The Secret History of Gavin McInnes (2024)

This account, based on my firsthand observations and interviews with McInnes’s friends and former colleagues—as well as McInnes himself—is the forgotten backstory of how a wisecracking media maverick became a well-known and influential “hatemonger,” to quote the Manhattan district attorney’s office.

I worked alongside McInnes at the start of Vice in 1994, becoming the magazine’s editor shortly after it moved from Montreal to New York in 1999. Though McInnes immediately struck me as someone to avoid outside of work, nothing then indicated he would hatch an organization as vitriolic and violence-prone as the street-brawling Proud Boys. He and I were never friends. Founding editor Suroosh Alvi—who remains at Vice Media with the title of founder—brought me on board as a writer at the same time as McInnes. And when I stepped down in early 2001, it was largely because of McInnes’s toxic attitude. (By then his title was cofounder.)

Vice’s third cofounder, Shane Smith, was integral to the arc of McInnes’s life. He was—before their very public falling out—McInnes’s bandmate, roommate, rival, and best friend. Close since the age of 12, they shared everything from mescaline (then the Canadian name for PCP or horse tranquilizer) to lovers. How tight were they? A 2002 book they coauthored, The Vice Guide to Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll, claims that McInnes once unwittingly squeezed his penis into the same condom as Smith’s during a threesome.

Smith today serves as executive chairman of Vice Media. He is considered an internet-age pioneer, having expanded an indie magazine into a global powerhouse. He is sometimes referred to as “Citizen Shane” among certain ex-colleagues, as much for his Hearst-like legacy as a media baron, huckster, and former purveyor of yellow journalism as for his Xanadu-like home in Santa Monica. In April, Smith’s wife, Tamyka, filed for divorce, and the mansion was sold for $48.7 million—the approximate amount, according to The Wall Street Journal, that Vice Media lost in 2019. Smith declined to be interviewed for this story.

The company provided the following statement to Vanity Fair: “VICE and Gavin parted ways in 2008—many years before Gavin founded the Proud Boys. VICE unequivocally condemns white supremacy, racism and any form of hate, has shone a fearless, bright light of award-winning journalism on extremism, the alt-right and hate groups around the world, and has created one of the most inclusive, diverse and equitable companies in media. Our respective records of the last decade and a half speak for themselves.” Vice News, in fact, has been unflinching in its extensive and clear-eyed coverage of the Proud Boys. (Media executive Nancy Dubuc took up the role of CEO in 2018 after Vice Media began to buckle in the #MeToo era, triggered in part by a New York Times sexual harassment exposé in which the founders apologized for the company’s “detrimental ‘boy’s club’ culture.”)

Though neither Smith nor McInnes typically comment on each other—due to the terms of a separation agreement—the latter recently told CNN that he still haunts Smith’s company “like Banquo’s ghost.” Lies, betrayal, greed: There’s a Macbethian whiff to the entangled narratives of McInnes and Smith. But even though Banquo gets sacrificed to the vaulting ambition of Macbeth, his former brother-in-arms, McInnes would seem to have more in common with Coriolanus, a violence-for-violence’s-sake fame-lord whose opportunism outweighs genuine political convictions. Shakespearean or not, McInnes started both Vice magazine and the Proud Boys, and one metastasized out of the other.

Gavin Miles McInnes was born in England to Scottish parents in 1970. His family immigrated to Ontario when he was five, settling in suburban Ottawa. In high school, he formed a gang called the Monks with guys nicknamed Pig Al and Pukey Stallion. Among the dozen-odd outcasts in the crew were McInnes’s two best friends, Eric Digras and Steve Durand. As kids, they said, McInnes’s predominant characteristic was his recklessness. “A super-radical sh*t disturber,” Durand told me. “Anything to provoke an extreme reaction.”

Was there any foreshadowing that he would go on to form a group as extreme as the Proud Boys? “Gavin was really into making rules that you had to abide by,” recalled Digras, explaining that one rule McInnes devised as a teenager has since become codified as a Proud Boys bylaw. The clan’s second-degree initiation rite—for “adrenaline control”—involves naming five breakfast cereals while being punched in the arms. The Monks did the same thing: “We’d all beat the sh*t out of you until you could say five breakfast cereals,” Digras said. “The culture of our gang was that if you were ever earnest or vulnerable, you lost all credibility.”

McInnes and his Monks were stoner freaks, on a different planet entirely than the Carpies, rural farm lads from up Carp River. “Nobody wanted us to show up at their party because we were the guys who started doing drugs and we’d always f*ck sh*t up a little bit,” said Digras, then nicknamed Dogboy. Moving on from bongs, some of the Monks, by age 15, were dropping acid and huffing Pam cooking spray.

In 1986, a police officer came to their school to screen a PSA about the dangers of drunk driving. As McInnes relates in his 2012 autobiography, the students at Earl of March Secondary School watched the sobering account of a young woman paralyzed in an accident. During the Q&A that followed, McInnes took the microphone. “Why do you consider being in a wheelchair so horrible?” he asked the officer. “My mother is in a chair and has been her whole life, and our family certainly doesn’t see her as some kind of tragedy.” This was a lie, but it already revealed his affinity for darkly unfunny identity-based jokes. Even at that early age, he was both a class clown and “a very natural manipulator,” Digras explained.

McInnes, Digras added, would use him and Durand as “the fall guys” for his jokes when girls were around. “We called ourselves ‘the cardboard guys’ because we were just these cutouts that he would use as props for his show.” Later in life, several people who became close with McInnes would come to understand a similar dynamic, most notably his two partners at Vice, Smith and Alvi.

The origins of Vice can be traced to a rehab facility 30 minutes south of Montreal. In 1994, Alvi was 25 and had been shooting heroin for five years. Having OD’d multiple times, he was thieving where he could, pawning gold or cameras to cop his fix. He’d tried getting clean many times. Nothing worked. Blaming Montreal—“It’s too decadent of a city”—he moved away, to Minnesota, Vancouver, even Slovakia. But wherever he went, after the dope sickness wore off, he’d kick, get clean for a little while, and turn to Valium until he could find a dealer; then he’d get strung back out.

That spring, Alvi checked into the Foster Addiction Rehabilitation Centre, a clinic overlooking a cemetery in Saint-Philippe, Quebec. “If you keep using,” they told him, pointing at the tombstones, “that’s where you’ll end up.” Two years ago, I drove out to Foster with Alvi, where, sitting in a grassy ditch at the graveyard’s edge, he recounted the story of Vice’s beginnings.

Days before entering rehab, Alvi had gone with his family to the mosque to celebrate Eid. As a Pakistani-Canadian, Alvi was raised Muslim but had never been observant. On that day in the prayer hall, however, he got down on his knees and begged for mercy: “If there’s an Allah up there,” he prayed, “I need your help now.” He felt a sense of surrender, of submission to Islam.