The Scribe Media Files, Volume II

Financial fraud, the last layoffs, and a disgraced former CEO invades our Zoom room. The end of a horrifyingly-wild ride.

As we were recording the podcast, and after I had delivered this monologue, the last employees of Scribe were laid off. Scribe Media was announced to be dissolving, with another company forming out of the ashes. And, most hilariously of all, JeVon McCormick was revealed to be in our Zoom room in entire time. JeVon, when you read this- the initials “jmc” on your Zoom nametag aren’t doing you any favors. :)

Update: Conflicting reports on the above CEO joining, but nothing confirmed nor denied.

Disclaimers:

First, I want to thank everyone for the success of the first volume of the Scribe Media Files. As of this writing, the podcast has been listened to or watched over 700 times. My Substack has exploded with comments and subscriptions. The veneer that the Scribe Media leadership has been desperately trying to hold up seems to be cracking more and more each day. That could not be possible without the people who came into contact with the Files deciding they were valuable. Thank you.

Second, the first volume of the Files also provided an opportunity that I wasn’t entirely prepared for. The amount of individual outreach that came my way after the initial drop was unprecedented in many ways. The first was how many people, those who participated and did not, affirmed the findings in the original Files. The culture of Scribe Media and the malfeasance of leadership to provide any competence seems to not only be true, but ubiquitous with everyone we talked with. Many told me that I went light on my depictions of both. As we will see later on, I believe them to be correct. 

The second way, however, was much more disturbing, and what largely caused me to do a second rendition of the Files. After initially breaking the seal with my own findings, many new sources came about. Some of the sources, those you will hear from most prominently in this report, were very involved with the last days of Scribe’s business and financial position. Their claims are damning. It seems to me that Scribe Media was not simply a business that failed because of bad leadership, although that was certainly part of it. Now, I believe that Scribe Media failed because of both bad leadership and blatant criminal activity in the form of financial fraud and manipulation. 

It is important to note the behavior of the Scribe executives and leadership, particularly JeVon McCormick and Meghan McCracken, in the wake of the Files and the continued erosion of their former empire since the first Files came out. No one is taking any of the blame. They’re climbing over one another like rats in a sewer. Nothing is their fault nor their problem. This report is designed, in part, to drop a nuke on all of those assertions, to drag them back into the mess that they’ve created. They have things to answer for- the second edition of the Files are meant to give them those answers to own up to. 

I also believe that it is important to correct what I got wrong in the last Files, which I will do first as I get into my new findings. Unlike the leadership of Scribe Media, I believe in integrity and owning up to where my mistakes lie. I’m proud to say that I did a pretty decent job at getting most things right. But, if these findings will continue to help out the people that have been harmed, the corrections need to be made open and public for all. 

Similarly to the first volume of the Files, all of my sources are, and will remain, anonymous. As just mentioned, these are individuals that have already lost much. They would undoubtedly be harmed by their identities being revealed. I take this very seriously. Many of them are preparing litigation. I will, under no circumstances, reveal the names of these individuals, nor where I sourced them from or how they came into contact with me and/or the Files. 

Now, with that said, let’s begin.

What I Got Wrong:

A former person on Scribe’s multimedia team reached out to me and provided a leaked video from an internal server on how they did indeed have plans to hire a CFO at one point during the peak of their powers. The video describes the qualities of the candidate, why they need one, and what that person would be responsible for. The reasoning this former employee gave for them not hiring one was that they did not have budget for it which, understanding more now about Scribe’s financial precipice it was staring over, seems at least somewhat credible. 

The “unnamed investor” that was mentioned in both the first edition of the Files and the Reddit thread itself was said to have pulled out suddenly. I now have had several people come to me and say that this claim is false. I do not know much more than that, but I want to lay these claims on the table for everyone. What I will say is that it seems to be in limbo, with no one really knowing what that situation looks like. 

These two errors, both massive on the part of my reporting that is solely my doing, help describe one big thing- Scribe’s financial positioning. The rest of the report, thankfully, is mostly centered around bombshell claims that have been made by my other sources around the remaining effects of Scribe. I’ve had several people who are very close to the situation tell me that the inner plumbing of Scribe is backed up in ways that people couldn’t imagine. To start the cleaning out of those pipes, I now turn to the biggest one of all.

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Out of happenstance, the next book I was set to read was Bad Blood by John Carreyrou, the man who documented the rise and fall of the Theranos empire. After putting my reading on hiatus for a month, I picked it up and thumbed through it to the Prologue. Knowing what I was about to start writing, the opening of what has been one of the most lauded books in recent memory slapped me straight across the face. 

The prologue of Carreyrou’s work describes the ouster of Theranos’ earliest Chief Financial Officer, Henry Mosley. Mosley, who had been a Silicon Valley finance titan for over three decades who began by helping launch Intel, had just been brought on by Holmes to help shore up her burgeoning unicorn’s monetary position. 

Mosley, however, had a problem. He had begun to hear through the grapevine that, contrary to what Holmes and her inner circle had been saying, Theranos’ original product, the Edison, had a much longer runway to go than they had been telling the public. In fact, when they demoed it to potential customers, it oftentimes failed to even work. 

What initially caught Mosley’s eye was a slide deck crafted by Holmes and the inner circle that detailed Theranos’ valuation to prospective investors and customers. That valuation, as per all valuations worth merit, were based on a future cash flow projection from incoming revenue through deals. Mosley, the man overseeing said cash flows and incoming revenues, knew that, even though the deck said otherwise, Theranos had yet to win a single contract with a large pharma company. 

Mosley confronted Holmes about this in a meeting after a fateful meeting to Switzerland for the demonstration and promotion of the Edison. When Mosley voiced concerns about the brewing fraudulent activities of Theranos, Holmes inner psychopathy came out. Her eyes turned into the huge and menacing lamps that are now lampooned on the internet. Her smile turned into a curt frown.

Henry Mosley was fired mere seconds later. One of the most respected finance moguls in Silicon Valley had to pack his bags and be escorted out. Holmes’ parting words to him were, “Henry, I don’t think you’re being a team player. I think you should leave right now.”

Through my research in the Scribe Files, it’s astounding how that same sentence was repeated time and time again by JeVon McCormick and Meghan McCracken to the employees and freelancers at Scribe Media. Any concerns were immediately shot down, any dissent crushed, any business legitimacy squirreled away by folly and foolishness. But it didn’t end there. Because, little did I know, a person who I was soon to meet, who would compared Scribe Media to Theranos unapologetically, would prove just how prophetic that moment happened to be. 

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Late last week, I got a Direct Message on social media from a representative of a former unnamed Scribe author. This person had listened to the Files and reached out with a bold claim- that their client had been “significantly financially defrauded” by Scribe Media. 

It is the wording here that is the telling part. Over the last three weeks, I’ve had the unfortunate experience of seeing and revealing just how much money some authors have lost. One author in my workshop in April, for example, had paid $48,000 up front for work to be done on their book. Another, who had been working on their book for almost two years, had put in north of $50,000. Several others have claimed to have put in more than $100,000 each for Scribe services for individual books, while others had prepaid for future packages that put them in a similar monetary bracket.

The horrifying, yet more and more likely, reality for all of these authors is that they will never see a single cent of that money again. Scribe Media, as we will see, has been reduced to next to nothing. They have no assets, no cash, dwindling outside investors, and no sources of revenue streams. Their reputation has been thrown through a woodchipper. Anyone who had thought about doing business with Scribe has been effectively, and rightly, scared off by the events of the company’s implosion.

Nonetheless, this is not fraud. It is terrible that the clients of Scribe Media, myself included, have lost money for services that are most likely not to be rendered. But that does not make them fraudulent. There have been hundreds of prior authors that got what they paid for in the past. Our problem was simply the timing. We threw our money in at the wrong time and got screwed. This is not to say that we were not gaslit because, as we saw in the first edition of the Files, we certainly were. But to say that it ranks in the level of fraud would be disingenuous, particularly with the claims of this representative coming to light. Here’s why. 

After I get a DM from the representative, they DM’d me their phone number and ask for time later that afternoon. When I call this person, they told me a number of important revelations. First, their client had had significant success with Scribe Media. The representative did not give me a name, so I cannot say how successful this person was. However, the representative told me that the client in question had a book that was “wildly successful”. The author was currently working on a second book, which was signed away to Scribe to do contracting. 

But that wasn’t all. The client had a personal relationship with Scribe’s former CEO and President, JeVon McCormick. They texted each other a minimum of once per week, and oftentimes more so. But this was more than just two people who had a personal relationship with one another. The two also were comfortable enough with one another where they talked intimate business. The most interesting intimate business they talked about was Scribe Media. 

Earlier this year, JeVon McCormick provided the client financial statements that described Scribe’s financial positioning, and where he personally felt that it could go. The way McCormick felt it was going to go, per the representative on behalf of his client, was one place- immediate acquisition. McCormick told the client that that very prominent investors were involved, and that the client would make a killing should they personally invest into the future of Scribe Media. 

JeVon McCormick then through down the hammer- he asked the client to invest $1 million into Scribe Media as a direct cash infusion. If the client did so, McCormick told him that he guaranteed him a return on investment of a whopping 40% within 90 days. McCormick claimed that, when the acquisition went through, all of the people that he invested would immediately cash out, himself included, and make a killing. 

The client, trusting the relationship with McCormick, did so, and invested $1 million into Scribe Media mere months before its sudden implosion and dissolution. The client, however, did not base the investment on the relationship with McCormick. The client, and his representative that I spoke with, did so on behalf of the financial statements that were provided by McCormick. They ran the numbers. They made all the right calls. They did the research. Everything checked out. 

It was not just the client and the representative that were looped in with these statements and this messaging by McCormick. According to the representative, the client was not the only person that made a similar type of massive investment. I, nor do I think the representative, knows how much was put in by each individual contributor. All I know, according to the representative, was that it was substantial, and by multiple people, all of them being former authors, people who trusted Scribe Media with their books, dreams, and money. They were all told the same thing- a massive return on investment within a minimal amount of time to wait for that investment. But there was only one problem:

JeVon McCormick had completely fabricated those financial statements. 

JeVon McCormick, in what was most likely an attempt to cash out as we covered in the first edition to the Files, cooked Scribe Media’s books. According to the representative, McCormick had so much personal money comingled into Scribe that he was using it as his personal piggy bank and leveraging it wherever he could. Scribe’s finances were a mess, at least in part, by design. The representative told me that, since the blowup, there were rumors of him having millions stashed in offshore bank accounts. 

After Scribe Media blew up, the representative reached out to their board of directors to inquire about this obvious fraudulence. According to the representative, not a single member on Scribe’s board has denied the accusations that they or any of the other clients said that JeVon McCormick did. The same was done to McCormick’s personal attorney, who also did not deny any of the accusations levied against him. 

The obvious plan, as per the evidence and as voiced to me by the representative, is to make McCormick the scapegoat. It’s all his fault, or at least that’s what they want you to believe. According to the representative, it was the board of directors that made McCormick take the fall. They forced him to step down, and told everyone they talked with that everything inside of Scribe came down to JeVon McCormick fumbling the whole thing at the one-yard-line. 

The reasoning for this, in my estimation, had to due with McCormick’s job before he became the head of Scribe Media- that of the President of Headspring Systems, the software company he ran before making the leap into professional publishing. More information has come out recently surrounding his time there, the one that was glamorized in his memoir, I Got There, as a time where he became the “Modern Leader” that would soon begin to take the world by storm. 

As it turns out, McCormick didn’t leave his position as President of Headspring Systems because he took a better job opportunity. As per the Reddit thread and numerous former Headspring employees, JeVon McCormick was fired from Headspring Systems for being an absolutely idiotic and incompetent business executive. 

As detailed by one source close to the matter, the only truth to the matter was McCormick rising from the bottom to the top of the company and taking over day-to-day operations. He wore that with pride, much like he did as the CEO of JeVon McCormick, Inc. in the later days of Scribe Media. He even had a customized Headspring license plate adorning his car. 

As the company went through massive expansion under McCormick, undergoing the opening of new offices and winning, yet again, a slew of “Best Places to Work” awards, they did so under significant financial strain. McCormick had no idea how to back up the growth with anything real. How he attempted to, according to the source, was by betting on his sales ability to close several significant contracts with large vendors. That way, they could pay for the growth on the front end by closing significant revenue on the back end. 

This did not come to fruition, however, because McCormick and Headspring did not close several significant contracts with large vendors. They were in the exact same position as Scribe Media was in its last days- staring down the barrel of the gun of untrammeled growth. McCormick, similar to his situation in Scribe Media, has absolutely no clue what to do about this. 

The same story begins to unfold. He lies about the financials to the CEO and owners of the company. McCormick is made the scapegoat and is fired. A good number of people lose their jobs. Morale tanks. But, unlike what happened at Scribe Media with Meghan McCracken (more on her shortly), they had their former chief step in and provide competent leadership. The company eventually rights itself and is sold. People walk away happy and whole. 

What the representative told me was that the same thing happened at Scribe Media. McCormick had bet big and lost, leaving Scribe’s financials in tatters. It all came down to pipeline, and McCormick, the man who had bragged about his ability to sell getting him to the top, had none of it. That led to the rest of the company’s implosion, and the desperate and fraudulent asks for outside investment, taking place. 

How McCormick somehow fooled Tucker Max and Zach Obront into hiring him as the President of Scribe Media is something that I do not know. This amount of failing up is unprecedented, particularly in the era we live in. The reality is, there are many things that we do not know. I’m assuming we’ll find out at some point. But, to give McCormick some credit, I am beginning to see why the word “snake oil salesman” has been attributed to him online more times than I would have ever thought. That’s a talent he certainly seems to possess. 

As the representative finished, it was revealed that the venture capital group that was evaluating the potential salvation of Scribe Media was a company called Enduring Ventures. The San Francisco-based firm had been in Austin, doing the due diligence on Scribe Media for at least a week. As the writing on the wall, and my sources, tell me, it did not go well. All seems to point to them having pulled out of the deal, the due diligence having failed. The representative told me that Scribe had also told some people they were going bankrupt, but wasn’t sure. Having exhausted all of the information, we agreed to stay in contact, and ended the conversation. 

This past Sunday night, I went to the Scribe Media headquarters based off of a tip from another source, who had sent me pictures of documentation being taped to the door of the building- two sheets of paper and an envelope. The two sheets of paper was from the realtor of the Scribe Media headquarters, who had staked their claim on the building. They had officially changed the locks. 

The reasons cited for their seizure of the property included, but were not limited to: failure to pay of monthly rent, additional rent, landlord funded overage, operating expenses, and other miscellaneous. And that was just for the building. The envelope was addressed to two people- JeVon McCormick and Meghan McCracken. Neither of them had opened it in at least a half a week’s time. By then, the two of them were long gone. 

—-------

Not so long after the phone call with the representative, the bottom started to fall out from what remained of Scribe Media. After Brittany Claudius, the beloved COO, resigned after McCormick, the entire executive team was held together by a hand-picked list of Meghan McCracken’s inner circle, including the entire finance and sales departments. After the first edition of the Files were published and the investor fell through, all of them began to resign in droves, most of them making their announcements public on LinkedIn. 

This was a remarkable change of tone from the original announcement that was headlined by Meghan McCracken. A letter of intent had been signed, she claimed. They expected to right the ship quickly. No one was going to be harmed. Everyone was going to be made whole financially. All the people laid off, including the freelancers, would be brought back. No one would miss any deadlines, and everything would go on as scheduled. Nothing to see here. 

Less than two weeks later, the same woman posted her resignation onto LinkedIn. Her work there was done, she said. And it certainly was. The woman that had made the biggest professional publishing house in the work go belly-up had killed Scribe Media culturally just as much as McCormick did financially. And, just like the board of directors and all the investors, she blamed McCormick for everything. “He still checks his LinkedIn”, was the statement she gave authors who were completely flubbed out of their money, desperately searching for answers and restitution. But at least she feels good about herself. Her heart is broken, as she stated a couple of sentences later. Everything was fine, it seems, until it wasn’t. 

She also was a victim. She said that she had been taken advantage of. She was also wronged in this whole experience. She was also excited for the future, stating that she had multiple offers lined up for other jobs. She plans to be in this space for a very long time, she stated. I believe I speak on behalf of every person she bullied, fired, humiliated, ridiculed, and stepped on that I sincerely hope that she is not in this space for a very long time. 

Tucker Max is still talking about his sheep. Zach Obront is still talking about blockchain. Neither are talking about Scribe Media. I’m still waiting for Tucker to say something on our messaging app that we all share, where he is certainly privy to watching the absolute chaos that has been going for weeks unfold. I have a feeling I’ll be waiting for a long time. 

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So, you may be asking- what is the current status of Scribe Media? Of that, I cannot tell you. What I can tell you is that, as of this writing, the white flag is officially being waived by the few employees that still remain. The people that remain trying to help the authors whose books, dreams, and finances are in tatters do not get to make a cheesy LinkedIn post. They do not get to sail off into the sunset. 

The abandonment of the executive team has left no one in charge of Scribe Media. There is no hierarchy, no structure, no anything. The remaining employees (if they even count as that anymore) have no one to report to, nothing to report about, and nothing to do about it. They’ve received no communication from McCormick, who is still the majority shareholder in Scribe Media. However, they do get to do something else, something that has been the result of all of the tragic fallout of Scribe Media:

Lead.

Emily Gindlesparger, the head of Scribe’s book coaching practice, has been mostly-absent throughout this process. She has told all of us that this has been a traumatic event in her life, and has owned up to the fact that she hasn’t been as present as she needed to be throughout this time. She distracts herself to get away from the pain, she said. I believe her. As of this writing, she is actively trying to get as many author files back to them as possible, and is doing her best to help authors get their houses in order. She is a good person, and is doing the best that she can under absolutely shitty circumstances with almost no support from anyone of merit at Scribe Media. 

Chas Hoppe, one of Scribe’s most well-known book coaches, is the only man at what is left of Scribe Media that has embodied anything resembling masculine virtue during this time. On Monday morning, in a Scribe-owned messaging channel, he encouraged authors to seek refunds, take legal action, and to reach out to him for help in completing their books. He is currently in the process of building a new community for ex-Scribe authors to continue their work with his help. Knowing full-well the consequences that come with speaking out against the Scribe cult, knowing that he has everything to lose, he took the bullet anyways. JeVon McCormick is a coward. So is Tucker Max. Chas Hoppe, thankfully, is not. 

The old employees of Scribe Media, unless someone snatches victory from the jaws of defeat, will still be unemployed, as will all of the freelancers that did a bulk of the work for Scribe Media. They also do not get the luxury of the executive team that bailed on them and promised them (against the legal documents they gave them, I might add) that they would get hired back. Most of them are currently picking up the pieces, some of them coming together to collectivize their skills to attempt to start over.

Scribe’s authors, for the most part, have nothing. Scribe has nothing, so they have nothing to request from them. Their best hope to recoup their investment, it seems, is in litigation, of which many of them are pursuing. There have been other examples of people being able to be refunded through their credit card companies and payment processors, but I personally have not had success with either. 

All of the investors in Scribe Media, seemingly, have pulled out. As per my source, there is still a lot to uncover. Hardly any of it is good. We will see what, if anything, they contain. But, until then, I end the Scribe Media Files with a final call to action. 

I send an open invitation to JeVon McCormick, Meghan McCracken, Tucker Max, or any of the other leaders who I’ve called out in these documents to come and tell their side of the story. Dispute my, and your former employees’, claims, if you dare. You’ve all viewed my LinkedIn profile. You all know about the Files. You all know where we stand. If you object, own up to it. I will give you a fair and honest platform to speak. If you don’t, the world has no choice but to take your silence as the acceptance of the Scribe Media Files as fact.

I eagerly await your reply.