On the anonymous denounciation. (and why your comments are down)

I am going to start this with an example that is public. Via Mark Steyn, who comments that the process of the courts is the punishment: it is immaterial that the man is exonerated by the courts: his career is ruined and his reputation in tatters.

Our second Nigel in the News is Nigel Evans, formerly Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons at Westminster. Like almost everyone in the Cameronized Conservative Party, Mr Evans is gay. Around the time the Canadian Nigel’s career was heading south, the Welsh Nigel’s career was plummeting in the same direction in the express elevator. A fellow Tory MP alerted the Speaker to a conversation she’d had with a young man regarding a supposedly unwanted sexual encounter with Mr Evans. Shortly thereafter, Nigel was arrested and charged with rape and sexual assault, his career collapsed, and he wound up on trial.

Here’s how that went:

What happened next is a matter of public record. Nigel Evans was acquitted of all charges. Not a few of the charges. Not most of the charges. All of the charges. It took the jury just four and half hours to throw out all ten counts.

And there was a reason they threw them out. Nigel Evans was totally and utterly innocent. Three of the alleged victims testified in court that they didn’t understand why the charges had been brought, and they themselves didn’t believe they had been the victim of any crime. The main complainant, who had alleged that he’d been raped, was proved in court to be a liar. He had twice told police Evans pushed him into his bedroom and onto the bed, forcibly tried to undress him, and promised him a job if he agreed to have sex with him. But on the witness box he was forced to admit there was no pushing, he’d taken his own clothes off and there had been no promise of a job.

Nigel Evans didn’t get off on a technicality. He didn’t do it… A wholly innocent man had his reputation destroyed and his career ruined, and now faces crippling debts to cover the cost of his legal fees.

So Mr Evans is innocent but a quarter-million dollars poorer. And, unlike his false but anonymous accusers, only Evans’ name will forever be indelibly linked to the words “assault” and “rape”. For both Nigel in Ottawa and Nigel at Westminster, guilt and innocence are irrelevant: as I like to say of my own legal travails, the process is the punishment.

And the Crown Prosecution Service will note that they lost this, but not reform. The anonymous denouncement, the accusations of nonconsensual sex, can affect us all.

As can accusations around children. This is one of my weaknesses: I find those who show their children off a little creepy, and try to keep the private private. Which brings us to catfights, and accusations. Firstly, at least locally, you are accountable for what you say.

David Bain supporter Joe Karam has been awarded more than $500,000 in damages after two men were found to have defamed him on the internet.

Kent Parker, the publisher of the Counterspin website, was ordered to pay $350,500 and Vic Purkiss, who had posted on the site and on Facebook, was ordered to pay $184,500. Justice Patricia Courtney found the pair had launched a “full-scale assault on Mr Karam’s reputation”. She found about 50 statements were defamatory without defence.

Karam is the main supporter of David Bain, who was retried after 13 years in prison and found not guilty of the 1994 murder of his family.

The judge said the pair accused Karam of “dishonesty in his motivations, lack of integrity in his dealings with expert witnesses, fraud in relation to the LSA (Legal Services Agency), lack of integrity in his motivation and dealings with David Bain”. “Few aspects of Mr Karam’s reputation were left untouched.” The publications caused Karam great distress and the judge said she accepted the evidence of witnesses who said Karam became “preoccupied, unsociable and visibly distressed” during the period.

Justice Courtney said the pair pleaded the defence of truth right up until Parker was cross-examined in court and admitted he could not prove the truth of his statements.

This last bit of information was published in today’s paper. Now, this means that I would have to be able to defend any accusation and prove the truth of it, if such remain on my website. So… a lot of comments will be taken down as of now. I have no ability to ascertain if any of them are true.

Which also brings me to another point. These are the tactics of our enemies, and we are not them. Matt Forney has written wisely on this, from his time in the trenches, and his post is well worth reading

If you’ve been exposed (or already write publicly), the next step for the haters is to make shit up about you. The rabbits will throw everything and the kitchen sink at you in hopes that something, anything will stick. Whether anything they say is true is irrelevant, because the goal of ganging up on someone in this fashion isn’t to be truthful, it’s to warn the other rabbits that dragons be here.

For example, my Portland article at Return of Kings generated a raft of false and baseless claims about me, from the obvious ones that I’m “ugly” and “misogynistic” to all sorts of bizarre speculation about both me (people were claiming that I’m in my thirties/forties) and the woman in the pic on my About page. Outraged feminists alternately claimed that she was my sister, that I was “hoverhanding” her, that she didn’t really want to be there, that I roofied her (?) and other blatant lies. Multiple people commenting on the article lied that Roosh and I were deleting hater comments, and one guy even claimed I had edited the article to add a whole entire section after Reddit Portland started gossiping about me.

The truthfulness or lack thereof of the hate Portland threw at me doesn’t matter to them. The purpose of hating on someone isn’t to get at the truth, it’s to pressure the offender to recant his evil ways and rejoin the flock. It’s also to warn other rabbits that here be dragons. Unfortunately for the bunnies, a proud hunter like the wolf has no reason to care about their disapproval, which leads to step three…

If they can’t pressure you into recanting, the haters’ next move will be to threaten you into recanting. They’ll dig up your Facebook profile, your address, your phone number and more and encourage each other to harass you. In pure Stalinist fashion, they will also harass your employers, your family members, your friends and more. The bunnies will defend their actions in a cowardly, Pharisaical fashion: claiming that what they’re doing is perfectly legal, as if the law is the only determiner of what behaviors are apropos.

They’ll even threaten physical violence against you, because while one rabbit will always lose to the wolf, a hundred rabbits might be able to win.

Going back to the Portlanders, their harassment of me was unprecedented in the manosphere; not even Roosh received this level of hate for his Toronto article. I’ve already written about how someone posted my phone number to Reddit Portland and on Twitter and how I stopped a DDoS/hack attack on my blog. I didn’t mention how I got a not insignificant number of hits for “matt forney portland address” from feminists trying to find out where I live. I also didn’t bring up how one loser created a Facebook page entitled “Matt Forney Should Kill Himself” (since deleted for blatantly violating the Terms of Service), after he spent an entire afternoon commenting on every single thing on my own page.

At the moment, there are other things happening locally, and I have to protect myself (and those who have commented, most of whom I respect) from accusations. So a pile of comments are going to be deleted. If they go up again, they will be deleted and the people added to the blacklist — that automatically routes all spam to /dev/null.

Folks, I don’t live in a place with a constitution. That usually is a good thing, but libel has teeth over here. And it clearly cannot be tolerated.