Joe Arden, the king of smut, built a career seducing women with his voice. Then, a sexting scandal turned BookTok against him.

Like the nature of desire itself, the question of what makes a voice sexy is highly subjective. But there’s no denying that a large number of people, mostly women, found Joe Arden’s voice to be exceedingly hot: smooth, insistent, husky, occasionally dropping to a seductive growl.

Arden’s voice made him one of the most popular romance audiobook narrators of his generation. Fans called him “the king of fuck” for the attention he lavished on the word, stretching it like honey. Even more swoon-worthy, his website declared him an “advocate for equality and consent” — a stance he also advertised on his social-media accounts, along with the fact that he restored vintage motorcycles and fostered rescue pit bulls.

Arden’s face, on the other hand, was a mystery. During public appearances, the 42-year-old wore a mask, a baseball cap, and sunglasses. In most videos of him reading out loud from his home studio, the camera stays trained on the microphone. Arden worked under a pseudonym, which isn’t uncommon in the romance world. His periodic meet-and-greets and interviews cultivated an air of intrigue and devotion to his craft, which, he told Men’s Health, was sometimes inspired by real-world trysts. “When I’m in the throes of passion with a woman that I’ve been pining over for years, and I get to tell her that I love her, or I want to fuck her, it comes from a primal place,” he said.

Fans couldn’t get enough. “Smut audio always was cringe to me,” a Reddit user wrote on one of the hundreds of gushing threads dedicated to romance narrators. “Then I heard Joe Arden and it blew my world apart.”

Another fan rhapsodized about Arden’s narration of “Joey,” a dark Mafia romance. It “should be illegal,” they wrote. “The way he says ‘fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuccccck.'”

Arden parlayed his talent into a decadelong career. He’s narrated hundreds of romance books, including some by best-selling authors like Lauren Blakely, Vi Keeland, Meghan March, and R.S. Grey. He’s won or has been a finalist for awards from the Audio Publishers Association, the Society of Voice Arts and Sciences, and AudioFile. Some people claimed that Arden’s talent made up for lackluster characters or mediocre writing: His “deep, sexy voice almost lets the listener forgive Lincoln’s oft-repeated references to the state of his package,” an AudioFile review of March’s book “Richer Than Sin” reads. Arden even became an author himself, cowriting 2021’s “How to Get Lucky” with Blakely and writing his own book, “The Chameleon Effect,” about an ambitious young actor who fakes an Irish accent to seduce a fetching costumer. In 2018, he and his wife cofounded a small audiobook-production company, Blue Nose Audio, which quickly became a popular choice for authors eager to have Arden voice their male leads.

At times, the Arden fandom edged into something like Beatlemania. BookTok — the corner of TikTok obsessed with all things literary, particularly romance — couldn’t stop talking about him. Videos of fans meeting Arden have hundreds of thousands of views. In one TikTok posted in May 2023, two women at a convention waiting their turn to speak to him giddily chant “Daddy Joe! Daddy Joe!” and one mimes letting him choke her.

In early March, however, Ardenmania hit a stumbling block. Several posts on an anonymous online forum called Tailgram alleged that Arden had sexted and emotionally manipulated authors and fans — aggressively soliciting nudes, for instance, and becoming petulant if he didn’t get them. Arden has conceded in public statements that some of the allegations are true but argued that while the interactions were inappropriate because of his marital status, they were consensual. B-17 was not able to independently verify the allegations on the Tailgram thread.

It was impossible to ignore the irony that someone who’d so aggressively positioned himself as a “good guy” was now being accused of mistreating women. Some authors whose Arden-recorded audiobooks had yet to be released began scrambling to get out of their contracts with Blue Nose; in many cases, the negotiations are ongoing. Others are weighing the cost of rerecording their books, while some narrators have said they’ll no longer work with the company. BookTok influencers apologized for platforming Arden and asked authors for guidance on how to support them while not promoting someone accused of sexual misconduct. “We believe women here,” one influencer said. “And we are not going to stand for this shit.”

For many Arden fans and authors who’d collaborated with him, there was a deep sense of betrayal. Romance is, in many ways, a genre created for and by women: a safe repository for both their money and the most private versions of themselves. “When this type of thing happens,” the popular romance author Brynne Weaver said, “it makes us realize maybe it’s not the environment that we thought it was.” Maybe the man in whom they’d placed so much trust, and whose voice had fueled so many fantasies, wasn’t who they thought he was either.

Last year, a promising new romance author reached out to Blue Nose Audio and received a reply from Joe Arden. She had just published a buzzy novel, and she and Arden set up a Zoom meeting to discuss his narrating her audiobook.

The author, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of professional repercussions but whose identity is known to us, said that at the time she knew “absolutely nothing” about audiobooks.

She said Arden began quizzing her about whether she knew how “famous and popular” he was. (She did not.) “I’m Joe Arden,” she recalls him telling her, seemingly in disbelief. He had her pull up TikTok on the call and follow him. He told her that some audiobooks weren’t successful because they didn’t have “good voices,” dropping names of people she understood to be his competitors.

Then, the author said, Arden started to read through her “trigger list” and asked her to describe the corresponding scenes. Trigger lists, which are common in romance, usually appear either at the front of a book or on an author’s website. They allow people who might be sensitive to certain things — kink, rape, or miscarriage, for example — to decide whether a book will be upsetting for them to read.

Arden’s ask made her “highly uncomfortable,” the author said, because “they aren’t things you bring up in normal conversation.” She refused, despite his pressing the issue.

At one point, the conversation turned to rates. The author learned that Arden would charge $15,000 to record her short novel. (Recording a full-length novel typically costs between $3,000 and $8,000.) Fifteen thousand was a no-go for the author. After the call, she and Arden exchanged a few emails, but the author ultimately told Arden she’d chosen to work with another company.

The new author’s experience was, as it turned out, part of a wider set of concerns about Arden. In late February, a group of women in the romance community — both authors and fans — began privately comparing notes. In March, they started a thread on Tailgram, a little-used social platform meant to host anonymous discussions. (The Tailgram thread has since been deleted, but multiple people shared screenshots with us and screenshots have circulated on TikTok.) In the thread, at least eight people who identify themselves as female authors and romance fans wrote that Arden sent them sexual messages, emotionally manipulated them, and, in their view, overcharged or strong-armed them in business negotiations.

One person who identified herself as a romance author wrote that “an innocent/professional interaction” with Arden turned into sexting, with him soliciting photos and videos. If Arden “didn’t get what he wanted, he made me feel awful,” she continued. “If he didn’t get the reaction he wanted, he’d use the ‘I’m being vulnerable’ and then get short and snappy. It got to a point where I had anxiety attacks whenever his name popped up on my phone and could not figure out how to get out of the situation.”

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Eventually, she said, he stopped trying to contact her. “I hear stories, I speak with other women who have had similar experiences and it can’t keep happening,” she wrote.

The Tailgram posts suggested Arden used the guise of vulnerability more than once. One woman wrote that she’d been a member of Audio Attic, Arden’s Patreon, which lets fans pay a monthly fee to support his work. (Membership tiers range from $15 for the “friends with benefits” level to $60 for the “soulmates” level, which offers sneak peeks of new Arden audio.) She wrote that after meeting at a signing event, she and Arden began messaging each other on Instagram and eventually started sexting. Arden “would play hot and cold,” she said, “oftentimes abruptly ending conversations if I asked too many or the wrong question.”

“When he would send me voice messages, if I didn’t give him the reaction he wanted (i.e. falling all over myself to tell him how amazing he is), he would get pissy and claim he was being ‘vulnerable’ and I wasn’t respecting that,” she added. When she called him out for the same behavior he’d accused her of, “he would say it’s different or that he couldn’t carry my vulnerability.”

In one sexting conversation, she said, Arden used a word that made her laugh. He “threw a fit,” the woman wrote, “and told me that having criticism over the word he used was ‘unsettling.'” The whole experience “was truly a master class in gaslighting,” she wrote.

Others said on Tailgram that Blue Nose and Arden had been aggressive and demeaning during contract negotiations — behavior they hadn’t expected from someone who’d made respect, consent, and positivity part of his personal brand. (The phrase “You matter” appears on the homepage of Arden’s website and is emblazoned on a banner he sometimes takes to romance conventions.)

“I reached out to Blue Nose Audio about a potential romance book. At first, nothing seemed odd or strange,” one woman wrote. After a few emails, Arden suggested they get on the phone. “He was instantly aggressive,” she wrote. “He was irritated with me that I had so many questions, and pressured me that ‘the only way I was going to have a GOOD romance audiobook was if I was ready to pay over 10k for it.'” At one point, “he literally said, ‘You’re lucky I’m taking the time out of my day to speak with you about this,'” she wrote. The interaction “left me feeling discouraged and small.”

The Tailgram thread spread to TikTok, where, on March 11, a romance influencer named Angela posted screenshots. She said she’d heard whispers about Arden’s behavior for years and used the hashtag #believevictims; as of July, her video had more than 579,000 views. In the following days, hundreds more videos emerged about the allegations and the need to support the women coming forward. Male narrators jumped in to declare that they stood with Arden’s accusers. “Own your shit, shut the fuck up, and be better,” a narrator named Aiden Snow said in a video clearly directed at Arden. A few Arden defenders also chimed in, including a woman who called those turning against him “sheep.”

It didn’t take long for the allegations to make their way to Arden and Blue Nose. On March 12, Arden posted a statement on his personal Instagram account denying that he’d engaged in “non-consensual, coercive exchanges with anyone.” He also paused subscriptions to his Patreon and stopped posting there.

Arden acknowledged to us that he had sexted with women, expressing his “deep regret for entertaining and pursuing online relationships outside of my marriage.” But he maintained that his actions were consensual and that he didn’t force anyone into intimate conversations. “My working name of ‘Joe Arden,’ has always been just that, a professional persona that labeled my career,” he added. “With that said, I am a flawed man who made mistakes and it pains me that my personal choices have affected my family, my co-workers, and a company that has done so much good for our community and the authors within it.” Soon after the allegations surfaced, Julie McKay, Arden’s wife and Blue Nose’s cofounder, told us that she was “still grappling” with their “personal and professional ramifications.”

In its own Instagram post, Blue Nose said it was “shocked” by the Tailgram claims and announced that it had retained a “neutral, third-party attorney-investigator” to look into them. The company said it would “make appropriate changes based on the investigation’s findings.”

Soon after, the company made another announcement on Instagram that Arden had stepped down as president. (Both of Blue Nose’s posts have since been deleted. An attorney for Blue Nose told us in May that Arden “has not resumed his position.”)

One prominent author said that even before the Tailgram thread, she was skeptical of working with Arden. “You can’t ignore that so many people from so many different sections of the bookish community have stories about him,” she said. “While obviously you take rumors with a grain of salt, eventually the salt shaker is overflowing.”

Before Joe Arden, there was James Patrick Cronin, an actor and improv performer whose red curls and rosy cheeks read more Rice Krispies elf than international man of mystery. Cronin was born in Los Angeles to two career actors. His mother, Beatrice Colen, appeared on “Happy Days,” and his father, Patrick Cronin, has had a 50-year television career. The younger Cronin’s IMDB bio says he recorded his first commercial at age 2.

Cronin earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from East Tennessee State University in 2004 and an MFA in acting from the University of Louisville. While pursuing his master’s, he cofounded a popular improv group called The Indicators. A since-deleted demo reel on Vimeo shows snippets from Cronin’s aborted comedy career. In one segment that particularly outraged some members of the romance community when they discovered it years later, Cronin played the founder of a nonprofit called Rich Agoraphobics Are People Everywhere, or R.A.A.P.E.

After college, Cronin moved to New York City to pursue acting, but things didn’t exactly pan out; Men’s Health described him in those days as a “struggling thespian and New York ‘manny.'” Narration can be an attractive choice for actors looking for better-paying gigs, and Cronin began working as an audiobook narrator in 2015 after attending an Audible information session. He dealt mainly in sci-fi, self-help books, and memoirs, but that same year he established the Arden persona and began recording romance. (He also sometimes records romance novels under the pseudonym Max Thomas.) Around 2016, he moved back to LA, where he now lives with McKay and their young child. McKay is also a romance narrator who uses the pseudonym Maxine Mitchell, and the husband-and-wife duo have recorded numerous books together.

James Patrick Cronin, shown here with his wife, Julie McKay, established the Joe Arden moniker and started recording romance audiobooks in 2015.

On its own, Cronin’s career was impressive. He’s recorded close to 500 books under his own name, according to Audible. In 2020 he held a workshop for SAG-AFTRA, and three years later he gave a live reading at the Nebula Awards, one of science fiction’s biggest honors. He’s narrated stories for Texas Monthly, GQ, Wired, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine through Audm, which the Times acquired in 2020 and killed last year.

Still, Cronin was nothing compared to Arden, whose work began to take off during the COVID-19 pandemic. Romance novels, which served as a cheap escape for the afraid, isolated, and horny, were exploding in popularity. The Sarah J. Maas fantasy-meets-romance series “A Court of Thorns and Roses” sold so well that it single-handedly changed Bloomsbury’s financial outlook for 2024; the genre is expected to hit $610 million in sales this year. The audiobook industry also expanded rapidly. The Audio Publishers Association estimated the industry brought in $1.8 billion in sales in 2022.

Part of the romance world’s success during the pandemic, Publishers Weekly wrote, was the special effort it made to engage readers through things like “hashtags, Zoom meetups, and virtual bookstore visits.” After all, in romance, the primacy of the reader is absolute. As Arden’s tagline suggests, they’re always made to feel like they matter.

Arden’s fans appeared particularly engaged. After joining TikTok in 2022, Arden quickly amassed 84,000 followers. Videos across social media depict his powerful, almost physical effect on his fans. A TikTok from last year shows a woman looking so nervous as Arden approaches her at an event that he asks, “Are you going to be all right?”

This January, the romance author Brittanée Nicole posted a clip of herself at a retreat for audiobook authors and listeners. Nicole is surrounded by women including Arden’s wife, McKay, and holding a phone; Arden and a fellow narrator, Teddy Hamilton, are on speaker. When the men say hello, the women shriek, and one gallops around the kitchen before saying, “I think I just peed on myself.” At one point, the women ask the men to “open up their mouths” and enunciate. “Open up like a good boy,” one adds jokingly.

Cronin kept his Arden identity separate from the rest of his life. This isn’t unusual, as some narrators would rather not publicize the fact that they read sex scenes out loud for a living. (One particularly popular TikTok has Arden reading from Brynne Weaver’s “Butcher & Blackbird” in a florid Irish accent. “Be as loud as you want,” he gasps with lusty urgency. “The whole goddamn neighborhood could hear you, and I wouldn’t give a fuck.”) Some narrators have day jobs. Some, one romance author said, feel the need to protect themselves from fans who find it difficult to separate fantasy from reality.

In Cronin’s case, it’s also true that an anonymous masked figure with a seductive voice is far easier to build a fantasy around than a genial dad. “We as romance readers put ourselves in the woman’s position,” Brittany Lowry, a BookTok influencer, told us. “We want to find the man attractive.”

A good audiobook can be a game changer, exposing a book to entirely new audiences. Many Amazon reviews for Kate Stewart’s novel “Flock” mention how much readers loved the “duet”-style narration, wherein the male characters are voiced by Arden and the female character by Maxine Mitchell. “Do I think I would have been invested in this book if I had eyeball read it?” one person wrote. “No, I don’t. Joe Arden and Maxine Mitchell performed this book, they didn’t just read it. The laughs, the subtle sounds of them blowing out smoke or the deep chuckles that would come out when they were really invested in a conversation just took this book to the next level.”

Successful audiobooks get picked up on BookTok, endlessly discussed and sampled, building the kind of organic hype that’s impossible to buy. (Amazon has a “Best of #BookTok” section.) Much of that enthusiasm hinges on the talent of the male narrator — the hypnotic love interest who seduces the plucky heroine. Arden isn’t the only one who makes fans pant; people like Hamilton and Shane East have the same effect. Men in the industry are in high demand, and there are far fewer of them, meaning they wield a lot of bargaining power. Several people familiar with the industry said good male narrators could easily expect to make six figures a year and were often booked out for six months or more. “There are 500 of me,” a female narrator, Paige Reisenfeld, said during a recent industry roundtable about misconduct controversies, adding, “If I say, ‘Hey, no, I’m not OK with this, I want to be paid what he’s being paid,’ they’re going to be like, ‘Cool, we’re going to go find somebody who sounds similar enough to you who’s willing to accept less.'”

Though Cronin had been careful to protect his identity, in the end, he wasn’t that hard to find. Even if they didn’t know him personally, many of his fellow narrators had heard his other work and could pinpoint his distinctive voice. And in 2022, the publisher Tor Books posted a YouTube video of Arden, his face visible, recording the audiobook for the dark academic fantasy “The Atlas Six.” After the Tailgram allegations began to circulate this spring, the fact that Cronin, the family man and failed comedian, was sex god Joe Arden became common knowledge. BookTok influencers made videos linking to Cronin’s now deleted X profile, his still active Facebook page, and his profile on Tantor Media, one of the narration companies where he worked under his own name. For good measure, they dug up Cronin’s abandoned trademark application for the Joe Arden moniker, first filed in 2020. They also posted side-by-side audio comparisons of Cronin’s and Arden’s work, which serve as an interesting indicator of how far the growling-sex-demon dial can be cranked in either direction.

Even so, the scandal has largely stayed siloed in the romance world — a place that exists separate and apart from mainstream publishing, despite its viral popularity and market-moving power. It’s unclear whether any of the publications Cronin has worked for under his own name know about the allegations against him. The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Tantor Media didn’t respond to requests for comment. Bee Audio, an audiobook company where Cronin has also worked as a contractor, said it removed Cronin from its roster in 2020 “at his request.”

A popular BookTok influencer said the controversy had highlighted one potential downside of anonymity. “Narrators can just have another pseudonym,” she said, “and you’d never know.”

Recording an audiobook is a strenuous and surprisingly physical undertaking: an act of artistry, technical skill, and bodily stamina. A good narrator has to honor the words on the page without overwhelming them. (One of the greatest sins of narration, according to many audiobook enthusiasts, is overacting.) At the same time, they have to be excellent performers; it’s no accident that many have theater backgrounds. Some develop subtle movements — a facial tic, lifting one shoulder — to pull out a particular voice.

Narration requires many hours alone in a booth: roughly 40 for a 20-hour book. Most narrators can’t read for more than six hours at a time, and successful ones become fanatical about hydration, vocal warmups, throat-soothing concoctions, and what to eat or abstain from. Men’s Health noted that some narrators eat green apples before recording to dry up saliva, reducing unappetizing moist noises near the microphone, and said that Arden avoided dairy, chocolate, alcohol, and spicy foods.

Sean Crisden, a narrator and voice actor, said he works out daily to ensure he has the stamina to record for hours. He often has intricate discussions with an author about how to bring their work to life. Like most narrators, Crisden makes a living by working across genres and industries. “My average day can consist of several hours of audiobook narration followed by voicing a guy-next-door commercial, then hopping into a session to voice a howling ghoul or snarling troll in a video game,” he said.

Any successful work of fiction builds an emotional connection with the reader, leaving them gutted or elated or turned on. This is especially true for romance, where readers’ reactions can be deeply personal. Plenty has been written about women using romance novels to help them recover from sexual trauma. Men’s Health said Arden had received text messages from a widow, a trauma survivor, and a COVID nurse “who all wrote to thank him for being there in their time of need.”

The series “A Court of Thorns and Roses” by Sarah J. Maas, pictured here at New York Comic Con, sold so well that it changed Bloomsbury’s financial outlook for 2024

That sense of trust can be especially important in dark romance, one of the genres in which Arden works. In these novels, complex — and spicy — ideas about who holds power and the multifaceted nature of desire can be explored more safely. Dark-romance scenes often involve dubious consent, or “dubcon,” meaning sex where consent is not clearly established, or “noncon” (nonconsent, i.e., rape). “People want a person who’d do anything for them,” a dark-romance author said. “And dark-romance books take it and stretch it further.” But, she added, “predominantly we’re all aware that this is fantasy. In real life, if a guy were to show up at our door covered in blood and body parts, we’d know that’s wrong.” Arden has performed dark-romance books such as Jescie Hall’s “That Sik Luv,” which a fan on Reddit called “a really messed up, super dark stalker romance.”

“Not the best story,” they added, “but hey, Joe does an awesome job with dirty talk in it.”

When a romance narrator is accused of behaving in a sexually unethical way, their audience can feel especially betrayed. In addition to the Arden blowup, the romance world was roiled by another pair of scandals surrounding men who call themselves voEROS and Ghostface Gulf Coast. (Like the Arden scandal, both controversies played out primarily on BookTok, with supporting roles from Instagram posts and subtweets.) The two can most accurately be described as romance influencers: anonymous men embodying the genre’s hint-of-dangerous characters. Sometimes they record videos of themselves reading passages from books. Other times they make up their own dialogue. “You made a mess all over daddy,” voEROS growls in a TikTok. “Lick me clean.” The comments are often filled with women announcing that they plan to masturbate to the audio.

Ghostface Gulf Coast is a well-muscled man who wears a “Scream” mask and brandishes a knife while reciting lines seemingly lifted from romance and erotica. He was accused of DMing unsolicited nude photos and sexual come-ons to women.

voEROS is a voice actor, narrator, streamer, and sex worker with a presence across several social-media platforms, including TikTok, where he has more than 250,000 followers. He depicts himself online using an anime avatar and operates a Discord server open only to women and nonbinary fans who use she/they pronouns. Three women told us that the environment on the Discord became increasingly bizarre, with voEROS demanding fealty to him over other narrators, particularly Arden, whom he detests. They said voEROS kicked people out of the group and blocked them for things like belonging to Arden’s Patreon or playing another game on Twitch while he was streaming his own gaming content. (The Tailgram thread about Arden included similar accusations: that Arden demanded adoration from members of his Patreon and got upset with one woman he’d been sexting with for leaving.)

voEROS has made an endless series of videos about the claims against him, which he calls unfair and unfounded. He told us in an email that he had never “pressured” fans and that he barred people from his Discord only “for repeated infractions, or if I know they’re spreading vitriol and trying to poach my followers for other creators.” He has even decried how Arden — whom he described to us as “a talentless egomaniacal hack” — is being treated. “How would you like it if someone accused you of something and then posted your real name online so people could harass you and possibly forward it to your family, your work, your friends?” he said in one clip.

Several people said the scandals had forced fans to examine their parasocial relationships with romance narrators: to consider what they’re getting from them, and what they’re giving away in exchange. “These people are masked,” the author Brynne Weaver said. “They are concealing their identity.” The women they interact with, meanwhile, have no such protection.

If news of the Arden scandal traveled fast, calls to boycott his work spread even faster. But the conversation was complicated, especially for authors who had contracts with Arden or whose books he’d already completed.

Recording and producing an audiobook is a costly endeavor and even the best circumstances, “it takes a while to get that money back,” a BookTok influencer said. Now, some BookTok users say they’ll no longer listen to Arden’s audiobooks. “So for some authors, their sales are going to drop,” the influencer predicted. “That’s going to suck.”

Many authors are scrambling to cut ties with Arden and Blue Nose. But anyone who paid the company up front could lose everything they forked over for an Arden recording. And those who’ve signed more traditional royalties-sharing agreements are faced with the expensive and time-consuming prospect of legally extracting themselves. One author, Kathy Haan, posted a video of herself in tears describing how difficult it would be to get out of her Blue Nose contract.

Multiple authors have been told by Blue Nose that in order to get their contracts voided, they’ll need to sign NDAs. Several of the authors have determined that severing their relationship with Blue Nose is essential for their brands and have retained the same lawyer. “We have so much to lose by associating with him,” one author said. “We just want to walk away.” As unappealing as she found the prospect, she thought she’d probably end up signing the NDA.

The ongoing negotiations are “such a mental drain,” the author added. “I have not been able to get anything done. I feel like I have an elephant sitting on my chest.”

On April 19, Blue Nose announced the results of its investigation. “Communications between Joe Arden and those in question were consensual and mutually engaged upon,” the company wrote on Instagram, “and no evidence was found to support allegations that he was aggressive, manipulative or misleading.”

It added: “Our mission is and always has been to foster a collaborative space for audiobook creation. We are excited to move forward together.” Arden has since begun updating his Patreon again without mentioning the scandal.

Plenty of people weren’t satisfied with those results, arguing that an internal investigation was designed to clear Arden’s name and protect Blue Nose’s reputation.

Still, Arden’s hold on his fans is strong. And many of the women who have let his voice seep into their lives aren’t willing to let him go so easily. Some have flocked to his Instagram page to welcome him back from cancellation. “I let out a huge breath of relief to see you active again,” one woman commented. “Stand strong. Happy you’re here.”

Another BookToker who calls herself a “Christian, Wife, Mother, Nurse & Patriot” posted her own TikTok to declare that Arden had been unfairly attacked. “I have a question: Why are we so mad at Joe Arden?” she said, pausing to sip noisily through a straw. “Why? Because he spoke dirty to some women? Don’t we pay for his books because of the way he talks dirty to us?”