Disinformation campaign v. Calvin Ayre claims crypto casualties

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The libelous disinformation campaign targeting Calvin Ayre is claiming more casualties, except this time it’s the attackers who are paying the price.

Last week, lawyers for CoinGeek founder Calvin Ayre launched a legal action against cryptocurrency news site Coin Rivet, which had published several articles alleging that Ayre was guilty of improper sexual conduct with underage girls during a trip to Cuba.

On April 4, Coin Rivet editorial director Darren Parkin informed Ayre’s attorneys that the site had pulled the offending articles offline, along with Coin Rivet’s social media references to the articles, “as a gesture of goodwill.”

It’s worth noting that, while Coin Rivet may have pulled its offending articles offline, partner content reposts of these same articles on mainstream news sites such as Yahoo remained online until Ayre’s own media sites pointed out this discrepancy.

Parkin also claimed that an article written by Coin Rivet’s Helen Bennicke – who bragged about personally alerting law enforcement agencies regarding the allegations made against Ayre because “to do nothing would feel immoral” – was “withdrawn from publication within 15 minutes of being published.” Parkin further claimed that Bennicke had “left the employment of Coin Rivet just days” after the offending post was published.

The removal of Bennicke’s “opinion” article doesn’t negate the fact that someone – and given Parkin’s status as editorial director, that dubious honor would appear to be his own – approved the article’s publication in the first place. The fact that the article made it online at all suggests at least some tacit approval of the article’s subject matter.

Parkin’s letter claimed that Coin Rivet now considers the matter closed, but the site has yet to address Ayre’s pursuit of a public apology for spreading these false allegations, although such public contrition won’t undo the damage caused by what Parkin referred to as this “unfortunate episode.”

Parkin and Coin Rivet CEO Sheba Karamat – as well as other individuals at crypto blogs that published similar articles – are about to discover that this ‘episode’ is anything but over, as Ayre’s attorneys have responded with a new letter seeking more info on “whether others at Coin Rivet were driven by a dishonest agenda” in deciding to publish these articles.

Ayre is rightly outraged by the fact that these articles not only cast aspersions on his good name, they also sullied the reputations of the female members of the dance troupe in the social media images that sparked this unjustified uproar.

Ayre has been publicizing similar ‘lifestyle’ promotional material for nearly two decades now, and the internet is awash in hundreds if not thousands of images and videos of Ayre with girls in bikinis. The fact that these recent images generated such controversy is both curious and revealing.

Ayre is one of the major public proponents of the Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV) protocol and its unique capacity for massive on-chain scaling. Ayre maintains that BSV offers the only real hope for a cryptocurrency becoming a truly global financial platform and not just another buy-and-forget form of ‘digital gold.’

Ayre’s support for BSV has made him an easy target for supporters of rival cryptocurrencies, who clearly hope that any mud that sticks to Ayre will simultaneously tarnish BSV’s public image.

Ayre’s latest CoinGeek Conference is scheduled to kick off in Toronto on May 29-30. Crypto trolls are welcome to attend, but we suspect they won’t, as spreading disinformation is a lot easier to do from the safety of one’s basement. For more open-minded and less conflicted individuals, the future of money awaits in Toronto.