After threatening to sue me and writing five blog posts about me, Dennis Hackethal published another blog post, some long blog comments (some could be posts but he put them in the comment section) and multiple videos attacking me. It's over 10,000 more words and 1.5 hours of video. He also sent me eight rude tweets in a row even though I'm blocking him on Twitter (he used a second account to get around the block). The tweets taunted me and said "I plan to make many more videos about you". He won't leave me alone, won't discuss our conflict, and isn't interested in deescalation. He also doxed me. He's trying to bully me into removing everything I ever said about him from the internet, which is one of his twenty non-negotiable demands.
Despite this, I tried ignoring him again. After his lawsuit threat, I ignored him for eight months and refrained from blogging about it. After his blog posts about me, I responded minimally, then ignored him for six months despite his many followup attacks. Then, in addition to continuing to attack me and recently hassling my fan when he tried to discuss my philosophy ideas online (unrelated to Hackethal), Hackethal made a website, Veritula, which uses Critical Fallibilism ideas without crediting me. Unfortunately, I don't think ignoring Hackethal is a viable option. He won't leave me alone.
For context, please note that he asked me not to respond to his posts. He said he wouldn't discuss and that he would consider it mistreatment of him if I or any of my associates wrote responses to his accusations on our own websites. My silence was not in response to him wanting to discuss the conflict, which he said he wouldn't do. Silence is what he asked for (but has no right to).
This post will respond to multiple issues in a series of fairly independent sections. One of my main themes is that Hackethal's factual claims are often false and often contradict his own sources, so don't believe his statements without analyzing the evidence yourself, even if they appear well-sourced.
These are mostly points I could have made six months ago, but I tried to deescalate instead, which didn't work.
False Claims
There's a pattern where Hackethal's statements about me and what happened are misleading, factually false, or involve logical errors. Here's a representative example.
In my 2024-05-28 letter to Hackethal's lawyers, which I didn't get a reply to, I wrote:
I find it implausible that Hackethal is genuinely concerned about potential harm to his reputation from my posts given what he's been posting online under his real name. For example, after sending the cease and desist letter, he blogged:
"Men should check a woman’s average weight for the past five years (eg social-media pics)."
"Husband and wife are not ‘partners’. The wife is the husband’s support system. He leads, she follows."
"From a man’s perspective, a girl with piercings and tattoos doesn’t look like a wife or mother; she looks like a girl you have sex with and then get rid of."
"When a woman asks you what you do for a living, she wants to gauge how much money you make. You should be able to counter the question with: how much do you charge for submission?"
"It’s not fair for a severely overweight woman to expect her man to be loyal."
These quotes are from May 21, 2024 on Hackethal's blog at [redacted]. They show that he's not making a serious attempt to build a positive reputation as an innovative philosopher.
Eight months later, Hackethal blogged a response (link omitted, and I didn't use the word "proof" so those must be scare quotes):
In his correspondence with my lawyers, Temple said he found it implausible that I was concerned with my reputation. As ‘proof’, he gave out-of-context quotes from an article where I paraphrase controversial things someone else has said. I even give an explicit disclaimer at the top of the article saying “I don’t agree with everything [that person] says […]” (emphasis in the original!). Temple conveniently didn’t mention either of these facts and presented quotes as if they were my views. That’s lazy and dishonest.
Here's the disclaimer (bold added):
Kevin Samuels was an image consultant with a successful YouTube channel about dating and relationships. I don’t agree with everything he says, particularly his advocacy for the corporal punishment of children, but he has provided valuable advice about relationships to men and women alike. I’ve listened to and analyzed several dozens of his episodes, and discussed many as well. Here are my key takeaways from his show.
I thought Hackethal disagreed with Samuels about corporal punishment and some other topics, but agreed with a lot of Samuels' views on women and relationships. In particular, I thought that Hackethal agreed with his own "key takeaways" from Samuel's "valuable advice". He also called them "Key Insights" in his post title. And he's posted similar opinions on Reddit. So who is being misleading or "dishonest"?
Factual Errors
Here's another illustration of how (un)trustworthy Hackethal is. He wrote (bold added, link to his Quote Checker website removed):
[Elliot] claims I reached out to him in bad faith last year because I “was already researching lawsuits a month before that conversation […]”. I wanted to find lawsuits stemming from misquotes so that I could market my tool Quote Checker as helping people avoid such lawsuits because Quote Checker helps them quote properly. My legal complaints against Elliot have to do with defamation, not misquotes, and the link he gives is clearly about misquotes, not defamation, so there’s no reason for him to draw this false connection.
The Law Stack Exchange page in question isn't just about misquotes. The word "defamation" is on the page 18 times.
Please don't believe things just because he states them as facts and provides source links. His claims often contradict his sources.
Hackethal Hassled Justin Mallone
I'm not Hackethal's only target. He's attempted to bully Justin Mallone on Twitter and YouTube. Here's Mallone's final comment (with reformatting):
I initially was honestly annoyed at YouTube's moderation and wanted to give you [Dennis Hackethal] an opportunity to post your thoughts and have tried to engage with you a bit. Based on your replies here, I now think that was a mistake. You seem to be engaging in bad faith. I do not believe you are represented [by a lawyer]. I think you are bluffing. I do not think any person operating with legal advice would conduct themselves in the manner you are conducting yourself. I also do not think any reputable law firm would have any association with you. You also appear to be trying to weaponize "no contact requests" (which you appear not to understand) to let you post things without having to deal with replies. I will be deleting your YouTube comment and blocking you. Please do not contact me personally again. If you do indeed have lawyers, you can have them communicate for you.
Also, I think you are being abusive and unfair towards Elliot and should frankly get over criticism you didn't like that happened half a decade ago and move on with your life. The fact that you're stalking my forum visits is creepy as hell, btw.
People curious about this dispute should try reading Elliot's perspective instead of taking Dennis' vitriol on faith.
Plagiarism
Hackethal wrote:
I don’t believe Elliot mentions in his new articles that I have long addressed his complaint about ‘plagiarism’. (Five years ago!) By not mentioning that, he misleads his readers yet again.
I don't know what he's referring to. In the context of refusing to have back-and-forth communication where I can ask questions, it's unreasonable for Hackethal to say things like this without providing details or evidence.
I'm not trying to be difficult. I've tried to think of what he could mean and I've asked others if they know. Because the plagiarism topic is particularly important, I'll respond to my best guess about what he means. Note that he said he addressed it five years ago, so he can't be referring to anything in his recent blog posts.
My guess is that Hackethal means he addressed my plagiarism complaint by creating a second edition of his book, A Window on Intelligence.
Hackethal's position is, in the words of his lawyers: "Mr. Hackethal has never plagiarized anyone." The second edition of his book is irrelevant to this (unless it contains plagiarism). If the first edition contained plagiarism, then Hackethal did ever plagiarize someone.
My blog post was about the first edition. No changes in the second edition could make my statements about the first edition false.
Hackethal hasn't updated his book's website to say there is a second edition. As far as I know, he hasn't announced it or tried to notify the public about it. He hasn't said what changes it contains or why he made it. He hasn't apologized for the first edition or retracted anything.
I bought the book on Kindle but my ebook wasn't updated to the second edition when that came out in 2020. I couldn't even buy the book again to get the update because I already owned it. When I received a cease and desist letter in 2024, I still didn't have access to the second edition. After Hackethal started blogging about me in 2025, I checked again and he'd finally sent the update to Kindle customers like me, four or five years late.
Quoting Defamation
Suppose I'm a journalist or blogger. An anonymous source sends me a tip: a celebrity is a chainsaw murderer. I publish an article accusing him of chainsaw murder. It turns out he's not a murderer. He sues me for defamation. Who will win? He will.
Now suppose I get the same tip but I'm a little more careful. I publish an article quoting an anonymous email accusing the celebrity of chainsaw murder. I don't make any accusations myself; I just truthfully, accurately share quotations. The celebrity sues me for defamation. Who will win? He will.
In the scenario, I did no fact checking or due diligence. I recklessly and/or negligently published a damaging, false claim. Quotation marks don't automatically make me innocent when I introduce the claim to the public or repeat it.
Hackethal published quotes attacking me, which he calls testimonials, mostly from anonymous sources. Some of the information is factually false. Hackethal's justification is:
But just so my readers know that these are real quotes from real people, let me state that I could easily produce the original texts in court one day, if ordered to.
Even if the quotes are accurate (someone else really said those things to Hackethal), it's still defamation. Before publishing those claims, Hackethal should have fact-checked them. He published them on his website so he's responsible for their correctness.
A common journalistic practice is to get two independent sources before publishing a claim. Hackethal didn't make reasonable efforts to ensure that the highly damaging statements he published were actually true. He's also refusing to communicate, so he won't retract them now or listen to corrections. His behavior is careless (or worse) and violates civil law.
Hackethal also published a wild email he (claims to have) received from an anonymous person. The email insults me and confesses to harassing me for years, which would be a crime if they weren't lying (they appear to be at least partially lying). Hackethal presented it as a quotation, but that doesn't mean he didn't do anything wrong by publishing it. He doesn't appear to have done fact checking before publishing. The confession basically says they did all the harassment, therefore everyone else is innocent. It provides no evidence and ignores the times people harassed me using their real names.
I reiterate my request that Hackethal retract defamatory materials about me, including quotations. I'd be willing to provide additional details and report more factual errors if Hackethal were willing to receive information and do removals or corrections.
No Contact
Hackethal wrote in a blog comment:
In addition to posting new defamatory articles about me, he [Temple] has also broken my no-contact request. As a result, I now consider his no-contact request null and void.
I don't know what he's referring to. I didn't contact him before he posted that. (I did later CC him on an email to his lawyers, who still have said nothing to me for over a year.) My best guess is he's referring to me writing blog posts responding to his posts about me. I don't think demanding people stop defending themselves on their own blogs is how no contact requests work, but that is what his request's wording appears to say.
Note: Hackethal was welcome to send me emails related to our dispute. He wasn't welcome to contact me in other ways, such as off-topic emails or switching Twitter accounts to send me more rude tweets. As far as my no contact request is concerned, of course he's allowed to blog about me because that isn't contact; the problem with his blog posts is that they're defamatory cyber bullying and contain factual falsehoods. However, after escalations like doxing, I have a new policy for Hackethal: he's no longer welcome to contact me at all. His lawyers can contact me if necessary. I'm also willing to communicate with other people, besides Hackethal, to attempt conflict resolution.
Hackethal also commented:
Elliot has yet to respond to [multiple things Hackethal wrote] (all of which he’s hiding by not linking to my exposé). (Wait for him to twist the part “has yet to respond” into me requesting more defamatory blog posts about me.)
and
[Elliot's] been evading several issues such as plagiarism, disregard for copyright, invasion of privacy, etc. Like, he hasn’t commented on them at all.
I find his complaint about me not responding enough to him bizarre given that:
- He's openly, explicitly refusing to discuss our conflict with me.
- He issued a no contact request to me.
- I already wrote a response letter over a year ago and I'm still waiting for a reply.
- He doesn't like any of my responses.
- When I do respond, he claims it's illegal defamation without giving useful specifics. That discourages responding, especially considering that he's threatened to sue me.
He also complained about me not providing links to his exposé. I generally try not to link to rights-violating content. Also, as I read it, his no contact request said not to link to him, so he seems to be contradicting himself by wanting a link. And it's not difficult to find his posts.
Breaking People
Hackethal says I've bragged about being able to "break" people (meaning writing enough criticism that people don't want to talk anymore). That's false: I didn't brag about that; I lamented it. That's a bad outcome that I try to avoid. People sometimes ask me to share all the criticism that I can, with no limits, and I sometimes respond by warning them against that and refusing to do it. I used to be more trusting of people who said they liked and wanted criticism, but I've become more skeptical.
For example, Hackethal wrote (mirror):
Elliot Temple is a bad, dangerous person who repeatedly verbally abused Deutsch, delights in ‘breaking’ people (his words, not mine), invades their privacy, lies to ruin their reputation, and more.
I never said that I delight in breaking people. It would be bad enough to accuse me of that, but falsely saying that I admitted it, and that it's my words, is really nasty. This is another example of how you shouldn't trust what Hackethal says.
Doxing
Dennis Hackethal doxed me. I don't share my photo online. He published photos of me.
Quotes and Sources
Hackethal frequently uses source links to make his claims look true. The source links often go to very long posts, not to anything specific. If you make a non-specific claim like "John is toxic", then a non-specific link to a long post on the general theme of John's toxicity is appropriate. In that case, the linked post has multiple relevant parts and the majority of it is relevant. If you make a specific claim, like that John said X or did Y, then a specific source is needed, not a link to an entire long post that may or may not contain a small, relevant section somewhere in the long post.
When Hackethal gives a quotation, it may be accurate but then he may make incorrect statements about what the quote said or uses flawed logic to draw incorrect conclusions from the quote. If you do a close reading to compare the quotes to the commentary on the quotes you can find major discrepancies. Similarly, when he paraphrases a quote he just gave, or paraphrases a source link, the paraphrase is often inaccurate.
The errors are frequent enough that many people would see it as unreasonable and be caught off guard because they don't expect a writer to be that unreasonable, especially when the general format (quotations and frequent source links) looks good and the author writes in a reasonably formal, educated style. I've given several examples of errors in this post but they're just a few representative examples and I wanted to warn people that there are many more.
Testimonials
Hackethal posted anonymous testimonials attacking me. He admits to editing them. He doesn't even claim to have gotten the approval of the authors for the edits (or to post the originals, for that matter). Most of the quotes appear to be people venting, not speaking for publication. He removed 5 quotes from the post without explanation. Why? Did someone complain? Does Hackethal post multiple quotes from one person but present them so readers would think they're from different people?
When a business posts testimonials, people expect that each testimonial is from a different person who isn't associated with the business (not an employee, friend, family member, etc). I find the quotes suspicious and doubt he really got that many different people, who aren't his buddies, who actually had a significant amount of experience with me, to say these things.
Also, the testimonials follow a broad pattern: Hackethal usually doesn't directly attack my actual words or actions. Instead, he focuses on people's opinions, his summaries of what he thinks happened, and other secondary issues. He says my forum community is toxic, but instead of backing that up with a bunch of quotes of me being toxic, he tries to back it up with anonymous quotes of people claiming I was toxic many years ago. The quotes don't give dates but generally seem to be referring to stuff from before the Critical Fallibilism forum existed.
Monitoring
Hackethal wrote:
Elliot vowed to monitor my success into the indefinite future to ruin my reputation by bringing up past complaints
Hackethal keeps repeating claims along these lines, so I want to make a clear statement addressing this: I did not vow to monitor Hackethal, ruin his reputation, or bring up past complaints. I have not been and am not currently monitoring his success. My goal is to protect myself, not to ruin his reputation. If he would leave me alone, then I would leave him alone.
Hackethal says he had to attack me because I would never leave him alone, so he started attacking me after I hadn't attacked him for four years. He claims to be attacking me, not because I attacked him, but because I might attack him in the future, and he has to deal with that potential threat from him misreading an old chat message. But I think this is an excuse; I don't think clarifying this point will stop Hackethal's attacks.
I blogged about him in 2020 and he escalated to lawyers in 2024 after I'd been ignoring him for 4 years. Although he was continuously selling a book that wronged me, and he refused to discuss my concerns, I tried to move on. Then when I was threatened by his lawyers, I tried to be reasonable. I offered to make some changes and to negotiate. When they wouldn't discuss the conflict, I left Hackethal alone again instead of blogging critiques of his unreasonable legal threats, but he was unwilling to leave me alone and started blogging about me in 2025.
He's done more things which I have serious complaints about (that so far I haven't blogged about) but I didn't even notice until he got my attention. I wasn't monitoring him and only reviewed his activities after the legal threats and again after the exposé. I didn't even notice the exposé about me immediately, nor the Veritula website, because I wasn't monitoring him.
Where does the monitoring claim come from? He's been reading old chat logs from my Discord server. He wasn't a member but got a copy of what was said. He's spent many hours digging through my online history to try to find dirt and stuff to be mad about (and not found much).
Regarding the old chat log, he misread, misunderstood or made logical errors regarding what was said. This fits the pattern of how he's dealt with other things.
The chat is from before my 2020 blog post accusing Hackethal of plagiarism. I'd emailed Hackethal about the issue and he hadn't responded yet. I was considering how ignoring my complaint would or wouldn't work as a strategy for him. I thought that if he ignored me, then got popular, then even if I did nothing at the time, his fans could notice or I could say something later. So I didn't see how ignoring the issue would be a good strategy for him. Having plagiarized in a book doesn't just go away and become a non-issue automatically after some years pass; just ignoring the problem doesn't solve it. There was no "vow", just a comment that I didn't think ignoring my complaint was a viable longterm strategy for Hackethal. (At the time, I thought people cared about plagiarism, but now I think I was mistaken. If people are already someone's fan and biased in their favor, they often won't care about plagiarism or many other problems. Most people don't take sides in disputes based on facts and logic.)
A few days later I blogged my complaint about the plagiarism and tried to move on with no monitoring. I didn't write a blog post about Hackethal again until 2025 after his blog posts about me.
In retrospect, I seem to have been basically correct: Hackethal tried to ignore the issue for years but he was unsatisfied with the results. But all that took was one blog post, not any additional actions or monitoring. In retrospect, he should have discussed that matter with me over email before I put up my blog post, rather than trying to ignore my complaint. What can he do now? I suggest that Hackethal stop trying to ignore the issue and instead write a response to my plagiarism accusation which refutes my accusations passage by passage. Or if he can't refute my criticism, and can't ignore it, then he should apologize, negotiate and try to fix and make up for his mistakes.
Hackethal has written over 50,000 words about me. He attacked me at length. But I don't think that's helping his reputation. And in all that text, he still didn't attempt to go through each passage I brought up and address it. Instead of defending his own actions, he focused on counter-attacking against me. Instead of using rational persuasion to show his innocence, he's trying to attack me to pressure me into silence.
Also, he says he avoided reading my blog for years to help prevent potential plagiarism of me. But then at some point he started reading my blog again. When and why? Why won't he just leave me alone and stop monitoring my philosophy work? Not reading my blog to try to avoid plagiarizing my new ideas was a good plan that he should have continued.
Recruiting
In November 2025, Hackethal wrote:
Elliot is now contacting members from my forum and trying to recruit them to his, hoping they won’t know he’s already been called out on his tactics.
This is false. I didn't do that ("trying to recruit" or "hoping"). I think this is another good example of how inaccurate many of Hackethal's claims are. To illustrate, here's a message I sent to one of my Twitter followers who has posted on Veritula (Hackethal's forum):
Hi, I thought you'd want to know that Veritula is not actually a programmatic implementation of Popper's epistemology. It uses ideas I created, so if you like them you can learn more from my essays. See: criticalfallibilism.com/dennis-hackethal-falsely-implied-that-critical-fallibilism-plagiarizes-karl-popper/
I wasn't "trying to recruit" for my forum. I didn't mention my forum. I was concerned with receiving credit for Critical Fallibilism (CF) ideas, and refuting misinformation, not with gaining a forum member.
While Hackethal presents himself as not wanting to face competition from my forum, I suspect the bigger issue is that he doesn't want people to read detailed evidence (including many quotations) that Veritula falsely attributes CF ideas to Popper.
Rather than "hoping" that people haven't seen Hackethal's attacks against me (which have little relevance to my arguments and evidence about Veritula), I have been hoping for years to discuss the conflict. I hope that people who have seen Hackethal's call outs against me will either agree with me or be willing to discuss.
It's also hypocritical for Hackethal to make this complaint after he contacted people in my audience (which he didn't disclose).
Timeline
I first talked with Hackethal in December 2018. He stopped participating at my community in April 2019. I published a blog post about harassment from Andy B in February 2020 which brought up relevant people including Hackethal (who had falsely told people that I had "insinuated violence" towards him). I published a blog post attacking Hackethal for plagiarism in April 2020 after he refused to discuss the matter by email. After that, my posts complaining about harassment focused mostly on David Deutsch, and Hackethal was barely mentioned.
There were no other major events between us until 2024 when he emailed me. That conversation wasn't productive because I didn't know why he emailed me or what he wanted. Nothing major happened in those emails. Then his lawyers contacted me and I finally found out what he wants: for me to delete everything I ever said about him and never mention him again (which would apply even if he plagiarizes me in the future). After I wrote a detailed letter to his lawyers, they stopped responding. My offers to negotiate, discuss or correct any errors in my posts were ignored or declined. They raised the concern that I had called Hackethal a criminal; I said I didn't intend to do that and I offered to remove any statements calling him a criminal if they pointed the statements out, but they ignored me. I couldn't remove the statements by myself because I didn't know of any statements that said it, and I found none after multiple rereads and searches. After his lawyers stopped responding, I didn't blog any complaints and tried to move on. But eight months later, in 2025, Hackethal started attacking me on his blog and on social media. And he has continued attacking me to this day.
See also my Timeline of Dennis Hackethal Using My Ideas without Crediting Me.
Conclusion
Hackethal is a bully who is attacking me online. He has no right to demand that I stop saying anything negative about him, such as criticizing how his book treated me or writing posts like this one which respond to what he said about me. He only has a right to demand that I don't lie about him and I correct factual errors about him, but he has not even tried to report any specific errors for me to fix. He's trying to treat disagreeing with him as illegal defamation, with no need for him to give arguments or evidence.
He's never written a point-by-point rebuttal to my plagiarism criticisms. If I'm wrong about the specific passages I criticized, he could give counter-arguments that discuss those passages.
He plagiarized me, doxed me and threatened me with a nuisance lawsuit. He's attacking me and says he'll continue until I give in. He keeps calling me a cult leader. He says he won't discuss or negotiate. He's trying to silence me because I gave him a negative book review in 2020, or because he didn't like some online discussions we had in 2019, or I don't know why; I don't think his behavior or explanations make sense.
Even setting aside the free speech and bullying issues, giving in would let him use my philosophy ideas without crediting me, as he is now doing with Veritula. I want to end this conflict and be left alone but I don't see any viable options as long as he's so unreasonable.
Also, this short video may help explain Hackethal.
I wrote this post to explain the situation to reasonable people and to defend myself against some attacks as a representative sample. He's trying to harm my reputation and my philosophy career. If Hackethal contacts you about me, please send me what he says. If anyone wants to help me deal with Hackethal, contribute to my legal defense fund, or provide relevant information, please email me at curi@curi.us
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