By Brian Doherty
The Washington, D.C., Libertarian Party gets the kind of detailed in-fighting reporting in Washington City Paper that third parties (and indeed even local and state branches of major parties) rarely get, with news about how a Party with newfound ballot access in D.C. sees conflict between those who are happy to get the Party rolling with anyone and those said to be seeking a higher level of professionalism.
Thanks to Bruce Majors winning the L.P. relatively trouble-free ballot access by earning 6 percent in the 2012 election for D.C.’s non-voting House member (Eleanor Holmes Norton kept the gig), the L.P. needs to collect merely a couple of signatures to get candidates on the ballot for local elections–literally just a couple, representing one percent of the number of registered Libertarians in D.C.
Now Majors is working hard to get other Libertarians to run for local office:
So far, his candidate slate—all white men and [Sara] Panfil, a white woman—doesn’t do much to disprove the stereotype of Libertarians as a party for nerdy white people. Majors has had trouble convincing people of color to take a trip to the Board of Elections, even when, in an attempt just to get another candidate on the ballot, he promises that their campaign work would be limited to signing a few papers and appearing on the ballot.
Read the full article here.
Who did that?
Be careful about making potentially defamatory statements on the web that could land you in court.
Jill brought it up, so I followed the discussion where it went. I thought the discussion had already moved on.
Doherty’s personal issues with Keaton are frankly irrelevant to the article in question and best left elsewhere. Stay on the topic, please.
“My parallel person” does sound catty, but maybe it is nothing.
This article plays nothing into something. To the best of my knowledge, Majors and LaBeaume are friends, and get along just fine. Do they have differing approaches to candidate recruiting? Maybe. Are they working against each other? Absolutely not.
Believe it or not, I’ve been over it for years. It may sound like I have a bone to pick, but I honestly do not. If Doherty really did beat her, that certainly makes me think less of him.
I haven’t had any strong emotions about her in a long time. She has her good and bad sides like everyone else. One thing she does have is a penchant for flipping really hard on people that used to be her friends, or more than friends. I should probably shut up about the whole thing but I hate to hear people being perhaps unjustly accused of doing horrible things. That in itself is a horrible thing to do to someone and can hurt as much as any beating, although it’s a different kind of hurt.
Saying you know he’s a wife abuser is a statement of fact. Do you know it for a fact? Or is it that you just believe it, or just that he has been accused of it?
Like I said I don’t know if it is true or not. It very well may be. I just have reason to doubt her veracity based on past experience. They were not completely analogous situations, but there were similar elements (her making accusations of violence by men against women, no physical proof that I know of).
Well, for whatever it is worth, I’m sorry to hear she is going through a bad time, regardless of what Doherty did or did not do (maybe he beat her, maybe he did something different, say abuse her verbally or cheat or neglect her or several of those things…or maybe it is her own issues and he had nothing to do with it). I just don’t want anyone to be unjustly accused or to have people saying that he did something as a statement of fact unless they actually know it to be a fact. I’ve been wrongly accused of things before, and threatened/blackmailed with being accused, and it sucks.
I’m also sorry for the trouble between you and Angela, Paulie.i have observed that she’s one of those people that brings out strong emotions in others, either good or bad.
I did amend my comment because I don’t know if he’s been taken to court or convicted of it. It’s certainly not unheard of for one spouse to accuse the other of things that might not be completely true when a marriage goes bad. I suppose I’m just being protective of someone going through a bad time.
Angela has accused people of beating women and then not produced evidence for the claims when challenged before. She was not an (alleged) victim that time, so there is of course a difference (she may have believed what she was saying then), but she repeated a story third hand from a source I personally know to be extremely unreliable, and the story seemed highly improbable. She acted like she knew this information to be a fact when it was only a rumor. When asked to back it up she did not either back it up or back down.
No evidence was ever produced to back up those claims, but because I bowed in to pressure and merely publicly questioned whether evidence for those allegations existed and truthfully testifed what I did know, actions were taken against me (revealing information about my past; publicly linking my online identity to my real identity, which I did not want to do at the time due to death threats among other things; me and others allegedly being “fired” as contractors by the LP, although in reality we kept working and kept getting paid; her dropping me as a friend and even as an acquaintance; “blacklisting” which did indeed keep me out of some other jobs later; turning other former friends against me; trying to kick me off IPR with a lawsuit threat). All this because I merely told the truth as I know it about someone with whom I was even then no longer on talking terms and asked to see evidence for accustions of violent crimes against women by this individual.
There’s a difference between repeating almost certainly false rumors and acting like they are facts on one hand and actually lying about being abused yourself on the other, so I am not saying she is lying, and I don’t really know Doherty so of course I would have no idea. But I do have a reluctance to automatically believe someone who I have good reason to believe in the past offered false testimony about someone else and accused him of beating women with no evidence.
And I’m not saying this because I like the individual she accused. I believe he is a scumbag and has done a lot of scummy things along the lines of ripping people off. But beating up women is not one of the things he has done, at least as far as any evidence I have ever seen or that she has ever produced. Nor am I trying to “get” her – I haven’t talked to her in years, even when we stood or sat next to each other. I’m also not doing it because I’m a fan of Doherty’s writing; I have met him a few times but barely know the guy, and for all I know he could be every bit as bad as she says and worse. But I am just not going to assume it is true – once bitten, twice shy.
I’ve decided that I need to edit my first comment that he’s “guilty” of domestic abuse, because I don’t know that it has gone to court.
His wife, my friend Angela Keaton.
Jill, what’s the source?
I like his writing, and as for the domestic abuse allegations, I have not heard his side of the story as to whether it is true. But even if it’s true he is still a good writer, although not a good person. I’m glad he is proviing the LP some coverage (and fairly positive at that) among a large, mostly small-l audience.
I can’t take Brian Doherty seriously anymore, now that I know he’s a wife abuser.