Exclusive: Unpublished ‘Cosby Suite’ Photo from BlizzCon 2013 Raises Inconvenient Questions

In December of 2023, the news broke that the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission lawsuit against Activision-Blizzard was finally settled and they will pay $18 million in compensation.

Few industries were spared the online pogrom caused by scheming feminist-aligned grifters during the turmoil of the #metoo movement. While the movement did some good by helping to expose serial perverts like Harvey Weinstein, it quickly morphed into a viral witch-hunt that ruined the reputation and the careers of many innocent men.

In every crisis, carpetbagging parasites inevitably slither out of the woodwork and take advantage of the infirmity of the host organism. The phrase uttered by Democratic operative Rham Emmanuel: never let a crisis go to waste immediately comes to mind. The video game industry — weakened by years of dubious claims of online harassment against females during and after the GamerGate movement — was ripe for exploitation by opportunists, cancel culture mobs, identity politics hustlers, and their accomplices in the woke media.

In 2021 when the EOCC in California sued Activision-Blizzard, the feminist activists in the video game industry won the proverbial lottery with the subsequent release of the sensationalist photos of the Cosby Suite.

For the clickbait media websites, the alleged salacious details of the Cosby Suite were like mana from heaven. Kotaku, a video game website sympathetic to left-wing causes and identity politics activism, pounced on this story and released an article titled: Inside the Blizzard Developer’s Infamous Bill ‘Cosby Suite’ a mere week after the lawsuits against Activision-Blizzard were served. It’s almost like it was planned in the same way that Leigh Alexander and various woke journalists colluded to push the “gamers are over” narrative that precipitated the 2014 Gamergate scandal.

Kotaku gave the world their first look at a photo from the Cosby Suite that would become emblematic of the struggle of women having to deal with alleged sexual harassment coming from so-called frat boy culture — a dubious cobwebbed term specifically brought out of retirement for this lawsuit.

Most people who think of frat boy culture will immediately recall the comedy film Animal House where drunken obnoxious fraternity brothers engaged in all sorts of mischief and mayhem and had carnal relations with women. The cunning strategists behind this lawsuit knew full well that the frat boy culture phrase would hit the jackpot in the minds of the public.

The “online harassment” scheme which only seems to blame men, was first deployed by clever cry bullies and their journalist accomplices in the Gamergate affair to divert attention from their misdeeds. Similar tactics are being employed by a new generation of woke journalists to deflect attention from that latest DEI scandal which involves video game industry collusion with consultant firms such as Sweet Baby Inc. and Black Girl Gamers.

What went unnoticed by most people is that according to Kotaku, more photos of the Cosby Suite were taken and shared by unnamed fellow attendees. The following paragraph from the article mentions the existence of these other photos that they received:

In one image procured by Kotaku, a group of women are sitting on a bed in the room with the Cosby portrait. One of the women appears to have a hand on another’s breast, which is cheered on by the men in the comments.

I always wondered why Kotaku withheld publishing all of the photos and instead posted the now infamous single shot of jovial Blizzard World of Warcraft developers posing on a bed holding a picture of actor/comedian Bill Cosby wearing his trademark sweater.

Another alleged photo from the Cosby Suite but with pixelated faces has surfaced. I am linking to it here:

As I was not at the Cosby Suite and had never attended a BlizzCon, I have no way of knowing if this alleged photo is real or if it is fake. These days, with the ubiquity of AI, it’s becoming harder to tell.

At a glance, the alleged photo seems to be the same room and bed as the infamous photo published in Kotaku. The lighting is the same.

There are other clues. Some of the females are wearing conference badges and lanyards consistent with those that are given to attendees at large convention events like BlizzCon. These seem like standard-issue Blizzard lanyards seen in the image below:

Here’s a screencap from an interview held at BlizzCon 2023. Notice the Blizzard developer on the left wearing the iconic black and white Blizzard staff lanyard:

The body language of the women in the newly surfaced photo does not suggest that they look like they are being held against their will, coerced, or engaging in lewd activity as alleged by Kotaku in their article. There is no visual evidence that the women are experiencing any discomfort or harm. They are not in chains, tied up, or in handcuffs; they do not look battered, bruised, or uncomfortable. The body language these people exude is consistent with people who are in a good mood and are at ease, relaxed, and happy to be there. I am no expert but this does not look like a crime scene.

By all accounts of people who attended, the Cosby Suite was an informal green room for the annual BlizzCon event which is hosted by Blizzard Entertainment. It was nothing more than a bunch of Blizzard employees, their friends, and family blowing off some celebratory steam in a hotel suite private BlizzCon after-party. After-parties happen all the time in Hollywood. The best examples are parties held after the Golden Globes, the Academy Awards, and other entertainment and fashion celebratory functions. They are routine in the Los Angeles area as are homeless people living on the streets.

In 2013 when BlizzCon was held, the prevailing public perception of Bill Cosby was that he was a veteran African-American comedic actor who had played America’s dad, the beloved Dr. Huxtable in The Cosby Show. It was most certainly not the alleged date rapist’s perception of him that was to gain traction in the years that followed. Therefore, it is not unreasonable to conclude that the inclusion of the Cosby Suite photo was a deliberate attempt to leverage the confusion surrounding the public perception of Cosby at the time and weaponize it as a way to demonize the attendees of the Cosby Suite with Activision-Blizzard being the ultimate target.

If Cosby was a widely known to be alleged serial rapist in 2013, I do not believe a group of intelligent women would have willingly posed on a bed with a picture of him behind them. It makes about as much sense as a group of smiling Jewish people posing on a bed with a photo of Adolph Hitler. It would be inconceivable and unthinkable.

It is reasonable to speculate that most attendees have not come forward to share their recollections because of the subsequent outrage that the media whipped up. Given the embarrassing nature of some of the other details of the lawsuit which leveraged Bill Cosby’s reputation and the nickname of the hotel suite at BlizzCon which were combined with other salacious details of the lawsuit, it is understandable that no sane person would want to come forward to tell the public what happened and have their lives ruined for admitting they visited the dreaded Cosby Suite.

Although guilt by association is a logical fallacy, it is commonly weaponized by nefarious people as a way to hurt people they disagree with. People who come forward could easily have their lives destroyed by any form of association with the Cosby Suite.

But one person did tell the truth; former Blizzard employee Jason Mosqueria gave the following explanation of what really went on at the Cosby Suite:

I am not defending these images, but I do want to offer context, as I attended that party at the “Cosby” suite. There must have been close to 100 people at the party, Blizzard employees and also their spouses, friends, and even family. Back then, in 2013, the suite was named after Cosby because of the hideous carpet that reminded us of his sweaters and not, as we would all find out a year later, the allegations leveled against the actor that once played Dr. Huxtable.

Here’s another take from someone on social media:

In the recent settlement of the EEOC lawsuit the time period that the Cosby Suite BlizzCon 2013 after-party was held — in 2013 — is ineligible for compensation:

You should file a claim if you believe you have been a target of sexual harassment, pregnancy discrimination and/or related retaliation while you were employed by Activision Blizzard or one of the related entities during the time period of September 2016 to March 29, 2022.

This makes it clear that the events that happened in the days before and during the Cosby Suite are irrelevant to the lawsuit settlement. If indeed something unethical or illegal transpired in the Cosby Suite, why wasn’t this included in the terms of the settlement? This proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Cosby Suite was only used as a public relations ploy to create bad optics to bolster the public perception of the lawsuit and increase its chances of success.

Analysis and Conclusion

The equality agenda has consequences, especially when it runs into the concrete wall of the reality of human nature. As famed Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson has duly noted, as women move into traditional male workspaces and displace men, there are bound to be problems due to a wide array of assumptions and expectations from both groups as society adjusts to this new arrangement. The natural sexual tension that occurs when both sexes are working together is something that Western civilization is currently grappling with.

Peterson makes a valuable observation when he says that both sexes working side by side is a relatively new phenomenon considering the totality of thousands of years of human development. We still do not know if this is feasible and we still do not know the long-term unintended consequences of this trend.

The post-World War II upheaval caused by striving for equality between the sexes and the transformation of a post-1965 America into a quasi-civil rights theocracy is being taken advantage of by bad actors who seek to cash in on the resulting adjustment, resentment, and confusion. Despite all these mitigating factors, sexual harassment and unwanted sexual advances of any kind is wrong; it should never be encouraged, tolerated, or ignored.

As the only video game journalist and pundit who has extensively covered Afrasiabi many years before the EEOC lawsuit, I have always been skeptical of the official mainstream video game media narrative of the Cosby Suite. I’ve never met him, I’ve never spoken to him, and I don’t know him. All of the information and analysis in my articles is based on information that I have gleaned from the internet.

Justice is supposed to be for all, not just the privileged few.

I contend that Kotaku refused to publish other pictures of the Cosby Suite because it showed autonomous women exercising their agency — their inalienable human right of freedom of assembly and to go where they pleased. Those inconvenient optics certainly did not fit Kotaku’s radical feminist #metoo victimhood narrative that unwilling women were being sexually harassed throughout the video game industry.

It is only reasonable to deduce that publishing all of the photos would have given the public a more balanced and unbiased perspective of what the Cosby Suite was all about, therefore Kotaku decided not to publish them. That purposeful omission was unethical, dishonest, and contrary to the spirit of journalism which is to report all of the facts in an objective and unbiased way so the reader can decide for themselves.

The Inside the Cosby Suite article was standard clickbait journalism made infamous by Gawker who ran and owned an empire of similar clickbait websites that profited by stoking outrage and creating societal polarization. Gawker once owned Kotaku before it was purchased by Univision in 2016.

The conveniently timed article was deviously crafted to elicit hi-octane outrage from its readers. Sadly, the rest of the white knights in the video game media followed suit and piled on by essentially repeating, repurposing, and laundering the salacious details of the Cosby Suite to generate more clicks so they could sell advertising and be on the side of the “good guys” virtue signaling about “believing all women” and caring about the marginalized.

Taking a page from the infamous Access Hollywood Donald Trump and Billy Bush leaked interview, the leaked chat excerpts showing the male attendees making crude locker room comments only bolstered the bad optics of the Cosby Suite. Were the comments shared from males to other males sophomoric, vulgar, and offensive? Yes. Were, they illegal? No.

The promotion of the Cosby Suite photo is a classic example of the clever deployment of the guilt-by-association logical fallacy and the odious technique of narrative laundering. The masterminds behind this elaborate plan managed to transfer the alleged sexual misconduct of Bill Cosby to the alleged inappropriate behavior of Blizzard employees with an out-of-context photo of Bill Cosby. The lawsuit manufactured a composite narrative of sexual misconduct that was plumbed from many different parts of the Activision-Blizzard stable of studios. They carefully crafted a patchwork Frankenstein monster from various parts of studio horror stories that was tailor-made to take advantage of the sensationalist #metoo moral panic that was the dominant narrative of the zeitgeist at the time.

The term infamous was used to describe the Cosby Suite in the title of the Kotaku article released a mere week after the lawsuit was filed. However, infamy takes time to develop in the minds of the public. It was not infamous at the time since the public didn’t even know it existed. Also, it was not infamous in 2013 when the event happened. So from the outset, Kotaku was trying to create a narrative that simply did not exist. They used a loaded term and were making a self-fulfilling prophecy and engaging in narrative framing. Instead of simply reporting the facts, they engaged in editorializing.

Thanks to that framed portrait in the hotel room, Cosby’s alleged sins were transferred to one man: veteran World of Warcraft developer Alex Afrasiabi. Given his well-known colorful personality, outspokenness, and Persian swagger, he was the natural choice to be a scapegoat for all of Activision-Blizzard’s problems. Thanks to the California government naming him in their lawsuit, (which is extremely unusual) Afrasiabi became the face of the Cosby Suite and would be blamed for everything. Alex was the patsy they needed.

Afrasiabi was the fall guy. He would be the Lee Harvey Oswald of the entire affair. Just like Oswald was assassinated after the JFK assassination, he too was quietly terminated by Blizzard before the story broke and they thought everything would go away. But something went wrong and the lawsuit went ahead anyway.

Why Activision-Blizzard never agreed to quietly settle with the state of California before the lawsuit was served, is a mystery for the ages. Somebody dropped the ball, resulting in years of bad press for everyone involved.

There is one crystal clear fact: if Afrasiabi had not been mentioned in the lawsuit, the Cosby Suite narrative would have never become notorious in the minds of the gaming public, and the powers that be would never have been able to leverage Bill Cosby’s notoriety to use against Activision-Blizzard. They used crypto-communist Saul Alinsky’s classic strategy of “pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it” and chose Afrasiabi to be the malefactor of the lawsuit.

Having both Cosby and Afrasiabi in the same photo was a stroke of good luck for the puppet masters pulling the strings. The optics of that image was like a proverbial pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. Cosby’s post-2013 reputation of being a womanizer and the allegation of multiple rapes combined with unproven allegations made against Afrasiabi was just too good to pass up to be used as a devastating tool of conflation to attempt to bring the California-based entertainment giant to its knees.

Meanwhile, the individuals who have made all these allegations of sexual harassment at Blizzard are shrouded in mystery and the people who have been named and vilified have been denied their constitutional right as per the 6th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to publicly confront their accusers. This is why this case will never be tried in a court of law because the accusers would have to be identified and subject to a robust cross-examination and discovery process.

Ever on the prowl for fresh blood, the vampires in the mainstream video game media along with the non-binary social justice warriors living on Jack Dorsey’s twisted version of Twitter became instantly outraged and the Cosby Suite frat boy culture narrative was birthed into existence. The esoteric term frat boy culture was not widely known before this lawsuit.

Even though at least 100 people (employees, friends, and family) attended the hotel suite in question, in the minds of the public, the beige-walled Cosby suite morphed into an Epstein island Bacchanalian orgy of debauchery where sobbing women were held against their will by reprobate mustache-twirling villains and mercilessly raped. As the feeding frenzy grew and people began to pile on, Twitter was rife with hysterical accusations and wild-eye speculation of what went on in the suite.

The clever architects of the Cosby Suite strategy must have been smiling, because their devious strategy was working as intended.

Years before, a similar epidemic of so-called “rape culture” in colleges and universities was concocted by magazines like Rolling Stone. This fiasco also involved an off-site party just like the Cosby Suite. The allegations of one lying woman were used to attack and defame the male Duke Lacrosse team. Those innocent men went through a living hell. One problem with the narrative: the entire story was proven FALSE. Eventually, those men were vindicated and lawsuits were eventually won against Rolling Stone and others, millions of dollars were paid in damages. The Cosby Suite affair has a similar dubious vibe which should set off all kinds of red flags for people who still care about the truth.

In the years that followed, the accusations against Afrasiabi continued and the WoW designer has even been blamed for sabotaging the ongoing storyline of Azeroth the fictional universe of World of Warcraft.

Alex Afrasiabi has had all kinds of vicious allegations made about him by luminaries in the WoW streamer community such as a British couple named Taliesin and Evitel. The pair were flown out to a previous BlizzCon and hosted some of the official events and even to this day get preferential access press at BlizzCon 2023. This is a husband and wife team and joint-owned Twitter account. However, it is a good bet that Taliesin probably authors most of the tweets.

Here’s a copy of a tweet below that shows him making outrageous accusations against Afrasiabi:

Word to the wise, mean tweets like that can now get you arrested and jailed in the UK.

During the witch hunt, everyone forgot the basic principle that people are innocent until proven guilty. Ian Bates AKA the Red Shirt guy turned on Afrasiabi as well and published an infantile tweet accusing him of sexism because he “ruined” Sylvanus.

Not only is Bates a self-proclaimed WoW lore savant, but he is now a self-appointed expert on sexism in fantasy worlds. Never forget that it was Afrasiabi and Chris Metzen who plucked Bates from obscurity to viral fame after he asked his $64,000 lore question at the WoW Q and A at BlizzCon 2010.

The Red Shirt guy even got an NPC named after him but has repaid that kindness by becoming an ungrateful, woke, backstabbing Afrasiabi detractor.

The Blizzard employees in that now infamous photo were found guilty in the court of public opinion; some have had their careers and reputations degraded if not destroyed. There hasn’t been one ounce of sympathy for them from the likes of Taliesin & Evitel, the video game press, or the sanctimonious non-binary cry bullies on Twitter AKA X.

The identity of the leaker who contacted the EEOC and provided the Cosby Suite photos is still unknown. Did they attend the Cosby Suite too? Is the leaker one of the people in the picture? Did they make a deal for immunity? Are they still working at Blizzard? What did they gain by doing this?

Let’s not forget that if you are a powerful, well-connected, left-aligned celebrity like Sting and the other members of the rock band The Police, you can be publicly accused of alleged rape and the mainstream media is mysteriously quiet and the lawsuit is quietly dropped or settled without fanfare.

If you are President Joe Biden’s beloved son, Hunter, you can engage in alleged criminal activity, blatant influence peddling, ignore congressional subpoenas, and walk between the raindrops, and Big Tech companies will make the story of his laptop from hell vanish. to protect their Orange Man Bad narrative to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president again.

If you are a billionaire, celebrity, or royalty that visited Epstein’s orgy island and had sex with underage women, you can get away scot-free and Jeffrey Epstein can mysteriously hang himself in a federal prison cell and nobody is held accountable. Nothing to see here folks. Move along.

But, if you are a white male game designer working at Blizzard with the wrong political beliefs, and no powerful friends, you can be thrown under the bus, turned into a dastardly villain, canceled at the drop of a hat, and have the ire of a capricious, vengeful outrage addicted world turned on you. It is important to mention that Afrasiabi was never accused of rape or any criminal wrongdoing like many billionaires, royals, politicians, and celebrities who have visited Epstein Island and participated in human trafficking by having sex with underaged women.

It has become readily apparent that the United States of America has become an oligarchic aristocracy with the wealthy, powerful rulers, and their constituency of obedient throne sniffers versus the rest of us who are treated like feudal serfs. This imbalance has created a two-tiered justice system: one for the politically connected and the rich, and one for the rest of us poor slobs. The government-led persecution and prosecution of the January 6th political prisoners is a perfect example of how justice has been completely perverted in America.

While all this happened and still happens, the constitutionally protected, corrupt, lazy American press — no longer looking out for the common man — fiddles while our country burns, our lands are being invaded by unskilled low IQ migrants, our treasury is looted by lobbyist-controlled politicians, warmongering defense contractors, and WEF alumni.

Somewhere along the way, both the search for truth and any semblance of honest journalism died in America. Only child molesters, politicians, and used car dealers have higher reputations than video game journalists. The one-sided reporting on the Blizzard lawsuit and the Cosby Suite narrative is a good example of how truth has become malleable clay in the hands of those who shape and control the narrative.

We live in Orwellian times. When a society declares war on reality, truth is the first casualty.

–Woflshead

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