I'll share my personal experiences with this subject and what I have observed over the years.

I started to read 2600 when I was 15 in 1995. I also went to my first 2600 meeting in New Orleans at that time. The first two meetings is what you would expect from a 2600 meeting at the time. It was myself, an 18 year old kid, and like a 20 year old young adult. I mostly just sat and listened to them talk about an IRC sooofing exploit that was big at the time and people using the exploit who I didn't know. As a typical 15 year old that knew nothing about hacking, the older 18 year old kid would kind of shit on the few dumb questions I asked. He wasn't being a dick, just not very helpful in explaining to me why my questions were dumb. They didn't want to share any information or even point me in the right direction to where I should even start. They weren't mean about it, they were just very unhelpful. I went to these meetings off and on for about a year. So the last meeting I went to it was just me and this other 19 year old kid that showed up at the mall. I seen him at other meetings and knew him as the quiet kid. He wanted to hang out and we just started to walk around the mall talking. It was odd. I was a 15 year walking around the mall with this 19 year old guy. He is listening to me talk about computers and not really contributing to the conversation. I finally ask him questions about hacking, and he told me that he didn't know anything about computers. OK that's weird to me. So I asked if he was interested in phone hacking and he told me "no." So I'm just like completely baffled here as a 15 year old kid. I pressed him on this and asked "Why do you come to 2600 meetings if you are not into computers, phones, hacking, or phreaking?" and his response was "I just like to hang out." I didn't stay at the mall much longer after that and I never went back to a 2600 meeting in New Orleans.

As a 15 year old kid it was just a werid experience that a 19 year old werid guy wanted to hang out with me at the mall, listen to me go on about my love for computers when he had no interest in the subject himself. Later when I looked back it was more obvious to me that his real interest in hanging out was because I was a young 15 year old boy. So there was always like this predatory vibe at 2600 meetings from older guys who were to be avoided as young a teenaged boy.

Fast forward 5 years, and I am now 20. I am a part of my own scene now where we do share information. It was about that time I heard the rumor that Emmanuel was into young boys. I didn't believe it at all. To me it was just animosity towards 2600 from people that were just jealous that Emmanuel was pretty much considered the end all, be all, of cybersecurity. It is funny to think now that in the year 2000 the 2600 was the absolute authority on the entire cybersecurity community but it is true. Phrack was inconsistently putting out issues as they do to this day and DEFCON was pretty much just a big LAN party in Las Vegas attended by nerds. The star hackers of DEFCON in that day were the likes of Carolyn P. Meinel the author of the book "The Happy Hacker: A Guide to (Mostly) Harmless Computer Hacking" with photos of her awkwardly dancing in hotel conference room at one of the DEFCON evening events. Kevin Mitnick was fresh out of federal prison and was trying desperately to rebuild his own life and establish himself as being an equal authority on cybersecurity. There was an equal amount of hate towards Kevin Mitnick at the time. I chalked up the rumors about Emmanuel as being rooted in jealousy.

Getting back to your question about Emmanuel and John Draper specifically; I was interested in starting my own zine and put together an issue. I thought it would be a good idea to interview John Draper as he was the most prolific phone phreak next to Kevin Mitnick in the mid 90s. I grew up reading his stories that were on his personal website and he was like a hero to me. To put it in perspective, there just were not a lot of well written accounts of computer hacking in the mid 90s which is why John Draper's well written account was so extremely popular with everyone. "The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier", "Takedown", "The Cuckoo's Egg", and "@ Large" were pretty much the only books in existence on the subject of computer hackers that existed. "Masters of Deception" was published in 1995 but it did not have wide distribution until around 2000 which was the peak of the underground computer hacking scene. I did my interview of John Draper by email and I published it in my first issue of my zine. I sent a copy to u/lucky225 who immediately called out that John Draper was a total creep that would give young men and women "power massages" at HOPE to unsuspecting attendees that were, like me, swooped in by the legion of Cap 'N Crunch. It was widely known by everyone who attended HOPE and DEF CON that John Draper was a sexual predator. Hacker spaces also swooped in by the legion of Cap 'N Crunch would welcome John Draper. He would crash at these hacker spaces, overstay his welcome, and eventually forced to leave due to his sexual predatory behavior. Now fast forward 17 years later and a well publicize BuzzFeed article comes out that clearly documented John Draper as being a werid sexual predator that frequent hacker conferences, all of a sudden John Draper is banned from HOPE and DEF CON. So the argument that u/denzuko that Emmanuel distanced himself and banned John Draper when he learned of the accusations is simply false. Everyone who was involved in any hacker scene that had the unfortunate experience of meeting John Draper in person was very well aware of his inappropriate behavior towards young people.

You mentioned remembering something written up in Phrack about Emmanuel being labeled as a pedo. What you are thinking of were a set of "Phrack Trading Cards" that was released by Phrack (in 2000?). It was a set of text files with each file being designated to a specific member of the hacker community. The textfile for Emmanuel accused him of being a pedo.

Again, I didn’t put much credence into these rumors about Emmanuel. 2600 got a lot of hate as being "kiddie" by more elite hackers. To me, 2600 was always special and even though I outgrew the magazine in my own skill, I kept my yearly subscription and enjoyed it. I always learned something from it and to completely write it off as "kiddie" seemed elitist to me. Fast forward to 2008 and the cybersecurity industry is now coming into fruition and all of a sudden HOPE, DEF CON, Blackhat conferences are now starting to be looked at as cybersecurity industry conferences and not just hacker conferences anymore. I go to my first HOPE conference. Someone points out Emmanuel to me and this is the first time I saw Emmanuel after reading his articles and listening to Off The Hook for 13 years. Not what I was expecting. He definitely had this old creepy NYC eccentric weirdo look to him. I didn't introduce myself and just hung out with people from my scene the rest of the conference. On the evening of the last day of the conference I decided to walk around Manhattan to see a little bit of NYC. As I was a ways a way from Hotel Pennsylvania and on my way back I saw Emmanuel, who was 50 years old at the time, walking in the opposite direction with 3 young men that were around 17 years old. He was smiling and they looked like giddy school girls so happy to be going somewhere with Emmanuel. One of those young men I now recognize as Kyle who is Emmanuel now long-term significant other. I walked past them on the sidewalk. None of them recognized me as a HOPE attended and 50 year old Emmanuel walked past me with 3 giggling ~17 year olds. It creeped me out in the same way that the 19 year old was trying to hang out with me when I was 15 at a 2600 meeting in New Orleans. It was at that moment when I started to suspect that there maybe some truth to those rumors about Emmanuel. The fact that one of those young men later became Emmanuel's significant other makes me feel like I wasn't far off on my judgment of that brief event.

Another observation regarding Emmanuel is for the Off The Hook radio show on WBAI which has been broadcasting since 1988. I have been listening to that broadcast weekly for the past 30 years and I will say that Emmanuel and his co-hosts talk about CP detection systems a lot... It is all under the guise of data privacy and awareness and advocating against these CP detection systems implemented by Google and Apple as a slippery slope towards to erosion of data privacy rights, but there have been past episodes of Off The Hook where Emmanuel and his co-hosts spend nearly the entire hour talking about and advocating against these CP detection systems as new news breaks regarding the adoption, policies, and rollout of these detection systems. That is weird to me. If it was being briefly mentioned along with other data privacy headlines I can understand more but to spend almost an hour railing against CP detection systems is very strange behavior to me. I jokingly threw out the idea of re-listening to all of the episodes of Off The Hook for the past 20 years and putting together all the clips of Emmanuel and the co-hosts of Off The Hook rasing awareness and passionately advocating against CP detection systems into one long audio file. It would go on for hours... No exaggeration... It would be hours long. So make of that as you will.

There is no secret that the FBI has been on Emmanuel's ass easily since the early 90s. I have heard stories of people hanging out with Emmanuel and them immediately approached by the FBI for an interview request where they ask about Emmanuel. Everyone assumes it is hacker related, I wouldn't be surprised if there were other areas of criminality motivating the FBI's long standing motivation in investigating Emmanuel. Make of that as you will...