Two Row Times and “Credible” Mohawk slander and libel Skyler Williams
Pro-Indian Act newspaper colludes in CME’s smear campaign against #1492LandBackLane’s most high profile warrior.
By Real People’s Media and Yakowennahskats
On January 5th, 2022 the Two Row Times newspaper in Six Nations ran a full front page story with the title “Sexual assault allegations rock Land Back Lane and Spokesperson Skyler Williams.” The unfounded and slanderous claims made against Willams in the unsigned editorial are part of a longstanding pattern by editors Jonathan Garlow and Nahnda Garlow to target and discredit those Onkwehon:we who uphold their traditional systems and fight to preserve their lands.
The Two Row Times article was based upon claims made by a non-native TikTok creator named Kristin Helliwell aka Charlie Cruise/thecaptaincanuckofficial and the “Credible” Mohawk Entertainment (CME) in Tyendinaga which is owned and operated by Andrew Brant (Mohawk Turtle Clan) and Renee Brant (Mohawk Wolf Clan).
According to the Two Row Times, Helliwell claimed that “Williams was a sexual predator who used his position as spokesperson for LandBack Lane to coerce them [Helliwell] into a polygamous [sic] encounter.” An investigation of the actual facts of the matter however, do not bear out the slanders and libel made by the TRT, CME and Helliwell.
It goes unmentioned in the Two Row Times article that the “relationship” between the Toronto based Helliwell and Williams occurred entirely over the phone while he was in Wet’suwet’en territory and lasted for only a week. Helliwell initiated the contact with Williams, and sent him sexually explicit messages. When Williams did not immediately respond to the nudes, Helliwell replied that she felt rejected by his lack of response and prompted him for comment. After further solicitation Williams said that he wouldn’t be able to sleep with Helliwell unless she joined him and his girlfriend in a threesome. Helliwell then turned on Williams and in text messages told him to “step down” from LandBack Lane and “make it public… and own your shit or I’ll make you wish you had.”
Helliwell then made a Tik Tok video attacking Williams “on behalf of [unnamed] people who have asked me to come forward and speak about it.” In the video, Helliwell claimed that “Skyler uses his position to take advantage of women” and then alleged that Skler had “love-bombed” her. Helliwell then alleged that Skyer hadn’t disclosed his relationship status until later in their texting exchange and had “tried [i.e. hadn’t] to coerce me into sleeping with a woman.” It is worth repeating that Williams and Helliwell never interacted in person, did not have sex, and that from our review of the text messages, Williams did not solicit or initiate anything with Helliwell and nor did he try to coerce her.
After Helliwell’s TikTok started circulating, a number of Indigenous TikTok creators, used their platforms to decry Helliwell’s account as “chasing clout” and stated that Helliwell – who is a Slovakian immigrant with no Indigenous ancestry – has used similar tactics to target and harass other Indigenous men. TikTok user childrenfirstsociety said “I don’t appreciate my name being used to corroborate lies…. I saw the chat logs of yours and Sklyer’s conversation and what you are doing is absolutely wrong and you know it.”
A friend or family member posted a picture of Helliwell modelling on a bodybuilding stage and wrote “Kristin you went from being this, to running away from your family, shaving your head, living in a van making videos for tiktok… To make matters even worse you are also selling sexually explicit pictures and video of yourself on the porn site Only Fans… and you have the nerve to blame it on your family.”
Kristin Helliwell on stage and her alter ego Charlie Cruise living the van life.
The not so credible Mohawk
Helliwell’s TikTok video was the basis for a “Credible” Mohawk Entertainment (CME) Podcast released on January 3, 2022 that heaped slander and innuendo upon Williams and provided fodder for the Two Row Times article. In the hour long podcast, Mohawk Andrew Brant Sha’tekayenton and former white supremacist Nick LaMarsh were joined by Rastafarian rapper Cotreezy, and the three proceeded to opine on Skyler’s “abusive” behaviour as they got high smoking weed.
During the course of the podcast, all three men disclosed that they themselves had been accused of various unspecified forms of misconduct and abuse, but insisted that all allegations against them were unfounded.
The claims made in the rambling CME podcast against Williams were then used by the Two Row Times to paint a dystopic picture of illegal drug use, gang rape, and rampant “toxic masculinity” at #1492LandBackLane.
In the podcast, Brant claimed that he’d been looking at issues related to Skyler Williams “for a couple of years” as he alleged Skyler had long been “approaching women” and “using his fame” to “persuade women into sleeping with him.” For proof of these claims, Brant referred to the screenshots that Helliwell provided. However, those screenshots show that it was Helliwell making the sexual advances to Skyler and not the other way around.
Nick LaMarsh, a co-producer of the CME who describes himself as a ‘reformed’ white supremacist, then recounted a story that supposedly occurred at Kanonhstaton (a different land occupation site in Six Nations several kilometers away from LandBack Lane) in December of 2020. LaMarsh says he came upon two French speaking women who were crying and who seemed upset. When one woman left to go into a tent, LaMarsh said “the other girl looked at me and she just said ‘she [the other woman] was gang-raped last night, and when I woke up from the drugs I ran away.’”
LaMarsh says in the CME Podcast that he mentioned the issue with some unnamed people that he regarded as “deputies” but that he did not raise the issue with Skyler Williams. LaMarsh said that the people he spoke to “got really, really mad, and said “keep your mouth shut and mind your own business. So I did.” LaMarsh indicated that he was physically threatened into silence.
Another claim made in the podcast is by someone first described as “a woman out west” and then later named by Brant as Delee. Brant summarized Delee’s critique of Skyler as being that “He’s acting like one of them white men. One of them white guys, one of them pretendians, one of them hippies that go out there and they’re just there for the glory, womanizing and just love-bombing.” Brant notes in the podcast that these are the exact same charges made by “Charlie.” In a screenshot later released by the CME, Delee wrote to Brant that Sklyer “did the exact same thing to me… exact same” as he did to Helliwell. So in other words, Williams didn’t abuse her either.
Brant is at pains to point out that neither Delee nor Helliwell have been in contact with eachother, and that although he was “sure” more women would come out with stories about Skyler, the CME was only reluctantly bringing forth the news because unlike other Indigenous media companies, “we do real fucking journalism.”
The three men were quite aware of the possible implications of their podcast, as LaMarsh stated on three occasions in the podcast that he thought one likely result of the episode would be to provoke a racist backlash against Onkwehon:we people once the National News Media got ahold of the story and ran with it.
LaMarsh knows his subject matter well, as he freely admits that he “used to be affiliated with people who were part of white supremacist groups, and things like that.” In his biography on the Credible Mohawk Entertainment site, LaMarsh writes that he was “raised in a strict Christian upbringing with racially indifferent ideals.” He was a soldier in the Canadian Military Reserves for 4 years, and was “your typical white guy, covertly racist and a patriotic voter who only cared about himself…. [I] didn’t know anything about Indigenous history or culture – nor did I care.” Nick claims that over a period of three years, [I] “realized my systemic racist ideals and changed my reckless, disrespectful lifestyle.”
Since then, and under the guidance of Andrew Brant, Nick has begun speaking about the Kayenere:kowa – the “Great Law of Peace.” Staying true to his upbringing he told Onkwehon:we women actively participate in their own culture to “sit down,” shut up, and “go heal.”
Hoisted on their own petard
The claims made in the CME podcast do not hold up to scrutiny. In the days since the story broke, the CME has posted dozens of screenshots purporting to implicate their critics as being pro-abuse or “harbouring predators.” Other people have sent screenshots of their own to Real People’s Media and Yakowennahskats. These screenshots prove that the CME and Nick LaMarsh were lying and misleading their viewers.
On the podcast LaMarsh stated that he was threatened into silence and did no further investigation of the alleged “gang rape” at LandBack Lane. However, screenshots of text messages LaMarsh sent to the executive of the group Allies of Onkwehon:we on January 14th, 2021 tell a different story.
In the texts, LaMarsh says he spoke about the alleged gang rape to Jacqueline House (Cayuga Turtle Clan), and that he also contacted Skyler, who “asked me to speak to him directly when I hear shit, so I am.” LaMarsh stated that his interventions had results, and added, “the French girls haven’t been back, the drugs have been removed.”
To be clear on the facts of this situation, nobody has ever directly heard from the victim who was was allegedly raped. LaMarsh is the sole source of the information about the alleged gang rape, and even then, he says he never spoke to the victim, just her friend. No criminal charges were ever laid in the matter, and nobody we interviewed had any recollection of the presence of these “French girls.”
Real People’s Media is also aware that the Haldimand OPP detachment carried out an intensive investigation into the claims of an alleged rape matching LaMarsh’s account in January-February 2021 but were unable to find any evidence that it occurred. Real People’s Media also made its own detailed inquiries into the matter at the time and was unable to find any corroboration of LaMarsh’s claims. We suspect that LaMarsh’s information led to an OPP investigation into a false rape claim.
Did the CME orchestrate the attack on Williams?
In a screenshot conversation with the “Woman out West” (Delee) that is provided in a CME article published on January 7th, Brant says that he assured Helliwell that “I had her back, and everything like I did with you. Said that I was aware of him [Skyler]… and that it was time to expose it.” Brant indicates that Helliwell made the Tik Tok with the original attack on Skyler after he told her it was the time to do so.
So in other words, Brant orchestrated and timed the release of Helliwell’s TikTok as he collaborated with Delee over text message. This suggests that Helliwell was referring to Brant and Delee when she said in the video that she made it “on behalf of people who have asked me to come forward and speak about it.”
This would also explain why in another TikTok, Helliwell made reference to the CME podcast slandering Williams and showed a screenshot of it before the episode was released. In his podcast, Brant explicitly made clear that neither Delee “the woman out west” or Charlie/Helliwell knew each other, and thus claimed that there was no collusion or staging of the stories.
However, Brant’s texts clearly show that he decided when it was time to release the materials, and that he literally co-ordinated it. There is also a unified demand for the same end goal for Skyler to “own his shit” and “admit to his guilt” and to step down and be gone from LandBack leadership with his position to be replaced by a “two-spirit” person. As Brant put it in a Facebook live, “We can’t have leaders like that. Toxic ones, toxic men or women. It’s time for the two spirit people to start taking over, because this is some bullshit.”
The truth is putting on its boots
As Mark Twain once said, “a lie can travel halfway around the world, while the truth is putting on its boots,” and this was the case with the Two Row Time’s article which has been read over 9000 times since it came out. The editors did have to make some corrections to the online version of their article, changing the allegations against Skyler to ones of “sexual misconduct” rather than “sexual assault.”
A number of Onkwehon:we women reached out to the CME with their concerns over their coverage of the issue. Their comments and messages were then recorded, screenshotted, and re-broadcast by the CME in attacks against the women, telling them to “sit down” and “go heal” and accusing them of being abusers themselves, or of “harbouring abusers.” One of the women, Jacquelyn House (Cayuga, Turtle Clan) wrote in response: “You two men are trying to silence me. You’re like a tornado spiralling back and forth. On one side you are welcoming people’s [comments] to satisfy your ego and on the other side trying to destroy everything in your path when you don’t like our words. You want to talk about “Women abuse”? You and Nick are doing everything [you’re] accusing everyone else of doing.”
In Tyendinaga, the Roskenrakehte:kowa Kanenhariyo issued two video statements on the matter. In the first video, he spoke about the phenomenon of social media influencers “shit-talking other people” and using misleading and untrue allegations to gain clout and social media followers.
In the second video, Kanenhariyo apologized for not having spoken out earlier about the actions of Andrew Brant Sha’tekayenton. Over the course of an hour and half, Kanenhariyo recounted a long history of Brant’s divisive and destructive behaviour.
Since Kanenhariyo’s videos, the CME has removed – without explanation – their original YouTube podcast smearing Skyler Williams, and also taken down the YouTube videos in which they attacked the Onkwehon:we women for responding to them. They have also issued a statement saying that “we’re done speaking on the matters that have been recently released, and everything that has been mentioned will be taken care of within the Nation.”
Stay tuned for Part 2 of this Article, coming soon.
