“If you don’t take my name off of your website I’m going to kill myself.”
That’t how the email started. It arrived in my inbox at 10:18 pm on September 18th.
The rest of it read:
When I wake up tomorrow morning. I just thought you should know. And I’m going to do it because you have risked reprisals from Keith and his lawyers against me and my family. Because I sent a few strongly worded e-mails. Voicing the same criticisms that others have been posting in your comments for weeks. I know I’m wasting my time even writing this. I guess I owe it to the few people who care about me to try. But I know I’ll fail. I’ll wake up and see a post on Frank Report titled something like “Deranged [name redacted] threatens to kill himself!”. And then I’ll turn off the computer, walk into the kitchen, and slit my wrists lengthwise with a steak knife. To hear you tell it, I guess the world will be better off. So I guess this is goodbye.
The context of this email is that I had just published two posts on Frank Report: ‘[Name redacted] goes on attack‘ and ‘Who is [name redacted]?’
In the posts, I published an email exchange between an email correspondent and myself. I asked the person to identify himself and he declined. I assumed it was a fictitious name.
He was hardly polite in his emails to me. Among other things, he wrote that in publishing Frank Report, I was engaging in “mental masturbation”; that I turned myself “into a joke” and that “more than likely the vast majority of everything [I’ve] ever written is bullshit”. He ended by saying I was an “opportunistic dipshit”.
So I thought he was fair game. I mean, he could certainly dish it out….
And so I published our correspondence and included his supposed name in the email and speculated on the posts that he might be Keith Raniere playing the misinformation game.
I also speculated that by the tone of the emails, the writer might be a little demented.
So, I published the posts and shortly after I received the email above threatening suicide, I took the name off within five minutes and changed it to “John Doe”.
I do not know if this guy is really the name on his email account, or if he’s Keith Raniere or one of his minions.
But I took the name off and changed it to John Doe just in case. I don’t enjoy suicide. I wonder if Vanguard feels the same.
