S18 E12: (2/2) [Tyler + Shane + Connelly] Believe Victims More
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Something Was Wrong is intended for mature audiences. It discusses topics that can be upsetting and triggering, such as emotional, physical, and sexual violence, suicide, child abuse, and murder. Content warnings for each episode are at the top of episode notes.

and confidential and free resources for survivors can be found linked in our episode notes, as well as on our website, somethingwaswrong.com slash resources. Some survivor names have been changed for anonymity purposes. Testimony shared by guests on the show is their own and does not necessarily reflect the views of myself, Something Was Wrong, Broken Cycle Media, or Wondery.

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Please note, I reached out to Archie Bronson to ask for his comment on these allegations. He said that beyond his two statements he's already made on his Instagram page, he has nothing further to add. You can find a link to these statements in the episode's source notes. As always, please use caution when listening. Thank you.

My name is Shane Fitch. I was born and raised in the western Washington area, majority Seattle. Leading up to all of this, my life was kind of interesting. It was a little bit up and down as far as housing goes, but just before this happened, I was able to settle into a place with my fiancé. I've been with them for almost three years now. When

Archie and I met, my partner and I weren't living together, but we were in a polyamorous situation. So we were dating other people. Polyamory can mean something different depending on the relationship. I feel like it's really contextual, really situational, depending on whoever is involved in the relationship's boundaries. For my partner and I, we want to be open and honest about everything. Like if a partner has a question about an interaction with another person, it

it should be open to sharing those things to the comfortability of that individual. So,

So we were committed to each other and still dating other people, not necessarily too many casual things, just wanting to find some intimate connections with other people at the time. Currently, we're just dating each other. We're not really in a place to date others right now, which that's the beauty of exploring polyamory is that you can take a pause on that if you need to, if you need to like step away from other relationships and focus on some people have an issue with calling it like your main relationship as if it holds it above the other ones, but I guess the one you're most committed to.

How did you meet Archie and what were your first impressions upon meeting him? I actually was friends with him on Facebook for a couple of years before I ever had any personal interaction with him. Based on internet first impressions, he seemed like a cool guy, a really talented tattooer, a

funny based off of the memes that he would share. When we finally did match on Tinder, we met up at Bait Shop in Capitol Hill. He seemed like a laid back kind of person, normal dude. I would say...

that he puts on a really good front of being a socially aware person. Now what I would describe him as is an opportunist, somebody who will take advantage of a situation to benefit themselves in a very selfish way.

It sucks because I used to describe him as somebody who was safe to be around and somebody who you could trust. We didn't ever work together. I did help with painting the tattoo shop and things like that. I was somebody who was handing out business cards of his quite a bit and recommending him. We never worked together in a professional manner. We went to an art night on a regular basis. He set one up over Instagram chat that had 20 or 30 tattooers on it. I was

I would go to that. And people who weren't tattooers went to that as well.

I met Tyler a little less than a year after I met Archie. He was working with Archie for a while, and that's how I got to know Tyler was coming around the shop and hanging out with him. Tyler and I started talking on Instagram and text message and stuff, but it was just friendly, nothing romantic. I would describe him as educated, opinionated, funny, and kind of a big dork, but somebody very trustworthy. I'm not currently tattooing. I am looking for an apprenticeship, but it's something that's pretty new for me.

which is interesting because Archie kind of encouraged that quite a bit. Archie told me that at first he wasn't sure if I liked him or not, and I was like, "Yeah, I do. I'm just, I'm not head over heels for him." I think he had a little bit of an ego when it came to his notoriety as a tattoo artist in the Seattle community. The vibe was definitely he wanted to get to know me for dating purposes, and I was in the same boat. I was interested in him. Our first interactions were very flirty over Tinder messages.

After our first initial meeting, he had decided that he wanted me to meet his girlfriend because I guess they both wanted to date me at the time. In the beginning, it was positive. I really liked his girlfriend. I liked him. I mostly interacted with Archie.

His girlfriend, she was mostly involved when we would go on dates, all three of us. We got along really well. Like we had a lot of really good conversations. I think our sense of humor is very similar. She liked really cool music, was a really, really good artist. She was just a really cool person. I think things just kind of fizzled out between her and I, 'cause we weren't really able to connect that much. We all went out with my partner once.

At first, it was really positive. I didn't really get to speak with his girlfriend outside text message a whole lot. The way that he described their relationship was that she was very controlling.

He very much villainized her to a lot of people, to a lot of his friends, and made it seem as though he was this kept man by her. Knowing what I know now, I don't think that's actually what was going on. I think I believed a lot of what Archie had said to me, and so I stopped interacting with her. "Oh, it doesn't matter if she's hitting me up, because I don't really need to talk to her anyway, because she's treating somebody I care about poorly." I think that she could sense that that was happening. I really noticed her demeanor change

In the year, I watched her become less outgoing, a little more reserved. She held fast to the idea that nobody liked her anymore.

But I think Archie was feeding her information to make her believe that people didn't like her. So she didn't come around as much so he could do whatever he wanted. When did you start to see the red flags within the relationship? I would definitely say when people started messaging me on social media, telling me about things they had heard about or personal experiences they had had with him.

This was before later allegations would come forward. So this was more just people in the industry giving you a heads up because they care about you and they see that you're aligning yourself somewhat with this person. Yes. A lot of them didn't even realize that I had a personal relationship with him until I would share that with them after they told me what was going on on their end. I would

I would bring these messages to Archie and he would dismiss them and say that they're just rumors and people just want for some reason to like cancel me because cancel culture is such a big thing now.

Archie actually did a tattoo on me. I wanted a different design and this is something that I thought about later like, "Shit, why did I let him do that?" Because I'm not normally somebody to just roll over like that. But he wanted to do a different design and I just said, "Yeah, okay, whatever. It's a free tattoo." And that's him using the power dynamic to be like, "Well, I'm just going to put a tattoo on you that you didn't actually want, but you're going to get it anyway because it's free and I'm cool."

I identify pretty heavily as a non-binary person. There were times where I would have to remind him my boundaries sexually being non-binary, like there were certain parts of my body that I didn't want referred to or touched. And there was definitely times where I would have to remind him of that.

And it was a little bit frustrating. But up until the actual assault, he was receptive. Like he would right away remember, oh yeah, I would brush it off as like, oh, you have other partners and we don't see each other that much. So it's not a huge deal. We would only see each other once a month. When we were first hanging out, it was like three times a month. And then it dwindled off until it was once a month, once every couple of months. There was a lot of

There was at one point a conversation we had about how his girlfriend at the time didn't really want him to have super serious relationships outside of their relationship. I was a topic of stress for them when it came to that. And so he did have a conversation with me at one point being like, we can't really hang out as much. And when we do, we can't tell her.

At the time, I was struggling a lot with my mental health, depression and substance abuse. So at the time, I was refraining from alcohol altogether and things like that just to keep my head clear.

Archie offered for me to come and see him. And I was assuming this was going to be at his apartment for some support because he was like, you don't reach out until things get really bad. Make sure you're actually reaching out to everybody to make sure you're good. I started driving up to Capitol Hill from Tacoma. I wasn't checking my phone. And apparently he wanted me to meet him at Mario's, which is a bar 10 minutes from his house. I was parked a block away from his house. So I looked at my phone and went, oh, okay, got to go to Mario's. I

finally get there. He's at the bar and it's clear that he's had a few drinks. He orders a drink and peer pressure gets to me and I'm like, yeah, I guess I'll have a gin and tonic, which I end up taking two sips of. He drops his all over the bar and we get kicked out of the bar after making the bartender very, very uncomfortable. They were not having it. I pretty much carry him back to my car. His arm is over my shoulder and we're walking back to my car and he's slurring and we're stumbling all over the place.

I finally get him in my car and we drive back to his apartment and walk back up to his place. We were watching a movie for probably five minutes and he starts to kiss me and I kiss him back and it's 30 seconds into that, he flips me over and starts assaulting me.

I had literally no time to say yes or no. Being abused in the past pretty heavily in my childhood and in my young adulthood, it's not necessarily muscle memory, but something clicks and I fawn and I pretend like everything is fine. I just need to get through this moment and then I'll be able to get away. There was just quite a few things that happened during the assault that

told me that I would be better off pushing through it. Yes, it was violent, but it was also, I think if I had fought back, it would have been a lot more violent. For me, I do like to engage in some BDSM things, but it was always something we talked about beforehand, like how rough is this interaction gonna be?

There was always a small conversation of, is this okay? Are we doing the things that you want to do right now? And none of that happened. He was hitting me a lot harder than he normally would. I had asked him, ease up a little bit, or I would say a word like, hey, or hold up or stop. Then he started grabbing at my chest. And that was something that we had discussed in the past that I really didn't like. And he was grabbing at me pretty hard. I had to tell him at least three times, that's not an area I liked.

I can't remember exactly what I said in all these situations, but I remember expressing like, "We've talked about this. This isn't something I enjoy." Finally, it was over, just to skip a few gory details. I just remember feeling really not right about what had just happened, and I was really quiet. And he asked me if I was okay a few times. I didn't say anything.

I didn't want to get into it. I was just remembering all of the things that had been told to me and I felt super unsafe. And it was interesting because I hadn't even been told all of the worst things yet. I just got this strange sense of things are not okay right now. I remember going into the bathroom, washing my mouth out and looking myself in the mirror and remembering this feeling from past assault that I had experienced. I had a text in my phone from my partner that

It was probably like 45 minutes old and he was asking if I was okay. And it was just really strange that he had texted me that right when it was happening. But I just said, no, can you come pick me up? I didn't really say anything that had happened. I waited for Archie to fall asleep. I got dressed as quickly as I could and left his apartment. I got in the car with my partner. I was just quiet and they're like, what's going on? And I was like, I really don't know what just happened, but I think I just got raped.

He looked over at me and was obviously pretty shocked. I'd actually quit smoking cigarettes a month prior to that. And I was like, I need you to drive me to the gas station to buy a pack of cigarettes right now. And that's what we did. I was feeling really violated at that point.

this queasy, sick to your stomach feeling. It had crossed my mind to go to the hospital, but I was worried that if I did go get a rape kit done, that it wouldn't come back as rape because the bruises are different. And because I had pretended like everything was okay. My partner did ask if we should go to the hospital. And I said, no, I don't think it's going to show up as rape. After I left at like one in the morning, he asked me where I was. And I said, you were dead asleep. I went home. I'll talk to you soon. And then

And the next day at seven in the morning, I was like, I think we need to talk about what happened last night, but I'm not sure I'm super ready to do that. I'm not happy with how things went for a few reasons. And then he asked me if I was okay. And I said, not really. I said that I really don't feel right about what happened last

And then the next day, he said, I understand you need time to process and I'm here to listen and support you through this. I care about you and trying to understand what happened. Whenever you're ready for an in-person conversation, it would help a lot to understand what happened as it's hard to process for me as well, knowing only so much about your experience. So basically, he was telling me that he didn't remember everything that had happened and he wanted to meet in person. For

For me, that's him not wanting there to be screenshots or evidence of anything. I think he could sense that I was definitely not okay. I was being really distant for good reason. He definitely could tell there was something up. At one point, I was still toying with the idea of meeting him in person. I was going to have somebody with me there. I was like, we can still plan for Thursday. And he said that he loved me. And I said, I love you too. I wanted to believe that he didn't mean to hurt me.

There was still some weird part of my brain that was like, yeah, he assaulted me, but he didn't mean it because he was drunk. I eventually told him, I'm not interested in having any conversation with you.

After I had decided that I was done with it, he started texting me over and over again. I had reached out to his girlfriend because I wanted to tell her what had happened. I was concerned for her safety. I hadn't told her anything yet, but he started blowing up my phone, being like, "What are you going to tell her? I'm about to see her." I said, "Well, she's probably just going to show you exactly what I said. I haven't said anything to her yet." And then he said, "Please tell me what you said. Shane, please tell me. Please reply to me."

I wasn't replying at this point. And then he tried to call me a couple of times. And so my partner actually told him to leave me alone for a couple of days while I thought about things. And I ended up deciding to make a police report. I've never really enjoyed interacting with law enforcement. I feel like a lot of people can agree with that. I knew to move forward with an investigation with this, it would be necessary.

When I went to make my report, I had to wait three and a half hours to even talk to anybody. They said, stay where you are and we will come find you if you move. Give us a call. I stayed in that Capitol Hill neighborhood for three and a half hours. Luckily, I had people with me, but it baffles me how much they are

with their actions and inactions saying they don't care. They told me that they would be contacting me at any point through phone or email, and they wanted me to send over evidence and try to get into contact with the sexual assault department of Seattle Police Department. But unfortunately, right around when this was happening, a lot of those people were getting laid off and their department was getting shrunk down.

I've heard from them all of once, and that was after I contacted them to get a hold of them again. I actually haven't been contacted personally since they gave me the dropbox to put screenshots in. After that, it seemed like they weren't going to be helpful. They weren't going to move forward in the investigation. I came to the conclusion that I needed to look for a lawyer when I was ready to do so.

I started contacting friends and asking them what they thought I should do, going over what I would like to do. I talked with them about it. And honestly, I can't really tell if they were taking it seriously just because they repeatedly asked me, did you say no? And I was like, well, I didn't really have a chance to say no. I couldn't really tell if they were believing everything I was saying. I like to hope that they were.

After I had started telling people what happened, I told Tyler and then I told a bunch of other people in the Capitol Hill area, like the barber shops and the tattoo shops, the piercing shops, because I don't want him to be able to victimize anybody else. I remember coming to Tyler and being like, I have something really hard to hear to share with you. I told him Archie assaulted me or something like that. And he was like, I knew that he was this type of person.

I always had suspicions because he had experienced some stuff with his girlfriend

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Hi, I'm Connelly. I'm a Seattle tattooer. I have been tattooing for about six years. I moved to Seattle right when the pandemic started.

I met Archie a little over a year ago. He was leaving the studio that I'm currently at to open his own studio, Blood Orange Tattoo. I was brought in as his replacement, so I never officially worked with him. Some of my coworkers had worked with him for a few years at my previous studio. They said that before I worked there,

Everyone was really quiet when they worked. They didn't have a whole lot of interaction with him outside of the studio until I moved to Seattle. And then he befriended me. And then we all started going out together. So I don't think that they were really close with him before any of that. So I don't think that they really noticed anything off.

Archie reached out to me after I started working at Studio Arcanum over social media one day. And he was like, hey, you should stop by my new shop and I'll give you a free t-shirt or something. Let's meet. And I was like, okay, that's cool.

I had just moved to Seattle. I was just starting to tattoo here. And I was impressed with this popular, talented tattooer. He wanted to be welcoming and friendly. I thought he was cool at first. He invited me to a bunch of art nights that he organized. He invited me to do conventions with him. I didn't know him for very long.

I would say that we were friends after a month or two. I didn't really notice anything off about him at first. I thought that it was cool that somebody that is more popular is trying to build a community within the tattooer community in Seattle, get artists together to do these art nights, to do conventions.

A lot of times in the tattoo industry, people that are popular are standoffish and don't really care about that kind of thing. When we would go out, he's the type of person that if somebody says, I'm not drinking tonight, he'll be like, why aren't you drinking? Why don't you want to be fun? He would be pushy, which I'm not a huge fan of.

I noticed some drug use from him. Like, I'm not super into drugs. I was sort of alarmed at one of the conventions that we went to, just the amount of drugs that he was doing. We kept on

pushing me to be like, "Oh, are you going to try this? Are you going to do that?" And I was like, "No, I've never really done that. I would rather try that with people that I know a little bit better in a more relaxed situation." I'm not really into that. And he just kept on pushing it and pushing it. So I did notice that about him, which I think speaks to pushing boundaries. I actually met Tyler through Archie. He was working at Blood Orange Tattoo at the time.

I met Tyler and we did some conventions together. I met him at Archie's studio a few times.

I really like Tyler. He was more reserved compared to Archie. I don't think he's a big partier, outgoing type of person. He likes to do his work and go home. I always had good interactions with him. I did meet Shane through Archie through one of the art nights that he put together. We would do these big art nights. Maybe like 10 to 15 artists would show up at either a bar or a location that we picked and we would draw, we would paint, hang out.

Shane had come to maybe two of those by the time all of this happened. So I'd only met him twice at that point. He was friendly. He was nice. He reached out to me through Instagram and liked my posts and stuff like that. So he was cool. I just didn't really know him very well. Do you remember when you found out about the allegations for the first time and what your initial thoughts were?

I was like, fuck you. That was honestly my initial reaction. I got a text from one of my coworkers because another tattooer in the community had sent her a message. We all addressed it as a studio. We met and we had a talk about it. And we were like, what are we going to do about this?

That made us question a lot about what did we miss? And it makes me feel bad that I didn't see it. I did let this person be my friend and hung out with them. We wanted nothing to do with Archie after that. It's terrible. If this is coming out, fuck that. We don't want anything to do with it. I just...

I did reach out to Shane because he had actually just contacted me the day before all of that happened. So I messaged him, I was like, "I'm so sorry, I just heard this." And we ended up meeting up with Shane that night to discuss things and about how we were going to address it as a community. We wanted him to know that we were behind him and supported him. We also, having had Archie work at that studio, wanted to distance ourselves as much from it

All of our careers could be ruined because of this. We drafted a public statement with Shane because he was very vocal about not wanting Archie to be able to get away with this. We were like, you know, whenever you're ready to share something, we will also share something so that you have support of people in the industry behind you. They ended up sharing their story the next morning and we made a public statement and went from there. Here's Tyler.

As I'm reading it, I remember thinking, why would he be lying? Archie started hitting him. He asked him to stop multiple times before he finally stopped, calling him really derogatory names and touching his chest, which he was not comfortable with. That was a very explicit boundary that they had had for the whole duration of their encounters. Everything about it felt really scary for him. He also sent me screenshots of him confronting Archie about it. By Archie's response, I

I can tell that that shit actually happened. Shane was saying things like, what happened last night, that felt like rape. That was really fucked up and I'm really traumatized by it. It was pretty clear that something was up. I'm like, I know someone else who has had sex with Archie before. I'm close friends with them. Let me just see what they think about this. And I had made sure that that was okay with Shane if I could share that. I sent the screenshots to this other person and they were like, that sounds a lot like my experience that I had with him.

I was not opposed to being hit, but there was no explicit conversation on whether that was okay. It just started happening. He started calling me derogatory names in Russian. You know, that sounds a lot like what I went through, and that would be incredibly terrifying. Coupled with my experiences, I think this is enough for me to put it together that this is not okay behavior.

When we all found out about Shane's experience, we had been wondering if something was going on because we saw graffiti on a wall that said Archie Bronson sexually assaults people. And we had confronted him about it. And he was like, oh, it's just like my crazy ex. We were trying to be reasonable. Maybe he really does have a crazy ex. I don't know. So they'd ignored it. But when Shane gave his testimony, they're like, it's too much. We need to take a stance against this.

All of us artists, six or seven of us at least, all privately messaged him before we went public with it, calling him out and giving him a chance to explain himself. He ignored all of us. He had a chance, but he decided to just ignore it. And he read all of our messages. And then it was a few days later, that's when we went public with it.

Shane was already going to go public with it regardless. So we're like, we want to stand in solidarity with him. This is not the kind of thing that we support. We wanted to like let people know this is not the kind of behavior we stand for. We all agreed to post about it and we did it in unison in my video that I made about it.

I'm just letting you know my experience and my girlfriend's experience and anyone else who comes forward with things so that you can make an informed decision. I'm not telling you to think one way or another. I'm just sharing this information so that you can make up your own mind.

For whatever reason, I got the most traction on it. I don't know if it's just because I made a video about it where everyone else just made a post. People who literally don't know anything about him, they're seeing all this stuff and they're like, well, all these people could just collectively be making this stuff up. But it's like, if you know anything about him, if you had my perspective, it would be so obvious that this is real. What would they gain from it? They're anonymous. Some of them aren't even posting at all.

He had a big platform, but not that big. He's popular in the Instagram tattoo world, but like in real life, he's still kind of a nobody. I was getting so many messages. The last I counted was like 300 separate people messaging me. I remember looking through all those and just being absolutely horrified. It was 10 times worse than I thought it could be. There were so many stories that were so similar. I wasn't even the only person that was getting stories. There were other artists that went forward with me.

We're talking with other people who for years have been complaining about this guy for a multitude of different reasons, and he always just painted them as crazy. There was at least 20 experiences that were similar, some worse than others. We asked all of them if they were okay with sharing it. I think I was only able to share maybe like five out of all of them. So many people were worried about possible revenge porn being shared or being harassed.

Some of them had said that they had already been harassed by him, so they were not even comfortable sharing anonymously. It was possible that he could figure out who they were based on their testimony. It was pretty insane. The things that were in these allegations were so unbelievably specific.

There was one in particular where someone was saying that they had gotten drugged with morphine. It gave me goosebumps. I remember him telling me when I worked with him, I got this big bag of morphine if you ever need it. I was like, I mean, I'm good. Thank you, though. So the fact that this person had said it was morphine in specific...

And then there were other people that talked about experiences being coerced into sexual things, getting nude pictures of them taken by offering them ketamine and then sending them into a K-hole and then threatening to share them if they didn't give him sexual favors. There was a lot of those. And what was really eerie about those two is they always mentioned it was Polaroid. And I know he has this huge wall of Polaroids in his shop between the Polaroid and the ketamine and the morphine. It's just like all these little things that add up.

There was an artist who had been complaining about him like a year prior, talking about how Archie was a dangerous person. Archie's like, that guy's just crazy. He's just jealous of me. After all that stuff blew up, I had reached out to the guy and was like, I want to get your sign.

And he tells me this stuff. I'm like, you know, that makes way more sense than you just being batshit crazy for no reason. He'd had this story about Archie had tricked him at a party or something, thinking that it was just a little bit of cocaine. He didn't even want to do that, but he had pressured him into doing it. And then it turned out to be ketamine. And so he went into a K-hole and was just straight up not having a good time. A K-hole is when you do ketamine and go too far. You're incapacitated. This guy tried to confront Archie about it. Archie gaslit him and ignored him.

So then he starts telling people, not even publicly, like just telling people that he worked with, watch out for this guy. Word was getting back to Archie. So he started talking mad shit about this artist. Painting him is crazy. And he had some people thinking that this guy was legitimately crazy. And then you talk to the guy and he's like the most normal person. He's so reserved and kind and polite. He's not this weird, unhinged, jealous freak that Archie tried to paint him as. After everything came out, I imagine now he probably feels very vindicated. I'm very happy for him.

Archie stayed quiet for, I think it was like a couple weeks at least. And then that's when he made a post, I guess he thought was somehow going to clear his name, where he essentially doxxed one of the victims. Shane had been anonymous and he just went right out there, the full name, right on the posts, shared screenshots that were not supposed to be shared. But ironically, in the messages themselves, you can just tell that he did that shit.

He himself was like, "I don't really remember much of what happened. Please inform me." But then simultaneously being like, "That's not how it happened though." He definitely seemed to try and flip the script. Actually, I'm the one who was taken advantage by all this. His quote apology that he made, which really wasn't taking accountability for anything. He tried to be like, "I do think maybe there are times that I abused my power. I'm definitely going to be sober from now on." The sobriety thing, I'm really tired of him weaponizing because it's like, he's done things absolutely sober.

He was sober when he groped my partner. This has nothing to do with you just losing control when you're intoxicated. The whole apology was just so insane. It was really funny reading some of the comments because, I mean, they were so accurate. People were like, this just feels like a chat GPT apology. Everything about it felt really emotionless. Here's Shane.

I had quite a lot of people coming forward telling me their experiences. People in the tattoo community and in the sex work community in Seattle, a lot of cam girls coming forward and telling me that they had really inappropriate interactions with him over messages, where he was sending unsolicited nudes, repeatedly asking for sexual situations to happen that they had explicitly said they aren't interested in. I had reconnected with some friends after this had occurred and they were like, I'm so sorry, I didn't have the chance to warn you.

I don't think anybody other than Tyler came forward publicly. I think everybody else anonymously came forward. I think initially people were really unsure about how he was going to respond because he had been able to keep it under wraps for so long.

I think because he had been a lot more violent towards some of the other victims, I wasn't really sure what he was going to do. I was a little bit afraid myself. Initially, he came out with a three-page text post for an apology, something along the lines of, "I'm going to work on my behavior. I'm going to work on my understanding of boundaries and work on respecting them."

I'm so sorry that I hurt anybody. I'm in therapy. It was less than a week that that was up. He took that down and made another post saying that I had fabricated all of it. I had decided after the fact, not in that very moment, that it was assault. But it's interesting. In that moment, I knew something was wrong. My brain just had not connected the dots on what was really happening. And I think a lot of people experience this when they're assaulted.

You don't want to believe that that's what happened to you. You don't want to really admit that it was assault, especially when it's coming from somebody you care about. You have to do a lot of picking up the pieces after the fact. I don't know how he frames that in his head. I've heard that he is using the defense that he is autistic and from Russia, so he doesn't really know our culture. And I think that's a really shitty thing to use as a shield for

huge cop-out. You can't wear our thing as your badge to do bad things. I myself am on the spectrum. A lot of my friends are. For the most part, we get boundaries. Somebody tells you not to do something or it's a common boundary for most humans. We'll respect that. But it's more than just boundaries. And I think he just uses that to make it a very gray thing when it's somewhat black and white. You just don't rate people. I myself am a sex worker. I think that he definitely stuck with being

being involved with people who are sex workers, queer people, targeted groups in a way to cover his tracks and say that, oh, well, they're sex workers. This is something that they just do. Did you have any other follow-up conversations with his girlfriend at the time after this all came out online?

A couple, mainly just getting my frog back from them. I have a White's tree frog that I had given to Archie to have with his tree frogs when he was getting a bunch of them. He told me that at any point if I wanted her back, I could have her back. So I decided since I didn't want anything to do with him anymore, I would definitely like the frog I raised back. So I reached out to his girlfriend.

My frog ended up having a pretty gnarly infection. The vet said that that's not something that she could have contracted in the three weeks to a month that I had her back. Since she wasn't eating, that had me worried, so I brought her to the vet and I contacted his girlfriend.

saying like, hey, you and Archie are responsible for her vet bill. That's something that I'm going to bring up in a lawsuit. And I let her know that I was going to end up suing the both of them because she placed herself as a business owner of the tattoo shop. So as far as I was concerned, that fraud was also her responsibility, not

Not only that, a lot of the interactions that I first started having with Archie was with her. I saw that as somebody who was bringing new people into a sexual situation that may not have been super safe because she had shared that people had been coming forward to her for a very long time about things that Archie was doing that were inappropriate.

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The majority of people that were commenting were in support of me and the other victims saying he needs to just stop tattooing, he needs to turn himself in. There's a handful of people that are being supportive of Archie and saying that they've had nothing but stellar experiences with him, but I just don't think that they've experienced that with him yet. They might not ever. He's pretty good at pretending like he's a safe person to be around. I think it was

actually pretty empowering to see that many people take that for face value and say, "We support you." There was people that were messaging me saying, "You don't need to prove anything to anybody. We believe you." I did end up losing some friends over it. People that I thought would stick around that met Archie through me, which was really interesting. They decided to go ahead and support him because they didn't approve of how I chose to go about it. I said it was okay to share my story online. I also wasn't really hiding who I was.

Here's Connelly.

There was fighting within all of the Seattle tattooers because people were still choosing to support him. I didn't sleep for a few days because it was just so stressful.

When we first shared the story, it was just Shane's story and we chose to believe it. And then we were getting dozens of messages from people being like, this happened to me too. And so we were having to deal with realizing that not only did this terrible thing happen to this one person, this terrible thing happened to multiple people. There was a lot of people that supported Shane that

that completely wrote off Archie as soon as all of this happened and warned all their clients. And that was great. There were dozens of artists that did that within the Seattle community. The Seattle Tattoo Expo immediately banned him. So did the Portland one and the Evergreen Tattoo Convention. That part of the response was great. There's another part where there are people still within this community that...

are lying and are saying that they are not on Archie's side. They've disavowed him and they are still following his social media, liking his posts, writing reviews on his Google page to get his Google rating up. They're just being two-faced about it and it's very disappointing to see. If this had been a stranger to them and they read this story, they would never support that person. They would

Be like, that person's an abuser. Get them out of tattooing. Whenever this kind of thing happens, people are always like, well, I never saw that. I didn't see that from him. I didn't see that from him either. I didn't see that person. Otherwise, I would not have been friends with him.

But clearly, these people aren't doing things out in the open. And they're getting away with it for so long because they're good at doing it behind closed doors. And they're good at doing it in a way that's secretive. When it does come out, people are going to doubt it because they have built up this reputation and this false persona of being such a different person than the person that you could imagine doing those things.

He's being like, "Oh, I messed up because I had a drinking and drug problem." There are plenty of people that have drinking and drug problems and they don't end up assaulting or harassing people. Archie has always gone on about, he's tried to be so

woke, for lack of a better word. He'll correct people when they say something that isn't quite in touch with what morals he thinks that people should have. You are this holier-than-thou person, and yet you're doing all this terrible stuff behind the scenes. Fuck this thing that you did to this person, and fuck you for also doing this in our industry when this is a prevalent problem.

I originally started working in North Carolina and basically the same exact situation happened there.

It was a prominent male tattooer. A woman posted on an anonymous Facebook group that was like, hey, this person assaulted me. And 20 other women came forward after that on this anonymous Facebook group and were all sharing their story. There was protests outside of his shop. He had to close down. All of his artists quit. I had just moved past that, moved to Seattle. And then it's happening here again.

Seattle is supposed to be this place that is against that kind of stuff. But here we are again, this person who is pretending that he is that liberal person is doing fucked up shit again. And it's really terrible. It's disappointing that Archie is still working and people are still supporting him. Artists are still wanting to work with him. Artists are still trying to guest spot at his shop. He's just taken the decal off the front door because somebody defaced it by painting rapist on it.

but he is still working there. Here's Tyler.

There were definitely some allegations that had come out after Archie's response. Those people didn't want to come out publicly with it, but they did confide in me. Archie has not reached out or contacted me or anything. He's got his... I've heard people refer to them as flying monkeys. He sends his people out there who side with him to harass me. I've definitely experienced that. I've had death threats. I've gotten a whole slew of people trying to flip this and to shame me.

To my knowledge, after his last addressing of everything, he went right back to posting every day, burying the post. I did notice that he is going back and deleting comments slowly throughout all this, especially anywhere people are calling him out for experiences that they have had. There were some people that were like, you sent me unsolicited dick pics, stuff like that. And those are all gone.

There's still people, even entire shops that are just like, I don't really believe in it. Charlie probably just started this all because like he wanted to take his clients or something, which makes no sense because I already had a fully booked schedule at all times. That's why I have to close and open my books. Why would I want more clients that I can't take on anyways?

the kind of excuses people will make to defend an alleged predator without really even entertaining the idea. It's possible that this shit actually happened, though. I've had some people that have reached out where they're like, sometimes it's a little skeptical of this stuff because I've had an experience where I was falsely accused. I'll even say, too, that when I was 13, right when I came out as trans,

I was in Indiana at the time. There was this girl in my choir class who was very Christian. She had apparently like went home and told her parents, "This kid in my class, they're trans." And their parents had apparently convinced them to like lie and say that I was molesting kids on the school bus. So they start telling the principal. So the school calls me in and was questioning me, "Have you ever touched these kids?" I was like, "What? Where is this coming from?"

I don't even know these kids. They asked the kids and they're like, we don't even know that kid. I didn't do anything. You're 13 getting questioned if you're touching children. Yeah, that was really traumatic. Then it was a couple years later, that girl, she had actually reached out to me and apologized. She's like, I'm really sorry. I came from a really Christian household. It was like a cult. I'm now living with my grandparents. And I just want to apologize. I made up that lie about you because my parents told me I should. I was like, thank you. That was really nice of you to admit to that because I don't think a lot of people would do that.

So when there's a false accusation, I have experienced it myself. I've been on the end of that. No one can accuse me of doing this willy-nilly. I do take this stuff seriously on both ends, but when all the signs are pointing there, it's just so obvious. Here's Shane. In terms of accountability for Archie, what would be your hope or desire there? I think that he should close his tattoo shop and remove himself from the community in Seattle immediately.

I don't see how anybody would be comfortable getting tattooed by somebody who's been abusive that way. It sounds harsh, but I just really don't think that he should be able to tattoo anymore. I don't think he should be able to be alone with people like that anymore. I don't think he should be able to renew his tattooing license. I don't know how to be fair to somebody who's been so unfair to others.

It's too serious of a thing for me to be like, yes, continue on with your life. I think that he should be going to some pretty intensive, serious therapy. And if it were a perfect world, he would turn himself in and he would serve jail time. Here's Tyler. I know of at least one police report that was made. There might be others, but I only know of one.

I found out that the Seattle SPD is no longer taking on adult sexual assault cases due to having not enough resources. I found lots of articles about it, so it makes sense why there was no actual investigation done. I had even talked to my therapist about that, and she informed me that that's absolutely real. But there was a police report with a case number. There was a good handful of people that were trying to take him to court, but I haven't had any updates on that. I

I personally would like to see criminal charges met against him, but unfortunately, I don't have high hopes for that. Between a lot of the victims being so petrified of retaliation from him, there was one time where someone was going to go forward with a case and they wanted me to get in contact with as many victims as possible. And I think I only got one or two people. I haven't heard anything since. It's really just shameful how little is being done.

Unfortunately, this was the best case scenario, I think. It did get a lot of traction within the community and a lot of people really stepped up to the plate. A lot of his sponsors dropped him immediately, but it still doesn't feel like enough. I mean, he's still tattooing in the same location. He still has some supporters. It's sad that this is the best case scenario.

Here's Connelly. In a perfect world, there would be legal consequences. My goal would be that I want to see this community push him out definitively. I want people to stop supporting him. I want people to stop being like, oh, it was just Tyler and Shane and they have personal beef with Archie and it wasn't a big deal. It's

It's like, no, there are dozens of people's accounts that you are discrediting or straight up ignoring if you are not paying attention to this. I think a lot of people have focused on Tyler and Shane because they found their stories easier to discredit.

But dozens of people had stories of not just assault. It was abuse. It was harassment over social media. It was things that made people feel uncomfortable. It was a lot. And people are trying to discredit that. But why would you want to be friends or support an artist that has all of these stories? Why would you want to support somebody that has been making people feel uncomfortable over social media, making people feel bad about their tattoo experience? Why would you want to support somebody like that, like that?

I'm like, why would they lie? Justice is never going to happen to these people. They're going to get called liars by hundreds of this person's fans. It's a huge undertaking to come out with something like this. I think it's absolutely gross that people can say that kind of stuff. If anything, way more people are keeping quiet about this and not coming forward.

because of people personally attacking you. It's just not an easy thing and to think that all of these people are lying about stuff like that, it's not rational. And if you're thinking that somebody might be lying, isn't it more logical that one person, Archie, is the one that is lying and that these dozen other people are telling the truth because they all have very similar stories? Why do you believe one person and not 12?

Also, when people try to say that we're just doing it for clout or whatever, I would have rather that whole situation just never happened. Never happened to Shane, never happened in general to all of the other people. And I never had to say anything about it. What do you hope that listeners will take away from hearing Tyler and Shane's story and your perspective?

That there were so many other people that maybe weren't comfortable sharing publicly, but they shared with us personally stories of his terrible behavior. And it was enough people that if you are doubting that this is true, that you are just straight ignoring everything. You are just calling dozens of people liars. And you're saying that only Archie is the one that's telling the truth.

That's what I hope mainly people would take away. I want to raise awareness within the tattoo industry to try to help these situations, prevent them from happening in the future. I don't want people to be victimized like this.

an artist is messaging you on social media and pushing you to come work for them or to come get tattooed by them, pushing for you to do anything like that is not normal behavior. It's suspect. If anything in this industry or anyone in this industry is making you feel uncomfortable, it probably isn't right. Reach out to somebody else that you trust. If

If anything makes you question somebody, don't be afraid to ask or don't be afraid to just go to somebody else. There are thousands of tattoo artists and thousands of other business people that are wonderful, kind, safe people that care about making you feel comfortable and care about you as a person and would never abuse you. So if anyone is ever making you feel even remotely suspect, just go to somebody else.

When you hear something about somebody, even if you know them, don't just immediately dismiss it because you really like the person that you're hearing it about. Take things into consideration. Really look at the facts. Don't just turn a blind eye to it. And when this kind of stuff happens, pay attention to the people that are still supporting those terrible people. There should be consequences for not denouncing people that are hurting other people in our community.

Thank you again so, so much. Thank you for doing this. Here's Shane. Some days it's even hard for me to wrap my brain around all of this. I'm still processing it. I've been through it with my mental health and a little bit with my physical health as well, but I'm lucky enough to have a good therapist and a good doctor. I've been able to work through it with them and things are slowly but surely improving.

I want to say don't be afraid to speak out, but really it's up to the individual. If you don't want to come forward and you don't feel safe doing that, then don't. But having the confidence and the sense of self to do whatever it is you think is best in that situation and to not let other people discourage you from doing whatever is best for you.

Being assaulted or being abused doesn't make you worthless. It doesn't make you damaged or unlovable anymore. You're not broken. You do need a community to support you to be able to go through it. If you're not coming forward, at least reach out to somebody and talk to somebody about it because it is so very isolating and you are going to feel alone, but you're not alone. Talking about this was harder than I expected it to be, but...

I'm so very thankful to Tyler and the Seattle Tattoo community for standing behind me and the other victims and survivors. I'm currently undergoing intensive trauma therapy and I'm still working out all of my feelings around this. I know for sure that I was manipulated, used, and led on for over two years by Archie. It's really unfortunate that things had happened the way that they did and he had to make the choices he made to not ask for consent and to take me and my feelings for granted.

I'm mourning the friendship and relationship we had on top of working through the trauma of the actual assault. I'm thankful I survived and I'm thankful I'm able to tell my story with the support of so many wonderful people.

Here's Tyler. I really hope that if you're a client looking to get tattooed, that you understand that at any point, if you feel uncomfortable, you can just walk out. You are not obligated to be somewhere where you're uncomfortable. I wish I had tips and tricks to avoid these things from happening, but it's really unfortunate that someone can call themselves like a safe space and not be. I wish I could tell you that just look for a safe space. The best that I can tell you is just learn to trust your gut.

There's so many amazing tattooers that will give you a wonderful tattoo and a wonderful experience. For every dirtbag tattooer out there, there's 10 amazing tattooers out there that are genuine. I hope that no matter what your opinions are, that you understand that this stuff is real. It takes a lot for people to come out with this stuff, to deal with people invalidating you and victim blaming and trying to tear you apart. Anyone listening, understand that this is very difficult for a lot of people to come out about this stuff.

our own careers on the line in speaking out against this stuff. So we really don't have anything to gain. I just hope that people will believe victims more. I understand looking at things critically, not just believing anything blindly, but to not just assume that people are trying to take someone down for no reason, because there's really no point in that. It's very rare for those things to happen.

Even being the whistleblower and seeing everything happen online firsthand, getting more inside knowledge, I can tell you that there's lots of shops that claim to be safe spaces and they are anything but safe places. It's heartbreaking. I think some people use that almost as a way to like lure people in or something or to get some kind of clout. They're virtue signaling, but their values don't actually line up with their actions. I think a lot of it does unfortunately come down to trusting your gut. If you go into a place and you get a weird vibe, you should

You should never feel ashamed if you would just want to turn around and walk right out. It might be kind of awkward, I'll admit, but you can do that.

I appreciate everything you've done, not only to advocate for yourself, but for others and be an ally to the others who were harmed. Thank you again so much for being willing to share your experience on the podcast and on your own platforms. I really do believe that people speaking out in the way that you have done do make a big difference. It just feels like if we're not going to save us, who is?

I'm so thankful to be able to do this work and to work with amazing people like you who are brave enough to stand up for what's right. It's not convenient. It's never the easy thing to do, but it is, in my opinion, the noble thing to do. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time, stay safe, friends.

Something Was Wrong is a Broken Cycle Media production created and hosted by me, Tiffany Reese. If you'd like to support the show further, you can share episodes with your loved ones, leave a positive review, or follow Something Was Wrong on Instagram at somethingwaswrongpodcast. Our theme song was composed by Glad Rags. Check out their album, Wonder Under. Thank you so much.

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