Chapter 1. I'm not even sure why this is necessary. And that's the truth.

But I've had enough. November 2020.

People ask me all the time what happened with Keri Smith and I. The truth is that I have no idea.

I know what Keri CLAIMS happened. But I also know that what Keri CLAIMS happened bears no resemblance to any reality that I ever experienced.

Keri was an integral part of my red pill journey - she was one of the people who showed me how much I had been lied to by people I trusted my entire life. My wake-up started in the knitting community where I suddenly noticed people being bullied for all sorts of stupid things, and I didn’t understand what was happening.

At the time, Keri was the co-host of a show called Unsafe Space on YouTube. It was a small channel that was covering different elements of the culture war, and Keri (as a “reformed” social justice warrior) was on the show to explain how she realized that social justice was toxic and what the ideology really was. And she and her co-host Carter were the only ones to cover what was going on in the knitting world. So I tuned in, and I learned. They helped me find my voice and my bravery to speak up against something that I hadn’t even been aware of (well, not fully aware of, anyway) prior to finding them.

And then I went on a journey of really questioning everything I believed in. That journey led me to a Trump rally on the eve of the New Hampshire primary. And that Trump rally led to me writing an article about being a Democrat at a Trump rally that went viral to the tune of 4 million views.

Suddenly, I was all over conservative media. I was getting all this attention. And the truth is, I felt so guilty…because Keri and Carter and Unsafe Space weren’t getting as much as I was.

So I really did everything I could to promote them. They were the very first interview that I did after Fox News. I was plugging their content all the time, talking about how important it was to my journey. And I had Keri on my YouTube channel several times, which was growing by between 500-1000 subscribers a day.

I thought Keri and I were friends. I had no idea that it would turn into one of the worst nightmares I’ve ever experienced in my life.

The day after the election in 2020, I woke up to chaos, with no one knowing who had won. I thought “I wonder what Keri thinks of all of this?” and I looked up her Twitter.

I was blocked.

What the hell? I really had no idea why. I started looking at other social media sites and realized I had been removed from all the groups I was in that they administered and had been blocked on all social sites.

I was really heartbroken by all of this. As I said, I had looked up to Keri, and I truly had no idea what happened.

I’d also be lying if I said I wasn’t under a lot of personal stress. 2020 was…a weird year. To say the least. And I had just spent the last six months traveling almost every weekend leading up to the election…and now it looked like everything we had worked for was for not.

I flew home that afternoon and texted Keri on the way. Here’s how the conversation went:

What Keri did in her message to me was to try to gaslight me into believing things that did not happen, and I was flabbergasted. I had told the complete truth about the hotel (to this day, there has not been one shred of evidence to the contrary, just a lot of people saying “we pinky swear, she lied”), there wasn’t any riff between Mike Harlow (at that time) and me because it was a miscommunication and we had had a conversation about why he was upset. He perceived me to be starting a “feud” for clout when all I did was state an opinion and then not back down when a famous influencer said I was wrong. I disagree to this day that I did anything wrong. And, in sofar as the Adam thing went, I DID know about what happened, but I never spilled the tea publicly about it until very recently, almost two years later. And the only reason I did was because Keri had been publicly accusing me of doing it for two years anyway and I basically figured “If I’m going to be accused of this regardless, what’s the point in keeping it a secret anymore?”

And you can see that I immediately called out Keri for trying to gaslight me in the moment. After I sent that text, I blocked her number. And I thought that was that.

To me, each of these complaints seemed to be more an issue of a misperception, not something to go completely nuclear over. To be honest, it almost seemed silly to me. If I had this type of disagreement with someone, I would talk to them about it. Keri had never even bothered to try to ask me about these things privately - she had just slammed the door in my face.

But this thing with Keri REALLY upset me, far more than I think I let on publicly at the time. Over the next few days, I was actually really depressed, to the point where I didn’t get out of bed for about three days. It was the first time I had experienced a gaslighting attack like that and I really couldn’t wrap my head around what had happened.

Little did I know it was about to get worse.

Keri had blocked me on all social media. I wasn’t looking at her social media, and I assumed that she wanted nothing to do with mine. So I tweeted a vague tweet that didn’t mention Keri, but was absolutely about the gaslighting I had just experienced at her hand.

But, Keri was still looking at my social media. She found it, took a screenshot, and put me on blast, using exactly the same language she had used in her text:

Keri also followed up with a whole thread:

And every time someone replied to the thread, Keri took advantage of the opportunity to smear me further:

The problem is, because I was blocked and very depressed, I didn’t see any of this.

BECAUSE I WASN’T LOOKING AT HER SOCIAL MEDIA.

The problem is that other people were.

I was in Washington DC for the million MAGA march when I received this message via my website:

I was used to people emailing me unflattering things. I had a person who sent me notes like this regularly using fake names and email addresses. That didn’t bother me.

What did bother me was the language. It was EXACTLY the same language that Keri Smith had used in her text message to me.

How did anyone else know that language? I thought it was just a private text message. I had no idea Keri had posted the same thing to Twitter (yet).

How did this person have that text???

How did they know Keri said that???

Was Keri actually the person who had been emailing me???

All of those thoughts raced through my head. I truly had no idea Keri has posted publicly about me and I didn’t know how else that person could have gotten that information.

So I did what I always do in these situations, and I called Joshua. Joshua is my life coach…and also a psychic. And I asked him to pull cards (tarot cards, work his psychic magic) on if Keri was the person who had been emailing me. He said “Karlyn, she posted that on Twitter. I saw it.”

WHAT????

I was floored.

I looked at Keri’s social media through another account I had that wasn’t blocked and, sure enough, there it was.

I’m a firey person. You don’t fuck with me like this. And I was pissed.

So, I fired back.

And then Keri instantly saw it (although why would she? She had blocked me. Why was she even looking at what I tweeted?) and quote tweeted it:

And, once again, she didn’t just quote tweet. She wrote an entire thread.

And then she used the replies to smear me:

That second tweet from the bottom was the first time Keri called me a sociopath. But it wouldn’t be the last.

And then she quote tweeted it AGAIN:

And then AGAIN she used the replies to keep smearing me.

Now, keep in mind that, although I did consider Keri a friend, she wasn’t a close friend. She was someone I had spoken to publicly many times but privately on probably less than 5 occasions. She CERTAINLY was not in a position to diagnose my mental health.

And here she was, calling me a sociopath and accusing me of threatening people. The whole thing was just insane, and so blown out of proportion that I couldn’t wrap my head around it.

WHO DOES THAT?????

I’ve always been one of those people who you either love or you hate. There is no in-between, no one who feels ambivalent about me. And it wasn’t uncommon for women (especially those, ahem, who are weaker than me) to hate me. I’ve always gotten along better with the boys than the girls, and I really chalked the whole thing up to that.

This person couldn't really be crazy…could she?

And why did she have this many feelings about me??? I had done nothing but try to promote her and her show up until this point, I had never been anything but nice to her. The whole thing made exactly no sense.

I wanted to keep things relatively private at this point, and most of our mutual contacts were on Facebook and IG where I had smaller followings. So, I addressed the issue there:

But it was about to get worse.

That evening, I found out that Keri was privately messaging people talking about how I was a horrible person. And I found out because one of Mike Harlow’s friends told me. I received this message on Facebook:

Now, you’ll notice in that email, Keri says specifically: “No one called her a drunk”

But that’s not true.

Keri did, in a reply to the tweet I sent, where I couldn’t see it because she had blocked me and was replying to someone else who had replied to me. Keri called me a drunk on Twitter and then private messaged people claiming she hadn’t, hoping they wouldn’t search her replies:

So, I posted it on Facebook:

So, now I knew that Keri was private messaging people saying the same thing she was saying publicly that I was trying to defend against. This was next level insanity.

I was so pissed I could barely see straight. And if Keri was going to post publicly, so was I.

I was ready to be done with it.

But Keri wasn’t. She logged in under her DOG’S account on Instagram a few days later to keep fighting…but in doing so, actually admitted she had shared private text messages.

Coincidentally, this is also when Keri found her current pastor, Bradley.

I mention this now because it’s going to become important later…although it had not become important yet.

This was also when Keri began interacting with a person who runs a Twitter account stalking me (they’ve even doxed my house) to this day. This is the first account they ran, which was a slight variation of my name (just enough to confuse people) which got banned after the posted photos of my house on Twitter:

And this is when Keri first started selling another story - that I was never a part of the knitting wars and had stolen the story from others.

That, itself, is provably untrue. I have absolutely no idea who the person Keri mentions here is - I had never heard of them before. But Keri apparently took everything they said at face value and began saying I had always lied about being in the knitting world. Keri, herself, was never directly involved. She didn’t even knit, though she still claims she does to this day.

Most of the knitting wars took place in the comments, and sadly I can’t easily go back and find those on IG. However, you can even still find my old posts from the knitting wars on my main IG account. Here are a few, with the dates included. They are each linked to the original posts, so you can see for yourself.

The one with the definition of bullying was when I entered into it. Others were mostly to show support for different ideas and things that were outside of the left. And then I worse the Make Speech Free Again hate to Vogue Knitting Live, the biggest knitting event of the year, just to prove the point. I was so scared to do it at the time. Things have changed so much since then.

All of that was from November 2020. And it has only gotten worse since then.

Much worse.

You might say “why don’t you just ignore it???”

I did. For a long time. I really tried to ignore it. I would hear through the grapevine that Keri was still saying crazy shit about me and I just tried to focus on what I was doing.

The problem is that when I was ignoring it, it got worse than I ever imagined it would.

The only thing I have left is to defend myself from it.

I have tried everything to get her to stop. And she won’t. I could probably sue her for defamation at this point, but it would cost me a lot of money and time to do it and I don’t believe that she has enough money to even begin to pay out a judgment.

I’ve even filed a police report on it, because I’m afraid that Keri’s cancel mob is going to try to have my house SWATTED and I had to come up with a plan with the police for that eventuality.

So the only thing I can do is document it and hope that people see my side.

I think that Keri is mentally unwell. I believe she has an undiagnosed personality disorder. I think it’s a dissociative disorder, but I could be wrong. You’ll find out later (over a year after all this started) that Keri literally believes I’m her abusive mother.

Why would I say that? Because Keri literally wrote an essay about how I’m her abusive mother.

I believe that Keri believes every time she attacks me, she is getting some sort of revenge on the woman who abused her as a child.

But honestly, I don’t care what’s wrong with her. I’m not unsympathetic to what this woman likely experienced growing up, it’s not like my childhood was rainbows and unicorns and I didn’t go completely mental on a woman I barely knew and carried on a two-year smear campaign.

Nothing can justify what this woman has done to me. So, fuck it. Let’s tell my side of this story, bit by bit, with receipts.

No matter how much Keri tries to gaslight me, I am not backing down. People can believe what they like, but I know the truth.

Follow along, if you care to see what really happened.

---

Read chapter 2 here.

---