“I thought, This is weird, but what’s the harm?” Ellenwood said. Ellenwood, under the impression that Draper might be able to lend his programming skills to the project, agreed to visit his apartment.Īs the two talked, Draper complained his back was hurting, and Ellenwood agreed to stand behind him to try to adjust it. He attended his first rave, Toontown, in the city’s South of Market neighborhood and found his way into a VIP room, where he met Draper.ĭraper, who was 48 at the time, wowed Ellenwood with his stories of phone phreaking and friendship with Apple cofounders Jobs and Wozniak. Two of Ellenwood’s friends confirmed he told them about the incident soon after.Īt the time, Ellenwood, then a self-described scrawny 24-year-old who weighed 140 pounds, was helping to create a tech and art collective in San Francisco. Ellenwood told BuzzFeed News that Draper assaulted him in the summer of 1991. BuzzFeed's effort to contact Jay was unsuccessful.Ī third man, Craig Ellenwood, who has no direct connection to the hacker community, also has now come forward for the first time. The Parallax, an online security magazine, reported that a man named Jay said Draper had assaulted him in San Diego in 2000, also by rubbing his erection into his back while doing exercises. In a series of tweets, Blaze accused Draper of stalking him when he was 14 or 15 years old and in the eighth or ninth grade.īlaze was never actually assaulted, he said, which he attributed to a combination of luck, instincts, and the people around him. The most prominent voice recounting odd interactions with Draper belongs to Matt Blaze, a cryptographer, University of Pennsylvania professor, and public speaker who’s testified before Congress, and who was among the first people to react to BuzzFeed’s initial report. Draper rejects any claims of sexual misconduct or assault, as well as any claims whatsoever involving nefarious intent or deeds posted on any social media platform at any time.” Draper offers a sincere apology if anyone has ever misunderstood his intentions and as a result feel they have encountered him in a negative capacity,” the statement said. “Did it occur in this instance, or is it merely an excuse to get away with the consequences of his actions? Certainly that’s possible.”Ĭontacted for this story, McKay offered an apology on Draper's behalf, but denied that Draper had committed sexual assaults. Mary’s College of Maryland who specializes in developmental psychology, told BuzzFeed News. “I think that it is possible that someone with Asperger's could engage in this kind of behavior because of a lack of understanding of what it would mean for his subjects or victims,” Laraine Glidden, a psychologist and researcher at St. Since BuzzFeed News' initial report, three more men have come forward with similar stories, a series of hacker conventions have announced that Draper is no longer welcome at their events, and two organizations have rejected his proposed donation of book proceeds to help fund research into Asperger’s syndrome - a condition Draper now says he has and that may have contributed to his behavior. Draper later did speak to the Daily Dot, which had previewed his book in October, and admitted that he “might have had an erection” when conducting exercises, though he denied that he knowingly committed assault. Through the book's spokesperson, Allie McKay, he refused to comment on any of those allegations before they were published and declined a request for an interview. Wozniak told BuzzFeed News that Jobs told him Draper once urged him to engage in an exercise, an offer Jobs turned down as “out of the ordinary.”ĭraper is promoting an upcoming memoir, Beyond the Little Blue Box. Another felt Draper’s erection against his back as Draper urged him to bounce up and down. One of the men threw Draper off and fled. 17 published allegations that Draper had acted inappropriately at hacker conventions, pressuring young men to join him for private “energy” workouts in hotel rooms and climbing on the backs of men who agreed. Before founding Apple, cofounders Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs sold a variant of a device Draper built to mimic the sound.īut his reputation has taken a hit after BuzzFeed News on Nov. He adopted the nickname “Cap’n Crunch,” after the cereal, which included a whistle whose sound was the precise right pitch. Additional men have come forward to accuse John Draper, the hacker pioneer and early Apple associate known as “Cap’n Crunch,” of inappropriate behavior, stalking, and sexual assault.ĭraper, now 74, was revered by many as an inspiration to early hackers, particularly as a “phone phreak” who discovered in the 1970s that people could place long-distance phone calls at no charge by playing a specific tone into their telephones.
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