Seth Allen, the Massachusetts blogger who threatened to murder Brett Kimberlin and got legal aid from "Aaron Worthing." |
Of everyone who answered the rallying cries of Frey and Breitbart, one of the loudest was a character who wrote under the pseudonym Aaron Worthing. A contributor to Frey’s blog — plus a publisher of his own sites, like the anti-Muslim hate-fest Everyone Draw Mohammed — Worthing offered legal advice to Seth Allen, the Bay State blogger who had threatened to “murder” Brett Kimberlin. A lawyer in neighboring Virginia, Worthing also attempted to defend Allen in his contempt case against Kimberlin. Worthing didn’t give his legal name, instead telling the court that he wished to represent Allen anonymously. That’s when Kimberlin hit back with a motion to disclose the identity of “Aaron Worthing.”
On January 9, 2012, Worthing showed up at the Maryland contempt hearing for Allen. By then, Kimberlin had leveraged the Virginia attorney’s butting into the case to reveal Worthing’s real identity: Aaron Walker. This incensed Walker. When Kimberlin attempted to capture video of him, Walker snatched the plaintiff’s iPad, initiating a minor scuffle that the fringe blogosphere would interpret as Pearl Harbor.
In the dust-up, Walker lost his job as an attorney for a health-care staffing firm. His wife, who worked for the same Virginia company, was also terminated. In a January 2012 letter asking for a public announcement that the blogger known as Aaron Worthing had been fired, an attorney representing his ex-employer seemed boggled. He wrote to Walker:
“It is unfortunate that you still do not grasp the gravity of what you have done, and the risk that you have created for your co-workers. . . . Apparently, you chose to start a blog for the express purpose of showing disrespect to the adherents of a major religion [Islam], which could be calculated to incite violent reprisals on the part of the most extreme elements of that religion. . . . While PHRI would have been justified in terminating you for your grossly irresponsible actions related to your blogging, especially on company time . . . the actual reason for your termination is the incredibly irresponsible way that you performed legal services . . . the state of your office is almost beyond description. . . . In fact, it is difficult to determine what you were working on for PHRI over the last few weeks, if anything.”
READ MORE: "The Trials of Nadia Naffe," by Chris Faraone
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