# Beware! Steven Boutwell, aka Huck/Huckstah, Admin of /r/Vagabond subreddit



## Scat (Apr 13, 2021)

This is a warning post for the traveler underground about u/huckstah on reddit, also known as Steven "Huck" Boutwell or Hobo Huck. You might recognize him as the person who organized the Vagabus/Volunteers on Wheels, or know him as the “founder” of the subreddit r/vagabond. I was a member of this project for three months. I was also a moderator on r/vagabond for a while recently (u/jouscat, formerly u/midairdodge). I will provide information for you to digest, and you can take it as you will. I'm not here to argue or slander/libel, merely to educate those willing to heed the warning.











_To Huck and Co.: _if you would like to sue me over any of this information being made public, feel free to message me on here to obtain necessary information. I would be delighted to go to court with you. Also, feel free to "greenlight" me or come after me yourself. You can have fun attacking the character of myself and your other victims if you'd like, but that won't change what you did. You can manipulate and convince whomever, but you're the one who has to live with the guilt.

Without further ado...

For full disclosure, here are screenshots of our staff chat on Discord as the events unfold. It continues past this point, but I will be summarizing the major takeaways throughout this bulletin. These screenshots show our intentions to try to have Huck removed as head moderator of r/vagabond, aka the mod coup. As much as he would like to believe this is about petty internet points and fame, we were trying to protect the public from becoming future victims of his. We wanted to do so quietly, but since he has fought tooth and nail to drag this "drama" to the public, then we will have to take a less tactful approach to keeping people safe.

Here is a folder of some of the evidence that our staff team was given. We were not provided with absolutely everything, and some additional details were word-of-mouth over the phone and in person, as I am now in close contact with his most recent victim, having driven cross-country to ensure her safety. Take it as you will. I know not everyone will be convinced, but do be careful, at least. Huck is mentally unstable and violent.

*TLDR;;*

Huck touched me inappropriately while I was presumably unconscious. We have reason to believe he has done this to other women because of his own admission.
Huck burned my toe with a lighter just for fun.
Huck held his ex against her will for six weeks in Alabama, threatening to harm her with firearms or to hurt himself if his mother tried to help her escape. He was very manipulative and even lit his ex's clothes on fire to try to prevent her from getting to the bus station to get away.
Huck physically assaulted his ex on multiple occasions. She had a Temporary Order of Protection (restraining order) filed against him, but a moderator of r/vagabond tipped him off, and he fled the state before signing it. He has a warrant out for his arrest from Montana for domestic abuse.
Huck has threatened violence against many others, including Pokebert (u/2717192619192).
Huck has continually scammed many people financially and does not repay debts.
Huck has spread false rumors about anyone who speaks up about him and bans any dissenters. He plays the victim while attacking others. He creates fake accounts to harass himself, and has done such for years.
Huck has a long history of being mentally and emotionally abusive to anyone close to him. He behaves irrationally and is worse while under the influence of various drugs.
Huck is discriminatory towards members of the LGBTQA+ community and those that are differently-abled.


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## Pokebert (Apr 13, 2021)

On January 28th, Jouska and I began to message each other on Discord with concerns about Huck’s behavior publicly. He seemed to be harassing a woman, seemingly an ex of his, who was alleging physical abuse and financially scamming her. Having firsthand experiences with Huck’s abusive and violent behavior before, we both reached out to her to try and understand more about what was going on.

What we found out next was disgusting and shocking - Huckstah had violently abused this woman, and just a couple days prior had been forced out of their employee housing because multiple witnesses reported the domestic violence. In addition, as moderators for the sub, we were able to see that he was constantly harassing her and doxxing her to the subreddit - specifically, he posted pictures of them as if they were still together, and made posts with her full name in the title to intimidate her.

After this, 6 out of the 8 moderators of the subreddit came together in a private Discord chat to discuss these issues and how to handle them - specifically, approaching the admins of Reddit.com to have Huckstah removed from his position of ultimate authority over the subreddit. He had threatened multiple users before, doxxed one, and had physically and/or sexually assaulted two young women that he met through the subreddit and groomed into thinking he would be a travel mentor to them. I made a whistleblower post under an old alt account, and their admins told us to start a dialogue and provide our evidence, as law enforcement was actively involved in trying to locate and arrest Huck at this point.

Unfortunately, one of the moderators (u/Willingplane) went totally rogue. From the very moment she began to respond to our group chat days after we’d already contacted the admins, she was combative and dismissive of the claims, claiming that they were a fabrication meant to harass Huck. We provided this staff member the same evidence we did every other moderator:

A video of Huck taunting and verbally abusing the victim, sent after she’d come forward to us, where he also admits to physically abusing her.
Emails between her and Huck, where he admits to the abuse in detail (such as how he had hit her head into a bed and left marks on her).
Her Temporary Order of Protection paperwork, filled out to the police and courts of the locality
Photos of the huge bruise he left on the victim (the photos were taken by the officer)
A phone call he made to his lawyers where he made violent threats to the victim, and then sent her a recording of it. He claimed this was a “joke” at the time, though it’s hard to imagine it as one considering he quickly escalated into physical abuse directly after this.
Audio recordings of him screaming at her and verbally abusing her

Of course, none of it mattered. When the restraining order was signed off by a judge and came in, we provided her the full and uncensored paperwork - she then called the wrong police department to verify it, and since they were in a different county, they had no record of it. This moderator came back to us gloating that we were lying, that this was all a fraud, and we then gave her the correct police department’s phone number to contact (before promptly kicking her from our private chat). This can all be seen around picture 100 in Jouska’s link above to our moderator chats.

She screenshotted every single message and every single bit of evidence and gave all of it to Huck immediately - which alerted him that the police were actively searching for him in Bozeman, allowing him to skip town and avoid being served and arrested. He immediately left to Florida and bought a boat, publicly declaring he’d sail into international waters.

Huck removed everyone except for her and another holdout, and then retaliated against every moderator involved in extremely disgusting ways.

For myself, he removed the subreddit’s partnership with r/Runaway and made a pinned moderator post full of slander, lies and false accusations about me and the subreddit. This included claiming that I was insane and unstable because I had been hospitalized for suicidal ideation as a 16 year old, or that I taught teens to escape mental institutions, because of a post I made as a 16 year old fearing that I would be sent to gay conversion camp. He even dug up old posts from when I used to believe in the NoFap BS as a teenager. Alongside this, he made other posts making fun of me for being on the autism spectrum and posting a video of me catching a shiny Pokémon called Absol, and claiming I was a pedophile.







(He also brought up a former project I was once a part of 3 years ago called the Sudomemo Files, where I had joined a cancel culture witch-hunt against a man and led a small movement accusing him of inappropriate and pedophilic behavior based on out-of-context screenshots. What Huck failed to mention was that I very publicly retracted my involvement with it in 2019 and made amends to the person I’d harassed - I was so dedicated to making things better with that person, we became good friends and road dawgs in late 2020.)
Finally, he accused me of being a pedophile who ran a sub for other pedophiles to find young girls and kidnap them. He brought up an incident from 2019 - a 14 year old girl was kidnapped by a predator who groomed her from the subreddit. Of course, Huck neglected to mention that we’d caught the predator a year before it occurred and reported him to both the FBI’s CyberTipLine and Reddit’s administration. Thankfully when this kidnapping occurred, the girl was found the same day and returned home unharmed. I have personally been in touch with the family since then, and provided their lawyers evidence that was used to help convict him; because of our efforts to try to catch and report him to the authorities in 2018, we were able to help give leads on other women he may have hurt prior. I’m on good terms with the family; her parents even made a post to r/runaway afterwards, which we kept pinned for every user to see for 3 months.





Enough about me, though, because I feel what he did to another friend and fellow moderator was even worse. I’ve gone ahead and included a testimony for him below:

One of our moderators, Eckhart (u/NameslessAndHomeless), was a homeless undocumented traveler, and Huck knew about his citizenship status. Once he realized Huck knew of his involvement/support in the moderator coup, he immediately left his homebase at the time to escape north; he feared that Huckstah or Willingplane would call ICE on him to retaliate. Huck knew his location due to a comment exchange on a post of his, and Huck specifically asked about the town he was in.
That decision saved his life. Just less than 24 hours after Huckstah removed every moderator EXCEPT for him, a sudden ICE raid was conducted on an encampment in this very small town - a town that hadn’t seen ICE come by for years, if ever. Locals were told that they’d gotten an anonymous tip about undocumented individuals in the area.

I have to hand it to Huck, he’s very good at hurting people. I was left in a state of anxiety for weeks afterwards, Eck was very shaken, and Jouska still carries the trauma of being his victim. As do all of the other individuals he’s damaged.

Reddit Admins were almost no help at all. We patiently messaged them and kept them updated for a whopping 3 weeks, all the while Huckstah kept escalating things; it wasn’t until he made the pinned witch-hunt post that they intervened by suspending his account for 3 days, a mere slap on the wrist. They refused any help beyond that, saying that this was a matter for law enforcement and claiming “both sides just need to calm down” — never mind that a head moderator of a community of 1million users was breaking the law through their website.

Even with the amount of detail I’ve put into this, I still feel that I’ve hardly scratched the surface of what occurred the last few months. r/Vagabond has suffered without proper moderation since Huck nuked his mod team, and he constantly goes out of his way to talk shit about us and call us pedophiles or stalkers. We’ve accepted that there’s nothing left we can do for the community we cared so much about with him at the helm, but we refuse to accept a reality where he can continue to hurt and traumatize people unabated. Where he can sexually assault women and violenty abuse his partners, physically assault people, threaten LGBTQ and neurodivergent individuals, etc.

Avoid Steven “Huck” Boutwell at all costs. He is dangerous and a menace to the traveler community.


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## iamwhatiam (Apr 13, 2021)

Wow. That is quite the read. I've only met him while up in Alaska and never really hung out with him but there were a couple things that happened that summer that kind of rubbed me the wrong way. He has a profile on here but I don't think he visits STP much these days.

I hope he can eventually work out his issues and the hurt he causes others, cause that's not a good look. Sounds like the drugs/alcohol do not help them.


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## MrArmenian (Jun 13, 2021)

This is deeply disturbing. I've been using the vagabond sub for quite sometime now and have talked to huck on a few occasions. I can't believe I haven't heard of this until now. I'm just not too sure what to think at the moment. I'm in shock.


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## Pokebert (Jul 4, 2021)

Just as a heads up, Huck and Willingplane have officially banned mention of this website on the forums now. We caught them in the act


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## CouchPunx (Jul 6, 2021)

Pokebert said:


> View attachment 65916
> Just as a heads up, Huck and Willingplane have officially banned mention of this website on the forums now. We caught them in the act


yeah i saw he's been posting a bunch of shit in r/vagabond and thought he had been booted. If I troll all his posts I'm assuming I'll get banned pretty fucking quick, right? I've been looking for an excuse to quit that awful group.


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## Anxious86 (Jul 6, 2021)

CouchPunx said:


> yeah i saw he's been posting a bunch of shit in r/vagabond and thought he had been booted. If I troll all his posts I'm assuming I'll get banned pretty fucking quick, right? I've been looking for an excuse to quit that awful group.


Most likely, yes. It doesn't take much effort to get banned. I was banned and never even commented on the sub.


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## CouchPunx (Jul 8, 2021)

yeah they wouldn't even let me post my shittalk, not banned yet, though, as far as I can tell, I'll keep trolling him until i am


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## NomadFisherman (Jul 26, 2021)

So now there sensoring post asking about huck only letting one side out. They even got him banned and won't explain why, this is a commie type action if he is guilty let him speak I'm really passed about this. Sensoring of a guilty person is stupid and makes you look like a dictator. Your take over of R/vagabond is absolutely against its principals and tour trying to hide it. I'll be at the jamboree in august


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## NomadFisherman (Jul 26, 2021)

Most of the shit posted is inconclusive at best wtf they got him banned from reddit and took over his sub I have proof. There trying to cover it up and deleted my post about it. This shit is kinda suspect.


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## Pokebert (Jul 26, 2021)

NomadFisherman said:


> So now there sensoring post asking about huck only letting one side out. They even got him banned and won't explain why, this is a commie type action if he is guilty let him speak I'm really passed about this. Sensoring of a guilty person is stupid and makes you look like a dictator. Your take over of R/vagabond is absolutely against its principals and tour trying to hide it. I'll be at the jamboree in august


Dude, be angry at u/Willingplane and the other new mods. We haven’t touched that subreddit in months, ever since writing this post.
And because everyone keeps asking and accusing me — no, I have no idea why Huck got permanently banned. What I CAN tell you is that he was suspended twice prior to his final suspension, and both of those times it was because he made massive mod posts witchhunting me/dropping my full name/trying to get people to brigade r/Runaway.
I have no clue what the final nail in the coffin was. But knowing Huck, he probably did some stupid and crazy shit again to deserve it. Or hell — maybe the admins finally agreed to suspend him for being a huge fucking predator.


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## Matt Derrick (Jul 26, 2021)

NomadFisherman said:


> So now there sensoring post asking about huck only letting one side out. They even got him banned and won't explain why, this is a commie type action if he is guilty let him speak I'm really passed about this. Sensoring of a guilty person is stupid and makes you look like a dictator. Your take over of R/vagabond is absolutely against its principals and tour trying to hide it. I'll be at the jamboree in august


I'm a bit confused by your statement. First off who is 'they'? Us? StP? the mods of /r/vagabond? it's unclear if you're criticizing us or the reddit folks.

personally, i have nothing to do with this other than running the platform this thread was posted on.

also, no one here (that i'm aware of) has taken over their reddit. all the previous mods were banned by huck as far as i know.



NomadFisherman said:


> Most of the shit posted is inconclusive at best wtf they got him banned from reddit and took over his sub I have proof. There trying to cover it up and deleted my post about it. This shit is kinda suspect.



actually, as far as i know, none of that posted info had anything to do with his account being banned, but i could be wrong. his account was banned like, months after this was posted.


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## NomadFisherman (Jul 26, 2021)

So any person who posted anything on this page will now be summoned. If you said something on hetjere or r/vagabond your liable for comment. if you do not wish to be heald liable this is your chance i/ we have had enough and will pursue litigation with out proof. You are more then welcome to provide proof to [email protected]. if not expect legal ramifications


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## Matt Derrick (Jul 26, 2021)

NomadFisherman said:


> So any person who posted anything on this page will now be summoned. If you said something on hetjere or r/vagabond your liable for comment. if you do not wish to be heald liable this is your chance i/ we have had enough and will pursue litigation with out proof. You are more then welcome to provide proof to [email protected]. if not expect legal ramifications



let me be the first to tell you to straight fuck off with your judge and jury shit. no one here gives a fuck. we said what needs to be said, and that's the end of it. let people decide for themselves, we don't need or want your stupid internet drama here.


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## Anxious86 (Jul 26, 2021)

NomadFisherman said:


> So any person who posted anything on this page will now be summoned. If you said something on hetjere or r/vagabond your liable for comment. if you do not wish to be heald liable this is your chance i/ we have had enough and will pursue litigation with out proof. You are more then welcome to provide proof to [email protected]. if not expect legal ramifications


I don't know who you think you are, but you aren't.


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## iamwhatiam (Jul 26, 2021)

where will i be summoned to? can i request the hearing to take place in the southeast around december??? i was planning to drive cross country then, but fuck it....if i can get a free plane ticket then count me in, man!


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## Scat (Jul 28, 2021)

As I stated before, feel free to reach out to me if there will be a court case with Huck present. I would be delighted to attend. Having him legally held accountable for his actions instead of fleeing into the ocean like a little bitch would be great.


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## Yerbiologicalfather (Aug 1, 2021)

I discovered this site through this post and I'm very glad I did. I was just banned from the vaga subreddit this evening for asking about huckstah and then posting a link to this in the comments after I found it. How eye opening. Hucks always acted unprofessional as a mod imo and not much of this shocks me. I just hope something can be done. I love you that sub and it was helpful in my past as well as the present. Maybe STP will be my new home.


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## Dusk (Aug 10, 2021)

Just like some others in this thread, I learned about STP from r/huckstah. I hope anyone who found themselves victim to any of the accused violence is able to find safety and fully heal. Thank you for posting your story.


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## Deleted member 31507 (Sep 16, 2021)

Appreciate this post, I've mostly avoided /r/vagabond for years because of him and the kind of people he enables there. I recently got perma-banned on that sub because I bullied him for being a misogynist to someone who posted selfies on that sub.


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## BVNNY (Nov 18, 2021)

I don't know what to say about all this except "what the fuck".


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## Matt Derrick (Jun 7, 2022)

So in the latest news in this drama fest, Steven Boutwell, aka Huckstah, has filed an 'abuse' complaint with the hosting company (Linode) that the StP website resides on:



> Hello,
> 
> We've received a complaint about content that is being hosted on your Linode:
> 
> ...





> Below is the report we received:
> 
> Reporter: Anonymous Reported URLs:
> 
> ...



Yes, his 'legal team'. Last I heard this guy was actually on the run from the law, so fat chance of that.

My response:



> The mentioned url does not violate any law or terms of use by Linode. We will not be removing the content.



I'll update this thread if anything else relevant occurs.


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## Scat (Jun 7, 2022)

He has also been reporting the content on the Google Drive link so several pages are down. I have this backed up multiple times across many platforms and hard files, so I will reinstate them as soon as I am able.


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## Pokebert (Jun 7, 2022)

Makes you wonder who inevitably found the thread and told Huck they didn’t want to associate with a known sexual abuser.

If you’re reading this Huck, just know that we’re off living our happiest lives without thinking about you. 🙂


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