Did Michelle Malkin drive a woman to suicide?
On June 24th, Denice Denton committed suicide, after having been hounded for several months by Malkin directed wingnuts:
An even better example of this started two weeks ago at U.C.-Santa Cruz, where a group called Students Against War protested and successfully expelled military recruiters from a job fair. The anti-war students had done this before and won themselves a place in a Pentagon surveillance file. That hardly slowed them down — they remained confident enough, after their latest stunt, to fire off a media advisory and make themselves available for interviews. Columnist and blogger Michelle Malkin read their press release and posted the students’ phone numbers and e-mail addresses on her own site, directing hordes of death threat-tossing readers their way.
Malkin’s UCSC post was titled “Seditious Santa Cruz vs. America.” Even after the UCSC students cried uncle and pulled their phone numbers offline, Malkin continued to post their information alongside the office numbers for the “capitulationist chancellor” who had refused to purge them.
Now the article on Denton’s death mentioned she had already been the subject of a physical attack:
Not only were the protests against her personal, but at times she faced physical threats. A year ago, in the middle of the night, someone thrust a large metal pole through a window in the president?s home. Denton was in another room at the time, but had she been in the room where the glass was broken, she could have been seriously injured, according to a Santa Cruz spokeswoman. Several other times, protesters showed up at her door, refusing to leave. Several people who knew Denton said that she didn?t feel secure and there were rumors on the campus about her having around-the-clock security. The spokeswoman said that there had been some improvements in security, but that reports about around-the-clock security were exaggerations.
And then Malkin wades into this situation and thinks it a wonderful idea to post Denton’s contact information and direct her followers to make their views known to her. Now, when these shitstorms happen it is more than a little threatening to anybody on the receiving end, as you never can be sure what some wingnut will do, but to a woman already fearing for her physical safety it must have been absolute hell.
Denice Denton may have committed suicide without this Malkin directed flood of hatred coming her way, but it may also have been the very thing that drove her over the edge. Whatever the truth, there is no doubt that Malkin behaved not just irresponsibly in directing her followers to take on Denton, but maliciously. She is not stupid, she knows the power she can unleash at her enemies and she choose to unleash it. That makes her partly to blame for Denton’s death.
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Michelle Malkin,
Denice Denton