Trolls. Deranged Cyberstalking Trolls.

About two years ago I discovered Bill Schmalfeldt.  He's a real piece of work, a friend of Brett Kimberlin, the Speedway Bomber, and Neal Rauhauser, who's currently hiding out from subpoenas to make him pay child support.

If you can tell a lot about a man by the company he keeps, you can tell volumes about this guy.  His story gets better.  He started threatening Patrick Frey (patterico.com) and Ken White (popehat.com), two lawyers who according to Neal had framed Anthony Weiner by somehow telepathically convincing him to take pictures of his privates (at least in his undies) and send them to women who weren't his wife.  Ken has blogged about him in a post entitled "True Threats, True Incitement, Or Truly Crazy? The Rhetoric of Deranged Cyberstalker Bill Schmalfeldt".  Another blogger on the end of Bill's crazy is Stacey McCain of TheOtherMcCain.com, who describes him as "Deranged Cyberstalker Bill Schmalfeldt". If you Google Deranged Cyberstalker Bill Schmalfeldt, you'll find more than one post. As a bit more back story I should probably add that Bill got himself kicked off of DKos because of a diary he wrote about anal sex, which can only be described as lovingly describing a rape.  DKos isn't exactly a bastion of prudery, and when they think something is way beyond the pale....

Bill also sometimes fancies himself a journalist, sometimes a reporter.  As such he decided to investigate Operation Burn Notice and Knot My Wisconsin, who were involved with the Scott Walker's recall election, on Walker's side.  I haven't figured out the whole story, but it seems that Bill decided he had it in for a guy who goes by the online pseudonym of Jerry Fletcher.  He just HAD to find out who Jerry was.  As part of this he contacted some poor woman on Facebook, and threatened her with having her children taken from her by the state if she didn't answer his questions.  I believe that Facebook did take action against his threats and suspend him.  But if you get him on the subject now he will tell you that that sort of threat is perfectly acceptable journalist practice, an "investigative technique", a trick of the trade, and it's perfectly OK as long as you don't actually plan to go through with it.  And anyway, the woman wasn't a nice person, so she deserved being threatened.

A real sweet guy, right?

Something over a year ago, he started harassing a blogger whose blog I follow.  To the point that said blogger ended up filing harassment charges, and winning.  So now Bill Schmalfeldt is an adjudicated harasser on top of everything else.  A Peace Order (which is what Maryland calls a Restraining Order) was put in place, and Bill was NOT to contact John Hoge at all.  Period.  

Did you know that if you put someone's twitter handle right after the @ so it shows up in their feed that isn't direct contact?  Bill knows this. However, no one else, including Twitter, knows it.  So come October Bill was facing 355 (or more) counts of breaking the PO.  In November the PO was extended for another six months, since it was pretty obvious that he wasn't going to leave John alone.  A few weeks back there was a mediation and John agreed to let the state drop the charges if Bill promised to just behave.

Bill is not behaving.  He isn't contacting John directly, but he's spending every waking minute following John's Blog and making snide comments about him and his commenters on Twitter.  We are "Lickspittles" and we are the stupidest folk on earth.  We ignored him completely for 12 hours on Saturday, and he went totally ballistic.  He claims he just wants us to leave him alone, but when we do, he gets upset.

Apparently someone using the same name as a commenter on John's blog, left Bill some nasty comments through Bill's blog's contact page.  There were five which could be construed as threats.  And apparently because the threatener had the same name as someone who had been commenting at John's for maybe a week, (it might have been longer, but the name didn't ring a bell with me) obviously John knew who he was and was harboring him.  Bill demanded that John tell him who it was as well as handing over all the headers on all the defamatory comments.  Bill put up some of the headers from the "death threats" on Twitter to prove that he hadn't faked them, because that was what a lot of us believed, and the headers resolve back to Bill's own computer, with an IP of 127.0.0.1. 

Bill has been demanding that John take control of his blog because he is legally responsible for every piece of libel and defamation against Bill.  As if with his history anyone could defame Bill better than he has himself.  He's been getting more and more hysterical as the week went on. So Friday evening he announced that he had just then sent two cease and desist letters including e-mailing John's lawyer (who he hates, because the only reason he lost the PO hearing is that the judge has the hots for her?!!?!?) who had acknowledged that he had emailed her.  He then posted the C&D on his own blog.  He then started ranting about how he was going to be contacting the county state's attorney (Marylander for district attorney) to have charges leveled against John if he doesn't "get his blog under control and remove all libelous and defaming comments".  The thing is, that current law is quite specific that the owner of a blog which allows comments, even if those comments are moderated, is not legally responsible.  Bill isn't having any of this, because he knows the law better than any damn lawyers.  Monday morning he talked to someone (unidentified) at that office and sent them copies of all the stuff he was complaining about, admitting that he didn't think the death threats were serious, but that it was upsetting. However he had spent the previous week shrieking about how they were real death threats while refusing to call the police, but eventually telling us he had contacted IC3, who deal pretty exclusively with internet fraud. This was pointed out to him, so he posted a screen cap of the contact form, which specifically asks about who defrauded you.  Monday evening he tweeted this:

We pretty much left him alone today, and he spent a lot of it getting upset because he kept checking John's blog.  He made snide comments on Twitter about how the posts which didn't talk about him weren't getting the traffic, so John was going to have to go back to posting about him or Brett Kimberlin (who is suing John and four others in state court, and over 20 others in federal on RICO charges for defamation, another person whose pretty much made it impossible to ever defame him more than he has himself).  

In the early afternoon he tweeted this:

At six I made this comment on John's last post about Bill:

That's actually pretty polite for Bill.  He claims he was raised to respect women, but you'd never know it from how he talks about us.

He's been going on about how smart he is and how stupid we all are for at least the last week. I had already challenged him on Twitter to prove it; tell us his IQ, SAT, GRE, ACT, something, and he'd always change the topic.

Bill, ever the mature adult:

Note he doesn't screen cap the bit where I give my IQ which is what would actually explain his unhinged tweet.

He's now saying he didn't say what he said yesterday, even when we show him what he said, and we're the idiots?  It's like Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland: "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."

We are not expecting much to actually happen.  The person he is talking to is the SA's media person (would you talk to the DA's media person if you were reporting a crime?) and anyway, libel and defamation are civil torts, so the SA can't do damn thing, even if there was any, which we're pretty sure there isn't.  

I've taken to calling him Moldwarp, because he keeps calling us Lickspittles, so something Shakespearean seemed appropriate.  It's a mole, but gets used to mean someone who digs in the dirt, seldom seeing the light of day, often with implications of not-so-smart; the name directly means thrower upper of dirt (and Bill flings it with the best), and there is also a weird English prophecy which got attached to the Tudors about a person called the Moldwarp who ends up losing everything because of his pride.  ALL of those definitions fit Bill Schmalfeldt.