Short answers, pulled from the story.
The panic grew from a combination of incidents and advocacy. The 1979 disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III was widely, and inaccurately, blamed on D&D. Patricia Pulling's group BADD amplified the concern, and a 1985 episode of 60 Minutes linked the game to 28 murders and suicides.
Patricia Pulling was an anti-occult campaigner from Richmond, Virginia, who founded Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons, known as BADD, in 1982 after her son Irving died by suicide. She filed wrongful death lawsuits against her son's high school principal and TSR, the game's publisher. BADD ceased to exist after Pulling died of cancer in 1997.
Multiple health agencies, including the American Association of Suicidology and the Centers for Disease Control, found no causal link between fantasy gaming and suicide. Between 1979 and 1988, BADD recorded only 128 game-player suicide attempts, against the 1,060 that national youth suicide rates would predict for the same period. A 2015 study found that psychiatrists did not associate role-playing games with poor mental health.
Waupun Prison instituted the ban in 2004, arguing D&D promoted gang-related activity. The policy followed an anonymous letter from an inmate claiming four D&D players were forming a gang. On the 25th of January 2010, the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the ban as a reasonable policy.
Wizards made changes from 2020 onward, including revised orc statistics in Explorer's Guide to Wildemount and a commitment to revise offensive portrayals of peoples including the Vistani. Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, published in November 2020, introduced optional rules that changed how racial ability scores worked. In December 2022, Wizards replaced the word 'race' with 'species' in official materials following consultation with multiple outside cultural consultants.
A series of share purchases by the Blume family reduced Gygax's stake in TSR through the early 1980s. When Brian Blume sold his shares to Lorraine Williams in October 1985, Williams became majority shareholder and replaced Gygax as president. Gygax resigned all positions in October 1986 and settled his disputes in December 1986, losing rights to the World of Greyhawk and his other creative work at TSR, including Mordenkainen, Robilar, and Tenser.