The story of Jeremiah True — the Reed College student who made headlines last month as a self-proclaimed free speech martyr, and who was arrested last week for harassment and sexual abuse — only seems to get stranger the more I look into it.
The latest development: On Friday, True pled not guilty to charges that he groped two young women on a high-school Rugby team who were practicing in a Portland park; he remains in custody.
We now have some more details on what he’s charged with. The Oregonian newspaper has reported that
According to a probable cause affidavit filed in Multnomah County Circuit Court, True walked up to and caressed the hair and arm of a female who was among a team of students practicing at Normandale Park …
True walked off, talking to himself, but returned to the park about 30 minutes later and approached a 17-year-old female and touched her breast with his open hand, and make a remark about her chest, the affidavit said.
Several witnesses restrained True until police arrived.
Portland police Officer E. Lamonte Johnson said True’s pupils were constricted and he was responding irrationally to questions and appeared to be under the influence of a controlled substance… .
This is not the first instance of disturbing behavior from True since his story originally hit the headlines. In late March, he engaged in a bizarre series of protests against Pancho Savery, the Reed College professor who had banned him from class discussion sections for his disruptive behavior. These protests got him booted from campus.
Then last week, he posted a bizarre 114-page manifesto online in which, among other things, he declared himself “the most powerful man in the Free World.”
First, the protests. On March 30th, according to a detailed account in the Reed College Quest,
True sat on the floor at the front of Vollum Lecture Hall during Hum 110 lecture under the chalkboard which read: “Restore Jeremiah True to their Conference” and “Your hypocrisy is showing Dr. Savery.” True remained on the floor wearing earbuds and removed his shoes while Professor of English & Humanities Laura Liebman proceeded to lecture on Virgil’s Aeneid. At the end of the lecture, True yelled out “Cowards!” to the general audience.
Just before 10 a.m. that same day, True stood outside of Professor Savery’s Humanities 110 conference on the third floor of the Performing Arts Building. When Professor Savery and the Humanities students began class, True approached the glass windows of the class, looking at the class and staring into the room. According to Professor Savery, the students were “upset and disrupted” by his presence, and the class proceeded to lower the blinds.
True persisted, walking back and forth along the length of the glass wall, occasionally peering through the cracks in the blinds and into the classroom. Professor Savery says, “I think people [in the conference] made the decision to ignore him, so as to not let him take class away from them because they thought that had happened too many times. We tried to have a normal class and ignore his presence.”
True showed up outside Savery’s next class as well. One student told the paper that
“[True] was stalking back and forth by the floor-to-ceiling glass windows, aping and mimicking Pancho’s [the professor’s] gestures, glaring at Pancho, flapping his arms, and making strange theatrical movements. It was one of the worst conferences we had, and everyone was extremely quiet,” Garriss says, “If he was protesting, I don’t know who his audience was.”
School officials were called to the scene and asked True to leave; he did, only to return five minutes later. The next day, he was banned from campus pending the result of an investigation.
Last Wednesday, a day before his arrest, True posted a bizarre document that he described as “The Senior Thesis of Jeremiah True ‘18.” (True is a Freshman.) In it, he declared, among other things, that “[m]y controversial actions both online and offline have partly been a sociological experiment and partly been performance art.”
He described Prof. Savery as a “Clever Devil” and claimed that
Within this document, I will claim that Pancho ghost-wrote much of what I was saying, and I believe this to be true. While he did not directly aid me in writing any of this document or previous documents, I have adopted his philosophy on life so entirely that I fully consider myself to be the disciple of Pancho Savery and would bow down and worship him if he would let me. After I met Pancho Savery, I became a completely different person, and I don’t know how to explain it. I love Pancho like I love my family. He has put more faith in me than anyone in my life ever has. It has been by his power alone that I learned what it means to be a father, to be a teacher, to be a Reedie, to be a Black man, and to be a Philosopher-King.
After admitting that he had gone “too far with my protest of Pancho’s conferences,” he went on to say that
The actions that I performed outside of Pancho’s classes were, to me, tame. When I was warned that I was being disruptive, I was completely incredulous, as I had not been loud or naked, nor had I attempted to forcefully gain access to the classroom. I did not realize how low the bar was set at Reed for what constitutes disruption, and what constitutes threatening behavior, especially since I have observed White DMABs perform aggressive behavior without consequence.
DMAB stands for “designated male at birth.” I can only assume he is using the term sarcastically.
He claims that his disruptive behavior was a part of a deliberate if indirect plan intended to open a debate about free speech.
Rather than challenge a noteworthy scholar of the First Amendment [ie, Prof. Savery] , I instead chose to play upon the nation’s perception of Black men in order to foster the belief that I was disruptive in class. This was further reinforced by Dr. Savery’s insistence that I was disruptive in class and my numerous instances where I engaged in using profanity.
So far I’ve only read portions of the entire 114-page document, but what I have read veers wildly between lucid arguments and bizarre assertions; his thinking (as has been the case in his previous statements) appears highly disordered and grandiose.
In one of his most grandiose moments, he declares himself
the most powerful man in the Free World. Stop me. …
I am the God of MRA’s, Anti-feminists, Anti-Marxists, Libertarians, and White, heternormative men and women everywhere. I also claim that I am the God of Reed, as I have called forth miracles and created earthquakes in the student body. Kanye has nothing on my ego. Eminem thinks I’M his Rap God. … I am a misogynist and a misandrist, a racist, and a feminist.
Despite the jokes, he seems to take himself very seriously indeed, and to believe a good deal of his own hype.
I may return with more thoughts on his case once I’ve read some more of it.
Tweak this slightly, and it’s right out of the MRA “rape is what I say it is” playbook. Rape and harassment are always defined as something extreme, so that their behavior seems reasonable by comparison. True couldn’t possibly have been disruptive – there are literally only two possible ways to be disruptive and he wasn’t doing either one of them, so there! Case closed! It’s not like anyone died!
Also note the subtle victim-blaming. Reed College is just too sensitive and jumpy and hysterical, so naturally any accusation coming from the college will be false.
Incidentally, he has a GoFundMe to raise money for his candidacy for President of the United States:
http://www.gofundme.com/s6x77ync?fb_action_ids=1088036321210326&fb_action_types=og.shares
To complete the Hell Cabinet, he should put Paul Elam in charge of the Treasury, and make Roosh Secretary of State.
“All tax revenues go directly to me, to be used as I think best.”
That would put his “bang [insert country]” series into a whole new light.
@buttercup
Attorney General Cernovich?
Wow. I know we talk about misogynists seeming like that live in an alternate reality or something, but this dude takes the cake.
Also so much nope to the stories of him “protesting” and groping those young women. This dude has straight up terrorized people.
I’m not trying to change the conversation away from misogyny. I’m trying to understand what is going on with him, and I don’t think it’s helpful to ignore one possible explanation for *some* of what is going on.
Much of what he’s said and done is the sort of stuff we regularly see from MRAs, though perhaps in a more grandiose form. But when the police arresting him say, as they did, that he seemed completely detached from reality to the extent of having lost his sense of time, there’s obviously something beyond male entitlement going on here. It is not unreasonable to suggest that he might have been on drugs; it is also not unreasonable to suggest it might have been, say, mania.
His stuff about his professor “ghost-writing” his faux thesis could be deliberate and somewhat ironic overstatement; it could also be a real delusion.
I agree that this discussion is taking place “within a social structure that handles mental illness very poorly.”
But one of the ways in which this society handles mental illness badly is attributing symptoms of mental illness to drugs. I know someone who had a very scary manic episode — scary in the sense that he was endangering his own life and safety, not anyone else’s. At one point he ended up running from a police officer. The officer assumed he was on drugs. Luckily the officer brought him back to the hospital he had run from rather than arresting him, and my friend was able to get the help he needed.
Again, we don’t know what’s going on with Jeremiah True, but I don’t think we should rule out all talk of mental illness because some people other than us have shitty beliefs about mental illness. Mental illness is clearly NOT the whole story here but it could be a part of it.
That said, there’s not much we can say about the mental illness angle at this point other than “it might be part of the story.” His misogyny, the similarity of his bizarre beliefs and grandiosity with a lot of what we see from MRAs every day — these and other things relating to misogyny we CAN say a lot more about.
Janet Bloomfield can be secretary of defense (even though I think she’s Canadian?), she would just ISIS members or any opposing world leaders whores. Everyone knows that automatically wins any argument.
IDK if he has a mental illness when he appeared to be on drugs. He could have been doing all this shit when high, including writing that 114 page trip fest. Regardless we’ll problem know in the next few days whether or not he was having a mental breakdown and/or was just experimenting with some mind-altering substances. I think it was just drugs though. I mean, he IS 18 and a freshmen, possibly away from his parents for the first time and trying out things that he couldn’t access before. Too bad he’s also been dipping into this misogynistic bullshit at the same time.
Whatever is happening, I hope he, IDK how to word it properly, I hope he gets over it and moves on with his life, hopefully getting away from this MRA bullshit as well. He is 18 afterall, he’s practically a baby. (Although I guess I shouldn’t say that because I’m not even 23 yet, but I surely didn’t feel like or acted like an adult at 18.) Hopefully he’ll look back on this and think “what the hell was I thinking?”
At least nobody’s given True any money to encourage him so far. The AVFM honey badgers from this weekend went to their convention with a cool 9,000$ in funding for airfares, hotels, con tickets and the like. But more than just the numbers, it encourages hateful bigots to keep on doing what they’re doing. I think giving True money would encourage him to keep pushing the envelope in whatever way he thinks is most provocative.
TBF it sounds like there’s something psychiatric going on with True. I can’t believe he would have been admitted to Reed if this was the person he presented in his application. I’m not convinced that jailing him is the best way to hold him accountable, but I also have no idea what ought to be done when a promising student (that prof who had to ban him said he had talent) goes off the rails like this and starts groping high school students in public parks.
Just wanted to jump in to say great post, David. People are generally much too quick to try to conflate assholish behavior with mental health issues, but True is sprinting past “MRA douchebag” and toward “actual genuine disconnect from reality”.
And, I apologize if this starts another flamefest, because the last one was hard enough to read, but just because the vast majority of people with mental illness are not dangerous while having an episode, doesn’t mean there aren’t any who are. I met plenty while working the NGRI unit of a psych hospital. They were some of the nicest people I ever met while they were lucid, but were capable of pretty horrible things while they weren’t.
Damn, what a strong smell of gaslight…
No no, Janet Bloomfield for press secretary! Or maybe Veteran’s Affairs, since she’s writing a war novel and all.
Attila Vinczer should be Defense Secretary, as he is a master of the fighting arts and also, you know, DMAB. /sarcasm
Re the OP, I would be terrified if l were Pancho Savery or his loved ones. An erratic and grandiose person with an obvious axe to grind obsessively focusing on you is a scary place to be. It’s a relief that True is in custody, I just wish more people hadn’t had their day and peace of mind disrupted for this to happen. (Not saying he should have been preemptively arrested–I think Reed’s reaction to his harassment was proportional.)
Schrödinger’s Douchebag strikes again!
“It wasn’t serious! I was only disrupting the class and scaring people as performance art!”
Ugh. I feel sorry for anyone who had to sit through that. Nothing’s worse than having someone inflict suffering upon someone else for the sake of the aggressor’s ego.
Joining in on the “smooth jazz posting” to make myself feel better:
Slightly off topic: Has anyone else heard that old “I’d be your ally if you weren’t so mean!” argument?
I’ve been seeing it a lot recently on a tumblr I follow, and I went on a rant about it, but it was word salad because I was just so pissed off about seeing it again. : /
I hope he gets help before he escalates his behavior and really hurts people.
Wouldn’t they want Peter Andrew: Nolan (c) to be the treasury secretary? He knows all about those troy ounces of gold.
Who was the chicken charcoal guy? He could be agriculture.
Dean Esmay VP, Atila chief of staff. Allison Tieman as lead speech writer.
JB as press secretary is inspired. As is Roosh V for Secretary (Bang) State.
I would say Paul Elam would make a better Secretary of labor with WT Farrell as pres.
Paradoxy,
Yes, and I hate it! It seems to be most commonly given to feminists, likely because traditional gender roles dictate that women be nice and self sacrificing. But I also see it a lot from white people, even unfortunately, white feminists who dislike when POC aren’t sufficiently deferential to white feelings.
Ugh, as a member of the First Church of Christ Performance Artist, I am disgusted by True’s blasphemous use of the words “performance art” to describe his unacceptable behaviour. It smack of a hasty justification and makes profane the sacred mysteries of our church.
Real performance art has clearly defined parameters for length of duration, materials required, what is permitted, etc. It has a clearly stated purpose. If we are to judge True’s “performance” on its artistic merits, it’s still a piece of sh*t.
The guy definitely needs some psychiatric help. No idea exactly what for, but you know, even in the unlikely event he turns out to be a garden-variety dirtbag and yells “fooled you,” it can’t hurt, right?
I suspect that this guy needs some serious mental help. I agree with you, David 🙂
Fuck it, I can’t take this ableist bullshit anymore. I’m tired of explaining over and over and I don’t want to get upset or in a fight, so I’m gone.
Performance art is getting used as a catch-all for jerks, now, which is hugely sad because performance art can be amazing.
John Cage’s first showing of 4’33” was performance art.
Metzger’s auto-destructive art was awesome. Also a little sad, because some of those things were pretty, but at least they were rubbishified for a purpose!
Marina Abramovic’s performance art was sometimes touching and sometimes terrifying. Google her, if you don’t know who she is.
Nate Hill’s Death Bear is a little different, but…
Performance art doesn’t always have to be planned, but just trying to justify being a jerk via “but, but, but ART” is cruel to an entire field of awesome.
This article seems to address some of the things which have come to mind recently when reading about the Honey Badger stunt and Mr True in his own words:
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/philosopherszone/should-freedom-of-speech-apply-to-the-outrage-industry/6398072
It is also interesting to note that at one point, Mr True made the point that groping is not rape. It isn’t, but his recent actions, for which he has been arrested, are sexual assault.
Ooooppppssss. I meant reading some of Mr True’s manifesto, instead of Mr True in his own words.
I’m less interested in why True did what he did than why he got so much support for it initially. Whatever the reasons for harassing his class, it can’t have helped that he had a national newspaper treating him like a martyr. Its a bit like when famous leaders through history are diagnosed (either as mad or sane but scarred by their childhood or whatever) and even if it’s true and interesting, the important thing is how did one individual get the support from others to make a social impact.
David, I think you expressed what I was trying to express yesterday with a bit more eloquence. Regardless of the explanation for his behavior, it is rotten, and it’s mock-worthy as hell that even main-stream right wingers held him up as a martyr.
Having said that,
@policy of madness, I shouldn’t have argued with you yesterday. I don’t have any mental health issues myself, and I should have deferred to your experience and the experience of others here that found problems with what I said. I don’t have any idea the struggle that ya’ll go through. What you said about your experience with doctors, that would have never even occurred to me. Even if I felt I was right, I shouldn’t have persisted with something that so obviously upset folks as much as it did. That should have been a sign that something was off with what I was saying. I have a bad habit of losing an argument, or just plain being an ass and not acknowledging it unit later. Pride and all that.
Really, apologies.
As others have pointed out, his actions could be explained by anything.
I have a buddy who once decided to drop acid for, more or less, two weeks straight, and he eventually was hospitalized for a brief period.
He wrote some very troubling rants on facebook, probably, in total, about the same length as True’s, developed a bunch of weird political ideas etc. He didn’t ever hurt anyone though because that’s not the kind of guy he is, even when not seeing reality clearly.
So, yeah, maybe this guy’s experimenting with drugs. Maybe he has mental health issues. Maybe he really is doing “performance art.” Regardless of any of that, he’s an ass that assaulted a seventeen year old girl.