Doxed and Stalked
One thing I love about irony is that at its heart lies the pure absurdity of coincidence. Nothing pulls me out of a funk quite as quickly as seeing how absurd whatever situation I am pondering really is. Over the course of the day, before the meeting happened, I just kept thinking about the absurdity of it all and by lunch, I was laughing to myself about it. During lunch, I got a text from Dr. K telling me that the meeting was on. By 3:30, I had cultivated a sort of gallows humor attitude about the entire thing...I was committed to making it as Kafkaesque of an experience as possible for EVERYONE involved. All for my own amusement, because I figured I deserved to get something out of the dreadful experience. Consequently, I was expecting to feel the stark formality of a meeting with cold war Soviet inquisitors when the secretary escorted me to the office. What greeted me was not at all what I was expecting: three kind-faced people, gracious as could be and smiling sadly. It felt like someone was about to tell me I had terminal cancer or something, and that there was nothing they could do about it.
I was seated and then introduced around. Prof. S., the dean for my campus, along with Prof. K and a member of TCC's legal team, Ms. W. That the latter was included is how I knew I was probably very fucked. My heart sank right to the floor. Followed by my jaw, when Ms. W. pushed a 2-inch thick dossier towards me and said, “We think you might soon have to deal with a very dangerous man. He has submitted an open records request for all digital communications from your office computer or your phone.” My heart stopped for a second. Then it started to race.
Jerking my head jerked towards them, I protested, “But I don’t have a computer, and the classroom ones are wiped nightly, and I do zero TCC business on my phone. What does this dangerous man want?”
That was when Ms. W explained who Chris Barnett was and how he had been terrorizing TU, TCC, and the rest of the town for the last few years via malicious litigation. The dossier before me was a part of the records their legal team had been keeping on Barnett, knowing that at some point, out of sheer stupidity, he was going to get himself arrested. Telling the DA that he has been up to scary stuff amounts to hearsay, but producing a pile of material evidence backing up every claim you have made is enough to get a warrant on him at least. Ms. W explained that at this point, TCC was playing a waiting game. The surveillance they had been gathering is how they were alerted to everything Barnett had produced regarding me. The upshot is that TCC brass had essentially called me in as a courtesy to warn me about Barnett.
As regards the actual request, W. told me that Barnett’s request was so far overreaching that most of it would be denied, and asked if I had anything in my TCC email they needed to know about. I told them no. They said that all my emails had to be turned over when the time to grant the request came, but that legal means had quashed the request from getting fulfilled any time soon. Then Ms. W had me turn to the first flagged page. In bold yellow highlighter, a few lines were marked. There were all the allegations regarding my trafficking in heinous contraband from my TCC office and my TCC computer. Ms. W. explained what this would mean for the future of my working for the State of Oklahoma when the OSBI check prior to employment turned THAT up. I idly wondered about filing a defamation suit of some sort against Barnett. Ms. W. made a point of reminding me that the only way to win a defamation suit was to prove you have the truth on your side. What she didn't have to tell me because I already knew was that proving the truth meant opening up everything on my end to prove Barnett had lied and letting his legal team rummage through all of it–because the only defense against defamation is the truth. After that, the malicious lies wouldn’t matter because they would have found something else they really could prove about me and used it to ruin my life. The realization that there was absolutely nothing I could do weighed heavily on me…Then it all got worse.
Ms. W then had me turn to another flagged page. It stopped me cold. There was a hard copy of a blog post written by Chris Barnett with my picture at the top of it and hideous, foul, vile, lies and libel written beneath. This evil abuse was now just a Google search away for anyone with the right search terms, and there was nothing I could do about it. Then, without prompting, I flipped to the next flagged page. On it was a picture of Barnett, holding an AR-15, next to a picture of what could have been my house with the owner’s name and address listed beneath. This act of aggravated doxing was Barnett’s way of encouraging acts of stochastic terrorism against his enemies, and it was perfectly legal for him to do it because of our First Amendment rights to free speech.
I sat, feeling myself slide down the gullet of absolute terror and helplessness as the situation engulfed me. I was so emotional that my face had gone mostly blank except for this really fake tiny smile I slap on sometimes in an emergency. Outside of my own terror, another thought nagged at me: This dossier was everything that Barnett had been doing in the past few years. Probably a hundred innocent people and two entire colleges, not to mention several small businesses, were being devoured by this leviathan. The baldness of the evil astounded me; but the banality of the means by which he accomplished it was truly stunning.
Near the end of the meeting, the assembled officials assured me that TCC was not taking action against me. They asked if I had anything I wanted to discuss. The only thing I could think to say was, “Well. You hired me to teach rhetoric and writing. Sometimes those who teach can also really do.” Dean S. looked at me, shaking his head and grinning wide, he said, “that was a GREAT letter.” At least there was that, which along with $6.50 would get me a latte at Starbucks. I don’t remember exactly how the meeting ended or how I got home that afternoon. But I do remember that when I got home from the meeting, I logged on to my TCC email account. If he was going to look through my emails, I’d make it worth MY while for him to do it. I spent the rest of the evening channeling my terror and rage into petty vengeance. I made dozens of dummy email accounts and sent my TCC email account the same thing over and over: a link to Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” video on YouTube. Have fun sorting through THAT email stack, I thought.
Thus began a strange month-long vigil. The campus police escorted me to my car after every class I taught. Beyond that safety concession, I mostly tried to keep this mess in the back of my mind while maintaining the veneer of nothing being wrong. It took a lot of work. I was careful in who I told about what was going on, because honestly I felt like the fewer in my professional and personal circles knew what was going on, the better. The rest of the time, I felt numb. Occasionally the numbness was punctuated by the sound of strange cars driving slowly by my house late at night and stopping for a few minutes before FINALLY going on. Soon it became necessary to sacrifice three different social media accounts and a Google Voice number that had been poisoned by trolls spamming me with random rape and murder threats. It was utterly horrific in a slow-motion kind of way, and it eventually became almost unbearable.
