by Jarett Kobek
“Sue the fucker,” said the friend of the friend.
So I did.
I sued the fucker.
My attorneys were Ridder, Costa & Johnstone of San Francisco.
And here’s another way that I was poor but not poor.
I paid the attorneys with money that I got from my family.
If you ever want to sound like an insane person, cold call some attorneys and tell them that you’re being impersonated on the Internet by someone who is libeling you as a rapist and a pedophile.
Imagine that conversation!
As I’d spent some time discussing the situation with friends, I knew the first question that the attorneys would ask.
“Do you have any idea who’s doing this?”
“No,” I said.
In that initial phone call, the lawyers said that in their experience almost all of these cases derived from romantic entanglement.
An ex-boyfriend, an ex-girlfriend, or the ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend’s new partner.
When men were targeted, it was always the same: rapist, pedophile, homosexual.
With women, it was: slut, whore, skank.
Often accompanied by boudoir media taken in a haze of coercion or deluded innocence.
Remember: this happened back in 2010 AD.
A more innocent time!
What made the actions of my stalker so egregious were their relative rarity.
Hardly anyone was dealing with this shit.
By the Year of the Froward Worm, which roughly corresponded to 2017 AD, 1438 AH, and 5777 AM, about 40 per cent of online political and social discourse was indistinguishable from the treatment I’d received at the hands of Oyster the Clown.
Seven years after my misery, and everyone was being smeared as a rapist and a pedophile!
One of the common points in the literature available to victims of stalking is the idea that the victim will go through a period of self-recrimination. They will hunt down their every ill deed and wonder which one was the cause of their current misfortune.
The literature is uniform in its rejection of the victim bearing any responsibility for their misfortune.
It’s not your fault, says the literature.
But, in my case, I find this to be bullshit.
I went through my period of self-recrimination, and my only conclusion was that the whole thing was my fault.
I had put myself out there.
No one had asked me to write a blog.
No one had asked me to be a writer.
I had done this to myself.
This was another instance in which my situation had anticipated the political and social tactics of the Year of the Froward Worm.
People who made the mistake of putting themselves out there, with the delusion that they should have a voice in the public sphere, were sifted through a purity test in which every public utterance that they’d ever made was given ruthless scrutiny.
If you were delusional enough to be an artist or a writer, you had to anticipate that the only possible reaction your work could receive was unfathomable amounts of hatred.
Let’s say that Donald J. Trump, the President, decides that he’s going to ban all Muslims from entering America.
Let’s say that he effects this ban by issuing an Executive Order, which was a way for the President to do whatever the fuck he wanted under the pretext of the law without having Congressional approval.
Now let’s imagine some slightly clueless person with a Twitter account.
This person is enraged by Donald J. Trump’s Muslim ban.
This isn’t his America!
His America doesn’t ban Muslims!
His America just murders them by dropping bombs on peasant villages!
This person decides that they want to criticize Donald J. Trump’s Muslim ban.
The way by which this slightly clueless person enacts his criticism is with a stupid little cartoon.
He draws big fat Donald J. Trump riding a beleaguered elephant, which is the go-to caricatured symbol of the Republican party. The elephant is trampling an America flag.
A dialogue balloon comes out of big fat cartoon Donald Trump’s mouth and it says, “I’m protecting America.”
At the bottom of the cartoon, another dialogue balloon comes out of the elephant’s mouth.
It says, “Plus he hates Ragheads. He’s not crazy about Spics either.”
Whose life will be ruined for at least several years?
Will it be the person who banned Muslims and ripped apart families and is literally killing people in the Middle East while ensuring that Palestinians live in misery?
Or will it be the person who attempted to criticize the person who bans Muslims, and in doing so used exaggerated rhetoric in an admittedly awkward attempt to strike at the truth?
Who will suffer?
Who will be haunted until their end of days?
The rich person or the poor person?
You’ll never guess what happens.
When I wrote the first draft of this chapter, I decided that it was only sporting to give my readers an opportunity to contribute to my eventual destruction, which is now the unavoidable fate of anyone who has ever been a writer.
What I had put in this very spot, reader, were some cheap misdeeds from my past.
The unstated joke about these cheap misdeeds was that none were particularly damning.
In the end, I’m just a shy, bookish person.
Happily, between the writing of that first draft and the publication of this book, I’ve committed a far greater sin than anything I could have confessed from my past.
In that window of time, I wrote and published a short book in defense of XXXTentacion.
XXXTentacion was a young musician who was shot to death at the age of twenty.
He was murdered after he’d been arrested and accused of beating the living daylights out of his pregnant girlfriend.
And the shooting occurred after he’d bragged, in an interview, about a homophobia-inspired beating of a fellow inmate in Florida juvenile detention.
These two incidents had caused much morality written on deadline.
He was the person who unified everyone across the political spectrum in their disgust.
He was the new O.J. Simpson.
And I defended him.
Without ambiguity, without shame.
I had sympathy for the devil.
Without repentance, without prejudice.
So there’s your raw material.
Go right ahead.
You can use almost any page of that XXXTentacion book to fuck up my career!
Rob me of the opportunity to contribute shitty opinion pieces to a dying news media!
Deprive me of the ability to be hired as faculty at a small liberal arts college where I can delude the stupid and the rich into thinking that they’ll be writers!
The future is in your hands!
Slender Man commands you!
But, reader, I give you fair warning.
You might be able to fuck up my shit, but no matter how much you huff and puff, you’ll never take away my tote bag that says BOOKS.
When my lawyers asked me who I thought might be responsible, I offered a crazy person’s answer: I suggested that my blogging had worked as sorcery and I’d summoned up a demon that was haunting me for the crime of hubris.
The suggestion was politely ignored.
My attorneys filed suit in Los Angeles Superior Court.
They received power of subpoena.
Power of subpoena meant that they could send out demands to the Internet service providers in Woodland Hills and Washington DC.
And when the subpoenas came back, we’d have the name of my stalker.
There’s a story in here that I can’t tell you, because it would go back on a promise that my attorneys made to a third party, but we very quickly ended up with the name of the person responsible for all the bother.
I’d been harboring the
delusion that, when the name was revealed, it would play out like Agatha Christie, and the unmasking would give me a sense of understanding and wisdom.
But that’s not what happened.
It was someone that I didn’t know.
At all.
Hadn’t met.
Not once.
With no connection to anyone that I’d ever known.
There was no reason behind the stalking and libel.
It was random.
And I could give you my stalker’s name, right now, immortalizing them in the annals of literature. There’s nothing stopping me. I can’t be punished for reporting on public records available in the case files of Los Angeles Superior Court.
But as I’ve been writing this chapter, I’ve reflected on how life plays out.
And how strange things have become.
Back when I was being stalked, there was no question that I was on a level playing field with my stalker.
I was no one.
He was no one.
But things have changed.
I’m an international bestseller, I’ve done countless radio appearances, I’ve been on television more times than is good for the spiritual health of any one person, I’ve been chased at the Frankfurt Book Fair by a swarm of book paparazzi, sat through about one hundred and fifty interviews, I’ve been hotboxed by Alan Moore, I’ve had Carl Bernstein talk to me about how his son plays guitar for Demi Lovato, I’ve informed Seymour Hersh about my cat’s irritable bowels, and I’ve annoyed Zadie Smith for about forty minutes at a reception filled with billionaires, Salman Rushdie, and the Jordanian royal family.
I’m famous in Serbia.
I’m writer-famous in Germany and the United Kingdom.
The power differential has shifted.
And we must embrace mercy above all things.
When my attorneys gave me my stalker’s name, I spent about a week putting together a picture of who’d been fucking with my shit.
There was a near vacuum of information, but he had a page on the Internet Movie Database, and I was able to figure out that he was a thirty-four-year-old man from Washington DC.
He was a failed screenwriter.
Unemployed and living with his parents.
And the namesake of his father.
He was a junior.
At the very moment when Junior was fucking up my shit from the family’s million-dollar row house, Senior was in the United States Senate, working as an assistant to a long-serving Republican.
I was being fucked with by Republicans in Washington DC!
For the first time in my life, I felt like a true American artist.
The father had spent decades working his way up through the Republican hierarchy, until he ascended into a job with the Republican Finance Committee. At one point, ABC News had called him, “One of the Republican party’s top officials.”
It had all fallen apart in 1996 AD, when the RFC was hit with a sexual harassment lawsuit that specifically focused on Senior. It alleged that on a near daily basis, Senior expected to fondle his female subordinates.
The culmination came in October 1996 AD, when 20/20, a television show, ran a report on the lawsuit and on Senior in specific.
It contained footage of Senior at a Republican holiday party, dressed like Santa Claus, leering at younger woman.
It also contained footage of Senior being confronted at the Republican National Convention by the reporter Brian Ross, asking Senior to explain why he had sexually harassed women while dressed like Santa Claus.
This was the beginning of the end.
Senior kept getting demoted to lesser and lesser positions in the Republican hierarchy until he ended up working in the Senate as an assistant.
Reader, let me say this: I’m sorry that this book has included two sexualized mentions of Santa Claus.
None of this is what I wanted.
This is what life has done to me.
In May of 2000 AD, the Washington Times ran a puff piece about the previous home of my stalker’s parents. This was where they were living before they bought the row house.
It was the sort of rubbish that newspapers run whenever a rich person wants to sell their home. Stuffed with quaint, folksy detail.
My stalker’s mother is quoted in the article, talking about how the home was haunted.
She tells a story about how the ghosts had fucked with a wheel of cheese.
I was being stalked by a person who’d grown up with a haunted wheel of cheese whose father had been exposed on national news for leering at women while dressed as Santa Claus.
That’s life.
No one ever said it’d be easy.
It’s very easy to laugh about these absurdities, but there was another way to look at the situation and quake with dread.
I had stuck my nose in a hornet’s nest.
These were very rich people.
And they were very well connected.
They were consummate Republican insiders.
And I was fucking with them.
Reader, I could supply you with endless details about the intrigues of the case and how my stalker dodged being served with the lawsuit, and how his parents aided and abetted him in dodging service, and how he finally accepted service after I had my attorneys call his sister and leave a message on her work voicemail.
But I’m only going to give the basics.
Before my stalker accepted service, Senior ended up on the phone with my attorneys, and he tried to talk them out of the lawsuit.
He threatened and he blustered.
He finally claimed that Junior suffered from “nerve problems” which kept him from working, but that he’d try to get his son on board with the lawsuit.
He said that he couldn’t understand why anyone would waste the resources suing his son, given that his son had no money.
I can’t remember what my attorneys said in response.
Had I been asked, I would have said this: I’m from Rhode Island.
Rhode Island is the smallest of America’s fifty states.
It has the longest official name: The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.
I haven’t lived in Rhode Island for nearly twenty years.
But I’m always from Rhode Island.
Whenever someone from Rhode Island is on reality television, they’re always the worst of the worst of the worst. They’re the people television producers cast because they know that the presence of a Rhode Islander is a shortcut to endless drama.
Rhode Island was founded in the Seventeenth Century AD by the most obnoxious people in the New World.
People like Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson.
They had fled England because their bad personalities threw their neighbors into murderous rages. They sailed across the Atlantic and settled in bullshit Massachusetts hellholes like Salem and Boston.
And then their bad personalities promptly threw the new neighbors into murderous rages.
They were banished from Massachusetts.
And they had to go somewhere.
So they went and founded Rhode Island.
The crazy never left.
It’s still there.
Think of it like this: unlike every other colony in New England, Rhode Island never had a witch trial. But we sure as fuck dug up some old corpses, cut out their hearts, and called them vampires.
If Senior had asked me why I was suing his son, this is what I would have said: Your son made a terrible error in judgment. He thought that the limits of his own imagination were the boundaries of the universe. But he had no idea about the chaos of Rhode Island. There’s a reason why it says INRI on the cross.
After the phone call with my attorneys, Senior convinced his son to accept service.
And then they stonewalled.
Months went by.
By stonewalling, what Senior did was this: he hung his only son out to dry.
I wasn’t stopping.
I was from Rhode Islan
d.
And my attorneys were fucking sharks.
If you’re ever sued, there’s good strategy and there’s stupid strategy, and then there’s the worst strategy.
Which is to do nothing.
And that’s what my stalker did.
Despite all of my attorneys’ phone calls, despite the constant forwarding of documents and filings related to the case.
He did nothing.
His parents would not help him.
We kept going, kept moving the case along, and we ended up filing a default motion.
When a defendant refuses to interact with the civil courts, the plaintiff enters a motion of default. When the motion is granted, the plaintiff then enters the documents for a default judgment.
If the court accepts the plaintiff’s plea for judgment, it means that the plaintiff has won the case. There is an accepted absolute veracity in the plaintiff’s filings.
The defendant agrees, tacitly, that all of the plaintiff’s claims are true. The defendant agrees, tacitly, that they are not contesting their responsibility.
My attorneys filed the proposed default judgment.
On February 11th, 2011 AD, Justice Daniel J. Buckley of the Los Angeles Superior Court signed off on the full requested amount.
$1,235,144.75.
One million two hundred thirty-five thousand one hundred forty-four dollars and seventy-five cents.
My attorneys had derived this figure as the ultra-extreme of what the law allowed.
I haven’t tried to collect on the judgment, which has compounding 10 per cent yearly interest.
As of this writing, my stalker owes me $2,406,947.70.
By the time this book is published, the amount will be more.
And that’s the last contact I ever had with my Internet stalker.
All of the comments he left about me are gone.
All of the accounts he made in my name are gone.
It’s like none of it ever happened.
But given that it did, I hope you’ll forgive me when I express discomfort with an entire society, and its decaying journalistic apparatus, orienting itself around the destruction of individuals based on things posted to the Internet.
Chapter Nineteen
Exeunt Rusticano
A magical island devoid of its charm would be like feminism in a society where all the men had been expelled or murdered. Pretty fucking pointless.