Dogpatch Press

Sick of bad news? Want some good news? Here’s how to make it. Get armed with knowledge to demand better for your community. When there is injustice, getting justice starts with reporting it. Bad media likes to linger on gross details of crime, but helpful media investigates and criticizes patterns, issues, impact, policy and leadership. This public service is often requested by people who need help — especially when leaders and police don’t help — like when there’s internet activity outside their reach, or news has to reach sources they need to come forward. It’s a job for independent reporting, so it can’t be suppressed when leaders are corrupt or protecting friends. This is news by us, for us, because outsiders and bad people don’t run your community… you do.

Five stories get their own headline posts. Here’s the short versions.

(1) Tennessee furry group leaders corrupted with predators and drug death; two evidence documents. MurfreesFurs, a furry group in Tennessee with around 1000 members, was the subject of an evidence document with 30 sources alleging that organizers covered up nazis and zoophiles in their inner circle, and failed to protect the community from predators. Sources face retaliation, and Dogpatch Press was pressured for suppression before even reporting. The shocking thing is, it was only part of the problem. A second evidence document came out independently from the first, alleging more serious complicity by MurfreesFurs organizers in CSAM, drug dealing and a fentanyl death. Sources include police reports and prison records.

(2) Mephit Furmeet put one of the world’s most infamous zoophiles on stage to represent the fandom. For years, furry conventions have hosted Charles Alexander Berry, AKA Toggle Rat. He runs a podcast that launders animal molesting as identity, like NAMBLA for zoophiles, while hiding their victims offstage. In 2021 he was outed as a zoophile with his husband running a furry group in Tennessee. Many people’s effort to protect the fandom went unheard in August 2025, when despite protest, Berry was given a platform on stage at Mephit Furmeet, the furry con running since the 1990’s in Memphis, TN.

(3) UK furry event founder and outed zoosadist ring member is still running events 7 years later. A series of international furry events under the name Club Animalz (and others) has been held in Manchester and Berlin since 2017. The founder, Foxb/Foxberance, AKA Ben Mills, was exposed as an animal rapist in the 2018 zoosadist leaks. Mills raped animals on video, in a fursuit made for him, that he kept using for years afterward. In 2025, his events are still popular and partnered with large cons in the mainstream of furry like Confuzzled.

(4) Mare Fair enabled shady crypto nazis and a zoophile organizer who preyed on horse rescues. Florida’s Mare Fair is an adults-only My Little Pony convention. It crosses fandom for a kid’s show with the edgy chanboard culture seen in The Atlantic’s article about the MLP fandom’s Nazi problem. The con is organized by 4chan users and bounced between 3 venues in 3 years while raising a reputation for hateful behavior. The management also teamed up with a zoophile, Kyle “Lightsolver” Foster, to help run Mare Fair and found a new con. Two horse rescue charity operators claimed that Foster manipulated their operations after keeping a crippled horse alive in pain for years of sex abuse. Foster’s enablers in management include Joshua “Corpulent Brony” Hope, who runs a website to host bestiality videos. Hope milks fandom with silver coin sales and his own cryptocurrency. This allegedly ties con finances to shady donors with crypto-wealth, who break charity records set by other cons — conveniently buying a PR front.

(5) Nazifur sex offender keeps going in and out of jail while misleading furries to trust him. In Colorado, Jacob Kovar was a nazifur sex offender who was convicted after his arrest warrant credited investigation by Dogpatch Press. Kovar did crimes as head of security for a furry convention, until they got tipped and fired him. After years in jail, Kovar returned to the community with friends in a regular furry group, while he was allegedly violating parole to be online. Kovar had his parole revoked and was arrested again in late 2025.

Click through to the full stories or read on for more context.

A system problem 

It’s pointless to debate about whether our groups are good or bad. The issue isn’t psychology of ordinary people with ordinary problems. It’s structural. We have internet-based subculture where users also meet in real life, but we don’t own the foundation. Social media is broken with a mountain of analysis about why. There’s so much to say about dependence on corporate internet, with unaccountable management and profit above principles. Furries rely on it for a loose and insecure network of local bubbles, but it also enables manipulators and abusers to have their own networks. Sometimes they gain influence over yours.

While the platforms are a fundamental problem, there’s the idea that furries are above it by being tolerant and loving. That has a dark side. Love is blind and goodwill doesn’t exclude favoritism for bad friends. Volunteerism without money doesn’t exclude predators from social influence. It makes our own work to do internally, on top of broken platforms that make complacency with the status quo.

Sometimes the community organizes to force bad leadership out. That happened in New Jersey, where the corrupt con Garden State Fur The Weekend was replaced with Furgeddaboutit. It would be nice to call such a victory the norm, but the norm is that there isn’t one. Change only happens if enough people organize to force it. It’s all too easy to settle for the status quo. In internet terms, that’s network-effect.

Corruption isn’t fate, it involves settling for it. Awareness can help, but it’s often suppressed by toxic-positivity and anti-media hostility, with a pretext about protecting the fandom by keeping it in the family. This enables more of the problem, and needs external reporting while transparency is withheld. It doesn’t have to be that way, but if it doesn’t get reported, expect soothing lies…

The lies start with good intentions. Furries love pride in community, but pride can be fair-weather and two-faced. Membership works like identity when people want to claim it, but anyone can be a furry by saying so, and then when someone behaves badly, “we don’t know them”. That includes people who have been among us for decades and run things. If we want to take pride in building and running things, that goes with media literacy and telling THE FULL TRUTH about things we’re not so proud of.

Truth or consequences

The five current stories aren’t about random bad people at random events. These involve a higher level of decisions, favor and influence at the top. When leadership fails, the community has to ask someone else for help.

All too often, selfish leaders gain power through “everyone’s welcome” enabling and negligence, even with evidence in their faces. That’s how problems go without consequences, get swept behind PR and blamed on outsiders for noticing, and become circular. PR is often used for evil this way, and deserves the same bad reputation that “the media” gets. Don’t expect any reporter to shut up and report more good news, because their job is not to be a gutless PR mouthpiece. It’s everyone’s job to make problems unwelcome if you don’t want them reported.

More attention can bring help, but independent reporting doesn’t help by itself without action. When it isn’t paid, there’s a disparity of resources and underreporting. We can’t possibly do enough after something goes wrong, compared to the need to Just. Stop. Supporting. The. Wrong. People. Stop giving them money, platforms, and excuses.

Why can’t we just have nice things by being nice and doing good? When we build community for the love of it, how do some insiders keep acting worse than made-up characters in the imaginations of hateful outsiders?

The problem is that volunteering and donation can make some people indispensable, and occasionally they take advantage of the inability to get rid of them. When someone volunteers specialized skills for free, you can’t just fire and replace them! The worst manipulators can create reliance, with cronies willing to back them with pressure or even walk out together to get what they want, like silence about abuse. Suppression starts with friends protecting friends. Twisted loyalty can be as bad as top-down authority.

It’s pretty simple to say furry events are parties and hobby fun, and there are bigger priorities. Why not just withdraw and let them die when they’re corrupt? So what if someone doubts our commitment to Sparkle Motion? What is this, a cult? The saddest part is, some people would rather have selfish power than priorities. Parties and petty power in them are the only thing they care about.

Letting problems go is self-defeating. It gives hateful outsiders the facts to say much worse than stories they can make up, handing them ammo to use against us if we don’t defuse it by transparency. Outsiders didn’t ruin our image in these stories, we already did it before they came out. That’s the truth; don’t shoot the messenger, and go organize to make better news. Even if you can’t fix broken platforms, you can demand better in real life.

This is the kind of good news we can accomplish:

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