Robert Evans is an American author, journalist, and podcast host who has reported on global conflicts and online extremism. A former editor at the humor website Cracked.com, Evans now writes for the investigative journalism outlet Bellingcat while working on several podcasts, including Behind the Bastards, Behind the Police, Behind the Insurrections, It Could Happen Here, The Women's War, and Worst Year Ever. In 2021 he published his first novel, After The Revolution, in a serialized podcast.
Career
Early career
Evans worked at the humor website Cracked as an editorial manager. In that position, Evans led a team that published "personal experience" articles. These articles fell into two main categories: journalistic pieces involving a variety of sources and personal narratives.
In 2016 Evans published his first book, A Brief History of Vice, about the formative effects of narcotics on the development and history of civilization.
Journalism
Evans has done reporting for the investigative reporting outlet Bellingcat between 2018 and 2021. He has reported on conflicts in Iraq, Ukraine, and Rojava, as well as on far-right extremists in the United States.
In the late 2010s and early 2020s, Evans produced a variety of content about 8chan, an anonymous message board, as well as the Gamergate controversy movement, a movement he describes as largely organically generated, with some direction given by white supremacists and extremists with long experience in radicalizing people on internet forums.
Following the March 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings, news outlets including Rolling Stone, Vox, and The Atlantic referenced Evans' warning about the nature of the shooter's manifesto. Evans argued that the manifesto was merely a red herring, full of references and memes meant to distract observers. Following the 2019 Poway synagogue shooting, Vox relied on Evans' work to explain how the shooter's manifesto again constituted a 74-page in-joke meant to further radicalize other 4chan /pol/ users.
In a 2020 Bellingcat article, Evans discussed the emergence and qualities of the boogaloo movement, a loose-knit group of individuals who express interest in fomenting American civil unrest. Evans says that he became aware of the boogaloo movement when he observed members at 2020 Virginia Citizens Defence League Lobby Day.
Portland George Floyd protests
Starting in late May 2020, Evans covered the George Floyd protests in Portland, Oregon. He began reporting in the first days of the protests by taking footage of protesters, counter-protesters, and police. His reporting on the protests was highlighted in the New York Times opinion section, which published an interview with Evans after the 50th day of protests about covering the events.
In July, Evans joined a class-action lawsuit against the City of Portland for police use of force at the protests. The suit is non-monetary, seeking instead "declaratory and injunctive relief — asking the court to find the plaintiffs within their rights and to order police to stop brutalizing and unlawfully arresting protesters." Evans joined freelance journalist Bea Lake and housing services specialist Sadie Oliver-Grey as a plaintiff. The suit alleges that police officers were unlawfully violent, stopped journalists from reporting, and interfered with the right to free speech. The suit describes incidents that occurred to Evans including the "police allegedly threatening him with arrest if he did not leave the area, shooting him in the foot with a tear gas grenade and spraying him, and repeatedly shoving him".
On Saturday, August 22, a right-wing protester wielding a baton broke Evans' hand while he was filming. In an interview with The Guardian, Evans said the right-wing counter-protesters "absolutely came prepared to fight", were "very aggressive from the jump", and were equipped with "knives, guns, paintball guns with frozen pellets, batons".