Exclusive: What the Official July 5 Hearing Transcript Tells You About Convicted Terrorist Brett Kimberlin’s Attempt to Get My Wife and I Killed

This is the latest post in what I call jokingly call The Kimberlin Saga^®.  If you are new to the story, that’s okay! Not everyone reads my blog.  So if you are new to the story, go to this page and you’ll be able to catch up on what has been happening.

I have been waiting to write this post for a while, to pick the moment that felt right, and I think this is it.  I want to talk a little more about how convicted terrorist Brett Kimberlin tried to get my wife and I killed (in my opinion).

So last week I got a copy of the final transcript of the July 5 hearing.  For those not following along, Brett Kimberlin has been on a nine month campaign of harassment that has included attempting to frame me for a crime.  When I revealed this conduct to the world, he obtained an abusive peace order against me forbidding me from talking about him on the internet for six months on the theory that by merely writing that he engaged in reprehensible conduct, I was inciting violence against him and thus could be stopped with an injunction.  This is not the law, and indeed the judge in that case, Judge Vaughey, actually disregarded controlling Supreme Court precedent by name.  That part of the injunction was vacated even before appeal was heard (after which I was SWATted), and then on July 5, we heard the full appeal.

I have previously reported on the hearing and even made my own attempt to transcribe parts of it, but I have not yet released the official transcript.  So let me give that to you, now:

Kimberlin v. Walker Hearing 7.5.12 (OCR)

As you can see, it’s not quite identical to what I wrote down.  But a quick comparison doesn’t reveal any significant difference and I suspect the differences that are there are more about the conventions of transcription than anything else.  So unless I notice something significant left out, I will defer to this as the official record of events as I have with all of the hearings.

But besides giving you this document, I wanted to highlight something I became aware of some time ago.  One of the things that marks the conduct of this crew is that what they accuse you of, is very often what they are doing or trying to do to you.  Kimberlin, for instance, is fond of accusing me of harassing and stalking him, ignoring the fact that he came after me first as demonstrated by the documents including his own emails.  All of this conflict began when he attempted to subpoena me to testify against my own client.

So if we recognize that his accusations are very often confessions of his own evil intent and conduct (in my opinion), consider now what two passages from the July 5 transcript imply (both are Kimberlin speaking).  First, this:

[Walker’s] putting, he’s putting out a false frame against me. It’s like saying that I’m the head of the KKK or something and trying to get people to come after me. You know, he, this is what he’s doing. He’s, he’s creating a false narrative and that, in order to get people to attack me.

And then this:

Judge, it has to do with incitement.  He understands the internet very well. He understands the, the kind of people that he’s dealing with on the internet. And he knows that if he, if he makes a false narrative that says that I framed him and that I’m somehow some kind of monster, and he dehumanizes me, that’s what he’s done. He’s dehumanized me, Judge. That’s what stalkers do. They dehumanize the person so that other people will come out and attack them, and that’s what he’s done.

And listening to him say that when I got the audio, something occurred to me: isn’t that exactly what Kimberlin and his compatriots have done to me?  But to show you how he has been doing that, I am going to have to go into a lot of background that you have heard before, for which I apologize.  But you have to see this all put together to see what I believe he is implicitly confessing to, for the sheer monstrosity of it all.

As regular readers know, I was an anonymous internet writer before this began, writing under the name Aaron Worthing.  As Aaron Worthing, I participated in the Everyone Draw Mohammed protest on May 20, 2010 and you know by now that they have been lying about my participation ever since.

The actual protest was nothing more than an attempt to address a threat to our Freedom of Speech.  Islamofascists had said that if anyone dared to depict Mohammed in even the most benign way, that they would murder whoever was responsible.  The idea behind Everyone Draw Mohammed Day was that if enough of us committed the same “offense”—that is, depicting Mohammed however benignly—that the terrorists couldn’t possibly kill us all.  Over one hundred thousand people participated in this protest on Facebook and something like 700 participated on my website, Everyone Draw Mohammed.  And they ran the whole gamut from truly benign to truly offensive (even against my own faith), and that was okay because I was running a free forum where the only rules were 1) you had to depict Mohammed and 2) it couldn’t actually be porn.  If you satisfied those two rules, I published it.

So then Brett Kimberlin tried to use the courts to out me.  He claimed at the time that his purpose was to secure my testimony, against my client in the very same case.  I argued in court documents that he was not truly interested in my testimony that he was in reality interested in harassing me.  Subsequent events bore me out on this point.  For instance, when I showed up at the hearing where my testimony was supposedly crucial he didn’t even bother calling me to the stand.  And then later at a hearing on May 29, he admitted in open court that his purpose wasn’t to obtain my testimony:

THE WITNESS [Kimberlin]: There are 800 depictions of the Prophet Muhammad on that blog in very insulting and vile depictions.  He's asking people to defile and defame the Prophet Muhammad.  And—

BY MR. WALKER: With what words did I have (unintelligible) to defame him?

A: He asked me a question.

THE COURT: Hang on a second.

THE WITNESS: Okay. As part of my work on human rights and supporting Muslim artists and activists overseas, I thought that this was wrong, The State Department has said that it's wrong for him to do this, The Government of Pakistan has banned his blog, Osama Bin Laden used his blog to recruit suicide bombers to kill Americans, I felt this was wrong, And so I filed a motion in this case, in front of Judge Jordan, on this contempt—

And then the judge cut him off.   Of course as par with the course for Kimberlin there is a ton of B.S. in the middle of that, but the key thing is he admitted now that his purpose was not to get my testimony, but to get my identity.  Mind you, I don’t buy his routine of righteous indignation at the belief that insulted Mohammed, but it is an admission that he was abusing the court process.

So pretending to want my testimony, he filed subpoenas against Google and Comcast to reveal my identity.  And then he obtained my identity by other means and filed a Motion to Withdraw.  I’ve said it before but it is important to remember that all he had to do was say to the court, “I have obtained the desired information by other means.”  He didn’t even have to put my real name into it.  But instead he gratuitously put in my real name, my current address, my current employer and their address (among other stalkerish details).

The key thing to get is that this is gratuitous.  This is not necessary to serve some other purpose.  This was done for no other reason except to put it into a public document.  And given the way that information filed in court by Mr. Kimberlin has a way of getting out into the world through Neal Rauhauser and Ron Brynaert, one would have expected to see this information on the internet shortly if the court hadn’t placed it under seal.

And his intent in doing so couldn’t be more vile.  I believe his intent was to place my wife and I in danger from being murdered by islamofascist terrorists.  In my opinion, this convicted domestic terrorist was outsourcing his terrorism to others.

Yes, this is my opinion, a surmise based on the facts, but the facts are pretty damning, for as regular readers know, on the very same day he filed that motion to withdraw, he sent a letter to law enforcement.  In that letter he explained that he wanted to give them a head’s up that I had been outted in court and stated to them that because of his conduct in outing me “there exists the very real probability that Mr. Walker could be subjected to serious harm or death now that his identity has been exposed.”  If he was really concerned for the safety of myself and those around me, he wouldn't have outted me in the first place.

Oh and for extra bonus creepiness, he notes that I live in a townhouse; how would he know that unless he or an associate actually went to where I lived?  This from a man who accuses me of stalking him.

Now you might reasonably ask, “okay, Aaron, but how much danger are you really in?”  I will say in all frankness that I am much more concerned with being killed by Brett Kimberlin (or by someone recruited by Kimberlin as the Indianapolis Star has stated he has attempted to do the past).  But the issue isn’t my subjective fears, or the objective danger, but Kimberlin’s intent.  You can read with Kimberlin’s own words that he believed he had placed my life, and the lives of my wife and everyone around me in danger by his conduct.  Whatever the reality of the situation is, this is what he believed he had done.

And if there is any question as to his intent, consider this.  On January 9 I went into court and made an emergency motion to place the Motion to Withdraw under seal.  Kimberlin has claimed he didn’t want to place my wife and I in danger, but if that was true, he should have jumped at the chance to place his own motion under seal.  Indeed, he should have thought of doing that himself.  But instead he fought to keep it in the public domain even though he had admitted to law enforcement that doing so put my wife and I in danger.  And his explanation for why he opposed my motion to place it under seal simply doesn’t hold water:

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.

Which is not true, but even if it is true, this justifies putting my life in danger?

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?

Kimberlin then gets a bad case of diarrhea of the mouth talking about why he wanted to identify me, which is a separate issue from why he put all that information in a court document.  To that issue he said this:

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 --

You can read that entire transcript, here.  Now, first notice that last line.  He wanted everyone to know.  He intended this to go out into the whole world.

Second, this dovetails to a fuller explanation he gave in the hearing on April 11, when he was asked about that conduct:

Q [Reginald Bours, my attorney] Then you learned who Aaron Worthing was, the blogger Aaron Worthing was, is that correct?

A Not through the court proceedings.

Q I understand that, but how and when did you learn that?

A I learned it on December 31st.

Q How?

A I got a tip, anonymous tip.

Q An anonymous tip via the internet, e-mail, or what?

A Yes. It was actually by phone.

Q By telephone?

A Uh-huh.

Q After you received that information, what did you do with it?

A I tried to verify it. I did Google searches and tried to verify that, in fact, Mr. Walker was Aaron Worthing and vice versa, and I was able to locate a bunch of -- a lot of documents online that made me comfortable that Aaron Walker was actually Aaron Worthing.

Q Pending before the Court, in that civil action against Mr. Allen, was a motion to require Google to disclose the identity of Mr. Worthing, is that correct?

A Right. Right.

Q So after you learned the information December 31st, you filed a request to withdraw that motion, is that right?

A Yes, because I had already learned the information. I didn’t want to take up the Court’s time 1 with a motion that was basically moot.

Q But in the motion you filed to withdraw, you put all that information in your motion, didn’t you?

A Not all of it. I have a lot more information that I didn’t put in there. I put his name, his address, where he worked, where he went to school, and things like that so that there would be no question that he was that person.

So he claimed that he put this information in there so I couldn’t deny it.  Which would only make sense if I was actually denying it.  Indeed why did it even matter if he had no desire to even actually call me as a witness?  My identity was profoundly irrelevant in the case at that time.  The only issue is whether Seth Allen had violated the injunction against him; how does proving Aaron Worthing is Aaron Walker even related to that question?  And certainly the moment I came to court and identified myself, that justification made even less sense.

And then as you know, he fought tooth and nail to unseal that information, filing a motion to unseal that put my identity in the caption of the document, leading the court to put his motion to unseal under seal and to change the caption in the Court’s database.  And after that bench slap, he did it again, placing my true identity in another motion.

That is all background to get us to this idea he presented to the court, that I was putting out a false narrative to cause people to want to do him harm.  But what he accused me of doing, he was actually doing.  That is just my opinion, based on the facts, but consider his testimony on July 5, again:

[Walker’s] putting, he’s putting out a false frame against me. It’s like saying that I’m the head of the KKK or something and trying to get people to come after me. You know, he, this is what he’s doing. He’s, he’s creating a false narrative and that, in order to get people to attack me.

And this:

Judge, it has to do with incitement.  He understands the internet very well. He understands the, the kind of people that he’s dealing with on the internet. And he knows that if he, if he makes a false narrative that says that I framed him and that I’m somehow some kind of monster, and he dehumanizes me, that’s what he’s done. He’s dehumanized me, Judge. That’s what stalkers do. They dehumanize the person so that other people will come out and attack them, and that’s what he’s done.

Now look at how he has tried to stir up Islamofascist terrorists to try to kill me with a false narrative.  For instance, this is what he said about my blog in his letter to law enforcement, a letter that was not designed for public consumption:

He urged people to draw and submit pictures to him of the Muslim Prophet Mohammed in various derogatory ways in order show support for Danish cartoonists who had a fatwa issued against them for drawing cartoons ridiculing Mohammed. Muslims who were offended by the depictions then made several violent attacks against the Danish cartoonists and publisher.

While that was not completely accurate—I did not require people to be derogatory and my protest was most immediately triggered by the threats against the creators of the TV show South Park—how can I say this?  His inaccuracies were probably just honest mistakes.  That's what he did when he didn't think the world would be listening.  But then as we go on, in documents he plainly intended for public consumption, on each retelling my blog changes from being a pro-free-speech and anti-terrorism site, to being a supposed hate site.

For instance in his motion to unseal he calls it an “anti-Muslim blog” and later says that it was a blog “attacking Muslims.”  Which is strange because Muslims actually participated on the site.  Indeed as I said in another context: "the criticism of faith, and of figures within that faith, is a vital part of freedom of religion itself. It should not be branded as bigotry against members of that faith."  And indeed the blog I created wasn't even about criticizing Mohammed, but securing the right to criticize Mohammed--or indeed to talk about him at all.

Then after I filled an emergency motion to place that motion to unseal under seal he filed a response to that motion in which he claimed that I said Islam was an “evil’ religion.”  Well, in fact I have not called it an evil religion although I am on record as being critical of the deplorable conduct of its founder.  And then he claims in the same document that my novel Archangel (which you can buy here), is a “direct assault on Muslims worldwide” because my main character allegedly “kills all the Muslims [sic], including the female Muslim ‘bitches’ and jihadist ‘whores.’”  As I noted in a responsive pleading, not only is that not true, but in fact the main character of the novel actually saves the lives of several Muslims, including several women.  And the only person who calls a Muslim woman a “bitch” is a person depicted as a bigoted person about to commit a hate crime that the main character prevents from happening.  Any claim that the novel is involves the indiscriminate murder of Muslims or endorses the degradation of Muslim women for being Muslim is simply a lie.

But he wasn’t done yet!  In his motion for a hearing on this motion to unseal, he again called it a “Muslim hating blog.”  And then he writes this:

He is a blogger who by choice regularly insults the Prophet Mohammed thereby inciting Muslims. He has no more right to remain anonymous than do Ku Klux Klan members who wear their robes and hoods while screaming invectives against African Americans.

Well, first as a point in fact, to the extent that the KKK does not have a right to anonymous speech it is because of their status as a terrorist organization, not because the courts don’t like what they are saying.  So once again Brett Kimberlin proves he knows nothing about the First Amendment.

But wait a minute?  Comparing the other people to members of the KKK?  Where have I heard that before?

Oh, right on July 5!  Let’s quote that passage again:

[Walker’s] putting, he’s putting out a false frame against me. It’s like saying that I’m the head of the KKK or something and trying to get people to come after me. You know, he, this is what he’s doing. He’s, he’s creating a false narrative and that, in order to get people to attack me.

(emphasis added.)  So it is in fact Brett Kimberlin and not I who has been going around creating a false narrative—“Aaron Walker hates Muslims” and “Aaron Walker is like a Klansman”—in order to incite violence against me.  In my opinion, he is literally trying to get me killed and his testimony is an implicit confession telling you how he is doing it.

And while we are considering what his accusations reveal about his own conduct, consider this bit from his July 5 testimony:

All I did was what I should have done and that is, go and get a peace order against him and, and get a, a file charges against him. That’s it. I did what I was supposed to do as a citizen of this country.

And what have I gotten in return? I’ve gotten attacked and, and, and brutalized and death threats, I mean, every day. I’ve had to put security systems in my house. I’ve had the police out to my house numerous times.

Again, these are words that fit better in my mouth as an accusation against him.  All I did was give a man a little bit of free legal help and point out to the court and the world that Brett Kimberlin perjured himself.  And what have I gotten in return?  He tried to frame me for a crime, he got me arrested on false charges, he filed numerous abusive peace orders.

Oh, and he tried to get my wife and I killed.  There is that.

---------------------------------------

My wife and I have lost our jobs due to the harassment of convicted terrorist Brett Kimberlin, including an attempt to get us killed and to frame me for a crime carrying a sentence of up to ten years.  I know that claim sounds fantastic, but if you read starting here, you will see absolute proof of these claims using documentary and video evidence.  If you would like to donate and help my wife and I in this time of need, please go to this donation page.  And thank you.

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.

---------------------------------------

Disclaimer:

I have accused some people, particularly Brett Kimberlin, of reprehensible conduct.  In some cases, the conduct is even criminal.  In all cases, the only justice I want is through the appropriate legal process—such as the criminal justice system.  I do not want to see vigilante violence against any person or any threat of such violence.  This kind of conduct is not only morally wrong, but it is counter-productive.

In the particular case of Brett Kimberlin, I do not want you to even contact him.  Do not call him.  Do not write him a letter.  Do not write him an email.  Do not text-message him.  Do not engage in any kind of directed communication.  I say this in part because under Maryland law, that can quickly become harassment and I don’t want that to happen to him.

And for that matter, don’t go on his property.  Don’t sneak around and try to photograph him.  Frankly try not to even be within his field of vision.  Your behavior could quickly cross the line into harassment in that way too (not to mention trespass and other concerns).

And do not contact his organizations, either.  And most of all, leave his family alone.

The only exception to all that is that if you are reporting on this, there is of course nothing wrong with contacting him for things like his official response to any stories you might report.  And even then if he tells you to stop contacting him, obey that request.  As you will see by the time I am done telling my story that this is a key element in making out a harassment claim under Maryland law—that a person asks you to stop and you refuse.

And let me say something else.  In my heart of hearts, I don’t believe that any person supporting me has done any of the above.  But if any of you have, stop it, and if you haven’t don’t start.