Barbara and ER Roberts shared this New York Times link with me, presumably because they’re aware that I’ve had considerable experience myself — quite continuously over many years, though on a much smaller scale — with the sort of online mobbing, the malicious and anonymous bullying, that it describes:
I’m a regular topic of mockery, derision, and personal defamation on several message boards (and probably on many more than I’ve seen). Utterly bogus tales are told about me, including completely false accounts of my cruelties and absurd antics given by anonymous writers who claim to know me and my family or to have been my students. (A favorite of mine — I’ve seen it twice — has been the insider account based on close friendship with my [nonexistent] daughter.) Mythical stories about the backstory of my parting from the Maxwell Institute are especially popular in certain quarters.
Things that I’ve said have been taken out of context, twisted, read in the most hostile possible way.
There’ve been calls for my firing. People have written to my employers and to the leaders of my Church seeking my dismissal from BYU and/or my excommunication. They’ve even proposed interfering with the legal proceedings against Brian David Mitchell (the kidnapper of Elizabeth Smart) in an effort to publicly discredit me there, because I’d been retained by the U. S. Attorney’s Office as an expert witness. (I don’t know what, if anything, came of that.) I receive several anonymous insulting emails each week, some of them obscene and a few threatening — three times, over the years, I’ve been obliged to file formal written complaints with the police — and there’ve been at least three websites (that I’m aware of) devoted entirely to mocking me.
And so on and so forth.
It’s a very weird world out there.
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