Jeopardy!: What happened when I got a furious email from one of the show’s biggest stars.

In just four games in January 2023, Yogesh Raut became an overnight Jeopardy! The subject line read, “Lying in your ‘Jeopardy!’ article.” In it, Raut accused me of “rationalizing the doxxing/harassment/cyberbullying of a POC,” and asserted that I had to “make up fake facts in order to cook up a victim-blaming narrative that justifies harming POC.” The next day, I received a second email, this time from a PR representative from a firm called Red Banyan, which, according to its website, specializes in “cancel culture.” It included a statement from Raut that the firm wished to have inserted into my story, as well as several bullet points further clarifying Raut’s criticism of Jeopardy! transformed Raut into a quizzing celebrity, so Wren only knew him as “this one guy who would be complaining to the scorekeeper all the time.” “It wouldn’t matter what the score was,” he told me. Both Short and Geeks Who Drink headquarters denied an interview request for this story, but in those same records reviewed by Slate, Short claimed to have “no record of Yogesh and myself ever communicating directly.” “I can remember Yogesh going on Christopher Short’s Facebook page, where he’s posting a photo of his baby getting baptized, and him commenting something like, ‘You’re an evil human being, how can you call yourself a Christian?’ with no reference to what the offense was,” said another former teammate of both Raut and Cahnmann, who spoke on the condition they not be named. One member of the team struck an informal “gentleman’s deal” with the company ensuring that Raut could continue to play at his local Geeks Who Drink pub trivia games, so long as he stopped publicly feuding with Short on social media, and didn’t attend Geek Bowl—where he might come into contact with Short—in the future.