When a Giant Tried to Break Me: The Story I Waited Five Years to Tell, and the Empire Now Unfolding

For five years I said nothing. I built the world’s biggest online magic competition during the pandemic to raise money for frontline health workers, and watched it, and very nearly me, get destroyed. This is what happened, what it cost me, and why I am finally ready to talk about it.

Some things take five years to talk about. This is one of them. After five years of silence, I am finally ready to tell it, not to settle a score, but because the lesson inside it is one I think the world needs to hear.

The Project I Believed In

In 2020, in the middle of a global pandemic, I built something I believed in. It was called Cyber Magic Superstar, the world’s biggest online magic competition. The idea was simple. Bring magic back to people stuck at home. Celebrate talent that had nowhere to perform. Raise money and awareness for Get Us PPE, the charity getting protective equipment to frontline health workers who were running out of it.

It was never a money exercise for me. I have spent thirty years in this industry, and I have learned that the work you remember is rarely the work that paid the most. On this one, I was set up to earn nothing until every other commitment was met. The charity came first. The winner’s prize came first. My partners’ investment came first. I built it that way on purpose, because that is what you do when the point is the cause and not the cheque.

So I gave it everything. Hundreds of unpaid hours. I brought on sponsors. I interviewed some of the most respected magicians on the planet and put their craft in front of a global audience. When the original plan lost its centre, I built an entire run of live online events from scratch, with almost no lead time, just to keep the momentum alive. I wanted people in twenty countries to log on, forget the news for an hour, and watch something extraordinary. I wanted frontline workers to get what they needed. That was the whole of it.

For a while, it worked. Then it fell apart.

When the Centre Fell Out

I am not going to relitigate every detail here. There is a long version with dates, contracts, emails, and screenshots, and there is a court that exists for that. This is not that. What I will tell you is the shape of it as I lived it, because the shape is what matters for what came next.

I had brought in a high-profile figure to help carry the project, someone with the kind of reach that could lift the whole thing. It mattered enormously, because in a campaign like this, a big voice is the engine. I committed to that person. I paid them. I built marketing around them. And then, at the worst possible moment, the support I was counting on fell away. The engine I had built the plan around went quiet. I was left holding something with a hole in the middle of it, and a promise to my partners, my sponsors, and the charity that I now had no obvious way to keep.

So I scrambled. I worked harder in those weeks than I have worked in my life. I did not sleep properly for what felt like a month. Every day was another problem, then another, then another, and the whole time I was trying to protect a cause that people were depending on. That is the part that still sits heaviest. It was never about me. It was about getting protective equipment to people who were dying without it, and I watched the thing I had built to do that come apart in my hands.

Then the story got out, and it got out wrong. Publicly. Told by a voice far larger than mine, to an audience far larger than mine. And once a version like that is moving, you cannot catch it.

When the World Turned

I want to be honest about what happened to me after that, because that honesty is the only reason I am writing this at all.

The magic community I had loved my whole life turned on me, almost overnight. I got hundreds of messages. Some were questions. Many were accusations. Some were threats. People I had never met decided they knew exactly who I was and what I had done, and what they decided was the precise opposite of the truth I was living. I was painted as the one who had taken, when I was the one who had given everything and kept nothing. The cause I had worked to protect came to doubt me. Sponsors I had brought on asked to be removed. Interviews and television appearances were cancelled. The name I had spent decades building, in twenty-three countries, on stages I was proud of, became something I dreaded seeing in writing.

The cruelty of it was the inversion. I had structured the whole thing so I would be paid last, if at all. I had poured in my own hours, my own reputation, my own heart. And the story that reached the world was that I was the con. I cannot describe what it does to you to be called a thief for the one thing you did purely out of generosity. It is a particular kind of vertigo. You keep waiting for the facts to catch up, and they do not, because the other voice is louder and the crowd has already moved on to the verdict.

What It Did To Me

I stopped using social media entirely. For a long time, every notification made my heart race, because I assumed it was another attack. That is not a figure of speech. That is what sustained anxiety does to your body. Months after the worst of it, the sight of a single post could put me right back in the moment, chest tight, hands cold. I lost relationships I valued. I lost trust in an industry I had given my life to.

It got darker than that. There was a stretch where I did not want to be here. I am saying that plainly, because I spent years not saying it, and the silence did me no favours. When the whole world you belong to decides you are the villain, and you know you are not, something in you starts to come loose. I learned that a clear conscience does not protect you from despair. Being right does not make the phone stop buzzing.

What Pulled Me Back

What pulled me back was not vindication. I am still waiting on a lot of that. What pulled me back was asking for help, which is the single hardest and most important thing I did in that period. I reached out. I told people the truth of how I was doing. And the thing I had been most afraid of, looking weak in front of an industry that had already written me off, turned out to be the thing that saved me.

Here is what I have learned, and it is the whole reason for this piece.

Good Intent Is Not a Guarantee

You can do everything from the right place and still watch it go wrong. I went into that project with the cleanest motive I have ever had, and it still ended in the hardest year of my life. For a long time I thought that meant the intent did not count. It does. The intent is the part you keep. Everything else, the outcome, the reputation, the noise, is partly out of your hands. What you meant to do is yours.

A Bigger Voice Is Not a Truer Voice

When someone with more reach than you tells a version of events, that version travels faster than yours can. Winston Churchill is supposed to have said a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has its boots on. Whether or not he said it, it is true. I lived it. And the lesson is not bitterness. The lesson is patience. The truth is slower, but it does not stop walking.

Your Mental Health Is Not a Luxury

I treated mine as something to deal with later, once I had fixed everything else. That was a mistake. By the time I turned to it, it was not a tune-up, it was a rescue. If you are in the middle of something that is grinding you down, the time to ask for help is not after you have solved it. It is now.

What My Education Gave Me

I was raised in the Jesuit tradition, and two phrases from that education have stayed with me through all of it.

The first is quantum potes, tantum aude. Dare to do as much as you can. I have thought about that line a lot. For a while I read it as a rebuke, a reminder of how much I had tried and how badly it had ended. I read it differently now. Daring to do as much as you can does not come with a promise that it will work. The daring is the point. The trying is the part you are responsible for. I dared. It hurt. I would dare again.

The second is esto homo pro aliis. Be a man for others. I built that competition to be of use to people I would never meet, in countries I would never visit, during the worst public health crisis of our lifetime. That was real. No version of events that came afterward changes what I was actually trying to do. I know what it was. So do the people who worked alongside me.

Owning My Part

I am not writing this for sympathy. If I am honest, part of me is embarrassed, embarrassed that it knocked me down as hard as it did, embarrassed that I let it take five years. I will even own my own part in it. I was warned. People I trusted told me to be careful before I ever started, and I went ahead anyway because I wanted to believe the best in people and in the project. That is on me, and I have made my peace with it. I am not writing it for revenge either. I have no interest in dragging anyone through the mud, and you will notice I have named no one. That is deliberate. The point of this is not to settle a score. The point is what it did to me, and what I want it to mean.

If you have ever poured yourself into something good and watched it get twisted into something ugly, I want you to hear this. It does not make you a fool for trying. It does not make the trying worthless. And it absolutely does not mean you have to carry the weight of it alone, in silence, for years, the way I did.

Speak to someone. A friend, a professional, anyone who will hear you. The relief of saying the true thing out loud is bigger than the fear of saying it. I know, because I waited far too long to find that out.

The Empire Now Unfolding

I am still here. The work is still good. And the magic that saved me as a child still saves me now. That is the part of the story I get to keep, and it is the part I am choosing to tell.

I will say one more thing, quietly, because it is the thing I most want you to take from this. I am about to enter the most exciting chapter of my career. Soon I will share something I have been building, and the heart of it is the message I needed most when I was at my lowest. No matter what you are going through, do not give up. There is light at the end of the tunnel, even when you cannot see it yet. There is good in the world. There is love. And you can build the life you dream of, whatever anyone else thinks of you and whatever anyone else says.

I know how dark it can get. There was a time I did not want to be here. I got through it, and getting through it is the reason there is a next chapter at all. The person I felt destroyed by did not get the last word. I did. And so will you.

That is what the next project is really about. Not magic for its own sake, but proof that you can be knocked all the way down and still rise into the biggest thing of your life. I am not ready to say more yet. But I can tell you the years behind me, the hard ones included, were preparation for what comes next.

Watch this space. And if you are in your own tunnel right now, hold on. The light is real.

A Note Before You Go

If you are struggling, please reach out to someone you trust or a mental health service in your area. In Australia, Lifeline is on 13 11 14, available any time. If you ever feel you might not be safe, please contact Lifeline or your local emergency number now. You do not have to be at the bottom to ask for help, and you do not have to get through it on your own.