Death Threat
The federal agent told me that threats are most often made against those “who have the appearance of being happy or successful.”
Saturday, June 14, 2025
Earlier today I received a death threat on my Facebook page for FOLLIES OF GOD.
To be clear, I did not see it, but Facebook did, promptly deleting the threat (along with other comments he had made to various people on the page) and blocking the offender. I was then contacted by federal authorities. I was told the true identity of the man (I did not recognize the name), and was told he did not live near me, but that I should be “cautious.”
Not knowing how I had been incautious, I asked the agent what he suggested. He was a deliberate and kind man, and he said the following: “You write about gay issues and women. You suggest that people be kind and to not judge. You defend people you feel have been treated badly.”
That, I interrupted, makes me “incautious”?
“It makes you a target,” he told me.
*****
This is my fourth credible death threat. I have had violence threatened. I have been called names. I have been slandered. A woman managed to get in my apartment building, going door to door to find me until the police were called. I have had a bowel movement mailed to me. With a return address. That arrest was easy, and it was traced to an employee of a Catholic church, who thought I was a piece of shit because I shared that Planned Parenthood had helped me with healthcare concerns when I did not have insurance.
Those were not death threats. When the FBI and local authorities got involved, it was because they recognized a direct and precise threat to me, along with proximity, and a revelation that the person making the threat knew where I lived. My home address was provided to many people via some political operatives who still believe that Hillary Clinton paid me to say she had been helpful to me when she was my Senator.
At one point, I received so much hate mail that my home address was altered on sites that freely share such information (Radaris, Spokeo) so that mail went directly to my local police precinct. No one needing to reach me for any valid purpose would be on those sites, they judged, and they were correct: Pounds of hate mail poured into the precinct, which then shared it with the proper persons if a credible threat was present. (Most of the hate mail shared postmarks, and were from a group of people who got together to create vicious letters and postcards. Some of these same people were the primary sources for a recent article on me. A small, shallow, poisonous pool.)
*****
I was told that threats of violence and violent acts are on the rise, and the fertile bed from which they grow is social media. It is very easy to dehumanize people who are not “real” to you—just some photos or some pixels or some beliefs you find repellent. We are in such isolation, with our phones in our faces, and our prejudices packed tightly within us, that every disagreement can become a diatribe. Or slander. Or a death threat.
The concept of ignoring or scrolling past something you find appalling is quaint, it appears. Stands must be taken.
Everyone wants to get in the picture, the story, the game. Toxic barnacles searching daily for a boat to stick to, abrade, destroy. A death threat is not protected speech. Neither is slander. Both are thriving, and one of the first things said when perpetrators are approached by authorities is that this is their “right.” No one, they claim, will tell them what to think or what to do.
I truly don’t know if we were always like this. Has social media introduced this long-present trait of humanity into our lives and faces? Has the anger of our political climate and the isolation of the COVID pandemic shoved us deeper into our silos and driven us crazy? Do we need enemies so badly?
Whenever I have been angry enough to make unwise statements (and I have), I realize that my fear motivated my feelings about someone. It is easy in times of emotional duress to feel that someone or something took something from you, and you will eventually find someone online who you believe did the taking. Someone who is not sufficiently sympathetic to your plight.
The federal agent told me that threats are most often made against those “who have the appearance of being happy or successful.”
It makes you a target.
I don’t know what to say or to write. Be careful. Be kind. I love you.