[Note 08/30/21: Be sure to read part 2 of this blog entry; it’s got the most useful material in it insofar as the crime of mobbing goes. See Mobbing and the Martha Mitchell effect: When defamation in the neighborhood violates due process in the courtroom (part 2).]
In 1974, Martha Mitchell, estranged wife of President Nixon’s attorney general John Mitchell, sat with David Frost to talk about Watergate on the BBC.
“The whole thing is incredible,” Mitchell exclaimed. “It’s like reading a James Bond novel. You can’t believe it. I can’t believe what’s happened to me.” (“Martha Mitchell speaks out about Nixon, Watergate,” in BBC News, http://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-18436516/martha-mitchell-speaks-out-about-nixon-watergate)
Her first call to UPI reporter Helen Thomas came within weeks of the Watergate break-in, Mitchell claiming that she’d given her husband John Mitchell an ultimatum to leave the chairmanship of Nixon’s reelection campaign before she left him. The implications of her response when asked for her thoughts on the Watergate break-in were ignored. Said Mitchell, “I’m sick and tired of the whole operation.” (“Martha Mitchell: The Day the Laughing Stopped,” by Vivian Cadden for McCall’s, July 1973, http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/White%20Materials/Watergate/Watergate%20Items%2004357%20to%2004655/Watergate%2004358.pdf). A week later, John Mitchell resigned his position on the Committee for the Re-Election of the President (CREEP).
Mitchell was ridiculed for her determined calls to the Washington press, her accusations of corruption in the Nixon Administration, and her charges that she was a “political prisoner” held captive in a hotel and drugged.
Questions about Martha Beall Mitchell’s sanity were encouraged by the Nixon administration, who consistently briefed against her and probably had her medicated against her will. But ultimately her claims were proven correct when the Watergate scandal broke. (Vaughan Bell, in The Guardian.com, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/aug/04/truly-madly-deeply-delusional)
Nixon later told David Frost, “If it hadn’t been for Martha, there’d have been no Watergate” (“I Want to Be With the Circus, Politico Magazine,” http://www.politico.com/magazine/gallery/2015/04/i-want-to-be-with-the-circus/002185-031140.html#.Wb62aYprxTY). Upon her death in 1977, The New York Times observed, “We didn’t listen to Martha Mitchell and we paid for it.”
Years after Nixon’s resignation, psychologist Brendan A. Maher coined the term “the Martha Mitchell effect” to describe a “delusion” that turns out to be true (Martha Mitchell effect, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Mitchell_effect#cite_note-Maher1988-3). See, also, “Anomalous Experience and Delusional Thinking: The Logic of Explanations,” in Delusional Beliefs, eds: T. Oltmanns and B. Maher, New York: Wiley Interscience. As quoted in the Wikipedia article, “Sometimes, improbable reports are erroneously assumed to be symptoms of mental illness”, due to a “failure or inability to verify whether the events have actually taken place, no matter how improbable intuitively they might appear to the busy clinician.” Naturally, and appealing to my sometimes dark humor, is the example of “pursuit by organized criminals” which does in fact describe the condition of being real estate mobbed.
According to the Guardian article, “claims against authorities are often dismissed by suggesting that the person has mental health problems.” In addition to the case of Martha Mitchell and Watergate, the article cites the German case of money laundering that was disregarded when the whistle blower was diagnosed with mental illness, and the case of NHS whistle blower Kay Sheldon, whose reports were met with cries for a psychiatric assessment (“Why I became a whistleblower at the Care Quality Commission, by Kay Sheldon, in The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2012/jan/24/kay-sheldon-whistleblower-care-quality-commission). According to Sheldon:
I have had to risk my reputation, income and health. My endeavors to provide robust scrutiny and challenge led to my professionalism being questioned. Doubt was cast on my mental health and my performance, whereas previously I had received overwhelmingly positive feedback. Many whistleblowers say they have been vilified and this inhibits others coming forward. (Ibid)
The purpose of the vilification of Martha Mitchell and of Kay Sheldon was to discredit their reports, reports that would lead to the prosecution of others for criminal wrongdoing. In both these cases, defamatory statements and innuendo that the women were mentally ill was used to defend a crime. When real estate mobbing enters the courtroom, the mobbers’ claims that the reporting victim is “delusional” do not only defend a crime, they may be used to prosecute one.
When I attempted in court a few years back to expose what I had come to understand as real estate mobbing, the attorney chum of the south house mobber responded with a poorly written brief that attempted to discredit me in much the same way. Citing the rather laughably named “psychcentral” website, the attorney of the south house mobber, who also appeared to represent the nasty neighborhood watch lady across the street, included a popular definition of “delusion” or “paranoia” to support a theory apparently intended to discredit me. I found it surprising that this sort of smear tactic was tolerated from attorneys who are not qualified to psychologically assess their clients’ opponents, and by how easily the Seattle North Precinct Police were taken in by similar “clearing by smearing” tactics, quickly acting on the innuendo of white front men and neighborhood watch captains who were not only unqualified to render psychiatric assessments but had an obvious conflict of interest.
According to Bell, “the relationship between madness and truth is a complex one” (https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/aug/04/truly-madly-deeply-delusional). Hence the 2013 DSM-5 redefinition of that “basic characteristic of madness” that is delusion. Instead of requiring psychiatrists to assess a delusion as a “false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary” the new definition focuses on “fixed beliefs that are unswayed by clear or reasonable contradictory evidence, which are held with great conviction and are likely to share the common themes of psychosis: paranoia, grandiosity, bodily changes and so on.”
Most importantly, [T]he belief being false is no longer central and this step forward makes it less likely that uncomfortable claims can be dismissed as signs of madness (emphasis mine).
In the second part of this blog entry, we’ll look at how being discredited as mentally ill, even by lay persons, can affect the due process rights of those victims of real estate mobbing who are unfortunate enough to be prosecuted, in effect, for refusing to leave their homes. Read Mobbing and the Martha Mitchell Effect (part 2).
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