“If you don’t take my name off of your website I’m going to kill myself”

“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.