I just had the most frustrating experience with a local deputy sheriff who was here to take a report about a stalker troll I have on Twitter. And the most frustrating part wasn’t that he never took a report.

I’ve had a vile nuisance of a troll for well over a year now, someone who has hundreds of accounts and who I’ve had suspended at least 50-100 times. He’s bigoted, racist, anti-Semitic, misogynistic, very conservative and very sick. He targets liberals, mostly women, and often more than once a day from each new account.

I’ve had well over 150 exchanges with Twitter about him, and they claim all they can do is suspend his accounts. They say they cannot block him. Here’s the email they sent me:

IP addresses are commonly shared by numerous different users in a variety of locations. Blocking a single IP, therefore, may prevent a large number of unrelated users from logging in to Twitter. In addition, IP addresses are easy to change and any blocks can be easily circumvented by logging in from a different location, a third-party service, or one of many free websites or applications.

Because IP blocking is generally ineffective at stopping this kind of behavior, and may falsely prevent legitimate users from accessing our service, Twitter doesn’t block individual IPs in situations like this.

If you notice similar behavior in the future, please feel
free to file a ticket and reference this ticket number, and we can
investigate the situation.

Meantime, I’ve taken screen grabs galore, but each time I do, I’m forced to go to his profile page and see the hard core porn, racist images and messages, homophobic porn, defecation photos, Nazi images, and attempts to impersonate celebrities (all progressives), even using my avatar for his, and including posting a request in his bio for help in finding out my real identity and other personal information.

Last June I had a female deputy come over and take an incident report to start a paper trail on this freak. She told me to call her again if the harassment continued, so I did, but got no response (it turns out they have a new system and she never got the messages). So today I called once again, and a male deputy was sent over.

This deputy was nice enough, but he had no idea what Twitter was, had never used any social media, and was more interested in my career highlights than learning about the miscreant in question. 

When I showed him my 30 or so very, very offensive screen grabs, he thought Rachel Maddow, Roseanne Barr, Lizz Winstead, George Soros, and Chaz Bono– who Troll Guy uses for his profile photos in different accounts– were the person I was reporting. He had no idea who they were, and didn’t understand the gist of my complaint at all, despite my repeated attempts to simplify things for him.

The conversation kept drifting back to where he could hear me on the radio. When I told him I was either online or on KTLK (L.A.’s one progressive station), he asked if KTLK was NPR. When I explained what KTLK was all about and that I was a liberal talk show guest, his response was, “Too bad.” Then he listed the 5 or 6 conservative stations he listens to.

He was completely unfocused, had an IQ of about 50, his eyes kept gazing aimlessly off into Dumb SheriffLand, and he appeared to have no idea why I was concerned. He eventually asked me what “other celebrities do when this happens.”

I counted to ten in my exploding head and explained that I’m not really a celebrity, that others do what I do (report, block), and that I decided it was time to take action and needed his help to do that. That got his attention for about 30 seconds.

Finally he suggested the one thing, the one intelligent thing, the one useful bit of advice of his entire visit: Wait until Monday and call the female deputy who took the original report. He promised me he’d give her my message personally.

Welcome to my world.