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| Angels and Saints I pray will protect me in dealing with Evil. |
Rustle League Attack
by Sue Basko
Nazi-inspired terrorism, from stalking to plans for murdering schoolchildren. Special Note to All the Concerned People Writing in: Yes, acts described in this post are crimes. The post does not get into detail about this since these are under investigation.
For over a month, from November 2012 through January 2013, I was attacked online and in real life by a neo-Nazi racist cyber terror group called Rustle League. My experience has been so horrifying that I want to warn others. I have located other victims. One victim has described the group as “an army of terrorists.” I concur. That victim was attacked so viciously that she has had severe problems from it – as I have also. She has been advised to get police protection. So have I. I have heard from several men at different Occupy groups that they are also being harassed and stalked by the Rustle League. Their experiences have been so terrifying that they are afraid to speak out.
I will explain briefly what the Rustle League group did to me. However, I know of other victims that have received phone threats and swatting, which is when police are falsely called to your home for an emergency, which can be extremely dangerous. The terrorizing tactics of the group are diverse.
In this article, I will not be giving the screen or real life names of the Rustle League, although these are now mostly known. At some point, I will most likely post those and I will make that information available to journalists. The situation is under investigation. I also will not give screen shots, although dozens exist, as do recordings of phone messages, a chat log, direct messages, and emails. Those are also available for journalists. All this evidence exists, but will not be shown here, for legal reasons. I also do not want to spread the filth created by this group to a further audience. It is best for it to remain unshown. There are also hundreds or thousands of eyewitnesses, as much of the harassment occurred online.
I had no previous contact or interaction with any of the attackers. I do not know any of them. Some of them were in my Twitter timeline and I noticed they were forming a group called Rustle League, the aim of which was to harass other people. The group calls it “rustling” someone’s “jimmies.” The group members seem to think stalking and threatening others is “funny.” The Rustle League is racist and anti-Semitic. They speak of their hatred often, and use Nazi symbolism and words, such as swastikas, their email of Hitler@Lowermyjews, pictures of Hitler, etc. I started blocking these people from my Twitter timeline, but at the time, I did not have my account locked, so they could still easily see it. After I locked my account, the Rustle League people created dozens of fake accounts that they tried to get me to allow as followers. These people are like cockroaches trying to sneak in every crack, so they can continue on with their nightmarish assault. They are the most hate-filled, useless scum I have ever experienced.
At some point in November, I received a few @ messages in my Twitter timeline, mentioning things about “jimmy” or “jimmies,” and giving cryptic messages I had no idea what they were talking about. I would block the senders. I had no interest in having anything to do with such immature and hate-filled people.
On Thanksgiving day, a young man known to some of the Rustle League members was arrested. He was somewhat known to me, also. The situation is complicated and cannot be explained here, but I had to become involved in assisting this young man get a public defender, which was not happening automatically at the jail. (Note: The young man is peaceful and loving, is not a Rustle Leaguer.)
Shortly after this, I noticed two forged documents being passed around online. Both forged documents were letters purportedly written by the father of the man I was assisting. One of the forged letters was the father rejecting his son. This was far from the truth, as the father cared very much about his son. The other forged letter was defamation of me, stating I was “full of shit” and saying the father hired me 5 months prior and fired me. In reality, I have never been hired by the father and 5 months before, I had never heard of him or his son. Also, the father, mother, and young man have all thanked me many times.
I wanted to know who forged these letters, who was passing them around online, and what on earth their motive was in interfering with me and this family. I also wanted to stop the defamation of me as a lawyer. At this point, I had no idea it was the Rustle League that had created the letters.
The forged letters came from a certain email address. So one evening, I posted on Twitter that forged letters had been sent from this email and asking if anyone knew to whom the email address belonged. This started an onslaught of attacks by the Rustle League and their associates that lasted over a month.
At that point, the Rustle League forgers could have owned up, said they were sorry, and taken the offensive letters off the internet. But they chose instead to engage in a shocking campaign of racist terrorism against me. You see, they decided I am Jewish and attacked me on this basis. I am not Jewish, but I am grateful, in a sense, that I got to experience a most horrifying anti-Semitic attack, because it gives me real insight into the things faced by Jews being attacked by anti-Semitic terror groups.
I received a chat log of the group, as they were responding to my query about the forged documents.
First, one person, with help from a few others, looked up personal information about me and posted it online.
Most of it is incorrect, but this does not make it any better or less offensive or less dangerous.
What kind of depraved person responds to an inquiry about forged documents by trying to endanger the victim further by posting personal information online? At the same time, the Rustle League posted terrifying death threats against me from several accounts. These were graphic death threats of knifings.
There was one death threat that included a photo of a bloody knife.
There was a death threat that included an address that they thought was my home address.
When they could not locate me at that address, they started trying to connect with me on Skype.
I blocked their accounts.
The Rustle League started a twitter account that was nothing but death threats aimed at me.
It was interesting and terrifying to read on the chat log the lack of morality of all members of the group, except for one who made mild objections. (He has tweeted that he is not a member of the Rustle League, yet he was in their chat room.) The other Rustle League members on the chat log agreed with this wrongdoing and participated in it. They thought it was fun, funny, they were ROFL.
Note: One reason it is so important to stand up to such defamer /bullies is because the lies they create stay on the internet. A while back, a crazy person started a smear campaign that I dislike autistic people. Like the Rustle League did, this crazy person stole my photos and used them to post her own ideas and attributed her tweets and blogs to me.
(There must be a DSM classification for this sort of madness, though legally, it is impersonation and cyberstalking.) In fact, I help run a blog written by an autistic man who is in prison, to give him voice and share his experiences. The blog has a solid following. This is his blog:
http://paulmodrowksi.blogspot.com) But the lies spread by the crazy person are still out there - and were even quoted by the Rustle League when they were dishing up "info" about me on the internet. See -- lies have a way of spreading and being cited as reality.
One sure way to know the Rustle League members and their associates are truly evil is that they have not removed their postings from the internet. Aside from the ones I had removed, the others remain. These demented individuals feel no shame in creating death threats and racist taunts and spreading defamatory lies, and neither remove them nor apologize. This lack of remorse is what shows they are darkly, deeply evil.
Then the same person who was posting my personal information online quickly started a campaign of lies and defamation against me. The lie was that I had in some way slighted the person’s sexuality. I had in fact done no such thing, had not in any way whatever even mentioned this topic. Soon, this hate gang had lots of hate-filled people posting tweets of vitriol and violence at me. Granted, the people posting these tweets at me were already known to be hate-filled convicted criminals or racist anti-Semites often charged up with anger at women, Jews, and Blacks. That is the kind of mob that follows the Rustle League. No one decent or normal would be associated with them.
In the weeks to come, during the continued attack against me by the Rustle League, I noticed that this technique is one they often employ: they pretend a person has made a statement and then they act all upset by it and begin to post defamation. They did this even to members of the public who posted messages on the Rustle Leagues' facebook pages where they promoted killing children, which I write about below. The Rustle League person pretends there has been a slight and then launches a defamation campaign against the person who supposedly made the imaginary slight. This is a technique of extreme manipulation geared to deflect the guilt to the innocent party and away from the wrongdoer. (Rustle League is an extremely evil, very tricky group.)
At this point, it was a few hours after I had inquired about who had created the forged documents, and in this short time period, the Rustle League attack against me included: posting my personal information, speaking and posting horrific anti-Semitic statements against me, lying that I had slighted someone's sexuality and stirring up an online mob attack against me, graphic violent death threats, stalking by skype, posting of hundreds of defamatory tweets, and creating several accounts full of defamation and death threats aimed at me. Reading the chat logs and tweets, one notes this group of sadistic racists found all of this “fun.”
The Rustle League then engaged in online harangues and harassment, attempts at flooding my email account using auto-sending, attempts to break into my email accounts, attempts to break into my Twitter account, etc. The Rustle League created various accounts using my name and photos, and used those to harass, defame, badger, and mock.
At no point did any of these deranged individuals state what their problem was. They simply hated Jews and wanted to torment one. (I am not Jewish. That makes no difference. Even if I were Jewish, of course, the things done to me were 100% wrong.) They are Nazis and I am perceived by them as Jewish, and that was all they needed to spend a month stalking, harassing, threatening, and defaming me.
The Rustle League created a Twitter account using my name and photo. It was anti-Semitic and horrifying. The background was the Israeli flag. The header was a piece of raw red meat, against which they placed my photo. They tweeted as if they were me, using my name and photo. They tweeted things I would never tweet. They tweeted: "I am a Jewish internet lawyer," and many other bizarre tweets meant to mock being Jewish. The followers of the account were the people who started it and some of the other racist Rustle League members. The other followers were fake profiles. The anti-Semitic twitter account managed to fool a few "real people" who followed it, apparently thinking it was me. How defamatory that people thought I would post such a page! Twitter really needs to change its policies and not only ban users who create such things, but should also do prompt and full police reporting.
When I got the Twitter page removed, one constantly belligerent young woman associated with Occupy Oakland, tweeted harassment at me about having it removed. Apparently, this sick woman thinks hate crimes are a right. This same belligerent young woman had also posted a tweet mocking me as "psycho" for saying I would block anyone that followed the account. Did this disrespectful person think I was supposed to gladly welcome anti-Semitism and hate aimed at me? Yes -- because she is full of anti-Semitism and hate and feels it is within her rights to torment Jewish people! In her world view, Jewish people should smile and stand silently while being attacked. Why the Occupy movement allows such a person in its ranks is beyond me.
Another young woman, who I know is deeply mentally ill and has a history of harassing people, was also involved with the Rustle League antics. This is typical: When a hate group starts, it gathers others, usually gathering those who are mentally ill or incapable of thinking clearly. That is because, of course, no other type of person would be associated with such a group.
Hate group actions are so dangerous because all participants in them are either fueled by hate or by lack of conscience and empathy, or by mental illness. None of this is good and all of it is horrifying to be the victim of it.
The Rustle League created a defamatory and bizarre you tube video “about” me. When I had this removed, three men called me late at night and left a threatening, terrorizing voice mail. The phone number was a cell phone belonging to one of the Rustle League members in Daytona, Florida. Receiving this terrorizing call was – terrorizing. I keep using that word, but it is the only word that is apt to the situation. I was terrorized. In the terrorizing late night call, the one doing most of the talking sounded drugged-up and psychotic – if psychosis has a vocal sound. “Deranged” is the only word that comes close.
I do not in any way want to minimize the horrors inflicted on the Jews in the Holocaust, but I do think I have tasted a hint of it. I have been stalked, terrorized, denigrated, endangered, defamed, traumatized -- and had mocking, belligerent young sadists tell me this is "fun."
One strange and bizarre thing the deranged people of the Rustle League kept repeating was that I was a “fake lawyer.” It was odd and I wondered if one of these sickos was someone that I had rejected as a client. I have no idea. I only accept clients who are good and kind, decent and fair. I spend time getting to know potential clients and understanding their goals and values. If a Rustle League type asked to be my client, they would be rejected. But I do not recall rejecting any of these people in particular.
Then, the week before Christmas, the Rustle League went over the top in its extreme campaign of hate against me. There had been a tragic mass killing of school children at Sandy Hook School in Connecticut, committed by a young man named Adam Lanza. The Rustle League created a facebook page called “Adam Lanza is a Hero.” They posted a large photo of me at the top with a caption stating “Sue Basko, Attorney at LOL.” The Rustle League posted that I was the lawyer for them and their page and that I agreed with what they were doing. Then the Rustle League emailed me from one of the same email accounts they had been using all along to harass me. In the email, they stated that they had put my photo at the top of the “Adam Lanza” page, and this was “lulz,” or funny, in their idea. Also, the email contained the group's usual sexual denigration and defamation of me as a lawyer. I checked the Twitter timeline of the Rustle League member in Florida, from whom the terrorizing phone call had come just days before, and he had posted a congratulatory announcement that they had just notched up their harassment against me.
I checked my other emails. There were many emails from concerned citizens asking if I was the lawyer for the horrifying “Adam Lanza” page. People were shocked, enraged that any lawyer would be involved in such a thing. I had to quickly reply to these people, assuring them that I was not the lawyer for the group, but was its victim and my life had been threatened by them. I also had to quickly file complaints with the FBI, post on the Lanza pages that I was not the lawyer, and start to flag the photos, comments, and the whole page for removal. A counter- group had already formed, called “Remove Adam Lanza is a Hero Page,” which I call the "Remove" page. These people were my saving grace during this ordeal. Over the next week, this group and I both spent many hours flagging the posts, photos and pages. When Facebook would remove a post or a whole page, the Rustle League people would post more. It went on and on all day and night, for many days. The Rustle League apparently had the page staffed with several "characters" at a time. They were relentless in their meanness and in the callousness they showed toward human life.
The posts made by the Rustle League detailed their plans and hopes of killing children. The posts were shocking and horrifying. People all over the nation, as well as internationally, were contacting police and FBI offices. The things that were posted promoted the killing of schoolchildren. Over the course of days, each new post seem more and more shocking and devoid of any shred of humanity. The Rustle League posts taunted the parents of the murdered children, saying the parents hated their children. (Flashback: This was the same thing the Rustle League had written in the forged letter about the man I was helping -- that his father did not love him.)
Some of the posts made by the Rustle League detailed methods for killing children, other posts extolled what a good thing it was that children were killed. Reading the posts, I knew I was coming face to face with the devil. For real. The screen shots show a horrifying lack of any normal social or human functioning, only the deepest darkest depraved evil. I was physically and spiritually shaken to my core from dealing with this – and yet I had to do it, to keep my name from being associated with it.
I would not have made it through this ordeal without the support of the 500+ people of the “Remove” group there, 24 hours a day, to assist and give love. The Rustle League kept posting statement after statement about me being their lawyer, the aim being to defame me by association with the disgusting violent things they were posting. The things they posted with my name attached were truly sickening. I feel like vomiting when I think of it, their ideas were so sordid and devoid of any decency. I had to spend 20+ hours per day for 5 days flagging things before Facebook finally got its act together and started removing things more promptly. Facebook bears a great deal of responsibility in allowing this to happen.
Ahh, but this was not the end of the Rustle League attack against me. They created the above-mentioned anti-Semitic Twitter account using my name.
And then, the Rustle League created 3 facebook accounts using my name and photos. They used the Facebook accounts to post vile and sickening statements, as if I would post such things. I and the wonderful team from the “Remove” page had to flag these accounts to have them deleted. The fake posts in my name momentarily tricked the "Remove" page moderator, who emailed me asking what was up with all the sickening posts on the page. The moderator then quickly discovered it was not me, but more horrors from the Rustle League attackers.
Then on New Years eve, the biggest twitter account in the name of Anonymous, @YourAnonNews, tweeted a threat to harass me some more. Then after making the threat, my email account was flooded with 10,000 hate-filled email messages signed from the Rustle League. I noted who had “liked” this threat message - the mentally ill woman with a history of harassing others, and a few other well-known accounts using fake names and photos. They were all "people" who, over time, had shown themselves to be lacking in decency or respect for others.
I have questioned why the @YourAnonNews account was used to threaten me. An account with 800,000+ followers, that is supposed to be a news announcement account, posted a threat at a lawyer who is known to help Anons and Occupiers? What is wrong with this picture? To me, it is proof that the account is not run by Anons, but is actually being manned by the racist, anti-Semitic, misogynist and criminal Rustle League. I have inquired of one of the men who says he helps run the account and have received no solid answer. Therefore, I am warning readers that, until I have heard a solid explanation and gotten a strong apology, and until I know that whoever posted the threat is no longer allowed onto the account, that @YourAnonNews account is not run by Anons, but is tainted and being run by racist terrorists. Until the situation is fully explained, that’s how it is. It cannot be trusted.
Then the Rustle League members created a set of memes using my photo and defamatory statements. The idea was that I file “frivolous lawsuits.” Reality is, I file no lawsuits, am not a litigation attorney. I saw one of the Rustle League members tweet that he had created these memes. I wonder how depraved this person is that he thinks it acceptable – and even brag worthy -- to harass a woman, a professional whom he does not know and with whom he has never had any dealings. What kind of person is capable of such disrepect? No one with any sort of education or culture would even dream of such a thing.
Who are these Rustle League people that they lack all morals, decency, respect? These are people who consider a young man who killed 20 children to be their "hero." These are people who spent days posting their plans and desires to kill more children. These people spent a week tormenting the families of children who had been murdered. And tormenting and instilling fear into the grieving public. This is the kind of group this is, rotten to the core.
I have some thoughts about this whole thing. I am not sure exactly why I was targeted. I look at the other woman who was severely abused by the Rustle League and the only similarity I can see is that it was a matter of convenience. She runs a radio show at the same place one of the Rustle League members runs his show. How do I connect? The only connection I can see is that the man I am assisting (the man who was arrested) was a guest on the man’s radio show one time. Somehow, this must have gotten the attention of these disgusting crazies and when I helped the man, the crazies latched onto the idea of attacking me. That’s the only explanation or connection, as tenuous as it is.
The second thought is that sickos like the Rustle League and their associates are only brave because they are using fake names and identities and hide themselves from the people they attack. These monsters must be revealed and bought to justice. They are racist, anti-Semitic, and they want to kill children. They have caused huge damage to me and to their other victims.
KEEP IN MIND, THE EVENTS I DESCRIBE ABOVE ALL TOOK PLACE in a matter of weeks. The assault was gigantic and disabling. The criminals perpetrating it NEED to be brought to justice. Also, keep in mind, the attackers are not anyone with whom I had ever had any dealings whatever. They are total strangers, seeking thrills by victimizing someone with their hate.
Also, it amazes me that anyone could be idiotically stupid as to join such a group, the purpose of which is to commit crimes, and to open oneself to very easy conspiracy charges on the crimes committed by all the other members. These people are not just disgusting, they are idiots.
Not a single member of this group has stepped forth to apologize, make amends or try to help identify those whose identities are still unknown. They are all cowards and criminals, every last one of them.
