Convicted Terrorist and Perjurer Brett Kimberlin Gets His Wife Arrested

...And Other Things I Witnessed in Court Today

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.

[Update: Please note that I have removed the first name of Ms. Kimberlin at her request and left only her first initial, “T.” She is, after all, a victim of sexual abuse and those kinds of reasonable requests will be honored.  While the moral right to privacy of rape victims is not absolute, it seems to be reasonably asserted here.]

Update (II): Two major corrections on this piece.  First, it turns out that T. Kimberlin was not arrested based on any criminal charges, but instead based on Brett Kimberlin’s false assertion that she was mentally ill.  Fortunately the confinement was only last as a few minutes until the judge could put a stop to it.  Read for more details, here.

Second, I have learned through my friend John Hoge, that “[t]he speculation that [T.Kimberlin] might have been at a disadvantage because she is not a native English speaker is wrong.”  I sincerely apologize for the error.  If she happens to read this, I hope she will see I didn’t mean to offend but I can totally understand if she is offended.  As I made it clear in the next post, I see her as another target of Brett Kimberlin’s evil, his lies, his threats, his abuse of the legal system.  I see her as no different than dozens of women I helped who found themselves in abusive marriages.  I have a special hatred in my heart for men who do not treat their wives with the love, respect and honor they deserve.  As one person once said, “women are jewels, not punching bags.”

Probably after all the lies Brett Kimberlin has told about me, she thinks I am an evil man, too.  I wouldn’t blame her.  I wouldn’t even get angry with her for it.  But regardless of how she feels about me, I am rooting for her.

Update: Offline and online, friends are making the case that the “1” is really a “7.”  First, dear reader, I gave you the evidence to make up your own mind.  So feel free to do so.  They have made the argument that in other cases it is clear she is making a “1” as just a simple slash.  But at the same time, Ms. Kimberlin has been present at several of the hearings involved, within the last seven months.  Which suggests they have not been separated this long.  But ultimately, it’s your call and I respect anyone who feels differently.  I feel confident in my opinion, but I could be wrong.

We now resume our original post, as is.

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First, dear readers, a warning.  Some of the language heard in court today was extremely raw.  And I think it is relevant to this story.  I normally try to keep this blog relatively family friendly, but this is one case where I am making an exception.  Sorry in advance for any offense.

So Mr. Hoge and I decided to make an excursion this morning to witness the hearings related to the peace order and domestic violence protective order that I reported on yesterday.  After all, I had noticed in the past that Kimberlin had a way of blaming me for the conduct of people who are complete strangers to me, so I wanted to know what was happening.  Literally as the post went up describing these and other filings appearing on the Maryland Judiciary Case Search, I was waiting in court to see what happened.

But first we have to start by amending the list of filings.  As I told you there was a domestic violence protective order.  We know now this was filed by Kimberlin’s wife, T.  Normally I wouldn’t give you her name, but frankly anyone who wanted to know her real name will shortly be able to find out just by searching the same Maryland Judiciary Case Search for reasons that will become obvious as this piece proceeds forward.  So that was styled T. Kimberlin v. Brett Kimberlin.

And now we know that the peace order was filed by Jay-Richard Elliott, whom I referred to in the last post as Jay Elliott.  And while I do not think race is inherently relevant, it becomes relevant when dealing with racists—and we have long established that Kimberlin is a racist.  Mr. Elliott is listed in Kimberlin’s criminal charges as African American, indicating how Kimberlin saw him.  Anyway, Mr. Elliott had filed a peace order against Kimberlin for harassment.

And apparently Kimberlin filed his own peace order against Mr. Elliott.  This was for harassment.

And then there are the criminal charges.  As I reported earlier today, Mr. Elliot was charged with a violation of Md. Criminal Law Code § 7-203, referred to as “unauthorized removal of property” as well as harassment.

Meanwhile, Mr. Elliott fought back, filing charges yesterday (but not appearing until today) for harassment, electronic harassment, and misuse of a telephone.  Regular readers are well aware of the harassment and electronic harassment laws by now, and I have previously discussed the misuse of a telephone statute, here.  All told, Kimberlin could go to prison for four and a half years if convicted of all of them.

And then there is a new charge filed against T. Kimberlin by Brett Kimberlin.  We literally know nothing about what she was actually charged with, but we have reason to believe that it is similar to the charge against Mr. Elliott.  Why we say this will become obvious as the story unfolds.

So we showed up this time at a Silver Spring District Courthouse, but it was still a Montgomery County case.  T. was already there, sitting close to who was later revealed to be Mr. Elliot.  He was accompanied with a man he later identified as his brother.  He told the court he was a potential witness but he never testified.

Kimberlin showed up later, wearing nice suit and ugly sneakers, with his mother, Carolyn (who was present on the day Kimberlin first trying to frame me for assault), and his two children in tow.  I will not give you their real names, but simply refer to them as the teenager and the pre-teen.  Both of them are daughters, and both are quite lovely young women who would make most parents proud.

Kimberlin evidently saw Mr. Hoge and I sitting in the courtroom before he entered.  I heard from inside something like “sh-t” and “they’re here” and we witnessed several members of the family pointing us out.  Later, when the case was first called, Kimberlin complained that we were supposedly stalkers  and that some of the testimony was going to be salacious and asked that the court carry out the hearing in chambers or otherwise exclude us.  The Judge Patricia Mitchell ruled correctly that court proceedings were public affairs, and Kimberlin just had to live with it.

Incidentally, I will give high praise to Judge Mitchell.  She was one of the best District Court judges I had seen in action so far in this sort of thing, very accommodating when she had to be and very tough when she had to be that, too.  I won’t say she was the best, but I would rank her first among equals.

Moving on, there was a snafu where Kimberlin didn’t have all of the people present who he wanted to testify (perhaps gone to the restroom or something), so they postponed the hearing at that point and heard other cases.  Ironically, no other witnesses but the parties testified.  And then it was resumed at around 11:00 a.m.  the multiple hearings ending about noonish.

First up, we have T. Kimberlin.  I don’t want to criticize the woman overly much, but I think due to language issues, she didn’t present her case very well.  She admitted Kimberlin had not actually struck her, but claimed “mental abuse” but didn’t go into details.  She also complained that Kimberlin kept coming to her work and trying to get her fired, which is probably rightfully considered harassment, but as I pointed out in the last post, you can’t get a protective order for harassment alone.  So her petition was denied and given the quality of the testimony before Judge Mitchell, that seems like the right outcome.

By contrast, take a gander at her written petition for a protective order:

  T. Kimberlin v. B. Kimberlin Petition for Protective Order 7.9.13 (OCR)

Notice toward the last page of it, she writes “He told me if I will try to take my kids with me he will hurt me and I will see what will happen to me.”  Any man telling a woman that is frightening, but Kimberlin has a body count and a history of laying bombs.  I suspect that if Ms. Kimberlin said that in court and told the court about Kimberlin’s past, that she would have walked away with that petition.  Perhaps she should file for an appeal, or simply re-file.  And in any case, she needs to get a good lawyer.

Notice also it raises other details.  She has been separated from Kimberlin allegedly for a month.  Mr. Hoge and I went back and forth about that—does that look like a 7 or a 1, when she talks about how long the separation has been?  I will go with it being a “1” because it fits with other details others have provided.

And notice particularly another allegation.  She claims on the second page that Kimberlin has had her arrested on false charges in the past, raising the dark possibility that Kimberlin has literally been using he courts of Maryland as a means of controlling a wife that plainly want to leave him.

Next up, we had Jay-Richard Elliot.  The story he told was pretty straightforward: Kimberlin was emailing him, texting to his boss, trying to get him fired, putting up fliers at his the pizza place he worked at urging people to boycott them for one reason or another.  In other words, Kimberlin was trying to get him fired to and generally harassing him.  He testified that he had told Kimberlin to stop this behavior in November.  And thus the judge correctly ruled that he had grounds to claim that Kimberlin was harassing him, and issued a temporary peace order.  So we will be doing this again next week, I suppose.

Here is his petition for a peace order:

  Elliot v. B. Kimberlin Petition for Peace Order 7.9.13 (OCR)

The fuller picture that started to emerge is that Kimberlin was jealous of Elliott since last November.  Elliott’s testimony left me unclear if Elliott was in a romantic relationship with Ms. Kimberlin or not.

And please note that Kimberlin was not asked to respond to the charges.  The judge gave Kimberlin the chance to have a final hearing in all three cases and he refused and the judge evidently took the attitude that if she was determining if a temporary order would issue, she would exclude the respondent from testifying.

After that, came Kimberlin seeking a peace order against Mr. Elliott and that is where the fireworks really started and a strong picture of what was going on started to emerge.  Now one should exercise some caution in believing anything Kimberlin said, but this was so humiliating to Kimberlin, while not actually serving any useful purpose, I suspect it is true.  According to Kimberlin on June 20, 2013, T. said she was taking the car and going to the beach for three days.  Brett suggested that she take the teenage daughter with her, and she refused.  So she left alone.  And then she never came back.

Now this car allegedly belonged to one of his non-profits, loaned to her as a perk for working for one of them, and he said that he placed a GPS tracker on it.  He discovered that she had driven not to any beach, but all the way down to El Paso, Texas.  Evidently she had subsequently returned to the area, but had not returned home.  Kimberlin also looked into her phone records and discovered she had been calling Mr. Elliott a great deal.  He figured out that the two of them had run off together, or so he alleged.

So Brett decided she was fired and had to return the car to him.  He also told Elliott that he was not to ride in the car or drive it or else he would be charged with unauthorized use of the vehicle.  And this is where the story gets actually pretty awesome.  Now this is all based on Kimberlin’s allegations, but if they are true Elliott truly didn’t give a crud about Kimberlin’s attempt to intimidate him.  This is in keeping with his pre-trial demeanor, where he was joking and laughing and I heard T. tell him “this is serious.”  He didn’t seem to think it was particularly serious even then.

Kimerblin said that Elliott was threatening to tell everyone about his past, to buy a billboard and put it up.  He also quoted texts from Elliot allegedly saying that Kimberlin was “angry because I am fucking your wife,” talking about destroying the tires by the way he was driving the car, and declaring that he was “doing donuts in your car while your wife sucks my dick.”  I might be a word or two off, but that is the gist of what he was saying.

Now you might wonder reasonably why I am quoting it and that is because Kimberlin said this all in the presence of his two daughters.  He didn’t censor it, water it down or anything, as far as I can tell.  He said “sucks my dick.”  He said, “fucking your wife.”  And he said all of this in front of his children.  It reminds me of the John Norton incident when Kimberlin was so enraged at what Norton allegedly did (and the court found wasn’t true) that he drove like a maniac to follow Norton, with his own daughter in the back, endangering her safety.

More disturbingly, the word “negro” came up several times in the alleged texts.  I cannot quote them exactly, but the way they were read suggested that Elliott was responding to Kimberlin calling him one.  I would be very curious to see the larger context involved.

He also allegedly said some stuff about kicking Kimberlin’s butt, or something to that effect, which is not ordinarily appropriate, but with Kimberlin I have to wonder if it was in response to threats from Kimberlin, if he even said it.  Kimberlin seemed even more out of control than usual in dealing with these people.  Elliott was not given a chance to speak on his own behalf in that specific instance so we have not heard his side of it.

The judge was absolutely disgusted by all of this, but asked Kimberlin a key set of questions.  Did you ask Elliott to stop?  When did you do so?  And did he continue to contact you after you asked him to stop?  The answer was, that Kimberlin did ask Elliott to stop and then... Elliott stopped.

So it was not harassment at all.  We can expect the harassment charges against Elliott to be dropped.

Incidentally, here is a scan of Kimberlin’s petition for a peace order:

  B. Kimberlin v. Elliot Petition for Peace Order 7.9.13 (OCR)

So up until then I found most of it amusing and interesting.  And then things got disturbing.  Suddenly we saw T. being led away in handcuffs.  When I got out into the hall, I couldn’t find anything in the Maryland Judiciary Case Search about it and up until this time I still can’t.  But one has to suspect it was based on the same kinds of charges he filed against Elliott.  But we cannot be sure.

In other words, he is giving his wife the full “Aaron Walker” treatment: try to get her fired, charge her with crimes that are, more likely than not, false, all in an effort to coerce her behavior.  It’s like he is a wife beater, but instead of actually hitting her, he uses the machinery of the courts to abuse her.  Indeed, he is sending a message to her in that hearing that if she dares to try to take his children away—that was one of forms of relief she was seeking, custody of her children—he will have her arrested.  This bears a disturbing similarity to the ambush tactics he had used against myself and Seth Allen, as noted by Patterico:

Kimberlin has used this tactic before. Last year, in a lawsuit against Seth Allen, he had Seth Allen arrested for harassment when Allen showed up to a mandatory hearing in the civil suit.

Now, in that case, the criminal complaint was arguably quite justified, as Allen had mused about killing Kimberlin in an email which was duly and promptly reported to police. If someone made a statement like that about me, I’d go to the authorities too.

But in the process, Kimberlin learned a technique that he later used against Walker: namely, having your critics arrested in civil court.

Namely, this serial litigant forces his critics into his jurisdiction with a frivolous civil action. If Kimberlin’s critics complain that the action is frivolous, he calls that criticism “harassment,” and through a process of seeking frivolous peace orders and/or filing frivolous criminal complaints, obtains an arrest warrant for the critic. When the critic shows up to court as required, he or she is arrested on the trumped-up charges.

Success! The story becomes about the critic’s arrest. The critics look worse because authorities seem to take Kimberlin’s side; and he gets the satisfaction of putting his critics behind bars, even if for a short time.

Alternatively, Kimberlin and his supporters can use the threat of arrest to try to frighten civil litigants into staying out of court. After Allen’s arrest last year, he was very afraid to go back to court, because Kimberlin continually alleged that Allen’s blogging violated a peace order. Kimberlin supporters flooded Twitter with messages declaring Allen was going to be arrested at the next hearing for blogging. Allen almost decided never to go back to court.

It’s a Catch 22 for people who want to blog about public figures. You either go to court and risk arrest on a bogus criminal charge, or stay away and risk default on a bogus civil claim.

The combination of frivolous civil and criminal actions is a creative abuse of process and it’s bound to be repeated — until judges start noticing that Kimberlin repeatedly makes false statements in the course of filing flurries of court actions against his critics.

It is sinister enough when it is done to a blogger, but in a way it is even creepier when it is used to bludgeon a spouse into obedience.

I will say tonight that Mr. Hoge and I are seriously considering creating some kind of legal defense fund for Ms. Kimberlin.  Kimberlin has once again used the power of the state to oppress another.

Let me say one other thing.  I never celebrate the break-up of a good marriage or one that is capable of repair.  But there are times in my life—particularly when I worked with battered women—where I positively worked to break up irredeemably bad marriages.  These events have convinced me that this is, at the very least, a psychologically abusive marriage.  So, yes, I will positively root for Ms. Kimberlin to free herself from it, and hopefully even to take her kids away from him.

Indeed, back when I was helping abused women, I was taught a simple practice: always refer to the woman as “Ms.” rather than “Mrs.”  It was a subtle way of making the woman think of herself as no longer a married woman.  And sharp eyed readers will notice I have done exactly that with Ms. Kimberlin.  I genuinely pray she beats these abusive charges and gets her kids away from their sociopath of a father and I will not apologize for feeling that way.

Anyway, folks, stay tuned.  There is surely more to come.

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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.