If I investigate the Oliver Smith saga, will I think that Oliver was overall the more wronged party?

Question

A recent ACX linkpost included the following bullet point:

Oliver D. Smith is an ex-Nazi turned social justice warrior. His MO was (is?) creating Wikipedia and RationalWiki articles on various IQ researchers/bloggers that portray them in the worst possible light (both sites tried to ban him, but he was able to come back with various sock puppet accounts). More recently, he’s become . . .famous? . . . for a very impressive litigation campaign to prevent anyone from naming him or mentioning any of his activities; this sort of thing usually doesn’t work, but he was able to at least City Journal to take down their article about him. Most recently, an extremely anonymous person on a blog with no other articles has finally published the whole story - this site was down the past few times I tried to link it, apparently because Smith launched “a barrage of spurious DMCA claims” against Substack, but seems to be at least temporarily back now. Read it while you still can!

I skimmed both of the linked articles, and noticed some oddities in the second one by "Ghost of Lomax". I left a comment on the ACX post saying:

This story has some questionable statements and I don't fully trust the author. For example, it says:

> When explaining why he has used these VPN servers, “Johns” stated, “I have received death threats and email abuse from the usual suspects for editing this topic area.” If Johns/Psychologist Guy/Oldman4 is a separate person from Smith, it is unlikely his article subjects could have contacted him by email, because there was no public email address connected to the “Johns” account

And uses this as evidence that Johns is controlled by Oliver. But given that Johns has already admitted to using multiple accounts, the much more straightforward explanation is that Johns received this abuse via some other account.

It also says:

> His various statements that Kirkegaard is a pedophile were the subject of a libel case in 2019, in which the court found these statements to be defamatory.

Which is technically true, but fails to mention that they were only found defamatory as an opinion, and thus not legally liable. Oliver won this lawsuit.

And it says:

> While making these edits, he also accessed it from a computer located in the U.K. town of Watford, a borough of Hertfordshire, which matches Oliver Smith’s location that is given at LinkedIn. This information from Smith’s LinkedIn profile is screenshotted and archived in case he decides to remove it in response to having it publicized here.

But Oliver's location is not particularly private. His home address is given in his lawsuits. The focus on LinkedIn as an important source of location information suggests to me that the writer of the Substack article has not even read the lawsuits.

Oliver himself replied to my comment on ACX, saying:

The real owner of the Oldman4 account has proven he is not me. He appeared on web camera to a RationalWiki moderator: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/RationalWiki:Chicken_coop/Archive139#Oldman4_is_not_Smith Despite this, the following absurd statement appeared on the blog post: "Oldman4 almost was banned from the site as an alias of Smith." In reality, there was not a single vote to ban me as Oldman4: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/RationalWiki:Chicken_coop/Archive139#Ban_User:Oldman4_as_a_sock_of_Oliver_Smith 14 votes for "no". 0 votes "yes". From what I can tell the main person spreading the misinformation I am Oldman4 is Anatoly Karlin (who Scott Alexander links to). Karlin was recently blocked from Wikipedia for posting these unfounded claims which admins reasonably construed as harassment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/SublimeWik

This comment then rapidly got deleted. Oliver PM'd me to claim it was deleted by Scott; I mention "claimed" because Oliver has a history of false flag operations, saying in one forum post:

I was playing you at your own game by adding false information [to the Encyclopedia Dramatica article about me] which I then used to get google.uk to block that page. Google initially refused to block that ED page before I added the Kiwi Farms link at the bottom with the libellous "pedophile" tag and comment about hating Muslims. In other words I added more (extreme) defamation to block existing (less extreme) defamation where you fabricate and lie my internet accounts/history (those Stormfront accounts are not mine either, but it was fun saying they were to troll you). The result is now google has blocked everything you wrote about me at Encylopedia Dramatica. Thanks for your cooperation.

So it's possible that Oliver deleted it himself to try to make Scott look bad, but I don't know.

It's worth noting that the Ghost of Lomax Substack article about Oliver has comments disabled, so people cannot even attempt to dispute its claims directly.

So it seems that, while Oliver has indisputably done many bad things, the people he's feuding with have also been rather sketchy. (As another...

Manifold Markets · Answer

Unlikely — Manifold Markets prediction market estimates a 15% chance (6 traders, as of Oct 6, 2025).