How Do You Survive a Cyber-Stalking Cult?

Summary

Podcast Summary: What It Was Like – "How Do You Survive a Cyber-Stalking Cult?"

Host: Julian Morgans
Guest: Patrick Tomlinson
Published: May 23, 2026
Production: Superreal

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into the harrowing personal story of Patrick Tomlinson, a science fiction writer and stand-up comedian, who became the target of an intense, organized campaign of cyberstalking and real-world harassment. The discussion unpacks the evolution from a seemingly innocuous tweet to years of relentless, multifaceted attacks by a “criminal cyber-stalking cult,” showing the complex realities victims face and why current systems—legal, technological, and law enforcement—often fail to protect them.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Genesis of the Harassment

• Patrick’s Life Before ([06:21])
  • Newly married, career thriving, just released a new novel with Tor Books.
  • Describes his work as varying from hard sci-fi to comedic, "Hitchhiker’s Guide" style.
• The Inciting Tweet ([07:30])
  • During a turbulent cultural moment (MeToo, Louis CK/Roseanne Barr scandals), Patrick tweeted criticism of Norm Macdonald—nothing unusual, he thought.
  • The tweet fell into the crosshairs of the Opie and Anthony subreddit, home to a notorious group trained in organized cyber harassment.
• First Signs of Trouble ([11:05])
  • Patrick’s Twitter account was mass-reported and suspended after a coordinated campaign; an eagle-eyed follower alerted him to Reddit threads bragging about their actions.
  • Realized he was the new target of a highly motivated group.

2. Understanding the "Cult"

• Not Just Trolls ([12:51], [13:52])
  • “These were not trolls. They are a dedicated, experienced, criminal, cyber stalking cult. They don’t act like trolls. Ignoring them doesn’t make them go away.” ([12:51], Patrick)
  • Perpetrators are mainly adult men (late 20s–50s), often with families and jobs. Not your stereotypical teenagers.
  • Motivated by misogyny, racism, and a need for power and control—many are far-right or adjacent.

3. The Escalation & Methods

• From Digital to Real-World Attacks

  • Began with doxxing: home addresses, phone numbers, threatening messages ([12:28]), leading to threats and harassment by impersonation.
  • Mass-review bombing his books, career sabotage, impersonation using contact forms ([18:51]).
  • Explicitly stated goals: driving Patrick to suicide or entrapment/death via police (swatting) ([22:35]).

• Swatting and Physical Danger ([24:46])

  • “They have 55 times now committed a crime called swatting…My wife and I have had pistols and assault rifles and shotguns shoved into our faces half a dozen times…They have almost succeeded several times.” ([24:46], Patrick)
  • Detailed recollection of being dragged from home by police at gunpoint, often naked or in a bathrobe, sometimes after the police had been pre-warned about the risk ([28:16]).

• Extended Targets and Persistence

  • Stalkers also targeted family, friends (including elderly parents), and innocent bystanders through impersonation and manipulation ([33:13], [54:38]).
  • Shift to making bomb and assassination threats using Patrick’s name when swatting became less effective ([38:47]).

4. Impacts on Life and Career

• Professional Damage ([18:51])
  • Review bombing led to actual financial harm—bad reviews before publication, loss of contacts/collaborators due to impersonated, hateful messages.
• Emotional & Social Fallout
  • "I've lost friends over this… they don't want to be the next target." ([46:10], Patrick)
  • Relentless time drain: “Between my wife and I, we were probably spending an extra 40 hours a week on trying to counter this.” ([18:51])
• Strain with Law Enforcement
  • Lawsuit against Milwaukee PD after months of inaction and repeated swattings ([34:32]).
  • Police only changed behavior after being sued; system’s failures highlighted.

5. Legal and Systemic Roadblocks

• Role of Technology Companies & Law ([17:46], [43:27])
  • Tried using DMCA takedowns to remove harmful content, leading to escalation as stalkers found more permissive platforms.
  • Laws protect platforms, not victims: “Section 230… means platforms are not responsible for content posted by users. Trying to tackle this yourself through legal avenues is nearly impossible.” ([43:27], Patrick)
  • Efforts to unmask stalkers through lawsuits backfired: judge ruled to protect stalkers’ anonymity and ordered Patrick to pay their legal fees ([42:35]).

6. Wider Cultural Context

• GamerGate and Online Extremism ([50:08])
  • Parallels drawn to GamerGate as prototype for online harassment mobs and the far-right playbook.
  • Stalkers funded, coordinated, and at times physically stalked Patrick overseas.
  • “There’s no left wing version of this. They’re all right wingers, they’re all fascists, they’re all Trump supporters.” ([56:10], Patrick)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the cult’s obsession:
  “This has consumed their entire personalities and worldview. They are nothing outside of this clinical obsession with destroying my life. They can’t stop.” ([55:06], Patrick)

• On the nature of online harassment:
  “These weren’t just pests…I mean, they were making death threats, they were doxing people…weaponized fan base.” ([08:41], Patrick)

• When the law failed:
  “A judge in California decided that not only was the anonymity of the people trying to murder us more important than our physical safety, but also decided that we should have to pay their legal fees.” ([42:35], Patrick)

• On systemic lessons:
  “I used to think [systems of justice] were imperfect but generally well meaning. Now I know that they’re actually actively harmful in an awful lot of ways.” ([57:43], Patrick)

• Patrick’s resilience:
  “If they think they're going to outlast me, they're insane.” ([57:29], Patrick)

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Important Timestamps & Segments

| Time | Segment Description | |----------|---------------------------------------------------------------------| | 06:21 | Patrick describes his life before the incident | | 07:30 | The tweet and Norm Macdonald controversy | | 11:05 | Realization of being targeted, Twitter suspension | | 12:51 | Distinction: stalkers are not trolls, but a cult | | 14:12 | Psychology and demographics of perpetrators | | 15:16 | Trying DMCA takedowns, escalation to websites | | 18:51 | Personal and professional impact (review bombing, loss of contacts) | | 22:35 | Stalkers’ explicit goals: make Patrick kill himself or get swatted | | 24:46 | Swatting explained; real-world terror | | 28:16 | In-depth: first swatting, police failures | | 34:32 | Suing the police; police only respond after legal action | | 38:47 | Stalkers switch to bomb threats, public harassment at events | | 42:35 | Legal system failings, lawsuit backfiring | | 43:27 | Section 230 and why tech law fails victims | | 46:10 | Impact on relationships, past targets of the cult | | 50:08 | Broader context: Gamergate, right-wing extremism online | | 53:06 | Stalkers physically following Patrick overseas | | 54:38 | Ongoing harassment against others via impersonation | | 55:06 | Why Patrick thinks it will never end without arrests | | 57:43 | Hard lessons about justice, trust, and activism |

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Advice & Reflections

• Advice for potential victims ([56:10]):

  • Block in bad faith encounters; expect no systemic help.
  • Marginalized groups at more risk—right-wing groups target women, LGBTQ+ people, minorities.
  • “This can happen to anybody... They pick their targets randomly.” (Patrick)

• On Resilience:

  • Refuses to give stalkers the victory of silence or disappearance ([45:12])
  • “I don’t get tired. That’s it.” ([57:14])

• On systemic failure:

  • Justice systems and tech laws prioritize abusers’ anonymity over victim safety.
  • Learned “just how fucking evil some people can be” and the need to believe marginalized people about systemic injustice ([57:43]).

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Closing Thoughts

This episode is a candid, disturbing exposé of the modern machinery of organized online hate and its crossing into real-world criminality. Patrick Tomlinson’s story is one of survival and hard-won insight: the battle is not just with stalkers, but with legal frameworks and inertia that leave victims to defend themselves. His determination not to be silenced offers a rare note of hope: persistence and public exposure, though costly, are weapons against the darkness—until systems catch up.

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For further information or support:

• Seek guidance from digital rights advocacy groups
• Document everything and consult legal counsel if harassed
• Understand the limits of police and platform response—publicity may help

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Summary compiled with direct quotes and attributions. Timestamps reflect key areas for in-depth listening. All explicit content and themes presented in the same forthright tone as the episode.

Transcript

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[Patrick Tomlinson]

Superu. They are a dedicated, experienced criminal cyber stalking cult. These are people with actual, legitimate, deep seated psychological issues. They have 55 times now committed a crime called swatting. What Swatting is you deliberately make a false call to the police saying hey, there's a hostage situation or hey, someone has just been murdered deliberately trying to get the police to show up with maximum force. So that has happened to our home. 55 times I've been dragged out of my house naked at one o' clock in the morning. My wife and I have had pistols and assault rifles and shotguns shoved into our faces half a dozen times. So when I say they've tried to murder us, I'm not exaggerating even a little bit. They have almost succeeded several times and they don't. They just don't stop. They can't. They can't stop themselves.

[Julian Morgans]

Hey, I'm Julian Morgans and you're listening to what it was like the show that asks people who have lived through big, dramatic events what it was like. Hey, welcome back. So this week we're talking about Internet vigilantism. That is online people or groups taking justice into their own hands. And it usually goes down like this. So let's say that someone posts something on the Internet that someone else doesn't like, and that aggrieved person sets about ruining the other person's life. One method, as you just heard, is swatting. That's on the more dangerous end of things. But other methods include doxing, which is dredging up someone's private information and posting it publicly. Like, imagine your address just sitting on some Reddit forum. Or at the latter end, you could order, you know, lots of pizzas to someone's house and let them deal with an aggrieved takeaway company. My point is that there's a spectrum of these kinds of attacks, going from pranky all the way through to genuinely dangerous. And these attacks can go for years. Careers come to an end, lives genuinely get ruined. Which brings me to today's guest. I think you're about to hear the worst version of this kind of online behavior that I've ever heard of. So Patrick Tomlinson is a science fiction writer and he's a stand up comedian from Milwaukee. And I think he's just a lovely guy. He's, you know, he's affable, he's smart, he's funny, he's, look, he's very inoffensive. But in 2018, he sent out a tweet that was taken pretty badly, and he became the target of what he describes as a criminal cyber stalking cult. A small group of people whose stated aim was to torment him until he either killed himself or he was accidentally shot by a police officer in a SWAT attack. And I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, all right, so just call the police. Well, Patrick tried that. And then you're probably thinking, well, all right, just so get off the Internet. But as you'll hear, it's just way more complicated than that. The police really can't help and you can't simply opt out. It's just this horrible trap with very few exits. So we'll get into that in just one moment. But before we do, I just want to tell you about this week's subscriber episode as well, because I think it's really fascinating. I'm speaking with a guy named Leo, who for years he's run this kind of campaign from the other side. He's accrued 9 million TikTok followers. And he used to not so much anymore. But he used to direct people to go after alleged pedophiles and sexual predators. But he's now reached kind of a crisis of confidence. He's got to a point where he thinks that he was doing the wrong thing. So it's a really interesting look at this issue, but from the other side. But anyway, that's enough from me. Here is this week's story as told by Patrick Tomlinson. Hey, Patrick. Welcome to the show.

[Patrick Tomlinson]

Hello. Thanks for having me on.

[Julian Morgans]

Let's start with 2018. Can you give me a bit of a snapshot of your life at that time? I understand things were pretty good.

[Patrick Tomlinson]

Yeah. So this all started on September 11, ironically enough, of 2018. But right around that time, I was still within the first year of my marriage here. We were still in that newlywed phase. I had just had my fourth book come out, the first of my new big boy author contract with Tor Books. It was a good period. Everything was going very nicely.

[Julian Morgans]

That's so cool. I just want to jump into your science fiction work for a minute. How do you describe the style that you work in?

[Patrick Tomlinson]

It's gone back and forth from being kind of hard sci fi to more like just action thrillers with sci fi wallpaper to straight up slapstick comedy, Hitchhiker's Guide style sci fi. Because I used to do standup comedy, so I was always trying to challenge myself to see what else I could do.

[Julian Morgans]

That's cool. I'll have to read one. I've done that terrible thing where I had a child and then just stopped reading for the last few years, which is a tragedy. So. All right, take me to this tweet. What was your relationship with Twitter and what did you write?

[Patrick Tomlinson]

2018? I probably had around 30, 35,000 followers, I want to say, somewhere in that vicinity. It was my main avenue for self promotion, for my career. So the tweet in question, I don't know how big this got in Australia or if it even really reached over there, but we had a couple of comics, one named Roseanne Barr from the Roseanne show, but they had some enormous scandals going on. Roseanne because she had made some real racist remarks about a woman, and then Louis CK because it turns out that he enjoyed masturbating in front of female comics and green rooms when they didn't really want to witness that. And there was this, you know, there was the whole MeToo movement over here was going on. There's the. There's the pushback from, from the far right about, you know, cancel culture. So in this environment there was a, another long term stand up comedian and an actor named Norm MacDonald, but he came out in defense of his colleagues and friends, Louis C.K. and Roseanne Barr. Anyway, so I send out this tweet that I just never particularly found him funny amongst this environment where all of a sudden Norm MacDonald has found himself a huge new fan base of these far right incels, you know, misogynists, racists, because he was standing up for Louis CK And Roseanne Barr. So these weren't fans of him, they weren't fans of his comedy, they were fans of misogyny and racism. They were white supremacists. And I don't know if he really caught onto that right away, but. So my tweet got passed around in some of these circles on Reddit and eventually landed on this page called the Opie and Anthony Fan Club. Now there's no reason for anybody in Australia to know who Opie and Opie and Anthony were. They were a shock jock radio show based out of, I think Buffalo, New York. And they had literally trained and weaponized their own fan base into being cyber stalkers. They would use their fan base as attack dogs. They would, they would encourage their fan base to go after people online, to make prank calls to them, to email their workplaces, all these kinds of things to the point that they affectionately called their fans pests. And they weren't just pests. I mean, they were, you know, they were making death threats, they were, they were doxing people. They were doing just, even at this time, they were doing just horrible things. Now the show's off the air, the two hosts are feuding with each other, but the fan base still exists and they've been trained and weaponized, and now they don't have anybody calling targets for them. So they started calling their own targets. And they did so through this, this Reddit, this subreddit that they had the opening Anthony Club or whatever. And for years they were the most hated subreddits on the entire site. I mean, they were voted the worst subreddit by other Reddit users like two years in a row. And this was something that these sociopaths were immensely proud of. And so my tweet ended up filtering into this, this group of people. And of course they were attacking anybody who was, who was going after Norm MacDonald. But anyway, so my tweet gets passed around these people and they're like, ah, here's a man we can fuck. With. And so they did. Oh, sorry, can I swear I didn't even ask before, please?

[Julian Morgans]

Okay, yeah, yeah, we're pro swearing.

[Patrick Tomlinson]

Okay. Pro swearing. All right. Anyway, so they're like, okay, here's, here's the next person that we're going to fuck with. And they did immediately for you on the ground.

[Julian Morgans]

What was your first indication that something was amiss? Can you take me to that moment?

[Patrick Tomlinson]

My wife and I were actually vacationing in Orlando and I got an email that my Twitter account had been permanently suspended. And I was like, what the heck is going on here? And the tweet that had apparently done the job was so innocuous, but the fact that they had gone in and used hundreds of accounts to report it thousands of times simply tricked the algorithm into thinking there was a real problem where there wasn't one, or that there was some popular outrage where there wasn't any because it was just completely manufactured and targeted. So that was my first indication that something was going on, but I had no idea what was going on at the time. It wasn't until a few days later when an eagle eyed follower of mine reached out and said, hey, I found this subreddit that is absolutely celebrating getting your Twitter account suspended and bragging about how they did it. And he sent me a link and that's when I went over to the Opie and Anthony subreddit and started reading through this. And there were already hundreds and hundreds of posts about me and, you know, across dozens of threads. And that was, that was just the start.

[Julian Morgans]

So when you first found this page and you were, your eye was going down this, all this stuff and you were scrolling through it, how did you feel?

[Patrick Tomlinson]

Well, I felt outraged. I felt targeted. I felt like an enormous injustice was being, was being perpetrated.

[Julian Morgans]

Were you scared?

[Patrick Tomlinson]

I don't scare easily. No. I was just angry and seeing my home address and my home phone number and my wife's phone number being spread around. And then we started getting text messages and then we started getting threatening email or threatening voicemails and threatening, threatening emails. You know, those. Scared still wouldn't be the right word. But like, it's like, okay, this is getting more serious.

[Julian Morgans]

How did you tell your wife what you discovered?

[Patrick Tomlinson]

My wife and I have a very open and honest and highly communicative relationship. So I just told her right away. I mean, she knew, like, she was very hands off with it because she thought it was going to blow over. And frankly, so did I, because I've been on social media long enough to, you know, Be the character of the day a couple of times. And so usually people will troll you and say horrible things and then you just say, you know, go fuck yourself. And then you block them and you never hear from them again. Because that's just how a normal interaction goes online these days. I, she was not prepared. But then also nor was I for just that. These were not trolls. And that's the first thing, that's the first mistake that most people, upon hearing our story makes is just assuming that these are Internet trolls. Well, they're not. They are a dedicated, experienced, criminal, cyber stalking cult. They don't act like trolls. Ignoring them doesn't make them go away. These are people with actual legitimate, deep seated psychological issues. And they just don't stop. They can't, they can't stop themselves.

[Julian Morgans]

What do you know about the age range and this sort of like psychological profiles of these people? Do they have lives? They got jobs? What do they do with themselves?

[Patrick Tomlinson]

Well, they're almost exclusively men. They're almost exclusively. They're almost all either far right Trump supporters or they claim to be apolitical, which is, you know, over here in America right now, it's basically the same thing. They're not young, for one thing. You know, we, we expected them to be a bunch of teenagers like most people would, and they're not.

[Julian Morgans]

Yeah, that's what I thought. Yeah, I was imagining the kind of teenagers who'd, you know, go and vandalize school buildings and spray paint bus shelters. That's what I was picturing.

[Patrick Tomlinson]

No, these are, these are grown men in their, anywhere from their late 20s to late 40s. There's one that we've identified. He's in his early 50s. If their stories about themselves are to be believed. A lot of them have jobs, a lot of them have families, even have children. Some of them are married. And this is what they spend all of their time doing. It's for seven and a half years. It's mental.

[Julian Morgans]

Okay, so what's the first step? I mean, do you go to the police? How do you try to deal with this?

[Patrick Tomlinson]

Well, the first thing we did was with that Reddit thread or that subreddit, the Opie and Anthony subreddit. We talked to other people who had gone through something at least similar to this before, and somebody came up with a great suggestion called the DMCA takedown. So the DMCA is a, it's a US law dating back to the late 90s. It's the digital Millennial Communication act, if I remember correctly. And basically it it allows somebody with copyright over an image, over song, whatever, to make a takedown request if their intellectual property is being used incorrectly or illegally. And so anytime they would take, you know, a photo that I had taken, anytime they would take, like the title page or the COVID page of my book, we would submit a DMCA takedown request. And that the moderators of the subreddit could not ignore those, because that then goes up to the actual site admins and the administrators of Reddit overall, because now that's a legal matter. Now that's something they have to take care of. So we, I have no idea. It was in the hundreds, maybe, maybe over a thousand of these DMCA takedown requests we made over the course of a few months. And they would all get answered and they would all get taken down, nearly all of them, until eventually the administrators on Reddit just got so sick of this group specifically because of how intensely they were harassing me and my family, that they nuked the Entire subreddit, all 30,000 subscribers. The whole thing was gone. So we're the reason that that subreddit no longer exists. But that took months. But then in some ways it almost backfired because they then went and started a series of websites dedicated specifically to trying to end my career, end my marriage, and end my life. A lot of those actually got booted because they were doing such blatantly illegal stuff. I mean, they were based in Russia for a little while and Russia kicked them out because doxxing is actually illegal in Russia, where it isn't in the US So. And they, they finally found a web carrier that would tolerate them and a hosting company called cloudflare. Cloudflare was also very famously, or infamously the ones who protected Kiwifarms that website for so long. No one on earth should go to Kiwi Farms. But anyway, if you did, what's.

[Julian Morgans]

What's Kiwifarms?

[Patrick Tomlinson]

Oh, Kiwi Farms is a larger scale version of the Opie and Anthony subreddit. It is a strictly cyber stalking criminal website run by a man named Joshua Moon who should absolutely have been in prison fucking 15 years ago. But it exists solely to stalk, harass, terrorize people that the users refer to as LOLCOWs. They have a running kill count of people that they have driven to suicide. And as far as we know, it's at 4. There could be more than that, that, you know, people didn't connect the dots, but the Kiwi farmers celebrate every person that they get to kill themselves.

[Julian Morgans]

My God, that is so twisted. Yeah, I had no idea that that could exist.

[Patrick Tomlinson]

Oh, well, it sure does. And it was. Several different attempts have been made to get it taken down and to get Joshua Moon in the handcuffs that he so richly deserves, but they have only been temporarily successful when successful at all.

[Julian Morgans]

So as this is all going on, what's been the impact on your, on your personal life?

[Patrick Tomlinson]

No, it's a second full time job. I mean, between my wife and I, we were probably spending an extra 40 hours a week on trying to counter this. You know, at the same time that my second book on that contract was coming out, they started review bombing it with one star reviews even before it had come out. You know, they did the same thing again to my most recent book. Nine months before it came out, it already had over a thousand one star reviews on it when the only two people on earth who had read it at that point were myself and my editor.

[Julian Morgans]

Has it been effective? You know, has it affected sales?

[Patrick Tomlinson]

It absolutely has, yeah. They have been relentless in attacking my books, in attacking my professional reputation. They would go around to my colleagues in the writing industry and find their websites and if their websites had like a contact me form, you know, at the bottom, and that would say, you know, leave your name and your email address and send me a, send me a message. Well, they would put my name in there, my phone number, my real email address, because they doxed all those, you know, years ago. And then they would leave the most racist or the most transphobic comments that you can imagine in these contact forms because they're not verified in any way. Like anybody can type anyone's name in and anybody can type anyone's email address in. It's not actually an email being sent from my email address. It's just going through this contact form. And so they have done that literally thousands of times to thousands of people and they've never stopped doing it. They call it the contact form bit. And I think it's hilarious because then I have to spend all this time, you know, reassuring people, no, I didn't send that. It's not me. Those aren't my words. It's coming from the people who have literally been trying to murder my family, you know, this white supremacist cult. And most of the time it has, it's not effective if someone actually reaches out to me and said, is this you like? And be like, no, wasn't me. Here's what's actually happening. There's one such example of this happening right now. She's an anti racism influencer, mostly on threads and Instagram, I think. But she runs something called Jackie's Academy. She's an African American woman. She lives somewhere in the Northeast, I believe. And she has been sent just tons over the course of the last year, constantly. Just tons of emails and texts and messages all purporting to be from me or purporting to be from my fans or people are, you know, are working under my orders, you know, just saying the, the absolute worst things you can imagine to this woman. But she has been completely and utterly bamboozled by them. You know, she's had the situation explained to her by multiple people, not just me. She has, does not have to take our word for it because like, this is, this has been reported on by like NBC Nightly News, the Daily Beast, the Independent Inside Edition. You know, like many, many professional, national and even international level journalists and their media platforms have reported on this story, fact checked the story and, you know, but she just will not listen. And so for a year she has been just hammering me, you know, accusing me of, you know, racism and of cyber stalking her and harassing her family and doxxing her family and all these things, when in reality we're being stalked by the exact same people. And they are laughing their asses off that they were able to manipulate her into doing this for them because their goal is to destroy my reputation and make everyone think I'm a Nazi.

[Julian Morgans]

You said before that their explicit goal was to have you murdered or your family dead. I mean, how do you know that?

[Patrick Tomlinson]

Because they have explicitly said so on their, on their website and in other messages. They have, they've given me an ultimatum that I have X number of days to kill myself or this will get worse for me and my, and my wife. They've told my wife that. They've repeatedly told my wife that this will all end for her if you just divorce him. That went on for years. When that didn't work and we didn't get divorced and I didn't kill myself as they demanded repeatedly, that's when they started to actively attempt to have us murdered. And that's not an exaggeration either. They have 55 times now committed a crime called we here in the U.S. call swatting. First off, swat is a special weapons and tactical team. It's the door kickers. It's the ones you send in with the really big guns and the ballistic shields to clear out areas that are, you know, where there's a hostage situation or where someone is known to be armed. They're, they're the ones that are going to go in and kill people if necessary. What swatting is, is you deliberately make a false call about a person and about their address to the police, saying, hey, there's a hostage situation, or, hey, someone has just been murdered, or I just heard gunshots, or whatever the case may be, and deliberately trying to draw out that incredibly violent police response in deliberately trying to get the police to show up with maximum force. So that has happened to our home 55 times. Now, not all of those calls were met with that kind of response from the police here in Milwaukee, but a lot of them were. My wife and I have had pistols and assault rifles and shotguns shoved into our faces half a dozen times. We have, like, I've been handcuffed twice now. I've been dragged out of my house naked at one o' clock in the morning. So when I say they've tried to murder us, I'm not exaggerating even a little bit. They have almost succeeded several times.

[Julian Morgans]

Oh my God. So the first time this ever happened, it must have been shocking. Like, must have been terrifying. Can you take me through it?

[Patrick Tomlinson]

The first time it happened was, I want to say, June or July of 2020. We were still in COVID lockdowns. We barely left the house and it was like 11 o' clock at night. My wife and I had had quite a few drinks, like everyone was doing during COVID lockdowns. And we were binge watching something or other. But then there comes a knock at the door. A very, very angry, aggressive knock at the door. And I go answer it in my bathrobe and there's two Milwaukee police officers there with their hands on their guns, demanding to know where the children are. And I'm like, what the hell are you talking about, man? And come to find out through a very angry, heated, shouted exchange that our stalkers had created a Craigslist ad using our address, using my real phone number, using my name, saying that we had free pepperoni to give away that we'd made out of the bodies of black children that we had kidnapped and ground into sausage in our basement. And then they used that as an excuse to call the police and say, hey, there's children in this man's basement. And so two of them came all hopped up, thinking they were going to find a, I don't know, a pepperoni grinder and kids shackled up in our. In our basement. Which, for the record, wasn't doing any of that. Just, just wasn't. Just wasn't a thing, you know, that's good, Pat. Yes, I think that's really positive. And the. It actually took, like. And I was so angry trying to talk through to these two cops that it actually took my wife to come out and, like, separate us and be like, look, we're being cyber stalked. This is obviously them. No, there's no damn kids in the basement. What the hell's the matter with you? And eventually they figured out that maybe a Craigslist ad offering up pepperoni made out of black kids wasn't real. But then it happened again a few weeks later when there's a pub that we frequent quite a bit just down the street from us that had a fire. But the people stalking us keep such close tabs on our entire neighborhood, like, they're part of a Facebook page on, you know, for the eastside neighborhood in here in Milwaukee. And so they had. They had news within the hour that the place that they knew we liked to go to had had a fire. And so they called the police, saying, we just saw someone we think was Patrick Tomlinson running in between the alleys away from the fire, carrying a bag. And so again, like, later that night, police show up, you know, angry questions, and I'm like, you guys have got to be. You have to get better at this. And then it was another that. That stopped for a couple of years. But then this. This one, it was June or July of 2022. My wife actually isn't home. She is up north in Wisconsin attending her grandfather's funeral. I wasn't able to attend because at that time, we had a cat that was quite a few different medications that needed to be given throughout the day. So somebody had to stay home and take care of the cat. And the stalkers knew that my wife was gone.

[Julian Morgans]

These guys are thorough.

[Patrick Tomlinson]

They're thorough. They're. They're absolutely clinically obsessed sociopaths. This. When I said earlier, this is all these people do, I was not exaggerating. And so they knew she was gone. They knew I was probably going to be at home alone. And so they made a call to the Milwaukee police pretending to be me, saying that I had just shot my wife. And, you know, someone, a man I found in bed with her with a gun, and that I would shoot the first, however many police that tried to come through the door, come get me, basically, and they did. And I was dead asleep because it's one o' clock in the morning, I'm out like a light, when all of a sudden there's this enormous pounding on the door. And I go Out. And, oh, I forgot to set this up properly, actually, because two weeks prior to this attack, we had gotten either a text message or a voicemail message from one of our stalkers saying that they were going to swat us, saying that they were going to send the police and they were going to have the police kill us. And so we called the Milwaukee police, we called District 1 and said, Hey, I spoke, I spoke to a dispatcher and I spoke to a desk sergeant. I said, hey, this is going to happen. This is the threat that we received. So if you get any weird calls about our house, and these are, this is our address and here are our names. If you get any weird calls about this, this is what's going on. Do not come fucking guns drawn. They did anyway. They didn't pay, they didn't take it seriously, they didn't pass it around, they didn't let anybody on any of the other shifts know. And so at 1 o' clock in the morning, I hear this enormous banging on the door. I go down, I see the police. I'm just in a bathrobe, I have nothing else on. And I immediately know what's happening. I know that we are being swatted and I know that the police have royally fucked this up, even after being warned by me and my wife. So I come up to the door, I know what's going on and I let loose on them. I did, you know, I let them know exactly how I felt about their incompetence. And they just, they yanked me out of the house. And it took, I will take a point of pride in this. It took four grown men to get me in handcuffs. But they did eventually get me in handcuffs. My bathrobe then had the, the cheek to open up fully. So now I am nude, in handcuffs on my own front porch at one o' clock in the morning. This, this goes on for like, I don't know, 20, 30 minutes, you know, and the whole time I am just, I'm shouting at them, explaining like, re explaining the situation, telling them, like, we already had this conversation two weeks ago. Meanwhile, they're going through my house, they're opening every door, ransacking the place. They leave the back door open. Both of our cats are still in there. The cats could have gotten out, you know, while I'm handcuffed on the couch, and we'd probably have never found them again. And they come back through and they're like, yeah, nobody's here. I'm like, yeah, I told you that. They finally uncuff me and Then they're about to just walk away like nothing happened. As soon as the handcuffs got off, I end up just blowing up at the sergeant in charge there and demanded that she get back on the porch. It was like, you're not leaving. We're going to finish this conversation. And that actually ended up getting recorded by one of my neighbors. Like, audio only, I think. And again, our stalkers pay such close attention to our lives and to our whole neighborhood that they ended up finding that recording from my immediate neighbor on Facebook because she had no idea what was going on. So they ended up, you know, playing that amongst each other. And they. And that was such a huge victory for them that they immediately started doing it over and over and over and over again. I mean, dozens and dozens and dozens of times. We ended up having to deal with that for nine, nine to 12 months. And it wasn't like the police during that time never figured it out. Like, sometimes we'd have good ones. We would have ones that knew the situation would show up and be like, hi, sorry, just have to leave a card in the door and be like, yep, nice to see you again. You know, grab a coffee next time. But then others just would come in, guns drawn every time. And so I think it was the. I think it was the 27th time that we had one of these. One of these incidents. And it was the fourth time that day. It happened four times in one day. It actually happened seven times in 36 hours. That. In that. That span, it was also the first time that my elderly parents who lived two hours away from us got swatted. So that all happened in that day. But so the fourth time that day, I have already dealt with three direct swattings. I've already dealt with my parents being swatted for the first time. So that's four. And at 9pm at night, I am just down the street at a bar that we like to go to when my wife calls in a panic and says, I think they're outside. It's happening again. Get out. And approach with my hands up, you know, palms out, announce that I'm. I'm approaching, that I am unarmed, but get the fuck off of our property. Like, what? This is the fourth time today you've been here. What the hell are you doing? Yeah, and my wife actually came out at that point and started filming as well. So they're like, not only was there body camera footage, there was our security camera footage, but then there was. There was footage from my wife's cell phone as well. And they swarmed me and try to get me in handcuffs again. And just the, the insanity of that, of that day was what finally pushed us to, to seek out a lawyer and sue the city because it had been going on for nine months. It had happened 27 times. It happened four times in one day, and then it happened three more times the following day. And like we tried to work with them, I'd find physically walked down there to their, to their department house several times, spoke to lieutenants, spoke to the superiors, saying we have to figure out a system to prevent this from happening anymore. And they would just steadfastly refuse over and over again. And so like, you know, we try.

[Julian Morgans]

Why would they refuse?

[Patrick Tomlinson]

Because they're idiots. I cannot explain to you how, how apathetic and incompetent these people are. They said they have to respond to every one of these things because if that ever happens where they don't respond, then they're in trou. Something actually did happen, which is. And we know it's because they stopped coming the moment we started suing them. Even after we tried for almost a year to work directly with them. Like our suing them was suing the city. Suing the police was our last resort.

[Julian Morgans]

Hey, we're going to take a quick ad break, but stick around because we'll be back with more what it was like.

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[Patrick Tomlinson]

Apro Vecha

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[Julian Morgans]

So you initiate a lawsuit against the. Against the city?

[Patrick Tomlinson]

We did. We. We started that process three years ago. It has. It has only recently started to wind down. A story came out in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel yesterday about. About the fact the city was. Was forced to. To entertain a settlement. I can't really speak any further about that simply because it isn't complete and isn't official yet. So.

[Julian Morgans]

So a settlement meaning that potentially, hopefully, maybe you'll receive compensation?

[Patrick Tomlinson]

Yes.

[Julian Morgans]

Okay. Could you give me just any sort of like a wink and, you know, how many digits are we talking here?

[Patrick Tomlinson]

Well, I mean, it's. I guess it says it in the Journal Sentinel article, but it's six figures.

[Julian Morgans]

Okay, that'd be nice. Does that feel to you like potentially the end of this journey?

[Patrick Tomlinson]

Well, it's definitely the end of the threat posed to us by the Milwaukee Police Department. You know, like, since we initiated the lawsuit, the police have not come in guns drawn, trying to kick down our door. None of that's happened since. But it also means that the criminals behind the calls knew it wasn't working anymore. So they started making bomb threats, either using our names or saying that they were targeting us. They have done that twice to conventions that I was attending as an author, whether I was doing presentations or signings. So they've made assassination threats against me and a couple of other authors at the worldcon in Chicago. A few years ago, there was a convention called Penguicon just outside of Detroit, and that was the first time they made a bomb threat. They made a bomb threat against Miller park, which is where the Milwaukee brewers play. My wife and I are big baseball fans, and so we've attended the opening day for the Milwaukee brewers every. Every year for the last 13 or 14 years. And of course, our stalkers know that because they've gone through our Facebooks, they've gone through our Twitters, so they, you know, made a bomb threat in our name. But fortunately, the police department or the district in that area was a little. Little smarter than the one in our area and called around to be like, do we know anything about this? And, you know, determined that it was most likely false. But they've. They've made bomb threats at least a half a dozen times.

[Julian Morgans]

God. Can you tell me about your efforts to identify some of the individuals behind this? And you know, why they can't be just arrested?

[Patrick Tomlinson]

Well, this lawsuit against the city was not actually the first one that we. That we brought in relation to this. I had mentioned earlier that after their subreddit had been shut down, they eventually created a website that is literally exclusively dedicated to stalking my family. That is the onaforums.net and once we found that place, and if you'd go there, which, just like Kiwi farms, you should not go there. It is not good for your mental health. But if you go there, you will see literally millions upon millions of posts about every tiny detail and facet of my life. My wife, my family, every post, every picture. Just millions of posts over tens of thousands of threads. And so we tried to sue the owners of that website because it exists exclusively for the purpose of planning, organizing, executing, and celebrating a criminal stalking campaign, and not because we thought we was going to get much money out of it, because we don't think most of these guys have very much money, because what successful person would ever do anything like this and spend this much time on this? The purpose of the lawsuit was more to get subpoenas out there to some of the Internet providers and get the identities of the worst abusers of this so that we could then turn them over to law enforcement. Because law enforcement, especially in Milwaukee, kept telling us, like, if they we don't have identities, we have nothing to go on. So we decided to try and do their jobs for them and take matters into our own hands. That lawsuit, because we were going after Cloudflare, the hosting provider I mentioned earlier, trying to get them to cough up information on their customers. Cloudflare's place is based in California. So a judge in California decided that not only was the anonymity of the people trying to murder us more important than our physical safety, but also decided that we should have to pay their legal fees.

[Julian Morgans]

What. What the hell? What is. What could possibly be the. The legal basis for that decision?

[Patrick Tomlinson]

Incompetence and stupidity. The on. On the part of basically everyone involved. If we knew then what we know now, we would have approached the lawsuit differently. We would have filed in federal court instead of state court. We would have. There's other things that we would have done. But this is all fairly new law, and it's. It's kind of untested. And, you know, there aren't many lawyers have much experience with it, much less success with it, which is how we ended up being on the hook for $83,000 to the people who have repeatedly tried to get a shot in our own homes.

[Julian Morgans]

I mean, this is just such a nightmare. I'm sure you've heard it described many times as a Kafkaesque nightmare, but there's just no off ramps from this thing. All right, so I understand there's some obscure sort of early Internet law that means that you can't identify people. Can you just walk me through that?

[Patrick Tomlinson]

I can't remember the name of the law, but this is something called Section 230. It's a US law. It doesn't apply outside of the US but the idea behind it is that websites and platforms such as Facebook, such as Twitter, are not responsible for the content created by their users. And so, like, if someone goes on Twitter and posts my home address and says, I'm going to kill you, which they have done. We can't sue Twitter for that threat. And Twitter is not actually obligated to give up the information on that user to us, at least not in civil court. Trying to tackle this yourself is, it turns out, through legal avenues is nearly impossible. And a lot of that's because of the way the laws were written 15 to 20 years ago, when no one really knew what the Internet was or what it was going to develop into. Mm.

[Julian Morgans]

Yeah, Just these antiquated systems trying to deal with these really modern problems. Surely it's changing. I like to think it's changing. Have you observed change while you're dealing with this?

[Patrick Tomlinson]

We've. We've observed change in the wrong direction. And there was a Supreme Court decision a couple of years ago that made it even more difficult to hold people accountable for their online harassment.

[Julian Morgans]

God. Okay, okay. So, all right. I mean, obviously this lawsuit was a total flop, and you're on the hook for what, $80,000?

[Patrick Tomlinson]

Yep. Little. Little bit of a flop. But, like, our case was Never heard, like, our evidence was never seen. It never got to the point even where we were able to say, hey, this is what's happening to us in front of a court. The judge just said, yeah, this is, this is all happening. This is all terrible. But my hands are tied with the laws. The law is what it is.

[Julian Morgans]

All right, so why don't you just leave the country, leave Milwaukee, go to a place that doesn't have much Internet, you know, a rural third world country.

[Patrick Tomlinson]

Silencing me is the ultimate goal of these criminals. They, you know, I have. I have a voice on the Internet. Not a huge one, you know, but I've got 60,000 followers on Twitter. You know, I've got 15,000 on Blue sky or whatever. They don't like my political takes. They don't like me exercising my First Amendment rights. They don't like my voice. They want to silence me, and I'm not going to give them that.

[Julian Morgans]

I mean, I'm just playing devil's advocate here, but does that make you the perfect target because you fight back and are therefore fun to play with?

[Patrick Tomlinson]

I think that the particular mental illness and compulsion that these people have makes it so that someone like me doesn't have a choice but to fight back. Yeah.

[Julian Morgans]

Yeah.

[Patrick Tomlinson]

If I, if I want to continue with any sort of a public life, if I want to continue a career as an author, this is like, I don't have a choice.

[Julian Morgans]

How has your relationships with your friends and family been affected by this?

[Patrick Tomlinson]

It's been incredibly straining. Can't lie. You know, I've lost friends over this. Not because they blame us or think that we're actually responsible for these things, but just because it's too much and they see what's happened to us and they don't want to get. They don't want to be the next target. That may be something that I should have explained a little bit better earlier is that, you know, my wife and I and our family are not the first targets of this group. They latched onto us, but they've existed for more than a decade already, this Opie and Anthony fandom community. And after the show broke up, they started just randomly picking their own targets. There is a comedian here named Patton Oswalt, and his first wife died a few years ago. He then later remarried. Now Patton is a very left leaning, very progressive voice in comedy and they hate him for that. And so this group decided that they were going to attack him and try and ruin his career. And they tried to start the Internet rumors that he had murdered his first wife because he was cheating on her with his next woman and that she needed to die so that he could marry her instead, which is absurd. But Patton Oswald, he's got millions of followers. He's a big personality, he's a big success, he's a big comic. He's, he's too big for this group because he has, he has money, he has resources. He's got more than enough fans that are going to push back and say this is ridiculous. So they moved down the scale after that because they had been used to going after people like Howard Stern. But that was when they still were running under the auspices of this Opie and Anthony show. So when they kind of fizzled out getting anywhere with Patton Oswald, they recalibrated and they started going after smaller names. They went after a trans woman adult performer named Sue Lightning, of course, because she's trans. Their next target was a singer songwriter out of Portland named Logan Lynn. He was an out and very proudly gay man, which of course they hate trans people, they hate gays, they hate Jewish people, they hate anybody who Nazis hate, which is one of the reasons they hate me, because I stand up for all of those people. And so they started going after this songwriter named Logan Lynn and they would call like venues that he was going to be performing at that he was scheduled to perform at. They would call venues pretending to be the parents of a 10 year old boy that he had raped at the last show and getting his, you know, getting his shows canceled, doing the same thing, like if with any other musicians that he was collaborating with. And you know, like some of those musicians knew that was bullshit, but they just couldn't, they would back out anyway because they didn't want to risk the public backlash or even just a whiff of being associated with anything like that. And this went on for Logan for over a year. In fact, his whole situation was written up in people magazine around 2017 or 2018, like right before they switched over and found us. So like, if they weren't doing this to us, or if they had succeeded and gotten my wife and I murdered by the police, or succeeded and driving me into such a deep depression that I killed myself, they would have simply moved on and done this to somebody else. And perhaps that person would have had even the fewer resources, even a weaker support network, or maybe they had, you know, maybe they would have had mental illnesses that they were themselves trying to work through and they were more vulnerable than and less robust than my wife and I have been in our responses. They Very well could have killed someone by now, just as they. Just as Kiwi Farms has done. That is the ultimate goal of these people. They want to kill someone because it would be so fucking funny.

[Julian Morgans]

Oh man, it is so twisted. It is so dark. What I'm trying to figure out while you're telling this story, like, is this a very weird byproduct of just sort of American politics and American culture as it's in its sort of most fractured form right now? Or is it like this sort of Internet thing? It's like, how do you place this?

[Patrick Tomlinson]

You know, it's. It's difficult to pare down exactly what it is, but I mean, most of these people are based in the US but not all of them. We know that there's at least one Canadian, we know there's a couple of Brits, and we know that there's an expat American currently living in the Philippines anyway. But it very closely mirrors something that happened here in the US about a little over a decade ago called Gamergate. There was a woman here, and I don't remember her name off the top of my head, but she was a video game journalist and she gave a favorable review to a game that happened to be coming from a studio of someone she was romantically involved with. And this sparked like this crazy backlash amongst this whole incel group attacking her for like, you know, giving a good review just because she's sleeping with one of the developers or whatever. And I mean, she was mercilessly attacked and stuck, stalked. And then it expanded out to. To include other people and these sorts of like online anonymous gang stalking circumstances, I think really were born out of that because that became the playbook, you know, that's when they started figuring out all the different ways you could fuck with somebody anonymously online on such a widespread scale into the degree of the severity and the volume of it. Yeah, that the Gamergate really became the model for so much of how the far right is manipulating online spaces now with its armies of bots, with its. All the propaganda and the attempt to silence voices from the other side and drive them off the Internet so that they own the complete battle space and it's being funded. The website that is dedicated to stalking us. And a lot of the things that they've done to us, like, it takes money. It takes a surprising amount of money. Like the. The whole swatting thing, for example. Like, we came to find out later that they may have done it themselves in the beginning, but then they offloaded risk by hiring an online swat for hire service. So there was this, it was called Tor Swats. It was on telegram and for as little as 50 to 70 bucks a pop, this 17 year old kid would swat whoever you wanted. And they paid him dozens and dozens of times. So it's like the money's coming from somewhere. These people have physically stalked us across countries like we were in Scotland a couple of years ago for something called worldcon, which is a big sci fi and fantasy literary convention. It's where the Hugo awards are given out. I attend most years, but this was the first time that I actually flown overseas for one. And one of them flew to Scotland with his kid so that he could, he could take spy pictures of me. Zoomed in as much as he could, leave flyers accusing me of pedophilia all over the convention. He flew across an ocean to stalk me and my wife just to do

[Julian Morgans]

that, just to do this son with his.

[Patrick Tomlinson]

With his son. Yeah.

[Julian Morgans]

That is such bad parenting. What an atrocious role model. Hey, this bit of music means it's time for an ad break. But please don't go anywhere. We'll be right back.

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[Julian Morgans]

So like where is it at right now? You know, it's been going on for years and years. What's been happening this week.

[Patrick Tomlinson]

I mean, they continue to, I'd mentioned this Jackie's academy earlier. They continue harassing her, you know, while impersonating me and harass other black creatives. It's getting innocent people who think they're defending her, who think they're defending a black woman to attack me online, to send us threatening texts, to send us threatening, you know, voicemails, you know, like more than one person has threatened Physical violence against us.

[Julian Morgans]

Do you think that this will ever end?

[Patrick Tomlinson]

This will end as soon as the criminals responsible are arrested and imprisoned. It will not end before that. This has consumed their entire personalities and worldview. They are nothing outside of this clinical obsession with destroying my life. They can't stop. It's been seven and a half years. Every day we've not gotten one day off.

[Julian Morgans]

This has obviously changed your life, but has it changed you?

[Patrick Tomlinson]

Probably. I'm probably a little less trusting and quicker to anger than I used to be. It has, however, hardened my resolve to continue fighting for the causes that I believe in, fighting for the politics that I believe in, because that's what they want to silence. That's what they want to end, so that they can just go and attack the next person.

[Julian Morgans]

What advice would you offer someone who maybe they're getting a bit of heat on some sort of obscure racist forum somewhere? Like just at the very start of what could potentially snowball into your journey? What advice would you offer them?

[Patrick Tomlinson]

I mean, you know, block as often as you want. There's no harm in just telling someone who's operating in obviously bad faith that you don't need to converse with them anymore. But other than that, I, I really hate to say it, but like, this can happen to anybody. They pick their targets randomly. With this particular group, you're going to be at more risk that. I mean, I'm kind of the outlier in a way because, you know, I'm not trans, I'm not gay, you know, like, I'm a boring straight white male. But, you know, members of all those groups are more susceptible, more likely to be targeted by these people because the people responsible for all this stuff, they're almost exclusive. There's no left wing version of this. They're all right wingers, they're all fascists, they're all Trump supporters. So guess who they're usually going to be going after?

[Julian Morgans]

How are you not tired? You seem angry and it doesn't seem like you've been beaten by this. How is that possible?

[Patrick Tomlinson]

I don't get tired. That's it.

[Julian Morgans]

I do. I'm impressed. I get very tired at a certain point. I think if this had happened to me, I'd be like, fuck it, you know, whatever. I'm just tired.

[Patrick Tomlinson]

Oh, sure, it's. It's exhausting and I'm tired of it happening. But if they think they're going to outlast me, they're insane.

[Julian Morgans]

Wow, that's cool. So what have you learned from this?

[Patrick Tomlinson]

I've learned Just how fucking evil some people can be. I've learned that systems of justice are not what I thought they were. You know, I used to. I used to think that they were imperfect but were generally well meaning. And now I know that they're actually actively harmful in an awful lot of ways. I think that now my wife and I have a view of the police and of the justice system that most middle class white people are insulated from because they never have to interact with it in the way that we have, but that other people, other races, other, you know, less advantaged socioeconomic levels and have probably been trying to tell us this whole time and we didn't hear it, but now we have. And so now when those people speak, like when Black Lives Matter was coming out, you know, we joined all of those protests, we joined all of those marches. We were ready to shelter people in our home if need be. We show up more than we ever did. Now I think that we've learned just how big the problem actually is systemically.

[Julian Morgans]

Patrick, this has been fascinating. It's been fascinating, but it's a really terrifying look into the abyss, I think.

[Patrick Tomlinson]

Yeah. Don't stare too long at it.

[Julian Morgans]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, thanks for taking us through it.

[Patrick Tomlinson]

Thanks for having me on. Thanks for exposing more people to our story.

[Julian Morgans]

What It Was like is produced by Rachel Tuffery. This episode was edited by Ellie Dickey, who also does our research. Our cover art is by Rich Akers. Our theme music was produced by Jimmy Saunders. And this whole thing has been a super real production.

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[Patrick Tomlinson]

ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend.

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In uptown New York City, underdogs created a sound that changed music forever.

[Patrick Tomlinson]

And we called it salsa.

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And one label captured that sound like no other Fania Records. I'm Rosie Perez and this is our thing, the birth of salsa in Nueva York, an original podcast from Futuros Studios premiering May 26. Follow wherever you get your podcasts.

[Patrick Tomlinson]

ACAST helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acest.

[Julian Morgans]

Com.