Peter Johnson is one of the candidates for Palm Coast mayor. He’s overly sure of himself and loves to hear himself talk, which he does to excess whatever the forum. He has the goods: lightning intelligence, sufficient eloquence and Double Jeopardy-round mastery of surface facts to make his fast-talking sound like a locomotive circling your wagons. It’s not often a pleasant experience.
It doesn’t help him that his know-it-all attitude can make others feel like idiots, sometimes by design. (I recognize so many of these traits because aside from sharing his name, I also share many of his traits.) That his listeners are often idiots, as we all are at some level, doesn’t justify what amounts to a perpetual drill in one-upmanship rather than an attempt at conversation, understanding, compassion. I’m not sure Palm Coast is ready for a mayor who would run the council as a local House Un-American Activities Committee.
Inevitably, Peter Johnson lends himself to impressions of arrogance, especially when this town’s prejudice against younger people speaking bluster to geezers kicks in. That he also makes more established candidates and politicians nervous as hell, for the right reasons, is also not helping him. He’s a tactical crackerjack and a strategic dunce, letting his most easily controllable attribute–his demeanor–define him. If his ideas are getting short-shrift, he’s to blame. He’s the one upstaging them, and that’s a shame: a little coaching, a little humility, a little time, a little trim, would make him a formidable candidate.
But say what you will about Johnson, he alone is this year’s target of the most vicious slander in Flagler County. Someone out there wants to make us believe that Johnson called someone else the N-word in an electronic message. The claim has been spread through an alleged screenshot of the alleged offense (the screenshot, too, is alleged, because it has all the makings of a fabrication). The claim has not been verified despite attempts by FlaglerLive, AskFlagler and the Observer.
That does not prove it to be a fabrication. But as the evidence stands right now, that’s all it is.
Numerous other indicators point to a fabrication, starting with the sources of the claim and the means, insistence and ethically dishonest ways they have used to disseminate it. Those sources have primarily included ex-sovereign citizen and serial liar Alan Lowe (a candidate for mayor against Johnson), GOP operative Jearlyn Dennie (local Svengali of slander whisperers), Tim Sharp (a thief who didn’t hesitate to steal FlaglerLive property to illustrate an echo of the slander) and an agitator who goes by the name “Ryan Christian” in his Facebook attempts to bait Johnson.
These are the dregs attacking Johnson, and baiting local media into reporting the claim.
Some months ago, on the promise of granting anonymity to the sender, I received the alleged screen shot at the center of all this, purportedly showing Johnson calling a mystery person the racial slur, prefixed with the word cat. (I’ve been at the receiving end of the slur: When people level it at me, the prefix is usually sand.) The sender claimed to have no involvement in the exchange, only of being a recipient of the screenshot by an anonymous something. I have my doubts. The sender is probably part of the cabal.
I confronted Johnson in person outside of a City Council meeting, springing the screen shot in front of him and asking what it was all about. I wanted to see his reaction. I wanted to see his eyes, his twitches, his body language. I can be a poor judge, but it seemed to me that unless he’s some kind of cyborg, he couldn’t have faked the outrage.
I then attempted to authenticate the image. There’s no two or three or five ways to go about this. Running an image like this through “authenticators,” as the alleged Christian claimed to have done, is bunk, and it misses the point. We do not libel or slander a person based on an anonymous document or source unless the person’s identity at the source of the document can be unassailably established, and the original document in the person’s possession, on the person’s original device, just as unassailably verified. No redactions, no copies, no exceptions. The person’s identity doesn’t have to be–and would not be–revealed. But I would have had to know who the person is, without cloaks or intermediaries.
Until I make those verifications and verify the verifications every possible way, the image is not just an allegation. It’s a fabrication more offensive than the language it uses, because it is compounding the offense with a fraud, and with the attempted demolition of a person’s character.
Despite various attempts to convince him/her/they otherwise, my anonymous source never revealed the source of the image. Nor has the cabal of people listed above, as they’ve gone about spreading it.
I then tried authentication through Jessica Myers, who heads Community Cats, the Palm Coast non-profit. What do cats keep cropping up?
If there is context to this claim–though how can there be context to a fabrication?–it is a stupid run-in Johnson had a year ago with a Community Cat volunteer, Vicki Shepherd, over a cat-feeding station Johnson seems to consider a violation of law as grave as a violation of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. At least that’s how he reacted to the feeding station, though it’d been there for an eternity.
Johnson had no business disturbing the feeding station, which the city had approved, or harassing a volunteer. Nor had Shepherd any business swinging at Johnson. He’s right: that sort of behavior would have landed her in jail had she attempted it at a cop. (He filed a charge that went nowhere, just as did a criminal mischief charge against him.) Johnson was intimidating and full of his usual “self-righteousness,” as a sheriff’s report put it after an equally blustery visit to Palm Coast’s Code Enforcement division, and taking video of the woman was entirely unnecessary. But he never threatened Shepherd nor came close to putting her in danger. He was playing attack-dog lawyer against a 68-year-old woman who was just feeding cats, for god’s sake. If Johnson would make an excellent trial lawyer, that doesn’t mean he has the temperament for a judge. Or a mayor.
So I had a long conversation with Jessica Myers. She despises Johnson and would happily connect him to any scandal that would sink his candidacy, but, to her credit, not on the back of a dishonesty.
Myers is a former paralegal who said she got the image in question from Alan Lowe (have I mentioned that he’s one of Johnson’s opponents for mayor?). She claims to have had contact with the person at the receiving end of the slur. But the method by which Myers sought out the person is unreliable: she broadcast a call for information in a social media group (closed or not makes no difference), basically giving the fabricator a heads up.
The response was equally suspect: the alleged person contacted her several days later: fabrications take rehearsing. The person did not reveal “her” name. She called from a blocked number. She would not agree to an on-record conversation. She refused to allow an examination of the original exchange. “For the life of me I could not remember her name,” Myers said.
All further evidence pointing to a fabrication.
The mystery woman’s claim that she was fearful for her safety is invalid. If she had an exchange with Johnson, he knows her identity. If she had that exchange with Johnson and is aware of the whirl of guessing and rumors and attempts at verification it has triggered, it’s her responsibility to enable the verification on the most transparent terms. She did none of that with Myers. Myers claims that the “woman” volunteered some of the lines Myers herself had not provided, but that were in the alleged message. Therefore, Myers reasons, that lends credibility to the woman. It does not. It only lends further credibility that the mystery woman has the original fabrication in hand.
At any rate, Myers herself told me in no uncertain terms: “I’m probably more than 50-50 on his side that this latest is probably fabricated,” she said. Meaning on Johnson’s side. “I, too, doubt that that part of it is true.” She then called the claim “a reach.”
Meanwhile, a fake website was created on June 14 with the sole purpose of planting a fake “news” story about Johnson being in the middle of a controversy–a controversy the site was designed to fabricate so it can be amplified. The website, whose phone number linked to a sex line, didn’t last. Mercenary libels aren’t meant to. It had done its job. Days later Tim Sharp was using the fake story to legitimize one of his own on his QAnon-calibrated website. Myers–who doubtless knew not the host’s proclivities for scandalmongering–was appearing on Jearlyn Dennie’s radio infomercial on WNZF. That led the Observer to decide to do a story about it all.
And there it was. The slanderers could claim mission accomplished. The “controversy” had gone mainstream. An unfair headline framed the main issue as Johnson being on the defensive and the article referred to “at least two websites having posted articles about Johnson and the messages.” A more accurate headline would have focused on the deep-faked slander: how an unverified claim had morphed into a fabricated controversy built on fabricated stories in a fabricated website and got disseminated by people with a partisan interest in Johnson’s defeat and a credibility gap wider than the asteroid belt.
Disappointing, too, was Myers’s claim to the Observer on July 3 that since her appearance on the infomercial she had come to realize that “she since had begun to doubt the veracity of the messages.” Not so. She was full of doubts in our June 24 interview.
As with any such fabrications, the fabricators’ amateur mishandling of it all means that even if somehow the slur was shown to be closer to authentic than not, too much time has passed, too much information has been revealed, too many how-tos provided to give the fabrication a make-over. Even its potential authenticity at this point could not be trusted.
This is where we are at this point. This is why it is easy to conclude that Johnson is the target of a slander more disgusting than the slur coloring it. This is where it should end.
The hypocrisy should not be lost, either: the cabal attacking Johnson is formed of the same people who deify Donald Trump, a white supremacist mass of bigotries whose entire being is a slur–an adjudicated rapist, a convicted slanderer, a liar, a fabricator, a twice-impeached sac of felonies who’d eat Community Cats kittens for breakfast if it didn’t risk distracting him from pussy-grabbing. In short, a man who makes Peter Johnson look like St. Francis of Assisi.
So consider who’s disseminating this slander. Then let Johnson go back to his campaign in peace and judge him on his own known merits.
Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive.
