Maryland Judge CJ Vaughey may not live in a country governed by the US Constitution but every one of Truth Before Dishonor’s authors do.
UPDATE: I thought I was being snarktastic when I added the above sentence to my blog posts yesterday, but it turns out I was far more accurate than I had thought. I thought Maryland Judge CJ Vaughey actually lived in, you know, Maryland. It turns out I was mistaken. He lives in the Caribbean, where the US Constitution and the First Amendment is not the Law of the Land. And he declared his lack of interest in US Supreme Court rulings, which ran counter to what he did. For more information, read the Conservative Commune and Patterico’s Pontifications. And I fully intend to republish Patterico’s article here.
The below article was originally written by Aaron Walker, a Virginia attorney who blogs under the name of Aaron Worthing on 20120524:
In Which Kimberlin Ally Ron Brynaert Threatens to go to the Police Because I Offered Him a Settlement
It never ends with these guys, does it? I have been telling you all week about the legal troubles caused by Brett Kimberlin in particular including
how he attempted to frame me for a crime, but at the same time I have had Ron Brynaert nipping at my ankles. I have heard from several sources that Ron Brynaert was accusing me of essentially being an evil, evil man by extorting him. I had supposedly done this by sending an email to him offering a settlement of the lawsuit I filed against him.
Of course Ron didn’t show any of these people the supposedly damning email. Instead Ron just told them it was extortion! And isn’t that typical for this crew? They never quote your words (except in snippets, taken grossly out of context), they just give you their spin and pretend it is your words.
You see, a few weeks back I saw him
tweet that “I will gladly testify for
@AaronWorthing if Kimberlin sues him over courthouse incident since Brett lied to me about it.” So I took that as an opportunity to try to get him to settle the case. And instead of just saying it wasn’t extortionate and hoping you believe me, I will let you read what I wrote for yourself:
Now if you read over the letter, you see I am asking for two things in settlement of the suit. First, I asked for money. Second, I asked for his testimony against the other defendants.
And notably I don’t suggest that I will or won’t file criminal charges, peace orders, etc. against him based on whether he settles or not like what Brett Kimberlin did. No, the only thing I am threatening to do if he doesn’t settle my civil case is… to continue the case.
So let’s take each of those terms one at a time. Is it extortion to ask for money in exchange for dropping a suit?
No. And the first hint that it isn’t, is the fact that this is what happens
in just about every settlement. Is Ron Brynaert under the impression that it is illegal anywhere in the United States to settle a suit in exchange for money? Well, it certainly isn’t illegal in the state of New York, as demonstrated by the numerous cases related to settlement agreements. If offering to settle a suit in exchange for money or property was extortion, then they wouldn’t be as commonplace as they are. Indeed it is generally the policy of the most states to encourage such settlements. See e.g.
Rock v. Reed-Prentice, 39 NY 2d 34, 40-41 (1976) (“The general purpose of section 15-108 of the General Obligations Law is to encourage settlements by altering or eliminating certain rules of prior law which had an inhibiting effect on the settlement process.”)
Second, as for asking for his testimony, that is also common in settlements. Haven’t Ron ever watched an episode of Law and Order? Or just watched Goodfellas? How often is it that a group of people commit a crime together, and the prosecutors offers one of them a deal in exchange for testimony against the others? And that prosecutor would also generally want collaborating evidence, so that the defense attorneys for the remaining suspects cannot claim that he is just spinning a fairy tale to keep out of prison. And that situation is far more coercive than what we have here. A prosecutor can put a man in prison or even on death row; I am just asking for compensation for the torts that Ron have committed against me.
Those torts include his serial defamation as he claimed over again that I assaulted Brett Kimberlin. He now appears to be arguing that he was merely tricked by Kimberlin with his silver tongue, as though “a convicted perjurer
with a whole book dedicated to his serial dishonesty told me, so I had to believe it!” is a viable defense.
Now that is not to say that Ron won’t feel any coercive pressure to settle. He stands to be financially bankrupted by my suit in Virginia, creating an obvious inducement to settle. But the reality is that not all coercive pressure is prohibited by the laws against extortion. A starving man can be told by a restaurant, for instance, they will not feed him unless he first mops the floor. That man might feel pressure due to hunger to comply, but that is perfectly legal. Or a law school graduate might be coerced into choosing between taking a bar exam or being unable to practice as an attorney in a given jurisdiction. And as noted above, a prosecutor can tell a criminal that he must turn state’s evidence or face possible prison or even execution, and that is perfectly legal. Likewise it is perfectly legal to offer settlement on these terms; indeed it is done all the time.
Go ahead Ron. Show them my email and explain that it is some kind of extraordinary act of extortion, as opposed to a perfectly ordinary offer of settlement. The NYPD works very hard and they could use a good laugh now and then.
At the same time he is peddling the claim that I violated his sister’s privacy somehow. Really folks this is almost too stupid to believe and it really goes to why I think that Ron Brynaert actually a little nuts. (The alternative theory is he is “crazy like a fox.”) That’s just my opinion, but judge the facts for yourself.
You see it started when my friend Dustin made this statement in the midst of a long comment at one of my
posts:
Of course, Ron has smeared just about everyone he’s come into contact with… even friends, which I guess is some kind of game theory in play. So have most of his buds. They smear at will, and yet if they also are quick to threaten to sue if ‘defamed’ with something accurate, such as Ron’s criminal record (at least Ron claims he has one… for all I know that was BS too).
Ron then emailed me and said that the reference to him having a criminal record was defamatory and demanded that Dustin’s comment be deleted. But what the truth turned out to be, according to him, that he did have a criminal record in the sense that he was arrested once and it was expunged. So technically he did have a criminal record although not one most reasonable people would care about. He went on then to explain that what had happened was this. His sister and he were at a bar. His sister was abducted and then raped. While she was missing, Ron got concerned and tried to get management at this bar concerned. To hear him tell it, the management didn’t care and later the cops showed a lack of concern, and he got a little out of control. So I told him that since what Dustin said was true, I was not going to delete his email. Instead I added a little bit of context, while also respecting his sister’s privacy by not specifying who was abducted or the fact this person was raped, as follows:
I have been exchanging emails with Ron and I will share to a degree some additional context. He states that his “record” consisted of being arrested once. He was not convicted and to hear it told, it was kind of a bullsh-t situation. Basically as he tells it, a member of his family had been abducted at a club, and he attempted to get management to help him locate this family member. They refused and he called the police and while the police was dragging their heels, he yelled at them and was arrested for that. If you credit his account, even if he was a little in the wrong (a big if), I don’t think it does any discredit to his character. How calm would you be if a family member is missing? How patient would you be?
And i say that bluntly leaving out a lot of details out of respect for the primary victim of this crime. From his account it fairly sounds like a nightmare.
He further asserts later that the judge agreed to expunge his arrest from his record. So as far as the law is concerned, it didn’t actually happen.
I will say that he has submitted to me no objective evidence to support this story, so we only have his veracity to go on. For what it is worth, for all the bad feelings I have had with him, and the deliberate deception I have accused him of, I actually believe him on this one.
So that puts Ron’s story into enough context to make you think that him being arrested probably wasn’t really such a bad thing, and Dustin’s comment—which covered many subjects besides just Ron’s criminal record—remained. I figured that was a fair solution.
Instead Ron insisted a few weeks later that I had done something evil, violating his sister’s privacy. I didn’t manage to save every tweet, but I have a few from this exchange. Here is one example:
@AaronWorthing knows I caught him lying about reporting threat* since he gave ridiculous excuses so he smeared me using my sister’s rape.
So I reacted with puzzlement. Didn’t he just violate his sister’s privacy by telling the world that the relative in the story is his sister and she was raped? So for instance I said (sometimes mashing tweets together when they were strung together):
@ronbryn if you really were so concerned with her privacy why did you announce to the world she … was raped just now? you could have kept that part quiet.
And later:
@ronbryn do you even grasp what the term “privacy” means? psst it means you don’t tell the whole world!
Which brought this head scratcher of a reply:
@AaronWorthing Are you for real? It’s my right to divulge my own privacy. Not yours. You’re sick. My sister was raped, you ghoul @Patterico
Which seems like kind of strange logic. I mean, isn’t that his sister’s right to privacy, here? She was the one who was allegedly violated. So that led me and others to doubt the veracity of his entire story. If he really had a sister and she really was raped, why would he act like that?
And if you think that doesn’t make sense, well… welcome to Brynaert logic. I have clashed with him before. For instance, when he was busy trying to figure out who I was, he argued that I was probably a commenter named Timb on IMAO’s website. Let me see if I can explain this “logic.”
On twitter I use an avatar of a kitten with a sniper rifle. Like this.
I like it because of the absurdity of a cute kitten doing a cold, evil thing. I found it years ago in IMAO’s site when he was running a caption contest. The winner was Timb, with the line, “Oswald was a p___y.” This was a riff off of a line in The Usual Suspects, where a sniper says, “Oswald was a f_g.”
So one day Ron decided to do an in-depth investigation into why I chose my avatar, and when he asked where it came from, I replied, “Oswald was a p___y!” and linked to the IMAO caption contest page. Therefore, Ron reasoned, we must be the same person because both “misquoted”
The Usual Suspects the same way!
Yes, really.As I wrote back then:
And what are the chances that both Tim B and myself would use the same words? Well, pretty frakking good, given that the words in question was the phrase that won IMAO’s caption contest connected to
that very picture, a fact I was alluding to when I referenced IMAO in my tweet. In other words, Brynaert, you colossal idiot, I was quoting Tim B.’s winning entry. It ain’t secret knowledge, you twit. I suppose if I said “Houston, we have a problem” Brynaert will think I am really Tom Hanks.
Oy, my head hurts just thinking about it.
By the way,
this email between long-time internet rival “Kman” and Brynaert is fairly prescient:
Your boner to bring down Aaron makes you — and by extension, liberals — look like a-hole children. Worse than that, the fact that you’re doing it BADLY with messed-up conspiracy theories, etc., makes you an ineffectual tinfoil-hat-wearing a-hole child.
Seriously, liberals, it is time to throw these guys under the bus. Disown and denounce. And in the case of Babs Streisand, ask for your money back.
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Oh, and now it can be told: I am proud to say that Fred Thompson made me a winner. IMAO had a
contest to see who could name the best quote from Fred Thompson, but they explained that they really weren’t going to check if he really said it, thus inviting people to just make stuff up, too.
So one
winner was real, one was… I don’t know. And the third was mine and yes made up. But I have to believe he said something like this at a certain point in his life…
So let me get this straight. You want me to play essentially myself, a man with a thick Tennessee accent and real conservative values—not the moderately liberal values that passes for ‘conservative’ in New York—and you want this character to be the elected D.A. of New York City?
Fred Thompson himself ended up picking the winners and we each got a signed copy of
his book. Which was really cool.
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* The supposed lying is equally dumb. When I ran the everyone draw Mohammed blog, every now and then someone would comment and say something to the effect that they were going to kill us. I would reply, “very good. Your threats have been reported to the FBI.” He claimed that somehow because I was using a pseudonym that I couldn’t possibly be telling the truth. You know, because the FBI will not take anonymous tips. (This is me rolling my eyes.) Why he felt it mattered a damn to determine whether or not I actually reported them or just said something to scare those thugs, is beyond me.
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Follow me at Twitter @aaronworthing, mostly for snark and site updates. And you can purchase my book (or borrow it for free if you have Amazon Prime), Archangel: A Novel of Alternate, Recent History here. And you can read a little more about my novel, here.
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