Patterico's Pontifications

5/22/2012

Brett Kimberlin Harasses Stacy McCain By Contacting His Wife’s Employer

Filed under: Brad Friedman,Brett Kimberlin,General,Neal Rauhauser — Patterico @ 8:14 pm



Stacy McCain:

Convicted terrorist Brett Kimberlin on Monday continued his effort to silence those who write about his criminal past by contacting my wife’s employer, claiming that I was “harassing” him. The resulting security concern required immediate relocation if I was to be able to continue writing about the case of Kimberlin, a violent felon, perjurer and admitted tax cheat who is employed as the director of a 501(c)3 non-profit that has collected $1.8 million in contributions since 2005.

Harassing family members; claiming that truthful criticism is “harassment”; taking complaints to a critic’s workplace . . . all of these tactics fit a pattern some of us have witnessed for months. Stacy is not the only one to suffer through this sort of treatment. He’s just the latest.

Kimberlin’s associates have asked for pictures of my wife; mentioned the names of Stacy’s children; outed a commenter of mine and made references to his family; made references to Aaron’s wife; and so forth. They love bringing family into these battles. Again, it’s part of a pattern.

This is what your “non-profit” money buys, donors! Be proud!

You’ll hear about all of it in coming days and weeks. But bear with us. The harassment has been an almost daily occurrence for almost a year, so there’s no way the whole story can be told in a short post or two. But it will be told.

Ace wants people to cover this, and says that those who don’t are acting like the bystanders in the Kitty Genovese case:

It is very easy to decide “this isn’t any of my trouble” and permit vicious behavior.

Easy. Perhaps understandable.

But hardly ethical. And certainly not heroic.

Who wants to get involved? Easier, and surely safer, just to duck one’s head and hide, and hope the danger visits someone else.

Perhaps the alligator will prefer to eat someone else first. Perhaps his belly will be full.

And why should you stick your neck out?

Hey, it’s not like the Conservative Media is supposed to cast a spotlight on injustice, stick up for the common man abused by bullies, or fight leftist outrages.

It’s not as if we’re supposed to fight the fights that others shy away from, right?

We’re all just supposed to sit back and let the traffic money roll in.

Right?

It’s easier that way. A few victims here and there aren’t our concern. We’ve got bigger things to worry about. We’ve got to keep focused on The Big Things, which just happen to be, felicitously enough, the things that won’t draw any heat.

Lee Stranahan has stepped up, with this video:

I will repeat a couple of points. First, this isn’t about dredging up a crime that happened 34 years ago. Kimberlin has done plenty since then. He made claims about selling pot to Dan Quayle — claims that the lefty author of a book about Kimberlin believes are false. He deceptively avoided paying a wrongful death judgment to the widow of the man he blew up. He sued a small-time blogger in 2011 for telling the truth about him, and made several false statements about his history under oath in an effort to win a large cash judgment. He made several provably false statements regarding his encounter with Aaron Walker, in an effort to get the State of Maryland to prosecute Walker. He has regularly defamed, harassed, and stalked people who criticized him.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, folks.

One more point that I have made before and will make again: this is not about partisan politics. Kimberlin thuggishly went after a left-leaning attorney who represented Aaron pro bono. He went after the lefty author of the book Citizen K. I believe this country is filled with millions of honorable people with left-leaning beliefs who would never tolerate the kind of behavior we have seen from this man.

Brett Kimberlin has no politics. He is all about making money. Don’t make this into a partisan battle. That’s what he wants.

Hello, I must be going.

Filed under: General — Karl @ 7:27 am



[Posted by Karl]

Last week, I informed Pat of my decision to reduce my blogging and take a hiatus from Patterico after a run of a bit over three years.

In recent weeks, I have had an unusual amount of work coming in the door.  Even more recently, it seems I have some reason to believe I may have substantially less work at year’s end.  Thus, I am in the position of having to spend more time working now and more time to help assure I have work six months from now.  This issue is common in a number of businesses and it’s apparently my turn now.  In this economy, that’s not a complaint.  But it is a reality.

During the same time period, I sort of became the default guest-blogger here.  When I accepted Pat’s invitation years ago, it was with the understanding that I did not want to be a regular blogger — and to his credit, Pat has never nagged me to write.  The impulse to serve fresh content daily has come from me, which actually makes it worse because it tells me I will fall into this counter-productive habit again unless I do something about it now.  Otherwise, I will increasingly start to chase the non-newslet of the moment (because it’s fun and draws comment), overly rehash may favorite old theories (because it’s easy and I’m pressed for time) and write things where I subtextually try to convince myself to keep going.  I would do those things at the expense of things I should be doing off the grid.

The other reason I accepted Pat’s gracious invitation (as opposed to others at the time) was the community of commenters here.  Many of the regular commenters here also frequented (and frequent) my prior blog haunt, which made my writing seem like a natural fit here.  Indeed, that even extends to the, er, dissenting voices that appear from time to time.  Other commenters were new to me, but I have enjoyed discussing and debating the politics and policy of this era with all of you.

I will not be vanishing entirely.  I will try to lurk and to comment when I think I have some value to add to a discussion.  I will also try to write two or three things for HotAir’s Greenroom weekly.  The daily news is already covered there, and they have plenty of contributors from whom to choose on slow news days.  I hope that situation prevents me from backsliding into compulsive blogging, while still affording the opportunity to write when something really strikes me and I have not seen it elsewhere.

In short, this is not a farewell so much as an au revoir.  One never knows what the future holds.   Someday, I may blog here again.  But that day won’t be tomorrow.

Thanks again to Pat and to you.

–Karl

UPDATE BY PATTERICO: If there were a way to give a standing ovation on the Internet, I’d be giving one right now.

This is a sad day for me. I’m not really up to the task of putting into words how grateful I am to Karl for his contributions here. Karl’s posts are well written, his points are insightful, and his topics are always timely and interesting. The burden of keeping fresh content on the site has lately fallen heavily on his shoulders, and without him, I’m not quite sure what I’ll do.

I wish Karl the best of luck and give him my deepest thanks for all his great posts here. I’m bumping this to the top.

Brett Kimberlin’s Latest “Peace Order” Against Aaron Walker Is Retaliation for Truthful Speech

Filed under: Brad Friedman,Brett Kimberlin,General,Neal Rauhauser — Patterico @ 7:25 am



The last time Brett Kimberlin was in a Maryland court trying to get a peace order against Aaron Walker, the judge told him in no uncertain terms that people are allowed to truthfully criticize others in America. The judge explained to Kimberlin that truthful criticism is not the basis for a peace order.

Now Kimberlin is back in court, once again seeking a peace order because Aaron is truthfully criticizing him.

Aaron has Kimberlin’s application for a peace order up at his site. I encourage you to read the whole thing. One of the things that Kimberlin complains about is that Aaron has called Kimberlin a terrorist:

“Terrorism” is a fair way to describe what Brett Kimberlin did to the town of Speedway, Indiana in 1978, when he set off eight bombs over the course of several days. Kimberlin has been convicted of those bombings, one of which blew off the limbs of a Vietnam veteran named Carl DeLong, who committed suicide as a result of his injuries. Brett Kimberlin earned the right to be called a convicted domestic terrorist, and he should not be marching off to court complaining about it when someone calls him just that.

It is beyond the scope of this post to detail every way in which Kimberlin’s peace order is misleading and deceptive. Kimberlin complains that Aaron spoke of purchasing a gun, implying that Aaron’s statement was aggressive — when Aaron actually said he had bought a gun to defend himself. Kimberlin claims that Aaron is responsible for “alerts” coming to his email inbox, suggesting Aaron is emailing him, when in fact the “alerts” Kimberlin is talking about are Google alerts. If you write about this guy on the Internet, he may run to a judge and say you are causing abusive alerts to come to his email.

You might say: what’s the harm in getting a peace order? I have watched this play out in other venues and I know just what Kimberlin is up to. As soon as he gets a “peace order,” he will run back to court the very next time Aaron mentions his name in public. That means that Kimberlin asserts the right to abuse the court process to harass Aaron — and if Aaron tells the world how Kimberlin is abusing the court process, Kimberlin will claim that as a violation of the peace order and try to have Aaron held in contempt of court.

Kimberlin and his crew have relentlessly harassed Aaron, me, and others over the course of the last several months. It is not harassment for us to tell the world what happened to us. It could happen to any of you. His supporters have outed or threatened to out commenters to this very site. They talk about wives, children, and fathers of bloggers and commenters. They ceaselessly abuse everyone they can who speaks the truth about Kimberlin’s past.

Ultimately, this is a free speech issue. Kimberlin and his group of thugs have done their level best to attack everyone in the blogosphere who wrote anything negative about him. Now the blogosphere is starting to wake up, and there are so many critics he can’t possibly intimidate them all.

But you can see he’s still trying.


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