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.
You know maybe we shouldn’t jump on the whole “he has mental issues” thing quite yet or even speculating that he might have them? Can’t we discuss this guy’s behavior without thinking he has a mental illness of some sort?
Again, he’s suspected to have been under the influence of something. There’s many psychoactive drugs out there that can produce this sort of behavior, like LSD, peyote, PCP, shrooms, what have you. LSD has been known to give people “god complexes” in particular.
@portlantonio
Yes, portlantonio, you really shouldn’t have argued with anyone about using ableist language.
Let me tell you something: When I was in middle school, one of my friends happened to have a brother with down syndrome. I happened to be an avid user of the word “retarded” back then (unfortunately). When my friend explained to me how it upset her that I used that word, I stopped. It didn’t hurt me or made me angry or anything because there’s plenty of other words to use to describe stupid things. I haven’t used the word sense…except for this instance, so there goes my decade without using it.
While you may not mean to say something in true malice–obviously I wasn’t trying to put down her brother or anyone with down syndrome–that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt people. And while we might not like having your words “policed” or whatever, we should just shut up and not use whatever word a person says we shouldn’t use without any sort of grumbling. We should be respectful of people, and if they ask us to not use certain words, we should listen and heed out of the basic respect of other human beings.
Also, I agree with the whole “acid” part, like I’ve said before.
Drugs are bad, mkay?
@PolicyOfMadness
Being mad is, in some ways, a lot like being drunk: a drunk person may become less careful of social norms and their actions may be more exaggerated, but the basic personality doesn’t change. A person who isn’t inclined to go on a gun spree when sane is not likely to go on one when insane. A person who isn’t inclined to treat women like objects when sane isn’t likely to do so when insane.
This idea has come up a few times here before this, and while I know we want to move away from mad people as sadistic horror film villains I dislike it. Saying that when mad people do bad things, it’s because they are bad, is placing an unfair burden on people who often grapple with terrible regret when they recover.
I hate the way I act when I’m depressed, and struggle to control it. My father has a much more severe condition and did some terrible things to us when children – yes, he probably had some conflict feelings about having the responsibility of children that fed into his delusions and subsequent actions, but so do most parents. He wasn’t able to repress those ideas or counter them with rationality and memories of the good things.
My latest comment is in moderation. I suspect it’s because I used a certain word that isn’t used politely in a story for the reason I don’t use that word anymore. It’s for you portlantonio so be ready to see it.
Mmmkay. And I bet that the word “satire” is somewhere in this manifesto as well. It usually crops up as a part of unholy trinity of Freeze Peaches.
Nobody here is qualified to diagnose True over the internet, and we don’t know for sure whether drugs were involved. Speculation adds nothing to this discussion.
I agree with Wicked Witch of Whatever – it’s like the Katie Hopkins debacle. It’s not so much about what’s going on inside her nasty little brain, or what her motivations are for writing the appallingly hateful things she does… it’s about why the hell she has the attention of a major publishing platform and such a large audience.
The pendulum has swung WAY too far for my tastes.
Initially most if not all of us were in agreement calling people r-tards was super uncool as was attributing violent behaviour like school shootings to developmental disorders and it wouldn’t be tolerated here. That is all very reasonable.
Now what we’re seeing is people being chided for pointing out detachment from reality in anyone who displays bad behaviour. Not attributing dreadful behaviour to mental illness but merely pointing out, in addition to engaging in dreadful behaviour for which they’re responsible, someone displays detachment from reality.
And that’s a crock of shit.
Mentally ill people aren’t less human than anyone else and are every bit as capable of doing harm as the rest. Pointing out that someone who behaves dreadfully also displays detachment from reality isn’t the same as attributing their bad behaviour to mental illness or absolving them of responsibility for being a jackass. Suggesting someone’s thinking or behaviour may be influenced by mental illness is where things start getting iffy but even that isn’t inherently oppressive towards people with mental illness.
Can we PLEASE have some balance here and not go nuclear every time a literal case of displayed detachment from reality comes up and someone points it out? We are all capable people here. We can tell the difference between pointing out that, gosh, this person seems quite detached in their thinking and dismissing someone, calling them an r-tard or absolving someone of responsibility on the basis they’re a loon and clearly don’t know what they’re talking about.
I think, I understand, what he is trying to achieve. We see white guys being successful with shit like True performed: Eminem, Marylin Manson. They earn millions with this and despite what is usually claimed it is not only their artistic persona. Eminem threatened his girlfriend with a gun once! So I don´t think True is crazy.
I’ve stayed out of the ableism discussions because there are others here who are more knowledgeable and better at expressing my general opinion. I’ve loved the contributions of PussyPowerTantrum and Policy of Madness on this subject. I also generally agree with what David is saying in this thread.
I think the following should be a non-controversial statement (but it probably isnt?): While misogyny is not a symptom of mental illness, surely mental illnesses do have some symptoms.
I still think we should refrain from speculating on people’s mental health, though.
I was in respite care with a woman who had pronounced schizophrenia. She talked a lot like this guy writes.
Only she was pretty much lovely apart from her firm belief I was hiding cigarettes from her.
Rugby players are often large, come in groups of twenty plus, and are very good at smashing people. The man has no self preservation, clearly.
Yes, there’s a lot of possibilities here, whether he has a mental illness, or he’s a troll using his bizarre behavior as a cover, or he’s on drugs, or he’s coming down from drugs. Meth in particular can cause bizarre behavior like this at the end of a binge. HOWEVER, given that he is a self-professed troll, and given that he’s spoken of wanting to launch a career in the limelight, I’m giving everything he does the good old side-eye. Right now we have more questions than answers, and IMO good old Occam’s razor cuts him down to being a troll.
With that being said, a few things being said bother me;
A. Being angry at those wishing that he gets help. He doesn’t need to be mentally ill to be helped by a professional. Professionals can help literally EVERYONE, and in fact, literally EVERYONE has some issue that would benefit from talking to a professional about. The idea that only “crazies” can benefit from therapy is one of the worst myths out there today.
B. Assuming that everyone with a mental illness thinks just like you, or that people with the same mental illness have the same symptoms at the same severity level as you. Admittedly, I do this as well, and it’s not one of my better traits.
C. This issue isn’t black and white.
As was said earlier, mental illnesses don’t make you evil, but they’re not a badge of innocence either. And as much as they affect thinking, thinking affects them. The lessons and beliefs of entitlement that this guy was TAUGHT affect the rest of his mental health. In this is way he’s no different than that guy who shot himself in the buffet. And in fact, I actually have a lot more sympathy for the guy in the buffet because his a tons don’t scream of trolling.
There’s not a clear line between sanity and insanity, and being mentally healthy and being mentally sick. To some level, these are abstract concepts that are open to interpretation.
So why do I suspect True of being a troll. For ONE example, let’s look at some of True’s words themselves.
“The actions that I performed outside of Pancho’s classes were, to me, tame. … 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.”
Yeah, uh-huh. No-one , including women, or “white DMABs”, could get away with half of what True was doing. Seems to me that this could be a dog whistle making fun of straw feminists here; or more specifically the straw feminist idea that white males can behave with unrestrained aggression and avoid trouble for it. I’ve seen MRAs make an easy straw man out of this, as it’s obviously false to anyone over the age of 6. Truth is, reality is obviously much more nuanced when it comes to white male privilege.
His out of character use of awkward social justice language is just the cherry on top showing that, sane or not sane, he’s probably a least partially in this for the lulz.
Sounds like yet another ignorant type guy who wants to be part of academic life but mistakenly believes that he can fake his way to being an intellectual by regurgitating jargon he doesn’t really understand and by being a huge blowhard. He doesn’t want to put in years of reading heavy books and performing difficult assignments in order to earn his laurels, he wants his laurels up front because he thinks he can do Dr. Savery’s job better than Dr. Savery because J.T. is too ignorant to realize yet just how ignorant he really is.
I don’t doubt for so much as a second that this guy’s reveling in the trolling he’s committing.
He also appears completely detached from reality.
Remember “Jace Connors” and how a surprising number of people here, even David, felt comfortable discussing his mental health? And how it turned out he was faking the whole thing?
I think that whatever the situation in his head he has clearly decided to be the uber provocateur, and with such childish posturing the best thing to do is to ignore it!
My sister plays amateur rugby. Those women aren’t necessarily big (some are, some aren’t), but they are tough, can most definitely be aggressive when needed (that’s kinda [part of] the point of the sport), as well as generally being assertive and don’t take crap from anyone. In that aspect, I’m glad it was a rugby team he decided to pick on, and I hope he got the reaction he deserved.
Can’t really comment on his previous strange activities or their causes, but he is just… so wrong, on so many things, in so many ways. Jeez.
(By the way, I don’t comment here much, which was why, the last couple of times I did, I used the handle ‘Penny’ I didn’t know there already was a regular named that. Changed now, so hope that’s alright.)
People writing manifestos are bad news.
I feel bad for Professor Pancho Savery. None of this is his fault and yet True picked him as his main target, disrupting his class and saying it was Savery who shaped his thinking. Meaning if True snaps even further, he will likely blame Prof. Savery for it.
It’s hard to tell if this guy’s just so neck-deep in internet hate culture that he’s unable to dig himself out of the sarcastic-ironic-dishonest-disingenuous stance that’s the default on 4/8chan.
I don’t see any contradiction between wishing he gets help and acknowledging that, even if he is mentally ill, he is also and separately a sexist and a creep. First of all, being mentally ill is not the same as being an asshole, but counseling can sometimes help someone change both of those things. I think it’s reasonable when someone is both ill and immoral to wish that someone intervene in their lives in a way which helps them become both healthy and helpful, unlikely though it mat be. “Get help” doesn’t even strictly specify help for mental illness; people who aren’t mentally ill go in for all kinds of counseling. If he was on drugs, he might benefit from some drug-related counseling (although he might not; not everyone who uses a street drug is dependent)
Second, I don’t think wishing that someone gets help implies that their bad acts wouldn’t have happened if they had. The impression I get from his writing is that the inside of his head is probably a pretty scary and upsetting place. I wouldn’t wish that kind of disordered thinking on anyone. Assuming that he’ll always be a sexist jerk, I still wish that someone can help him get to a place where he can be a sexist jerk who isn’t gripped by delusions about mind control. If he has a disorder or a drug habit influencing his behavior, then getting that under control *might* result in him being a sexist jerk more quietly on his own time and cut down on the most disruptive behavior, but even if it doesn’t make him treat the rest of us better, it’s still an inherent good.
Third and last, whether he “gets help” — or rather, whether there is an institutional interventions — is actually a foregone conclusion. He’s been arrested and charged with a serious crime. He may very well go to prison, but whether he does or not I’m certain he will be seen by a psychologist. Wishing he “gets help” in this context means wishing that whatever interventions happen to him, whether prison, inpatient treatment, outpatient counseling, drugs, or what have you, encourages positive rather than negative development.
@mrex, etc
Okay. So: yes, he might have some sort of mental illness. He might have been on drugs. He might be *willfully* detached from reality. He might be a completely lucid troll.
All of these things are possible. But… saying that “hey, *everyone* could benifit from getting ‘help'” is very much a misdirection from the fact that you probably wouldn’t tell someone acting “normally” that they should get help.
This is a website where we laugh at misogynists, not where we handwringing about their mental health. Because we can’t do anything about it, and it will hardly hurt society if *internet commenters* on a blog that makes fun of misogynists refrain from telling someone to get help. Or handwringing about how we hope he does.
@PussyPowerTantrum
If you’re leaving this comments section — I completely understand why, and do whatever you need to.
If you’re leaving the blog — I understand why you’d do that too, and I’ll miss you. Good luck!
Oops. That kinda turned into a teal deer. Sorry about that.
@Orion
Ah, I didn’t see your comment. I do agree that I hope whatever intervention he gets is positive rather than negative, but that can be done without all the handwringing.
Handwringing. Handwringing. I’ve said that word too many times; it’s stopped looking like a real word.
(Again, sorry for all the posts-in-a-row.)
Heartiste for Surgeon General. His total lack of medical/biological/reproductive knowledge make him perfectly qualified to instruct everyone on safe sex.
Mentally ill or no, everybody has a set of narratives they use to explain how the world works. Some are more accurate and useful than others. It’s telling that True, with his entitlement and grandiosity, his provocative nature and need for attention, and his pompous pseudo-intellectual writing style, gravitated naturally to the MRA belief system and adopted its gaslighting language and tactics. It says a lot about how accurate and useful the MRA narrative is, the type of person it attracts, and the behaviors it gives cover to.
It also says a lot about right-wing “journalism” that they elevate offensive assholes like this into folk heroes. They’ll uncritically repeat any story, so long as it confirms their prejudices. I doubt any of the freeze peach media champions are giving any airtime to his arrest on sexual assault charges.