The Pests part 1 & 2 Revisited

Speaker: All right, before we start, and you've heard me say this before, but I really, really mean it this time. Please don't listen to this episode at work, kids, or with anybody around. It is, it's bad. And this whole series is just way inappropriate. So if you don't have the stomach for it, it's pretty dark. You've been warned. All right, let's start the show. This man began his television stand up debut with us 25 years ago this week. I didn't know that. I didn't know that. Nobody funnier, ladies and gentlemen, Norm MacDonald. Nobody is funnier than Norm MacDonald. It's a bit of a hyperbole, but you know what? I happen to agree. Norm MacDonald is one of the greats. His deadpan humor gets me every time, but not everyone thinks Norm Macdonald is funny. Comedian Norm Macdonald has become a huge hot topic over his comments about Roseanne and Louis C. K. and the Me Too movement. We wanted him to come and clear the air, so please welcome Norm Macdonald. You know you're in trouble when you have to go on The View and apologize. Norm Macdonald. Do you regret saying that? You just keep on getting into trouble, Norm MacDonald. It's always bad when you have to apologize. For the apology? An apology. Norm said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter that he was happy that the Me Too movement had quote, slowed down a little bit. He was disappointed that cancel culture had destroyed the careers of some of his closest friends like Roseanne Barr and Louis C. K. His comments, which after the dust settled, were taken a little bit out of context by the Hollywood Reporter article, set Twitter on fire. I'm going to read you one of those angry tweets. It reads, Hot take. I never thought Norm Macdonald was funny and was pretty sure all my comedy friends who did were either nuts or screwing with me. Trust me. This is important. I'm going to read it again. Hot take. I've never thought Norm Macdonald was funny. And was pretty sure all my comedy friends who did were either nuts or screwing with me. Hm. Seems pretty milquetoast as far as the internet is concerned. But little did Patrick Tomlinson know that his tweet, written almost 5 years ago, would destroy his life. And I'm not even exaggerating. Since he drafted that tweet. Patrick and his wife Nikki have received daily death threats. They've been swatted more than 40 times. They have shotguns. They have assault rifles. They have their pistols drawn. We get voicemails and text threats all the time. Threatening to kill us, burn down our house, skin our pets. Rape me, kill my family, they've physically stalked us, they've come to our house multiple times. Saved message. You don't know who I am. Uh, you don't know who any of the people fucking with you are. You don't know who any of us are. Faggots. Die. Message saved. All of this because of a Norm Macdonald tweet? It doesn't make sense. But, it's really happening to them. You know, I just got done with the stalker case, and that took me two years to investigate. I had my fill of stalker stories, and I was ready to move on. But this case, wow. This case makes the previous stalker case look like child's play. In fact, this series is not about one stalker. It's about a gang of stalker, obsessed online trolls who have turned tormenting Patrick Tomlinson and his wife Nikki into a sport. And the worst part is there's not really much that they could legally do to protect themselves. I'm Javier Leyva, and this is Pretend. Stories about real people pretending to be someone else. I just think it's crazy that this all stems from a Norm Macdonald, like the fact that you don't find Norm Macdonald funny. That was the triggering event, but it's not really about that, and it never was. Patrick Tomlinson is a science fiction and fantasy author. But these days, if you search his name, you'll find endless online forums dedicated to destroying his reputation. Why do these internet trolls hate him so much? Which surely it can't just be because he doesn't find Norm Macdonald funny. There has to be more to the story. And in order to answer that question, you first have to understand who these people are. Starting at the beginning, you've got to know some background on this group. This group is, they call themselves the Opie and Anthony fan club or, you know, ONA forums is their website. They came from the. Old, um, shock jock radio show, Opie and Anthony, which was based out of New York. The Opie and Anthony show was a shock jock radio show hosted by Greg Opie Hughes and Anthony Cumia that aired from March, 1995 to July, 2014. Here's a clip where the host encourages a suicidal caller. Let me tell you the reality of, uh, of, uh, being a listener to this show. You decide it's not for you anymore. You go away. Someone takes your place. Leave. We didn't give a crap. We couldn't be happier. Don't, don't threaten us. Don't make it like it's a threat that you're gonna leave if we don't get back. We don't want you. Leave. Now. We don't care. We don't care. We don't care. We've been doing this for 12 years. The only reason you're on the phone is so we can beat you up a little bit. Maybe it's a real suicidal caller, maybe it's not. The point is that this was one of the cleaner clubs I could find. I've never personally listened to the Opie and Anthony show, but From what I can tell, it seems like the kind of programming made for regular dudes. And when I say regular dudes, I'm talking about the 18 to 34 year old white male demographic. Listen, I do think that we are a little too sensitive as a society. There's a trigger warning for everything these days. Some people can't take a joke. We've become so fragile. But where should we draw the line? There has to be a line, right? But these two guys, they really don't care. As much as I don't like cancel culture, the reality is that cancel culture is real, and it's businesses who draw the line. And after being fined by the FCC for airing songs about a father raping his daughter, and another tune called, quote, horny for little girls. and encouraging listeners to have sex in public places like St. Patrick's Cathedral during mass, Infinity Broadcasting decided that, hey, you know what? These guys were too much of a liability and they pulled the plug on the Opie and Anthony show. After two years of radio silence, the shock jocks returned on XM radio. The second and final straw was in 2014. The show abruptly ended after Sirius XM fired Anthony Cumia for posting Quote, racially charged and hate filled remarks on social media. He apparently called a black woman who assaulted him a savage. Opie and Anthony are off the air, but their fans, well, their fans are alive and well. These fans are the people that Patrick Tomlinson says are harassing him. But they were originally their, their fan club. When their show was on the air, they referred to their fans as pests. And it was because they would sic their fans on, on other people that they were having. Like Opie and Anthony rival Howard Stern fans. Here's a confrontation with a Stern fan. We steal a lot of shit from Howard, I don't really like him. Yeah, of course we do. We steal a lot of shit, like his radio stations. His radio stations? Yeah. Now he sits there. In this YouTube video, you can see that the Stern fan is surrounded by these pests and some of the show's producers. They take the guy down in a headlock. Nice one getting your ass handed to you. You put your hands on Ben, did you? You put your hands on Ben, you fucking faggot. These pests were notorious for disrupting live news broadcasts. Here's a clip of two pests holding an Opie and Anthony show sign behind the reporter in the middle of a live shot. But it's costing the TA a great deal, about 16 million. The reporter turned around and asked the two pests live on air. What the fuck is your problem, man? He was immediately fired. They basically weaponized their, their fan base and then used it against other people. This went on for years until finally the fan base actually turned on Anthony. In January 2018, Anthony Cumia offered 5, 000 to anyone who could shut down a Reddit message board dedicated to his own show. He claimed that the members of the forum had constantly harassed him, his friends, his family, and former guests of the radio show. After that, they, they were this loosely knit community, for lack of a better word, of weaponized people. Stalking sociopaths, except now they didn't have any, they didn't have their, their, uh, you know, heroes on the show picking targets for them anymore. So they organized on Reddit and in a subreddit called r slash Opie and Anthony, and started picking their own targets and started going after. People that they decided deserved this kind of treatment for whatever reason. Um, they did it to the comedian, Patton Oswalt. They went after him trying to create, uh, online rumors that he had killed his wife so that he could remarry the woman that he eventually did remarry. So then they started going after other people. They, they never stopped going after, uh, Anthony Cumia from the show. Um, they still, they still try to torment him today. They went after a. She was a, she was a, uh, adult, adult film star, a trans transgender woman. Her name was, uh, Sue lightning, or at least that was her performance name. And they went after her for a long time just because she was trans. Then there was another, there's another one before me. Uh, his name was Logan Lynn and he's a singer songwriter out of Portland, Oregon. And he's openly and proudly gay. And so that was enough for them to hate him. So they started going after him and did for over a year. In fact, his, his ordeal with the same group, uh, landed an article in people magazine a few years ago. And then they found me because of that. Uh, Norm Macdonald tweet. Now, again, these people are not Norm Macdonald fans. They don't give a shit about Norm Macdonald. He's not important to them. At the time, back in 2018, Norm Macdonald was in hot water because he was coming out in, um, in support of Louis C. K. and Roseanne Bauer against their careers getting derailed. Again, and Norm came out to support them because they were his friends and colleagues, you know, and I thought it was a bad move, I thought it was a boneheaded move, but, you know. Whatever. And so it wasn't norm that these people were supporting. It was, it was racism and misogyny that these people were supporting. And all of a sudden norm had a whole bunch of alt right. Fucking incel fans that came out of the woodwork, you know, the coming to defend him. And that's what these people are. You know, they, they don't, they don't care about comedy. They don't care about norm. It wasn't, it was never about that. It was just about finding their next target. And they found me in September of 2018. And the first thing that they did was they took my 30 some thousands, uh, follower Twitter account and then made a mass false reportings to get it suspended. And so I was permanently suspended from Twitter for almost a year. So it's not like you stepped into their crossfire. It's like, You just, they just happened to stumble upon your tweet, correct? And then they bought the Twitter, that Twitter vile shit that happens all the time where, you know, people just gang up on people, except this is like magnified by, uh, a headless organization of just, Angry, like an angry mob, basically. They're not angry. That's the funniest part of it. Well, it's not funny, but they're, they're not angry. They're not angry at me. They don't, they don't. I mean, some of them do hate me, but I was, I was, I was just a new target. I was just something, someone new to, to, to hurt. They care only about inflicting pain and suffering. They get off on it. That's what, that's what this group is about. It is a group of anonymous cyber stalking sociopaths. That's their whole thing is just about inflicting pain and suffering on, on random, innocent people through anonymity and doing as much damage as they can, because that's funny to them. Patrick Tomlinson doesn't help matters if you ask me, he's the type of guy who debates people on Twitter. What's the point of debating people on Twitter? I never understood that. It's basically this performative and dismissive. But that doesn't mean that he deserves the level of torture that he and his wife have been receiving. This is Nikki, Patrick's wife. It's basically this performative Cruelty, right? So in the days before the internet, you wouldn't have the ability, you know, sociopaths would not have the ability to gather in groups. They were usually, usually out ostracized and kicked out of their communities. So essentially the internet for better or for worse exists. And now we have, you know, people who can collect collectively gather to destroy other people, because the thing is, is they don't have any camaraderie. They're essentially this anti community. Like they, I mean, they eat their own. If any of them are, um, identified or whatever, they go after each other. I mean, there's no loyalty. It's not like an actual community that you would typically think as a community. They're not, they're not friends with each other. They don't, they don't form friendships. There's no trust. There's no loyalty. They don't, they don't even particularly like each other. But they do like hurting people. That's it. That's the whole, like, that's, that's the hardest part for people who haven't been exposed to this to wrap their heads around well meaning people always come into the comments and like, but why you, like, why are they doing this to you? What did you do to them? Nothing. There is no, why we don't have, like, we don't have a beef with these people. They don't have reasons for doing this other than it gets them off. That's it. How did you get banned again? I was, I was permanently suspended because these, these people took my norm tweet back to their back to their layer. And then they organized a mass false reporting attack, where You know, dozens or hundreds of them would come in and report the same tweet over and over and over again until Twitter's algorithms and Twitter's moderation algorithms would be tricked into thinking there was a problem when there wasn't one. It was, it was a, it was a totally innocuous tweet that ended up getting me suspended. Um, and I was off Twitter for almost a year. In fact, we had to go out and hire lawyers to, um, just so that a real person would actually look at my account and look at the tweet and go, Oh yeah, this doesn't actually violate Twitter's rules. Terms of service in any way, and we never should have suspended you. And so, you know, 5, 000 later, I did get my Twitter back and my, you know, my Twitter is my, like I'm an author, but you know, five years ago, Twitter was my main way of building my audience and my main way of promoting my work. Um, and also it helped me get bigger contracts out of, out of publishers because, you know, an author with. tens of thousands of followers is easier to market and easier to sell for my agent to, uh, to go and get bigger advances. So, you know, we spent money to get my Twitter back because it had an enormous value for me. So, yeah, um, you know, we managed to get my Twitter account unsuspended. Was able to keep all my followers and after 11 months, I was, I was back in business. Um, but in the meantime, they had absolutely exploded, um, going after us in a million different ways. They were, they started going after my Facebook, my Instagram, my YouTube channel. They, um, They doxed us repeatedly all over the place, got our private information, started, um, started harassing us by voicemail, email, text, which they still do a dozen or more times every single day for the last five years. They doxed most of our family members and started harassing our family members. They make like pornography of me and send it to my family. They've put me up on websites like I'm looking for sex. And I mean, some of it had been extreme, like, you know, I want to rape fantasy kind of thing. And then give our address so that people would come over and try to forcibly rape my wife. Yeah. Um, they also, you know, harass, like I said, my family, my mother is harassed, like all the time. Um, And they, one of their favorite tactics is to basically go onto somebody's website, fill out their contact form on their website, because you can put anybody's name or email address in there, put in our email address, our name, and then say something horrible, racist, transphobic, whatever. And then, you know, these people then, Come after us because they think that we're out there saying all this terrible thing, terrible thing. So, I mean, They don't understand. I mean, we get told, you know, don't feed the trolls. It's like, okay, listen, you twits. Yeah. Well, and they say like, don't, well, why, why haven't you changed your email address? It's like, cause they'll find the new one and use it. Do you want me to change my name? Like what, like, what are you talking about? Like we can't move every five minutes either. You know, People have. You know, people say, like, change your, you know, just change your phone number. We're like, these people literally found my social security number. You think they won't find my new phone number? I gave Patrick and Nikki some tips on how to disappear from the internet. First, they have to remove their names from public databases. Then, they should put their house on a trust and their car under an LLC. That way, no one could find them. I gave her all the tricks that Michael Basil, the cybersecurity expert, gave me. But Patrick and Nikki didn't seem to go for it. It seems that they are way past this point. And that's the thing is we're refusing to do any of these things that are recommended because it's already as bad as it can possibly get. If we move, they will figure it out. They, they figure shit out. They figured out my mom was in the hospital. We didn't tell anybody that. I mean, it's. They figure stuff out. It's, it's beyond just like being able to get away from it. And plus we're unwilling, I run a business. He's an author. We have every right to be public people and have people be able to reach us and all of that driving us out of. But driving us off the internet and silencing us is their goal. That's what they want. They want us to stop talking about them. They want us to stop talking, period. And if they have to kill us, they're, they're willing to do that. I mean, they have publicly, publicly and proudly stated many times that their ultimate goal is to destroy our lives and our careers and our marriage and drive me in particular to kill myself. Lots of the threats that come to me are like, we'll leave you alone if you just get divorced. We'll leave you alone if Patrick deletes his Twitter, which of course, it, it, none of those things would matter. They won't leave me alone. They won't. And I mean, I wouldn't anyway. That's, I'm not going to listen to some random stranger to tell me to dissolve my marriage because they think that I should for some reason. And that's not gonna like what kind of guarantee do you have and like you said, you know Yeah, you could run from it and disappear, but that comes at a cost right like that comes It's like admitting defeat and and running away. And like you said you you're an author Yeah, we've built lives. I've built my company. I mean i've spent 20 years building my company He's spent however long building his career. I mean What are we supposed to do? No, they don't get to do They don't take our lives from us. They don't. Do you get the sense that it's like one person, five people, twenty people, a hundred people? There are, their website, their forums that they coordinate all this harassment on has several hundred users. Um, but most of them are hangers on. Most of them are lurkers. They're just there to, they're just there to watch the car wreck and laugh. People who are actively actually committing these crimes against us is limited to, we believe, no more than a handful of people, maybe half a dozen. So the ones doing the worst things are, we think, yeah, like three to five people. We're going to discuss the possible suspects in a future episode, but for now, let's just focus on the harassment. While my, while my Twitter was suspended for those 11 months back in 2018 and 2019, their subreddit, R. O. B. and Anthony, um, turned into nothing but harassing me. And, and my family, obviously, but it's just, it, it became an, a 24 seven attack, Patrick Tomlinson, any way possible place. And so we started, uh, submitting DMCA claims. A DMCA takedown notice is a complaint. If someone suspects a website of copyright infringement, oftentimes they would take, uh, they would take covers of my books, which of course are copyrighted. And so we would, we, and we submitted hundreds and hundreds of these things to get. To get all these images taken down, it was only, it was basically the only effective way we could come. I don't know. I've been poking around these message boards, and there are tons of pictures of Patrick photoshopped and various gay pornographic images. They make fun of his weight. They call him names. It's really, it's kind of disturbing, actually. And at first, the harassment started on Reddit. Anytime someone would make one of these posts, Patrick and Nikki would report it. And eventually, the actual, the admin, the administrators of Reddit, uh, for the first time ever changed their harassment policies, specifically because of what was happening to us, and changed their harassment policies quite wide, specifically so that they could ban this group. And so, they ended up banning the, the OpenAnthony thread, er, uh, subreddit, and A couple thousand of their accounts all got, all got nuked. And when their subreddit would be taken down, a new one would just pop back up. The administrators really, they, they just had, they'd seen enough and they'd had enough. I mean, for, for many, for many years, like they were the most hated subreddits on all of the, all of the site. They were voted the worst subreddit by like two years running. And they were very proud of that. I mean, just being, being the worst type of people is something that they, they relish in. They, they love being hated. And so when they lost their subreddit and then all the subsequent ones that they used, tried to use to replace it, they lost their minds because they lost their most effective platform. I mean, they had something like 30, 000 subscribers on that subreddit, which, you know, isn't huge. So once they got kicked off of Reddit. They kind of floated around the internet. They, they created, uh, you know, a handful of the survivors started creating their own forums and that's where the current website came from after three or four different iterations. Pests have a new, very loosely moderated forum, the new Opie and Anthony forum. It's a place where you can freely use the N word without any judgment. The site has four main forums. One is labeled Literary Criticism. Innocent enough, right? A bunch of bookworms just chatting it up. Wrong. The first post I pulled up was a court document with Nicky and Patrick's address on it. One user posted, I want Nicky to get fucked especially hard. The next four threads I clicked on were all devoted to mocking Patrick and Nicky. Not exactly literary criticism. There's also a ton of content about Patrick and Nikki on Kiwi Farms, and for those of you fortunate enough not to know what the hell I'm talking about, Kiwi Farms is an online forum devoted to gang stalking and harassment. Users prey on transgender, disabled, black, heck, anyone they want to. There's also a lot of content about it on Kiwi Farms, though. There is. Yeah, there's, there's definitely overlap in the user's base between these two groups. Between these two horrible, horrible, horrible groups. Uh, and Kiwi Farms has, I mean, the last time I looked at Kiwi Farms, my, the thread about me and us had 1, 500 pages, you know, tens of thousands of comments. It's been four and a half, almost five years. Every day, no days off. I know that their goal is to destroy you both. Like the, not only individually, but destroy the couple, like your marriage. I can't believe it hasn't. Well, honestly, I think that if either of us were going through this alone, we might be dead by now, because I think that, first of all, Kiwi Farms is directly responsible for at least three or four suicides that we know of. I mean, people who go through this kill themselves. And they don't have a voice. They're not heard, which is another reason we're not showing up. In 2016, Julie Terryberry took her own life after being targeted by users on the site. Two years later, Chloe Seagal lit herself on fire at a public park. All this because of harassment on kiwi farms. When Seagal posted about her suicidal thoughts, kiwi farm users sent private messages to her, urging her to kill herself. In June 2021, an American video game developer based in Japan named David Ginder took their life after relentlessly being tormented for being non binary. One thread was more than two dozen pages long. Here's what David wrote in their suicide letter. I've been bullied, ridiculed, and humiliated my entire life. I could only just tolerate it with heavy depression when it was 4Chan, but Kiwi Farms has made the harassment orders a magnitude worse. One user wrote, Bruh, I hope he streams his suicide. Sick. Honest to god, I We share an insane amount of empathy and understanding about this. If I, if we didn't have that immediately between us, it would be difficult. I mean, it's difficult to exist as it's difficult to exist in the world. Like having this happen to you by yourself. Yeah. By yourself. And most people have to deal with this type of harassment by themselves. Next time on Pretend, it's actually going to get worse for Patrick and Nikki because these pests have moved on to a new nasty little corner of the internet, and this time they are completely unhinged. That's next time on Pretend. Okay, well, I have an update for you for those of you who fear that maybe the pests will one day hear this and what will happen if these episodes get out and they find out about it. Well, guess what? The cat is out of the bag. I posted these episodes. The first three on Patreon and Apple podcast on pretend plus and. Somehow, some way the pest found out about it. They even created fake accounts under Patrick's name for the first couple hours, the online forum where they all talk, they were trying to figure out what was in these episodes. So only the ones that subscribe could actually hear the episodes. And it only took them a couple of hours to hack Patreon, download, All three episodes, and they posted it on their forum. And boy, did they have a lot to say. Since then, I've been in touch and in contact with the forum's administrator, who remains anonymous, and some other pests who are quite vocal about Patrick Tomlinson. And they have a way different story to tell. If you want to listen to all three episodes, they are now posted on pretend plus on Apple podcasts or on Patrion. You can listen to them now. And there will most likely be a fourth episode with my conversation with the pests. All right. Well, that's it for this week. We'll talk again soon.