The Horror Writers Association just eliminated the position at the center of nearly every scandal engulfing the organization this year. HWA President Lisa Wood announced in a September 2 Facebook video that the Executive Director role, held by embattled Maxwell Ian Gold, has been dissolved entirely. It’s the biggest single move yet in a collapse Fandom Pulse has been tracking since early August, when the first trustee got removed for saying the wrong thing about AI.
Where This Started: The Girón Purge
On August 6, HWA stripped trustee Sèphera Girón of her position within hours of a column she wrote for the organization’s own member newsletter. Girón’s “In the Trenches” piece argued the group’s anti-AI culture had curdled into hypocrisy and witch-hunting, writing bluntly that “the real enemy isn’t your buddy who is using AI to make a book cover” and that “every week, the gatekeepers of horror writers have some new witch hunt.” HWA’s board response was swift and total: a statement calling the piece a failure to meet “the standards of care and support” expected of trustees, rejecting her characterization of AI critics as “Luddites and/or gatekeepers,” and removing her from the board effective immediately, all within the same news cycle the column went out.
That removal set the tone for everything that followed: an organization willing to move fast and publicly against its own elected leadership the moment internal dissent became visible.
The Election That Collapsed
Two weeks later, HWA’s 2026 presidential election had fallen apart entirely. The lone candidate, running unopposed, withdrew after allegations surfaced online, leaving the organization weeks from a vote with nobody on the ballot.
What made that withdrawal bigger than a single resignation was what it exposed underneath it. In the process of covering the fallout, horror author Brian Keene revealed that Brett Talley, the person who’d been quietly running HWA’s Grievance Committee, the body responsible for handling confidential member complaints about harassment, assault, and misconduct, was a former Trump judicial nominee who received a unanimous “Not Qualified” rating from the American Bar Association, one of only three nominees since 1989 to get that distinction. Talley had also been reported, per Slate and BuzzFeed coverage from 2017, to have made comments defending Nathan Bedford Forrest and “the early KKK,” falsely claiming Reconstruction-era Klan activity involved no violence or racism, and to have expressed support for a 20-year-old having sex with a 14-year-old. Multiple dues-paying HWA members said they had no idea he held that position at all. By mid-August, HWA quietly dissolved the entire Grievance Committee, framing it in a statement as an effort to align with peer organizations, after their own attorney reportedly told them the committee had no legal standing in the first place.
What Broke Open in the Weeks Since
The organization’s troubles didn’t stop with the election. On August 26, the operators of Creepaway Camp, a horror-fan summer camp business, published a formal public complaint against Gold directly. According to their statement, what began as camp organizers being excited about a potential HWA partnership turned into Gold pressuring them to let HWA “absorb” their event, using language suggesting the camp’s founder would effectively become “an HWA employee” and that HWA would “hold the Creepaway Camp trademark.” When they declined, they say they were met with what they described as gaslighting and hostility, and copied nine board members on their concerns without receiving a response. HWA’s board issued a statement acknowledging the complaint and promising an investigation, without commenting further.
Then came Angela Yuriko Smith, a former HWA President and the organization’s 2020 Mentor of the Year, who published a letter explaining why she’d resigned as president the previous October, reasons she says she’d kept quiet out of fear of being sued. Smith described discovering that sensitive member data, including home addresses and bank details, appeared to be exposed through the organization’s Wild Apricot membership platform, and says that when she tried to alert affected members, the organization’s focus shifted to criticizing her for disclosing the breach rather than addressing it. She wrote that she began recognizing patterns from her own history with domestic abuse in her interactions with Gold: “I began to recognize some of my interactions with the Executive Director as gaslighting and bullying.” Author Scott Couturier posted his own account of a years-long pattern with Gold, describing being used for free editing work, then discarded once Gold’s career took off, along with allegations of inappropriate personal conduct.
On the financial side, member Todd Keisling publicly pushed for HWA to release financial information beyond the legally required minimum tax filing, while researcher Michael Bailey, digging through HWA’s actual tax returns, found the organization paid Gold $98,642 in the fiscal year ending February 2025, the first year that specific figure was broken out in HWA’s filings.
Where It Stands Now
Wood’s September 2 announcement dissolving the Executive Director role is HWA’s most direct response yet, though it comes without an apology, without naming Gold in connection to any of the specific allegations against him, and without a clear account of what happens to the “very good work” she says the position was doing. She also used the same video to defend HWA’s non-disclosure agreements as “pretty standard,” a detail that’s likely to draw its own scrutiny given how much of this entire saga involves members who say they were pressured into silence.
An organization that opened its August by punishing a trustee for publicly criticizing internal culture closed the same stretch by dissolving the very position multiple former leaders and business partners say enabled the culture she was criticizing. Whether removing the title fixes what members say happened underneath it is the question HWA still hasn’t answered.
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When a cat finds himself with nothing to do, he licks his balls.
When a progressive finds themselves with nothing to do, they pulls some drama out of their ass.