Smear campaign

Patrick has issued a stern warning.

The defamation campaign stops now or lawsuits are coming.

But what does hunting down Internet trolls look like in actual practice? Joining us to continue the very conversation we started just a few weeks ago on this very topic, defense attorney and former prosecutor David Eric Faddis, along with Robin Drake, retired FBI special agent and chief of the counterintelligence behavioral analysis program.

Eric, let's start.

As far as mutual friends, like mutual friends that my ex-husband and I had together, all of them basically, quote unquote, sided with him.

He was, you know, launching this whole, you hear about smear campaigns, right? with narcissists.

And it's very true.

I was not prepared for it.

What is this?

And the irony is that the same CBS article explains how and why the media is running a smear campaign against him.

So the more El-Sayed is questioned about his prior rhetoric, the less he will be able to wage successful attacks on his opponent, the Republican Mike Rogers.

said Democratic strategist and CBS News contributor Joel Payne.

It didn't end there, though.

An active smear campaign against me ensued, as Mr. and Mrs. Psycho actually went door to door to everyone's house in the community, posing as good citizens to warn everyone about their extremely dangerous, manipulative, five-foot-tall daughter-in-law.

My neighbors didn't react the way that was expected, though.

They were more wary of her than of me.

Welcome in.

Now, if people haven't known me for the last 10 years, I'd say I've been under a smear campaign ever since I came out to Christ.

Ever since I said that Jesus Christ is Lord.

Yeah,

That's why.

An

ongoing smear campaign.

It's a weird, like, Christian persecution complex.

I also met her kids, who looked kind of like me, which was just one more weird thing in my life right now.

As we sat in their living room, surrounded by family photos that felt both familiar and alien, we told them everything, Mom's illness, Dad's absence, the inheritance drama, and his recent smear campaign.

Linda was just as stunned as we were.

She confessed that she had always wondered about Dad's job.

Clap, clap.

Every day and every Here is an example of how a smear campaign works.

An obsessive focus on, again, a minor figure with no power or influence of any meaningful description, in which anything and everything was just thrown into the mix in an attempt to completely discredit and character assassinate in a total way.

That's what this aimed to do.

Is the argument that minor public figures like Jason Arday should not have scrutiny or questions? No.

Nobody's arguing that seriously.

What happened here, though, was a full-blown smear campaign, one of the most relentless onslaughts against any individual I have ever seen, which culminated in his death, and it leaves a grieving wife and two little children.

And as we can see, that included entirely false smears.

Said every relationship has rough patches.

Linda's running a full smear campaign.

She's telling everyone that Kendra was miserable for years, that I was controlling and emotionally abusive.

Says Kendra wasn't allowed to have male friends, that I monitored her phone and spending.

... to these guys.

Let's talk about the smear campaign that he started.

Was this, I'm guessing, during your divorce proceedings?

Yes.

When I originally contacted you, I had a question on, how do you deal with the smear campaign? This is happening with my in-laws, and it was so upsetting to me to feel like I had lost my in-laws.

I'd known them since I was a teenager.

I feel like they thought of me like a daughter.

Then we had Turbo Coopers and their single Dame Life, followed by The Gimps with their single No Friends.

And we finished it up with Baghead and No Sleep from their album Smear Campaign.

I started off with all four as singles, but then probably changed it.

They're kind of, I guess you can call them more independent bands, including Lone Creep.