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
An eye-opener for me was reading articles about how people in my field were Micro-dosing LSD as a performance enhancer. I read into what they were getting out of micro-dosing, and realized all these poseurs were clandestinely acquiring and ingesting an illegal substance in the hopes that it will allow their normal brain, for just a few hours, to act like the brain I've had my entire life.
 

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Michael Linke

Adventurer
Probably shut down the discord after/because the leak of the message about Jamison doing everything possible to make sure none of this harms Satine. Apparently he can't trust many of the people who were on that server, and he's better off without it.

Stone's a terrible person, but clearly not stupid. He knows that if he can take all of the heat for this, Satine has a lucrative career ahead of her. Unfortunately, she's shown to be an abuser herself, and not just an enabler/victim of Jamison's, and her inept attempt at apology the other day hasn't helped her outrun the accusations against her.

You hate to see it, but I don't think she's gonna come back from this. All things considered, I would prefer that she genuinely learned from her actions and went on to something so good that it made up for the wrong she'd done. She doesn't appear to be doing well so far on the "genuinely learning" front.
 

Charlaquin

Goblin Queen (She/Her/Hers)
Suppose money IS an object. You have a set amount of money you can spend per month on models to paint, and a fixed amount of space to store the models you've painted. Selling models you're willing to part with frees up space to store and display more models, and gives you access to funds to buy additional models to paint above your tight monthly hobby budget.

Making money and showing dedication aren't mutually exclusive.
When did I ever say they were mutually exclusive? By all means, if you want to monetize you hobbies, you are perfectly free and welcome to do so. Not everyone does want to do so, and they are also perfectly free and welcome not to. What I find extremely distasteful is the societal incentive structure that pushes people to monetize their hobbies out of necessity or social pressure, not the people who choose to do so. Money is indeed an object for most people and that’s the problem.
 

mythago

Hero
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.

It is off topic in the sense that "how do we re-integrate people with criminal convictions into society" is an enormously complicated question, made more so by the fact that (in the US at least) issues of racism and disparate treatment factor strongly into what is a crime, who is charged with and convicted of crimes, and who gets the benefit of the doubt afterward.

It's very much on topic in the sense that, those complicated questions get weaponized to excuse bad actors within a community. How very dare you say you would not want to work with these people! Why, you're exactly like the carceral system that punishes a guy convicted for pot dealing by depriving him of job opportunities and the right to vote! Isn't is much more harmonious and better for everyone, particularly for those of us not directly harmed by the bad actors, if we just accept their apologies and hand out second, third, and nth chances like they were promotional T-shirts at a con party?
 


doctorbadwolf

Heretic of The Seventh Circle
This. I don't think it's great to personally spew bile at S&J; meeting toxicity with toxicity isn't good. But we all, as consumers of this industry and community members of this hobby, have a responsibility to each other to keep our community safe, friendly, and open. And that means making it clear that abusers aren't welcome.
This is fair, but I think the sentiment happening here is more than doing so shouldn't cross the line into actual harassment, physical threats, telling someone to unalive themselves, etc. Mass rejection by your community is plenty of negative feedback. The people doing the above are also abusers. They just target people being ostracized in order to avoid criticism for their abuse.
Making money and showing dedication aren't mutually exclusive.
I think her point was that they also aren't inherently tied to eachother, not that they are mutually exclusive. Saying "you don't have to focus your hobby on profit making" doesn't imply that it's bad to do so, it just means it's also fine to not do so.
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.
Yeah I have no idea how to operate excel for it's intended purposes, but I spent months of screen time mastering it as a vehicle for creating widgets to copy and paste-as-picture into a word document in order to make a clean-looking character sheet. Meanwhile I can only reliably do about 90% my daily paperwork as a manager, in spite of having the job for 6 months. I'm exceptionally good one on one with people, though. I learned how to mask and mirror like a right bastard.
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.
It's so hard to even express to neurotypical folks why I am so uncomfortable being told how smart i am, even at 37.
Hell, I've been treated like I wasn't masculine enough by jerks who associate specific behaviors and habits with boys vs girls, and I didn't fit the paradigm. (Fellas, is it gay to participate in class enthusiastically?)
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.
Careful with that brush, neighbor. Plenty of people simply cannot function in a way that allows them to live how they want to live, or to do the work they want to do, or to maintain relationships without undue stress, without those "hard drugs".

The fact that medication wasn't the right choice for you does not indicate a disability-wide prognosis.
 


Yora

Legend
It's so hard to even express to neurotypical folks why I am so uncomfortable being told how smart i am, even at 37.
I thought the whole Mensa organization is ridiculous if someone like me meets the entry requirements. :p
That's not genius level. That's not even an exclusive club. Those people aren't anything special, even if they like giving themselves a badge for their own greatness.
 

doctorbadwolf

Heretic of The Seventh Circle
I thought the whole Mensa organization is ridiculous if someone like me meets the entry requirements. :p
That's not genius level. That's not even an exclusive club. Those people aren't anything special, even if they like giving themselves a badge for their own greatness.
Oof. Yeah. The variation I've seen in my own IQ test results is hilarious to me. I'm anywhere from genius to well below "average", depending on my blood sugar, how well I slept, and the methodology of the test.

Also the premise of Mensa is, even if not out loud, that getting geniuses to socialize and develop strong bonds will lead to more geniuses and a better society, which is both ablest and a bit eugenics-y.
 

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