Anita Sarkeesian

Anita Sarkeesian is a media critic who produced Tropes vs. Women in Video Games under the name Feminist Frequency. The crowdfunding campaign for that series, and the harassment campaign that followed it, made her one of the standing reference cases in argument about online abuse.

The Kickstarter, 2012

Sarkeesian’s Kickstarter campaign asked for $6,000 to produce a video series on the treatment of female characters in games. It closed on 16 June 2012 having raised **$158,922 from 6,968 backers** — more than twenty-six times its goal. It was her first Kickstarter project. The page’s stated aim was to “amplify the existing conversations happening about female characters in games and maybe even get the attention of the gaming industry.”

The campaign is notable both for the scale of its overfunding and for the volume of hostility it attracted.

Utah State University, October 2014

On 14 October 2014, during the Gamergate campaign, multiple Utah State University staff received an email threatening Sarkeesian and people who attended her scheduled lecture. USU police assessed it as similar to threats she had received before, and the university decided to hold the event.

Sarkeesian cancelled it. The university’s own statement records why: she asked whether weapons would be allowed in the venue, and was told that under Utah law anyone with a valid concealed firearm permit could carry one there. The university proceeded with the event; it did not take place because Sarkeesian cancelled it after learning what the venue could not exclude.

Feminist Frequency as an Organization

Feminist Frequency is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with an IRS ruling date of May 2014, registered in Covina, California. Its filings show a small operation: total revenue between roughly $235,000 and$567,000 in the tax years 2020 through 2023. It ran a surplus in 2020, 2021 and 2022, and a deficit in 2023, when revenue fell to $235,220 against$390,029 of expenses.

Digital Political Impact

• The 2012 campaign is an early example of crowdfunding used to fund media criticism outside traditional publishing or broadcast gatekeepers
• The harassment directed at her became one of the standard examples in reporting and policy argument about coordinated online abuse
• In the USU episode, the university proceeded despite the threat, but the event did not take place because of what the venue could not exclude under state law
• Feminist Frequency’s tax filings show a nonprofit with revenue in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars

What Is Not Established Here

Removed in the citation audit: her birth year; Twitter and YouTube follower counts; the 2009 founding date for Feminist Frequency, which no first-party record consulted supports (the IRS ruling date is May 2014); the claim that she advised the UN Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development, tech companies and lawmakers; the claim that she participated in US congressional briefings and UN panels in 2016-2018; and the launch date and description of the Games and Online Harassment Hotline, whose domain no longer resolves. The affiliation is retained in frontmatter but nothing is asserted about it in the text.