D&D Celebrity Satine Phoenix & Husband Jamison Stone Accused Of Abuse Towards Freelancers

D&D influencer Satine Phoenix, and her husband Jamison Stone, who run tabletop gaming company Apotheosis Studios, have been accused of abusive behavior towards freelancers and contracted workers. Satine Phoenix is a well-known D&D personality and creator, and was the D&D Community Manager for about a year back in 2018. Both she and Stone have appeared in many events and streaming shows, and...

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D&D influencer Satine Phoenix, and her husband Jamison Stone, who run tabletop gaming company Apotheosis Studios, have been accused of abusive behavior towards freelancers and contracted workers.

Satine Phoenix is a well-known D&D personality and creator, and was the D&D Community Manager for about a year back in 2018. Both she and Stone have appeared in many events and streaming shows, and have worked with WotC, Geek & Sundry, and other companies. Recently their Kickstarter campaign Sirens: Battle of the Bards raised over $300,000. At GaryCon, a US gaming convention, the couple held a public wedding.

sirens.jpg

Accusations were initially leveled last week against Stone by tattooist Chad Rowe, who tweeted about the abusive way in which Stone, as his client at the time, treated him. The artist was "insulted, berated, and talked down to as if I was a lesser person". Other reports started to roll in as people shared similar experiences, with people revealing how they had been bullied by them, and how the pair frequently portrayed themselves as 'better' than those they worked with. At the time of writing there have been many such reports including one from voice actress and designer Liisa Lee who was subjected to underhanded business practices by Phoenix and her then partner Ruty Rutenberg. Others indicated difficulties in getting paid for work done for Stone and Phoenix or their company.

Lysa Penrose reported on problematic interactions while Phoenix worked at WotC, who was the primary point of contact regarding a report of abuse. Penrose reports that Phoenix failed to pass on the reports of abuse, and continued to publicly associate with the abuser.

Jamison Stone has since resigned as CEO of Apotheosis Studios (though the pair do own the company) and issued a long apology which has been widely criticized. Phoenix released a statement about a week later. Screenshots leaked from a private channel indicate that they have adopted a strategy of shifting the blame onto Stone, so that Phoenix's public image remain intact, with Stone writing “I also am ensuring behind the scenes ... we shield Satine as much as physically possible from damage.”

D&D In A Castle, which is an event which hosts D&D games run by professional DMs in a weekend break in a castle, has dropped the pair from its lineup, as has Jasper's Game Day, an organization which works to prevent suicides. Origins Game Fair, at which the couple are celebrity guests, removed Stone from its guest list, but not Phoenix, stating that "staff assessed that there was no immediate risk of physical harm".

According to ComicBook.com. former collaborator of Phoenix, Ruty Rutenberg, is suing Phoenix, alleging misappropriation of $40,000 of stream network Maze Arcana's money.
 

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Michael Linke

Adventurer
The use of the word "debilitating" here seems to push past empathy and merge into degrading.
So, I hope that your feeling there is out of genuine concern, and not something else.

ADHD IS a learning disability, and it is debilitating. It doesn't mean i'm incompetent or incapacitated by it, but it definitely does have a strong, often negative, impact on my ability to function in conventional learning and working environments, and is a source of frustration for people who are close to me who don't understand why I think and act the way I do.

There are a lot of people that disguise their dismissal of handicaps as encouragement. There are a lot of other people that fall into that line of thinking without malice, because they believe the people who say "Don't let your disability define you!" rather than trust the people who actually have those disabilities to know what does and doesn't define them.
 

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Jer

Legend
Supporter
"Flaws are discovered"? "Fall" into a narrative arc? These people cultivated celebrity status for profit and used that status to intentionally cause harm to others who annoyed them or got in their way. They didn't trip and accidentally anger the slavering mob over a minor slight.
I was speaking more generically and about why a public online apology where everyone can comment on it is going to turn out like hers did regardless of what kind of apology you give, what you try to do to fix it, or what you've done. That's how it works - the comments on the video are going to be nasty and disgusting regardless of whether the content of the video deserves it or not because that's how celebrity narratives work. As soon as you're caught doing something wrong you're going to get savaged for it. It is what it is.

It's a bad idea to expect anything less than vitriol from a public apology like that. So people should stop doing them and start making actual apologies and restitution to the people actually harmed rather than to the general public who are at best spectators in something that is only their business to the extent that they might want to stop buying what the person apologizing is selling.
 

mythago

Hero
I probably would, actually. Such a person would know the job inside and out, and would be intimately familiar with the laws and regulatory requirements. And they would also know that they are being watched, like a hawk, by nearly everyone.

Or, they learned from their mistakes and are determined not to get caught this time. (Part of being intimately familiar with the laws and regulatory requirements means knowing where the loopholes and lack-of-oversight are, too.) Or, they simply don't have the impulse control to resist grabbing money they have access to. Here's a guy who embezzled from his employer while he was on parole for a previous embezzlement conviction. Being "watched like a hawk" by everyone from the parole office to his new employer didn't stop him from stealing money to spend on truly frivolous things.

And - you also might have a real headache on your hands if happens again, and now someone else harmed by that embezzlement - or who is charged with enforcing those regulatory requirements - wants to know why you deliberately put somebody with a bad past in a position of doing the same harm all over again.
 

Michael Linke

Adventurer
So, I hope that your feeling there is out of genuine concern, and not something else.

ADHD IS a learning disability, and it is debilitating. It doesn't mean i'm incompetent or incapacitated by it, but it definitely does have a strong, often negative, impact on my ability to function in conventional learning and working environments, and is a source of frustration for people who are close to me who don't understand why I think and act the way I do.

There are a lot of people that disguise their dismissal of handicaps as encouragement. There are a lot of other people that fall into that line of thinking without malice, because they believe the people who say "Don't let your disability define you!" rather than trust the people who actually have those disabilities to know what does and doesn't define them.
It sounds like bragging, but I fully believe this is an apt description: My ADHD essentially makes my brain 20% faster, stronger, better than the average bear's brain, but it also leads me to needlessly multi-task along often pointless pursuits. The net effect of that buff in Int and that debuff in Focus is that I typically end up performing 20% WORSE than the average bear at the one task that matters at the moment.

In certain, very specific instances I'm able to leverage that potential and actually perform with efficiency. Managing ADHD is a matter of knowing how to take advantage of the features, while minimizing my exposure to situations that make it work against me. It lends itself well to dev work, where I'm essentially reading/understanding/editing multiple editor windows simultaneously while also monitoring logs and screen output. But then when I have to read and understand some API documentation, or focus down on a very narrow problem, i'm definitely operating at a handicap.
 
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CleverNickName

Limit Break Dancing (He/They)
If they had that kind of intimate familiarity with the law and awareness of scrutiny, how'd they get caught in the first place?
. . .
Most criminals are not scheming masterminds... or, at least, the ones who get caught aren't.
They would also know you were a sucker and fleece you for everything you got.
Or, they learned from their mistakes and are determined not to get caught this time. (Part of being intimately familiar with the laws and regulatory requirements means knowing where the loopholes and lack-of-oversight are, too.) Or, they simply don't have the impulse control to resist grabbing money. . .
I know this is all hypothetical, and I know it is completely not on-topic for the thread, so I'll drop it. On my way out, I'd like to remind everyone that attitudes and assumptions like this are why people with felony convictions, who have served their time and paid their dues and done everything asked of them by the legal system, are still ostracized and shunned, and have difficulty finding stable work and housing. We need to do better than this.
 

Faolyn

(she/her)
I didn't think ADHD could be so bad.

Reading articles like this has downplayed the severity for me :
"Of the 6.4 million kids who have been given diagnoses of A.D.H.D., a large percentage are unlikely to have any kind of physiological difference that would make them more distractible than the average non-A.D.H.D. kid. It’s also doubtful that biological or environmental changes are making physiological differences more prevalent. Instead, the rapid increase in people with A.D.H.D. probably has more to do with sociological factors — changes in the way we school our children, in the way we interact with doctors and in what we expect from our kids."
I can't read the article because of the paywall, but this paragraph alone is really badly done. It ignores that testing is more accurate and more widely performed, for one. I'm a woman. When I was a kid back in the 80s, ADHD was something that only boys had. It never occurred to anyone that I had an actual problem. I "lacked stick-to-it-iveness" or "needed to apply myself" or was just "lazy" or even "bored in class because she's so smart" because I was a girl (and wasn't bouncing off of walls). Even boys, sometimes, were (and are) misdiagnosed: not enough discipline, too much sugar, etc.

So this basically ignores that doctors are looking at the disorder in a more in-depth manner these days.
 

Michael Linke

Adventurer
Yeah, refusing to recognize that it can be debilitating can be the greater offensive. I was diagnosed as in the early 80s and put on Ritalin when the field was new and Ritalin was over prescribed. A lot of drugging up of difficult kids in over-crowded schools and all that. Even though I have mild ADHD, the experience in 6th and 7th grade was very negative. I felt rather zombified by Ritalin, though my teachers were happy with the result. For me, mild ADHD is a bit of a super-power in that the same impulse that can distract me from paying attention to what I'm supposed to, also allows me to focus intensely on one thing for long periods of time to the point of forgoing sleep. Computerized calendars, task, and project-management systems help make up for my weaknesses.

But my experience in middle school put a big chip on my shoulder when it came to talk about ADHD, especially medicines to treat it. My armchair theorizing based on some reading I did was that what we call a debility in our industrialized and post-industrial society was, in fact, and evolutionary advantage for most of human history. The same thing that makes someone with ADHD perform poorly in our modern school system, makes them a good hunter (really, go hiking with someone with ADHD, they always seem to notice things that most people don't). I was strongly against medicating people with something I didn't think should be treated as an illness.

It took me a while to accept that some people really do need medicine to treat severe ADHD and it be a life-changing improvement to many people's well being. The science has come a long way since the 80s and dismissing the fact that for some people it can be really debilitating can be quite harmful to people who whose lives would be greatly improved by proper medical care.
The education system didn't know how to deal with us. Instead of looking at ways to improve the education system to work for more kids, they put the problem kids on hard drugs.
 

Parmandur

Book-Friend, he/him
I know this is all hypothetical, and I know it is completely not on-topic for the thread, so I'll drop it. On my way out, I'd like to remind everyone that attitudes and assumptions like this are why people with felony convictions, who have served their time and paid their dues and done everything asked of them by the legal system, are still ostracized and shunned, and have difficulty finding stable work and housing. We need to do better than this.
I think that it is on topic: I wouldn't want to work with Satine or Jacaon here, ever, because of how they have treated people in the past. And I don't think that an embezzled, say, can never offer anything to society. Just not in a position of fiduciary responsibility because...theyblack fiduciary responsibility.
 

Parmandur

Book-Friend, he/him
I can't read the article because of the paywall, but this paragraph alone is really badly done. It ignores that testing is more accurate and more widely performed, for one. I'm a woman. When I was a kid back in the 80s, ADHD was something that only boys had. It never occurred to anyone that I had an actual problem. I "lacked stick-to-it-iveness" or "needed to apply myself" or was just "lazy" or even "bored in class because she's so smart" because I was a girl (and wasn't bouncing off of walls). Even boys, sometimes, were (and are) misdiagnosed: not enough discipline, too much sugar, etc.

So this basically ignores that doctors are looking at the disorder in a more in-depth manner these days.
I was someschooled growing up, and a large number of people in thst scene in the 90's were parents getting their ADHD kids away from an unsupportive negative feedback loop st school, diagnosed or not.
 

Michael Linke

Adventurer
Instead, the rapid increase in people with A.D.H.D. probably has more to do with sociological factors

In better words, there were always people with ADHD. Before the 80s, we just considered them to be degenerate, lazy or stupid. In the 80s and 90s we recognized there was something different actually going on with a good percentage of the populous, gave the condition a name, and thought long and hard about what was making these people different. The first solution was to try to treat the individuals. The more modern, more effective solution, is to create an education and work system that supports more people without making their liver pay the price for their cognitive issues.
 

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