
and increasingly bizarre narrative of “abuse” hoping to hurt me and damage my career. To quote the words
she sent in a text to her close friend, this is a “Joe take down scheme.”
Because she told me throughout our relationship that she had been a victim of abuse before we met and
had suffered from mental health issues ,
I tried to be as sensitive as possible, even as she made it clear that
she was intent on defaming and damaging me. It is clear that my hopes that time would help her move on
and she would cease her vindictive campaign against me have been misplaced.
Now she has taken her attacks public by filing a lurid and salacious lawsuit alleging abuse and assault. Let
me be completely clear: there is not a single allegation of abuse, assault or neglect contained in her lawsuit
that is true. These attacks were and are 100 percent fiction – provably false. There are not only hundreds
of
loving emails and handwritten love letters from her during and even immediately after the relationship.
More than six weeks after first breaking up with her, for example, my exgirlfriend emailed me, “Joe, you are
capable of treating me better than any man in the world. You have proven this to me before, which is why I
fell in love with you….I crave for you to come closer.”
There are also statements from third parties, including a very close friend of hers who has voluntarily come
forward to state in an affidavit that she is lying – and that she tried to enlist the friend to lie about me. In her
affidavit, this close friend of my exgirlfriend states that “at no time” during the relationship did she ever say
that I had been verbally or physically aggressive to her or that any part of our relationship was
nonconsensual. “She was with Joe for a long time and never said he was abusive in any way when they
were together and nothing I observed suggested the relationship was anything other than ‘normal’ and
loving.”
Tomorrow I will file a defamation lawsuit in Federal court, and I will counter these vindictive attacks at every
turn. I will not be bullied by lies and threats, and I now have the ability to fight these lies in the light of day. I
am fully prepared to confront her fabrications with facts and evidence.
This is a malicious attempt to destroy me, pure and simple. The facts and the evidence refute every
allegation, however, and I will not allow my name and reputation to be tarnished any further.
Regrettably, that requires me to discuss very personal details about this yearsold relationship. Anyone who
knows me can attest that talking about intimate details of my personal life publicly is the last thing I want to
do. However I have no choice but to speak up and to present the facts.
In early 2013, I ended a yearlong relationship with a 22year old woman named Ellie Clougherty. I would
not name her, but she has identified herself in the lawsuit that she filed. If you are receiving this note, it is
likely that you know and have met her. We were a very public and committed couple. And like any couple
in a longterm, loving
,
committed relationship, we attended important family and social events together, went
on vacations together, and planned our future together.
Our first meeting came at her initiative, about a year before we became a couple. While a Stanford
undergraduate, she and her mother sought me out through a mutual friend, and we first met in New York in
the Spring of 2011. After this first encounter, we kept in contact over the ensuing months.
As my friends know, I have long served as an informal volunteer for a variety of Stanford organizations,
including an entrepreneurship class at the University. As a Stanford alum and an entrepreneur, it is
something I think is important and that I’ve enjoyed doing.
Fully knowing that I would be volunteering again in the entrepreneurship class for the Winter Quarter, she
emailed me to say that she had enrolled in the class. As an informal volunteer, I was one of several names
on a roster that was made available to the students, and was encouraged to meet with groups a few times
for advice. I was not aware of any Stanford polices in connection with my role, consistent with the fact that
the role fell outside the University’s purview.
Despite this, I wanted to be careful, so I sent an email to
confirm that my role did not mean I would be evaluating her coursework in any way.
While we had been seeing each other socially even before the class started, and started dating during class,
it was not until after the class ended and we were on a trip to Rome that we began an intimate relationship
(an experience my exgirlfriend later described to me in an email as “a beautiful moment together”).
She
was 21, and I was 29.
Like most couples who fall in love, we wanted to spend as much time as we could together. She was a very
intelligent woman, who had a curiosity about the world, technology, and society that matched my own. She
accompanied me to every major event in my life, and on numerous vacations and trips. She was my date at
my 30th birthday party and my father’s wedding, and we traveled together to Italy (
a trip she recalled foundly
for the “love” she felt for me on it
),
South Korea, New York, and Hawaii .
She spent time with my family, and
I with hers.
Throughout the course of our relationship, she regularly expressed her love and affection for me— which I
reciprocated. There are hundreds of emails from her telling me how much she loved me, how happy she
was, and how excited she was about our future. She said that I was “like the boyfriend every girl dreams
about but doesn’t think actually exists.”
On another occasion, she wrote in a handwritten card, “I want to
learn more about you too to love you deeper in return for the way you love me. You are a really special
man.” These and other effusively loving emails exist from throughout the entirety of our relationship,
including some from immediately after we broke up.
By the Summer of 2012, our relationship had developed to a new phase. Our discussions and emails turned
to talk about future plans – kids
,
and the impact of our careers on family. She told friends that she might not
need to work because of her plans to marry me, and she emailed me about “branding” our relationship with
a name.
I was excited about our relationship and the future. In retrospect, I understand that I was naïve about some
warning signs – especially those concerning her unstable behavior and related mental health issues, many
of which were revealed for the first time over six months into our relationship in her letter to me following our
trip to Asia in August 2012. I trully wanted to think that the positive aspects of our relationship would
outweigh what she told me were past issues in her life and that we could work through anything together.
My family and a few friends were also worried in particular about her mother’s deep involvement in the
relationship. Her mother was always involved in our relationship – urging a mutual friend to introduce us
originally, accompanying us on one of our first dates, encouraging me to spend more time with her daughter
and making decisions for her, and even calling and writing me to weigh in on our relationship. She and her
mother discussed the most intimate details of our relationship, and her mother somewhat shockingly related
them back to me, including one time thanking me for the positive impact our sexual relationship had on her
daughter. Her mother also continued to insert herself more and more in planning our future together,
including my deliberations over a home purchase in Palo Alto .
She even went so far as to fly out to
California to go househunting purportedly on my behalf. In another harbinger of things to come, her mother
attempted to leverage our relationship for personal, financial gain. She asked me for contacts with
investors, and asked me to invest her money. Toward the end of 2012, with her daughter’s graduation in
sight, she also repeatedly pressured me to secure a highpaying job for her daughter.
As she continued to behave more erratically toward the end of the year, my unease about the relationship
began to grow, and I lost confidence that we could work through our fundamental problems. Just before the
end of December at a vacation at their family house, it became obvious to me that it needed to end. After
that trip, I broke it off, and yet, over the course of the next two months, both she and her mother persuaded
me through emails to try to preserve the relationship. Her mother emailed me a twopage letter imploring
me to get back together with her daughter. She also mentioned that I should continue to help her daughter
find a job and buy her more thoughtful gifts.
Just days after these entreaties, in late February of 2013 when I made it clear the relationship was over for
good, the tone of my thenexgirlfriend and her mother changed dramatically. When I began dating other
women casually, my exgirlfriend and her mother became disturbingly angry and vindictive. In one of our
final breakup conversations, my exgirlfriend suggested to me, for the first time, that I had been “emotionally
abusive” toward her, and told me that she had visited a campus counseling center to discuss it. This was
the first time she had ever mentioned or even hinted about any alleged “abuse” in our relationship. In the
literally hundreds of emails between us, discussing the most personal aspects of our relationship, not once
did she intimate she thought our relationship was in any way abusive.
I brushed this off at first, as she often invoked the term “abusive” when discussing her exboyfriends (on
several occasions, she had told me various exboyfriends or male friends had “abused” or “stalked” her). By
that summer, however, I heard through friends that she was openly accusing me of being “abusive,” creating
completely madeup and hurtful stories that she began to spread among my friends, associates, and
business partners. She went so far as to contact investors and cofounders in my businesses, officials at a
prominent nonprofit with which I was involved, and a former girlfriend— all with increasingly outlandish lies
about me.
She also reported her fabrications of abuse to Stanford. When Stanford first contacted me in May of 2013, I
was informed only that it was investigating whether I had violated school policy about consensual
relationships between students and staff, and I’d heard none of the sexual harassment claims. Because I
was confident in my standing as a volunteer and not university staff—and confident in my innocence—I
readily agreed to be interviewed without ever contacting a lawyer. I had done nothing wrong and had
nothing to hide. What I didn’t know until many months later was that she had been fabricating new stories
about our relationship – lies designed to leverage the political climate on campus around sexual assault that
would pressure Stanford to take action.
In late 2013, I learned for the first time that Ms. Clougherty’s new fictional story was not one of emotional
conflict, but some undefined “sexual abuse.” This was the first time since our relationship began almost two
years earlier that I’d learned of her defamatory allegations.
As I have since learned, Stanford’s initial response to her complaint was muted, finding that it was a
consensual relationship, but claiming I had an obligation to disclose it to the University. I thought that was
the end of it, as I’m sure Stanford did as well. However, Ms. Clougherty and her mother were clearly not
satisfied. They retained lawyers and threatened Stanford with negative publicity concerning its handling of
her complaint.
As most of you know, Stanford has been in the spotlight in connection with its prior mishandling of
oncampus sexual assault claims. Her team of lawyers exploited this political climate to their benefit. Under
this pressure from my exgirlfriend and her lawyers, Stanford initiated a second investigation, dispensing
from the outset with any pretense of fairness.
It’s not an overstatement to say that what followed was a Kafkaesque nightmare. Stanford’s investigation
guidelines are such that the University could not tell me any of the specific allegations against me, and I
never had a chance to review or comment on anything submitted by Ms. Clougherty to support her
manufactured and constantlyshifting claims. Key evidence, including email correspondence between us,
that directly exculpated me and proved Ms. Clougherty was lying was not considered, nor were previous
claims that she had made against other men in the past. The University never spoke to key witnesses with
direct, personal knowledge, whose testimony would further prove she was lying.
Out of the blue, I received a terse, written notice that Stanford had banned me from campus for 10 years.
Again, I was never told what the specific allegations were against me. All I was told was that Ms. Clougherty
claimed that there was some subset of sexual encounters between us that were “abusive.”
Despite being told that as a nonstudent I had no right to appeal the ban, last October I provided Stanford
with volumes of evidence – literally hundreds of emails – proving that my exgirlfriend and I shared a loving,
communicative and respectful relationship and her allegations of “abuse” were suspiciously never uttered
until after her and her mother’s attempts to resurrect the relationship failed.
The evidence shared with Stanford includes a lengthy statement from one of Ms. Clougherty’s closest
friends, stating not only that she believes her friend to be lying but also that Ms. Clougherty and her mother
asked the friend to perjure herself and lie to Stanford to help get me banned from campus.
This friend came contacted me on her own accord – neither I nor anyone representing me approached her –
and later provided her definitive statement. “I do not believe, based on Ellie’s excitement and happiness
when discussing their relationship – including the first time they were intimate – that Ellie was in any way
forced to have sex,” she says in her statement. And when Ms. Clougherty and her mother attempted to get
her to testify to alleged abuse, “I told her I thought the accusations were false and I was not willing to lie.”
She also states, “I feel bad about testifying that my longtime friend is not being truthful. But I don’t think that
Joe should be accused of something he did not do to help her cope with her guilt about having sex with him
or to punish him for ending the relationship.”
I hope Stanford considers this evidence and ultimately does the right thing.
Regardless, the latitude Ms. Clougherty has received from Stanford to make unsubstantiated false
allegations will not carry over to the courts. And while I do not relish the headlines and stories her lies will
create, I am relieved to finally be able to confront them with the full force of evidence and thirdparty
testimony, including other exgirlfriends who will attest to my respect for women and that I would never
abuse anyone.
I apologize for bringing you into something that no doubt seems bizarre and unpleasant. I have tried to
protect my friends and loved ones from being impacted by this sad episode. But as Ms. Clougherty and her
mother have taken their campaign of false and disturbing accusations to the courts, it’s important to me that
you know the truth. Everything I have outlined in this note is supported by emails, texts, or objective third
parties, which will be included in the lawsuit I will be filing.
If you have any questions, I hope you will reach out to me directly.
Thank you very much.
Joe Lonsdale