A Bully and a Troll

Let’s be clear, people: When it comes to the scourge of unpunished college sexual assault, the real victim here is Charles C. Johnson.
If you’ve never heard of him, it’s not for want of his own efforts. The 26-year-old blogger has done the Internet equivalent of running naked through the streets, posting irresponsible and inaccurate tweets to bully and intimidate others. Most recently, Johnson (whose dubious career includes contributing to the debunked Dally Caller story alleging Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey paid for sex in the Dominican Republic) provided what he said was the real name of “Jackie,” the woman who recounted her rape in an inadequately reported – but not entirely discredited – piece in Rolling Stone magazine.
Now, Johnson is rattled. He responded with worry, the Washington Post reports, when he realized his home town of Fresno, California, was still up on his Twitter profile. Johnson told the Post, “People are threatening to kill me. … People want to do me harm," adding, "They will try to take down my site and are threatening my family members.”
That must be awful for him. Yet he didn’t seem to have any compunctions about making threats himself, warning the alleged rape victim in a tweet, “I'm giving Jackie until later tonight to tell the truth and then I'm going to start revealing everything about her past.”

That tweet is so loaded, so offensive on so many levels, it can’t be summed up in 140 characters. Identifying a rape victim – especially when he can’t prove he’s got the right ID – is appalling and contributes heavily to the reluctance on the part of sexual assault victims to come forward and demand prosecution of their attackers. And what “past”? What would it matter, anyway? No one’s “past” makes it OK for them to be sexually assaulted.
Rolling Stone has rightly taken heat for failing to contact the alleged attackers in the rape story, but that hardly means Jackie was not assaulted at the University of Virginia. In fact, witness testimony indicates there was some kind of sexual assault, although not as it was described in the piece. But is Johnson really the best person to throw stones here? Here’s a tweet he issued on Aug. 18, regarding the killing of Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri: “News tip from law enforcement source: #MichaelBrown Brown was charged with 2nd degree murder as a juvenile. Confirming now... #Ferguson.”
Oops. That turned out not to be true. But why let facts interfere with retweet bait?

Oh, and another way to get attention is to say something so objectively vile and cruel that you’re bound to get a reaction, which is what the trolls of the Internet do. Johnson tried that with a series of insulting remarks about James Foley, a real journalist who was beheaded after being held captive in Syria. Tweeted Johnson, “Kind of hard to like James Foley when he blames U.S. government for his killing. Just saying.”
This is not journalism; it’s bullying, and in the most cowardly way. It kind of makes you miss the days when bullies had to show some kind of courage themselves, cornering you by your locker and threatening to pour liquid soap all over your belongings inside it. (The victims tended to win later on, getting advanced academic degrees while their former tormentors were relegated to out-shouting other parents at hockey games.) Remarkably, Johnson feels Jackie has no right to anonymity after she was attacked – and yet he now feels targeted, according to the Post, for attempting to unmask her. Did he think he could retain some sort of protection online where Jackie could not?
Nor is this about some kind of mainstream media backlash against a conservative blogger. (There’s really no point in promoting his sketchy website here.) He’s not a conservative columnist, and it insults the work of writers such as George Will, Charles Krauthammer and the very impressive Michael Gerson to suggest he is even in the same business. Johnson, a former colleague told the Post, wants “scalps” – not stories and certainly not truth. It’s intimidation of the most pathetic variety. And now, Johnson is finding out what it’s like to be on the receiving end of Twitter attacks. Kind of hard to like Charles C. Johnson when he blames others for his own irresponsible behavior. Just saying.