This post was co-written with Tim Dreier of The One-Handed Economist; both of us are graduates of the University of Oregon in Eugene, where Deb Frisch once taught and now lives. As a matter of full disclosure, we’ve had a few scrapes with Frisch of our own, she having trolled the blog of a student magazine we both once edited. That’s covered below. For previous Blog P.I. coverage, see here and here.
The saga of Deborah Frisch, longtime comment troll and all-around kook, took another troubling, if not exactly unforeseeable turn in the last 48 hours. As far as we know, she is now the first troll of the political blogosphere to face criminal charges relating to such activity. On August 21 she was arraigned in an Oregon courtroom on charges of stalking and telephone harassment (PDF). The docket can be found at the link preceding, but is captured below for your viewing pleasure:
According to Don’t Hire Deb, a blog devoted to documenting Frisch’s outrageous behavior while depriving her own site of traffic, Frisch posted either $4,000 bail or $400 to a bondsman, and must reappear in court on September 25th. As is speculated in DHD comments and elsewhere, this likely stems not from Frisch’s well-publicized Jeff Goldstein-related misadventures (to the best of our knowledge she’s never called him) but rather similar interactions with former colleagues at University of Oregon (where she was denied tenure in 1994 and served as an adjunct until July 2001) including calling, emailing, and a quickly-removed post to her blog.
Just a few months ago, Frisch was an obscurity known only to the blogs she trolled, such as our own Oregon Commentator and Steve Verdon’s Deinonychus Antirrhopus. But at this point, she is undergoing the most severe public self-destruction we’ve seen yet. And when you consider that includes Jason Leopold and other, better-known individuals, that’s saying something. Academic John Lott and attorney Glenn Greenwald may be guilty of sock-puppetry, but that’s bush-league compared to Deb’s prolonged breakdown. Michael A. Bellesiles? A liar and a hack, but so far as we know he never ended up in jail for his antics. And no, having his Bancroft Prize revoked is not the same thing. Hell, Jayson Blair managed to spin his utter fecklessness into a book deal, as did “fabulist” Stephen Glass. Frisch, though, is in a class of her own: a vitriolic sociopath whose delusion knows almost no bounds.
For those of you just tuning in, Deb made a name for herself in the rightosphere by making altogether disturbing, one might say John Mark Karr-esque comments about Goldstein’s family. Within hours of Goldstein having publicized her identity being called out by Goldstein’s readers, Frisch resigned from a Univ. of Ariz. teaching job, thereby pre-empting a probable termination. The story got some press play in the Tucson Citizen, Eugene Register-Guard and Inside Higher Ed. Goldstein sought and obtained a restraining order against her, and that might have been the end of it.
Instead, her online behavior became even more erratic: Posting fake suicide notes, angering colleagues on an academic listserv, claiming to pursue legal action against Goldstein, Ace of Spades HQ and Matthew Heidt of Blackfive. And most strangely, attacking the folks at lefty satire blog Sadly, No!, well known for its disdain of Goldstein, and which had previously belittled the Frisch controversy. More recently she has gone so far as to heckle Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden (whom she had claimed an interest in working for) and, apparently, now managed to stalk and harass former colleagues in Oregon.
Commenters at DHD, Patterico’s Pontifications and Ace of Spades HQ have posited that the cyclical nature of Deb’s “teh crazy” implies a drinking problem. Whether a joke or conventional wisdom, the notion has has gotten so much play that after the first of Deb’s bizarre attacks, the S,N! regulars mentioned her drinking whilst tearing her a new one:
Three days later, Frisch was in a Lane County courthouse.
Over the course of a few short weeks Frisch has gone from employed university adjunct to unemployable Internet sociopath with a rap sheet. It’s one thing to troll a few right-wing sites for fun and attention, but another matter entirely to make thinly veiled threats about a man’s child, imply that he’s a pedophile, and then proceed to alienate essentially everyone in the blogosphere and more than a few in what we might call “meatspace.”
If we didn’t know any better, we’d call the whole thing unbelievable. But having followed the unfolding Frisch fiasco, it’s more than believable. It was an inevitability.
Update: Kevin Hayden from The American Street, in the comments:
As a Eugene liberal, I’m not surprised at this latest development. While many in the blogofear postulated that she’s some hero of the left for her claims to represent us, she’s actually been pretty abusive to people all over the political spectrum, online and off. … The blog that seeks to keep people from hiring her is superfluous to the reality that her rep precedes her like the trail of a slug moving backwards. My sources indicate her long and continuing pattern of trashing professional associates, many of them highly esteemed scientists and scholars, makes it unlikely that she will attain any position of note.
This sounds right to us; far from being her only target, Goldstein was just the one with the biggest soapbox. We won’t join in the clinical depression/alcoholism debate, and we certainly hope we don’t give the impression of gleefully piling on. Fortunately, the only person likely to be hurt in all this is Frisch herself — alas, not so fortunate for her.
Update 2: An interesting possibility raised in a non-political message board, found via our referrer logs:
The phone law they cited her under may not mean she used a phone. In 2006 stalking laws were amended to include posting anonymously on the internet. We’ve had trolls here who could be cited under that same law.
The poster is based in Kentucky, while Frisch was charged under Oregon laws, so we’re not sure if this is applicable or not. We haven’t had a chance to look into Oregon’s cyber-stalking laws, so we don’t know whether this is the case in California’s Canada. If anybody knows the answer, please let us know.
Update 3: Having perused Oregon’s H.B. 2918, a cyberstalking law passed in 2001 and a (perhaps too) brief summary of S.B. 1067 relating to “telephonic harrassment,” it’s our guess that this charge actually does pertain to actual use of telephones. On the other hand, IANAL, and neither is Tim.
Update 4: John Dunshee, a self-described Poor Schmuck, offers a clarification of Oregon bail procedure in the comments:
Oregon does not have bail bondsmen. The State itself takes that role. You only need to provide 10% to the jail to be released, and the truth of the matter is that in Oregon even if you have a bail amount specified, the jail can still release you on a “matrix release” without you putting up a dime. It is not at all unusual for someone to be released on a “matrix” be given a court date, fail to appear and have a warrant issued for that, be arrested again and released again. It’s all a jobs program for cops, lawyers, and social workers.
This is news to me, having never been arrested and only going through Lane County’s court system after getting caught at a university neighborhood bar with a fake ID. But I can affirm that Oregon does like its jobs programs: For a whole summer during college, I pumped gas at a Portland-area Chevron. At most gas stations in Oregon and New Jersey and nowhere else, self-service is illegal.
Blog Traffic As A Reverse Bell Curve (Kind Of)
The comments to the Hotline On Call post that started the McCain/Mele Melee (feel free to borrow this phrase!) calls to mind, though doesn’t perfectly illustrate, a truism not just of politics but of the blogosphere in particular: Centrists are loved by no one, not even fellow centrists.
Originally, the post mistakenly identified Reynolds as “center-left.” Verbatim down to the formatting, reader Kathleen complained:
And so it was corrected — but a few hours later Not Marc (possibly referring to post co-author Marc Ambinder, perhaps even a handle of the Not Larry Sabato variety) disagreed with the updated descriptor:
Here at Blog P.I., we have cast aspersions on the oft-proctored renounce-your-allies tests employed by the left and right, and this is a typical case; Reynolds points readers to Little Green Footballs, but that shouldn’t constitute an endorsement of LGF’s commenters. This kind of guilt-by-association has unfairly dinged the man behind Big Orange, and Reynolds has said before this is one reason why he doesn’t have a comment section of his own — and singled out the Lizardoids as a specific example. For what it’s worth, he doesn’t even self-identify as conservative, but in much of the blogosphere, it really doesn’t matter what you call yourself. (Many of Reynolds’ own fans even dispute his non-conservatism.) And if you do describe yourself as “center” anything, you’re more likely to get burned at both ends.
I’d also wager that even moderates are more likely to criticize fellow moderates, because their independence in part defines them, and their particular issues are also different. Centrist is not a definite category like Left or Right; it’s a None of the Above or Other. And overall, there are fewer moderates driving big traffic compared to their more ideological (or more easily-pegged) peers.
If you lined up a sample of blogs according to ideology along a left-right axis, I predict you’d find something resembling an inverse bell curve — though traffic would drop off again as one approaches either fringe. On the other hand: While the high traffic sites are found closer to the edges, if the center of this curve describes an amalgam of different philosophies, a long-tail effect would flatten the curve, maybe a little, maybe a lot. So it could be a fat upside-down bell, if that makes any sense.
All of which presumes, of course, that one could even agree on how to classify individual blogs as lefterer and righterer (these should be real words) compared to their peers. Which raises too many questions for this post, and cries out for the sort of levity provided by Fred, also in the Hotline’s comments: