Ed Piskor, the American alternative comics artist, passed away at 41, his sister Justine Cleaves announced on social media. Piskor, who was best known for works like ‘Hip Hop Family Tree’ and ‘X-Men: Grand Design,’ shared a note on Facebook hours before he died in which he refuted the allegations of sexual misconduct brought against him recently.
Comic Ed Piskor. (Photo: X)
Ed Piskor, the American alternative comics artist, passed away at 41, his sister Justine Cleaves announced on social media. Piskor, who was best known for works like ‘Hip Hop Family Tree’ and ‘X-Men: Grand Design,’ shared a note on Facebook refuting the some of the allegations of sexual misconduct brought against him recently.
Last month, a 21-year-old presenting cartoonist named Molly Dwyer accused the comics artist of attempting to “groom” her. According to reports, the two exchanged messages on Instagram in 2020 when she was 17 years old.
As per a report by Comics Beat, the screenshots from May 2020 conversation between them seemingly showed that Piskor was aware of her age. Despite this, he called her naughty girl” and a “good partner in crime,” before asking her, “you’re not a snitch are you?” He also reportedly sent her a photograph of a room in his room and invited her to crash if she ever came to “my side of the state for a few days.”
In the note shared on Facebook hours before his death, Piskor acknowledged that he should not have messaged her.
“I’m so sorry for being so stupid. I definitely should never have talked with Molly D. The language and optics look real dumb at best but I promise my innocence. Especially out of context it looks terrible. It was the height of Covid with no end in sight and I was alone through most of it . I was just happy to have the internet to talk to people with common interests. The way that I noticed her was when she would like a bunch of my picture at once. I wasn’t trolling Instagram randomly but I definitely shouldn’t have chatted with her when I found out how young she was,” he wrote in the note.
Piskor, however, said he would have never made any advances on her.
“There was no way I’d have a 17 yr old stay at my place. Maybe not 18 even. I was forward projecting to some unknown future where Covid lockdowns were finished and we could see people again. And it wasn’t even with sex in mind but simply saying that there’s a bed here to crash like the kindness that was given to me a bunch of times when I was starting out,” he wrote.
“When I said ‘naughty girl’ it was sarcastic after she told me some simple crime or infraction she committed. The whole pile of my dms she collected to show is just awful to look at. I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to offer professional favors to anybody or use my ‘position’ (what a joke) to get into anyone’s pants.”
Soon after Dwyer leveled allegations against him, another woman named Molly Wright accused him of “asking her for oral sex in exchange for giving her his agent’s phone number,” according to The Wrap.
Piskor refuted Wright’s allegations in the note. He said that her actions were “border criminal” and she should be held accountable for them.
“Molly Wright is a conundrum to me and her actions border criminal,” he said. “He said/ she said never looks good but none of what she said happened and I can’t believe she’d be so malicious and pile on like this. Now that I’m officially checked out I think my family has a civil lawsuit and she should be held accountable.
“She pushed this over the edge into ‘multiple women’ territory. It’s so corny. I absolutely never asked for a blowjob in trade for anything ever. She successfully made me look stupid and everybody accepted her word as fact. Citizens of the internet are playing such dangerous games with people’s lives.”
“I was murdered by Internet bullies. Massive amounts of them. Some of you out there absolutely contributed to my death as you were entertaining yourself with gossip. I wasn’t AI. I was a real human being. You chipped little bits of my self esteem away all week until I was vaporized. Maybe I’ll be able to haunt you dorks as a ghost. I come from Gypsy heritage and I’m definitely cursing a lot of you,” he added.
