The Other McCain

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The Harm Deborah Frisch Has Inflicted, and Why She Must Be Incarcerated

Posted on | November 24, 2017 | 2 Comments

Deborah Frisch, arrested Thursday in Oregon.

For more than decade, Deborah Frisch has been harassing blogger Jeff Goldstein and his family. The story made national headlines in 2006, when Frisch — then an adjunct professor of psychology at the University of Arizona — was fired for her vile threats against Goldstein. Yet this was not the end of her deranged harassment, merely the beginning.

Frisch was a fugitive when she was arrested Thursday in Oregon, after having failed to appear at a court hearing in Colorado to face two felony charges. Frisch had sentenced to 10 years probation in April, after pleading guilty to felony stalking and harassment. Why was she not imprisoned at that time? It’s a mystery to me, and when I spoke to Goldstein by phone Friday, I asked him if he had been given a chance to provide a victim’s impact statement at Frisch’s sentencing. He agreed to send me a copy of his statement:

Firstly, let me note that we’re not here today, thankfully, to decide on the guilt or innocence of Ms Frisch. She has pled guilty to a felony — and she’s done so for the sole purpose of gaining release from incarceration. This is evident, I submit, in both the tenor and substance of her own statements to the Court and to PSI. She continues to refer to my family — and by extension, the families of all those she’s harassed and sought to libel and intimidate over the last 11 years — as “so-called victims,” while simultaneously casting herself as the REAL victim of some grand conspiracy in which law-enforcement, the judiciary, court personnel (including her own representatives), and an expansive collection of private citizens, are all responsible for her decade-plus-long social and legal travails. Such fantasies of persecution, coupled with the kind of malignant narcissism that, in her mind, justifies her behavior towards her victims, to me seems indicative of an unrepentant mind. More so, her latest incarnation as a self-proclaimed “justice advocate” — whose role it is to unmask what she believes to be some endemic iniquity in the legal system, using herself as the crowning example of such serial inequities — reinforces my belief that she’ll use her own warped sense of persecution to justify continued assaults on those she believes have aggrieved her.
Secondly, I understand — and even agree — with the Court’s position that any infringement upon a citizen’s first amendment rights is to be taken very seriously. As Your Honor has noted in prior hearings, Ms Frisch’s relentless desire to avail herself of her right to petition the court and its staff for grievances, is — and should be — sacrosanct. That being said, what I DON’T believe to be among her rights is the right she believes herself to have to libel private citizens in writings that she hopes to be permanently archived by internet search engines; I DON’T believe it is within her rights to try to extort money from her victims in exchange for relief from her harassment and intimidation; I DON’T believe it is within her rights to track down personal information on the family members of her primary targets and to use that information to contact them, and, for instance, pose as a journalist in order to elicit a statement from members of her victims’ families, in which she first informs them that the victim has been arrested for child molestation.
And yet this is what Ms Frisch has done, in the latter example, tracking down my late Mother’s phone number and calling her up to ask her to comment on my non-existent arrest for having molested my son. This information, incidentally, she gathered from my Father’s obituary. She then threatened to travel to the cemetery to desecrate his grave with her bodily fluids.
I DON’T believe that using voter records to uncover our home address and my wife’s personal information — then using that information to contact my wife’s place of employment with stories of her own victimhood at our hands — falls within her rights. Further, I DON’T believe that posting pornographic stories about our children, who have never had any contact or dealings with Ms Frisch, are among her unalienable rights.
On numerous occasions, Ms Frisch has offered false reports to authorities in order to cause both my family, and the families of her other victims, emotional distress, with the further goal of causing us legal difficulties. Ms Frisch has on several occasions reported me to law enforcement for alleged crimes that never took place — nearly every time using my supposed molestation of my two young boys as the focal point. She has contacted Federal law enforcement agencies alleging that I have Ricin and am a dire threat to my community. She has posted on town websites and the websites of local businesses that my family poses a danger to my neighbors — with one example occurring just before her arrest, when Ms Frisch advised the people of our home town to avoid our house during Halloween Trick-or-Treating, because we may have laced the candy we were handing out with poison. And she has on multiple occasions threatened to contact the Department of Child Services to have them look into our supposed mistreatment of our children.
Given the nature of bureaucracies and their commitment to protecting children first and asking questions later, Ms Frisch was clearly banking on their caution and their zeal to protect children from harm. This particular tack of hers has caused us severe distress, particularly in a climate where stories of children being removed from homes — and the struggle of innocent parents to retrieve them from the state — are all too common and all too frightening.
This particular stratagem of Ms Frisch’s is generally accompanied by some demand, either for access to information she is seeking about someone — or for some monetary compensation for her troubles as the “real victim” of her own behavior — in exchange for her NOT contacting various local, state, or federal authorities. This is, it seems to me, a clear and deliberate act of extortion. And it is something Ms Frisch has attempted not only with me, my family members, and my original lawyer in the 2006 case, but also her OWN counsel.
Not every one of her victims has taken the time, nor expended the effort, to prevent her from continuing her criminal behaviors. Many in fact have thought — incorrectly, as it turns out — that if they ignore her she will simply grow bored and leave them alone. Her multiple arrests, however, speak to the reality of who she is, and to the futility of such an approach: Ms Frisch will not and has never ceased her pattern of stalking, harassment, and intimidation, save for those times when she has been physically prevented from doing so through incarceration or strict supervision.
Even in this latest case, the Court was able to witness for itself just how Ms Frisch operates: Having been released on bail, it took her less than a day to violate the conditions of her release, leading the Court to revoke bail and order her re-incarcerated.
It is important to note to this Court that its own experience with Ms Frisch is not novel. She has, in fact, followed the same pattern in other states and with other Courts and with other victims. She is, she’s shown repeatedly, unwilling to cease her behaviors; instead, she merely redoubles her efforts and seeks to find creative ways to avoid Court orders and violate the terms of her parole.
In our case, it was only through the efforts of Frederick law enforcement and the Weld County DA’s office, that Ms Frisch has been temporarily curtailed. In 2006, when we originally filed for relief from Ms Frisch’s campaign of libel, extortion, and harassment, cyberlaw was in its infancy, and Ms Frisch used that fact to put herself beyond the reach of the edicts of the Colorado Courts. It was only when, in this latest round of harassment, we went to the Frederick Police, that we found that laws now exist to cross state boundaries in order to provide relief to victims. Clearly, Ms Frisch was unaware of these changes to the law. Fortunately, newer statutes had been enacted between the original case in 2006 and this latest iteration of her harassment campaign, rendering her habitual violations of the Colorado protection order we were granted against her actionable despite her taking refuge in other states.
As a family of law abiding citizens with no criminal history, we have taken the time and expended the resources to put a stop to Ms Frisch’s congenital need to harass, libel, and intimidate her victims. This process has been long and slow. And yet we stuck with it in the hope that we are able to prevent some future potential victims from having to go through what we have.
Going through the courts and through law enforcement has been our only means to combat Ms Frisch, whose goal always and foremost seems to be to game the system and find ways to continue terrorizing her victims without repercussion. If we can’t count on the Court to protect us, we have no real recourse to stop the harassment or to curb the libels Ms Frisch is intent on turning into “truths” by archiving various allegations in internet search engines or through email blasts. . . .
My wife and I are already deeply concerned that Ms Frisch’s past behaviors will harm our oldest son — who is now 13 but who was just 2 when Ms Frisch began her campaign against us — as he grows older and creeps toward adulthood. Whether it be by way of a risk-averse potential employer or a college admissions committee, the prospect that our sons — who are entirely innocent and who have never had any dealings with Ms Frisch directly — will be penalized thanks to the efforts of a serial stalker, is both worrisome and repugnant to us.
If we can’t find relief from the Court, we wonder just where and how we WILL be able to find relief. And perhaps more crucially, we worry that our own children will lose faith in a system that either can’t or won’t protect them.
In closing, please allow me to say this: My wife and I do not believe for a moment that Ms Frisch will EVER stop what to her has become both a way of life and now, apparently, a supposedly righteous cause, in which we play the perpetual nemeses to her crusading heroine of “justice advocacy.” Ms Frisch’s unwarranted sense of her own superiority and rectitude, which she’s displayed more times than one to the Court in this case, practically compels her to harass, to terrorize, the threaten, to intimidate, to libel, and to extort. She believes herself the most clever person in any room.
In 11 years, the only time we’ve experienced any relief is when Ms Frisch has been either incarcerated or subjected to harsh and enforceable sanctions that prevent her, always temporarily, from targeting us. We also note that the support system Ms Frisch claims to have at her disposal — her parents and siblings — have never once been able to prevent Ms Frisch from continuing her vulgar and, now, criminal behavior.
In fact, we believe that through material efforts, Ms Frisch’s family has consistently and knowingly enabled her behavior, providing her with free housing, internet access, and legal support — even knowing as they do that she has repeatedly been an aggressor and a menace to any number of victims.
We have no confidence that Ms Frisch’s return to living with her parents will do anything save provide her the means and opportunity to once again find a way to game the system and harass her victims. She has shown she will use aliases, or misrepresent herself, to continue doing the things she does, things that have come to define her and, in a twisted way, provide her with her sense of worth in the wake of a career devastated by her own actions.
We ask the Court to please consider the lack of other recourse her victims have when it imposes her sentence.

Frisch’s harassment is no laughing matter. It’s fun for bystanders to point and laugh at her deranged behavior, but it’s an entirely different matter for those who are targets of Frisch’s harassment. As Goldstein pointed out in his April statement, Frisch’s obscene libels — including her repeated false accusations that Goldstein and his wife were abusing their children — inflict genuine harm in multiple ways. Frisch has occasionally engaged in similar behavior against others, but Goldstein has been an object of her fixated obsession since 2006, and yet she has the effrontery to claim that she is somehow the victim!

As Goldstein says, Frisch shows no evidence of remorse. She seems to consider herself justified in her malevolent conduct, and will no doubt continue to be a public menace if she is ever again released from custody. Frisch ought to be locked away for a long, long time, and the judge in her case ought to be made aware of his duty to protect the public.

(Booking photo via Teh Daily Squeak.)

 

Category: Crime

Comments

2 Responses to “The Harm Deborah Frisch Has Inflicted, and Why She Must Be Incarcerated”

  1. The Insane Professor : The Other McCain
    November 30th, 2017 @ 11:46 am

    […] will recall that the notorious Deb Frisch was once a tenure-track psychology professor at the University of Oregon. Isn’t it important […]

  2. The Insane Professor – Living in Anglo-America
    November 30th, 2017 @ 4:32 pm

    […] will recall that the notorious Deb Frisch was once a tenure-track psychology professor at the University of Oregon. Isn’t it important to […]