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So in my last post, I noted that A Voice for Men’s excitable founder Paul Elam was threatening to dig into the lives of alleged “yellow journalists” he thinks have libelled him in an effort to discover the alleged “skeletons in [their] closet[s].”
Unfortunately, he’d deleted the post in which he gave the details of this new, er, initiative, so I couldn’t give more details.
But now one helpful We Hunted the Mammoth reader, Alice Sanguinaria, has dug up the Google cache of his original post, and has conveniently saved an archived version of it.
So here are some highlights of that post — that is, some of the things that Elam decided he probably shouldn’t actually be saying in public.
After starting off his post by complaining that “many, many bloggers, mainstream ‘journalists’ and major publications have chronically lied about and fabricated defamatory stories” about him and his pals, Elam went on to make some highly charged accusations against some of these writers.
The first name on his list: Jeff Sharlet, the author of a highly unflattering GQ portrait of Elam and his AVFM cohorts.
GQ writer Jeff Sharlet recruited a pedophile and inserted him at ICMI 14 in order to cast us in a horrific light. He also brought a young woman in to attempt to sexually entice a member of AVFM’s staff into a compromising position so he could write from that angle. This is not allegation, it is fact.
Elam offered no evidence whatsoever to back up these alleged facts, which appear utterly ridiculous on their face.
He also deliberately took a statement by Dan Perrins way out of context in order to defame him.
Here’s the statement Elam is evidently referring to, as Sharlet presented it in his GQ piece:
For Dan Perrins, one of the security black shirts, it was the day he ended up in jail, after he says he lodged a complaint against his ex, the beginning of a legal battle that led him to a hunger strike. “I should have killed the bitch five years ago,” he tells me. “I’d be out by now.”
I would be interested in seeing the “context” that Elam evidently thinks will make this statement smell better.
Elam continued with somewhat less lurid accusations against two other writers, charging Buzzfeed’s Adam Serwer with “blend[ing the] claimed woes” of former family members “with a pack of lies and us[ing] that to disparage me on Buzzfeed,” and Mother Jones’ Mariah Blake of doing “a complete con job … cherry picking everything she could in order to paint a false picture of myself and Warren Farrell.”
And then Elam, warming to his subject, laid out what he had in mind for these writers and others he feels have wronged him in print and online.
So far, we have only responded to all this treachery with refuting the material written about us on our page. This was far more civil than these people AND THEIR ENABLERS deserve.
In the months ahead we will be teaching some of these people, all that we can, a lesson or three about what happens when you go too far in provoking the wrong people.
So, you can bet right now that if Jeff Sharlet, Mariah Blake, Adam Serwer and a whole lot of other people have dirt in their backgrounds, we are going to dig it up and spread it around like gonorrhea in a whorehouse.
That goes for their family members and embittered exes as well. Two can play at that game and it is our turn.
Oh, but he wasn’t done. He also claimed he would go after
every employee, especially senior management, at publications like Mother Jones, GQ, Buzzfeed, Washington Post, Time Magazine, The Houston Press, Maclean’s Magazine, and many more.
And why stop there? Elam then threatened to bring his crusade not only to “[t]hose who have libeled us, or work for a publication that has libeled us” but also to “everyone they know,” whom he declared “fair game for a fair and certain return of what they have dished out.”
That’s right: everyone they know.
How exactly Elam figures that someone who happens to know someone who works for Time magazine, say, could possibly be held responsible for anything in that magazine is not exactly clear.
Elam went on to promise that “[u]nlike them, we will only print what we can prove,” a claim that seems rather dubious given AVFM’s long and unglorious track record with “proof.”
He then claimed to have connections to “some people with real reach” who would be able to bring his alleged “proof” to the world.
He ended with a virtual declaration of war:
We have tolerated this abuse for far too long. We are done playing nice with miserable, lying hacks.
And this creepy coda:
Now I can go on to have a fantastic day.
Apparently Elam gets quite a boost from threatening to ruin the lives of people who happen to know people who happen to know people he doesn’t like.
But this boost doesn’t seem to have lasted long. With even some of his supporters suggesting he was going too far, Elam deleted his post and replaced it with an apology of sorts, though he didn’t actually take back any of the accusations he had made.
Luckily for us, Google remembers what Elam would like everyone to forget.
For all his rabid spittle-foam about “Libel” that isn’t libel, he’s going to get his arse pinned to the legal wall for that “Recruited a paedophile!” (that Paulie Boy openly agrees with and happily welcomed into his treehouse…) bit of actual libel.
Oh boy. That’s either going so pear-shaped as to put Elam (at least) in the poorhouse (if not prison), along with anyone who helps him, or (if they merely stick to what they can prove), nowhere.
Assuming he actually tries to dig up dirt; and someone engages in hacking to try and dig up info, game over when the money Mother Jones, or time, or even Buzzfeed has to pay lawyers comes into play.
That, and (in all probability) the feds, because that’s gonna be an interstate violation.
Because threatening people who point out what you really are is TOTALLY a way to win friends and influence people. =__=
I’m genuinely surprised Elam didn’t threaten to dig up dirt about you and your cats.
Can we please put this terrorist in jail now?
It’s hilarious that Paul thinks he’s so important that anyone would actually recruit a pedophile to take him down. And what does it say about them that they can be tricked into accepting a pedophile with open arms anyway? By making this claim, all Paulie is doing is reminding everyone that MRAs think raping little girls is okay. It also doesn’t say anything to good about MRAs that they regard an attractive woman as rape bait.
Wow I’ve never seen someone go after Canada’s own Mcleans Magazine before – this guy must really be desperate
It’s the last gasp for AVFM. I hope he goes ahead and attacks people who have resources and are expecting it. Let AVFM expend the rest of its waning energy sniping at untouchable enemies. Very good.
I’ve seen a few of the martyr pieces he writes after the threatening ones. I wish he’d dump another one of those online — they are really fun to read.
Those photos of Paul Elam:
(left) Dangerous hitchhiker; (right) Halloween mask
It’s stunning that he thinks those photos lend him credibility.
I think it’s funny that he clearly imagines that he can dig up meaningful dirt on INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISTS that will make them squirm. i mean…I doubt he can play with the big boys and girls :-p
The Men’s Human Rights activism is strong with this one, oh yeah!
Will he punish three generations of a family, for one family member’s “crimes”? You know, like they do in North Korea?
This guy seriously needs to chill. Perhaps with the money he has bilked from his followers, he can move to Colorado and obtain a steady supply of weed.
@CCD
Finally, a sensible suggestion for Paul Elam!
And this is to serve the cause of Men’s HUMAN Rights™ how, again?
What I’m hung up on is: how do you go about hiring a pedophile anyway? I mean, most of the open pedophiles we see don’t exactly call themselves that, they come up with all sorts of justifications for why they’re not actually horrible people. How do you find one, say “Hey, if you go to this thing and pretend to be one of those MRA types, people will think they’re horrible because you’re horrible, and we’d like that” and expect him to agree? How does that work?
I know I’m getting lost in the weirder little details of this man’s strange, strange mind, but seriously.
Rabid Rabbit: That was my big question, too. Not like you can just pop down to Pedophiles-R-Us.
Bina: about the same way everything else that they’ve done (or said they were going to do) so far has done so.
I realize he hates all women, but Pauly seems to have particular contempt for sex workers. I suspect erotophobia.
Jeff Sharlet is one of the best and most respected journalist/writers around. The other project he was working on last year involved interviewing gay men in Russia. I think he found the comparison between the actual oppression and danger the Russian gays were living with and the imaginary oppression the MRAs whine about rather striking.
no doubt one of his cronies will be videoing him yet again, revealing his absolute indignation..
I love how they all video each other to try and give themselves an air of importance!
Nobodies dreaming of being somebodies…
Over bloated ego’s should be burst with a very sharp pin wherever you may find them!
I don’t know whether to be thankful or sad that David wasn’t mentioned here. I mean, David’s “libeling” him by quoting huge chunks of his articles and linking directly to them like every other day!
It is at this point that I would like to beg everyone’s indulgence and request your most delicious recipes for popcorn, because I will need lots if this goes the way I think it will.
First time commenting here, been reading/lurking for ages now tho. So firstly, ahoy everyone!
Secondly: what I found the most… I almost types “interesting”, but that sounds too positive so I’ll go with “telling”, was Elam’s declaration that Sharlet “also brought a young woman in to attempt to sexually entice a member of AVFM’s staff into a compromising position so he could write from that angle.” It’s so telling because it reveals the assumptions on his part, about both Sharlet and about the young woman in question – of COURSE that’s why she was there, why else would he have brought her? What other purpose could she serve? And, naturally, if this nefarious plot succeeded and any AVFM staffer hit on her or made sexual advances or what have you, well, that’s her fault for SEDUCING him! Her very presence as an attractive woman is the problem, not the behavior of the men around her who choose to react that way.
He assumes everyone else thinks, and operates, like he and his MRA skeevewagon think and operate.
The use of declaring his targets are ‘fair game’, that is, that it’s allowable to use any means to punish them, including attacking them directly, pricks up my ears – it’s a favoured tactic of Scientology, for instance.
One of the hallmarks of totalist thought structures is that the leaders of the movement that created the believe that they are qualified to decide who does and doesn’t count as a human being. They cannot tolerate the idea of a reasonable person who disagrees with them, because their entire movement is built on the idea that their truth is obvious and comprehensive, and that those who believe it are better in some way than those who do not. This means that their opponents must be monsters.
Feminism is generally better in this regard, although totalist thought is by no means confined to the extreme right and there have been feminists who have built a little cult around their (invariably shitty) interpretation of feminism, such as Requires Hate in the sci-fi community.