Friday was a good day for the morale of Kimberlin victims

Current events

On Friday, August 1, we learned that Brett Kimberlin was ordered to pay sanctions (hopefully first of many) for one of his attempts to play unconscionable, outrageous games with the discovery process and make a mockery of justice. This event calms fears that Brett can commit whatever abuses he wants by flashing  the "I'm just a stupid pro se" card. Besides this, noted free speech paladin Paul Alan Levy wrote a post called Brett Kimberlin’s Dilemma, which shows the fallacy behind much of what Kimberlin has said recently to defend his indefensible methods. Paul's post has also received some favorable coverage, which is encouraging since Brett's desire seems to be to commit crimes under cover of silence or misdirection.

It is not really my intention to become a current events blogger. Hogewash! is already doing an admirable job of covering current events in the Brett Kimberlin matters. It's also not my intent to add legal commentary to Paul's work, since I don't have the background to do it and he's already doing that himself. Although I do want to belabor one point he made, i.e., the law already prescribes how litigants should properly serve anonymous defendants. Brett Kimberlin is pointedly avoiding the law on this, which points back to his three goals. One, he wants to try to win a default judgment against at least some defendants. Clearly this is one of his goals  in mind and it's the same reason he keeps committing forgery and perjury in his "diddling" with service rules on ALL the defendants in his different frivolous lawsuits. Two, he wants his online critics to give him personal information he and his supporters can use to harass those critics. Three, he wants to deter any future critics by leveraging goals #1 and #2. There's no defending what Kimberlin is doing and his complaints about defendants playing games with service are just attempts to confuse onlookers. Even if Kimberlin didn't originally understand the underlying law, he's now had it well explained to him by legal experts so (given we are talking about convicted perjurer and forger Brett Kimberlin here) the only reasonable explanation for his "misunderstanding" on the point is that he's actually purposefully lying. But enough about that.

Back to the big picture

Levy's post raised a sensitive issue that should interest followers of this saga, namely, the difficulty posed for children of notorious criminals. Now, Levy's purpose was to dissuade Kimberlin from his apparent threat to put his own children in a more difficult position. Levy's points seem correct to me and I don't have more to say about that. What I do want is to think out loud about what it is like for the innocent to actually be in that position.

In my offline persona, I have known a handful of conmen. Just a little beneath the surface, they are not normally the charming rogues of fiction. They can be vicious, manipulative, grasping people who don't give two thoughts about the amount of pain they inflict on those close to them. I am acquainted with some people who were raised by a con man who was, for a time, very successful. He stole millions of dollars, and did it while pretending to be an important, adept, highly connected financier. His public persona was that of a man who demanded respect and admiration for his deeds. He basked in the esteem gained from his social status and wealth, all of which seems to have been stolen in various pure scams. His sons made it a ways into adulthood not having any idea what their father's true business was. They just knew he was very special and their household was very special. When the house of cards came tumbling down, they had to confront the fact that their affluence had all been built on lies. Can you imagine what it was like, having friends and family hearing scandalous gossip about your father's 7-figure heist? Can you imagine later meeting a friend who learned that your father was jailed for being a great thief? Especially if that friend was used to thinking of you as being a refined, wealthy person.

I won't fully understand the experience myself, but for those who went through it, it was a difficult life changing experience. One of the children of the conman I describe above is a young adult but now quite lost about who he is and what he wants to be. He used to know, but that was taken away from him in a painful way that made him feel foolish for also having been, in a very real sense, conned. But I must say that my respect for these sons went up hugely when I learned what they'd been through, and I suddenly understood the attitude they had toward social status and appearance as children, and I was impressed at their efforts to grow past the turmoil. Other acquaintances of mine confirmed this view of holding the children in much greater esteem after understanding what they had actually gone through. Another great benefit of when the scams folded is that the children had been kept out of touch with some of their family by the machinations of their conman father. It's really heartening to see those walls torn down after decades.

Reader, none of the above is even much changed in details. I just removed some more nitty-gritty details in the unlikely event that a more detailed post would bring undue attention to the innocent involved. These are real incidents I'm familiar with, which involved millions in scam profits by a conman and his confederate, who was only after decades, by chance, caught by cooperation of multiple law enforcement agencies in multiple countries.

I hope followers of the Brett Kimberlin saga will think about the story above, and contrast it with other worse possible outcomes. It's important to understand that there are always innocents involved somehow - often closely involved - in crimes. This is one of the reasons it's so beneficial for the good guys to only use just and ethical means.

Pardon the rambling nature of my post. The analogy between Brett Kimberlin, and the conman I knew from my own acquaintances, has been in my head for quite a while and Paul Alan Levy's post compelled me to think aloud about it.