“You can’t believe it,” said Martha Mitchell of the bizarre events of the Watergate years. “I can’t believe what’s happened to me.” I had to smile when I watched the David Frost interview clip on the BBC website and listened to those statements (“Martha Mitchell speaks out about Nixon, Watergate,” on the BBC website, http://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-18436516/martha-mitchell-speaks-out-about-nixon-watergate). I have made similar statements numerous times these last years as a victim of a real estate mobbing—truly, an organized crime—at the hands of speculators and a corrupt neighborhood watch in northeast Seattle.

The incredible events that unfolded as speculators moved in around my rental home in northeast Seattle and began their attempt to harass me out of it have been beyond imagination. Making sense of the what, how and why of mobbing has required a significant amount of observation, research, and thoughtfulness.

Understanding does not come out of incredulity. To comprehend, one moves through disbelief and, as Husserl said, begins to observe the things themselves. Yet disbelief is likely to be the most common response to the reports of a mobbing victim. This is why I repeat in numerous posts on On being mobbed, that mobbing done as the mobbers of northeast Seattle do, is an unbelievable crime that cannot be believed.

The construction of mobbing as an unbelievable crime of which the reports of the self-professed victim cannot be believed, is intentional and revealing of the conspiracy at the heart of this organized crime. Real estate mobbing is constructed to protect the two-bit speculators and corrupt neighborhood watches who would engage in the practice. Mobbing is not only a predatory crime that takes advantage of the victim’s isolation. The criminals heighten the victimization by seeking to deny the victim the victimhood that would trigger the prosecution of a crime. This they do by shielding themselves and their bullying crime behind the walls of neighboring houses. They eliminate the victim’s ability not only to take refuge but to get help, by cyber-bullying (also referred to as “mobbing”) and other digital crimes that the FBI ignores. They harass by tricks and technologies, using directional sound and acoustic leakage to subject their victims to waves and streams of constant radio and video-transported verbal abuse. They shield themselves and their bedfellows in the immunity that being fronted by upper-class white men confers. They discredit victim accounts with their clandestine harassing machines and their daisy-chains of remote control mobile devices and drones.

If all of this was not enough, the mobbers discredit the victims who report, by defaming them as criminal, crazy, or both. In the civil courtroom, defamation may provide a cause of action. In the criminal courtroom, however, when the mobbers attempt to prosecute the victim of mobbing out of his home, defamation can derail the chances of a fair proceeding and interfere with the due process rights that the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution bestows.

Ω

Real estate mobbing is, according to Amnesty International and the United Nations, a human rights crime. For those of us who are white, privileged, and live in the United States, a crime against human rights is an abstraction. At least for most of us, human rights crimes are crimes that happen to someone else. But the crime of real estate mobbing, an expression of racketeering that is driven by speculation and greed, operates on many levels. In real estate mobbing, the drive to the constructive eviction that is the ultimate goal and a human rights crime, is founded on nuisance complaints, complaints of civil code violations, civil actions and threats of civil actions, and critically, defamation that is intended to frighten the victim into acquiescence.

When a victim of real estate mobbing refuses to leave her home, push comes to shove and the mobbers may attempt to criminalize her tenancy. But this criminalization could not succeed were it not for a strategy that combines bias with defamation in a bid for the hearts and minds of those who live in the village, who police its streets, and who preside over its courts. It is through a strategy of slights and insults that abrade the social fabric,  and by a social death inflicted by a thousand crows, that the character of the victim is brought into question. The result is that the state that should protect the victim of a predatory crime, instead begins to scrutinize the victim for her criminal nature.

Clearing by smearing

Early on in bedtime harassment, the mobbers crowed about their take-no-prisoners style of forced eviction. When you’re harassing someone out of their home by bullying, you have to talk about something. When they slipped up and said the names of those they claimed to “be” or to “represent,” they attempted to ensure I would keep quiet by telling me they had set “defamation traps” for me, “traps” that would presumably lead to civil suits for defamation or “inference” if I didn’t “shut up.” Telling me “someone wants to build on it” (meaning the property on which I reside), they attempted to scare me out of my home with the casual statement that they intended to “ruin me a little,” and might have to ruin me “a lot.” By the time these threats and promises were made, I’d already been the victim of a protracted campaign of what they boasted was “clearing by smearing.” Over the wild days and nights of that first year of mobbing, as I struggled to financially survive the loss of a long-term contract with Microsoft, and after my cat died a heartbreaking death after a series of asthma attacks as the mobbers battered the window panes of my small home with their unremitting taunts, threats and demands, I was forced to give up my disbelief that other human beings would do this, that they would do it to me. Once I accepted the situation I found myself in, I began to see the things themselves. I came to understand “clearing by smearing” as a strategy of constructive eviction that I have described as the criminalization of tenancy.

“Clearing by smearing” ensures that if the crime winds up in the courtroom, it is the victim who is the object of scrutiny. When the “whodunnit” that is mobbing does not succeed with indirection, the best defense is misdirection. And when the deflections of those involved in this organized crime succeed, justice is turned on its head, and the punishment of the victim moves from the public square to the courtroom, continuing with the victim in the role of criminal.

The criminalization of tenancy and the erosion of due process

I’ve written about the ploy of criminalizing tenancy in numerous entries in On being mobbed;  one that I’d like those who care about the rights of lessees and lessors to read examines the connection between the use of anti-harassment orders and the Chronic Nuisance Ordinance (CNO). The nature of anti-harassment orders, as well as their availability, differs from state to state, and my discussion focuses on Washington State. But those with an interest in tenants’ rights and in the excesses of speculators would do well to consider the abuse of anti-harassment orders and CNOs, and how these laws may be paired by racketeers and in organized crime. No matter what state you’re in, the note written by New York attorney Salim Katach provides valuable insight into how CNOs potentially interfere with the due process rights of tenants. See Use of anti-harassment orders and Chronic Nuisance Ordinances (CNOs) to constructively evict.

Ω

Real estate mobbing is not only a human rights crime. Mobbing includes many other crimes along the way.  Mobbing is a drive to bully the victim into acquiescing to forced eviction, and some victims require more “encouragement” than others before they “get out.” This litany of crimes, some more petty than others, slowly wear away not only on the victim, but on her rights. In a prolonged mobbing, any chance the victim has of equal protection under the law, is slowly and painfully eviscerated.

When “clearing by smearing” and the criminalization of tenancy force a mobbing victim to defend himself in criminal court, the defamation and mudslinging that got him there may make any adequate defense impossible. Indeed, the name-calling that got him there may shape the nature of the proceeding and the course of the prosecution. In short, when a mobbing enters the courtroom, the involvement of the prosecutorial system contributes to, and must be examined for, violations of the victim’s due process rights.

Investigators are fooled by an unusual crime with an unfamiliar phenomenology

Words like “cyberstalking” and “cyberbullying” have become part of our daily discourse. But the experience of being cyberstalked and bullied over speaker is unbelievable, at least, until it happens to you. The phenomenology, the very experience of being victimized in this way, challenges our perceptions of what is real.

Being cyberstalked is an experience shared by few. Fewer still have become aware of, much less familiarized to, the experience of being stalked and harassed over the smartphones of others, over computers at the public library, over the speakers of the ATMs at Chase Bank, or over speaker-enabled access points at Whole Foods. Likewise, the experience of directional sound as used by mobbers to avoid the creation of witnesses as they insult, taunt and threaten their victims, is not something you run across every day. Nor is the likely use of radio, software-defined radio, or TV transmitter to add tracks of verbal abuse to your favorite NPR shows.

In the same way that these technologies of entertainment and communication—these technologies of sound—are used to provide the victim of mobbing with an unfamiliar experience that is intended to frighten him, to deny him his victimhood, and even to make him question his own sanity, the victim’s experience can have a profound effect on police and in the courtroom. When it comes to the police and the courtroom arena, the truthful statements of the mobbing victim do not only discredit him—they may be taken as evidence that he has lost his mind.

Mobbers con the police

If real estate mobbers fail to achieve a “white-glove eviction” and instead escalate their “clearing by smearing” to the point where police are involved, the prosecution of the mobbing victim may rest on statements the mobbers make to police in the form of police reports. In a case where a victim of real estate mobbing who is being bullied from his home attempts to find protection in getting an anti-harassment order against the mobbers and fails, he may find that they rapidly secure an order against him and then quickly move to show that he has violated the order. This is most likely to happen when the mobbers begin to fear that the victim who resists will expose them. In such a case, the prosecution of the victim will almost certainly rely on the statements of the criminal real estate speculators who have been attempting to bully him from his home.

Police reports, and the statements of “witnesses” in those police reports, may provide the basis of a criminal prosecution. Police reports are made available by public disclosure request where public disclosure is provided. In criminal prosecution, the content of police reports and “evidence” must be disclosed to the defense. But what happens when the police reports incorporate false statements and misrepresentations of “witnesses” whose goal is to hide their own criminal wrongdoing?

The statements of those deemed to be witnesses in police reports may be admissible in court and would, I imagine, be considered testimony. It appears that a prosecution that is based out of false statements to the police, and if you extend it to what due process principles refer to as “misrepresentations,” is one that should arguably be withdrawn.

In the case of real estate mobbing as performed by the real estate mobbers of northeast Seattle, the mobbing harassment involves not only lies and defamation about the crimes or criminal nature of renters—saying that renters are cocaine dealers or pornographers, for example—but it involves attempts to convince authorities that the victims are mentally unstable and must therefore be dangerous. The mobbers, moreover, enlist technology to enable them to endlessly follow, harass, and provoke their victims, using directional sound and cell phone “mobbing” to effect hoaxes. If the mobbers play their victim well, perhaps he’ll abandon ship and they can use the circumstances to pressure the owners to sell. When victims fail to believe them and report that they can hear the neighbors’ verbal abuse whenever they turn on their televisions, radio or smart phones, the mobbers counter by telling the police and court that the victim is “hearing voices.”

Mobbing enters the courtroom

Suppose that a mobbing enters the court system based on the lies and misrepresentations of the mobbers. This can easily happen when a mobbing victim refuses to capitulate and the mobbers move to protect themselves and the nasty neighborhood watches and low-end developers who work with them. In this scenario, the strategy of bullying continues in the courtroom, with the joint statements of the mobbers about how they fear for themselves and their families since they moved next door to the mobbing victim, about the “distress” they experience living next door to the mobbing victim, and about how the mobbing victim is harassing them. Here, they continue to make good on threats issued early on to a victim who refused to budge, but the defamation moves beyond malicious gossip in the neighborhood and false reports to the police. The statements are coordinated and rehearsed, the claims carefully incorporate the wording of the statute, and the misrepresentations and lies of the mobbers enter the courtroom.

When the mobbing enters the courtroom, the stakes are raised for the mobbing victim. If the mobbing victim is not silenced by the civil court action, the mobbers may state, and even argue in their briefs, that the only plausible reason for his claims that they are harassing him out of his home using bizarre methods like verbal abuse transported by ventilation or transmitted by software-defined radio, is that he must be delusional. It seems to work for Kellyanne Conway, after all. Besides, even if documents reveal a longstanding bullying situation of the respondent and victim, a layperson without an attorney may not be able to negotiate the the rules gating the admission of evidence into the courtroom.

It’s no great feat to run rings around a victim who cannot afford an attorney, and given a proceeding in which only one side has one, there’s a good chance the court will grant their motion. The mobbers probably assume that securing an anti-harassment order will finally scare the victim off and the moving truck will show up within the week. If the victim does not move after the order is secured, the mobbers can put the screws to the victim, calling the police again and again and insisting that the victim is violating the order. After all, if the mobbers procured an anti-harassment order, the victim must be harassing them. Dutifully, the police begin to document the mobbers’ allegations of violations and bring them to the attention of the prosecutor. Soon enough, the victim receives a summons to appear in court on criminal charges for violating a civil order of anti-harassment.

What if the victim refuses to capitulate? The mobbers may be dismayed to find that the victim intends to stay and fight the charges. Now they’re stuck with their story, lies and all. What happens when a real estate mobbing fueled by defamation of the victim’s character and defended by defamation of the victim’s mental competence results in criminal charges against the victim?

When mobbers con the prosecutor

The prosecution of a mobbing victim is a gross misrepresentation of the nature of the human rights crime that has occurred. And it is a misrepresentation that comes out of the lies the mobbers make as they try to effect their crime. If it weren’t already more than Kafkaesque when the victim of an attempt at forced eviction is hauled into court as a defendant in a criminal case, the punishment of the victim continues by painting him in a court of law as mentally incompetent to ensure that his reports of the racketeering crime with all of its felony-level crimes, are ignored.

This means that the prosecution itself may be predicated on misrepresentations. For example, consider a case in which the police believe and incorporate into their reports the mobbers claims that the defendant is paranoid schizophrenic or delusional. The prosecutor may act on the mobber’s misrepresentations and outright lies by extending an offer to the mobbing victim—now the defendant—to defer prosecution if the mobbing victim submits to a mental exam. No doubt that such acquiescence on the part of the mobbing victim would have long-lasting damage on his life. As for any “restitution” that might be expected from the mobbing victim who has now been cast in the role of defendant, it’s likely he’ll be expected to move. If he does not, his “crime” may lead to his eviction, especially if a Chronic Nuisance Ordinance (CNO) is in play.

And where real estate mobbing is effected through a neighborhood bullying situation, there is the additional factor of statements made to the police that misrepresent the situation. For example, in the case where mobbers neglect to mention that a years-long drive to harass the mobbing victim, who has by his resistance become the defendant in a court proceeding, out of his home. This is easily the result of a prosecutorial system that unquestioningly accepts the content of police reports, even when the City has documents in its possession that contradict police findings.

The active relationship between the prosecutor and the presumed victim in a criminal case may also contribute to the entry into the mobbing of the prosecutorial system on the part of the mobbers and against the restoration of justice. For example, in the Seattle of City, the Criminal Division “helps people who are crime victims or witnesses through the criminal justice process” (“Crime Victim Assistance,” https://www.seattle.gov/cityattorney/crime-victim-assistance). The Seattle City Attorney offers an array of services to victims, including paralegals. In Seattle, someone recognized as a victim of crime may also write a “Victim Impact Statement,” a document that allows “the victim in a crime to tell the judge, in their own words, what the crime has meant for them and what they would like to see happen.” Victims may also “write the judge a letter outlining how the crime has impacted your life or business” (“Victim Impact Statements,” https://www.seattle.gov/cityattorney/crime-victim-assistance/victim-impact-statements). Naturally, when real estate mobbers are recognized as victims, they may want to see the persons who report their criminal harassment defamed as delusional, threatened with mental exams, and diagnosed as delusional. Even better if they can claim great losses in the valuation of their investment houses and real estate sales and blame them on the victims of mobbing. Victims are advised that defendants who plead guilty or are found to be guilty can be ordered by the court to cough up restitution to their victims (“Damage Recovery and Restitution”, https://www.seattle.gov/cityattorney/crime-victim-assistance/damage-recovery-and-restitution). I’m no attorney, but wonder if this means that the unfortunate mobbing victim who pleads guilty as part of a bargain for deferred prosecution not only accepts the lifelong blemish of being a criminal instead of a victim but might then actually be fined for depreciating the value of the mobber’s investment property.

In another case that affects the due process rights of the defendant, the city on whose behalf the prosecutor labors may hold records that demonstrate a history of bullying or harassment of the mobbing victim who is the defendant in the proceeding. Those records may show collusion against the defendant by a corrupt neighborhood watch, real estate speculators, and the mobber who claims to be a victim. Signs of such collusion could be in nuisance complaints lodged with the city against the mobbing victim by multiple of those involved in a bullying situation or by those who can be demonstrated to be allied with the mobber who claims to be a victim. In my own case, for example, a defamatory letter from a developer makes clear not only his own alliance with the neighborhood watch and the owner of a neighboring house but makes clear that the neighbor’s attorney has also represented the nasty  neighborhood watch lady whose “chronic” complaints to Parking Enforcement have been well documented.

When the precursor to prosecuting the victim of a mobbing is a bullying situation founded on false representations, and moreover, when the victim of the bullying attempts again and again to report and even appeals to a city to rein in a neighborhood watch and its speculator friends, records that attest to the true nature of the situation are within the holdings of the city and are accessible to the prosecutor. Shouldn’t the prosecutor have a duty to consult the records at his disposal before basing a prosecution on misrepresentations? And does the infringement of the due process rights of the mobbing victim begin even when the matter enters the courtroom? Especially if the prosecutor, in his reliance upon the false statements and misrepresentations of the mobbers, requests a mental exam of the mobbing victim for nothing more than truth-telling.

“The corrupting impact of false testimony on the justice system is profound and corrosive,” writes Anne Bowen Poulin in her Penn State Law Review article on the effect of untruthful testimony on courtroom outcomes. In “Convictions Based on Lies” (Penn State Law Review, Vol 116:2, p. 331), Poulin reflects on the lack of protection afforded defendants from false testimony. “The Supreme Court has long-since held that the due process clause protects against convictions based on testimony that the prosecutor knew or should have known was false.” (p.334)

Poulin argues that false testimony cases “always present a violation of a legal duty and the corruption of the trial process.” (p.335) “A defendant who demonstrates the improper use of false testimony is entitled to relief if there is any reasonable likelihood that the false testimony affected the outcome.”

The article cites the influence of the cornerstone case of Brady v. Maryland on the law and principles of due process protection. Specifically, Poulin is concerned with the obligation of the prosecutor to disclose exculpatory evidence to the defense. However, protection from false testimony is not limited to the disclosure of exculpatory evidence. These protections extend to testimony and statements that are less than truthful or simply misleading. “When false testimony is given at trial the truth finding process is fundamentally corrupted.” (p.334) The 1935 false testimony case of Mooney v. Holohan provided the underlying case law for the further articulation of due process principles that emerged with Brady. In Mooney, the court condemned the use of perjured testimony by “prosecuting authorities” without defining the due process requirements of the prosecution (p.336).

Mobbing, in which the very premise of prosecuting a victim makes it a false prosecution, would seem to present an abuse of due process. When this murder of crows occurs in the workplace, the malicious gossip and backstabbing come to involve the office hierarchy that may ultimately demote or fire the victim. When it happens at home, the defamation and accusations of the mobbers bend the ear of authorities and agencies that can institute penalties and deem homes “nuisances.” When police bias against renters or for the white male professionals who front the mob intervenes, neighborhood defamation may ultimately lead to incarceration.

When the public defender is conned by a tainted case

A mobbing victim without funds to hire a private attorney could face the misfortune of being assigned a novice public defender. Public defenders, notoriously overworked, have little time to speak to their clients; their “defense” may be based on little more than a quick read of the charging papers while the defendant sits faithfully before them under the misguided impression that his interests are being served. In an extreme case, it’s possible that upon reading in the charging papers of the mobbing victim’s strange reports of voices on the radio or of the prosecutor’s offer to suspend prosecution pending a mental exam, the public defender might conclude that the defendant has a mental problem. In such a case, indeed, one documented in Seattle Municipal Court, the inexperienced public defender who is duped by the charging papers may seek to protect the defendant from prosecution by requesting a competency hearing. With an advocate like that, the mobbing victim may quickly wind up the subject of a competency hearing, and at this point in the evolution of criminal law on digital crime, at the mercy of an inexperienced therapist who knows one thing: When someone “hears voices” that others don’t, they have a mental problem. Even if the defendant manages to extricate himself from a chain of events that could lead to his being legally deemed to be non compos mentis, the net result of this kind of “help” from a public defender is to discredit his own client and gut the chances of the victim’s truthful reports being heard. After all, the motion of the public defender to subject his unfortunate client to a mental exam is a public court record.

Even if the error of the defense attorney and the court is corrected, the very fact of its occurrence may be damning to the victim. Even if the victim’s case is moved back in the regular pre-trial courtroom without the judge forcing a mental exam upon him, the entire proceeding is tainted.

Decrying the claimed victims as paranoid schizophrenic is highly prejudicial. Cases in which accusations of insanity are used to discredit purported victim reports or defendants should likely be thrown out. Accusations of insanity by lay persons or parties having an interest in prosecution must be doubted on their face.

Does admission of this pretrial and pre-charging statements into a court of law by the prosecutorial system, even in the pre-trial phase, constitute violation of the defendant’s due process rights? Once cast in the light of being even a misdemeanor criminal, or cast in the light of being mentally incompetent by way of reporting an unbelievable crime, how is the victim of real estate mobbing to redeem himself? How can the victim of real estate mobbing who is at risk of being forced to submit to a mental exam have her testimony heard? And how likely is it that such a victim could submit to the exam and wind up falsely “diagnosed” as being delusional? Once so “diagnosed” in public records, the life of the mobbing victim will probably be irrevocably ruined. Certainly, such a diagnosis would affect the due process rights of the mobbing victim or, as the mobbing victim is recast in the light of the mentally ill, the rights she is accorded would change. To put it bluntly, what kind of due process violation of rights is it when a defendant is mistakenly “diagnosed” as mentally ill in a forced mental exam that is the result of lies and misrepresentations that are allowed in the courtroom by the prosecutorial system?

It might be that a mobbing victim who has no history of psychosis can defend himself against the mobbers statements to the police and in the courtroom that he must be “hearing voices,” that he must have become “paranoid schizophrenic”. As I have outlined in other posts on On being mobbed, an experienced therapist, especially one who is familiar with criminals, should be able to offer an opinion that the victim is not schizophrenic. But why else would the victim say that the voices of upstanding citizens like themselves are hurling abuse at him from radios and TVs, from smartphones and speakers? Because the fundamental purpose of the psychiatric professional is diagnosis, it may be that the clinician who is at a loss to find gross pathology offers the conclusion that through no fault of his own, the victim may be suffering from a delusion. I suspect that a forensic psychiatrist, especially one who is accustomed to working with victims like, say, Mark Levy of Forensic Psychiatric Associates Medical Corporation in San Francisco, might be able to conclude that the victim may be the victim of the crime he claims.  [Note 03/23/22: It may be that any forensic psychiatrist who uses multiple-choice tests as a diagnostic tool would misdiagnose the victim of mobbing who honestly admits to hearing “voices” (whose source is unknown to her).  Unfortunately, this appears to be standard in the field.] Surely there must be police or FBI investigators, or forensic interviewers or psychiatrists, who have interviewed the victims of hoaxes and scams. Criminals who claim that their victims are crazy are probably fairly common.

When mobbers tell the police that the victim must be “hearing voices,” it discredits him. When the statements of mobbers enter the courtroom, however, and when those statements are made to ensure that if there is any prosecution, it falls upon the victim, it has a greater impact.

When victims are treated as delusional

The words of the mentally ill are not credible. We believe this to be a fact. A defendant who is adjudged to be incompetent cannot be prosecuted. The criterion for incompetence is the defendant’s ability to understand the proceeding and to aide in his own defense. The claims of a competent defendant’s insanity require a failure to understand that the criminal act is wrong.

The mobbers have constructed a scam that is modeled on persecutory delusions and their relationship to schizophrenia, delusional disorder, and querulous paranoia. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delusion)

The concept of a defense based on insanity evolved from the moral imperative to avoid punishing those who, literally, know not what they do. The first documented use of a defense of insanity dates back to Hammurabi’s code in 1772 BC or thereabouts. In the Roman Empire, those lacking “mastery of mind” were non-compos mentis (Early Implications of the Insanity Defense, http://historyforensicpsych.umwblogs.org/the-insanity-defense-outline-by-andrew-garofolo/early-implications-of-the-insanity-defense/). Arguments against and the qualification of the insanity defense quickly followed its promulgation.

The 1800 case of James Hadfield after his attempted assassination of King George III was a landmark. Hadfield held the unusual belief that Jesus Christ would return if Hadfield succeeded murdered King George and was punished by death for the capital offense. Hadfield’s attorney was able to prevail based on the argument that Hadfield’s belief was an obvious delusion. As quoted in Trials of Criminal Lunatics: An Introduction (https://voicesfrombroadmoor.wordpress.com/2014/03/09/trials-of-criminal-lunatics-an-introduction/), the historian Joel Eigen wrote, “Delusion suggested a state of partial derangement—”total” to be sure when the subject of the delusory belief was touched upon—but absent when any other subject was invoked.” This finding of “partial” insanity caused some consternation and led to the Criminal Lunatics Act of 1800, which gave judges the power to detain those acquitted based on insanity, until “His Majesty’s pleasure be known.” With Hadfield came the idea that a delusion was just as good in the courtroom as insanity, at least, it was as good as “partial insanity.”

What to do when mobbers mob the legal system

Cases of mobbing should be examined for the contributions of the police and the legal system to the violations of due process rights. Once the police and the courts begin to act on the behalf of organized crime and accept the story of the crooks  as a true narrative, they are instrumental in the violation of due process rights.

Serious consideration and a proper investigation should be made into neighborhood brouhahas, especially those involving developers and neighborhood watches, when the mobbers begin to claim that the victim has victimized them and say that the victim must be crazy. The weight of the prosecutors office must not be used to smear victims as crazy, to create public records that demand them to undergo mental exams that will not only ensure that no one heeds the truth they tell but could end their careers and finally effect the ruination of their lives. Defense attorneys should not accept the words of the so-called victims in police records and become complicit in moving an unjust matter into mental health court.

Victims of mobbing should litigate the harm done them when the city joins into a mobbing by accepting the false counterclaims of mobbers. The ACLU and victims’ rights organizations should look into how false accusations of mental illness can affect the dynamics and the course of criminal cases, as well as how such accusations affect court cases in general. When should a municipality act on such innuendo, and when is the acceptance of defamation as truth a sign of inexperienced and naive defenders and prosecutors. It’s bad enough to be victimized by an organized crime without having municipal and legal authorities joining the organization.

Maybe this is one of those cases where all it takes is one, or maybe just a few of us, to resist the use of technology to extort and coerce, to resist an apparent trend for unethical businesses to utilize what the mobbers bragged was a “shadow service” to effect acquisitions or force deals. Using hacking as a method of surveillance to “get something on someone,” and using technology to harass victims into capitulation, seems to be some new kind of McCarthyism. Perhaps it is a technology of fascism in the hands of amoral businesses and hate groups. Maybe all it takes, is for us to say no to digital blackmail and bullying, to say it loud and often, until the justice system catches up, until laws are codified with an understanding of what it takes to prosecute digital crime, until the FAA establishes a reasonable level of oversight over the burgeoning commercial and private use of drones as they begin to be used in crime, until hardware and software designers build adequate security into their products, and until the police learn enough about digital crime to stop being duped by sneaky crooks who use the law and its loopholes, to effect their bad ends.

The City has detectives who should have properly investigated this matter, as well as forensic investigators who should have understood how it is technically done. Come on City of Seattle and Seattle Police, I shouldn’t have to be spending my earnings and years of my life to defend myself from scumbag speculators and to expose their scam. No victim should.