The more I look into Joe's situation, the more I'm convinced that he suffers from significant mental illness, if not namely paranoid schizophrenia.
I understand that the document(s) and audio recording has been taken down out of hopes that Joe can get help. I would still implore others to come to their own conclusions in reviewing the facts. If I make any statements in error, please correct me in the replies. Bottom line is that interacting with Joe in any way is not a good idea and to harass him benefits nobody.
To start, the document frames many of his communications and actions as manipulation. I do not personally think, due to what I'm about to say, that Joe is capable of playing mind games in this way. This does not mean that his communications were neither hurtful nor dangerous; quite the opposite. I think his lack of awareness makes him more dangerous. But I personally think the writers of the document, his victims, colored their recollections of the events with some of their feelings of hurt and distrust. I don't know Joe and likely never will. But I want to extend him the benefit of the doubt as I would with anybody; I find it unlikely that he is aware of his actions. Though Eden admits, in their recollection of at least one of these incidents, that it simply "*felt* like a manipulation tactic, whether intentional or not." My intention here is to provide somewhat of a rationalization for why I think the hurt he caused, up to and including the verbal abuse and unwanted sexual advances towards his victims, were not intentional.
Make no mistake that none of this excuses his actions. I'm sure we can all agree on that. But if we want to understand why it happened, we have to accurately examine his behavior and base our judgements off of that.
His behavior is not that of a sane person, let alone a sane person who is also bigoted, a predator, and emotionally abusive with full awareness and attempts to justify his wrongdoing. His behavior is that of someone who cannot properly percieve, and thus does not understand, reality.
I've seen several recordings of him in his post-2011 years that struck me as odd. I've remarked on them on the subreddit in the past, but to list a few:
- In a 2018 instagram livestream, Joe makes several odd remarks. Actually the entire recording is utterly bizzare. I think just about everything he says speak to his mental state in one way or another, but here are some highlights to consider.
He states that he thinks [bacon should be illegal](https://youtu.be/kkBSAWxcvIA?t=124), following that statement with a seemingly unrelated explanation about styrofoam in cigarette filters being the real cause of cancer, and that tobacco could possibly be *good* for your lungs.
He segways (pun intended) into saying that marijuana was probably too complicated to be smoked thousands of years ago due to its similarity to the human genome. I have no idea what he means by this.
He says medical marijuana is "probably great in raw form" but that the zombie apocalypse is a difficult situation. Mid sentence he implies that the 72 viewers of his instagram livestream were responsible for this apocalypse. He makes several grandiose statements about the number of current viewers throughout the stream. The way he speaks of them is as though they've entered into some sort of magic ritual that will change the world.
He states that "drugs and music are sort of interchangeable relative to zeitgeists" in response to someone wondering how the topic switched from music to drugs.
Someone asks him to rap the ruler of everything rap, which he remarks seemingly to himself as "kind of a... scary idea..." And then says the first couple lines out loud slowly in a funny voice before moving on to other comments.
He remarks that one of the chatter's names matches the name of a teacher from his middle school.
He reads the time off his watch then shows his watch, notably set to the inside of his wrist, remarking specifically the watch's model, insignia, and where he got it.
He quips that the "worst curse word on instagram" is probably "buses".
In response to a chatter saying "scars are weird," he states that there are lots of parasites living inside us that doctors won't tell you about.
He discusses his song space station level seven, but his final remark seems very odd especially after having just recited some of his own japanese lyrics. "that's cliche at this point as we both know, jane"
"it's an elevator song, bora insisted it was a ladder" the elevator seems to be referring to the elevator song from a video game he was citing as an inspiration for the song, while the mention of bora i would guess is a strange recollection of what was likely a discussion they had when they were working on the project.
when asked what else he does for work he again remarks on the number of watchers and replies that "every moment is work"
some people asked his thoughts on the lgbt community, which he didn't see. but someone said "lgbtizzies" and he read that and remarked something to do with that topic. he cuts out but appears to say "i always- sexual- but I'm gay" without more context not much can be assumed but it didn't seem antagonistic in the very least. some may interpret that as him saying he's a part of the community. some chatters appear to reiterate the idea that he did refer to himself as gay, but many didn't seem to hear it properly either.
"hally tall is trying to tell me what to do" "please say the f word"
"why do people keep requesting to be on the video and then decline it. own up to your own request!"
when someone gets featured he becomes grandiose
in response to her saying "incredible" he says "lacking credibility"
"i'll say the fuck word for you joe" "awesome well fuck! you said it!"
"peer pressure, i'll tell you how i die" i drown at the age of 102, but it's a secret so if anyone tells they'll die too (very grandiose and bizzare) "when you know how you die, you know"
Worth mentioning is that his state in this video seems relatively calm when compared to his other actions, where he got very angry and rude over seemingly nothing. He only mentions a couple times that people were "telling him what to do" but doesn't seem angry at all. I'd imagine later versions of him would be angrier at some of the chatters.
But seeing more of his conversations and hearing at least one phone call... He's very clearly unwell and has been for a while. So many of his sentences and responses are nonsensical in or out of context. I'm no expert on schizophrenia specifically, as many have speculated, but I wonder if these patterns of communication are common with such troubled individuals. He non-sequitrs constantly, like with his descriptions of his past trauma. He sees situations happening around him now as a paranoid extension of past traumas.
For instance, he implicates an unnamed individual as having "something to do" with him getting hit by a car. Not much is known about this alleged incident, but I'm assuming based on the context that this unnamed individual was another fan, who was friends with Nymn and Eden, which makes it highly unlikely they had anything to do with such an accident. Plus, his wording is strange. If he was hit with a car, surely he'd know who hit him? The accusation that the redacted individual had "something to do" with it reads to me as him linking his past traumas to unrelated individuals and lashing out because he has no ability to percieve the lack of correlation between past events in his life that were painful to him, and current people and events that are most likely benign and completely unrelated.
Again, I'm no expert on paranoid schizophrenia, but it reminds me of one Gary Stollman. For those unaware, Gary Stollman was a paranoid schizophrenic whose condition got so bad that he held a KNBC anchor at gunpoint [on air](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tL9jGWqvkIE) to read a small statement of his. I researched this topic because I thought what he had to say was really interesting, given he mentioned the CIA, and the video that had mentioned it dismissed it as insane nonsense. Upon further research, I came to the same conclusion, but the video didn't do a good job of explaining the fascinating story behind *why*. His father had been on KNBC for many years and Gary had seen his act as the only way to get his statement read and seen by the world. His statement alleged that he was being stalked by the CIA in an elaborate sting operation involving aliens. He wrote a [45-page document](https://www.scribd.com/document/52361592/gary#) several years later detailing his experiences and why he believed what he alleged and committed this crime on air. He describes getting a phone call from his father, where his father described ludicrous scenarios to him. He would ask his father about them later, and his father was unable to recall these situations. He got a call from his mom, who he insists "was not my REAL mom!" due to the "tonal qualities" of her voice over the phone. And all of a sudden he didn't recognize his own mother, thinking she was some sort of replacement sent by a team of CIA and Alien collaborators. He described his interactions with the operator, swearing up and down that a female phone operator would call *him* consistently asking *him* questioning him about people he didn't even know. The biggest moment that solidified my understanding of his condition was when he described him thinking that because of a single thing that a college counselor mentioned offhand, that almost every single other student had dropped out of all classes, and some of his awkward interactions with his classmates going forward, meant that the CIA had replaced every single one of his classmates with agents to spy on him. "It was as if they were playing parts out of a movie, the way they were carrying on during class. Something just wasn't right. It seemed like they had been assigned various "roles", and their actions in the class made me believe that they had been put there for some specific purpose." It seems to me that Gary's transition into was was likely paranoid schizophrenia was gradual enough that he thought he was the only sane one when really, he needed serious help. When your perception of reality suddenly slips and it seems like nothing makes sense, it's heartbreaking to see that he became extremely distrustful of everyone and assumed the only thing going on was that something as ludicrous as aliens colluding with the CIA to specifically target HIM of all people. He frames his brief tenure in a mental asylum as a targeted attack by the CIA to keep him quiet. He couldn't see the people trying to help him, his parents, family, the professionals, were trying to help him. He genuinely thought due to his condition that he was surrounded by replacement people in a top-secret government-funded effort to experiment on him and keep their alien fratenization hidden from the public. From what I can find, he may never have gotten the help that he needed, especially considering his 45-page recollection was penned several years later. His faith in his delusions, as far as I'm aware, never faltered, so he never got better. It's heartbreaking and it's a shame.
I bring up this example because it may shed some light on Joe's mental state. All people are different, but perhaps their disconnection from reality has some key similarities. Joe, like Gary, appears not to interact with reality, but with a false perception of it caused by paranoid delusions. Again, his responses are often full of non-sequitrs. He frames situations in this grandiose way that implies he assumes collusion between unrelated people. He reacts with anger, profanity, and rudeness at the most benign things, like being asked to clarify some of his cryptic, one-word messages to help his corresponder understand where they were meeting. He refers to Nymn's call as "committing physical violence" against him. He viewed an informational instagram post about SA as a personal threat "in context," as he says, about a relationship that had ended, to my understanding, over 15 years ago. It seems highly unlikely that he's aware, almost of anything happening around him. It's all augmented by delusion. So perhaps when he interacts with people in this way, to him, he's defending himself to what truly are unfounded attacks, perhaps even that of a physical nature, against his reputation and his person. But we can't put on his glasses and see the world as he sees it. Without that perspective, we may never understand why he behaves this way. I saw a fan on [twitter](https://twitter.com/idcabout_names/status/1691637491307077651?s=20) say that his "mental derangement" has drasticaly hindered his "true self" and that he one day may see the line of right and wrong *as he once did*, as long as he can get help. This struck a chord with me. I don't think Joe can be expected, in his current state, to differentiate the line between right and wrong, when he can't differentiate his current interactions with fans from his relationships that have ended in the past. If he thinks getting a calm phone call kindly asking him what happened last night and what he meant in his rage, equates to *physical violence*, if he thinks an instagram post about SA is a personal threat due to allegations that were made against him in the past... If he thinks all those things, how can we expect him to even begin to understand trans issues? The connotation that slurs have for society at large? How can we expect him to be a decent person when he lives in the augmented reality he seems to live in?
None of this justifies his actions. From all I've seen, he appears to be undeniably dangerous. His sexual behavior towards minors, and, moreover, his lack of awareness of any wrongdoing, is nothing short of mortifying.
