A Response to: “Inside Look: What Happened at Wicked World’s Fair?” and other Steampunk Explorer articles. It also shows very clearly that Eventbrite’s actions were completely destructive and hurt hundreds of people, and their ‘denial’ denies nothing.
Eventbrite is a large company. If they want to disagree with this legally, we WELCOME it. Because we have the proof.
by: Jeff Mach
Hello. My name is Jeff Mach, and in February 2024, I ran an event called the Wicked World’s Fair. If you’ve heard about it, you’ve probably heard incredibly awful things about it. And a lot of those things came from this set of articles.
I’ll tell you a secret: I hadn’t read this until I started this project.
I…was fairly sure that, no matter what was in here, I’d have no real chance to respond. That’s part of being canceled. Without being dramatic about it, deplatforming is quite real.
Then Joe Burnap, of DarkMusic.net, did something very few people do: he essentially confronted me to respond to The Steampunk Explorer. And he made the very bold move of saying that if I post an account to my site, he’ll post it to his.
That was enough.
The event absolutely ended up with a lot of problems. And Eventbrite gave out over $8,000 in refunds. But the narrative The Steampunk Explorer gave out is simply not accurate.
Let’s go through it point by point.
First, a note:
I’ve revised this document a few times, almost always for tone more
“I was a witness to the Apocalypse.” Those were the words of one participant at the Wicked World’s Fair (WWF), a self-described “Steampunk/Polygenre Festival” that took place Feb. 23-25 at the SureStay Plus hotel in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
I’m sure there are people who said that. I could, if I wanted, quote plenty of participants who said (and still say) otherwise. But that wouldn’t suit the narrative.
It’s a great quote, but it’s not an accurate representation of what happened. These are well-written, flavorful stories. They’re certainly interesting to read.
But they’re not actually overall true. And they also take one particularly weird approach:
Throughout this piece, one of the weirdest things (in our eyes) is the sheer glee The Steampunk Explorer seems to take in believing the event to be a failure.
Even if, for your personal reasons, you hate an event, the promoter, the performers, the venue …we’d like to remind you that the vast majority of people at fandom events are, not of squabbling well-known influencers, but everyday fans trying to have fun, and vendors, performers, and entertainers trying to make a living.
We shouldn’t have to say this, but if thousands of people are already going to a show, trying to destroy the show because you claim the promoter is a bad person…hurts those thousands of people. It doesn’t “protect” them from anything other than getting the enjoyment they paid for.
Wishing the event pain, instead of going directly after the promoter, is wishing pain on hundreds or thousands of innocent people in the hopes that one or a few people you don’t like will ALSO get hurt.
It’s not something anyone who loves fandom ought to do as a matter of policy. If you don’t like someone’s events, support other events; don’t go lying about a show in the hopes people get hurt. Not if you love events.
Participants described scenes of overcrowding, lax security, and, in one case, ceiling tiles that crashed near a vendor’s table. Some vendors said they were shortchanged on spaces they had paid for. The crew hired to provide sound and lighting for music performances left early because they hadn’t been paid. Participants reported that attempts to get refunds through Eventbrite were declined.
False.
That is, we’ll go through all of the above point by point and explain them, since most pieces are partly true (emphasis on: partly.)
But as for the refunds:
We gave out quite a lot of refund money.
We did deny some refunds for cause, and gave out refunds for cause.
But primarily—and apparently The Steampunk Explorer did not check this, despite the fact that we brought it up—one of the first things Eventbrite did post-event was give out just under $7,572.60, very conveniently, apparently almost entirely to the vendors who crafted that negative viral video about us. They got to vend and make money all weekend, and then Eventbrite refunded them—without giving us a chance to tell our side of the story..
Eventbrite claims specifically that they can give out refunds without speaking to the organizer, based entirely on secondhand accounts. We feel more organizers ought to know that regardless of what actually happens at your event, Eventbrite may choose to base their refunds on, for example, other peoples’ attacks (such as The Steampunk Explorer’s article here) whether or not there’s any truth in them. And they may choose to bypass the promoter altogether, regardless of any and all evidence on the part of the people who actually put on the event.
For people who deal with merchant services providers: Yes, it’s exactly as frightening as you’d imagine.
Those were primarily vendor refunds. As for attendee ticket refunds?
Simple: we had very few attendee requests for refunds compared to how many tickets we sold. Much less than 5% of our attendance, I’m fairly sure; I no longer have access to Eventbrite, but it was a tiny fraction of ticket sales. I can go through and rather laboriously check my old emails, if anyone really desires. My original number here was 1%; that may be more accurate.
But the vast majority of our attendees did not want refunds and wanted to come back. They were prevented by this article and other acts of what appear to be deliberate sabotage, not by the event itself.
Because the attendees enjoyed the event; and they also got the event they paid for, which was a great event thanks to dozens and dozens of hardworking people. We did have to have Chris Cyanide come in and do last-minute sound and light; and he was amazing. We did have to work around Eventbrite withdrawing access to the money we earned, hiding it, and lying to us about it, which made finances very difficult. But that’s on Eventbrite.
Which is what we told The Steampunk Explorer. Which very clearly didn’t want to believe us about anything positive whatsoever.
At the center of it all was festival producer Jeff Mach, a controversial figure best known as the organizer of the Steampunk World’s Fair in New Jersey.
The Steampunk Explorer spoke with many WWF participants, including volunteers who assisted Mach in planning for the event. We recorded more than six hours of interviews via Zoom and received additional eyewitness accounts via email and Facebook Messenger.
We appreciate The Steampunk Explorer’s hard work.
I spoke to Stephen at great length. He mocks me a bit about being reluctant to speak to him; I can assure you, I didn’t start out reluctant. It was when Stephen turned aside every piece of evidence and proof I had. But as I’m going to show you, he had a narrative he wanted to craft, and he wasn’t going to let the truth stand anywhere near in the way.
Vendors Overbooked
Many problems seen at WWF had a single root cause, our sources said: Mach signed up more vendors than the space could realistically accommodate. He also lost the services of his vendor coordinator, Kim Lewison, who had been working for him as a volunteer since May 2023.
Kim is welcome to say that we didn’t fire her, she quit. But in our opinion, we fired her. And we fired her significantly before the event.
The Steampunk Explorer acts in a fairly baffling way this entire time: They act as though this method of laying out vendors was some weird, unorthodox, crazy method—not the same method we used for a decade and a half at the Wicked Faire, and every year at The Steampunk World’s Fair, to tremendous vendor success. This is a proven method and may even be our signature method of placing vendors. We still use it for Halloween; the one year we didn’t, the placement was markedly inferior. We’ll discuss this more later.
So yes. This being our standard vendor setup, and the plan we had from the day we first walked the hotel, we did, indeed, fire Kim for not wanting to do the difficult work of placing people in a way that would get them traffic or get them noticed.
Lewison said the areas that she originally designated for vendors could hold a maximum of 65 spots. Most of these, she said, were in the Hanover Grande Ballroom. By Jan. 13, she said, the event had sold 80 vendor spaces and she told Mach that it was overbooked. According to her account, Mach told her that it wasn’t overbooked and that he would assign the vendor spots.
Actually, I agree with this assessment. Kim indeed thought that the event only had room for 60 spots. Kim had also never laid out an event like this before. We had.
Now, it should be noted again that we’ve spent several decades laying out events like this with the help of vendor coordinators. We’ve worked with a number of vendor coordinators (a paid position, before I was canceled). We don’t simply know what we’re doing; we’re also aware that you do, in fact, need to place your vendors in advance, and we have a several-decade history of doing so. We don’t book more vendors than we have spaces for; you have to put those vendors somewhere. We would not actually book more vendors than we could place.
Let’s be specific: This is something we have been doing since 2007. It’s part of what created our first huge event, The Wicked Faire. We’ve done it with most of our major events, including The Steampunk World’s Fair; indeed, the only times we haven’t really done it were either times with private events, or…yes, pretty much just private events which were more self-contained than your usual festival.
Let’s also note this: That’s an official hotel map that guests use, but it’s not the map they actually use for event planning. That’s this one, below. We assume that The Steampunk Explorer was averse to the more accurate map because it clearly shows space for 85 vendors:
And bear in mind that—like a lot of hotel maps—this is an older map which doesn’t even include the nightclub, which, as mentioned below, played an important role.
As of Feb. 10, two weeks prior to the opening, the vendor count was 85, she said. That same day, she said, she told Mach that she would step down as the vendor coordinator—an unpaid position—after the event closed. Mach, she said, immediately cut off her access to internal communication channels. He now says that she was fired. She did not attend the event.
As far as we know, we’re one of the only fandom event companies in the Northeast which has, in better terms, had “Vendor Coordinator” as a fully-paid, yearly salaried position.
At these times, at our shows, Vendor Coordinator typically gets travel expenses, meals, hotel, and, if the event can afford it, a stipend. That’s pretty industry-standard for a company of our current size.
Mach was also assisted by Maria Daggett, a volunteer whose responsibilities included logistics and operations. She, too, is no longer involved with his events, but unlike Lewison, she stayed on board for the duration of WWF.
FALSE.
I like how this account makes it sound like Maria stayed to witness the horrors of the event and therefore stopped associating with us. NOPE. Maria was fired on the first day, before the event started, and she is perfectly aware of it; she’s the one who created the rumor that we were overbooked, and she apparears to have done so on purpose. When we walked in on her doing it, we fired her. Details below.
The short version: Maria was indeed vendor coordinator after we fired Kim. During actual event setup, we found Maria going behind our backs and badmouthing us to our vendors. We fired her. If she snuck back into the event, I don’t particularly remember seeing her.
But, in total contradiction of The Steampunk Explorer, she absolutely did NOT stick around in an official capacity, and if she was there unofficially, she was sneaking about and avoiding our staff. She was definitely not running around, openly, especially not as staff talking to vendors or patrons officially. We’re fairly certain she never came back at all. All of which means that this entire account, which is portrayed as a first-person account…simply couldn’t have been.
Declaring to vendors that we were overbooked, as The Steampunk Explorer aptly noted, was tantamount to telling them as they were getting their spaces, that their spaces were broken the minute they arrived—a serious claim no business should make lightly without a clear explanation, immediate solution, or compensation.
Again, we hate to use harsh words, but we can’t put it more plainly. Maria’s choice to broadcast this to vendors without consulting her teammates at all was nothing short of sabotage, whether fueled by her genuine belief that we had failed them or by some personal vendetta left unaddressed. If it wasn’t sabotage, then, as an executive of this company, she should have brought company problems to the company…not hide them from us and declare them to our customers behind our backs.
We all, as a team, walked the hotel to strategize how we would use it and choose best spaces for vendors. So if Maria believed those spaces were bad at the time, she had her own reasons for not bringing so.
(It also obviously led directly to the vendor attack on our VIPs, which, again, The Steampunk Explorer chose not to mention.)
The article conveniently sidesteps Ms. Daggett’s history, neglecting to mention she and I had a previous conflict which ended in her being banned. Ironically, one of the primary reasons was that I’d received information from friends that she was speaking ill of us behind our backs, an allegation she denied categorically at the time.
It’s not uncommon for someone in her position, acting on reports like those in the article, to jump to the mistaken conclusion that we deserved to be targeted, with facts taking a backseat to emotion. Had Maria approached me or anyone on the team directly with her concerns about overbooking, the situation could have been entirely different. We could have collaborated to assess the situation and, if we were overbooked, devise a plan, and, if necessary, address any perceived harm to vendors with a solution that upheld our commitments. Instead, her actions bypassed teamwork and undermined us all.
It worked out well for Ms. Daggett. She saved herself a whole lot of work; she made herself look good; and she didn’t have to buy into a plan she didn’t like. Ms. Daggett is a longtime veteran of scifi conventions, which do things differently; we recognize her long experience and her high opinion of her own expertise.
It was just unfortunate for everyone else, vendors and event alike.
This set the stage for the festival’s opening on Feb. 24.
Daggett and other sources told us that vendors were placed in rooms originally designated for other purposes, such as panels and musical performances.
NOPE.
That is: This rather neatly conflates Maria’s false allegation about the spaces being incorrect, with the true note that we had to improvise when the hotel failed to provide a fully usable ballroom as per contract. But the implication that we somehow planned in advance to fail our vendors is not true in any way, and is frankly ugly and unprofessional.
Again, this was part of a disagreement between myself and Maria. Let me put it this way:
We followed this with the Wicked Faire and the Steampunk World’s Fair. Vending spaces for both of those events tended to get 25%-100% more applications than they could handle. Vendors often told us that one or both of those events drove several months of their sales.
We have been doing this at The Catskills Halloween Festival & Vendor Market for twelve years. As we mentioned briefly, the one year our vendor coordinator DIDN’T do this was the most unsuccessful year we’ve had, and we know it.
It’s an unorthodox way to do things, but it was one that was planned, one that Maria knew about.
When she told vendors we were overbooked, she knew how many vendors we had, she knew the space, and she knew the plans. So she made a decision to tell vendors the opposite of what she told the rest of us, and to try to hide it from the rest of the company.
For example, two meeting rooms originally set aside for panels, Muhlenberg and Cedar Crest, “became cram-them-in vendor space,” Daggett said.
A hotel bar known as The Bar With No Name, she said, was originally slated to be a vendor-free area with a performance stage. But then vendors were placed here as well.
Some vendors were also placed in hallways. Daggett said the original plan called for a small number of authors and artists who would have tables in a wide hallway outside the Grande Ballroom. But with the overflow of vendors, some were placed in a second hallway that was narrower.
False.
Those were areas where MARIA didn’t want to put vendors.
(Also, the ‘bar’ was a large former nightclub, a really great space for vending and for a stage. Its existence, and its use for that purpose, was one of the major points of the hotel. It’s not as if the room was some dingy closet; it was a gorgeous space intended for basically exactly the purpose towards which we put it.)
Something The Steampunk Explorer omits here:
Yes, it’s pretty horrible that the hotel had broken ceiling tiles. This is a good situation for the vendors and the event to get together and send a deputation to the hotel to fix it. But many of our vendors were already disgruntled, for reasons we didn’t discern until we walked in on Maria.
This definitely cost us multiple vendor spaces and meant we had to move some people. That’s never okay. While the damage was the hotel’s responsibility, but that hotel apparently knew it was going out of business (it’s since been demolished) – and didn’t care. So we took responsibility for that; after all, it doesn’t matter who’s to blame, it matters that the vendors have the opportunity to vend the show.
This hallway was so crammed, sources told us, that attendees had to walk single file to get through. Some said the arrangement was likely not ADA-compliant because there was insufficient room for mobility equipment.
Really?
Because, like all major events, we had fire inspectors come through. As we knew we would; we certainly told them we’d have several thousand people coming into their local hotel. They came, of course, as they have been at most of my indoor events, and most peoples’.
They did NOT have any problems with the hallway.
Also, as someone who walked, jogged, and ran through those hallways hundred of times over the weekend: This simply isn’t true.
Multiple sources reported seeing a vendor operating from a coat closet. “She only came out to take pictures of people, and then she’d go back in,” one participant recalled.
Yep.
Didn’t ask for a refund, as far as I know. I spoke to her several times during the event. She did quite well in that room, or so she told us at the time. If she’s upset now, or remembers differently, I’d love to talk to her.
People do understand that we were physically present and speaking to those vendors, right? That, as I am very known for doing, I spent the entire event checking on all of them, speaking to them and seeing how they were doing? That is part of how I run events, and always has been.
We had to move several vendors because of that damn ceiling tile. We did, indeed, end up improvising some spaces. And I spoke to each vendor in each space, as above.
Aside from the vendor count, some vendors said they received spaces smaller than what they had paid for.
Yes. That’s one of the things that happened when we had to move people from the ceiling tile.
Stephen is omitting the fact that we, of course, discussed compensation with each of these vendors. How could we not? We were right there, in the building. I speak to our vendors multiple times.
The article implies that they simply didn’t get what they paid for, and sat there in angry silence for three days. This isn’t how vendors act; it isn’t how anyone acts…especially people who need to spend multiple hours setting up and breaking down. Especially people who will see the people running the show dozens and dozens of times over the course of the weekend, and have multiple opportunities to speak with them.
Especially people who are vending an event which is very full of happy attendees who are looking to buy from vendors.
I get that, due to accounts like this one, there are places where I’m quite unpopular; you can be banned from some events for vending at mine, which gives people a lot of reason to speak against me. But any vendor at any of my events who doesn’t get what they paid for will come and approach me on the first day; no vendor is going to sit there and lose money for 72 hours. And if they do, I can’t help them; we talk to our vendors to know how they’re doing.
Prices ranged from $75 for an artist or author table to nearly $500 for a 10×10-foot table with access to electrical power, plus advertising in the WWF playbill. However, Mach would periodically offer discount coupons, Lewison said, which accounts for reports from vendors that they paid varying amounts for similar spaces.
Yes.
And?
We apologize; we’re not sure what the complaint is here.
Mach’s Response
Mach disputed the notion that he had booked too many vendors. He told us that the final vendor count was 85, but that the hotel could have accommodated 115.
“Kim and Maria both essentially advocated for the idea that the only place to put vendors was the Grande Ballroom,” he said. “That is a normal sci-fi convention idea, and one we started rejecting a good twenty years ago.”
He said that with vendors in one ballroom, “people tend to visit them once, maybe twice, and not be as motivated to explore all the vendors or sample/purchase more of what they’re selling.”
However, the Grande Ballroom also included the event’s main entertainment stage. According to the schedules posted on the website, it was slated for activities including costume contests, musical performances, and a magic show.
Even here, “the room was packed full of vendors including right in front of the stage,” said one attendee who requested anonymity. “The vendors in the middle of the room had tall screens dividing their space from the vendors behind them, so you could not even see the stage.”
We were shown a video of the room that appeared to support this account.
Again, the “gotcha” quality of this eludes me.
The Steampunk Explorer seems to have a common thread of believing that we should have put all of our vendors in the big ballroom. And it continues to complain that we put vendors where traffic is, not where it’s convenient or easy for an event to place its vendors.
It’s an unconventional practice. Other people don’t often want to do it. It’s made a lot of vendors a lot of money in the last 30 years. Yes, we had vendors in the same room as performers, something we knew about in advance, and which we’ve done for decades. It’s not some strange kind of vendor or attendee abuse; ask the tens of thousands of people who’ve experienced it. Or watch any video from our old shows.
Vendor booths are indeed fairly high in general. There were definitely places in the room where you couldn’t see the stage; but the goal of the main stage was to have a big, highly visible space where you could see the performers from the audience chairs. It absolutely had that. I performed on that stage and I was in that audience; I and the other people who did those things can all vouch for that stage. The vendor setup was definitely more crowded than we’d like; we were suffering a venue emergency, which wasn’t rectified by the venue. But there was a great audience space, as we’d always intended.
Leaking Water and Falling Tiles
Lewison and Daggett both gave high marks to the hotel staff. The facility itself was another matter.
Neither Lewison nor Daggett was there.
What high marks could they possibly give to the staff, which ignored us, treated us poorly, and refused to actually send security when a group of rogue vendors actually pushed out our VIP attendees?
Our actual staff did not give high marks to the hotel staff.
One vendor, who requested anonymity, said she paid for a 10×10-foot space in addition to advertising in the playbill. She ended up with a 6×6-foot spot in the Hanover Grande Ballroom.
Shortly after setting up, “we noticed water dripping from the ceiling,” she said. “A couple of hours later, the leak became a steady stream of water.” After she informed Mach and hotel staff, “the hotel gave us a bucket and told us to put it under the leak,” she said.
Then two ceiling tiles fell near the table, one of which narrowly missed hitting her, she said.
This is horrible.
However, this is clearly a mutual problem that the event and the vendors faced.
Why, exactly, is the hotel’s failure being presented as something the event did? Failing to provide the room in full working order is obviously a breach on the part of the hotel.
We still had to deal with it, obviously. But the dramatic tone here is peculiar.
After she waited for hours, she said, Mach took her to a series of alternative locations. One was outside the hotel bar, “but this would have blocked traffic into the hotel and was denied as a fire hazard,” she said. She ended up in a hallway outside the Fireside Ballroom.
“When I asked Jeff about a refund for my space and the playbill advertising, since I did not get what I had paid for, I was offered free space in his next show,” she said. When she asked again for a refund, she said, Mach walked away.
This was Mach’s response: “You do know that I don’t own that hotel, right? That we obviously had no idea the ballroom would do that, that we would never want this, and that this also contributed to the loss of two or three vendor spots?”
Wait, which was it? Did we have unsafe hallways which require, and don’t have, fire inspection? Or did we have fire safety which prevented this vendor from getting a space they wanted.
This is a very cold-hearted story. But it didn’t happen quite like that.
Or at least, The Steampunk Explorer may have left something out because (as their later reporting shows) they don’t want to believe it.
I didn’t tell her we wouldn’t refund her. I told her that Eventbrite had shut down our funds and even though the event was, as she pointed out, obviously doing very well—we had no money. We could not refund her at the time. Again: This may have been contrary to what Eventbrite told her, for all we know. It’s contrary to what Eventbrite told us, but as we later found out, they were lying directly.
Also:
While we take responsibility for the welfare of every vendor, the hotel’s inability to provide us the space we contracted, in a fully usable form, is on the hotel. And the hotel’s actions hurt everyone at the event.
This is an important detail, and it’s obvious to anyone who has been involved with Steampunk events. We’d like to suggest that The Steampunk Explorer is being, at best, deliberately disingenuous here.
The Sound Crew
Musical performances at WWF included a set by Dust Bowl Faeries on Friday night and “The Cabaret” show on Saturday night with Durty Rotten Parrots, The Flesh Junkies, and The Chris Cyanide Solo Bass Project.
This required the services of a production crew, so Mach hired LAW Sound & Lighting of East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania to provide the needed equipment and technical personnel for two stage areas, one in the Hanover Grande Ballroom and the other in The Bar With No Name. LAW quoted a price of approximately $6,500, with half due on arrival and the remainder later.
(This suggests it’s unusual for us to hire a production crew, instead of it having been the norm for the past several decades. It’s been the norm. We run festivals; we run the largest Steampunk Festivals group on Facebook; we pretty much always need sound and light. The Steampunk World’s Fair often spent as much as $50,000 in 2017 money on sound and light. Suggesting we’re unaware of the sound and light needs of professional musical performers is, again, more than a bit disengenous.)
Also, that’s actually a severe underrepresentation of how much entertainment we had. Which is it? Did we have so much entertainment that it disrupted vending, or did we have only three or four performers?
But yes, we absolutely required a sound and light crew, as all my major events have for several decades.
One sample of my conversations with Eventbrite:
Here’s a piece from my conversation with Eventbrite. I have lots more conversations with them I could post as (obviously) the question of whether or not they would release the money they owed us was critical to the event.
Kobe
Let me review your account.
1:58 AM
jeff mach
Please.
1:58 AM
Kobe
Is the event going to be cancelled?
2:00 AM
jeff mach
No!
Except:
I owe my sound and light company $2500.
The money that I instant transferred hours ago.
2:01 AM
Kobe
It would depend on how you have setup your payout. Let me check.
2:01 AM
jeff mach
No. Wait..
I’ve done this instant payment dozens of times. Dozens.
2:01 AM
Kobe
If that is the money that you transferred. You should be in contact with your bank.
2:01 AM
jeff mach
It still says it’s processing on YOUR end.
Also, my bank has accepted the money dozens of time.
2:02 AM
Kobe
The funds that we send goes to your bank account. If you did a bank transfer, that is from your bank account as Eventbrite won’t have any bank account to be transferred with.
2:03 AM
jeff mach
So tell me: why has it worked dozens of times?
[If anyone would like me to sort through, at least, the conversations I saved, and put up more endless late-night discussions wherein Eventbrite kept saying that the problem was our bank, or a brief glitch, or, in fact, anything other than what it was: Eventbrite intentionally shutting us down because apparently someone reported that the event was canceled, and they both didn’t believe the actual person running the event, and lied to me about it.
When the crew arrived on Friday, Mach told them that he was having problems accessing funds from the WWF Eventbrite account, and asked them to provide their services for the night as he tried to resolve the issue. That’s according to Daggett, who said she witnessed the conversation and watched as Mach was on his laptop computer using the Eventbrite dashboard. She was able to see the screen, she said, which indicated that the account had a balance of approximately $2,000.
So the implication here, presumably, is that we had plenty of money, but somehow that we chose to schedule a sound and light crew, then that we chose not to pay them because… because we hated ourselves? Why would we do that?
But yes! The money was in the account!
Imagine how frustrating it was to know that we had the money right there, we could SEE it, and the minute we tried to actually draw it into our business account…it would disappear.
The obvious implication, that we had the money but (for some insane reason) would fail to pay the people we needed…is easily answered by what we told The Steampunk Explorer several times: Eventbrite, contrary to every other ticketing company we have ever worked with, withheld our money and lied to us about it. We’ll keep repeating this fact, as it’s critical to what happened, and The Steampunk Explorer refused to accept it, regardless of proof.
Mach never came up with the payment, Daggett said, and the crew left the following morning. This meant that bands would have to use their own equipment.
No, it meant we had to find replacements because of the crisis Eventbrite caused.
Chris Cyanide is the stage name for Chris Vazquez, who said he brought his own gear and allowed The Flesh Junkies to use it. Durty Rotten Parrots said they performed without sound equipment.
Yes, they’re an acoustic act.
The rest of this isn’t actually cruel to me so much as it is cruel to Chris Cyanide.
Chris Cyanide provided full technical sound and light that weekend. Because he could see the event was in an emergency; he could look right at the laptop and know it wasn’t our fault; and because he’s that kind of guy.
If Chris had not been able to do that, we would have spent Friday night finding a sound and light crew willing to be paid at the end of the event. Bands can’t ‘provide their own equipment’ primarily in a situation like this. We needed a sound and light crew.
Mach did not respond to a question about how much money was available in the Eventbrite account to pay the sound crew or cover other expenses.
We also asked him about Daggett’s recollection of the encounter with the sound crew. His response: “If I don’t have a chance to actually look over the bank records, I’m curious whether Maria was talking about our Eventbrite account or our bank account.” Our question made it clear that we were referring to Eventbrite.
You mean, your OPINION of your question is that it was clear? Because if you were referring to Eventbrite:
That 100% helps my story, not yours,
Because obviously, having the money in the Eventbrite account, but being unable to access it, is exactly what happened. We had the money; we did the right things; we had the cashflow. And Evenbrite prevented it from going through into the bank account.
Eventbrite kept a lock on the money that should have gone to that sound and light crew. And denied doing so.
As we told you. As we said we could prove. And which we can, indeed, prove.
Sir, regarding your numerous sarcastic references to our conversations:
It’s intimidating to talk to a journalist who despises you and has made it clear he plans to hurt you as much as possible because he, personally, regrets having been so friendly with you in his past. Trust me. It’s scary to have a conversation with someone who doesn’t believe you about a single. Damn. Thing.
Your adamant refusal to listen to any proof about Eventbrite meant I had nothing to say; if you wouldn’t believe me about what happened, what could I tell you?
Eventbrite
Many people know Eventbrite as a platform for purchasing tickets to concerts, festivals, and other events. Mach also used it to handle sales of vendor spaces. All monies collected from those sales went into the Eventbrite account. Lewison and Daggett said that they had limited access to the Eventbrite app: They could issue refunds and discount coupons, they said, but only Mach had the ability to withdraw funds.
Not true.
Mr. Mach also didn’t have that ability during the event. Not to belabor the point, but it’s an important point.
The Eventbrite app became a central issue as vendors and other participants attempted to get refunds over the weekend of the festival. We’ve seen two screen shots from the Eventbrite app stating that requests for refunds had been declined.
Again, the ominous tone is frankly weird in a journalistic piece. Yes? Some requests for refunds were, indeed, denied. Some were fulfilled. This is normal for an event. The really ABNORMAL part was from Eventbrite. I’ll get to that later.
I suppose it would be ominous if the event was, in fact, something for which most attendees wanted refunds.
Despite The Steampunk Explorer’s implication that this was the case, it’s not.
During the event, and to this day, Mach has stated that Eventbrite was to blame for the festival’s inability to offer refunds or cover other expenses. He cited a feature called Instant Payouts that allows event producers to withdraw a portion of event payouts in advance. He said that Eventbrite put a hold on his ability to use the feature.
Regarding the payment to LAW: “LAW did indeed need $3,000,” he said. “And I had repeated assurances from Eventbrite that the money would be forthcoming. Why Eventbrite had the account locked down, but refused to tell us, I don’t know.”
Yes.
That’s quite true.
However, in a previous message, he suggested that someone had been trying to disrupt his event by convincing Eventbrite that it had been cancelled.
Why in the world does that have a ‘however’, as I were contradicting myself? Are you really suggesting that the theory someone is trying to hurt me through Eventbrite—which your own screenshot proves true—invalidates the fact that Eventbrite, which lied to me for several days in a row and refused to give us the payouts we were due, was harming the event?
These aren’t contradictory ideas. And, again, The Steampunk Explorer’s own screenshot proves all of them.
“What I can tell you, and what Eventbrite can verify, is that this was deliberate,” he said. “Somebody had to have contacted Eventbrite and told them the show was off. Think about what that means. Somebody wanted a show I was doing to fail, badly enough that they were willing to screw over an entire event’s worth of vendors, performers, and attendees. That’s not an accident. That’s deliberate sabotage. There’s no other word for it.”
Yes. And your own screenshot, again, shows it.
We continue to be appalled at the way The Steampunk Explorer appears to have attempted to write the provable damage from Eventbrite out of the picture, when it was clearly central to a number of these problems.
So let’s be direct:
The Steampunk Explorer is lying about this event. This compounds someone else who doesn’t like us, who lied to Eventbrite. This compounds Eventbrite lying as well. And all the proof is right here in this article.
On Wednesday, Mach forwarded what he said was an email from Eventbrite, purportedly offering verification of his claim.
All of my emails have their full headers. The ones from Eventbrite helpfully have Eventbrite.com in their ‘from’ segment. All of them are fully verifiable. Which any journalist knows. There’s no need to pretend there’s any doubt that the email is from Eventbrite.
It was dated Feb. 26, the day after the festival closed. The email mentions “a report about your event” but has no other details about why the payout was withheld.
Now, I can be more detailed, but:
- They received a report about the event. One which caused them to stop making payments. So while this message carefully gives as little information as possible, a simple translation is: “They received a report from someone which caused them to believe the event was canceled. They acted on that report but denied the existence of any problems, and withheld all of the money while simultaneously telling the actual account holder, and actual people running the event, that nothing had happened.” Which brings me to:
- The entire time this was happening, their tech support was telling me that it was a temporary issue of one kind or another. I have numerous transcripts. We were ABSOLUTELY assured they would be releasing our money by Saturday morning and we would be paying the sound and light team, for example.
- Yes. They did, indeed, release the money. But they released the money MONDAY. Which is AFTER the event. Which is why we were unable to grant refunds during the event, why we were unable to meet our bills. The nonfunctionality of Eventbrite (with whom, again, we had an exclusive contract upon which they’d insisted)…means we were also largely unable to sell tickets at the door.
- This means that a staff member lied to our vendors, and then someone claiming to be a staff member told Eventbrite that the event had been canceled or was otherwise some kind of scam. Then this article came out.
Following the original publication of this article, Mach contacted us with numerous complaints about our coverage, some related to the Eventbrite account and his apparent inability to cover some of the event’s expenses. We asked him repeatedly how much money he had in the Eventbrite account, or had available in other accounts, to cover those expenses. He declined to answer.
I reached a point with the “Explorer” where I knew they were going to twist anything I said. At the time, financial details felt fairly private.
But here, Mr. Beale, let me scratch that itch for you.
I’ll be honest: I’m pretty sure I have a later screenshot bringing the final total to about $43,000. Since Eventbrite, again, removed about $7500 from the event by fiat, then locked us out, the finances from then got quite chaotic.
What does that prove, exactly? Knowing how much money came in doesn’t particularly tell people how profitable it was. It doesn’t tell them how much of that money went to the hotel, the dozens of performers, the other show expenses. Why would you need the statement, Mr. Beale?
Update: Eventbrite provided the following statement on Monday, March 11:
“We ticket millions of events each year and strive to ensure our community has a safe and positive experience using Eventbrite. Creators are responsible for managing all aspects of their event, including refunds. In the case of the Wicked World’s Fair, Eventbrite has paid out all ticket proceeds to the event organizer, much of which was paid out in advance of the event date. It’s worth noting that we also offer creators the opportunity to issue refunds through the product even after they’ve received their full event payout.”
We would like to respectfully ask The Steampunk Explorer why they even included this statement.
Our entire point is that we had no access to the funds we had earned, throughout the event. This obviously meant that all of our costs went way up as we had to deal with all of the problems Eventbrite caused in so doing. Saying that they had given us the funds in full after the event merely says that they recognized they’d done as much damage as they could, and recognized that their TOS couldn’t continue deny the event had happened after it had actually happened.
In The Bar With No Name
Two participants, Charles and Andi Ward, described a chaotic scene in this venue, where vendors had to share limited space with performers and sound equipment. The Wards said they were assisting a vendor who was first instructed to move to one side of the stage. Then, they said, he was told to move onto the stage to accommodate the sound equipment.
“The sound crew came in and offloaded everything in the middle of the room,” Charles said. “We straight up asked him, ‘Hey, you’re not going to block our displays?’” The reply, he recalled: “‘No, we’re not going to do that.’ The next thing we know, we’ve got one of those giant amplified speakers sitting in front of our display.”
Interestingly, we have absolutely no record of a Charles and Andi Ward in our vendor applications. They might be who they say they are, but if they were there, why didn’t they speak to me? I was in the room much of that time, and by my phone the rest.
We hired these professionals to set up their equipment in that room. If they acted in an unprofessional manner, why didn’t this vendor come to us?
Having, again, been in that room and talked to every single vendor, I wish these people had spoken up.
You unfortunately can’t have it both ways. Either the event had a necessary, professional sound and light company, and was hurt when we lost them—or the sound and light company was completely unprofessional and hurt their actual clients, and were a detriment to the event.
Which is it?
That was on Friday. They described worse conditions on Saturday, when two additional vendors were placed in the room. A crowd came in, Andi said, and “we were lucky the fire marshal didn’t walk around. It wasn’t ADA safe. There was too little room to maneuver. It was just an absolute bottleneck.”
As mentioned, the fire marshal DID come in.
Also, let’s note: The payoff that vendors WANTED, in exchange for being in a room with live performances including music, was a huge crowd.
I love how the article makes attracting a huge crowd seem like some kind of sin against the vendors. The vendors themselves did not see it that way.
Another issue was security. The Wards said they were told that vendor spaces would be locked down at 10 p.m. to prevent theft of merchandise. But activities in this room were scheduled until after midnight.
“We basically just tried to hide all the extra valuable items under a table, to keep it from being taken,” Charles said.
Mach’s response: “I put each individual vendor in that room myself, and all of them were aware how late the room ran.”
Other WWF vendors also reported that their spaces were not locked down as they had been promised.
- One of the reasons we all agree that these events need sound and light professionals, like the team we hired, and like Chris Cyanide, is specifically to prevent this happening. As I came into that room many, many times on Friday, I am going to assume they had some reason for being silent about their complaints until after they had left with their profits.
Otherwise, they needed to speak to us. I’m sorry they were blocked for any amount of time; but that’s not particularly the event attacking them. One of our guests of honor, Mr. Mal Havock vended in that room the entire weekend and can attest to the quality of the room and the success of vending there. - The hotel not locking rooms, in general, sucks, and I’ll take responsibility for that. I needed to follow up with the hotel way more forcefully about it. But, as mentioned: the hotel staff didn’t really listen to us. They knew they were closing; we didn’t know that.
- The thing is, I DID place each vendor there personally, and they WERE familiar with the closing time of that space. People who are familiar with my events are also familiar with the fact that our vending tends to run late—indeed, when there are lots of people (and the event was packed with happy people; at least everyone agrees on that)…vendors tend to PREFER to stay open late and make money. Which is what happened (see: the huge crowd of excited people at the event.)
The Tea Party
One event originally planned for The Bar With No Name was a tea party. This was a premium event that required a separate $35 ticket.
If otherwise empty, the bar could have accommodated 60 seated patrons, Daggett said, so they decided to make 60 tickets available.
But that was before Mach decided to put vendors in the bar. After considering other options, they moved the tea party to the Fireside Ballroom, also known as the Lehigh Room.
Daggett said this was another room originally set aside for non-vendor activities. But vendors were here as well.
“We did our best to not get in the way of the vendors, but it was impossible,” said one participant.
We’ve heard varying estimates of how many people were eventually seated, ranging from about 35 to 45. But our sources all agreed that ticket sales for the event exceeded the capacity, so some ticketholders were turned away.
Mach said that 88 tickets were sold. As for the capacity, he said this: “Room for only 35 people? Why would I put a 90-person catered event in a room which couldn’t seat them?”
Answer: I wouldn’t, if you care about the truth.
Our sources say that The Steampunk Explorer is “a fantastic resource which has chosen to tarnish itself badly by lying really hard about us”. It’s amazing what ‘sources’ can say, and it’s not really journalism to treat an individual, anonymous anecdote (if it’s even actually real) as if it proved any point about the event,
Here’s more of why this isn’t real:
That’s it.
From the Vendor Side
One vendor in the room with the tea party was Lexi Dostal, who founded her company Loving Intentions about a year ago. Her business sells wellness items such as spell jars and lotion bars. She said she paid $150 for a 10×10-foot space without electricity.
Thanks to a coupon, she said, that was $50 less than the listed price. But she ended up with a six-foot table in the Fireside Ballroom.
As the tea party tables were being set up, she said, the vendor tables were pushed back, and some of her products were knocked over. The arrangement, she said, created a barricade that limited space for people to move.
“It was absolutely a fire hazard,” she said.
- Again: Was the hotel staff fantastic, or did they knock over vendor spaces? It was quite a large room.
- Again: the hotel staff, and the fire marshal, did not think it was an ADA problem or a fire hazard.
- No offense, but I’m going to say that this is about as accurate as the claim that this room had literally half its actual capacity.
We’re sorry that Ms. Dostal did not have a good show. We’d also like to note that the first thing that comes up for us when we search for her is her popular video about the show.
We’re not saying that Ms. Dostal has no legitimate complaint; she’d have to talk to us for us to go over that. We’re saying that, not unlike The Steampunk Explorer, Ms. Dostal appears to have gained some clout for speaking against us.
One of the most striking scenes from WWF was a contentious meeting on Sunday, Feb. 25, in which angry vendors confronted Mach and his associates. One video clip, posted in the Daily Mail Video channel on Facebook, had 1.2 million views as of Wednesday.
During that meeting, Dostal described the chaotic scene at the tea party along with other problems she saw at the event.
“My mind is so blown,” she said at the meeting. “As a vendor coordinator for a much smaller scale, I can’t even imagine treating my vendors like this.”
Her experience at the festival prompted Dostal to set up Disgruntled Wicked Vendors, a private Facebook group. As of Thursday, it had 100 members. Dostal estimated that 30 to 40 percent were actual vendors at WWF. The remainder includes attendees and other interested parties. She allowed The Steampunk Explorer to join to help us get a better sense of what happened at the event.
It wasn’t a “meeting”, Mr. Beale. It was the VIP feedback session. Wherein our vendors just plain kicked out all of our actual VIPs.
It was certainly chaotic. I walked into a room expecting our VIPs to have their positives and negatives, and I saw that they’d been kicked out by third parties.
My staff says I should have walked out. My wife called security, which told her they would not come.
I genuinely thought, very briefly, that the vendors actually wanted to talk.
Again: I was there the entire time. I was staying at the hotel. The vendors had every opportunity to send me a delegation of people, or to speak to me.
Vendors want to make money. VIPs are, intentionally, usually some of the biggest spenders at a show. Vendors typically don’t leave their booths, destroy their relationship with the VIPs, disrupt their promised perks, and they don’t stage a very professionally-filmed moment of outrage.
I got up in front of everyone and there was nothing but screaming. And it just kept going on.
I should have realized, at that moment, that there would be nothing but bad faith in that room. They weren’t there to give me feedback or let me talk to them—and frankly, the more that I see what you’ve been saying, the more I understand why they didn’t want to actually give me a chance to talk.
But I thought I’d try to actually talk to them. I shouted to be quiet at the very top of my lungs. The last time I did this was almost ten years ago, at The Steampunk World’s Fair, in a very contentious room trying to decide about a Steam Powered Giraffe performance in a storm.
It makes for great film. If you edit that moment properly, it looks like I’ve melted down. I wouldn’t feel bad if I had, honestly.
But it’s not a negative response to people being upset. It’s an attempt to communicate, which was not their desire.
I was warned not to go in, by the way. I was aware when I DID go in that it was full of angry vendors, but I was excited to talk to angry vendors.
These vendors didn’t want to talk. They just wanted to record that video. It was great film; great cinematography, great script, great sense of drama.
Just not actually accurate.
Positive Experiences
It’s clear that the problems at WWF weighed most heavily on vendors. Some attendees and performers have reported positive experiences. Some have criticized this publication for our previous reporting about the event.
Yes.
So how could different people come away from WWF with such different impressions?
Dostal suggested that the vendors did a good job of maintaining a positive presence.
“Vendors are professionals,” she said. “You want to stay warm and welcoming as a professional trying to make sales.”
Sure. But vendors who are sincerely upset and not making money take lots of actions. Vendors who are sitting around, selling nothing, spend plenty of their time talking to each other (and often, to attendees) about how quiet the show is, and how much money they’re losing.
So the point she’s omitting is: they were busy being warm and successfully selling things to customers. That’s why they didn’t complain to the customers that the show is slow.
As, in fact, a very good example:
The year we set up Catskills Halloween with vendors in big, long, traditional block rows, they were slow. We hated it, and we couldn’t do much about it; this is part of when we started realizing that our style of vendor setup was honestly more work than most vendor coordinators wanted to do.
I can guarantee you that the attendees saw how slow it was, the vendors were talking about it, and yes, when people approached the vendors, they were warm, but they were weary, and they mentioned how much they could use those sales.
What Ms. Dostal’s artful note tries to avoid saying is: “The vendors were too busy and successful to have a lot of time to complain during the show.” Again, the fact that a number of vendors decided to complain on the last day, in a mob, with video, and then got refunded by Eventbrite…
…we would honestly like Eventbrite to tell us that these aren’t the vendors they refunded without talking to us. Because we’re fairly certain that they are.
Other vendors were taking the same approach, she said, despite their anger at the show management. “We’re going to handle things as professionally as we can even in bad circumstances.”
“Other vendors”? As the “Explorer” keeps noting, we had at least 85 vendors. Why did you specifically speak to the one who started a hate group against us, and then act as though she represented all of the vendors?
Because that’s noticeable here. You asked one of our detractors why things looked good. Of course her theory is that everyone was faking being happy. It’s a very convenient theory.
“Stephen is, by now, heavily invested in being one of my detractors. He has to make sure I look bad and won’t give any room to very factual, very provable things which discredit his false narrative that the event failed and I am pure evil,” said Mach, a noted detractor of Beale’s.
I believe this. I think lots of circumstantial evidence backs it up.
It’s still an opinion. It influences the reader and implies facts, while not actually containing any solid, known facts.
The fact that you believe something, or want to believe it, doesn’t make it true. I get that you want to believe that I spent a weekend hurting people. But I didn’t.
Chris Vazquez, aka Chris Cyanide, was one of the performers with a positive take. “I sold merch and had a lot of eyes on my band,” he told us via Facebook Messenger. “Will absolutely work with Jeff Mach again!”
Alfonzo Todd, who performs as DJ Ozno, had two rooms at WWF where he performed and promoted one of his events, Lehigh Valley Itz-A-Con.
“[I] just created a vibe for vendors/attendees through my DJ music,” he said. “We did have some overflow, but they were graciously welcomed and fit right in. Everyone had fun, we had steady traffic, made money, and had an enjoyable three days.”
Todd has been one of Mach’s staunchest defenders in posts on social media.
Yep.
How Many People?
One question about the event relates to attendance numbers. How many attendees were vendors told to expect, and how many actually showed up?
We posed that question to members of the Disgruntled Wicked Vendors group. Two members said they were promised around 6,000. Another said 5,000. One said 1,000 to 2,000.
Mach’s response: “I told people that we were hoping for 1,500-2,000.”
As for actual attendance? Mach said the number was around 1,500, but others put it much lower.
Guys?
Which is it, exactly?
Did the event have “overcrowding” or too few attendees?
I’d like to note: Vendors have NOT been complaining about poor sales. Why not? That’s usually the primary vendor concern.
Unless someone like, say, Daggett, spends the event’s setup, for reasons of her own, riling the vendors up.
Daggett said that Mach refused to use a device to scan QR codes on the Eventbrite tickets. “We were just looking at their tickets either printed or on their phone, but we were not checking them in to Eventbrite,” she said. “So there is no way to check the attendance totals.”
We weren’t checking them into Eventbrite because Eventbrite was broken at the time. Please bear in mind that Eventbrite had locked us into an exclusive contract, so we couldn’t use another ticketing system, but all the money that went into Eventbrite disappeared, with no explanation or idea of when (or if) we would ever see it.
For the millionth time: The Steampunk Explorer’s absolute refusal to address the evidence of Eventbrite’s wrongdoing doesn’t change Eventbrite’s actual, event-destroying wrongdoing.
Why?
Eventbrite took direct actions which actually hurt the Steampunk community. (And, obviously, hurt everyone at the event)
Why is there not an instant to criticize them?
New Ownership?
The vendor beefs at WWF caught the attention of a local news site, LehighValleyLive.com, which ran a story about the event.
Really? They told me they heard about it through you.
In that story, Mach told the reporter that he had transferred ownership of the event to “another group” that would be responsible for delivering refunds (the story is behind a paywall but can be viewed with a seven-day free pass).
We repeatedly asked Mach for details about this new group and he has yet to respond. Here’s what he said on Monday: “Honestly: I’m waiting on that group right now. It’s genuinely not my place to say anything about them.”
Yes.
I believed it at the time. It’s what Dawn said to myself, the staff who were present, and at least one other person.
During the contentious Sunday meeting with vendors, a woman named Dawn Marie stood and appeared to speak on behalf of the event. However, it is not clear if she has any involvement with the group that Mach referred to. We contacted her using an email address provided by Mach, but she has not responded.
Update: Dawn Marie responded to our email query on Sunday, March 10, and provided the following statement:
“Jeff Mach Events has seriously created a very bad press situation. There are so many different stories about not paying his debts. I am not interested in buying his company, at all. I had volunteered to help him with the refunds to VIP guests and vendors from the Wicked World’s Fair, but he has not sold the company to me. I had offered my accounting skills, and not my financial wallet to him, and any amounts refunded to vendors were to be paid from the show’s funds.”
We have asked Mach for a response and will post an update if we hear from him.
We look forward to your update, Mr. Beale.
Dawn Marie was the partner of one of my closest friends and longtime business associates. I genuinely didn’t know what her plans were. I still don’t actually know what her intentions were. Since she told ME she was taking over the event and perhaps the whole company (something I needed if I was to step down) but told YOU that I was simply bad at accounting, which I’m not, I can’t speak to what she actually wanted.
It would be pretty foolish for me to say someone else was taking over the event if it wasn’t what I thought was happening. I can’t see what I would gain. I’m still right here. I’m still running events. It’s not like lying about new ownership would gain me anything.
It sure gives Dawn plenty of cover after her fiancé (or wife, now?) helped make that video go viral.
But I’ll put it simply: I said Dawn was taking over because I thought she was taking over. I guess it’s her word against mine. I’m not actually sure why you think I’d lie about that. Whether or not she took over, what happened at the event, bad and good, was my responsibility.
Mr. Beale, when the event came under public attack, Dawn-Marie decided to change sides. Thank you for your hard work in making such things happen.
If you’re suggesting that I claim, going forward, that they’re responsible for anyone who is owed money, it’s quite the opposite:
I’m in communication with all of those people. I’m working on paying them. If I go out of business, as you desire, they’re not getting paid. Nobody else is going to take responsibility for it. You’re certainly willing to make it impossible for me to pay them; do you want to do it?
_____________
Below is a follow-up article. There’s a lot of repeated information, but a lot of points I wanted to clarify as well.
Eventbrite Refutes Mach’s Claims About WWF Payouts, Hints at Possible ‘Actions’
Unfortunately, that’s a complete lie.
A note, August 5th:
I revised the above piece, not particularly for content, but for tone; I was a lot angrier in the first few drafts.
I haven’t revised this piece. I’ll be revising for tone in the next few days–but not for content.
The content, unfortunately, is simply true.
They don’t refute my claims in the slightest. And that’s visible. But I’ll break it down.
Amid the fallout from the Wicked World’s Fair (WWF), show organizer Jeff Mach has repeatedly blamed Eventbrite, the online ticketing and event management platform, for his inability to cover the event’s expenses. But in a statement provided Wednesday to The Steampunk Explorer, Eventbrite refuted key aspects of his claims.
A personal note: I’ve removed most of the bitterness towards this article, but I’m really curious.
Mr. Beale, since I’m about to show that you’re lying, I leave as an exercise for the reader the following question:
Are you lying because you genuinely don’t understand the situation?
Or are you lying because you enjoy all the credit you get for being one of my better-known detractors?
WWF was held Feb. 23-25 at the SureStay Plus hotel in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Mach used Eventbrite to manage ticket sales, as well as sales of vendor spaces. During the event, as a sound crew was awaiting payment and vendors were requesting refunds, he told them that Eventbrite had frozen his account, preventing use of the platform’s payout features.
False.
Eventbrite had not FROZEN our account. That would involve some kind of communication. They’d have to give a reason.
Eventbrite left our account open, accepting orders, and apparently functional; they simply made all the money vanish and lied to us about it for several days.
In the weeks that followed, Mach continued to blame Eventbrite for payment issues at WWF. “I had repeated assurances from Eventbrite that the money would be forthcoming,” he remarked in one statement to The Steampunk Explorer. “Why Eventbrite had the account locked down, but refused to tell us, I don’t know.”
This was the company’s response on Wednesday: “Eventbrite offers, but does not guarantee, multiple ways to request funds ahead of the event date. Due to an error on the organizer’s end, we can confirm that a few of these advance payouts were delayed. This was quickly remedied, and the organizer received much of his payout ahead of the event and has now been paid out in full.”
Straight-up lie.
Here’s what Eventbrite said about it:
———- Forwarded message ———
From: Eventbrite Support <[email protected]>
Date: Mon, Feb 26, 2024 at 11:34 AM
Subject: Instant Payout Status [ ref:!00D7008atE.!5005Y02amBye:ref ]
To: [email protected] <[email protected]>
Hi Jeff,
Thank you for chatting with us today! It seems that our conversation got disconnected earlier.
Regarding your question about why the payout is being held, I don’t have specific details here, upon checking, our Trust and Safety Team received a report about your event, which reviewed every detail of your event. Nothing for you to worry about; I can see now that there is no problem with your account or event.
Your instant payout has already been processed, and you will receive it within this day.
Thank you, and have a blessed day!
Best regards,
Keith
The Eventbrite Customer Experience Team
__
Not an error on the event’s part.
The statement also clarified Eventbrite’s refund policies. “When it comes to refunds, we expect organizers to refund their customers when they do not deliver what was advertised and provide them with multiple paths to do so, depending on whether or not they have received their event funds. Should an organizer fail to adhere to our Refund Requirements, we may take actions to preserve the integrity of our marketplace.”
The statement did not specify what actions the company might take.
The thing is that, like every business, if a customer requests a refund, I expect to speak to the company through whom I’d process the refund. I’d expect to be asked what happened and to provide proof.
I can absolutely believe that Eventbrite reserves the right to destroy an event with no discussion whatsoever; I do find it weird that they seem to enjoy admitting it publicly.
When asked for comment on Eventbrite’s statement, Mach responded with a laughing emoji.
Yes.
This is, of course, technically true; the majority of the money that went through Eventbrite was, indeed, distributed before the event. That’s how we paid the hotel’s rather high rates (it’s a lot of space, after all); and how we met a lot of event bills.
But almost every event that sells door tickets makes the majority of its money in the last few days of the event, and at the door.
Removing the pre-event money, and then making it impossible to sell online and very difficult to sell at the door, did thousands and thousands of dollars of damage.
It’s rich—it’s hilarious, in retrospect—that Eventbrite gave you that bluff about their refund policy.
But let’s be clear here:
My contention the entire time was that Eventbrite withheld the money it was supposed to pay via Instant Payout, during the event.
Eventbrite repeatedly affirmed it had paid AFTER the event. And hasn’t and CAN’T confirm that they paid when they were supposed to.
In other words, despite the fact that you call this a ‘refutation’, Mr. Beale, this is actually a CONFIRMATION that Eventbrite did exactly what we said.
Because they didn’t pay when they were supposed to. And they lied about it. Which is why we blame them.
Also, let’s be really clear:
When there were two opposing parties with claims, one of whom had proof, one of whom didn’t, you simply took the word of the one you wanted to believe.
And you misled the public.
Also, the “action” they’re talking about is removing $7500 from our account without giving me ANY options. THEY didn’t want to be specific because they really don’t want it getting around that they can do this; it’s basically the opposite of how they represent the way they treat their clients. YOU didn’t want to check because YOU wanted to believe I was lying.
So you lied, instead.
From Past to Present
Mach has been a controversial figure in the steampunk community dating back to his time as organizer of the Steampunk World’s Fair (SPWF) in New Jersey. SPWF was once among the largest steampunk events in the U.S., but collapsed in 2018 following allegations that he had engaged in shady business practices and sexual misconduct. Mach denied the allegations.
That’s not why the event collapsed. As I note on the front page of my blog, the event collapsed when Michael Whitehouse and the Silver Phoenix Society, the people who took it over, who had removed me from every aspect of the business, went on live Internet and told people the event was canceled.
As I mention there, Dark Side of the Con kept going and is now huge, under the name “Dark Force Festival”. The Wicked Faire was able to run until the management team canceled SPWF, which (correctly) destroyed their reputation as people who can put on events successfully. Watch City is still going.
My events can continue to happen without me under proper management. The Steampunk World’s Fair was destroyed by a management tea which included some people who are fairly prominent in the community; I can see why The Steampunk Explorer would protect them, but I don’t think that’s the ethical choice.
Participants at the latest event in Bethlehem cited a litany of problems, many apparently related to overbooking of vendors. Some vendors said they received spaces smaller than what they had paid for, and that their subsequent requests for refunds were declined. Many have discussed their experiences in Disgruntled Wicked Vendors, a private Facebook group that was established in the event’s aftermath.
In your other article, you noted that it’s almost half people who were NOT vendors at that event, and mostly not vendors at ANY events—just what you call “interested parties”.
Well: It’s a private group that nobody who was involved with the event can access. I assume you’re (a) trying to advertise the group, which I imagine you’ve done with great success here, and (b) try to imply that the existence of a group means there’s something bad.
But frankly, I think most readers are thinking the same thing I’m thinking: If they have serious concerns, why is it a private group with almost half the members being random haters, not people who were ‘Wicked Vendors’?
Mach has denied that he overbooked the vendors. But the event’s former vendor coordinator and operations manager both told us that he placed vendors in spaces that were originally designated for other uses.
“Operations Manager”?
You spoke to Kim Lewison and Maria Daggett. Those are two vendor coordinators. And Maria was fired as vendor coordinator precisely because she was telling vendors that as she was setting them up. As we discuss elsewhere.
One vendor who sought a refund shared a screenshot of the Eventbrite app with this message from Jeff Mach Events: “We were unable to complete part of what we needed to do because Eventbrite failed to live up to the sense of its advertising, if not necessarily (but very possibly) the legal meaning. This is Eventbrite’s responsibility. Don’t get me wrong—please do email me, because I’d like to start paying you slowly out of my own pocket once I can get my second job going. But Eventbrite has frozen our funds. Please complain/talkk (sic) to me about anything, but blame them for that.”
Yes. We said that. They did that.
And yes. I took on a second job to start paying people.
You keep acting like it’s inappropriate for someone to try to pay people, Stephen.
Paying the Sound Crew
Mach also blamed Eventbrite for his failure to pay LAW Sound & Lighting, the company he hired to provide production services for WWF’s musical performances.
Correct.
MJ Law, the company’s owner, said he quoted a price of approximately $6,500 for the weekend. Half was due immediately as a deposit to hold the booking. Mach was to pay the remainder when the sound crew arrived at the event.
Mach, he said, promised to come through with the money later that night, so the crew agreed to stay and provide production Mach, he said, persuaded him to relax the terms. “He said he was dependent on ticket sales and that payments from Eventbrite were not coming through,” Law said, so he agreed to take half on arrival and the rest later.
Yes.
I don’t know how many of my chats with Eventbrite are saved. I can likely find some of the relevant conversations. But without quoting them directly, I can tell you that Eventbrite’s 24 hour tech support kept telling me the money would be there very shortly – in a few hours, at opening of business Friday, at midnight, in the morning…
Even when I was running much larger events, the vast majority of the money came in right before the event, and at the event—which is normal for pretty much any ticketed show where you can get tickets at the door.
A note: For reasons never explained to us, the hotel demanded an extra $2000 deposit before the show. We tried to argue; they took a hard line; we gave them what they wanted, as we could afford it.
Until Eventbrite removed our payments from our account.
I’m also just not sure what Stephen is trying to imply here. We had te money to meet our obligations and thus bring people what we promised; Eventbrite deliberately withheld the money while telling us It would be there. Is he trying to suggest that we hired a sound and light team and tried to avoid paying them simply to steal the money? That’s insane. We failed to pay them because Eventbrite, instead of depositing the money in our bank account as they had been doing for weeks, and said they were just about to continue doing—withheld it until Monday.
“I saw it as a ground-level situation,” Law said, where he would have an opportunity to work with Mach on other events. “So I let things slide a little bit.”
The deal included sound and lighting equipment for the main stage in a hotel ballroom and a smaller stage in a bar. The sound equipment included speakers, microphones, digital mixing consoles, and a drum kit.
He assigned three technicians to work on site. “When my guys showed up, there was no money,” Law said. “He was telling my guys, and me, that he was having problems getting money out of the account.”
services for Friday night’s performances.
“At 6:30 a.m., the money wasn’t there,” he said, so the crew left. This meant that bands on Saturday’s program would have to provide their own sound gear.
Following the event, Law said, he adjusted the invoice and asked Mach for $2,000 for the services provided on Friday night.
Yep.
I’d like to note that this was a new situation for me, as well. I specifically looked for a sound and light team who came highly recommended. What I could have looked for was one who would accept getting paid after the event, the way our sound and light crews did with The Steampunk World’s Fair and Wicked Fair. But it wasn’t necessary—until Eventbrite sabotaged us.
Enter Dawn Marie
On the last day of WWF, angry vendors confronted Mach and some associates during a meeting that was captured on video. One clip has been viewed more than 1.2 million times on Facebook.
“A meeting”?
Again, these vendors took over the VIP feedback session, kicking out the VIPs. That was an extremely hostile act which hurt a lot of attendees directly.
Among those associates was a woman named Dawn Marie, who stood before the vendors and appeared to speak on the event’s behalf.
Mach later told a local newspaper that a new ownership group had taken over WWF and would assume responsibility for refunds. We repeatedly asked him to provide details about this group, including Dawn Marie’s role, but he did not respond.
When we spoke with Law, he helped to connect those dots. Mach, he said, “was telling me that Dawn was taking over the business and he referred all my questions to her.”
Since then, Dawn Marie has emphatically stated that she is not assuming responsibility for the business.
“Jeff Mach Events has seriously created a very bad press situation,” she said in a statement to The Steampunk Explorer. “There are so many different stories about not paying his debts. I am not interested in buying his company, at all. I had volunteered to help him with the refunds to VIP guests and vendors from the Wicked World’s Fair, but he has not sold the company to me. I had offered my accounting skills, and not my financial wallet to him, and any amounts refunded to vendors were to be paid from the show’s funds.”
Yes. You recount the whole arc correctly, you just make it sound like something weird. Dawn Marie was strongly on my side during the event. It’s obviously her word against mine. So I’ll put it this way:
During the event, she was on my side. When that video went viral, she switched sides very quickly. Which makes sense: during the event, we clearly had a successful show with thousands of happy attendees. AFTER the event, we looked terrible, thanks to that video, and people like you, Stephen.
Law still has not been paid. At this point, he said, he’ll settle for $1,300 to cover his costs for paying the crew.
“It’s been aggravating, but it’s not going to make or break [the business],” Law said. On the other hand, he said it was “heartbreaking” to see what the vendors were going through. He mentioned one who had planned to use the event to launch a new business.
As for Mach, “he has been passing the buck every time I have talked to him,” Law said.
Mr. Law, we told you our exact situation. It’s true that when Dawn Marie offered to take over, we told you she was taking over; but that’s only because it was true.
Nobody wants you to have not gotten paid. We had the money for you; Eventbrite blocked our accessing it. And because you left, the event was damaged, our reputation was damaged, and it’s going to take more time to pay you. That’s how these things go. We can’t change that.
Gargantuan Tax Bill
As Mach contends with angry vendors and potential actions by Eventbrite, his biggest worry might be the state of New Jersey. State court records indicate that he owes more than $900,000 to the state’s Division of Taxation.
The court records show two judgments. Both are from 2023, identifying the Division of Taxation as the creditor and Mach as the debtor. One shows a debt of $893,523.79 and lists Mach’s company Widdershins LLC as an alternate name. The other shows a debt of $10,745.07. The records indicate that Mach represented himself in both cases.
We asked Mach how he incurred so much tax debt. He did not respond.
Mostly because, to be perfectly honest it’s a weird story, and sounds hard to believe, and given that I wasn’t able to make you believe things for which I had solid proof, I found it a weird story to go into.
You’re welcome to ask the New Jersey Department of Revenue for their opinions on this. Frankly, if they disagree, I’d like to know, myself.
I don’t remember which Wicked Faire it was. Which is odd; you’d think such a large happening would stick in the mind, but honestly, there were many Wicked Faires, and it was a long time ago.
The New Jersey Department of Revenue came in to one of the Wicked Faires and assessed how much money they estimated was made by EVERY vendor in the entire place.
They then assessed us the tax burden as if all of that money had gone to us, not to those vendors.
They haven’t given us an explanation. They also haven’t particularly tried to collect. This situation is pretty weird for us.
Dissing Eventbrite
On Sunday, Feb. 25, the last day of WWF, Mach posted this message on one of his Facebook pages: “Life is an adventure. May I recommend never working with Eventbrite?”
One commenter posted: “Ticketleap.com is the only way.” This was a reference to an online ticketing platform that competes with Eventbrite.
Mach’s reply: “Ahhh, not since they didn’t let us pay them back for SPWF.”
We asked Mach to elaborate on the issues he had with Ticketleap, and whether he can use that company’s services.
His response: “I’m not exactly sure that it’s terribly helpful for me to try to respond to these things. It’s true that I’m grateful to have a chance to see my allegations, but that’s because my circumstances are unusual and it’s not really something I should be grateful for.”
He went on for three more paragraphs and then concluded: “You can go and make your rather comic documentation of me as some sort of supervillain, but I think I’m done playing.”
I am, indeed, done playing. And I hope the reader can see why.
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