Update: A few readers complained that this post is too long--that it was straining their computers' performance. So I created a new version that broke it down into little pieces, here.
[Important Note: I have uploaded a number of documents onto the internet and reference them in this post. In all cases, I have endeavored to remove all personal information from these documents, such as addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, etc. If I have by oversight included any personal information, please inform me in the comments or by email and I will seek to rectify it immediately. I have also redacted certain information that was privileged.]
[Important Note: I have uploaded a number of documents onto the internet and reference them in this post. In all cases, I have endeavored to remove all personal information from these documents, such as addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, etc. If I have by oversight included any personal information, please inform me in the comments or by email and I will seek to rectify it immediately. I have also redacted certain information that was privileged.]
Dear reader, I have been holding back a story from you for over four months. A crime was committed against me—indeed, several have been—but I was afraid to publicize it, because it would have the effect of fully and completely “outing” me.
Well, today I break that silence, starting with my name. It’s Walker. As in Aaron Walker, not “Aaron Worthing” as you have known me for now over two years.
And I am going to tell you about how Brett Kimberlin attempted to frame me for a crime. He attempted to make authorities in Maryland believe that on January 9, 2012, as we were both exiting a courtroom, I essentially beat him up. You will see him claim that I “decked” him, that the sheriff’s deputies had to separate me from him, that I kept coming at him and the deputies had to restrain me.
And then you will see video of the incident and realize that all of this is a lie. I will even show you a second video that contrasts Kimberlin’s words with the video footage. That is right, you are not going to have to believe my word. You will only have to believe your eyes.
This is a long post, but that is because there is a lot to tell. And we do have to start with some background.
Part 1: Background.
Even if you have been following the posts in what I am calling “The Kimberlin Saga,” there are some things I didn’t share and in any case it helps to put it all in one place. Of course if you want to go back and read all the posts in this “saga,” I suggest you use this link. But I am going to take a few minutes to give you the major points of what happened before. And I am going to write this as if you know nothing about me, because hopefully I will be attracting many new eyeballs with this post.
So let’s start with me. Now that you know my real name, who is this Aaron Walker guy? What secrets are revealed now that I have removed my mask? Am I in a secret conspiracy with the Chamber of Commerce, the late Andrew Breitbart, and/or the Freemasons?
Actually no. In truth, “Aaron Walker” is really kind of a nobody. The reality is that Aaron Worthing, my online alter ego, has had a greater impact on the world than Aaron Walker. Aaron Walker is simply a lawyer of reasonable professional accomplishment, but not exactly a superstar, either, who has a hobby on the side of blogging under the pseudonym “A.W.” and later “Aaron Worthing” (always making it clear that both were the same person).
As Aaron Worthing, I have had a pretty good run as a blogger. I have blogged, commented, etc. on the internet almost continuously for about ten years, but let’s keep it to the last few years. A few years ago, I created this site “Allergic to Bull.” I also participated in the free-speech, anti-terrorism protest called Everybody Draw Mohammed Day and even created a website dedicated to it, called “Everyone Draw Mohammed.” I talked about my participation in that movement, here and here. And this Wikipedia article on the movement as a whole is fair and mainly accurate as of this writing (Wikipedia articles are notorious for being “strategically edited” by people with an agenda).
In October of 2010, I was contacted by J. Patrick Frey, a.k.a. “Patterico” of Patterico’s Pontifications. Patrick is a Deputy District Attorney in Los Angeles in the hard core gang unit. I think it is fair to say that we were acquaintances who mutually admired each other’s writing at that time, but we were not yet friends. But he was about to go on a vacation for two weeks and he needed someone to serve as guest blogger while he was gone, to keep his regular readers happy. So he honored me by asking me to do this for him, and I happily agreed.
And then when he got back he told me that, gosh, his workload was murder and could I stay on a guest blogger and pick up the slack? So I did, and two weeks ended up being a little over a year. But Patrick always intended it to be a temporary thing and so in December of 2011, he asked me to leave and I won’t say I don’t miss it, but I think I was very gracious about it. And as I was leaving I revealed publicly that Aaron Worthing was a pseudonym, in a post.
Now one thing that was going on from the beginning of my tenure at Patterico’s Pontifications in the background was the Brett Kimberlin story. Patrick published a couple posts about him. The first post he wrote was this one, supplementing a post at Breitbart’s site by Mandy Nagy. Kimberlin then threatened to sue both of them, mentioned in posts here and here. Patrick challenged Kimberlin to name one falsehood in his post; Kimberlin couldn’t. But that didn’t stop him from making this threat: “I have filed over a hundred lawsuits and another one will be no sweat for me. On the other hand, it will cost you a lot of time and money[.]”
But for me I just didn’t find the story very interesting. Don’t take that as criticism of Patrick. What makes a story interesting to a blogger is a matter of the very particular preferences of each blogger. Patrick found something fascinating about it, but in my mind it was “ho-hum, another domestic terrorist accepted by liberals despite his crimes.” Horrifying, yes, but not quite shocking anymore. It was like Bill Ayers all over again. It was hard to see the significance of it.
Of course Brett Kimberlin is an awful human being. I realized that even before we truly crossed paths, and I am only more convinced of this today. He is a convicted terrorist (bomber, specifically), known as the Speedway Bomber. Kimberlin v. White, 7 F.3d 527 (6th Cir. 1993). He earned that title by setting off eight bombs in six days in the community of Speedway, Indiana. Here’s what the Sixth Circuit wrote about him:
Kimberlin was convicted as the so-called “Speedway Bomber,” who terrorized the city of Speedway, Indiana, by detonating a series of explosives in early September 1978. In the worst incident, Kimberlin placed one of his bombs in a gym bag, and left it in a parking lot outside Speedway High School. Carl DeLong was leaving the high school football game with his wife when he attempted to pick up the bag and it exploded. The blast tore off his lower right leg and two fingers, and embedded bomb fragments in his wife’s leg. He was hospitalized for six weeks, during which he was forced to undergo nine operations to complete the amputation of his leg, reattach two fingers, repair damage to his inner ear, and remove bomb fragments from his stomach, chest, and arm. In February 1983, he committed suicide.
Later in a civil suit Kimberlin was found to be liable for Carl DeLong’s death and the injuries to the widow DeLong. Kimberlin v. DeLong, 619 N.E.2d 46 (Ind. 1993).
Kimberlin was indeed convicted of thirty three offenses related to those bombings. Besides the more obvious bombing-related counts, he was convicted of illegal use of a Department of Defense insignia, and illegal use of the Presidential Seal. That might seem puzzling until you realize that the materials Kimberlin used to build his bombs couldn’t exactly be bought at the local Piggly Wiggly. They are highly regulated explosive substances. So he had to forge documents, with Presidential Seals and Department of Defense insignias, to obtain the materials. So it is right to say he is a convicted document forger. That will become important later.
By the way, you might also ask why he committed his spree of domestic terrorism. Well, that was never proven, but according to the Indianapolis Star and Mark Singer, in his book Citizen K: The Deeply Weird American Journey of Brett Kimberlin, the police had a theory. It started with a young woman named Jessica Barton, the daughter of Sandi Barton and the granddaughter of Julia Scyphers. Kimberlin had a relationship—he claims it was platonic—with Sandi Barton and through her, he came in contact with this young girl. How young? When they first became acquainted Jessica was ten years old and Kimberlin was twice her age. (Citizen K, page 76.) And there is this passage from Singer’s book:
For three consecutive summers, 1974 through 1976, they took vacations of a week or longer in Disney World, Mexico, and Hawaii. Sandi couldn’t get time off from work, so on these summer trips it was just the two of them-Brett and Jessica.
Eyebrows levitated. A drug-dealing colleague had memories of conversations with Kimberlin that struck him as odd: “We’d see a girl who was pubescent or prepubescent, and Brett would get this smile and say, ‘Hey, what do you think? Isn’t she great?’ It made me very uncomfortable.” Another recalled Kimberlin introducing Jessica as “my girlfriend,” and if irony was intended, it was too subtle to register. To a coworker at IU-PUI, Sandi confided that Kimberlin was “grooming Jessica to be his wife.” To another, Sandi explained that though Kimberlin’s relationship with Jessica was chaste, he intended “to wait for her and would marry her.”
(Page 78.) So Julia Scyphers—who you remember is Jessica Barton’s grandmother—allegedly became concerned about this relationship and was very vocal in her concern. Kimberlin claims there was no such conflict with Scyphers, but according to Singer and the Indianapolis Star, this was contradicted by the statements of others, such as that of Judith Johnson, an employee of the management company that serviced the Barton family’s apartment. She reported to the police that Scyphers tried to have the locks changed—possibly to lock Kimberlin out—and someone prevented the maintenance man from changing the cylander (this might have been Sandi Barton, Julia’s daughter and Jessica’s mother). Ms. Johnson then reported this encounter afterward:
Brett C. Kimberlin came to our office. He came into my office and closed the door, talked very low, was nervous, introduced himself as living with Sandra Barton, 68 POC #A, and stated he had lived there for a good many years. He told me that his girlfriend's mother was harassing them, that she hated him and their situation (living there with her daughter and grandchildren) ... he said that Mrs. Barton's mother was insane and that he wanted them to get away from her but that Mrs. Barton was afraid of her mother and would not stand up to her.
(Emphasis added, page 81.) So then next thing you know, Julia Scyphers was murdered:
On July 29, 1978, Speedway resident Julia Scyphers, 65, answered a knock at her door. A man she didn’t know was standing on her stoop asking about items she’d recently tried to sell at a yard sale. She let him into the garage to look at the items and he shot her in the head.
Mrs. Scyphers’ husband, Fred, 68, heard the bang and came out in time to see a car pulling out of the driveway. He would later tell police he’d gotten a glimpse of the man who’d come to the door.
When police began looking for a motive in the Scyphers slaying, they found there’d been a recent family clash. Julia Scyphers’ daughter, Sandra Barton, had become involved with a man who seemed to Mrs. Scyphers to be inordinately close to one of Barton’s young daughters. Mrs. Scyphers told friends she was so concerned that she’d arranged for both of her granddaughters to come live with her. Whether or not Mrs. Scyphers’ fears were correct (no charges were ever filed to that effect), this incident led investigators to start looking at Brett C. Kimberlin.
(Source.) So according to Singer and the Indianapolis Star, the police’s theory went like this (this whole paragraph is based on their claims): Kimberlin starts having this questionable relationship with the very young Jessica Barton. Of course one can only speculate whether anyone’s suspicions were valid, but according to witnesses (besides Kimberlin who denies this) Julia Scyphers suspected something was seriously wrong and was very vocal about it. Then someone gunned Scyphers down, and a lead suspect was a Kimberlin associate. According to Singer and the Star, the police suspected this was a murder-for-hire ordered by Kimberlin himself. Mind you, none of this could ever be proven, but it was what the police suspected, according to those sources. And shortly after that, the Speedway bombings began—the police believing that these bombings were done to distract from their Scyphers investigation—all according to Singer and the Star.
Which I admit makes very little sense. I mean if you believe the theory attributed by Singer and the Star to the police, he tries to get away with a crime by... committing other crimes? But that hits on an important point. As I have said to several people when explaining this, it is useless to try to make sense of his conduct. All one can do is recognize the conduct he has engaged in. But I believe that explaining the workings of his mind in a way that makes sense is impossible—because I believe that he does not think like a rational person. At least that is my opinion. Feel free to draw your own conclusions.
Also, these were not the only crimes he was convicted of (or suspected of). He was also convicted of conspiracy to distribute 10,000 pounds of marijuana. And he was convicted of perjury.
Nor did his immoral behavior end there. As noted above, he was found liable for the death of Carl DeLong and for the injuries to the widow DeLong, and as a result of that civil suit against him he owed her over a million dollars. He then started to come into money, particularly as the money from Citizen K started to roll in. After all, the book was written under contract with Singer, so that he got some money from that (even though it was far from the flattering portrayal that Kimberlin had probably hoped for). So the DeLong widow attempted to take some of those profits as part of an effort to collect on her debt. The parole board later found that Kimberlin had done just about everything he could to prevent the widow Delong from collecting her debt and indeed found his conduct to be so deplorable that they revoked his parole—an extraordinary action for a parole board to take. This passage from case of Kimberlin v. Dewalt, 12 F.Supp. 2d (D. Maryland 1998) is particularly damning:
The [parole] examiner found that petitioner [Kimberlin] used “deceitful maneuvers to hide his ability to pay” and that his “relatives and friends are obviously acting to help him by filing claims and liens to protect his money and property from being available to satisfy the victim’s judgment.” The examiner further found that the “evidence against [petitioner] was provided by the subject himself,” and that at no time did petitioner “indicate any concern or empathy for the victim.” Finally, the examiner found that petitioner’s settlement offers were not undertaken in good faith; concluded that petitioner had resisted parole supervision by Officer Ramsburg “in every way he can,” and recommended revocation of parole with a presumptive parole date of two years... Petitioner was taken into custody at the conclusion of the hearing.
So he is not exactly a prince among men.
Anyway, throughout 2011, I was also vaguely aware in the background that Kimberlin had sued a blogger/commenter named Seth Allen in the Montgomery County, Maryland lawsuit known as Kimberlin v. Allen (case number 339254v). You can look it up, here. And you can look at the complaint, here, and the amended complaint, here. I will probably do a post in the future discussing all the dissembling going on there, but bear in mind that many of the statements attributed to Seth were not actually written by him. For instance, Kimberlin has claimed that Seth advocated for the extermination of Jews, and if you might think this is an odd position for a person who is actually Jewish to take that would be because he didn’t actually say that.
I can also say that the complaint doesn’t appear to be sufficient as a matter of law. But Seth ended up with a default judgment against him and on August 22 and 23, 2011, he was looking for help. And because I kind of lived kind of close to where this was going on, he sought out my help. The problem was that I am not an attorney in Maryland, so I couldn’t do very much for him. But I briefly provided him a little legal advice. Of course some of it is privileged, but I share the unprivileged part of our interactions, here. And that was the end of it. Or so I thought.
But Brett Kimberlin learned that I had provided Seth that brief, slight, free legal help and that was enough to make me a target of his anger.
The Maryland case went on. There was a hearing on November 14, 2011, to determine what damages would be awarded to Kimberlin for this supposed defamation. You can read the transcript of that hearing, here. He was awarded the grand sum total of... $100, and court costs, which resulted in much mockery from Patrick. But Kimberlin was also given an injunction that commanded that Seth shall never defame Kimberlin or tortiously interfere with his business relations. And as he is wont to do, Kimberlin very quickly decided that Seth had violated this order and demanded that Seth be held in contempt in a hearing set for January 9, 2012.
And that is when he decided to drag me into this. In an email I have published at this site before, written just after midnight on December 15, 2011, he remarkably asked that I ask Seth to waive attorney client privilege so that I could testify against him, and if I didn’t, he would subpoena Google in order to get my information. You can read that email, here. And then after waiting only two business days, he filed that subpoena and a motion to compel spinning a wild conspiracy theory, which I shared with you here. You can read a scan of the document, here. You remember that line above where I jokingly asked, “[a]m I in a secret conspiracy with the Chamber of Commerce, the late Andrew Breitbart, and/or the Freemasons?” Well, it isn’t entirely a joke to Brett Kimberlin. Kimberlin has gone on record as believing that I have been “conspiring with, advising, and aiding abetting [sic] Mr. Allen for over a year regarding” Seth telling the truth about Kimberlin’s deplorable past. Mind you, he has no proof of this, and indeed no evidence of it. All he has is evidence of contact, between a lawyer and a guy being sued, after he was sued, which isn’t even unusual when you think about it. And he has indicated in conversations with my counsel, Beth Kingsley, that he believes that the conspiracy includes Andrew Breitbart and/or the Chamber of Commerce, but there is no word on whether he thinks the Freemasons are involved.
And there is some debate in my circle of friends about whether he actually believes this or not. I don’t know; I can’t say. I do know, however, that it is what he said in that document. But I have also learned not to trust anything that Kimberlin claims to be true. He has no compunction about lying about easily verifiable facts as you will see. So... who knows what he really thinks? I can only describe his conduct.
Of course in talking to my friends I came to believe that what this really was, was a prelude to Kimberlin stalking and harassing me. As I have shown before, Kimberlin has at least two people—Ron Brynaert and Neal Rauhauser—who at the very least have proven to be willing conduits for any information that Kimberlin wants to put out in the public sphere. For instance, in regards to Brynaert (a former editor of Raw Story), when Seth Allen was arrested, Brynaert knew of this within twenty-four hours, even though this had not appeared in any public record at the time (see here). When Kimberlin filed his motion to compel, Brynaert also knew of it within twenty-four hours (see here, an excerpt from Brynaert’s blog). On December 30, 2011, Kimberlin wrote an email to my then-attorney, Beth Kingsley, accusing me of a violation of legal ethics by trying this case in the press, accusing her of having a conflict of interest because she represented the organization known as ACORN and arguing that she was responsible for my alleged ethical violations. (See here, and my response, here). On December 30, Mr. Brynaert suggested I was unethically trying this case in the press (see here). On January 1, 2012, just after midnight, Brynaert alluded to the fact that my lawyer once represented ACORN (see here.) On January 6, he suggested Ms. Kingsley was responsible for my supposedly unethical conduct (see here).
Indeed, Brynaert is only one degree of separation from Brett Kimberlin. He has guest blogged at Brad Friedman’s “The Brad Blog” and Mr. Friedman is an admitted business partner of Mr. Kimberlin (see here). Further, Brynaert has received emails sent by Kimberlin (see here), and has acknowledged in a recent tweet that “I will gladly testify for @AaronWorthing if Kimberlin sues him over courthouse incident since Brett lied to me about it”—thus admitting that Kimberlin had been feeding him information about the case from the start.
Turning my attention to Neal Rauhauser, whom Kimberlin has described in court as his “associate,” he has obviously served as a conduit for information only available to Brett Kimberlin. For instance, Rauhauser published a document on the Scribd document-sharing service (the same one I am using). I revealed the existence of this document on this blog and he promptly made it disappear. As I wrote at the time, “Don’t bother making it disappear, Neal, because I have already preserved it.” And indeed I did. You can read a copy of that document, preceded by a screenshot from the Scribd page indicating his authorship, here. It includes numerous images of documents related to the Kimberlin v. Allen litigation, including letters addressed specifically to Brett Kimberlin. The document also included wild accusations that Seth was being paid by one of a number of persons, including myself, to bring up Brett Kimberlin’s deplorable past.
And this crew—Brett Kimberlin, Neal Rauhauser and Ron Brynaert—had a long history of stalking and harassing others, and I expected the same to happen to me if Kimberlin got my real name. I talk about that history to a degree here, but bluntly there are a lot of things they have done that I know about, that the victims have asked me to be silent about... for now. Besides, would you want a convicted domestic terrorist with a grudge against you to have your name and home address?
So on December 29, I filed a motion to quash the subpoenas and an opposition to Kimberlin’s motion to compel Google to reveal my identity. That isn’t a typo, on “subpoenas.” By then he had also subpoenaed Comcast, but did so without informing me—I discovered it by searching the Maryland Judiciary Case Search website on my own. This is a regular pattern with several people reporting that when he was required to serve documents on others, he often would fail to do so and then claim he had.
In any case, my response—which you can read, here—argued that Kimberlin was abusing the discovery process in an attempt to stalk and harass me. It also argued that the underlying injunction that he was seeking to enforce should be dismissed in any case because it was obtained in significant part by false testimony. I brought three examples of his dishonest statements to the court’s attention, but here is the most easily proven example.
Q [Seth Allen] Were you released and then sent back to prison for a parole violation, for failure to pay compensation to the, Ms. Delong (phonetic sp.), the wife of Carl Delong, who took his own life after those bombs --
A [Brett Kimberlin] No.
Q -- tore up half his body?
A No, I wasn’t.
I have linked it before, but you can read the transcript, here. That would be on Page 40, lines 12-18. And of course what he said was not true: he had his parole revoked for precisely that reason, as you can read, here. I also said in my response that the court should consider reporting Kimberlin to the appropriate authorities for charges of perjury.
Now for reasons more complicated than they are interesting (but if you are curious, you can read up, here), I was essentially forced to retain a lawyer pro bono for a small procedural matter in relation to the suit named Beth Kingsley. She is the ACORN lawyer that Brynaert mentioned earlier. And Brett Kimberlin began to call and email her. It started with veiled threats to my lawyer’s livelihood, and to file frivolous ethics charges against us in an email I have already shared with you. How frivolous were they? So much so that he claimed I was violating a rule that didn’t exist. Yes, really.
Then he proposed a settlement. Normally, the privacy of settlement negotiations should be respected, but what he wrote in this is in fact key evidence of his intent to frame me, so I think I am justified in sharing this. (And there is no rule against sharing it in public—it’s just sort of a cultural norm.) You see on that date, January 3, 2012, I had never met the man. I had never spoken to him, emailed him or indeed contacted him by any means whatsoever. And yet already on that date he was talking about filing criminal charges against me. Here’s what he said he was going to offer me—a not-so-veiled threat:
Please take this letter as an offer to settle issues between me and your client known as Aaron Worthing. This settlement will allow Mr. Worthing to maintain his anonymity.
1. I will withdraw my subpoenas for Comcast and Google to identify Mr. Worthing filed in Kimberlin v. Allen.
2. I will forgo any future litigation concerning Mr. Worthing, including bar complaints, sanctions, civil suits, criminal complaints, peace orders and other administrative actions.
3. I will not make any public statements about Mr. Worthing, and will not ask others to make any public statements or posts on the Internet about him.
4. I will not make any future attempt to identify Mr. Worthing in any manner.
(Emphasis added.) Here is an embedded copy of that offer:
So he was already talking about criminal complaints and peace orders against me, when we had never even met, when he had no just cause to do such a thing.
And notice something else, here. All of this was started with him claiming that he wanted my testimony. But there was no attempt to obtain that testimony in that offer. Indeed, it was all about shutting me up—getting me to withdraw my response and to take down my truthful postings about him on the internet. Oh, and apologizing and saying I should leave him alone—as though he hadn’t come after me first. I mean, read the archives of this site. Before Kimberlin came after me, I only mentioned him in a post once, and it was in response to his conduit Ron Brynaert attacking me for my slight representation of Seth. This is therefore the sum total of what I had written about Brett Kimberlin before he came after me:
Brynaert is almost certainly referring to [Kimberlin v. Allen], involving the alleged defamation of Brett Kimberlin, the convicted terrorist known as the Speedway Bomber. I suppose next he will assert that I have defamed bin Laden. Seriously, defamation is a cause of action for damage to reputation; does Kimberlin even have a public reputation capable of being damaged?
Everything else I had written about Kimberlin was in response to his thuggish behavior. But according to him, I was the supposed stalker.
Now I did want to try to get out of the immediate situation relatively unscathed so I did authorize my attorney to make a counter offer. So as we were considering how we would respond, Kimberlin sent my attorney these emails:
Because I have decided to redact his email address, it is sometimes unclear who is the sender or recipient in that copy. However, in each case, it is an email exchange between Beth Kingsley and Brett Kimberlin, ultimately being forwarded to me. Notice how his sole focus is silencing me, not obtaining my testimony.
So we made a counter offer and let a few days go by. On January 5, according to his own documents, he made up his mind to reject the offer. He filed a motion to withdraw the subpoenas. Here’s a copy of it, with only my birthdate, my address, my then-current employer, and my employer’s address redacted. Please take the time to read the whole thing and see the amount of personal information he chose to put into this document:
Remember folks, according to Brett Kimberlin, I am the stalker. And yet he decided to put this “stalkerish” amount of information into this public document.
On the same day, he sent a letter to the FBI, the Virginia State Police, the Fairfax County Police and the Prince William County Police (I lived in Prince William but worked in Fairfax). This is a copy of that letter, with the same information redacted.
Notice that he wrote that “there exists the very real probability that Mr. Walker could be subjected to serious harm or death now that his identity has been exposed.” Since he was the one who exposed my identity on that date, and indeed at that time, he was the only person exposing my identity, he was confessing to having engaged in a course of conduct that he believed could get me killed.
But of course I didn’t know he had filed that. So he chose to send me a copy of it, by email on January 7, a Saturday morning. I immediately informed my work about the situation, fully expecting the harassment my friends had suffered to arrive at their doorstep and realizing that at this point in time they had a right to know. And then I planned to come to the contempt hearing January 9, 2012—the following Monday.
And that brings us to the day of what I have since referred to as the January 9, 2012 incident.
Part 2: The January 9, 2012 Hearing.
So I went to the Montgomery County, Maryland Circuit Court on that morning to address Mr. Kimberlin’s blatantly improper Motion to Withdraw. I hoped to ask for the document to be sealed and for Kimberlin to be sanctioned. I will mostly let the transcript of that day speak for itself, but obviously there are things that do not appear in it, so I will supplement it with my commentary occasionally. For starters, when the court case was called, I immediately stood up at the same time as Kimberlin and came forward about a step behind him.
THE COURT: Civil 339254, Kimberlin versus Seth Allen. And you are?
MR. KIMBERLIN: I’m Brett Kimberlin.
THE COURT: All right.
MR. WALKER: My name is Aaron Walker. I am the blogger known as Aaron Worthing. And I have an emergency motion against Mr. Kimberlin for his gross misconduct in this case, and I’d like to be heard. I know it’s unusual.
THE COURT: It’s not here on your proceeding.
MR. WALKER: I understand, Your Honor.
THE COURT: So I’m not going to hear it.
MR. WALKER: Your Honor, he filed an improper motion before this Court on Friday. I had no notice until Saturday morning that he had done that. He has, in a blatant attempt to stalk and oppress me, he has put --
THE COURT: Hold it. Hold it.
MR. WALKER: Yes. I’m sorry.
THE COURT: First off, you don’t have any right to be saying anything.
Let me break in. At this point, Kimberlin burst out laughing, so the next sentence is directed at him:
THE COURT: And you don’t have a right to be laughing. There’s a motion to withdraw as moot plaintiff’s motion to compel seeking identity of Aaron Worthing.
MR. KIMBERLIN: Yes.
THE COURT: And then there’s a, plaintiff’s response to Aaron Worthing’s motion to quash. And you’re Mr. Worthing?
MR. WALKER: Well, I’m Aaron Walker, and I blog as Mr. Worthing, that’s correct.
THE COURT: Are you requiring that he come to court today?
MR. KIMBERLIN: Judge, initially I, he’s an anonymous blogger who’s been involved with the stalker.
Notice in Kimberlin’s mind it somehow reflects on the lawyer to be “involved with” an alleged “stalker,” meaning Seth Allen. Kimberlin thinks that Seth Allen is so self-evidently evil that he doesn’t deserve even the slight legal help I gave him. On the other hand, do you think Kimberlin has a problem with all the lawyers who represented him, a convicted domestic terrorist and drug dealer?
THE COURT: But why are you, why is he here?
MR. KIMBERLIN: And so, I didn’t ask him to be here. He just foisted himself on this hearing.
THE COURT: Well, he says he’s been summonsed.
MR. KIMBERLIN: No.
MR. WALKER: Well, no, no, no.
MR. KIMBERLIN: He wasn’t summonsed.
MR. WALKER: If I may explain, Your Honor.
THE COURT: All right.
MR. WALKER: He did actually initially ask me to testify today in his initial correspondence with me. If he’s not interested in my testimony today, then I would ask why he has subpoenaed this Court in order to obtain my identity.
MR. KIMBERLIN: I withdrew that.
THE COURT: It’s been withdrawn.
MR. WALKER: Yes. But I understand, but why did he do that in the first place?
THE COURT: Well, it’s been withdrawn, so it’s, he says it’s withdrawn. It’s moot.
MR. WALKER: But Your Honor, if you look at what he has filed today, all he had to do in order to file that motion was to tell the Court that he obtained my information. He did not have to even say my name. Instead, in this public document now, he has put my name, he has put my home address, he has put my birth date, he has put the high school I went to. He put the fact that I dropped out of high school in this. He put the fact that I received a GED. He put the fact that I went to the University of North Texas. He went and put in the fact that I sued the law school admissions council. He put in the fact that I was admitted to Yale Law School and graduated in the class of 2002. He put down my current job with my current employer and their address as well. His intent in doing this was so that it becomes a public record so that him and his friends can put this out into the public so they can stalk and harass me. It is plain on the face of this. And I would ask Your Honor to swear him in and ask why he put all this unnecessary information in this, in this filing.
THE COURT: Well, it’s been withdrawn as moot.
MR. WALKER: Well, I’m talking about the motion to withdraw itself.
THE COURT: Well, it’s done. It’s no longer in effect.
MR. WALKER: But this is a public document. And his friends will then take this public document, his motion to withdraw as moved, and they will put it out, and then put out all of my information.
At some point in all of this—and I think it was about now—I saw the judge look through the file and read. I believe he was looking at the document itself, and I could be wrong, but I believe I heard him say, under his breath: “What the…?” And after he was done looking, I sensed a shift in his demeanor.
THE COURT: Are you asking that this be sealed?
MR. WALKER: I would like this to be sealed. I would like –
THE COURT: Any objection to sealing it, Mr. Kimberlin?
MR. KIMBERLIN: Judge, this –
THE COURT: Say yes or no.
Now let me pause here and ask you a question, dear reader. Let’s imagine that Kimberlin cared about my safety. Let’s imagine that he didn’t want to create “the very real probability that Mr. Walker could be subjected to serious harm or death” as he said in that letter to law enforcement. Then wouldn’t he jump at the chance to seal it? If he was acting in good faith, wouldn’t he happily put it under seal?
So why exactly does he object to this?
MR. KIMBERLIN: Yes, I object.
THE COURT: Why?
MR. KIMBERLIN: Why?
THE COURT: Yes, why. Why should all of this be a matter of public record?
MR. KIMBERLIN: This man has engaged in stalking with the defendant in this case.
THE COURT: Well, there’s no order against him in this case.
MR. KIMBERLIN: No, there’s no order against him. But he –
THE COURT: So why is he even a part of this case?
MR. KIMBERLIN: He did it anonymously. Initially, I wanted to call him as a witness. And then when I filed the motions to call him as a witness, he began trying the case in, on his blog. He filed every, he posted every motion on his blog. And he kept accusing me of all kinds of terrible things on his blog. And he ridiculed me. He taunted me. He threatened me. He had people posting on his blog that I was a terrorist and a pedophile and all this other stuff. And he engaged in unethical behavior. He said that he represented the defendant in this case as an anonymous person. He can’t, a lawyer cannot represent someone as an anonymous person. He asked to be identified. I mean, he went on his blog and said I am representing, I entered into an attorney-client privilege relationship with Seth Allen as Aaron Worthing. And he’s not even a lawyer in this jurisdiction. He lives in Virginia. He can’t represent somebody as a fake person, in a pseudonym.
You can search on this blog. I have never threatened him, except to say that if he breaks the law I will ensure that he will face the consequences proscribed by law (which any citizen is allowed to do). And the people “posting” he is referring to are commenters. This blog is a one-man show. Those who call him a “terrorist” are of course, right. And the only commenter talking about his suspected pedophilia, was stating in his opinion that he had an inappropriate relationship with Jessica Barton, which given what I quoted to you from Singer’s book, seems like a pretty reasonable opinion to me if you credit Singer’s reportage. As for his assertions that I have behaved unethically, I have addressed them here.
MR. KIMBERLIN: I mean, that’s -- and so he put himself out there to be identified. I mean, if he’s a lawyer, fine. I have a right to determine if he’s a lawyer. He can’t say that he’s anonymous and he’s representing Seth Allen. It just, it didn’t make sense. And so I said, well, I need to find out who this guy is. If he’s saying he represents somebody in a case against me, then I need to be able to identify him. And so I identified him. And I didn’t want him to come out and say -- the reason I put all that information in the document was because Mr. Worthing has called me a liar over and over and over. And I wanted to, everybody to know –
Notice that part: “I wanted... everybody to know[.]” He was admitting that this was for the world’s consumption.
THE COURT: Why is this even in the court? This is incredible to me.
MR. KIMBERLIN: I know. It’s really incredible.
THE COURT: No. I mean, the whole thing is incredible. I’m going to, there’s a motion that was, to quash that was filed on behalf of, it was filed originally by –
MR. WALKER: If you’re looking, it’s Seth Allen, I suspect.
THE COURT: No. It was filed by Elizabeth –
MR. KIMBERLIN: Kingsley.
THE COURT: -- Kingsley.
MR. KIMBERLIN: Yeah.
MR. WALKER: Oh, that would be the attorney who represented me in the past.
I had technically “fired” Ms. Kingsley that morning—not for cause, but because I was representing myself from there on in.
THE COURT: And she filed a motion to file anonymously or to file under seal.
MR. KIMBERLIN: Right.
THE COURT: And she’s filed that. And I’m going to grant the request to file this anonymously or under seal.
You can read that motion, here. Basically it was asking the court to create a mechanism by which I could challenge Kimberlin’s attempts to out me without outing myself. We presented the court two different alternatives, and with this action, the court basically said, just then, “go ahead, do either approach.” Brett Kimberlin will later read much more into this decision than is actually there.
MR. KIMBERLIN: Okay.
THE COURT: And I’ll grant the request to seal the information that’s contained at Docket Entry 114, which is the motion to withdraw as moot. [To me] All right. Sir, that concludes your –
MR. WALKER: Actually, I would like a little more relief, if you don’t mind me taking a moment.
THE COURT: That’s it. No. I’m done. You’re done.
MR. WALKER: All right. Thank you, Your Honor.
And for the most part that was the end of my involvement in the hearing. The transcript doesn’t quite capture how hostile the judge was to my even being there, and you know what? I completely understand. I think by the end he saw that I was genuinely aggrieved to a degree, but I can understand why he didn’t want me there at all.
Now there is one more part where Kimberlin was being misleading to the court and I attempted to intervene and correct the record. Bear in mind, Seth didn’t show up for this hearing. He lives in the Boston area on a fixed income and couldn’t afford to make the trip. He did file motions to appear telephonically, but apparently they don’t allow that in Maryland (and let me say as a matter of constructive criticism, that this rule should change). So no one was there to defend Seth, and so I attempted to break in to correct the record.
For instance only seconds before I attempted to intervene, Kimberlin said this: “And, you know, he calls me all kinds of things. He calls me a terrorist. He calls me a cyber smearer. He calls me a pedophile. He calls me a perjurer.” Kimberlin was implying that these statements were defamatory—that is untrue and harmful of his reputation. Well, of course two of those terms (“terrorist” and “perjurer”) were absolutely true and I was concerned that the judge didn’t know that. A lawyer has a duty of candor toward the tribunal that I take very seriously. So it was about then that I attempted to intervene, peacefully:
MR. WALKER: Well, Your Honor, if I may, I’m sorry to break in a second time.
THE COURT: You know, I had a sheriff up here, because I didn’t think one would be needed. I’m about to get a sheriff to escort you out of the courtroom.
MR. WALKER: I don’t understand –
THE COURT: You’re not breaking in. Sit down.
MR. WALKER: I felt a need to explain something to the Court, if I could.
And yes, that makes me look a little bad, but that is because I am here to tell you the truth, warts and all.
And that was my last involvement in the hearing at all. But I did stick around, because I wanted to know how things went for Seth. I was considering blogging about it at the time. And listening to it, my fear that the judge didn’t get it—that he didn’t know about Kimberlin’s horrible criminal background—was unfounded. And to be self-critical, I should have figured that out from listening to the other hearings that day. What struck me as I listened to the other cases (Kimberlin’s was the last to be called), was that this judge had clearly done his homework. He knew most of the files back and forth and remembered a great number of details from every case off the top of his head. So I should have known that even though Judge Rupp had not sat in on the whole case, that he would have read the majority of the relevant documents, which would have brought out Kimberlin’s deplorable past. Now in one moment I will share with you an embedded copy of the whole transcript and you can read through it at your leisure, but here’s the moment where it became the most clear that Rupp got it, that he understood exactly who Kimberlin was:
MR. KIMBERLIN: I mean, it’s like I said, this is all since November 14th, this stuff. And it’s all about my business, and it’s all about me. I mean, I was arrested 32 years ago on a case. I got out of jail. I did my time. I run two non-profits in this, in this wonderful city working with kids and congressmembers and community leaders. And you know, I have two kids and a wife. And this guy will not leave me alone. He wants to post stuff that happened 32 years ago. You know, he dug up 32-year-old mug shots of me that I had never even seen before, that had never been posted.
THE COURT: Well, that doesn’t constitute defamation. It’s all true.
So the court went on, looking at post after post at Seth Allen’s blog and deciding that one post after another didn’t constitute defamation and therefore it didn’t violate the order. I didn’t see which exact posts Rupp was talking about, but you can deduce much of it from reading the transcript. So if you are curious—and in the name of full disclosure—embedded here is a full copy of the transcript of that hearing.
So that takes us through the hearing and it was after that hearing that what I call the January 9 incident occurred.
Part 3: The January 9 Incident.
As the hearing ended, I gathered my things and got up. Because of this I found myself about a step behind Kimberlin as he left. Kimberlin has feebly claimed I was “following” him in an attempt to claim I was harassing him—but it was only in the sense that I knew of no other way to leave the building available to me. Anyway, so Kimberlin turns to me and says, “I would suggest, Mr. Walker, that you leave me alone.”
I replied, “I will continue to tell the truth about you.” And then he continued to leave and I decided to ask him a few more questions in the hope of getting an admission out of him, asking him why he didn’t call me to the stand that day, given that I was supposedly such a vital witness. I said to him at one point, “The truth is you didn’t want my testimony, you just wanted my identity.”
And he turned to me and in a flash of anger, he said, “And I got it!”
During this exchange we had moved out of the courtroom, and into the waiting area outside. Shortly after he said those words, he took about two steps back and with a smirk, he raised his iPad as though to use it. Here’s what I wrote about it in my criminal complaint against him, and it is the truth (I will embed it later):
On January 9, 2012, I was leaving court at the same time as Mr. Kimberlin when Mr. Kimberlin raised his iPad as though to use it. Knowing that Mr. Kimberlin had deep malice toward me and knowing his criminal history, I was afraid he was about to do harm to me so I took the device from him. Because of the malice he had toward me and his criminal record, I believe I had a reasonable fear of bodily harm in that situation, justifying the invocation of self-defense. Even so, I only used the minimum force necessary to protect myself from this perceived danger. Specifically, I snatched iPad from him (he offered no resistance) and kept it from him, without ever once making contact with his body. I did not strike his body with my own. I did not push him. I did not wrestle with him. I did not strike him with the iPad as he later alleges.
That was the judgment I made about his conduct when I had no time to think, when I had to make a snap decision. As I waited, holding the iPad away from him I had time to think and to replay the event in my mind. As I thought about it I realized that more than likely Mr. Kimberlin only attempted to take my picture. I concluded that it was unlikely that the device was a bomb because I believe Mr. Kimberlin is too much of a narcissist to ever risk his own life. Therefore when the sheriff’s deputies arrived at the scene, I stated my belief that Mr. Kimberlin had taken a picture of me. Mr. Kimberlin denied that this occurred. I asked the officers to inspect the iPad for photographs. I did not see them do this, but they represented that they did, and I trust their word. I asked to inspect it myself, but they refused this request.
So basically I took his iPad out of fear for my safety—he is a convicted bomber after all—and then held it away from him peacefully. Courtroom staff told me that they had called the sheriffs deputies. I don’t remember my precise words, but I urged them to do exactly that. And the deputies arrived shortly afterward. At that point I gave back the iPad (giving it to a deputy who passed it along to Kimberlin) and accused Kimberlin of attempting to photograph me, which is against the rules in the courthouse.
Since then, Brett Kimberlin has essentially claimed that I not only took the iPad but I beat him up while doing so, and he filed charges for assault based on that claim. He has at times claimed that I have “decked” him, that I punched him repeatedly, that I wrestled with him, that I pushed him, that courtroom staff had to separate us, that sheriff’s deputies had to separate us, that I kept coming at him repeatedly and they had to hold me back. I will show you in just one moment where he said all of that—all of the documents, transcripts, etc.—but there is one way Brett Kimberlin fatally miscalculated. It never occurred to the rocket scientist that there might be security cameras in the courthouse that captured the whole thing.
Well, either that or he knew this was a possibility and didn’t care.
The video itself takes a bit of introduction. It was recorded using ViconNet’s proprietary software and while apparently the camera feed to the main security station is continuous, the recording is not. Let me use the testimony of Lt. Col. Bruce Sherman, of the Sheriff’s office, to explain to some degree, taking his testimony from the April 11, 2012 hearing related to this:
Q [Reginald Bours III, my attorney] Tell me about the system that these photographs are taken with or these videos are taken with.
A [Lt. Col. Bruce Sherman] There’s a Vicon system that has a number of hard drives, maybe two or three hard drives. I’m not exactly sure about the electronics, but there is a rack in the Sheriff’s office on the T8 level in the courthouse that records video feeds from cameras that are installed in the courtrooms, installed in the hallways in the courthouse, pursuant to a security study done by the National Center for State Courts some years ago.
They typically -- some of them are fixed cameras. Some of them are directable cameras and they record what I would call multiplexed video. In other words, it’s not a continuous stream of photographs. There are maybe 16 cameras being recorded on one hard disc and it will switch from each of those 16 cameras, as I understand it, take a fraction of a second, switch to the next camera, and then it gets multiplexed. Then there’s a software kind of set up that allows it to separate those pictures out again.
So the video feed to their hard drives is continuous, but the recording is not. Instead it only takes a “snapshot” at certain intervals and the video is going to be a series of these snapshots, shown in order. Here’s a screenshot of the video, with some helpful arrows on it:
Of course you can see where I pointed out where I was, and where Kimberlin was (the easy way to remember is that I am about half a foot taller than Kimberlin). And notice that there is a time stamp at the bottom left of the screen. Each “snapshot” will tell you down to the second when it occurred. And by watching the intervals, I estimate that the actual gap between images is around 1.75 seconds; that is, there is about 1.75 seconds between each snapshot.
Finally, because this is extremely raw video, you need to wait a minute before anything happens at all. Or you could fast forward... And I suggest you view it on "full screen" mode.
So without further ado, here is the video:
Feel free to watch it more than one time. Now whose version of events lines up more with what you just saw? Mine, where I say (as I have always said) that all I did was that I took the iPad from him and nothing else? Or his various accounts?
But in fact Kimberlin went a lot further than that. This convicted document forger went as far as to produce fake photographs and fake medical records in an attempt to convince law enforcement that I had so brutally beat him that I put him in the hospital.* In short, he attempted to frame me.
Part 4: What Kimberlin Said about the January 9 Incident.
But let us focus on what he said about the incident and we will start with his Application for Statement of Charges, filed on January 9, 2012. Citizens who claim that a crime has been committed against them in Montgomery County, Maryland, can go over the Commissioner’s Office in the District Court building in downtown Rockville, Maryland. The person fills out an Application for Statement of Charges, swears an oath that all that had been said is true, and the Commissioner or their delegate determines whether to file the charges. Here’s what Kimberlin said in relevant part in his Application against me:
[Aaron Walker] attacked me physically while exiting the courtroom. He hit me on the shoulder and chest and pushed me, and grabbed my iPad away from me and refused to return it. Mr. Walker has been [page break] harassing me and stalking me online for months, and as we were exiting the Courthouse / Room 5 / Floor 9, he said he was going to continue harassing me, and as we left the courtroom, he grabbed my iPad, hit me in the face, shoulder and chest and wrestled the iPad away from me. Several people witness [sic] this event and the police were immediately called. They got my iPad back and safely escorted me from the building. Mr. Walker tried to come at me several more times but was restrained.
(Emphasis added.) And here is an embed of the same document:
So just to keep track of things, I supposedly struck him three times, and then after the sheriff’s deputies arrived I supposedly tried to come at him several times and was restrained. And there is something else to note on this Application. Look at the time he filed it: 12:31 p.m. The entire incident was over at 11:49 a.m. So within forty-two minutes of the incident, he was pressing charges against me. And you will see later that he claims that I caused him to lose vision in an eye. If someone hit you in the eye so hard you lost vision in it, would your first action be to press charges? Or would you high-tail it to the nearest hospital, worried that you might permanently lose your sight? But no, instead he filed charges and then filed for something else called a Peace Order. That is sort of like a restraining order issued in domestic violence cases, only it is specifically required that the two people are not family. So he also filed a Petition for Peace Order, and in relevant part he said this:
Mr. Walker assaulted me while leaving the courtroom. He hit me in the face, chest, & shoulder and took my iPad, and threatened to harass me more.
Here’s an embed of that document:
So this time it is three strikes—”the face, chest, & shoulder.” No mention of wrestling, of me being held back like a wild bull or any of that.
(Please note that in the Maryland Judiciary Case Search database, his name is incorrectly written as “Kimberline.” So, if you are verifying that story, you need to do searches under both Kimberlin and Kimberline.)
It’s also worth noting that he affirmed the truthfulness of the petition, in a quick hearing held at 2:19 p.m. the same day, in order to get a temporary peace order against me. The hearing lasted approximately two minutes. Besides claiming that what he wrote in the petition for a Peace Order was true he also said, “I’m having trouble seeing out of this eye. I’m going to go to the doctor right now.” So that is right, as of about 2:21 p.m. on that day he hadn’t seen a doctor even though he was allegedly losing vision in one eye.
And believe it or not, he wasn’t done talking about the case for the day. At 4:59 p.m., he emailed my former lawyer, Beth Kingsley, and wrote (in relevant part):
I just finished pressing charges against him for assault and battery and got a Peace Order against him. Nine deputies had to back him off. He decked me in the face, hit me in the shoulder and chest, pushed me, grabbed my iPad away from me and wrestled me....
Went to doctor and they sent me to ER at Suburban, said I need a CAT scan.
You[r] client is very dangerous...
So just to review, he claims this time that I “decked” him and struck him two more times, that I pushed him, that I wrestled with him. So there he was supposedly losing vision in one eye, and in need of treatment at the ER, and he took the time to tap out an email. Good to know.
Here’s an embed of that email:
And let’s remind ourselves what the word “decked” means. If you google it, you get this:
That means in order for a person to be “decked” they have to be at least knocked on their behind. Did you see that happen in that video?
Of course this wasn’t a statement under oath, but later in a hearing on April 11, 2012 (which I will embed for you later in this post), he claimed under oath that he told the truth in that email:
Q [Reginald Bours III] Later in the afternoon on January 9th, did you send an e-mail to Beth Kingsley?
A [Brett Kimberlin] Probably.
Q Did you use Justice Through Music as your return on e-mail?
A Yes. Uh-huh.
Q Do you want to look at this? The top is irrelevant, but is that your e-mail to Beth Kingsley?
A Uh-huh. Yeah.
Q In that e-mail, did you say, I just finished pressing charges against him for assault and battery and got a peace order against him. Nine deputies had to back him off. He decked me in the face, hit me in the shoulder and chest, pushed me, grabbed my iPad away from me, and wrestled me.
A That’s true.
Q You say that’s true and that’s also what you put in the e-mail to her, correct?
A Right. Uh-huh.
And as usual it was all about shutting me up. This is what he wrote to my former lawyer at 10:46 p.m. that same night:
Beth,
You might want to advise your client that anything he says can and will be used against him in a court of law. I went into court seeking contempt and came out with criminal charges against your client because he physically assaulted me right in front of the court staff. If he blogs about me, harasses me, or takes any other action, he could be facing additional charges for obstruction of justice, and his sentence could be enhanced for intimidating his victim. I have asked over and over to be left alone, and now the Sheriff and Court have advised me to report any action, statement or other conduct by or on behalf of Mr. Walker, including his contacts to third parties such as Seth Allen.
It was Mr. Allen’s continued harassment of me after the November 14th judgment that drew Mr. Walker into the civil case. Now he is facing very serious criminal charges that occurred in the court itself and the entire matter has now been taken over by the long arm of the criminal justice system.
I am already working with the Victim’s Advocate at the District Court and I know my rights, the main one being that I have the right to be left alone by now criminal defendant Aaron J. Walker.
I spent five hours in Suburban Hospital this afternoon and evening being treated for injuries caused by your client and have been ordered by the attending physician to rest and take medication.
Brett Kimberlin
Yes, he was told to get bed rest, but somehow he crawled out of bed and wrote her an email helpfully telling me to shut up. You can read that email, here.
And of course Neal Rauhauser had to get into the act, too, writing in relevant part:
Kimberlin is hospitalized, blind in his right eye. They think maybe a blood clot, he was going in for CT scan when he called me.
I won’t be giving you the entire email, because he says a lot of things about different people that I suspect amounts to defamation and I am not going to be a platform for that. But he wrote that email to me at 8:14 p.m.
He also wrote this extortionate email earlier in the evening:
Aaron,
Do you think it would be best if each of us never said the other’s name in a public venue, nor induced anyone else to do this? If that is the case you can assent by simply removing anything you’ve ever written about me.
Sincerely,
Neal Rauhauser
In other words, silence myself about his creepy behavior (e.g. here and here) or be outed before the whole world. You can read that email, here.
The next time Kimberlin was asked to speak about the incident was a hearing to determine if a final peace order would be issued. That was on February 8, 2012, and I will embed a full copy of the transcript shortly. One important thing to note is that at this point in time I didn’t know there was video of the incident. I had asked a representative of the sheriff’s office immediately after the incident, and he had told me that no cameras were pointed in the correct direction. This turned out to be wrong (obviously). And as far as I could tell, Brett Kimberlin had no idea the video existed, either.
So here are the relevant excerpts from Kimberlin’s testimony:
But so as we were exiting the courtroom on the 9th floor, Courtroom 5, I believe, we walked out of the courtroom and he’s screaming at me and telling me that he’s going to continue harassing me. And as we got outside the door, right outside the courtroom, he began lunging at me. I picked up my iPad and took a picture of him lunging at me. He decked me in the eye and wrestled with me.
A man that followed us out of the courtroom raced back into the courtroom and told two people that were working for Judge Rupp that he was attacking me and attacking me. They came out and told him to get off of me and they called the police. Nine police came up to the -- or, sheriffs came up there and separated him. He had my iPad in his hand at the time and refused to give it back.
The sheriff went over and took the iPad away from him and told me to come down and press charges against him. I pressed charges against him for second-degree assault and I also got this peace order. At that time, the judge in the temporary peace order case told him not to harass me and not to bother me or do anything.
(Emphasis added.) And there is this silly bit:
You know, Judge Rupp ran him out of the courtroom and he was so angry, he went into a complete rage. I ended up in Suburban Hospital, you know, for six hours that night. I got -- here’s a picture of him with his hand coming down towards me to whack me in the face that I took from my iPad. Here’s pictures of me with my black eye. I’ve got medical reports from the hospital from January 9th where he attacked me.
So let’s review, here. He claimed I “decked” him in the eye, and that I “wrestled” with him. He also claims that the courtroom staff told me to get off of him. He also claimed that Judge Rupp ran me out of the courtroom, something you can see is not indicated in the record for the January 9, 2011 hearing and indeed didn’t happen. Indeed, if it did, I wouldn’t have been leaving court at the same time as him and my life would have been much less complicated.
Here’s an embed of the entire February 8, 2012 transcript:
So this goes on and the charges against me stood until shortly after March 19, 2012. Of course they attempted to drop the charges—after seeing the video—a few days before. But Kimberlin managed to delay it for a few days by filing an opposition to the prosecutor’s motion to dismiss the case, entitled: “Victim/Complainant Brett Kimberlin’s Motion in Opposition to State’s Motion to Nolle Pros This Case.” One thing that is important to note is that I believe that at this point in time Kimberlin at least knew that the video existed and may have even seen it. It does explain the dramatic reduction in part of the story. Here’s what he said in that opposition about the incident:
6. As Victim [Kimberlin] was exiting the courtroom, Mr. Walker began berating Victim for identifying him and said that he would continue to harass Victim. As Victim exited the courtroom doors, Mr. Walker became more irate and began making threatening moves toward Victim including coming toward Victim. Therefore, Victim, using his iPad, snapped a photo of Mr. Walker with his hand coming toward Victim Exhibit A. [sic]
7. Mr. Walker struck Victim with his hand, and Mr. Walker began wrestling with Victim for possession of the iPad. A person who followed Victim from the courtroom repeatedly called back into the court, “He (Mr. Walker) attacked him.” Two courtroom staff came running from the court and separated Mr. Walker from the Victim. Mr. Walker retained possession of the iPad. The staff also called for assistance of courtroom deputies who arrived shortly thereafter.
(Emphasis added.) Here’s an embedded copy of that document:
So now I only struck him one time, and then wrestled the iPad away from him. Also he saw me coming at him and took the photo. And also the courtroom staffers came out and separated us.
And notice at the end of the document you see a picture supposedly of the bruise. You can’t see it particularly well in black and white (sorry, but the court would not give me a color copy), but in the original there was some purplish yellow discoloration near the eye. There is no way to know—besides this perjurer’s word—when it was taken; indeed it appears he just held his iPad up and took the picture himself. You can also see a very poor copy of the photograph he unlawfully took in the courthouse itself as my hand came at him to stop whatever he was doing.
I have also seen color copies of several of these pictures at the February 8, 2012 hearing. In addition to that, this is when he showed a copy of the supposed medical record. He did not make copies of that medical record to retain, so I cannot show you, but you can see clearly on page 12, lines 2 and 3 in the February 8, 2012 transcript, that Kimberlin indicates that he gave the judge the medical record. I am not medically trained so I cannot repeat what it said verbatim, but it claimed trauma to the head and that he had a cracked rib, supposedly.
And then finally in a second peace order hearing on April 11, 2012, he spoke about it again. First, in his opening statement (which is not technically under oath) he said this:
Mr. Walker has been engaged in a campaign of bullying towards me online and this resulted in him showing up in a court case that I was involved with, getting admonished by Judge Rupp to remain quiet in the court case, and following me outside the courtroom where he continued to berate me and came at me in an aggressive manner which resulted in me taking a photograph of him as he was coming to hit me. He did assault me at that time.
The courtroom staff came out of the courtroom, from Judge Rupp’s court, called the sheriff. Nine deputies showed up and they advised me that they could not arrest Mr. Walker because they didn’t see the assault, advised me to go to the commissioner’s office and press charges, which I did, and I got a peace order at that time also.
But this next part is under oath and it is somewhat lengthy:
THE WITNESS: Mr. Walker -- When the hearing ended, Mr. Walker followed me outside the courtroom and told me that he was going to continue harassing me. He –
MR. BOURS [my attorney]: Judge, could you instruct Mr. Kimberlin at least to give quotes of what was said as opposed to characterizations?
THE WITNESS: I heard Mr. -- okay. I’ll say what I heard.
THE COURT: You need to say exactly what he said. Don’t characterize it.
THE WITNESS: Okay. Mr. Walker said that he was going to continue harassing me.
THE COURT: Well, I don’t think he said he was going to continue harassing you. He didn’t speak in those terms. What did he say? Quote him.
THE WITNESS: That’s what I recall. Then as we –
THE COURT: You’re not understanding me. Mr. Walker did not come out of that courtroom and say he is going to continue -- he said, quote, “I” what?
THE WITNESS: “I am going to continue to harass, expose,” something about that. I’m going to continue bothering you, something to that effect. I recall the word harassment. Maybe it was bothering, exposing, something to that effect. And as we exited the two doors, he said, “You abused the court process by using subpoenas to identify me.”
As we continued to exit the second door, he got very loud and I felt threatened by his aggressive behavior toward me. I backed up. I backed up more and more. Finally, I pulled out my iPad because I wanted to document the fact that he was coming at me.
As I lifted my iPad, Mr. Walker came to me with his -- with his hand and hit me in the eye, or the face. He continued to come at me and wrestled with me for my iPad. Fearing that my iPad would be destroyed from Mr. Walker’s conduct, I finally released it and I heard someone come behind me, out of the courtroom, saying, “He attacked him, he attacked him.”
Two courtroom staff came running out of the courtroom and told Mr. Walker to get away from me, and they called the police. The -- within a very short time, eight or nine deputies came up to the ninth floor and Mr. Walker had my iPad still. He -- the deputy went over and took the iPad away from him. I told the deputies that he had struck me, assaulted me. They advised me to go to the commissioner’s office and get a -- press assault charges and to get a peace order against Mr. Walker. That’s what happened on January 9th. I did that.
Since then, I have been retaliated against. First of all, after that incident, I had a very distinct problem with my eyes. I had blurry vision in my eyes and –
MR. BOURS: Object.
THE COURT: What’s the basis of that?
MR. BOURS: It sounds like he’s trying to give a medical diagnosis. There are proper ways to do that. But I think all he’s entitled to state is what my client did to him, not what it caused.
THE COURT: Yes. There are no damages awarded in a peace order.
THE WITNESS: Well, I ended up at the hospital. I ended up at Suburban Hospital for six hours.
THE COURT: I mean you understand you don’t get damages in a peace order.
THE WITNESS: I’m not asking for damages right now.
THE COURT: But go ahead.
THE WITNESS: I’m saying what happened. I had a terrible -- a screaming headache. I had blurry vision in my eye. I had back pain. I went to a clinic over here on Seven Locks and the doctor looked at me and –
MR. BOURS: Object.
THE COURT: Sustained. You can’t say what the doctor said.
THE WITNESS: Well, the result was I was sent to the emergency ward at Suburban Hospital where I went there and was there for approximately six hours, and had a CAT Scan, multiple other evaluations –
MR. BOURS: Judge, I object again.
THE COURT: I sustain that. You see, that has nothing to do with whether a peace order is granted or not.
And then my attorney cross-examined him:
Q So then you filed in the jacket all the identifying information about him and you withdrew the motion before Judge Rupp, is that correct?
A Yeah. I -- yeah. I let the judge know that it was moot and this is why.
Q You agree, I think you even said on your direct, that this gentleman to my left came to court and asked that your motion to withdraw be sealed because it contained his identity, correct?
A Yes. And the judge granted that motion.
Q But you still had your iPad with you and you tried to take a photograph of him outside the courtroom, didn’t you?
A That’s not the series of events. I would not have taken –
Q Well, you did try to take a photograph with your iPad.
A Yeah. I did take a photograph. I did take a photograph.
Q It’s the one you put in evidence.
A Exactly.
Q You claim you took that only because he was attacking you?
A No. He was -- he was being an aggressor. He was verbally aggressive and physically aggressive toward me, and he was coming at me, and I felt that in order to memorialize that aggressive behavior, I took a picture. And I’m very well aware of the rule requiring -- I mean prohibiting photos in the courthouse and so --
Q You are now or you were then?
A No. Of course I was then. And I talked to the deputies when they came up and I told them that I had taken a picture, and –
And then we get this later in the cross-examination:
Q In connection with the assault, will you tell this Judge now in what manner he assaulted you? Give us a concise, but complete statement of the ways in which he assaulted you on January 9th.
A Well, as I said, he -- when he came out of the courtroom, he was berating me with comments, and being aggressive, and coming toward me. And I felt threatened, so I pulled the iPad out to catch him, because I could see that he was getting ready to actually physically hit me, and I backed up and clicked the picture. I got his hand as it was coming toward me and it hit me some -- somehow it hit me in the eye. I mean everything happened very quickly. And he started wrestling with me and I felt bumps on my side, my chest, and my back twisted. And he’s wrestling me for the iPad and he actually took the iPad away from me. And I didn’t want to struggle with the iPad too much because I was afraid it would break, and my kids use that iPad a lot and I didn’t want to disappoint them, so I let it go. And he -- then the man --
Q Let me try a couple of things here.
A Okay.
Q Did he knock you down?
A No. He hit me.
Q He hit you?
A Well, his hand hit me. His hand hit me. Whether it was his fingers or his hand like this, I don’t know, but I –
Q Are you claiming that he hit you with his fist?
A No. I don’t know if it was -- I can’t say it was a fist. I can say it was a hand.
Q Isn’t it really a fact that he was just holding up his hand so you couldn’t take a photograph of him?
A Absolutely not. Absolutely not.
Q And then he grabbed the iPad from you and walked away from you?
A No, sir. I -- no, sir. Not at all.
Q That’s not a fact?
A That’s not a fact at all. I mean I –
Q Now you’ve apparently watched the video?
A Yes.
Q Do you claim the video supports what you’ve just told us?
A Exactly. Yeah.
And this is slightly off topic, but here is where my attorney cross-examined Kimberlin on the subject of the opposition he filed to the charges being dropped against me, and his motives in filing it:
Q Excuse me. Prior to filing the motion that is part of No. 7 [the State’s Attorney’s motion dismissing the case], did you know the State had the absolute right to drop a case?
A Absolutely. Of course.
Q So in other words, you filed this multi-page opposition to their absolute right to drop the case and put that in a public record, is that correct?
A I filed it because I didn’t want them to drop the charges. That’s why I filed it. And I felt like I wanted to get it before a judge and make my case before a judge and I thought that I would be able to have that motion heard. I was also in touch with several people and they said yes, including the victim’s advocate. I talked at long length with the victim’s advocate and she suggested that I file that motion.
Q She? What’s her name?
A Donna Becker (phonetic sp.).
Q She told you could file an opposition in the court file?
A Yeah. Uh-huh.
Q Sir, isn’t it a fact that this is just part of your ongoing campaign, your campaign, to put materials about my client in public records so that other people can look at them and potentially put him in danger?
A Oh come on. I -- the State’s Attorney called me up and had a long talk with me.
Q Excuse me. Could you answer my question?
A That’s totally false.
So that is what he said about the January 9, 2012 event. Now to be fair let’s review everything I said about the incident. Here’s what I said about the January 9 incident in the February 8, 2012 Peace Order Hearing:
I did not, I did not physically touch him once. This is what happened that day. I knew that he was a convicted terrorist. I knew that he was a convicted bomber. We were, I was, I was, frankly, cross-examining him live in front of, right there after the hearing. I was trying to get him to make damaging admissions and I did. I got him to admit that his entire process of attempting to obtain my real identity was a sham.
And at that point he stepped back, and now as he admits, broke court rules by attempting to take a photograph of me with his iPad. And I saw him go to do this, and I didn’t know what he was doing and I had a split second to think, Your Honor, and I didn’t know if this convicted bomber had a bomb inside of the device, had who knows what inside of the thing. So I had a split second to think and I reached down and I grabbed the iPad from him and I peaceably held it away from him, and that is all I did.
I did not deck him. I did not lay one single finger on his body.
Later in the same hearing I said this:
So, all I had done that day, Your Honor, is, you know, I literally took the iPad from him, I surprised him so much it wasn’t that difficult to do, frankly, and then I held it one way, you know, the other way -- it’s kind of like kids on the playground, honestly, Your Honor. And then finally I just held it above me, and that is all I did. And I did not touch his person one single time. I simply removed the iPad and held it away from him until the sheriffs could arrive and straighten the whole thing out, and that is all I did that day.
And I have also filed an Application for the Statement of Charges against him, on April 17, 2012 (which I will embed shortly), and although I have quoted it before, let me re-post what I said in it:
On January 9, 2012, I was leaving court at the same time as Mr. Kimberlin when Mr. Kimberlin raised his iPad as though to use it. Knowing that Mr. Kimberlin had deep malice toward me and knowing his criminal history, I was afraid he was about to do harm to me so I took the device from him. Because of the malice he had toward me and his criminal record, I believe I had a reasonable fear of bodily harm in that situation, justifying the invocation of self-defense. Even so, I only used the minimum force necessary to protect myself from this perceived danger. Specifically, I snatched iPad from him (he offered no resistance) and kept it from him, without ever once making contact with his body. I did not strike his body with my own. I did not push him. I did not wrestle with him. I did not strike him with the iPad as he later alleges.
That was the judgment I made about his conduct when I had no time to think, when I had to make a snap decision. As I waited, holding the iPad away from him I had time to think and to replay the event in my mind. As I thought about it I realized that more than likely Mr. Kimberlin only attempted to take my picture. I concluded that it was unlikely that the device was a bomb because I believe Mr. Kimberlin is too much of a narcissist to ever risk his own life. Therefore when the sheriff’s deputies arrived at the scene, I stated my belief that Mr. Kimberlin had taken a picture of me. Mr. Kimberlin denied that this occurred. I asked the officers to inspect the iPad for photographs. I did not see them do this, but they represented that they did, and I trust their word. I asked to inspect it myself, but they refused this request.
I’ll share a full copy of it in just a few moments.
Now let’s talk for a moment about the video—about what it shows and what it doesn’t show. Now, I know I am telling you the truth, that I only took his iPad, and that I never touched Kimberlin at all. But lawyers have to learn how to see the evidence for what it is, not what they want it to be. Because the video is not continuous, because the camera was some distance away, and it was not perfectly sharp, the video is not good enough to prove my version of events to be true. But you can take several things away from the video. Here, watch it again:
The first thing you can take away from it is that while it does not prove that I didn’t touch Kimberlin’s body, at the same time it doesn’t contradict my claim, either.
The second thing you can take away from it is that Brett Kimberlin has continually lied about happened. Let’s review all the things he said I did, starting with the most obvious lies:
He said I “decked” him. This was said in his February 8 testimony and in an email to my attorney on January 9. He claimed that his statements in the email were true in his testimony on April 11. But do you see me knock him down even once?
He said that after the deputies arrived, I “tried to come at [Kimberlin] several more times but was restrained.” This was in his Application for the Statement of Charges, filed on January 9, less than forty minutes after the alleged assault. Obviously this is pure fantasy.
He said the sheriff’s deputies had to separate me from him. This was in his testimony on February 8. But look at the video when the sheriff’s deputies come up. He is fully separated from me at that moment.
He said that two courtroom staff had to separate me from him. This was in his Opposition to the State’s Attorney’s decision to dismiss the charges. They never made any effort to pull us apart. Indeed I would assume that they were told to leave this kind of thing to the professionals in the sheriff’s department.
He said that I struck him three times. That was in the Application for the statement of charges and the petition for a peace order. Now to be coldly analytical one cannot be sure just from looking at the video whether I hit him at the same moment I snatched the iPad from him. I know I didn’t, but a neutral observer, just looking at the video would say “because of the poor quality of the video, I can’t tell whether he struck him at that moment. It is possible that he did, but it is also possible that he didn’t.” But multiple strikes? That is plainly implausible. As I wrote in my criminal complaint against Kimberlin:
To believe that I struck him three times (“in the face, shoulder and chest”), you would have to believe that I timed each action precisely between “snapshots” so that you not only don’t see the blow, but you don’t see any movement from me indicating that I was about to strike, or had just struck, and you don’t see any reaction from Brett Kimberlin in terms of being knocked by the blow or recovering from it. The same can be said of his allegations that I wrestled with him or pushed him; one would have to believe that both my actions and Mr. Kimberlin’s actions were timed perfectly so that the complete motion was missed by the “snapshots.”
And since I mentioned the allegation of pushing and wrestling, let me give you the source for that, too. Pushing was mentioned in was mentioned in Kimberlin’s Application for Statement of Charges. Meanwhile, “wrestling” was mentioned in Application for Statement of Charges, the February 8 testimony, his opposition to the State’s Attorney’s decision to dismiss the charges, and his April 11 testimony.
Indeed, to drive this point home, I have created a video comparing what Kimberlin said about the incident to what the video shows and also giving you a brief introduction to who Kimberlin is. I will win no academy awards for my work here, but I think it does what I need it to do, and I think it is fairly devastating.
(By the way, I am bound to say that the music is by and from MpFree.)
So the video doesn’t prove I am telling the truth, but it doesn’t contradict what I said, while at the same time it absolutely proves that Kimberlin has lied about what happened, from the beginning. I submit that under those circumstances it is logical to believe my account and discount everything Kimberlin claimed, but of course I am biased when I say that.
Part 5: The Effect of Kimberlin’s Lies.
The most horrifying part about this is how effective this man has been in convincing people to act on his lies. You have seen it suggested here and there in the last section as I focused on unearthing every example of his lies about the incident but yes, using these lies Brett Kimberlin has done the best to make my life hell for the last few months and succeeded to a disturbing degree.
It began on January 9, 2012 after the incident. One thing to understand is that my wife actually worked at the same company as I did. I called her to let her know the hearing was done and to give her an overview of what happened and she told me that a detective from the Fairfax County Police had come by. I won’t name him publicly, but she told me that he knew of Kimberlin and was interested in discussing the case with me. When I got there, I discovered that he was a specially trained detective in counter-terrorism and he came there out of concern for that letter Kimberlin wrote to law enforcement authorities. So I sat down in the office of the head of the Human Resources Department and discussed the situation with him in her presence.
Anyway, I also learned by the end of the day that both my wife and I were being suspended from our jobs. It turned out that the President of the company and some of her receptionists were in such complete apprehension that Brett Kimberlin might commit an act of domestic terrorism on their building that they no longer wanted me or my wife to be there as a target. They told us we were suspended without pay until the situation was “resolved”—whatever the hell that meant.
You will notice that I am leaving the name of the company, or indeed the names of any of their personnel, out of this. The reason why I am doing this is because the story I am about to tell makes them look awful. There are no two ways about it. But at the same time, I don’t have any malice toward them. I don’t blame them; I blame Brett Kimberlin. As I wrote to Patrick just the other day, “don’t think too harshly of [the President.] She’s just scared.” The company is in fact an excellent health care agency, that is successful in treating patients in every way you can objectively measure. And the President of the company herself has a “Horatio Alger” story that would make any patriot’s heart proud. I didn’t like how they treated me (and you won’t like it, either), but I bear no malice toward them.
On the same evening, I got that email from Beth Kingsley forwarding where Brett Kimberlin had informed her that he filed his false charges against me. This was second degree assault, for which a person could be sentenced up to ten years in prison. Now one of the things I had done as a corporate counsel for my company was internal investigations of allegations of wrongdoing. I am very good at investigations. And so I immediately started going over events in my mind and thinking of how an investigator would approach it. I knew that Kimberlin had a very old woman as a companion that day—you can see her in the video. There was also an old man there. I didn’t know the old man’s name, but I thought it was very likely that he was an ally of Kimberlin. So I believed it very likely that Kimberlin would have two people there to lie for him and just my word to back me up.
(By the way, it turned out that I was wholly wrong about the old man. He was a stranger to Kimberlin who was only there because he enjoyed watching trials. But I didn’t know about this until much, much later.)
But I also knew enough to believe that there was very likely to be a video camera pointed in that direction. But I honestly wasn’t sure. So on the tenth or eleventh, I came back to the circuit court building and looked in the 9th Floor’s waiting area. I could see, for lack of a better word, a large “pole” dangling from the ceiling, with the familiar security camera dome underneath it. But unlike most security camera domes, this one was transparent, allowing us to see the machinery inside. What I saw looked like there were three cameras, one of which pointed toward where the incident occurred. But I couldn’t be certain from where I stood that it was a camera.
So after a little asking around I figured out where the sheriff’s office was. I met with a nice man and asked him if anyone had taken footage. (I am not going to name him because I don’t want to bring public opprobrium down on him.) I knew enough about these security systems to be concerned that the footage might be deleted if it was not preserved. So he went back into their offices while I waited outside, ostensibly to examine the footage. When he came back he said he looked at the footage and told me remarkably that in fact there was only one camera in that dome, and it was not pointed in the correct direction; that they typically left it pointed toward the elevators because apparently that is where most incidents occurred. To this day, I have no explanation for the discrepancy; I have no idea why he didn’t think there was any footage of the event.
So I was faced with the prospect of Kimberlin possibly getting two other people to lie for him—after all, as the parole examiner noted, he had a history of getting friends and family to help him in his schemes—and just my word to back me up.
But at the same time, I believed prosecutors would probably take one look at my clean criminal record and Brett Kimberlin’s horrifying criminal record and at the very least it would raise a major red flag. As near as I could tell at that point, these were just his charges filed, and the State’s Attorney had to decide whether to go forward with it and I felt confident that the charges would be dropped in a week.
That Friday, meanwhile, I got a call from an attorney who had served as my company’s outside counsel when that was needed. He informed me that they had decided to terminate my employment. They had not immediately decided on my wife’s employment, but they eventually terminated her early the next week. They were literally so scared that they wouldn’t even let me come back to my office and retrieve my stuff. They ended up using a courier to send me my materials a few days later including something like nine boxes of law books. I think the poor courier got a hernia. I have no idea whether the criminal charges against me factored into the decision.
Also shortly after I got a copy of Kimberlin’s Application for Statement of Charges, I visited the State’s Attorney’s office. I asked them politely if I could speak to one of them about the charges pending. I knew from reading the Application that he had told verifiable lies. I mean you didn’t need video to show that his claim that after the deputies arrived, “Mr. Walker tried to come at me several more times but was restrained” was fantasy. You simply find out which deputies were present and ask them if that was true—and soon, before memories faded. I also wanted to make sure they knew about Kimberlin’s deplorable past, including his conviction for perjury. But apparently as a policy they will not talk to people they have charged. And that has indeed been one of my greatest frustrations in this whole process: the State’s Attorney was making decisions about my life without once allowing me to give them my side of the story.
Meanwhile, on January 17, Kimberlin filed a motion to unseal the documents. It was entitled “Motion to Unseal Pleadings Related to Aaron Justin Walker aka Aaron Worthing.” By placing my real name in the title, he ensured that all a person would have to do is search the Maryland Judiciary Case Search website and they would see my name; they wouldn’t even have to go to the trouble of going to the courts and getting a copy of the documents! This is a copy of that document (exhibits omitted):
I do not believe it is a coincidence that he filed this that day, and indeed made sure I had a copy of it right away by email. You see the following day (January 18) was the original date for the hearing to determine whether a Peace Order would be placed permanently on me. But I filed a pair of motions a few days before. The first was a motion to continue until February 8, which was granted. The second was a motion to clarify the Peace Order. You see it stated that I shall not contact Kimberlin, but I knew I was getting ready to sue him (and Brynaert and Rauhauser) in the State of Virginia for their conduct and as a matter of law I am required to serve copies of the documents upon them. We lawyers call this service of process. So I asked the court to either clarify that legally required communications by mail did not constitute a violation of the Peace Order, or modify the Peace Order accordingly. The judge said that it was implied that I was allowed to make legally required communications, such as service of process, but she also granted the motion to clarify. This will be important later.
On the same day I went to a nearby restaurant with a wi-fi connection and while my wife ate lunch, I tapped out an “Emergency Motion to Place Plaintiff’s ‘Motion to Unseal’ Under Seal” and then printed it out and filed it. I have had some data loss in my computer, but I believe that this is the final version of what was written. If it is not identical, it is only trivially different:
The motion was granted immediately sub silentio, with the court actually going as far as to change the name in the internet database so that my real name was replaced by John Doe as I requested. This was as clear an indication as Kimberlin should have needed that the court didn’t want him to put my name in a public document.
But then he did it again. On January 27, 2012, Kimberlin filed a “Plaintiff’s Response to John Doe Aaron Worthing’s Emergency Request To Seal Plaintiff’s Motion” and this time he included an un-redacted, unsealed version of the letter to the law enforcement I shared with you earlier, thus putting my real name, real address, and the name and address of my former employer into this public document. But at least he didn’t put it in the title of the document, this time. This is a copy of that document (with the exhibits, including the offending exhibit, excluded):
So I was forced to file another emergency motion to seal one of his motions. I also had to take the time to rebut his blatant lies to the court. For instance by this point in time I had published a novel I wrote on my spare time. You can buy it here, and read a little more about it, here. All you need to understand in this context is that it contains a gritty, realistic depiction of what a real-life superhero would look like in our post-9-11 world, with my character spending most of the novel fighting against islamofascists of various stripes and Chinese intelligence agents. And this is what Kimberlin wrote about it:
Mr. Worthing published a book this month called “Archangel,” which amounts to a direct assault on Muslims worldwide. It is an alternative history of September 11, 2001 in which a superhero appears and kills all the Muslims, including the female Muslim “bitches” and jihadist “whores.”
That is right, according to him, my main character supposedly “kills all the Muslims.” I admit I am not even sure what he means by that. Is he claiming that my character killed every Muslim alive? Or just any Muslim the character sees? (And how would he know a person was Muslim just looking at them?) Here’s what I wrote in response to that little bit of dishonesty (SPOILER ALERT):
This is demonstrably false. The character does not kill all Muslims on Earth or even all that he sees. Indeed, he saves the lives of many Muslims. A large sequence of the novel involves the hero saving a Muslim-American CIA agent and the Iraqi family he is embedded in from Saddam Hussein’s evil regime and he does so with the aid and under the command of several Muslims who are part of an American Special Forces Unit.
Indeed, the term “Muslim bitch” only appears once in the novel and is depicted as being said by an intolerant character which the superhero stops by his superpowers (telekinesis). Here is full context:
[Michael Sanchez, the superhero in the story] landed to find a couple drunken, angry youths chasing a woman in a Muslim veil. The woman stumbled because her ability to flee was hampered by clothing that covered her entire body except for her eyes. The youths fell in toward her, a dangerous mix of fear and hate filling their hearts.
“Stop!” he shouted, and threw up his hand, his palm flat out. The charging men knocked back as if they had hit a brick wall.
“Why are you taking their side?” one shouted.
“This isn’t up for discussion,” he said, “if you run away now, I won’t turn you over to the police.”
“Don’t walk alone at night, Muslim bitch,” one said, as they both turned and jogged away.
So rather than “kill[ing] all the Muslims, including the female Muslim ‘bitches’” the superhero is actually depicted as saving a Muslim woman from men filled with “hate and fear” who call her a “Muslim bitch.” Meanwhile, there is not a single reference to a Muslim (“Jihadist” or not) as a whore. It is a complete fabrication.
(SPOILER ALERT ENDS)
Indeed as one reviewer at Amazon wrote:
My favorite parts of this book deal with the reality of Muslim and Arab heroics. The bravest character in the book isn’t the superhero, but rather is a Muslim woman evolving from respect to fear of Saddam Hussein. Many of the heroic soldiers presented have Middle Eastern heritage. One of the heroes cites Islam when making highly moral judgments. The truth is, this book also takes a highly critical look at Islamofascism and a barbaric dictatorship, but it doesn’t generalize Islam. There’s no PC pretense. There’s no Rah Rah they are evil pretense. The world is more complex, and this story is more complex. The closest it gets to simplistic is a flashback scene discussing civil rights in America, but even then the effort to be realistic is evident.
This was one of many examples of this convicted perjurer lying about me to try to portray me as a Muslim hater, particularly for having participated in the Everyone Draw Mohammed movement. In doing so he ignores inconvenient facts, such as the fact that self-identified Muslims participated in the protest at my site, or the simple reality that he cannot quote a single word I have said negative about Muslims generally. I have always made it clear that I drew a sharp distinction between the ordinary Muslim (who is no better or worse than most people), and Islamofascist terrorists and tyrants.
The other thing that is interesting is that in his “Plaintiff’s Response,” Kimberlin writes in paragraph 15 that “Plaintiff [Kimberlin] has known of Mr. Worthing’s true identity for a month[.]” He wrote that on January 27. Here’s what I wrote in response:
Conservatively, that means the Plaintiff has known of Mr. Worthing’s identity since December 27, 2011. This means that the Plaintiff allowed Mr. Worthing to take the time and effort to file before this court on December 29, 2011, without informing him or the court that his subpoenas were mooted. This means that the Plaintiff allowed Google.com to file its response on January 5, without informing them or the court that his subpoenas were mooted. Indeed, the Plaintiff didn’t even serve his Motion to Withdraw on Comcast so that they needlessly sent the Plaintiff their response without knowing he had moved to withdraw the motion, on or about January 10, 2011.
Further, since the Plaintiff is now confessing that he knew the real name of “Aaron Worthing” when he sent this settlement offer [on January 3, see above], then this is also a confession that he made that offer in bad faith. In that settlement offer, the Plaintiff stated that “I will not make any future attempt to identify Mr. Worthing in any manner.” This implies that he had not yet identified Mr. Worthing’s true identity, but according to his filing today, he had already done so by that date.
Later in the April 11 hearing, he claimed that he knew of my identity since December 31st. Anyway, you can read my entire response, here. It was also a victim of the data loss I mentioned (basically a thumb drive I owned went kaput) but if it is not identical to what I filed, it is only trivially different:
Indeed, a sharp eyed reader will notice that I accidentally failed to censor out one mention of my real name in the document. I then had to go through the somewhat ridiculous step of having to move to put my own motion under seal. But while the court happily put all of Kimberlin’s motions under seal, oddly the court refused to put mine under seal. I was going to move that the court reconsider that, but I also knew at the time the decision was made that I was very close to writing a post like this. So I decided to hold off, in case I was wasting the court’s time.
After all that, I also filed my actual Opposition to his Motion to Unseal. You can read that, here (again, exhibits omitted):
And shortly after this he filed a motion for a hearing. I never filed a formal response to it, but it was denied anyway. You have to really love the part where he likens the pro-freedom-of-expression Everyone Draw Mohammed movement with being in the KKK, when he writes: “He has no more right to remain anonymous than do Ku Klux Klan members who wear their robes and hoods wile screaming invectives against African Americans.” In fact, to the extent that the KKK doesn’t have a right to anonymous speech, it is because it is a terrorist organization engaged in “activities, involving acts of unlawful intimidation and violence” NAACP v. Alabama Ex. Rel Patterson, 357 U.S. 449, 465 (1958). But it is interesting that he thinks that a person peaceably expressing a point of view is stripped of their rights if the court doesn’t like his or her viewpoint. Of course, that is not what the law says.
And as usual it was dishonest. For instance, it mentioned that the Virginia suit included my real name, etc. What he didn’t mention was that there was a motion to seal filed in that case too.
Anyway, here’s that motion for a hearing:
Through all of this, I was also getting ready for the final peace order hearing on February 8, but it was like beating my head against a wall. The sheriff’s department had written reports that day, but they refused to give me access to them. I did happen to run into Deputy James Johnson, who was one of the deputies there that day. He answered a few questions that prepared me for his testimony on the eighth. And he was willing to give me his name but not the names of any of the other deputies; he was concerned his supervisors would frown on that. Worse yet, there was no process for discovering facts like this before the trial. I couldn’t depose Deputy Johnson, nor could I serve their custodian of records, Lt. Col. Sherman, with a subpoena duces tecum to obtain anything like an incident report ahead of time, and I was not getting all of the information I needed voluntarily. I will say as a gentle criticism to authorities in Maryland, that if you are going to take away a man’s freedom to any degree, you need to have more due process than this.
So I had to go to the February 8, 2012 Peace Order hearing with almost no objective evidence to prove my side of the story—certainly with no video evidence because I didn’t even know that the video existed. I did have Deputy Johnson there to testify that he saw no sign of injury on Brett Kimberlin after this supposed assault that supposedly temporarily robbed him of his eyesight. And I had Brett Kimberlin’s willingness to lie about everything in my corner. That helps.
For instance, one of the biggest whoppers Kimberlin made was when he tried to minimize his criminal background:
I was, I was charged with a crime 33 years ago. I was released from prison. I’ve done my time.
Got that? He was only charged with only “a crime.” Singular. He does the same thing later in the transcript:
He throws this criminal case that I was convicted of 33 years ago in my face constantly.
Again, it was just one case. That’s all. Or so he wants you to think.
So I let him have it in response:
He, for example, said that he was convicted of a crime. He has 35 counts conservatively against him. He has been convicted of setting eight bombs in six days in Speedway, Indiana. He has been convicted of conspiracy to distribute 10,000 pounds of marijuana. He’s been convicted of perjury and he comes here to this court and says [“]I was convicted of a crime?[”] This is the character of him. He lies about everything.
(Emphasis added to reflect how I said it.) By the end of the hearing, even without the video evidence I showed you today, the judge couldn’t conclude I had done anything more than what I always admitted to: taking the iPad from him. But unfortunately the judge misread the harassment statute and found that I had harassed him.
In the background of all of this, Neal Rauhauser started talking about an event called Kookpocalypse that was supposed to take place on February 6, 2012, placing things on his websites such as videos of beheadings and the promise that “something wicked this way comes.” If you know the reference, you know it is talking about blood. He also posted how to get to Manassas, Virginia, and Boston, Massachusetts—where both I and Seth live. I try my best to keep some of this ugliness from my wife, but she insisted on knowing and at times it reduced her to a crying wreck she was so afraid. I am more stoic as a rule, but I recognized I had a rational reason to be concerned. So we took a few days to prepare for whatever he was up to. I filed for a Temporary Peace Order against him and got it. Given that Rauhauser was being intentionally vague I was pleasantly surprised they granted that much and not actually very shocked when they didn’t grant a permanent one about two weeks later.
I also purchased a handgun. I had owned a shotgun since law school for home defense, but I wanted something I could more easily carry in public. As they say, better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it. And I made sure Kimberlin’s crew knew I was armed, to make them realize that I was not defenseless.
In the end, the only thing that happened on “Kookpocalypse” was Rauhauser releasing a long and unhinged screed sketching out his conspiracy theories. I can only speculate about whether this was what he was planning all along, or if he was scared off of his original plans by the Peace Order. It’s also worth noting that I had two additional Peace Order hearings related to that. The first had to be continued because Rauhauser had not been served. That was also on February 8. And Kimberlin decided to try to intervene in that. He filed a motion to intervene and claimed falsely that I was being dishonest, playing dumb on the difference between where a person currently lives and where their last known address is. I knew that Rauhauser on that date lived in Montgomery County, Maryland, but I did not know his actual current address. So for the Virginia litigation I listed his last known address, which was in Illinois.
His attempt to intervene was very quickly shot down because he had no standing in this case; he had no right to intervene. And as a point in fact, I didn’t tell the Sheriff’s Department that Neal lived in Kimberlin’s house. I told them that they were associates (as Kimberlin admitted) and therefore Brett Kimberlin almost certainly knew where he lived. Then approximately a week later I was back in court again for the Rauhauser Peace Order. And Kimberlin came again, and tried to intervene again on the same motion to intervene. He didn’t even bother to write a new one; he just tried to assert, a second time, the motion that had already been denied. Again, remember that Kimberlin was claiming I was stalking him. Kimberlin was dismissed quickly. But since “Kookpocalypse” had passed and Neal had been so vague in the first place, it didn’t quite surprise me when the judge decided not to issue a Final Peace Order.
At the same time, to my growing horror, the criminal case remained in place. So I did a few things to try to shake things up. First, I filed my own criminal charges against Kimberlin, for perjury at the November 14 hearing (for denying his parole had been revoked), for extortion in threatening to file a false criminal charge against me (in his “Settlement Offer”) and for filing a false police report. I had two goals in filing that. First, I believed that he did commit these crimes and hoped he would be taken off the streets. It’s not fun having to check your car for bombs every time you go to drive it. Second, I figured that filing this complaint just might force the State’s Attorney to talk to me—something that thus far they refused to do. Here’s a copy of what I filed:
(Please note, that I made an irrelevant transcription error when quoting from Kimberlin’s Application for Statement of Charges.)
Please note that the first page of my copy is as unreadable as yours; it was a carbon copy and it didn’t press through too well. Sorry about that, but it was all basically a condensed and very conclusory summary of what I wrote in the typed pages. As you can see I also filled out a criminal complaint against Rauhauser, too and combined it into one document. But for some reason, the commissioner only filed the charges on the perjury against Kimberlin. The following week, on February 7, I met with people in the State’s Attorney’s office. I had hoped for a chance to discuss the whole case but because the Commissioner only certified the perjury charge, that was all they would hear from me. Which was frustrating.
I also filed at about that time that civil suit in Virginia based on their misconduct, you have heard mentioned a few times.
And shortly after the final peace order hearing, I began shopping around for local counsel in the criminal case. By then I had concluded that there was a prejudice in the system towards anyone representing themselves—which didn’t disappear when the person in question is actually himself an attorney. And frankly I wanted the division of labor you could enjoy when the advocate is not also the victim. It is hard to be dispassionate when dealing with a man who was literally trying to get you and your wife killed, frame you for a crime, and in general ruin your life. We ended up hiring Reginald Bours III, justifiably considered one of the best lawyers in the area. But it ended up costing about $7,000 in total. This was indeed why I went very silent about all things Kimberlin—out of respect for Mr. Bours’ wishes.
And already things started to change. Some of it might have been my doing. The supervising prosecutor (I won’t name her) said there was a “cross-complaint situation” that was complicating matters, meaning that they noticed my criminal complaint against Kimberlin. But at the same time, Bours spoke to Lt. Col. Bruce Sherman and Sherman told Mr. Bours that there was video footage of the event. We didn’t have a copy of it at that time, and I can’t disclose the full conversation between myself and my attorney, but the description of the video was similar in content to the video you have seen, but understated the detail conveyed. But I knew from the moment I heard of the video that if it was as good as promised it would exonerate me—as I believe it does.
Eventually, remarkably, my criminal complaint against Kimberlin was dropped on February 23, 2012. I won’t name the official who dropped it, but I will quote the email that he wrote: “I have reviewed the case and determined that an insufficient factual basis exists for the case to go forward. Consequently, it will be nol prossed as soon as possible.” (“Nol prossed” is criminal law slang for filing a nolle prosequi which is just a fancy way of dismissing the case.) You can scroll up, read what Kimberlin said about his parole not being revoked on November 14, 2011, and see if the prosecutor’s analysis seems logical to you.
Meanwhile my attorney had put in his request for our constitutionally-mandated discovery, including a copy of the video. Time marched on and we kept getting closer and closer to the trial date. We were getting signs that the case would be dropped, but how can I say this? I didn’t think it would’ve gone this far in the first place, so I didn’t feel like it was finally over until it was actually, officially dropped. I was told by my attorney on or about March 16, to expect it to be dismissed any day. But then Kimberlin filed an opposition to the decision to drop the case, which I have discussed before, above. That would be the third time he had attempted to intervene when he had no right to intervene.
So finally a few days later, they dropped the case. I asked soon thereafter if I could have the record expunged and they explained to me that in order to that I had to release everyone from liability—including Brett Kimberlin. Which was galling. I said to them (paraphrase):
I understand why you might want me to let the State of Maryland off, but why should I have to let Brett Kimberlin, a private citizen, off the hook? The man attempted to frame me for a crime I didn’t commit. If there is any case where expungement is justified, it’s this one. And yet then I have to let this guy off the hook for what he did to me.
So as of right now, I can’t get it expunged.
At the same time, they still hadn’t given me a copy of the video. I learned later that they had given a copy of it to Kimberlin by then—indeed I believe they gave it to him before he filed that opposition. But they didn’t give me a copy, even though they had been required to by the Constitution. But showing a willingness to work with me, the prosecutor assigned to my case agreed to give us a copy. Then some bureaucrat tried to claim I had no right to it because the case was over. Finally around April 5 or 6, they gave it to my attorney, but he told me on April 9 that it was a strange format that wouldn’t work on any of his computers. I began to think perhaps I had died and gone to Tantalus’ version of Hell. The next day I brought two of my laptops to his office and tried it out on them. It ended up working on a very old Toshiba that literally had a crack running up the plastic on the back side of the monitor and with very little battery power.
And then finally, I got to see the video. And it was better than I hoped for. It made it clear that almost all of his story was a fabrication.
I immediately emailed Mandy Nagy, Patrick and Dustin, who had been following this story very closely as my friends (yes, by then all three of them were good friends). You can read the email here, but the subject line said “I got the video and it proves everything!” The rest of the email said simply, “But transferring will be challenging... Still, very happy.” It was an iPhone email, so there was only so much I could write. And then to make sure they saw it, I tweeted shortly afterward “@Liberty_Chick @Dust92 @Patterico very good news. Check your email.”
I also started calling pretty much all of my friends and family to tell them about it, between meetings with my attorney, including eventually Mandy, Patrick and Dustin. My joke to all of them was: “I have the video. It’s real and it’s spectacular.” Picking up on my reference, this led Dustin to tweet to me a link to this video as a winking reference to my news:
This was a big deal because the next day was the appeal for the Peace Order. You see if you lost in the District Court you could appeal that decision automatically to the Circuit Court for an entirely new trial (a trial de novo, as we lawyers call it). Testimony, evidence, etc. from the first trial could be introduced into evidence in the new trial, but Kimberlin would start the case at square one.
By the way, Brett Kimberlin, hiding on the internet under (ironically) a pseudonym that we were able to crack, has insinuated that the “very good news” was that supposedly my lawyer bribed the assignment clerk to arrange for a supposedly friendly judge. He has no evidence for this, but that didn’t stop him from his libelous insinuations. Under another mask, he has also claimed that prosecutors were bribed to drop the case. So he didn’t start losing because people started to see the video that proved him to be a liar. Of course not! Everyone was bribed, or so he says; who knows what he really thinks.
Anyway my criminal lawyer, Mr. Bours, had agreed to help me out in the Peace Order hearing. I think it is fair to say that Mr. Bours had been looking forward to cross-examining Kimberlin. He had read Mark Singer’s book about him, knew all about his deplorable criminal past, and now he had the video. So I think he felt a little “cheated” when the case was dismissed without going to trial. As my advocate he was surely glad that the case was dismissed, but surely part of him was looking forward to the cross examination and was glad to have a crack at it in the Peace Order appeal.
And I believe something else about him. Defense attorneys have it rough. Obviously every person, however scummy, deserves zealous representation, and lawyers like Bours are vital to making sure that no one is convicted unless there is proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Still, Alan Dershowitz has supposedly said that over 90% of all criminal defendants are guilty, and I think that is about right. Bours says that to him a lot of the time it’s about getting people the help they need, a somewhat liberal view of his clients I don’t personally share. But I have to also think that it was a nice change for him to be able to represent an innocent man.
By the way, as Kimberlin was wont to do, he had already filed a motion claiming I was in contempt of the Peace Order. It was denied summarily because the case was on appeal. Here’s a copy of it:
So basically his entire argument that I was in contempt was that I served process on him in my Virginia suit. As you would recall (I told you this would be important later!), I had filed a Motion to Clarify before the District Court the first time I came to court in Peace Order, back in January. Using it, I sought to clarify that the prohibition on contact did not include legally required notices, in the mail, such as service of process. The judge said that it was implied that I could do that, but granted the motion to clarify anyway. But in doing what due process of law required me to do, and the District Court specifically said I could do, Kimberlin claimed I was now in contempt. The mind boggles.
Of course I don’t think there was any sincerity in this. I don’t believe he really thought a peace order in Maryland could command the courts of Virginia. I believe he just filed this motion to annoy me.
So the day after we got the video—April 11—we went to court and it went very well. I will mostly let the transcript speak for itself. But what it came down to was that Kimberlin couldn’t even make his case; that is we didn’t even have to present a defense, his case was so feeble. After Kimberlin rested his case, my attorney stood up and said this to the court: “I’m going to ask that you make a finding now that the petitioner has not met, even initially, the burden of proof required under the statute.” And the court agreed. And it gave Mr. Kimberlin a ten minute long “bench opinion.”
Now Kimberlin has claimed that the judge found that I committed assault. But in fact the judge was considering only Kimberlin’s presentation without considering anything the defense had to say. And technically taking an iPad from a person’s hands would ordinarily be an assault—if no defense applied. Just as intentionally shooting a man is ordinarily murder—unless you can validly offer a defense, such as self-defense. So the judge said:
What occurred? An item was snatched from your hands. If this was an assault trial, perhaps the evidence would be sufficient beyond a reasonable doubt, without addressing possible defenses, that an assault did occur. Obviously wrestling something from somebody, he assaulted you. That occurred. He did. He assaulted you.
(emphasis added.) So all the judge was saying was that as a matter of law, taking the iPad from him would be considered an assault—unless that act was justified or excused. And I had a justification: self-defense. The judge never had the chance to consider the defense, because the defense was never required to put on a case—because Kimberlin’s presentation was so weak. So the judge did not, contrary to what Kimberlin insists, find that an assault occurred. It would indeed be improper for a court to find an assault occurred unless it first considered any defenses.
And then the judge gave him a lecture on the First Amendment. I will embed the entire transcript in just a second and I suggest you read the whole thing. But here are some juicy excerpts:
We’ve reached a point in this society where people think they have a right not to be offended. Where did that come from? You read about it every day in the paper. Somebody is offended by something and wants somebody to apologize. Where did that come from? Where is the right not to be offended?
So there’s a lot of annoying conduct that perhaps might be rude and would cause Emily Post to turn over in her grave. I don’t know if she’s still alive or not, but manners -- and just for the record, I am not suggesting that the respondent doesn’t have proper manners or anything like that. But what I am saying are examples of annoying conduct, things that people can do that are just annoying.
This Court doesn’t blog. I don’t even know what it is. I wouldn’t know how to set-up one and I don’t know if I’ve even read one since I don’t know what it is, but I can imagine it is a medium in which published material can be made available to the public. I can imagine that a blog might be likened to a magazine except that it’s electronic and it’s not on paper, unless of course it’s printed out.
You say that things have been written about you that are not right. It is a dangerous, dangerous argument to make that a sanction should be entered against people when they choose to exercise their First Amendment constitutional rights just because it’s annoying.
Now let me say, parenthetically, there are civil remedies available if someone defames someone, however, truth is a defense.
So if a person says somebody has a record and, in fact, they do have a record, you’ll have a hard time getting a judgment in a libel or slander case. If someone said someone had a record for something that, in fact, they didn’t do that was, in fact, false and it caused the individual harm, then they perhaps would have a cause of action.
And this went on for a good ten minutes, dear reader. Really, part of me wishes that we had full motion video of this, with sound, if only so I could show Seth Allen how pitiful Brett Kimberlin looked at the end of this. He looked like a whipped dog.
And there is something else to note in that Peace Order hearing: Kimberlin implicitly admitted that I was an honest person. You see several times, Kimberlin stumbled on the issue of authentication. He wanted to introduce statements I had made on the internet but the judge kept insisting that he prove that I was the one who wrote it.
THE WITNESS: On or about December 20th, I wrote to Mr. Walker, who I believed at the time was named Aaron Worthing, an e-mail asking if he would cooperate in providing some information about a stalker that I had sued in Judge Jordan’s court named Seth Allen. Mr. Walker responded –
MR. BOURS: Object.
THE COURT: Sustained. That’s hearsay.
THE WITNESS: I went online and saw Mr. Walker’s response where he posted on his blog, Allergic to Bull, that “Brett Kimberlin, convicted terrorist and perjurer” –
MR. BOURS: Object. Your Honor, I object
THE WITNESS: This is something I read.
MR. BOURS: This is not self-authenticating.
THE WITNESS: This is something I read and it shows his harassment of me.
THE COURT: Okay. Understand something. In this book, Subtitle 5, these are the rules of evidence that this Court is governed by. People in the public think that if you get something off the Web, all of a sudden it’s admissible in court. It couldn’t be further from the truth. It still has to be authenticated, like any other document.
THE WITNESS: All right.
THE COURT: Spiderman could be putting stuff on the Web. You have to be able to authenticate it and you can’t authenticate that.
THE WITNESS: Well, I can tell you what I read and I can --
THE COURT: I can’t consider what you read. These rules of evidence have been tested over time and they are there to protect you as well as people who are accused of doing things.
THE WITNESS: All right. Well, when Mr. Walker testifies, then I’ll ask him if he wrote these.
THE COURT: That’s up to you. I can’t tell you how to try the case.
THE WITNESS: That’s the only way I can get it in.
So basically there was a situation where all I would have to do is lie, and say I didn’t write what I in fact did write, and he would be completely stymied. And yet he still expected that I would tell the truth, authenticating what I wrote. He makes the fact he expected me to own up to everything I actually did write even more explicit, later:
THE WITNESS: I’m trying to explain that. He called me terrible names and --
THE COURT: Where was he when he called you terrible --
THE WITNESS: On his blog.
THE COURT: How can you prove he did that?
THE WITNESS: Well, I prove it when he gets on the stand.
Again, if I denied it, he wouldn’t be able to admit the evidence; and yet, he knew I wouldn’t deny authorship (if it was genuinely my writing). He knew that I, unlike him, would tell the truth if asked, especially under oath and therefore if I only took the stand, he would be able to authenticate all of it.
On the other hand, Kimberlin once again didn’t tell the truth on the stand about his deplorable background, particularly the revocation of his parole:
Q You were subsequently involved in this case where bombs were set off and people were hurt, correct, known as the Speedway Bomb[er]?
A Yeah.
Q You were convicted of a number of counts on that, correct?
A Yeah.
Q And a man who was injured in those bombings actually killed himself because of his severe injuries, correct?
A I have no evidence of that. I have no information about that.
Q You were sued for it and there was $1,000,000 judgment in favor of his widow against you, right?
A Yes.
Q It was a condition of federal parole that you pay that judgment, correct?
A You’re getting into nuances.
Q Well, it’s not a nuance that your parole was revoked because you didn’t, is that correct?
A Not exactly[.]
Anyway without further ado, here is the transcript itself of that hearing. And of course you have figured out by now that if Brett Kimberlin tells you that the sky is blue on a sunny day, you should get independent verification of it, so don’t make the mistake of trusting that any of his assertions are true.
So at the end of the hearing, the Peace Order was dismissed. And he has already attempted to appeal the decision, but since he is more or less challenging the rules of the authentication of evidence, he has pretty much zero chance of getting an appeal. The courts are not going to suddenly relax the rules of evidence because Brett Kimberlin doesn’t like having the world know about his deplorable past. He also filed for a stay pending an appeal that has already been denied. I’ll probably share those filings with you on a future date, but bluntly, this post is already fifty-three single-spaced pages in Word. Likewise I learned the Saturday before that he has filed bar complaints against me in Virginia. It is as frivolous as anything else he has filed. I will probably post more on this in the future.
Part 6: Trying (And Failing) to Get Justice in Montgomery County, Maryland.
So once I had the video, I decided to make another attempt to get the State of Maryland to concern itself with what Kimberlin had done to me. There was serious doubt among my circle of friends whether they would do anything, but as I said to them, “I can’t say they aren’t doing anything about him, until I give them a chance.”
So I filed for another Application for Statement of Charges, you can read the whole thing here but this is the main part (starting after the January 9, 2012 incident):
Mr. Kimberlin has subsequently [to the January 9 incident] claimed that I essentially beat him up. Many of these statements can be proven absolutely false by video evidence obtained from the Sheriff’s Office or other objective evidence. By that, I mean that you do not have to believe my word that he was lying; you can believe either the video evidence or the testimony of disinterested third parties.
On January 9, 2012, at 12:31 p.m. Mr. Kimberlin filed an Application for Statement of Charges with the Commissioner’s office. Bear in mind that Mr. Kimberlin later claimed to lose sight in one eye, and that he needed to be [seen] in the ER that evening, and yet his first action, rather than getting treatment, was to file charges.
Kimberlin stated in the Application that (in relevant part):
[Aaron Walker] attacked me physically while exiting the courtroom. He hit me on the shoulder and chest and pushed me, and grabbed my iPad away from me and refused to return it. Mr. Walker has been [page break] harassing me and stalking me online for months, and as we were exiting [the courthouse / Room 5/ Floor 9, he] said he was going to continue harassing me, and as we left the courtroom, he grabbed my iPad, hit me in the face, shoulder and chest and wrestled the iPad away from me. Several people witness [sic] this event and the police were immediately called. They got my iPad back and safely excorted me from the building. Mr. Walker tried to come at me several more times but was restrained.
A copy of that Application is attached as Exhibit B. The video evidence establishes that this is false. First, when viewing the video, any person can see that I did not “tr[y] to come at [Kimberlin] several more times” nor did any third person restrain me. Further it is implausible to claim that I struck him three times, pushed him and “wrestled” with him. As you may or may not know, there is a camera constantly pointing in that direction providing a constant feed, but the digital recordings are not constant. Instead the software extracts a “snapshot” from the camera at intervals of roughly 1.75 seconds, most likely to save space on the hard drive. To believe that I struck him three times (“in the face, shoulder and chest”), you would have to believe that I timed each action precisely between “snapshots” so that you not only don’t see the blow, but you don’t see any movement from me indicating that I was about to strike, or had just struck, and you don’t see any reaction from Brett Kimberlin in terms of being knocked by the blow or recovering from it. The same can be said of his allegations that I wrestled with him or pushed him; one would have to believe that both my actions and Mr. Kimberlin’s actions were timed perfectly so that the complete motion was missed by the “snapshots.”
He also applied for a peace order on the same day (January 9). In that petition for a peace order, he stated that:
Mr. Walker assaulted me while leaving the courtroom. He hit me in the face, chest, & shoulder and took my iPad, and threatened to harass me more.
A copy of that petition is attached as Exhibit C. We can see the same claim that I hit him in the face, chest and shoulder and it is equally, provably false here. After this he went for an ex parte hearing to obtain a temporary restraining order. After being sworn in, he stated under oath that everything in the petition was true, thus adding perjury to the charge of filing a false petition for a peace order. He also stated under oath that he was having trouble seeing out of his right eye.
Using that petition and his perjured testimony reaffirming the truthfulness of that petition, he obtained a temporary peace order against me. Using his false statements in his application for charges—as well as anything he might have said or presented to the State’s Attorney in person—he convinced the State’s Attorney office to file charges against me and to sustain them for two months.
On February 8, 2012, a final peace order hearing was held (after a continuance). In sworn testimony, Mr. Kimberlin stated that “He [Walker] decked me in the eye and wrestled with me.” Again the video evidence flatly contradicts this claim. Mr. Kimberlin was plainly never “decked”—that is knocked down by a punch, usually to the face. And at no time did any “wrestling” occur.
He also stated that at one point that:
A man that followed us out of the courtroom raced back into the courtroom and told two people that were working for Judge Rupp that he was attacking me and attacking me. They came out and told him to get off of me and they called the police. Nine police came up to the -- or, sheriffs came up there and separated him. He had my iPad in his hand at the time and refused to give it back.
The claim that anyone—courtroom staff or not—told me to get off of him is false, and I am confident that interviews with witnesses will verify this.
Later in the same hearing, he misrepresented his criminal record. Specifically he said: “I was charged with a crime 33 years ago. I was released from prison. I’ve done my time.” In fact, Kimberlin was charged—and convicted—of at least 35 separate crimes that I know of, over the course of five different trials. A claim that he was charged with a single “crime” is simply false.
And this wasn’t an isolated incident. He has repeatedly referred to his criminal past as though it was only one case, one charge. For instance he states at one point in the same hearing that that “he [Walker] takes what I have done and he throws this criminal charge of mine over and over and over in my face.” He has made the similar statements—falsely stating that he has only been convicted of one crime—throughout the case of Kimberlin v. Allen, although they were not made under oath. But I mention this to show that this was not a slip of the tongue but a deliberate pattern of deception.
At the same hearing, he produced photographs purporting to show his injuries and even medical records claiming serious trauma to his eye and a cracked rib. These were necessarily fakes and proof that Mr. Kimberlin was actively fabricating evidence in an effort to frame me.
Finally, there was another peace order hearing on April 11, 2012 in the Circuit Court, a de novo appeal. I do not have a copy of the transcript yet, but I can state from memory that he repeated his lie, under oath, that I struck him repeatedly and that I essentially beat him up. Remarkably he stated under oath that he believed that the video was consistent with these statements.
He also admitted again on April 11 that he took a photograph of me in the courthouse and he offered no valid defense to this action.
As I said, the video demonstrates that Kimberlin has repeatedly lied about the incident. I have a copy of it, and I will gladly make a copy of it for you. What it shows is consistent with only my account. While it doesn’t capture every movement and every moment, several things are absolutely clear from it:
1. I did not knock him down. Not once. So his statement on February 8, 2012 that I “decked” him is clearly false.
2. His statement in his application for charges that “Mr. Walker tried to come at me several more times but was restrained” is false. No third party ever physically restrained me.
3. His claims that I repeatedly struck him, pushed him, wrestled with him, etc. are implausible. One would have to believe that each blow was struck in perfect timing with the recording equipment and that Mr. Kimberlin recovered each time before the next “picture,” because there was no sign of either movement—my alleged striking him, or his reaction to being struck. The same can be said for his allegations of pushing and wrestling. The only time when it was at all possible, according to this objective evidence, for Mr. Kimberlin to have been struck was when I first took the iPad from him. Of course I didn’t strike Mr. Kimberlin, but speaking objectively that is the only moment where a third party would believe it was even possible that I might have struck him in the video feed.
In addition to that, it would not be difficult to locate the persons who were there that day and ask if any of them told me to “get off of me [Kimberlin]” as he alleged on February 8 in perjured testimony.
In summary I believe that Mr. Kimberlin:
1. Made false statements to law enforcement officers in violation of Md. Criminal Law Code § 9-501 by claiming he did not take a photograph of me when in fact he did.
2. Filed a false petition for a peace order in violation of Md. Courts And Judicial Proceedings Code § 3-1503.1.
3. Made false statements on his application for charges, in violation of Md. Criminal Law Code § 9-503.
4. Perjured himself on January 9, 2012, by falsely stating under oath that the contents of his petition for a peace order was true in violation of Md. Criminal Law Code § 9-101.
5. Perjured himself on February 8, 2012 by numerous false statements outlined above.
6. Perjured himself on April 11, 2012 by claiming essentially that I beat him up, under oath.
But there is a reason to charge him that is more compelling than that outline. Mr. Kimberlin set out to frame me for a crime I did not commit. This convicted document forger produced false photographs and false medical records to lend his claims verisimilitude. In doing so, he has tricked the State’s Attorney Office into being an instrument of oppression over me. Since these charges were filed against me, I have lost my job and have been unable to obtain new employment. At a time when my finances took a serious hit, I was also required to hire counsel to defend against these charges and it cost me about $7,000. Yes, in theory I might be able to recover from Mr. Kimberlin, except that Mr. Kimberlin has a long history of evading judgments against him.
As a friend of mine said, Brett Kimberlin is about to figure out that doing this is either a really good idea, or a really bad one. If he is not prosecuted for this blatant and evil attempt to frame me, then you will be telling him that the laws against perjury—and other false statements—are meaningless. And you will be telling him that all he has to do is falsely claim another person has committed a crime against him, and the State’s Attorney will put that person through hell. The State’s Attorney should be offended that Mr. Kimberlin has manipulated this office in this fashion and it should be eager to see Mr. Kimberlin suffer consequences for his conduct.
So that is my second criminal complaint (the exhibits are omitted from the scan, but frankly you know by now what each of them are).
The following week I did a follow up visit at the State’s attorney’s office, where I was asked to fill out some forms. To accommodate my dysgraphia—it makes it hard to write by hand but doesn’t affect my typing skills—I typed it out manually on my computer in their waiting area and printed it out there. I knew I would have to do something like this from the last time I filed charges with them, so I had a lot of it already written out which I could copy and paste, but I had to do a lot of the typing right then and there. So it was not the most ideal conditions and there are some typos and a lot of it is simply repetitious. But you can read the document, here.
Well, I found out on May 1, 2012 that they had dropped the charges. It was frankly the last straw with me and led to my decision to go public and write this post. The next day I received a rare personal letter from the State’s Attorney’s Office. I will block out the name of the author (it is the same guy who also dropped the previous charges I filed, but not the same woman who dropped the charges against me), but otherwise I will let it speak for itself:
I have written this man an email in return. This is the body of the email:
Mr. [omitted],
I received your letter of April 25, 2012 and respectfully I would like to correct some factual misconceptions in it. First, you write that “Judge Everngam apparently credited Mr. Kimberlin’s testimony and, consequently, extended the peace order against you until August 8, 2012.” That is true, but incomplete. First that hearing occurred before I received a copy of the video surveillance of the incident on January 9, 2012. After that hearing, I filed an appeal and received a trial de novo in Circuit Court (case number 8444D), and this time we had the video evidence. After the judge saw that video, he plainly concluded that all I had done was what I had forthrightly said I had done from the beginning: I took his iPad from him. He then found that Kimberlin failed in the first instance to even meet his burden—without considering any evidence or arguments that the defense had to offer—and that peace order was lifted. I just got a copy of that transcript yesterday, and am attaching a copy to this email for your convenience.
That misunderstanding may have also led you to the incorrect legal conclusion that the Peace Order is presently active. Of course in the name of full disclosure Kimberlin has appealed the denial of a peace order but bluntly his appeal has zero chance of succeeding as a matter of law. I will be happy to illuminate that point for you if you consider that to be important, but the short answer is that Kimberlin is challenging the vitality of centuries-old rules of evidence.
You also seem to believe that this is some kind of mere civil “spat.” But even a normal “spat” justifies the involvement of law enforcement when they do not respect the bounds of the law. So ordinarily a husband and a wife arguing is not a matter of your office’s concern however loudly and angrily they argue. But if one spouse begins to batter the other, it becomes a matter of state involvement. And it doesn’t matter who was right or wrong in the underlying argument. You are absolutely not allowed to hit the other (indeed you are not allowed to hit anyone, except in self-defense). That is when a mere domestic dispute becomes rightfully the concern of the state.
And maybe in an ordinary civil case, you would prefer not to get involved. I can appreciate that. But what Kimberlin did went far outside of what is acceptable behavior in any civil dispute.
The man attempted to frame me for a crime. He produced false medical records and false photographs and used that evidence to manipulate your office into depriving me of my freedom—up to ten years! And the way you prosecute a man for trying to frame another is by prosecuting him for his false statements. That is what I am asking you to do.
He did this because I briefly represented a man he was suing, and because I dared to tell the truth about his deplorable criminal record and his misconduct in court. When I told the Court and I told the world that I believed he committed perjury on November 14, he threatened to file criminal charges unless I silenced myself. That is, he tried to intimidate a person from exercising their God-given right of Freedom of Expression. And when I didn’t buckle to that pressure he did exactly as he promised—he filed false criminal charges against me.
And if you look at the video and read my criminal complaint—the 5-6 typed out pages I attached to the application for charges—you will see absolute proof that he did indeed lie under oath and that he filed a false police report. I would ask you to call up Mr. Kimberlin and ask him to tell you the exact minute and second in which I “decked” him, or exactly when the sheriff’s deputies “separated” us, or when exactly I was supposedly coming at him over and over and restrained by those deputies. Those are all things Kimberlin has claimed under oath and the video evidence proves to be absolutely false.
Indeed, on that disk I gave to Ms. Hull, I included a video entitled “Kimberlin Presentation02.wmv.” It is crudely made (because I am a lawyer and not a videographer), but I think it is effective in juxtaposing what the video shows of the incident with what Kimberlin said about it. I challenge any person to watch that video and conclude that Brett Kimberlin did not lie repeatedly about the incident of January 9, 2012. As we speak a friend of mine who is a professional video editor is creating a better version of it for release to the general public.
And let me say something about the last complaint. When Kimberlin first filed these charges against me I came to the State’s Attorneys office in the Circuit Court building and asked to speak with someone about the charges. I knew from the application for charges he filed that what he said was objectively false. And I wanted to make sure you knew about the character of Brett Kimberlin and by comparison my clean criminal record. But your office refused to speak to me. I don’t mean you specifically, but the whole office as a matter of policy apparently won’t speak with people they are charging with a crime.
So I had two goals when I filed the first set of charges against him—and you will note that what I brought to the commissioner was actually three charges against Kimberlin: extortion (threatening to file false criminal charges), filing false criminal charges and for what I believed was perjury on November 14, 2011. The first goal was I simply believed that he did commit those crimes against me. But I also hoped that it would force your office to finally talk to me, to get my side of the story, and start to see that Brett Kimberlin is a man not to be trusted. Because that was what was so frustrating to me: nobody was asking for my side of the story. I could have told you from the beginning that there were easily verifiable lies in the application for charges he filed against me, even before I learned there was video evidence. And perhaps if your office had simply spoken to me, we could have avoided the disastrous personal consequences I have suffered because Kimberlin tricked your office into filing charges against me and pursuing them for almost two months.
This is not a simple spat. The man tried to frame me for a crime and in the process tricked your office into inflicting harm upon me for his sick motives. And I have done nothing to him but briefly provide legal advice to someone he hated, and to tell the truth about his deplorable past and his misconduct in court.
And every day I face the risk that he might do this to me again. I assume you will never let that happen in Mongomery County again because I assume you are a conscientious public servant. But what assurance would I have that Brett Kimberlin won’t claim I beat him up in Anne Arundel or Howard County? And what can you do to protect a third party who might not even know about this history? This man has to be taught that there are consequences to his actions and the world has to be shown—in the form of a conviction—that Kimberlin is known to frame others.
So with that in mind, I respectfully ask that you work with me to reinstate the charges against Kimberlin. An injustice was done to me, and to some extent I will never get back what was taken from me. But you can at least give me justice.
Respectfully,
Aaron J. Walker, Esq.
I have not, as of this writing, received a response.
Part 7: How You Can Help!
So this is where you, dear reader, come in. There are several things you can do to help me out.
First, please spread the word far and wide about this story. Tweet it, blog it, Facebook it, link it, whatever. If you are a reporter and would like to talk to me about this and even view the un-redacted documents, let me know at any of my emails, including AaronJW72@gmail.com. I will be happy to speak with you.
Second, you can write to the State’s Attorney of Montgomery County. I did not name the subordinate responsible for the inaction, but ultimately it is the responsibility of John McCarthy, the State’s Attorney himself. You might also consider writing to the Governor, or the Attorney General of Maryland. Be polite. You will not help me by being foul or insulting. Simply state that you believe a grave injustice has been done to me—if you happen to agree—and ask them politely to see to it that justice be done.
This is his office’s contact information:
State’s Attorney for Montgomery County
50 Maryland Avenue, 5th Floor
Rockville, Maryland 20850
240-777-7300
Third, and importantly, I will be setting up a defense fund very soon. This will not be limited to my case, but to all victims of Kimberlin and his crew because there are more of them than I am disclosing in this post. Their goal is to get anyone who crosses them fired, impoverished by continual and frivolous legal actions and so on. They have already cost me $7,000 and my job. You can help make sure that this will not happen to others and, yes, help me pay my legal expenses.
Fourth, if you are hiring, I need a job. I can work as a lawyer, blogger, researcher or any number of things. Feel free to contact me by email if you think you can offer me something.
Fifth, if you donate to his organization, please stop. It is apparent to me that this man does little else with his life other than harass people who dare to tell the truth about him. If he had an ordinary job where he actually had to work 9-5, maybe he would have no time to bother people for telling the truth about him. This isn’t a legal threat, but simply an observation of reality. If you donate to his charities, you are helping him to torment me and others. His charities might do excellent work, but as long as they employ him, they also support this criminal and immoral conduct.
Besides, can you really trust this man with your money? Look at the video and look at what he said about this incident. Is he a trustworthy man? In my opinion, he is not.
I want to thank you for reading my story. If you have read this far, you have put a lot of effort to get here and I appreciate it. And anything you do to help will be equally appreciated. By sheer shamelessness, Brett Kimberlin has damaged a lot of people’s lives, including my own. Hopefully we can fight back against him.
--Aaron Walker
---------------------------
* I say that his medical records and photographs were fakes, as a matter of logic. I know I didn’t strike the man once and hopefully by the end of this story you will believe me. So there is no way he was actually injured the way he claimed. So when he produced photographs there are only three logical possibilities, as far as I can see: 1) the photographs are fakes—where he put on makeup or used software Photoshop—to make himself appear bruised when he was not, 2) the photographs are real but were from a prior injury or 3) he was really bruised that day, but not by me. Either way, they are fakes. Likewise, Kimberlin’s medical records cannot genuinely reflect injuries I gave him, so therefore there are only two possibilities: either this convicted document forger forged medical records, or he was genuinely injured that day, but not by me. And in both cases there is the possibility that he had someone beat him up for him, or even caused himself harm. But bluntly, I think it is more likely that the documents were just phony in some fashion. It better fits with the criminal conduct he has engaged in, in the past.
---------------------------------------
I will make this offer to Brett Kimberlin. If I have gotten any fact wrong, and you can prove it, I will happily issue a correction. But there are two important limitations on that. First, I will only issue corrections of fact; I am entitled to my opinions as a matter of First Amendment law. Second, I will only issue corrections if you prove me wrong—and by proof I mean something other than your word. Email any such requests for a correction to me or I am unlikely to notice. You know my email address.
---------------------------------------
Follow me at Twitter @aaronworthing, mostly for snark and site updates. And you can purchase my book (or borrow it for free if you have Amazon Prime), Archangel: A Novel of Alternate, Recent History here. And you can read a little more about my novel, here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTk-QxiJ5yE&feature=youtu.be
ReplyDeleteA.W. - I loved reading the Judge's galactic bench slap to our diminuitive convicted terrorist, perjurer and drug smuggling buddy at the January 9, 2012 hearing - I read Seth Allen's blog posts and don't see anything in there that constitutes defamation because it's all true.
ReplyDeleteSuck it Brett.
A.W. - I can understand why Brett filed false assault charges against you after the January 9 Court hearing and then had his buddies broadcast them all over twitter and the internet.
ReplyDeleteHe must have been confused by all the nonexistent blows that you rained about his person, or just lying again or something.
Hey, Brother, I feel ya' I need a job, too. I'd prefer to actually get paid for blogging. I'm an intelligence analyst by trade. Any ideas?
ReplyDeleteKeep us posted. I'm on your side.
Unfreakingbelievable! My little dog is dying and I am beside myself. I was looking for something to distract myself when I came across a tweet that linked to your story. It not only distracted me, it sent my outrage meter into outer space. You are a most courageous man, sir. Your story should be on 60 Minutes; alas, you are on the wrong side of the political spectrum. I will do whatever I can to spread the story far & wide. Best of luck to you & your family, here's to the triumph of truth, justice & the American Way.
ReplyDeleteLinked:
ReplyDeletehttp://marezilla.com/2012/05/violent-convicted-terrorist-bomber-given-million-by-progressives-now-terrorizes-bloggers/
I stand with you, Aaron!