How Brett Kimberlin Tried to Frame Me for a Crime—Part 1: Background.

[This post is part of a larger series of posts.  See here for a fuller explanation.]

Previously: Introduction.

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 (6^th 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:

Brett Kimberlin's Settlment Offer for Aaron Worthing Threatening to File for Criminal Charges and Peace Ord...

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:

Emails From Brett Kimberlin to Beth Kingsley 1.3.12 1.4.12 (OCR)

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:

Brett Kimberlin's Motion to Withdraw as Moot (OCR)

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.

Brett Kimberlin's Letter to Law Enforcement 1.5.12 (OCR)

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.

Next: Part 2: The January 9, 2012 Hearing.

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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.