The “Journalist” Bill Schmalfeldt

This is the latest post in what I half-jokingly call The Kimberlin Saga^®.  If you are new to the story, that’s okay! Not everyone reads my blog.  The short version is that Kimberlin has been harassing me for over a year, his worst conduct being when he attempted to frame me for a crime.  I recognize that this might sound like an incredible claim, but I provide video and documentary evidence of that fact; in other words, you don’t have to believe my word.  You only have to believe your eyes.  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.

Okay so last Tuesday Lee Stranahan had enough of Bill Schmalfeldt’s harassment and filed charges against him under Maryland’s electronic harassment statute as well as their general harassment statute.

In a long, “open letter” Bill Schmalfeldt claims that as a journalist he has a right to do these things.  Here’s a safe link to that piece.

Except Bill Schmalfeldt isn’t a journalist and I am going to show you the proof.  These are public documents, tweets, etc. but I have never highlighted them to you before to show you what they reveal.

The first is a post Schmalfeldt wrote at his “Liberal Grouch” site called “Socrates Unintentionally Serves Hemlock Smoothie to Allies.”  He has deleted this post in its entirety, but, dear reader, I have preserved it and present it to you as a Scribd document:

   "Socrates Unintentionally Serves Hemlock Smoothie to Allies" by the Liberal Grouch by  

To explain what is going on (and so you don’t have to read his madness if you don’t want to) Socrates is one of the internet personae that Seth Allen uses.  In the post Schmalfeldt accused Seth Allen of admitting to stalking Brett Kimberlin.  What was the evidence?  Well, dear reader, it was a comment he allegedly left on a blog.  You can read that post, here.  But there are several problems with that claim.

First, one can only guess as to whether Seth Allen actually wrote that.  I have seen evidence of Kimberlin’s allies pretending to be Seth online and posting false information under their name.  Indeed, I have seen Bill Schmalfeldt do the same thing.  But we will see when and if that information comes into the public sphere.

But let’s pretend he is Seth Allen just for the moment... so what does this “Socrates” say?

He says this: “By the way, apparently this is BK flipping someone the bird who had been checking him out.”  And he posted this picture:

Now, dear reader, just look at those words and tell me what you think Seth is allegedly saying?  Is Seth saying he took the picture?  Is he saying he was checking Brett Kimberlin out?  No.  Plainly in context he was saying that someone else was doing this.

But Bill Schmalfeldt is such an ace reporter he either fails to apply proper reading comprehension, or he is actively trying to deceive you as to what he just read.  Instead Schmalfeldt writes: “A stalker admitting to stalking? One doesn’t see that very often. But that’s what we have here!”

He then goes on to quote from that same comment, apparently believing that Seth was talking about himself, when plainly he had given no indication he was doing so.  So, for instance, he writes this about Kimberlin flipping the bird (with apologies for the language): “And, as you look at BK flipping you off, you can see the PEN he was using to WRITE DOWN YOUR STUPID, FUCKING LICENSE PLATE NUMBER!!!”  The “you” is plainly Seth Allen.”  He also wrote this:

Brett Kimberlin saw someone on his lawn taking pictures. He goes outside to give chase. The stalker jumps into a red car and drives away. Kimberlin jumps into his car and chases the red car. Stalker takes photo of Kimberlin flipping him the bird. Kimberlin gets car license plate number. Kimberlin contacts police. Arrest warrants about to be issued.

Readers with long memories will know exactly what story this actually is.  This is actually what Brett Kimberlin claimed that John Norton had done to him.  Now, let’s notice a subtlety in my wording: I am not saying John Norton had actually done any of these things (Norton only admits to driving past Kimberlin’s house and taking the picture of Kimberlin flipping him the bird when Kimberlin was following him).  I am simply saying that Kimberlin had claimed that Norton had done this and we know that Kimberlin is an absolutely pathological liar.

Oh, and by the way, none of these things amounted to stalking, harassment, or even trespass under Maryland law as I explained here when I shared the dueling peace orders filed by Mr. Kimberlin against Mr. Norton, and by Mr. Norton against Mr. Kimberlin.

And there is something else important to note, too.  This story that Kimberlin told about an alleged intruder on his property, was not known to the public at this point.  Kimberlin would go on to file this peace order against Norton making these claims...

   Brett Kimberlin v. John Norton Petition for Peace Order 6.22.12 (OCR) by   AaronWorthing

...but that wouldn’t be until June 22, two days later as indicated on the first page.  So how is it that Bill Schmalfeldt is putting out Brett Kimberlin’s highly-dubious version of events two days before Kimberlin made the story public?  It suggests that he is in fact in close communication with Kimberlin or one of his allies.

And even then the story Schmalfeldt spun was still false and laughably so.  I mean let’s put ourselves in Schmalfeldt’s position.  Let’s do a thought experiment where we imagine that you or I are just an ordinary person in Schmalfeldt’s shoes.  First you get the story that someone had intruded on Kimberlin’s property, allegedly, from either Kimberlin or one of his allies.  Let’s say Kimberlin told him.

Well, first, a journalist of any worth says to Kimberlin, “do you have any proof of this besides your word, that this guy did these things?”  Kimberlin might point at the photograph, or to the license plate he got, but that only proves that Kimberlin was pursuing a then-unknown man.  It doesn’t prove any wrongdoing on this person’s part.  And any reasonably skeptical, reasonably diligent reporter would know by now that Kimberlin was a liar.  I mean besides him being a convicted perjurer, there is this:

So any reasonable journalist could report the story, but it would have to have a lot of “allegedly’s” sprinkled in, wouldn’t it?  So that paragraph about someone on his property would read like this instead (with the changes in italics):

Brett Kimberlin allegedly saw someone on his lawn taking pictures. He allegedly goes outside to give chase. The alleged stalker jumps into a red car and drives away. Whatever this person actually did, there is no question that Kimberlin jumps into his car and chases the red car. Alleged Stalker takes photo of Kimberlin flipping him the bird. Kimberlin gets car license plate number. Kimberlin contacts police. Arrest warrants allegedly about to be issued.

And that is leaving out the just plain poor grammar involved.  That’s how a reasonably objective journalist writes the same paragraph.  Then next, in my hypothetical situation, let’s say you got confused and thought that Seth Allen was confessing to being the person driving the other car.  Before declaring to the world that Seth is the stalker, wouldn’t you first go to Brett Kimberlin and ask him a few basic questions, such as:

“Hey I have some information that suggests that Seth Allen might have been the one that you say was taking photos of your house.  Do you think that could have been him?”

I mean isn’t that what any minimally competent journalist does?  And since Kimberlin knows what Seth Allen looks like (and John Norton is not likely to be mistaken for Seth Allen), Kimberlin would be able to confirm or deny it.

And of course if Schmalfeldt received his information from one of Kimberlin’s allies—such as Neal Rauhauser—then he could have simply asked his source to talk to Kimberlin and relay back the answer to him.  Same difference.

So no matter how you slice it, either Schmalfeldt didn’t bother to take the most minimal steps to ensure the story he was printing was true, or Schmalfeldt did ask, and Kimberlin or his ally lied to him, and Schmalfeldt never reported that fact.  Either way he is not acting like a journalist.

Well, either that, or Schmalfeldt always understood that Seth Allen was not the person who allegedly came to Kimberlin’s house in the first place and he told a deliberate lie.  Which is really not acting like a journalist.

Meanwhile, Bill Schmalfeldt—still claiming to believe that Seth Allen had done all the things that Brett Kimberlin in fact accused John Norton of doing—wrote a post accusing me of helping Seth Allen to stalk Brett Kimberlin entitled “Sometimes, One Just Needs a Dumbass to Come Along.”  Here’s a pdf of the post in question which has since disappeared:

   "Sometimes, One Just Needs a Dumbass to Come Along" by the Liberal Grouch by  

In it he writes:

Here’s the sum of my Twitversation with a particularly challenged individual who calls itself @Occubama. After we went to press with our info about Ali Akbar, @Occubama tweeted in. I had been figuring that Walker had been working with and somehow assisting Seth Allen in his stalking efforts against Brett Kimberlin, but no way was I ever going to get either of them to admit it. So, I needed a dumbass.

God provides.

Then he publishes a tweet by a guy on Twitter who goes by the handle @Occubama who wrote: “uh, no, Walker was helping [Seth Allen], dullard.”  The “dullard” he was referring to was Bill Schmalfeldt.

So you got that?  The big revelation is that I was helping Seth Allen!  Oh noes!  Schmalfeldt’s got me now!

Folks, there is so much wrong with this, it makes my head hurt.

First, there is the obvious (by now) fact, that Schmalfeldt was wrong about Seth Allen stalking Brett Kimberlin on June 15 or any other day.  Indeed, I suspect Seth doesn’t have enough money to stalk anyone if he was so inclined.

Second, let’s pretend for a moment that 1) Seth was stalking Brett Kimberlin and 2) that @Occubama’s statement amounts to an admission that I was somehow aiding in that effort.  With those two assumptions in mind, a basic journalistic question would be this: what would @Occubama know?  I mean, I am not putting down this “Occubama” guy.  I am not even upset at him for writing it because Schmalfeldt’s response is downright useful.  But why does Schmalfeldt think some random guy on Twitter knows anything special that isn’t in the public domain?  “@Occubama” isn’t a friend of mine.  I don’t even know his real name.  And I have never seen him claim to be a witness anything more than what is in the public space.  And Schmalfeldt makes absolutely no effort in trying to establish this “@Occubama” as a source we should pay attention to.  He doesn’t provide one piece of information to make us think this twitterer knows anything that isn’t readily available to the public.  Which leads me to the next point...

Third, the fact I had helped Seth Allen as an attorney was public knowledge since December 13, 2011 as I mentioned in this post.  And more importantly anyone who read my now-famous monster post exposing how Brett Kimberlin (start here and keep reading) would know this to be the case.  So obviously saying that I was helping Allen amounts to nothing more than stating a pedestrian fact that was already in the public domain.  And yet Schmalfeldt treats this as some kind of thunderous revelation!  How can Bill Schmalfeldt claim to be a “journalist” investigating my conflict with Brett Kimberlin and not even have read my monster post accusing Kimberlin of trying to frame me for a crime?  Well, we will talk about that more in just a minute.

But let’s continue with the Norton debacle—the debacle being Bill Schmalfeldt’s downright comic screw ups on that story.  Of course within a few days Brett Kimberlin’s official story started coming out and Bill Schmalfeldt was all too happy to print it.  I have preserved, sans personal information, a post where he declares that Norton is supposedly being thrown under the bus.  You can read it here:

   "Meet John Firman Norton - Speedbump" By the Liberal Grouch (Redacted) by  

By the way, I had to redact every piece of personal information about John Norton from this site, including his email address and even his home address.  But I didn’t have to redact Brett Kimberlin’s information: Schmalfeldt had redacted that information already.  So the same guy who had no trouble doxxing John Norton and Lee Stranahan drew the line at revealing where Brett Kimberlin lived.  Now why the differing treatment?

But there is also something more significant to note here.  When I first posted Norton’s application for a peace order against Kimberlin, I excluded any mention of Schmalfeldt or his site from Norton’s post.  Here is that document for your benefit:

   John Norton v. Brett Kimberlin Petition for Peace Order 6.25.12 (OCR) by  

So on page 2 the blocked out references were to Bill Schmalfeldt and an address on his “Liberal Grouch” website.  And here’s the important thing.  Schmalfeldt wrote to him on June 22, the same day Brett Kimberlin filed for his peace order against Norton.  Dear reader, there is no way for a person to learn of the contents of a Peace Order on the same day it is filed, unless you are being fed information by the person who is filing it (including receiving information from one of his allies, obviously).  So once again, we see the close communication between Brett Kimberlin and Bill Schmalfeldt.

And the other interesting thing is that by this time, Schmalfeldt knew that his story about Seth Allen being on Kimberlin’s property was false and necessarily his claim that I was helping Seth Allen to stalk Kimberlin was also false.  But did he correct the story?  Did he admit he got it wrong?  Did he perhaps even reveal that he was lied to by Kimberlin or one of his allies?  No, that is what a journalist would do.  I checked back at his blog even months after the fact, and the false stories were still there.  It is only recently that he has cleaned out much of his archives and simply deleted the posts, without ever admitting to making an error in the first place.

I wrote a number of tweets to him sarcastically mocking his idiocy as follows:

The only change I made to those tweets is that I changed the order they were written, so they were easier to understand.  All of those tweets were written on June 21, 2012.

And the amazing thing as that while those tweets each pointed out his obvious factual errors, Schmalfeldt never once waivered from his story.  Indeed he put these tweets on his site, and claimed it was proof he had gotten close to the truth and repeated his libels on Mr. Allen and myself.  Here’s a pdf copy of that post:

   "Whoops! Seems I'Ve Struck a Nerve" the Liberal Grouch by  

But I am saving the best for last, because it is necessary for you to see how damning this next piece of evidence is.  As I said before, Schmalfeldt had thought it was some kind of damaging admission (by a third person) that I was “helping” Seth Allen.  He wrote this with apparently no idea that I had openly stated that I helped Seth Allen as an attorney in his legal case, which proved he had not even read my post discussing how Brett Kimberlin attempted to frame me.

But it gets better.  Schmalfeldt not only didn’t give my side of the story any consideration at all, he also lied about whether he had done so.  What I will show you is a series of tweets he wrote on June 18.  This was at a time when I had only started to know who he was, and therefore gave him the presumption of good faith that good people give to all people who are strangers: you assume until evidence shows otherwise that when a person is getting something wrong, or seeking information, that they are doing so with good intentions.  So when Schmalfeldt started getting part of my story wrong and tweeting it at me, I wrote back to him suggesting that he take a look at my blog and see for himself.

That resulted in a string of two tweets giving one continuous thought.  This is what he said to me:

You see, here’s the basic fault with your premise.  You assume I have not seen your evidence.  You assume I have not reviewed both sides, and you assume I am incapable of making up my decision based on what I read.

He further reinforced this claim in in a second pair of tweets presenting one continuous thought:

I don’t know you.  I don’t know Kimberlin.  But I can read the English language pretty well.  And I have weighed the evidence in my own mind and... sorry... I just don’t see it your way.  So please, don’t stalk me or anything.

Here are screencaps of the same tweets:

You got that?  So he is claiming that he had reviewed my evidence.  But if he had, he would have already known I had been “helping” Seth Allen as an attorney and would have realized that someone saying that I helped Seth Allen was not a revelation, but old information before he posted on it two days later.  So in fact, not only had he never even read my side of the story at this point in time, but he lied about having done so.

So even then, he was lying in order to give us the false impression that he was behaving even slightly like a journalist.

He’s not a journalist.  He is barely even pretending to try to get at the truth and to the extent that he is pretending to do so, it is a lie.  So what is his real purpose?  Lee Stranahan found the tweet where he revealed it:

There you have it, folks.  He is threatening to continue what he is doing until we stop investigating Brett Kimberlin, until we stop revealing Brett Kimberlin and his associates’ criminal conduct.  This negates any claim to having a legal, journalistic purpose.  No, his only purpose is to harass those of us revealing the truth about Brett Kimberlin to dissuade us from continuing to do so.  Which raises the question: is he being paid enough to compensate for prison time?

And as for one final coda on this chapter of the story, as I write this (Sunday evening), I see that Schmalfeldt has now protected his tweets.  I wonder if this means he is finally getting competent legal advice?

And for my next post, the working title is “The Hypocrisy of Bill Schmalfeldt.”  This is going to be fun.

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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 help in the fight to hold Mr. Kimberlin accountable, please hit the Blogger’s Defense Team button on the right.  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.

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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.  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.