I read Mo Troper before I heard him. An essay of his, published in some obscure corner of the internet, in which he ambitiously attempted to define his great passion, power pop, as well as explain his curious ambivalence to it.
The guy could write, I thought, and his enthusiasm for the genre was obvious in his encyclopedic knowledge. But his ambivalence really interested me. “My relationship to power pop is characterized by [an] ouroboros of sympathy and revulsion,” he wrote in “Power Pop is Camp,” published by Talkhouse. “I admire it and detest it.”
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I found his albums and I played them over and over and over. Turned out that Mo Troper is a superbly gifted maker of the stuff.
Now 33, he lives in Portland, Oregon. He’s released seven albums in all, or eight if you include the COVID-era project he made in his bedroom, a faithful, solo recreation of The Beatles’ Revolver.
In his music you can hear the influence of early Robert Pollard, Matthew Sweet, The Cars, and Fountains of Wayne. Pitchfork favorably reviewed a few albums, too, but for years Troper’s talents have been expressed in relative obscurity.
We first spoke in early 2023. He was unusually thoughtful. We discussed his ambivalence and painful self-awareness. He told me about a dream he’d had, where he plays a friend a new song of his, and his friend thinks that it sucks bad. “Well, I didn’t mean it,” dream-Troper says defensively. “And that’s the problem,” his dream friend replies. “You never mean anything.”
The dream stung because its meaning wasn’t cryptic. For the man who’d written “The Only Living Goy in New York,” he wondered if he pre-empted failure with a schtick of ironic detachment. Was he too apologetic for desiring a career making such music?
The public humiliation of Mo Troper happened suddenly, in March last year. And, per the inclination of practitioners of vigilante “justice,” the online mob swelled quickly and deliriously. And they almost killed him.
It was Friday the 15th and Troper was out jogging when he first got word. A text message from a friend interrupted his playing of Elvis Costello, and he stopped to read it. “Are you okay?” it read, ominously. Troper had no idea what it referred to.
He soon did: his ex-partner, musician Maya Stoner, with whom he’d broken up with two years previously, had begun alleging in a torrent of social media posts that he was “violent,” a “serial abuser,” and “transphobic.” Stoner, a respected indie rocker who records and plays as Floating Room, also unleashed increasingly personal information about Mo: conversations with his therapist that he’d relayed to her, his bipolar condition, his medications, his sexual kinks.
Troper felt sick. But as sick as he felt, he couldn’t quite appreciate the gravity of the situation – not yet, anyway. It was like the very beginning of COVID, he told me, when the threat still felt fuzzy and indeterminate. But then you go to the grocery store and see that half the shelves are empty.
“I sent the head of the record label, Lame-O, a text that was like, ‘Hey, this thing is happening. I don’t really know how crazy it’s going to get, but I just want to let you know,’” he says. “And he was like: ‘Shit, this is really bad timing. I’m about to get on a plane to Texas [for the SXSW festival], but let’s touch base on Monday.’
“So, I had these conversations with a lot of people along those lines, like, let’s sort of wait out the weekend and touch base on Monday. And then I think when Monday came around, those people had already made up their minds and there wasn’t really a dialogue — it was too late for that, you know? That was really disturbing. I mean, there’s a lot about it that was, and still is, really disturbing. To have people in my corner say, this isn’t a big deal, we’ll wait this out — and then to have their tenor change completely over the course of a weekend was really bizarre.”
On Sunday March 17, Stoner had posted that Mo was a “straight up sick in the head violent and depraved person.” On Monday, Mo’s manager, Luke Phillips, put out a series of tweets about his decision to “step away from being Mo’s manager,” writing that “I believe Maya. I hope everyone involved can take the steps to heal and grow from this, and I hope that those blindsided by these allegations like I was can find space to support each other through whatever they need going forward.”
Camp Trash, a band set to begin recording that Monday with Mo producing — members having arrived in Portland from Florida — abruptly dispensed with his services. Lead guitarist Keegan Bradford tweeted that “upon hearing Maya’s story, myself and the band have made the decision not to move forward with recording our album with Mo, and we hope Maya can find comfort and healing.”
The next day, Lame-O Records dropped Mo, writing that: “In light of recent information, we will no longer be releasing Mo Troper’s album Svengali. Refunds will be available at point of purchase. We are sending healing thoughts to Maya and victims of abuse everywhere.”
Even Mo’s PR reps, Grandstand Media, dropped him from their client list.
The mass dumping on, and cancellation of, Mo was duly reported by a rash of music-press outlets, N.M.E., Stereogum, Pitchfork, Brooklyn Vegan, etc. and it had the effect of solidifying nonsense. Coverage provided contact details for the National Domestic Violence Hotline. Despite his obscurity, Mo Troper became a trending topic on Twitter. A storm of savage hysteria was building. His public statement, flatly denying ever being abusive, seemed to mollify no one. “The transformation of my life happened over the course of a week,” he tells me.
Maya Stoner’s wild allegations, spread over months, ranged from accusing him of violence and abuse against multiple women, credit-card identity theft, forcing her to sleep on a kitchen floor for months (!), to being a “closeted incel” — and even labeling Mo a “Zionist” (a serious accusation during the Gaza war in Portland).
Stoner presented herself as privileged to have a platform for standing up to “dangerous” brutes like Mo, a perpetrator, she wrote, of “emotional, psychological, financial and sexual abuse.” In May she posted that “he has hurt others too but i’m only willing to tell my own story — not other victims” and “there are other victims and most of the time when men like mo abuse women the victims don’t have any platform at all.”
It was all recanted a few months later.
Mo Troper was preparing to release Svengali — his seventh album and the one, he thought, that might really cement him. But Svengali wasn’t coming out now. Not through Lame-O, anyway. On that Monday after South by Southwest, Troper spoke for an hour with Eric Osman, Lame-O Records’ founder and co-manager. He says this was about the sum of dialogue with most of his representatives. “I think that they weren’t totally convinced [about the allegations],” Troper says. “I could start to sort of sense them starting to delude themselves – I could sense that they were searching for a justification.”
That the label had abandoned Svengali was celebrated noisily online. Troper was now perceived as a sex criminal and emotional predator, and faced with the corresponding abuse, he naturally closed his social media accounts. But the actions of an innocent man cruelly besieged can look much the same as a guilty one, and friends told him to reconsider. “Everybody was like, ‘Oh, it looks really bad that you deleted your socials’. Okay, well, I’ll reactivate them,” Troper says.
He probably shouldn’t have, but when he did, he says he found proof of the hypocrisy that flourishes on social media. “There were people whose band’s Twitter accounts were publicly denouncing me, and then in private one of their members would be really sympathetic. And instead of being like, ‘suck my balls’ or whatever — which now I realize would have been a reasonable response to that — I was like ‘Oh, it’s so good to hear from you. Thank you so much for checking in.’ I was just so desperate to maintain any connection.
“I think that my immediate response was sort of to be as charitable as possible towards anyone that was willing to still talk to me, because I quickly went from being like ‘Shit, how can I salvage my career?’ to ‘How can I maintain some kind of support network?’”
A neutral observer would have seen the astonishing volume of abuse and his ex-partner’s vindictive airing of intimate details, and winced. A prudent observer might also have wondered if this wasn’t all very strange and unsatisfactory as evidence of wrongdoing, and if a grave and potentially dangerous injustice wasn’t being committed, on Mo.
I write ‘strange and unsatisfactory’ for good reason: in the hundreds of impulsively shared messages and filmed monologues by Maya Stoner, her paranoia (“people are banding together to silence me”) and erraticness were conspicuous. There were whole gulfs between what was being alleged and proof. Gossip was invoked as inviolable; indignation was expressed when evidence was asked for (“You don’t believe me because I’m an autistic sex worker and I’m indigenous and I’m a person of color”). Disordered thinking was attributed, conveniently, to her autism, and the inconsistencies of her stories to trauma (“Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder,” she wrote as having). The word “evil” was used several times to describe Troper, and his dreams, song lyrics, and even his press releases were offered up as “proof.”
A traumatized person may not always come across as strictly coherent of course — but in this specific and floridly bizarre case, there was certainly sufficient grounds for pause amongst those who participated in the savage hysteria that drove Troper to hospital.
Inflating this public mania was the well-intentioned but not always fair #MeToo creed: “Believe All Women” — a response to the very real, deeply ingrained problem of decades of abuse victims whose allegations were dismissed or cruelly diminished. But the infinite credulity that “Believe All Women” demands is hardly practical, nor compatible with principles of law, or journalism.
To briefly venture a motherhood statement, the safety and credibility of alleged victims must be considered, but it’s impossible for the law’s presumption of innocence to operate simultaneously with the dictate that all women must be believed. But this irreconcilability is frequently elided — a problem too complicated to consider. It’s much easier, as was the case with Mo Troper, to righteously dismiss anyone expressing neutrality, uneasy ambivalence or distaste for mob justice, as being immoral enablers of rapists.
I suspect that those who most ardently invoke “Believe All Women” accept, but rarely say, that the inevitable collateral damage that follows from such radically inflexible credulity is justified in the name of yanking the pendulum back. But if that’s the case, then say so: that you think injustice is inescapable but justified to correct for a perceived greater injustice.
Finally, the creed in its most literal form tacitly proposes that women are magically free from errant memories, biases and vindictiveness — that they are a special category of person wholly incapable of malicious agency. Which is weird, right? And defiant of reality.
Fine intentions mixed with tribal zealotry rarely ends well, nor is it a condition terribly receptive to criticism. But the indie music scene, and the press that serves it, swallowed the creed to believe Maya whole and would not — out of cowardice, pride or spite — admit error when Stoner’s allegations proved false.
There have been important scalps of genuine monsters: R. Kelly, Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein, to name just three. Each practiced the ritualized abuse of women, and benefited from explicit or tacit support for it.
But Mo Troper ain’t those men. Mo Troper was collateral damage.
In June last year, he sued Stoner for defamation.
Vindication — but not the erasure of serious damage to his health and reputation — followed in late September. That’s when the defamation case was privately settled, and Stoner retracted her myriad public allegations of abuse. In an affidavit, she admitted that those allegations had “impacted [Mo] and his career.” There was also a statement: “While there were some issues with our relationship and it was emotionally fraught for both of us at times, Mo was not abusive toward me as that term is legally defined. I will continue processing other aspects of our relationship in private. Troper and I have signed a mutual no-contact agreement, and I will not disparage him publicly again.”
When we requested to speak with Maya Stoner, she declined and sent this statement:
“Mr. Troper has already publicly stated almost a year ago: ‘We have resolved this matter and hope everyone will move forward from this situation.’ I ask your publication to respect the wishes of both parties involved.”
At least she sent that. Lame-O Records didn’t respond to numerous requests for comments, including emails and social-media messaging, our FedExing an invitation to talk, and reaching out to label owner Eric Osman on his cellphone. They also haven’t commented since Stoner recanted her allegations, based upon which they publicly and self righteously dumped Troper, without any attempt to establish veracity.
Presumably they are just waiting this out. Or are just plain old cowards.
At least they are living up to their name.
In late March last year, Mo Troper admitted himself to a Portland hospital, fearing that he might kill himself with an overdose of psych meds. He had briefly considered the survival of his career, but now he was simply considering his physical survival. A few weeks later, his younger brother posted: “Sick to my stomach at what has happened… Not to mention the SEVERE amount of emotional turmoil, distress and anxiety it has put on my brother.”
For a long time, Troper was scared to leave the house. He does leave it now, but with a painful self-consciousness. The weird, slanderous campaign against him — magnified by countless strangers — has contaminated the world a little. One might favourably settle a defamation case, and have poisonous slanders formally retracted, but one can’t assume that others know. Or care. The world will never quite be as it was.
“I remember that somebody posted about it on Reddit, and they were like ‘This has to be the worst music cancellation I have ever seen’,” Troper says. “And in some ways that’s really validating, because I’m in a state of paralyzing anxiety and now I’m like: I guess I’m not overreacting, the bear really is chasing me.
“But at the same time, you want somebody to just tell you it’s going to be OK. The first time I hung out with somebody who had something similar happen to them, I realized how starved for it I was. Hearing that it would be OK. That time’s your friend. Because it’s such an isolating experience. And I think the only people who can do that are the people who have been through something like this and are still alive, frankly.”
One of the stranger aspects of Troper’s public stoning was the use of his lyrics as evidence for his supposed wickedness. On social media, Maya Stoner would often cite and feverishly interpret his lyrics as if they were some kind of smoking gun. The public obligingly and blindly followed, of course, adding volume to the unfounded claims, applying bizarre literalism to selective Troper lyrics.
Lyrics may be confessional — or they may not be. They may, in fact, be entirely fictional. They may incorporate exaggeration, imagination or irony. This hardly needs to be said, you’d think.
“Suddenly, this record that is just a collection of love songs that sounds sort of like the Beatles, is like this concept album about being a serial abuser, or whatever the fuck people thought that it was,” Troper says.
“I think that there’s this misconception that all lyrical music is diaristic. And you look at a lot of artist bios now, there’s sort of this feigned vulnerability which I think is a lot of the time a marketing ploy. And I think that people just have this tendency to buy the narrative without question.”
This also applied to his former label. “[Eric Osman] really knew in intimate detail what these songs were about, and suddenly it seemed like he was incredulous towards all of that,” Troper says. “There’s a song on the record called ‘The Face of Kindness’ and he’s like, ‘Well, now I’m worried that anybody could misinterpret any of these songs, like, in ‘The Face of Kindness’, you say, ‘killing the face of kindness.’ ‘ Like, what are people going to think about that? And suddenly I had to justify my art to this person who had really encouraged me to go as deep inside of myself as possible, you know? I was now interrogated about lyrics. It was absurd.”
Maya Stoner has form. She’s been here before.
Speaking to Seattle’s KEXP about her band Floating Room’s single, “Dog,” in a June 2018 article (“Portland’s Floating Room Comes to Terms with a Toxic Relationship on “Dog” (KEXP Premiere)),” Stoner was frank: “This song is a document of physical and emotional abuse,” she told the station. The victim? Stoner. “It’s about an abusive relationship I was in with a much older man,” she said. A couple of weeks later, in a Portland Mercury interview promoting False Baptism, the album containing “Dog,” Stoner said: “I’m a survivor of sexual assault and an abusive relationship, physically and emotionally.”
This preceded her relationship with Troper.
As, of course, did her comments from two years before that, to the Portland Mercury — comments in which she plainly tied Floating Room’s 2016 debut album, Sunless, to what she’d suffered at the hands of an “abusive ex.” In plugging that album, Stoner told the news outlet: “These songs are not about heartbreak as much as they are about abuse of power.” She said she’d developed Sunless with her then-lover and Floating Room bandmate Kyle Bates, after cutting off contact with the unnamed abusive former partner. “Now that I was freed from the grip of his manipulation and brainwashing, I could finally look back and see the abuse for what it was,” she said.
Jump forward to Stoner’s 2024 rampage against Mo Troper, mind you, she even took a shot at Kyle Bates (whose solo project is called Drowse). “Kyle Bates of @drowseportland is an abuser too,” she wrote. And in a new shot at the ex she’d condemned in 2016 and 2018, she suddenly threw animal cruelty into the mix, tweeting that when she was 22, “I dated that famous guy and he abused me and my dog.”
In my experience, indie music scenes are possessed of great moral vanity — and yet this incident was distinguished by cowardice.
There was the immediate dumping of Troper, and a conspicuous (though not total) silence from those who knew him. People I attempted to speak to for this article, who accept that Troper was subject to a serious injustice, are still wary of speaking publicly lest they receive blowback, along the lines of “you’re a disgusting piece of shit for supporting an abuser but all of Mo’s supporters have been disgusting pieces of shit so that’s not surprising,” as one social media poster put it.
And so here’s one difficult and very adult lesson: that in the name of “courageous accountability,” cowardly injustice can be committed. One friend of Troper’s — who asked not to be named, naturally — told me: “I don’t think any of the outspoken people who were convinced Mo was an abuser learned anything from this. Maybe some of them did privately, but not in a way they would ever admit. Some of them have gone on to use Mo’s taking legal action against his accuser as further evidence of his abusive nature. There is essentially no way for Mo to truly win in this situation.”
Mo Troper eventually released Svengali independently. Pitchfork didn’t review it. Social media makes him sick now, and he can barely log on -– to which you might say “Fucking don’t!” but when you’ve made an album you love and have released it on your own, the poisoned waters of social media are still the ones you might need to promote it.
Acutely painful for Troper was the understanding that nothing he said might help. A beastly image of him had been made, broadcast, and then seemingly ratified by the retreat of his colleagues and the online fury. He was a victim of false allegations, but also a cipher for thousands of strangers. Mo Troper became a cultural voodoo doll.
“I feel like one of the main takeaways is that there’s nothing you can do once you’re in that timeline,” he says. “Like, ‘Oh, if only I had addressed this in my statement’ or something. It’s like there really is only one outcome no matter what.”
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