Why I write 

My perspective comes from lived experience across the full spectrum of power and powerlessness. I’ve worked inside nonprofit, political, and professional hierarchies, including for people who wielded authority responsibly and others who exploited it. I’ve seen how proximity, access, and promised opportunity can be used to extract compliance, especially from those with the least room to refuse.

At the other extreme, time spent incarcerated stripped power of all pretense. In prison, compliance isn’t a moral choice; it’s a survival strategy. I entered that environment with an education in social research and documented my own experience alongside the experiences of others, producing thousands of pages of writing about how authority operates when protection disappears entirely.

I use my experiences as an aperture through which I examine the invisible social contracts we negotiate every day. I write to make these dynamics visible—not to reduce people to their worst moments, but to understand how harm is normalized and how silence is enforced.

The book

My memoir is where all these questions about social contracts first took shape.

Rebuilding my life after prison, I went to work for a man who plausibly claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto. He exploited my vulnerability, offering opportunity and redemption while entrapping me in a coercive sexual dynamic. I understood the power imbalance as it was happening, and knew the cost of refusing.

That story, and others in the book, became the framework through which I began to understand how authority disguises harm, how social contracts are weaponized against the vulnerable, and how survival is later misread as complicity.

Beyond the book

Through essays, reporting, and public conversation, I explore what these stories mean beyond my own life — how harmful social contracts form, how they’re protected, and how they can be dismantled without asking the most vulnerable to carry the greatest risk.