A familiar syndrome; from the New York Times:
Ronald Kuby, a lawyer for Raphael Golb, last week disputed Mr. Cargill’s characterization of himself as an innocent victim, writing in an e-mail message that “he played a vile role in this case. Among other things, Cargill spend hundreds of hours obsessively tracking down ‘Charles Gadda’ because of the latter’s online criticisms, engaged in his own sock puppetry while concealing it and condemning Golb for the same thing.” Mr. Kuby added, “Cargill is probably a lot of fun to chat with, but he is more than capable of using his hurt puppy persona to manipulate the criminal justice system.”
Mr. Golb put it this way: “Cargill was stalking me.”
The story is well-known; Raphael Golb used more than 80 aliases, including “Charles Gadda”, to harass and impersonate scholars of the Dead Sea Scrolls on the grounds that they had failed to give proper acknowledgement of the theories of his father, Norman Golb. One of those targeted, Robert Cargill, assembled the evidence which resulted in a successful criminal prosecution. According to the Times, Robert sent Golb a message under a pseudonym which Golb would recognise as having been written by someone who knew his identity. Kuby’s suggestion that this is the “same thing” as Golb’s conduct is laughable.
Golb was exposed – and is now off to prison – because of Robert’s careful attention to detail. The lesson for who use the internet in bad faith to lie and harass is that paying attention to detail needs to be stigmatised as something weird and creepy. Hence the familiar smears of “obsessive” and “stalking”, deployed by someone whose own behaviour is transparently that of a real stalker.
There’s a lot of it about.
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[…] justice in large part due to Robert’s careful attention to detail, which Golb’s lawyer sought to stigmatise as “obsessive” and “stalking” (an accusation that is often the first refuge […]