It occurred to me today that in 15 years of fairly active online presence, most of it writing about crime and legal matters on About.com and Crimeweek, I’d never received a significant amount of hate mail until this week. I’m not talking about the usual Usenet namecalling, but more than a dozen people taking the time to look up my e-mail address so they can personally berate insult me. Three different people told me I was a f****** a******, which was a bizarre piece of synchronicity.
Many people over the years have e-mailed me telling me my articles revealed my right-wing or left-wing bias. Sometimes referring to the same article.
There were times I’d expected hate mail: When I interviewed a white supremacist leader, though, I don’t recall receiving a single negative comment. I got a letter of thanks from the Anti Defamation League. Also from a white supremacist group, which was kind of creepy.
I wrote a lot about the Mumia abu-Jamal case (black activist convicted in the murder of a white Philadelphia police officer), and while a lot of people commented that I seemed to be the only person writing about it in a balanced way, some on both sides criticized my “bias” for supporting the other side. I got an angry e-mail from the widow of the police officer, which did disturb me.
I’m not sure I can explain, in 2009, the online community of people following the JonBenet Ramsey case. They were divided into “the parents did it” and “the parents didn’t do it” groups, and I thought of them as opposing groups of cultists. There were at least two actual death threats between the enemy camps, one incident of offline harassment, and (though I couldn’t confirm this personally) one arrest.
I have to confess these people did scare me, to the extent that I made sure my employer, About.com, did not have my home address on file. Still, I managed to negotiate this minefield pretty well, with both sides coming to trust me to the extent that the chat rooms I set up were the only places where groups from both sides would come and interact. I thought of it as neutral territory where both the Jets and the Sharks would come to dance.
(I eventually became so involved with this story — all the time really, really hating it — that a writer for a major magazine called me up to ask me some questions; when the cover story came out, I discovered she’d taken everything I told her, most of it word-for-word, and used it as the basis of “her” article, casually mentioning my name only once)
The point of all this? In fifteen years, through white supremacists, racially charged murder cases, being knee-deep in JonBenet cultists… I never had three separate people seek out my address to call me a f****** a****** until I changed the CIDU Page’s RSS feed. I can’t speak for anybody else, but I find this very funny.
