So there’s your raw material.
Go right ahead.
You can use almost any page of that XXXTentacion book to fuck up my career!
Rob me of the opportunity to contribute shitty opinion pieces to a dying news media!
Deprive me of the ability to be hired as faculty at a small liberal arts college where I can delude the stupid and the rich into thinking that they’ll be writers!
The future is in your hands!
Slender Man commands you!
But, reader, I give you fair warning.
You might be able to fuck up my shit, but no matter how much you huff and puff, you’ll never take away my tote bag that says BOOKS.
When my lawyers asked me who I thought might be responsible, I offered a crazy person’s answer: I suggested that my blogging had worked as sorcery and I’d summoned up a demon that was haunting me for the crime of hubris.
The suggestion was politely ignored.
My attorneys filed suit in Los Angeles Superior Court.
They received power of subpoena.
Power of subpoena meant that they could send out demands to the Internet service providers in Woodland Hills and Washington DC.
And when the subpoenas came back, we’d have the name of my stalker.
There’s a story in here that I can’t tell you, because it would go back on a promise that my attorneys made to a third party, but we very quickly ended up with the name of the person responsible for all the bother.
I’d been harboring the delusion that, when the name was revealed, it would play out like Agatha Christie, and the unmasking would give me a sense of understanding and wisdom.
But that’s not what happened.
It was someone that I didn’t know.
At all.
Hadn’t met.
Not once.
With no connection to anyone that I’d ever known.
There was no reason behind the stalking and libel.
It was random.
And I could give you my stalker’s name, right now, immortalizing them in the annals of literature. There’s nothing stopping me. I can’t be punished for reporting on public records available in the case files of Los Angeles Superior Court.
But as I’ve been writing this chapter, I’ve reflected on how life plays out.
And how strange things have become.
Back when I was being stalked, there was no question that I was on a level playing field with my stalker.
I was no one.
He was no one.
But things have changed.
I’m an international bestseller, I’ve done countless radio appearances, I’ve been on television more times than is good for the spiritual health of any one person, I’ve been chased at the Frankfurt Book Fair by a swarm of book paparazzi, sat through about one hundred and fifty interviews, I’ve been hotboxed by Alan Moore, I’ve had Carl Bernstein talk to me about how his son plays guitar for Demi Lovato, I’ve informed Seymour Hersh about my cat’s irritable bowels, and I’ve annoyed Zadie Smith for about forty minutes at a reception filled with billionaires, Salman Rushdie, and the Jordanian royal family.
I’m famous in Serbia.
I’m writer-famous in Germany and the United Kingdom.
The power differential has shifted.
And we must embrace mercy above all things.
When my attorneys gave me my stalker’s name, I spent about a week putting together a picture of who’d been fucking with my shit.
There was a near vacuum of information, but he had a page on the Internet Movie Database, and I was able to figure out that he was a thirty-four-year-old man from Washington DC.
He was a failed screenwriter.
Unemployed and living with his parents.
And the namesake of his father.
He was a junior.
At the very moment when Junior was fucking up my shit from the family’s million-dollar row house, Senior was in the United States Senate, working as an assistant to a long-serving Republican.
I was being fucked with by Republicans in Washington DC!
For the first time in my life, I felt like a true American artist.
The father had spent decades working his way up through the Republican hierarchy, until he ascended into a job with the Republican Finance Committee. At one point, ABC News had called him, “One of the Republican party’s top officials.”
It had all fallen apart in 1996 AD, when the RFC was hit with a sexual harassment lawsuit that specifically focused on Senior. It alleged that on a near daily basis, Senior expected to fondle his female subordinates.
The culmination came in October 1996 AD, when 20/20, a television show, ran a report on the lawsuit and on Senior in specific.
It contained footage of Senior at a Republican holiday party, dressed like Santa Claus, leering at younger woman.
It also contained footage of Senior being confronted at the Republican National Convention by the reporter Brian Ross, asking Senior to explain why he had sexually harassed women while dressed like Santa Claus.
This was the beginning of the end.
Senior kept getting demoted to lesser and lesser positions in the Republican hierarchy until he ended up working in the Senate as an assistant.
Reader, let me say this: I’m sorry that this book has included two sexualized mentions of Santa Claus.
None of this is what I wanted.
This is what life has done to me.
In May of 2000 AD, the Washington Times ran a puff piece about the previous home of my stalker’s parents. This was where they were living before they bought the row house.
It was the sort of rubbish that newspapers run whenever a rich person wants to sell their home. Stuffed with quaint, folksy detail.
My stalker’s mother is quoted in the article, talking about how the home was haunted.
She tells a story about how the ghosts had fucked with a wheel of cheese.
I was being stalked by a person who’d grown up with a haunted wheel of cheese whose father had been exposed on national news for leering at women while dressed as Santa Claus.
That’s life.
No one ever said it’d be easy.
It’s very easy to laugh about these absurdities, but there was another way to look at the situation and quake with dread.
I had stuck my nose in a hornet’s nest.
These were very rich people.
And they were very well connected.
They were consummate Republican insiders.
And I was fucking with them.
Reader, I could supply you with endless details about the intrigues of the case and how my stalker dodged being served with the lawsuit, and how his parents aided and abetted him in dodging service, and how he finally accepted service after I had my attorneys call his sister and leave a message on her work voicemail.
But I’m only going to give the basics.
Before my stalker accepted service, Senior ended up on the phone with my attorneys, and he tried to talk them out of the lawsuit.
He threatened and he blustered.
He finally claimed that Junior suffered from “nerve problems” which kept him from working, but that he’d try to get his son on board with the lawsuit.
He said that he couldn’t understand why anyone would waste the resources suing his son, given that his son had no money.
I can’t remember what my attorneys said in response.
Had I been asked, I would have said this: I’m from Rhode Island.
Rhode Island is the smallest of America’s fifty states.
It has the longest official name: The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.