Ethereum cofounder Gavin Wood apologizes for blog post about sex with preteen girl Elizabeth

Gavin Wood at TechCrunch
Disrupt Berlin 2017.
Noam Galai/Getty
Images for TechCrunch,

• Ethereum cofounder Gavin Wood has apologised for a
  now-deleted blog post he wrote in 2013.
• BuzzFeed republished elements of the blog post, which
  resurfaced last year on Reddit and featured a story about Wood
  having sex with a preteen girl dying from AIDS.
• Wood tweeted a lengthy statement apologizing for the blog and
  stressing that it is a work of fiction, designed to “spark debate
  and conversation” about the nature of consent.

Ethereum cofounder Gavin Wood has apologized after a now-deleted
blog post from 2013, in which he wrote about having sex with a
dying preteen girl named Elizabeth, returned to haunt him.

Wood, who left Ethereum in 2016, tweeted a lengthy statement
after BuzzFeed republished elements of
his blog post, which first resurfaced on a Reddit
cryptocurrency group last year. Wood said the story was a work of
fiction. Business Insider has contacted Wood and Ethereum
for comment.

In the now-deleted post from Wood’s old blog, “Insights Into a
Modern World,” he describes having sex with a girl named
Elizabeth. The post describes Elizabeth as a girl he used to
babysit who contracts AIDS. According to BuzzFeed, Elizabeth, who
would have been 11 or 12 in the story, then asks an 18-year-old
Wood to have sex with her before she dies. The blog post then
describes the sexual encounter.

Wood said
in a statement that the account is entirely fictional and was
intended to spark debate about the nature of consent. “My story
is fiction and was written purely as a literary
thought-experiment in the context of current events,” he said.

BuzzFeed conducted an investigation and could find no record of a
girl named Elizabeth dying in Lancashire County, UK, where Wood
grew up, around the time he describes in his blog. BuzzFeed
noted, however, that Wood wrote in the blog post that Elizabeth
gave him a woven bracelet, and that Wood has been seen to wear a
woven bracelet at events and in photographs.

In Wood’s statement, he said the blog post was prompted by a UK
news story about a math teacher named
Jeremy Forrest, who absconded to France with a 15-year-old
student. Forest was jailed for
abduction and sex with a minor in 2013, the year Wood’s blog
post was published.

He cited the book “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!,” by Nobel
prize-winning physicist Dr Richard Feynman, as inspiration for a
caustic approach to inciting debate.

Wood also said press interest in the post is indicative of a
malicious campaign against him. “The fact that my blog is no
longer on the internet and reporters, unassociated with my
industry, have still ‘found’ and pursued it indicates that
individuals with less than good intentions have been actively
trying to disparage and slander me,” he said in his statement.

He apologised to anyone who had been upset by the contents of the
post. “It was not my intent to upset anyone, and I took the story
down as soon as I realised it was being misconstrued,” he said.
“Recent re-publications of this story have been entirely by
others, and I am very sorry to anyone that may have become upset
by its contents.”

BuzzFeed reported that the blog was unearthed on a cryptocurrency
Reddit group, Buttcoin, last year, and that shortly afterwards
the blog post disappeared from the Internet Archive. An office
manager at the archive told BuzzFeed that pages are only removed
upon request.

Wood cofounded the cryptocurrency project Ethereum in 2013 with
Vitalik Butelin. Ethereum’s cryptocurrency, Ether, is the
second-most popular in the world behind Bitcoin. He left Ethereum
in 2016 and founded Parity Technologies. 

Here is Wood’s statement in full:

Over the past few months, several reporters have approached me or
my associates asking aggressively about a fiction story that I
authored more than four years ago and is no longer posted online.

The story posted on my blog was fiction ‒ a made-up story meant
to spark debate and conversation.

The fact that my blog is no longer on the internet and reporters,
unassociated with my industry, have still “found” and pursued it
indicates that individuals with less than good intentions have
been actively trying to disparage and slander me.

My public acknowledgement of the story, along with my strongest
possible rebuke that any part of this story is true, is meant to
end all attempts to destroy my reputation.

I sincerely apologise to anyone who found my experiment in
creative writing upsetting, and I hope we can all come together
in understanding its original intent and purpose.

The content in question was created four years ago, when I wrote
a story in rather poor judgement. I published it to my personal
blog, Insights into a Modern World, in which I offered readers
“projections of thoughts for you to reflect upon and refract
over.” To reiterate, this story is entirely a work of fiction ‒
no characters or events described anything real.

The story, entitled “Elizabeth” was the last in a series of posts
(“Sexism and Physics” followed by “Lolita Justice” and then the
post in question) that were prompted by current affairs at the
time, specifically the Jeremy Forrest case in the U.K.

My story is fiction and was written purely as a literary
thought-experiment in the context of current events.

In the months before I wrote those posts, I had read “Surely
You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”: Adventures of a Curious Character
by the physicist and Nobel-winner Richard Feynman, in which the
author applied a unique critical perspective on the world,
ruffling a few of his audience’s feathers along the way.

Along those lines, my blog posts at the time were meant to
provoke intellectual debate and discussion around generally taboo
subjects like the nature of consent. Nothing about it should be
taken as indicative of my personal position. My only position
here is that rigorous, rational and unrestricted discussion on
all topics is generally a requirement to make informed decisions
as a society.

It was not my intent to upset anyone, and I took the story down
as soon as I realised it was being misconstrued. Recent
re-publications of this story have been entirely by others, and I
am very sorry to anyone that may have become upset by its
contents.

Gavin Wood