To be perfectly honest, this incident has had a very detrimental effect on my mental health.
Being blackmailed is an extremely stressful and anxiety-inducing experience. I hope that none of you will ever have to go through it.
However, it must be said that this happened because I allowed it to. I have to take full responsibility for my own actions that led up to this.
Firstly, I harbored a deep dislike against Wesley, and so I didn’t make enough of an effort to do due diligence on Russell’s initial claims. I believed that the allegations were true because of my own biases.
Secondly, I allowed this stressful experience to bring out the worst in me. I said things that were embarrassing, and that painted me in a bad light - and this is what made me susceptible to blackmail in the first place. Moving forward, I will try my best to be more measured and judicious. Ideally, I should only say things in private that I would be comfortable repeating in public. This is what it means to be completely authentic and transparent. It is a difficult ideal to aspire to. But this is the only way to truly be fully protected against blackmail.
Thirdly, I have learnt that I should stay out of fights that are not my own. When Russell told me what Wesley had allegedly done to him, I was outraged, and I decided to get personally involved in a campaign to hold Wesley accountable - even though I acknowledged that Wesley had never scammed me personally. Not long ago, it was revealed that I had also been scammed for $13,000 by Robert Mercer, and the one similarity between these two cases is that I attempted to insert myself into a situation that I had no business getting involved in. I will learn from these mistakes and not put myself in similar situations in the future.
Finally, I have learnt that when one is in the public eye, it is inevitable that information about them will be easily and widely available to large numbers of strangers. While the vast majority of these strangers might have no ill intent, a small handful of them might be able to use this information for the purposes of exploitation and harm. For the majority of my career, I have kept a very low profile and have not sought public attention. I intend to go back to that. While poker is a hobby that I love, it is a very small part of my life. I have enjoyed the challenge of being on Hustler Casino Live, but it really makes no sense for me to subject myself to this kind of risk.