(Royalty Free photo from Gone With The Wind)A few weeks ago, I was tidying my desk drawer and came across a printout of Thomas Churchwell's Diagnostic Assessment, dated July 16, 2008, written by his psychiatrist, Dr. Alkesh Patel, ACT Team Psychiatrist for Services For The Underserved. Posted by Churchwell himself on his own blog, it was a stunner. I had forgotten some of the content, including this quote:
"This 44 y/o Caucasian male has a long history of psychosis as well as a history of chemical dependency. The patient has a history of multiple hospitalizations."
In college my major was psychology, though I am a photographer by profession. Since I do have a background in psychology, however, I think it is safe to assume that Churchwell's recent rant, in which he wrote again that I "stole pictures off the Internet", am stalking him, work at Walmart, am jealous of the bully Susan, and many other loony lies—forecasts another lock-up for him. Cross your fingers.
Life being the way it is, a couple of weeks after I'd drafted this page, but long before I had finished it, I received the following joke in an email from someone who knows the blog situation well: "What do Tarquin Churchwell and a sperm have in common? Answer: Both have about a one in 3 million chance of becoming a human being."
Let's begin. Psychosis is defined by the American Psychiatric Association as the extreme condition of losing touch with reality and good judgment. Symptoms include paranoia, grandiosity, racing thoughts, abnormal behavior, bizarre sexual activity, hallucinations, rage and compulsive lying. Churchwell's psychosis is on parade on this site. I know nothing about his chemical dependency, as referenced above by his psychiatrist.
His blog's predominant theme is hate. While he has been known to type a few harmless lines about the weather, or post snapshots, he always returns to the topics that have consumed him for years. And they are nothing if not contradictory. On a typical day, he toggles back and forth between libel attacks and grandiosity; he posts lewd pictures of teenagers and professes Elmer Gantry style outrage over lewdness; he claims to be a victim and victimizes anyone who crosses him; he brags that he was a pickpocket and accuses other people of stealing; he boasts about his anti-social experiences and claims to catch other people in shameful behavior, and believes Yahoo, MySpace and Google are in cahoots with him, and so on. In his mind boggling posts, we see that what he says and does are two very different things. Put another way, Thomas Churchwell may be the most blatant liar and hypocrite who ever drew breath.
The most telling thing he does is contradict himself. When you wonder about a particular contradiction, he will deny ever writing it, though it may literally have been only a day since he wrote it—how could you think he'd ever say that? You're a wacko! He will contradict FACTS. He will lie to you about conversations you had with him. He will misquote you to yourself. Typically, he writes poison post titles about me that start with the lie: "SCARLETT ADMITS" and what follows are more horrific lies. When you catch him in a lie, he will say that you are the one who's lying, making stuff up, and you are a wacko.
Forensic psychologist Dr. Robert Hare, author of Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of Psychopaths Among Us, said this about psychopathic liars, and it fits Churchwell to a T:
"When caught in a lie and challenged, he makes up new lies."
Psychopaths have always existed. Most, like Churchwell, come from low socio-economic backgrounds. Most are males. They have been studied using various techniques, perhaps the same techniques that Churchwell's psychiatrist used to diagnose him, and through the years their problems have been blamed on various causes. But one thing never varies: all anti-social people share four common characteristics. They are all very egocentric, they have no empathy for others, they are incapable of feeling remorse, and they are very manipulative.
Far from being killers, on the whole, psychopaths tend to harm people in ways other than murder. They are not always serial killers, Norman Bates poster boys, or greedy, cut-throat CEOs. Many are hostile creeps like Churchwell, who enjoy making life difficult for others. Competitive to an extreme, they regularly lie and turn ordinary interactions into struggles to the death. This is how Churchwell conducts himself on the Web, and strangely enough, he believes that blogging should be for him alone. He will go to a blog to derail a conversation with libel, and if another blogger calls him on his lies, he will go after that person, too. The right that other people should have to blog peacefully means nothing to him. Which leads us to what psychopaths do that is truly shocking: an ability to focus their undivided attention on people, until they ruin them. Some clinicians have compared this to the concentration with which a predator stalks his prey. Churchwell calls it "winning". A couple of years ago, he posted snapshots on a MSN amateur photography site, and when the moderator offered him a bit of helpful criticism, Churchwell lambasted the poor man for weeks, calling him a "phony, crappy nobody," among other slurs. Sound familiar? He has been trying for three years to drive me off the Internet with lies that are identical to those he wrote about the moderator. As a predictable collorary, anti-social people feel most comfortable with those who they perceive as being one step down from them. They shift their obsessive natures away from defeating those who are trying to get ahead and toward those they perceive as already having made it. Churchwell demonstrates the utmost benevolence toward underage girls who look like Diane Arbus prototypes, and who will never be models, yet when he encounters people who earn their livings as writers, magicians and photographers, he attacks them like a rabid dog. Those people, in his opinion, "need to be taken down a notch," although he would never admit that he is jealous. Psychopaths thrive on winning. How many times has Churchwell published lies about me, or someone else, and then screamed like a highly immature adolescent: "I WON!" and "GOTCHA!" Too many times to count. Although his "victory dance" is often short lived, before he starts to feel bored again, smearing professional people and beating us to a bloody pulp on the Web is his definite objective.
In her book Invisible Eden, Maria Flook got this chilling quote from Churchwell, and it may be the only honest thing that he has ever said: "I love messing up people's heads."
Psychopaths hate the world. Consumed by envy and suspicion, they are incapable of forming normal attachments. Occasionally, they may team up with a disordered individual like themselves, if it suits their purposes, and some even marry, but knowing a psychopath is like riding in a car with no brakes. It's no wonder this type is drawn to the Internet. Technology is a great gift to cyber bullies and cyber stalkers. They used to sit outside their targets' home—hiding in cars or bushes—waiting to follow them. They used to leave threatening notes on their windshields before slashing their tires. But now they have moved into the 21st century, using modern technology to terrorize their victims. They have an uncanny ability for recognizing nice, caring women and can sniff out potential victims seemingly through their computer screens. Churchwell got lucky in the niceness arena, when he met me on an Internet forum in 2006.
I have written about his vindictiveness and how he began to attack me the day after I ended those short-lived phone conversations with him in 2006. What you may not know is that his abrupt change from decent (though odd) treatment on the phone to outright abuse was very shocking and bewildering, and so unlike my normal experience that it was a long time before I realized that my being nice to him was what triggered his nasty reaction. Once he knew that I was nice, he expected to be able to use me like an appliance and shove me around like a piece of furniture. When I objected to his behavior, then he thought that obviously I was a wacko, or else I'd let him do whatever he wanted with me. When I got so uppity as to tell him that I didn't want to talk with him anymore because of his tall tales, then he went bonkers—just like that, trashing me on his blog with unbelievable lies. I was suddenly a broken toaster oven. Once a psychopath knows that you are sincere, he'll suck you dry like Dracula—demand all your time, be more work than a newborn—and test you with tiresome demands and power plays. In his world, sincerity is a weakness and trying to "understand" him is asking to be hurt, so be careful; he will hurt you without blinking. He can't, or won't, trust, so he will constantly test you - an example was when Churchwell unsuccessfully pressured me for nude pictures. If you won't submit to the tyranny, then you will be bullied as "a moron," "a waste of time," "If you liked me, you would do whatever I ask," "I give up on you," and "You're a wacko."
He has a weird sense of time. It's as if he is not aware that the passage of time changes people, and generally makes them less gullible, or maybe he just isn't aware of time passing at all. Three years have gone by and he has spent them arguing obsessively to rationalize his awful treatment of me, heatedly battling the wacko (as he calls me) with name calling and finger-pointing in cruel and vulgar rants. It is also in this vein that he has worked on my readers and tried to destroy my photography career, repeatedly telling the Internet that I have no talent or ethics, and that I'm a "photo thief," and so on.
Here's a typical lie Churchwell posted on Google Groups. He listed every blog he could find with his name in it, and then wrote:
"These are hate site (sic) created by a cyber bully who is now writing "Parody" on the blogs in hope to keep them up but they are not parody blogs and she makes sure to get what she writes on Google listing first before writing parody so people will read her hate in Google listing. She has been doing this for 3 years now and she attacks everyone in my family incluing (sic) my mother and my little girl."
First, if he had a nickel for every time he has exploited his family in his libel schemes, and that includes his grown daughter, he surely would have enough money by now to get off the welfare rolls. Here was an actual reply from a reader who wasn't fooled:
"I think this is funny. I also think that you did, in fact, write these blogs and posted them here to get people to read them. I also believe that no one gives a crap about this. No where in there did I see an attack on you or your family. I also doubt that you are who your name says you are. I believe you are the author of these blogs."
Many people see through his lies immediately. So, why doesn't he stop? This is a question that all cyber victims ask themselves.
An anonymous comment posted on a victim resource site:
"What surprises me is even when the psychopath stalker has been caught out, he still DOES IT! He carries on! It's an obsession! He doesn't stop thinking about himself long enough to realize his victims are smart and can call him on his behavior! The psychopath will still stand there and in plain sight proclaim that "he is the victim." It's a wonder how they can carry on after being exposed, yet we all know it's a compulsion."
I wish that woman the best of luck.
Anti-social people are typically "street smart", so one clue why Churchwell continues to lie is that he boasts about being able to trick people. He seems to think people are too dumb to ever figure out that he is a pathological liar. Another clue is what the American Psychiatric Association calls "duping gratification". A psychopath will twist the truth just for the fun of putting something over on someone. The lies Churchwell tells are very stupid, but psychopaths pay so much attention to "winning," they fail to hear warning bells. Further, there is something outright evil about his lies about women. This may be the result of some long ago trauma at the hands of a woman, faulty brain wiring, or perhaps he was born that way. Whatever the cause, clinical research shows that psychopathy does not suddenly spring into existence in adulthood. The symptoms appear in early life.
And what about his victims? Some victims, such as the photo site moderator mentioned above, or that male writer who Churchwell cruelly libeled a "drunk," say nothing and hope that the bully will go away. But sometimes a victim is tempted to give a long explanation to prove the bully's allegations false. I have done that here, of course. On those occasions when I have asserted my right not to be libeled, a paranoid fear of exposure seems to compel him to silence me immediately. These attacks also include the common tactic: "My fans say you are a freak" and "Everyone wants you to go away." This is standard bully-speak. Churchwell has no fans. He just likes the idea of hiding behind an imaginary mob, much like a toddler will hide behind his mother. It also is a variation on: "Nobody reads your blog" and "It must suck to be you."
Don't be fooled into believing that what he writes has any validity - it doesn't. He is actually describing himself. Author Melton said this about projection:
“Keep one simple fact always in mind, regardless of whether he is borderline, narcissistic, psychopathic or sadistic: Whenever he is criticizing characteristics in you, he is making autobiographical statements about himself. Listen closely to the hateful things he says to you about you. You are listening to verbatim descriptions of his character defects. This is extremely important to remember, especially in the midst of verbal attack. These are the only moments when you will hear the truth about the man who lies concealed behind the steel wall of his personality disorder.”
So, Churchwell projects his anti-social behavior onto others; he accuses others of deviant behavior that he is guilty of himself. Additionally, something should be said about his feigned victimhood, since it always follows attacks that are particularly nasty. If he starts to think that maybe this time he will be held accountable for his behavior, he immediately will turn on the water works. Playing to the emotions of others is one of his manipulative tricks, and it commonly takes the form of self-pity, phony indignation, pretending to be misunderstood ("Me hate women? I love women!"), claiming that he's the one being bullied or harassed or stalked, claiming to be deeply offended, martyrdom ("I wonder how much longer I will live..."), claiming a scary past ("I think my father was in the Mafia.."), and even claiming religious persecution, and a poor-me drama ("I am mentally ill..." and "I gave up magic because of the death of Christa Worthington...", "I am the victim of a wacko ...," and "I am the one being bullied..."). All of these tales portray himself as the downtrodden victim.
Standing head and shoulders above Churchwell's pile of feigned excuses and victimhood tales is this whopper: "I'LL KEEP WRITING ABOUT SCARLETT UNTIL SHE STOPS ATTACKING ME AND MY FAMILY AND GOES AWAY." Translation: Every time Scarlett exposes me as a liar, I will get even!
Those of us who have had an experience with psychopaths know that their language is two-dimensional. They are, as someone once said, as "deep as a thimble." An analogy is given by Dr. Hare of a psychopath as a color blind person who has learned how to function in the world of color by certain strategies. He may tell you that he "stopped at a red light," but what he really means is that he knew the light at the top means "stop," so he stopped. He calls it the "red" light like everyone else, but he has no experience of what "red" looks like. Psychopaths use words about emotions the same way people who are color blind use words about colors they cannot perceive. They not only learn how to use the words, and repeat the same words over and over, they also learn to pantomime the feeling. But they never HAVE the feeling.
According to experts, persecutory thoughts often combine with delusions of grandeur: defined as the gross exaggeration of one's own importance, power, or talents. Delusions of grandeur abound on the Churchwell blogs and can be found in recent posts where he wrote that he is a "witch" (perhaps meaning warlock?), a psychic, a successful photographer, a famous retired magician, and that he used to know and date celebrities such as Brooke Shields! Delusional types are convinced that they are special, unique, famous, or know someone who is famous. Or, notorious. Churchwell is just as likely to say that he is a "member of the press" who photographed Cardinal Egan up close and personal, as to claim that he was pals with the psychopathic wife slasher O.J. Simpson.
Read what others say about Churchwell's occult delusions on this thread.
As for his failure to have a productive life, anti-social people rarely hold a job for long. His old girlfriend from twenty years ago reports that he couldn't even keep a Santa Claus job in a department store for more than one day. According to her, he lost his marbles after he and other store employees were filmed for a segment that was to air on a local TV channel. The camera crew got only one distant shot of Churchwell, and no one recognized him on TV. The next day, feeling slighted, Churchwell refused to get out of bed. It was much the same story in 1996 when he was hired as a 'table-hopper' magician in a bar and "worked," by his own account, as a pickpocket in a strip club.
In Invisible Eden, Maria Flook wrote about that time in his life: "T.C. was no longer a rising star but was more like a disabled satellite orbiting the same seedy wee-hour solar system, night after night."
Normal people work for a goal, even if the goal is only a paycheck. Normal people measure things by how much they have to spend (in time, work, energy) to get the desired results. They want to goof off from time to time, usually wanting as much free time as they can get to pursue their own pleasures and interests. Anti-social people might work for a goal, too, but it's a different goal: they want power, authority, adulation. Yet, they don't understand how people achieve these things; they think it's all arbitrary, it's all appearances, it's all who you know. They often try to attach themselves to those who already have what they want, as Churchwell did with two magicians.
To read what magicians really think of him, go here and here.
And go here to read an entry about him on the Urban Dictionary website, written by one of the magicians he ripped off.
It appears that Churchwell was not invested in magic—whatever he may have produced was something he did sporadically. Clearly, he didn't pay attention to stuff like diligence, ethics, and honing his craft, preferring instead to leech off, or demean, those who were successful. Psychopaths feel entitled to whatever they can take. They expect special indulgences, and they also feel entitled to use people. The idea of working for a paycheck, of competing in the work place with other men and with women, is anathema to Churchwell. Of course, he has no time to earn a living anyway, since he is hard at work being a liar, cyber bully and stalker.
Ironically, people like Churchwell actually receive a disability check from the government so that they are able to spend their entire day attacking people on the Internet. Before he started blogging, he managed to qualify for monthly disability benefits by satisfying certain criteria for manic depression, according to him. Which means he may have qualified under any of the eight mental disabilities listed on the Social Security website; personality disorders are included. In order for a claimant to get benefits, psychiatrists must state that he can no longer perform his past work, or any other type of work, that he has repeated episodes of decompensation (mind deterioration), and ongoing difficulties in maintaining social functioning. Manic depression, also called bipolar disorder, is characterized by mood changes that swing from depression to mania, with periods of normalcy between the two extremes. There are online articles explaining the "mood cycling" involved in this disorder, and the differences between a mood disorder and a personality disorder. One of the hallmarks of manic depression is guilt. As most of us know, guilt is a feeling of responsibility or remorse for something wrong we have done. It is our conscience judging us for our actions and thoughts. In people who are bipolar, guilt feelings seem to come from nowhere, and often there is no outside source. When they harm other people through their actions or words, they feel remorseful afterwards. Generally, they are profoundly sorry for hurting others. Contrast that with Churchwell, who has never demonstrated remorse for anything he has done to others. If he is bipolar, then surely this is only part of his problem, and it is his personality disorder, characterized by steady hate, compulsive lying, and a total absence of guilt, which is responsible for the misery caused by him on the blogs. I will close the paragraph by adding this. I loved a wonderful man who suffered with manic depression. Believe me. He was nothing like the anti-social thug Thomas Churchwell.
That paragraph clarifies his victimization of me (and others) for three years.
In college my major was psychology, though I am a photographer by profession. Since I do have a background in psychology, however, I think it is safe to assume that Churchwell's recent rant, in which he wrote again that I "stole pictures off the Internet", am stalking him, work at Walmart, am jealous of the bully Susan, and many other loony lies—forecasts another lock-up for him. Cross your fingers.Life being the way it is, a couple of weeks after I'd drafted this page, but long before I had finished it, I received the following joke in an email from someone who knows the blog situation well: "What do Tarquin Churchwell and a sperm have in common? Answer: Both have about a one in 3 million chance of becoming a human being."
Let's begin. Psychosis is defined by the American Psychiatric Association as the extreme condition of losing touch with reality and good judgment. Symptoms include paranoia, grandiosity, racing thoughts, abnormal behavior, bizarre sexual activity, hallucinations, rage and compulsive lying. Churchwell's psychosis is on parade on this site. I know nothing about his chemical dependency, as referenced above by his psychiatrist.
His blog's predominant theme is hate. While he has been known to type a few harmless lines about the weather, or post snapshots, he always returns to the topics that have consumed him for years. And they are nothing if not contradictory. On a typical day, he toggles back and forth between libel attacks and grandiosity; he posts lewd pictures of teenagers and professes Elmer Gantry style outrage over lewdness; he claims to be a victim and victimizes anyone who crosses him; he brags that he was a pickpocket and accuses other people of stealing; he boasts about his anti-social experiences and claims to catch other people in shameful behavior, and believes Yahoo, MySpace and Google are in cahoots with him, and so on. In his mind boggling posts, we see that what he says and does are two very different things. Put another way, Thomas Churchwell may be the most blatant liar and hypocrite who ever drew breath.
The most telling thing he does is contradict himself. When you wonder about a particular contradiction, he will deny ever writing it, though it may literally have been only a day since he wrote it—how could you think he'd ever say that? You're a wacko! He will contradict FACTS. He will lie to you about conversations you had with him. He will misquote you to yourself. Typically, he writes poison post titles about me that start with the lie: "SCARLETT ADMITS" and what follows are more horrific lies. When you catch him in a lie, he will say that you are the one who's lying, making stuff up, and you are a wacko.Forensic psychologist Dr. Robert Hare, author of Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of Psychopaths Among Us, said this about psychopathic liars, and it fits Churchwell to a T:
"When caught in a lie and challenged, he makes up new lies."
Psychopaths have always existed. Most, like Churchwell, come from low socio-economic backgrounds. Most are males. They have been studied using various techniques, perhaps the same techniques that Churchwell's psychiatrist used to diagnose him, and through the years their problems have been blamed on various causes. But one thing never varies: all anti-social people share four common characteristics. They are all very egocentric, they have no empathy for others, they are incapable of feeling remorse, and they are very manipulative.
Far from being killers, on the whole, psychopaths tend to harm people in ways other than murder. They are not always serial killers, Norman Bates poster boys, or greedy, cut-throat CEOs. Many are hostile creeps like Churchwell, who enjoy making life difficult for others. Competitive to an extreme, they regularly lie and turn ordinary interactions into struggles to the death. This is how Churchwell conducts himself on the Web, and strangely enough, he believes that blogging should be for him alone. He will go to a blog to derail a conversation with libel, and if another blogger calls him on his lies, he will go after that person, too. The right that other people should have to blog peacefully means nothing to him. Which leads us to what psychopaths do that is truly shocking: an ability to focus their undivided attention on people, until they ruin them. Some clinicians have compared this to the concentration with which a predator stalks his prey. Churchwell calls it "winning". A couple of years ago, he posted snapshots on a MSN amateur photography site, and when the moderator offered him a bit of helpful criticism, Churchwell lambasted the poor man for weeks, calling him a "phony, crappy nobody," among other slurs. Sound familiar? He has been trying for three years to drive me off the Internet with lies that are identical to those he wrote about the moderator. As a predictable collorary, anti-social people feel most comfortable with those who they perceive as being one step down from them. They shift their obsessive natures away from defeating those who are trying to get ahead and toward those they perceive as already having made it. Churchwell demonstrates the utmost benevolence toward underage girls who look like Diane Arbus prototypes, and who will never be models, yet when he encounters people who earn their livings as writers, magicians and photographers, he attacks them like a rabid dog. Those people, in his opinion, "need to be taken down a notch," although he would never admit that he is jealous. Psychopaths thrive on winning. How many times has Churchwell published lies about me, or someone else, and then screamed like a highly immature adolescent: "I WON!" and "GOTCHA!" Too many times to count. Although his "victory dance" is often short lived, before he starts to feel bored again, smearing professional people and beating us to a bloody pulp on the Web is his definite objective. In her book Invisible Eden, Maria Flook got this chilling quote from Churchwell, and it may be the only honest thing that he has ever said: "I love messing up people's heads."
Psychopaths hate the world. Consumed by envy and suspicion, they are incapable of forming normal attachments. Occasionally, they may team up with a disordered individual like themselves, if it suits their purposes, and some even marry, but knowing a psychopath is like riding in a car with no brakes. It's no wonder this type is drawn to the Internet. Technology is a great gift to cyber bullies and cyber stalkers. They used to sit outside their targets' home—hiding in cars or bushes—waiting to follow them. They used to leave threatening notes on their windshields before slashing their tires. But now they have moved into the 21st century, using modern technology to terrorize their victims. They have an uncanny ability for recognizing nice, caring women and can sniff out potential victims seemingly through their computer screens. Churchwell got lucky in the niceness arena, when he met me on an Internet forum in 2006.
I have written about his vindictiveness and how he began to attack me the day after I ended those short-lived phone conversations with him in 2006. What you may not know is that his abrupt change from decent (though odd) treatment on the phone to outright abuse was very shocking and bewildering, and so unlike my normal experience that it was a long time before I realized that my being nice to him was what triggered his nasty reaction. Once he knew that I was nice, he expected to be able to use me like an appliance and shove me around like a piece of furniture. When I objected to his behavior, then he thought that obviously I was a wacko, or else I'd let him do whatever he wanted with me. When I got so uppity as to tell him that I didn't want to talk with him anymore because of his tall tales, then he went bonkers—just like that, trashing me on his blog with unbelievable lies. I was suddenly a broken toaster oven. Once a psychopath knows that you are sincere, he'll suck you dry like Dracula—demand all your time, be more work than a newborn—and test you with tiresome demands and power plays. In his world, sincerity is a weakness and trying to "understand" him is asking to be hurt, so be careful; he will hurt you without blinking. He can't, or won't, trust, so he will constantly test you - an example was when Churchwell unsuccessfully pressured me for nude pictures. If you won't submit to the tyranny, then you will be bullied as "a moron," "a waste of time," "If you liked me, you would do whatever I ask," "I give up on you," and "You're a wacko."
He has a weird sense of time. It's as if he is not aware that the passage of time changes people, and generally makes them less gullible, or maybe he just isn't aware of time passing at all. Three years have gone by and he has spent them arguing obsessively to rationalize his awful treatment of me, heatedly battling the wacko (as he calls me) with name calling and finger-pointing in cruel and vulgar rants. It is also in this vein that he has worked on my readers and tried to destroy my photography career, repeatedly telling the Internet that I have no talent or ethics, and that I'm a "photo thief," and so on.Here's a typical lie Churchwell posted on Google Groups. He listed every blog he could find with his name in it, and then wrote:
"These are hate site (sic) created by a cyber bully who is now writing "Parody" on the blogs in hope to keep them up but they are not parody blogs and she makes sure to get what she writes on Google listing first before writing parody so people will read her hate in Google listing. She has been doing this for 3 years now and she attacks everyone in my family incluing (sic) my mother and my little girl."
First, if he had a nickel for every time he has exploited his family in his libel schemes, and that includes his grown daughter, he surely would have enough money by now to get off the welfare rolls. Here was an actual reply from a reader who wasn't fooled:
"I think this is funny. I also think that you did, in fact, write these blogs and posted them here to get people to read them. I also believe that no one gives a crap about this. No where in there did I see an attack on you or your family. I also doubt that you are who your name says you are. I believe you are the author of these blogs."
Many people see through his lies immediately. So, why doesn't he stop? This is a question that all cyber victims ask themselves.
An anonymous comment posted on a victim resource site:
"What surprises me is even when the psychopath stalker has been caught out, he still DOES IT! He carries on! It's an obsession! He doesn't stop thinking about himself long enough to realize his victims are smart and can call him on his behavior! The psychopath will still stand there and in plain sight proclaim that "he is the victim." It's a wonder how they can carry on after being exposed, yet we all know it's a compulsion."
I wish that woman the best of luck.
Anti-social people are typically "street smart", so one clue why Churchwell continues to lie is that he boasts about being able to trick people. He seems to think people are too dumb to ever figure out that he is a pathological liar. Another clue is what the American Psychiatric Association calls "duping gratification". A psychopath will twist the truth just for the fun of putting something over on someone. The lies Churchwell tells are very stupid, but psychopaths pay so much attention to "winning," they fail to hear warning bells. Further, there is something outright evil about his lies about women. This may be the result of some long ago trauma at the hands of a woman, faulty brain wiring, or perhaps he was born that way. Whatever the cause, clinical research shows that psychopathy does not suddenly spring into existence in adulthood. The symptoms appear in early life.And what about his victims? Some victims, such as the photo site moderator mentioned above, or that male writer who Churchwell cruelly libeled a "drunk," say nothing and hope that the bully will go away. But sometimes a victim is tempted to give a long explanation to prove the bully's allegations false. I have done that here, of course. On those occasions when I have asserted my right not to be libeled, a paranoid fear of exposure seems to compel him to silence me immediately. These attacks also include the common tactic: "My fans say you are a freak" and "Everyone wants you to go away." This is standard bully-speak. Churchwell has no fans. He just likes the idea of hiding behind an imaginary mob, much like a toddler will hide behind his mother. It also is a variation on: "Nobody reads your blog" and "It must suck to be you."
Don't be fooled into believing that what he writes has any validity - it doesn't. He is actually describing himself. Author Melton said this about projection:
“Keep one simple fact always in mind, regardless of whether he is borderline, narcissistic, psychopathic or sadistic: Whenever he is criticizing characteristics in you, he is making autobiographical statements about himself. Listen closely to the hateful things he says to you about you. You are listening to verbatim descriptions of his character defects. This is extremely important to remember, especially in the midst of verbal attack. These are the only moments when you will hear the truth about the man who lies concealed behind the steel wall of his personality disorder.”
So, Churchwell projects his anti-social behavior onto others; he accuses others of deviant behavior that he is guilty of himself. Additionally, something should be said about his feigned victimhood, since it always follows attacks that are particularly nasty. If he starts to think that maybe this time he will be held accountable for his behavior, he immediately will turn on the water works. Playing to the emotions of others is one of his manipulative tricks, and it commonly takes the form of self-pity, phony indignation, pretending to be misunderstood ("Me hate women? I love women!"), claiming that he's the one being bullied or harassed or stalked, claiming to be deeply offended, martyrdom ("I wonder how much longer I will live..."), claiming a scary past ("I think my father was in the Mafia.."), and even claiming religious persecution, and a poor-me drama ("I am mentally ill..." and "I gave up magic because of the death of Christa Worthington...", "I am the victim of a wacko ...," and "I am the one being bullied..."). All of these tales portray himself as the downtrodden victim.Standing head and shoulders above Churchwell's pile of feigned excuses and victimhood tales is this whopper: "I'LL KEEP WRITING ABOUT SCARLETT UNTIL SHE STOPS ATTACKING ME AND MY FAMILY AND GOES AWAY." Translation: Every time Scarlett exposes me as a liar, I will get even!
Those of us who have had an experience with psychopaths know that their language is two-dimensional. They are, as someone once said, as "deep as a thimble." An analogy is given by Dr. Hare of a psychopath as a color blind person who has learned how to function in the world of color by certain strategies. He may tell you that he "stopped at a red light," but what he really means is that he knew the light at the top means "stop," so he stopped. He calls it the "red" light like everyone else, but he has no experience of what "red" looks like. Psychopaths use words about emotions the same way people who are color blind use words about colors they cannot perceive. They not only learn how to use the words, and repeat the same words over and over, they also learn to pantomime the feeling. But they never HAVE the feeling.
According to experts, persecutory thoughts often combine with delusions of grandeur: defined as the gross exaggeration of one's own importance, power, or talents. Delusions of grandeur abound on the Churchwell blogs and can be found in recent posts where he wrote that he is a "witch" (perhaps meaning warlock?), a psychic, a successful photographer, a famous retired magician, and that he used to know and date celebrities such as Brooke Shields! Delusional types are convinced that they are special, unique, famous, or know someone who is famous. Or, notorious. Churchwell is just as likely to say that he is a "member of the press" who photographed Cardinal Egan up close and personal, as to claim that he was pals with the psychopathic wife slasher O.J. Simpson. Read what others say about Churchwell's occult delusions on this thread.
As for his failure to have a productive life, anti-social people rarely hold a job for long. His old girlfriend from twenty years ago reports that he couldn't even keep a Santa Claus job in a department store for more than one day. According to her, he lost his marbles after he and other store employees were filmed for a segment that was to air on a local TV channel. The camera crew got only one distant shot of Churchwell, and no one recognized him on TV. The next day, feeling slighted, Churchwell refused to get out of bed. It was much the same story in 1996 when he was hired as a 'table-hopper' magician in a bar and "worked," by his own account, as a pickpocket in a strip club.In Invisible Eden, Maria Flook wrote about that time in his life: "T.C. was no longer a rising star but was more like a disabled satellite orbiting the same seedy wee-hour solar system, night after night."
Normal people work for a goal, even if the goal is only a paycheck. Normal people measure things by how much they have to spend (in time, work, energy) to get the desired results. They want to goof off from time to time, usually wanting as much free time as they can get to pursue their own pleasures and interests. Anti-social people might work for a goal, too, but it's a different goal: they want power, authority, adulation. Yet, they don't understand how people achieve these things; they think it's all arbitrary, it's all appearances, it's all who you know. They often try to attach themselves to those who already have what they want, as Churchwell did with two magicians.
To read what magicians really think of him, go here and here.
And go here to read an entry about him on the Urban Dictionary website, written by one of the magicians he ripped off.
It appears that Churchwell was not invested in magic—whatever he may have produced was something he did sporadically. Clearly, he didn't pay attention to stuff like diligence, ethics, and honing his craft, preferring instead to leech off, or demean, those who were successful. Psychopaths feel entitled to whatever they can take. They expect special indulgences, and they also feel entitled to use people. The idea of working for a paycheck, of competing in the work place with other men and with women, is anathema to Churchwell. Of course, he has no time to earn a living anyway, since he is hard at work being a liar, cyber bully and stalker.
Ironically, people like Churchwell actually receive a disability check from the government so that they are able to spend their entire day attacking people on the Internet. Before he started blogging, he managed to qualify for monthly disability benefits by satisfying certain criteria for manic depression, according to him. Which means he may have qualified under any of the eight mental disabilities listed on the Social Security website; personality disorders are included. In order for a claimant to get benefits, psychiatrists must state that he can no longer perform his past work, or any other type of work, that he has repeated episodes of decompensation (mind deterioration), and ongoing difficulties in maintaining social functioning. Manic depression, also called bipolar disorder, is characterized by mood changes that swing from depression to mania, with periods of normalcy between the two extremes. There are online articles explaining the "mood cycling" involved in this disorder, and the differences between a mood disorder and a personality disorder. One of the hallmarks of manic depression is guilt. As most of us know, guilt is a feeling of responsibility or remorse for something wrong we have done. It is our conscience judging us for our actions and thoughts. In people who are bipolar, guilt feelings seem to come from nowhere, and often there is no outside source. When they harm other people through their actions or words, they feel remorseful afterwards. Generally, they are profoundly sorry for hurting others. Contrast that with Churchwell, who has never demonstrated remorse for anything he has done to others. If he is bipolar, then surely this is only part of his problem, and it is his personality disorder, characterized by steady hate, compulsive lying, and a total absence of guilt, which is responsible for the misery caused by him on the blogs. I will close the paragraph by adding this. I loved a wonderful man who suffered with manic depression. Believe me. He was nothing like the anti-social thug Thomas Churchwell.If someone you know is a psychopath, watch out. They feel that the rules don't apply to them, and they will always cause trouble wherever they think they can get away with it, not to mention alienating family, co-workers, clients and friends with their arrogance, lies, and malice. They become enraged over simple disagreements, plus they have evil mouths and will say ANYTHING. If you live or work with them—or find yourself in the same blogosphere with them—expect big trouble sooner or later.
A quote from a satire site, by "Frank the Psychopath":
"I don’t think I feel things the same way you do. It’s like… at my first job. I was stealing maybe a thousand bucks a month from that place. And this kid, he was new, he got wise. And he was going to turn me in, but before he got the chance I went to the manager and pinned the whole thing on him. Kid lost his job, the cops got involved, I don’t know what happened to him. And I guess something like that is supposed to make me feel bad, right? It’s supposed to hurt, right? But instead, it’s like there’s nothing..."
That quote is uncannily similar to comments Churchwell makes on his blogs. Although anti-social types often steal from others, they never experience feelings of shame, guilt or remorse. They are legally sane—they do know right from wrong—but they refuse to accept any responsibility for their actions. Instead, they accuse others of wrongdoing. Dr. Hare refers to psychopaths as being morally insane.
A recap of excuses that Churchwell and other psychopaths use to avoid responsibility in all situations:
* Justifying: "I CAN'T HELP IT. I'M MENTALLY ILL."
* Blame shifting: "YOU ASKED FOR IT!"
* Play Acting: "I AM A VICTIM!"
* Entitlement: "IF I WANT TO DO IT, I CAN."
* Grandiosity: "I AM SMARTER THAN YOU! YOU ARE A DUMMY!"
* Projection: "YOU ARE A BULLY, STALKER, LIAR, THIEF, WACKO!"
And let's not forget this biggie, which is closely tied to all the rest: Leaving out major sections of any incident and inserting his own loony spin. Rewriting history to suit himself.
As we slosh through the cesspool of lies and manufactured excuses, we always come back to what he told Maria Flook in that interview: "I LOVE MESSING UP PEOPLE'S HEADS."
Shouldn't he feel embarrassment and shame for what he has done to me and others? He should, but he has no deep-seated emotions. No empathy, not even a morsel of compassion or concern for other people. Thomas Churchwell is completely amoral, or perhaps, he has the morals of a bright two-year-old. Which brings me back to his diabolical lies. You've heard of a magician's bag of tricks? Churchwell, a failed magician, has a bagful of lies that he uses for the purpose of trying to destroy my life. When he starts to feel bored with one lie, he tosses it back into the bag, and pulls out another. Did I mention that he's been doing this for three years? The following are links, in no particular order, to my archive posts that set the record straight about this psychopath's big bag of lies.
The truth is here:
The child porno writer lie
The phone message lie
The Susan and I are the same person lie
The "I never threatened to kill Scarlett" lie
The hate blogger lie
The nudie pictures lie
The photo thief lie
The photo thief lie redux
The stalker lie
The "Scarlett is attacking my family" lie
If I have forgotten a lie, readers, just read my whole blog.
H.M. Cleckley writes in The Mask Of Sanity:
"One almost amusing example of how psychopaths lie can be exemplified by a man who's footprint was discovered at the scene of the crime. "No, that's not my foot" he said, even though everyone knew he was lying."
Before I wrote the first post on this blog, I tried to convince Churchwell to stop telling lies by appealing to his better nature. But I found out that appealing to his better nature was about as effective as spitting in the sea. What you see is what you get: he has no better nature. The fundamental problem, again, is that he doesn't have a conscience. He won't take other people's feelings into consideration and he overlooks an obvious fact, that other people will react when abused or exploited and that most people get REALLY pissed off by being lied to, or lied about. He treats people like dirt.
It is ironic that two of his favorite lies are to call people perverts and thieves. Ironic and so contradictory, in view of the fact his deviant history includes posting lewd pictures of underage girls, and stealing magic tricks (according to several magic forums), and stealing the copyright of my commercial photograph, and boasting that he once was a pickpocket, among other weirdness. Again, these are prime examples of how he projects his own behavior onto others. The pretense that his screwball allegations about me are part of a morality campaign, of all things, and that he is Snow White, is another lie designed to dupe the Internet along with the mental health professionals.
Never in my life have I encountered such a damaging person. If I hadn't stopped carrying his lies around with me like suitcases, I probably would have had a nervous breakdown. There was a period of time two years ago when I remember looking in the mirror and feeling like I was the most worthless human being to ever walk the earth. Churchwell's attacks did that to me. This was when I had recently lost my parents and was dealing with depression, a result of my mother and father dying within 11 months of each other. A couple of years before that, I had lost my fiancé tragically. I was vulnerable, in other words. I actually believed, when I met Churchwell on that message board a few months later, that my young 60-year-old parents would have recovered from the heart disease and cancer, if I had just prayed harder for their recovery and devoted myself to their care 24 hours a day. Believing myself a failure, I was ripe for buying into the awful things that Churchwell was saying about me on his hate sites. I think that is part of the hook of being in the same blogosphere with disordered people; victims want to prove that they aren’t the way the hater says they are. I know this was true for me. I would get so close to the proverbial delete button and then he would say something so outrageous that I couldn’t stand to close my blog without defending my character and proving him wrong. Even after I came to terms with my grief, I continued to defend myself against his lies. Defending myself against his scurrilous attacks, or dodging them like arrows, had become an unwanted habit.
As readers know, he told Blogland that I was a pornographer, thief, hater, liar and stalker after I had lost sleep, work, and suffered so much that I ended up in the hospital with pleurisy. Not content with stopping there, he mocked my illness, claimed crazily that I posted he gave me "flu on the Internet" and continued to attack me, even while I was hospitalized. His emotional abuse was (and still is) a strategic move to break me down—and "level the playing field" to make it appear that I am just like him. "Throw enough mud and some of it will stick," is his motto.
Here's a link to an article about stress and the immune system.
Before I soldier on with my experiences, I want to share what happened to a friend of mine from the UK. She had been communicating for over a year with a man who lived in Florida, and during the time of their correspondence and phone calls, he seemed so "sweet, caring, and kind." She mentioned how he had grieved over his dead wife, and so on.
This man asked my friend to marry him, and, to top it off, he promised her that he had a terrific job lined up for her in the city where he lived. My friend believed him and came to the United States to marry him.
At their first meeting she mentioned how it was the beginning of the end, and she should have seen it coming. She told him, after they met at the airport, that she needed to make a phone call, but instead of letting her use his cell phone, he coldly told her to use the pay phone. She noticed how this contradicted his warm personality on the phone and in emails. She said she was shocked, but being naive, she married him anyway.
As the weeks went by, things got worse. She found out that he had lied about the terrific job. Next, she began to get phone calls from two women in Canada who told her that her new husband had been inviting them, via online chats, to live with him! My friend was distraught and told these women that he was lying to them. The women didn't believe it (why do women tend to doubt another woman when she is trying to warn them?), so my friend said, "If you want proof that I am married to him, come down here and you can see for yourselves."
Eventually, she learned from his family that Mr. Wonderful was a pathological liar who had a long history of using women and having his mother cover his tracks. I don't want anyone else to go through what my friend and I experienced. It is my hope that this post will provide a bit of support to others who live, work, or blog with psychopaths. I'm sorry that I cannot also provide a solution, but since a prime characteristic of anti-social people is believing that they are always right, no matter what, they are extremely resistant to change and, unfortunately, tend to get worse as they get older. I know this is true of Churchwell; he is worse now than three years ago, when he started blogging. The key, then, is prevention; learning how to recognize losers, before they can damage you. I hope that more women will become informed, so that they will not become victims themselves.
Pathological liars are also pathological attention seekers. More than anything else, they crave attention. It doesn't matter if the attention is positive or negative, as long as they get attention. Churchwell basks in the "narcissistic hits" (narcissistic supply) that he gets from reading my posts, and from the knowledge that others are reading them, too. Although he denies every terrible truth about himself, he enjoys the attention nonetheless. As Freud said of narcissists, these people act like they're in love with themselves. And they are in love with a fantasy of themselves—or they want you to be in love with their fantasy self; it's hard to tell just what is going on.
Lying is the most common complaint about narcissists. Fragile ego, a need for adulation, fishing for pity, and expecting other people to defer to them are also signs of the disorder. Narcissists are quick to blame others when their expectations are not met. They react like hornets to criticism, and when they are rejected, they vilify the person who rejected them. Thus, Churchwell's attacks on me. Their lack of insight is breathtaking and often leads them to wildly misinterpret other people's motives. Churchwell's preoccupation with himself has always obstructed his ability to see people as they really are, obstructed even his ability to perceive bloggers as separate people! For a long time, he was convinced that the bully Susan and I were the same person, even though she and I are nothing alike, obviously.
Psychologist Theodore Milton has written about two primary types of narcissists: the elitists, who often become successful leaders, and the fanatic type, which describes Churchwell. The fanatic narcissist is a severely narcissistically wounded individual, usually with major paranoid tendencies, who has an illusion of omnipotence. These people are fighting the reality of their insignificance and are trying to re-establish their self-esteem through grandiose fantasies. When unable to gain recognition or support from others, they often take on the role of a warrior on a grandiose mission. Thus, Churchwell's obsession to rid the Internet of his perceived enemies, claiming that we are stalkers, thieves and pornographers. He has wrongly accused at least four people of being pornographers. Fanatics can be found among cult leaders, in mental hospitals if their delusions become sustained and extensive, or in prison, if their missions counteract those of society.
Grandiosity can take many forms. Like Narcissus gazing at his reflection, narcissistic men are obsessed with their looks, the same as narcissistic women. One of the first things Churchwell said to me on the phone was, "I hate getting old." But male narcissists are more likely than women to get hung up on the 'specialness' of their work - in Churchwell's case, the "work" is his hate blog, which means if he is spewing on his blog, by definition it is more special and important than anyone's nice blog. People with narcissistic personality disorder overestimate their abilities and inflate their accomplishments, while underestimating and devaluing the accomplishments of everyone else. Churchwell does that constantly. Like psychopaths, narcissists are very envious. They also have those strange religious ideas, in particular believing that they are God's special favorites. God loves them, so they are exempt from ordinary rules; God tells them they are omnipotent, so they can do anything they feel like. Conveniently, the narcissist's God has strict rules for everyone else! Churchwell's recurring fantasy that he is a persecuted Jew fits with his fantasy of being a victim on the Internet, and not the victimizer. Always contemptuous of others, he makes insulting, mocking and crude comments about women, as if auditioning for an episode on Jerry Springer. A person like Churchwell who is quoted in Invisible Eden as comparing a certain part of a woman's anatomy to a computer trackball, is either a narcissist, emotionally retarded, a loathsome misogynist, or all three.
But, I digress. The intoxicating high Churchwell gets from reading a post about himself wears off after a few days, or within minutes, and then he must try to provoke another reaction. As he has demonstrated many times, failure to provoke a response from his victims is wounding to him. It makes him feel panicky.
I should point out here that many of his attacks on me failed to get a response. I defended myself against his continuous libel in just thirty-something posts over a period of three years. To some of you, that may seem like thirty-something posts too many, but let me tell you, if your character was being defiled on the Internet, and your livelihood threatened by a determined psychopath/narcissist bent on destroying you, then you just might need to defend yourself occasionally. I learned long ago that keeping silent doesn't stop the abuse. Recently, he posted more libel on a sleazy site that caters to sadomasochists, where, not surprisingly, he is a member. Of course, the link ended up in the Google blog listings. What he wrote about me was hideous, yet this was one of many times when I didn't bother to defend myself. See my archives for the sex "story" that he posted on a kiddie porn website, in which he impersonated a certain male blogger.
His name calling, in particular, has been a sign that I am silently winning one battle, if not the war. He is telling me that I do know what I'm talking about when I describe him as a psychopath.
I take it as backhanded validation when he "critiques" every word in my blog in the nasty style of a psychopath. I also have an idea how Maria Flook may have reacted, had she known that Churchwell plagiarized her insightful chapter in Invisible Eden, describing his brief romance with socialite Christa Worthington, six years before she was stabbed to death by her garbage collector. When Churchwell put that chapter on his blog, readers saw how he had scribbled snide comments over the text and all along the margins, obviously hating what Flook had written about him. (You can download the entire text here and read a brief biography of the author here.) He has spent years trashing this author. Paradoxically, he pimps her book, his obvious purpose being to lure readers to his blog with cheesy tabloid headlines: "YES, I WAS THE BOYFRIEND OF CHRISTA WORTHINGTON IN INVISIBLE EDEN!" On other sites, he makes disgusting comments such as this: "IN INVISIBLE EDEN I AM PEPPERED THROUGH THE WHOLE BOOK AND HAVE MY OWN CHAPTER ON PAGE 288 CALLED "THE AMAZING TARQUIN." Since he desperately wants to be famous, or infamous, he is not above exploiting his short-lived relationship with a woman who was brutally murdered. To those of us who read the book, he comes across as a seedy bar magician, a moocher, unstable, and a source of comic relief for the sometimes meaningful relationships that filled Christa Worthington's short, tragic life. Flook aptly described Churchwell's personality during her interview of him in 2002 as "exibitionistic." Interestingly, she also relates in her book that Churchwell sent her numerous "heated emails that were incendiary, sensational and always wacky." Sound familiar? Now that I have reposted a tiny portion of his bona fide, genuine psychiatric diagnostic assessment in this post, he will step up his written attacks on me, just as he did to Maria Flook and others.
Michael O'Keefe, lead prosecutor in the Worthington case, described Churchwell as a "nutcase." There you have it. One guideline for dealing with this type of person is: don't respond, don't interact and don't engage. As I stated above, this is not as easy as it sounds. From my own experience I know it is natural to want to defend yourself and set the record straight. However, I finally learned that trying to reason with him was like trying to reason with a screaming toddler. Of course, toddlers develop and mature and act out for only a brief period, after which they are on the road to becoming grown ups, whereas bullies never grow up. Churchwell's response, upon reading this post, will be more bizarre "critiquing" and name calling; so immature and childish, as to be beyond the belief of any adult.
Yet this is not merely the case of a bully who is unbelievably crude, immature and mean. People who spend their lives attacking people on the Internet are afflicted with a form of sadism. They find joy in hurting others. They are psychopaths. Churchwell's lust for causing pain is evident in what he chooses to write about me and other innocent people. Along with spewing vile lies on his blog, he also irritates everyone by flooding a group with drivel on completely neutral sites. A few months ago, he went to the ABC News website and posted libel about me. This week, it was the Deviant art website. Since it is unlikely that any intelligent person would be favorably impressed or influenced upon reading hate comments written under the guise of "warning" others about a victim, it is obvious that his goal is to find excitement from being a sadistic pest.
Psychopaths are loners; narcissists are dependent and clingy. I think it is not going out on a limb now to conclude that Thomas Churchwell is afflicted with both of these disorders. Anti-social people share many of the same characteristics, including grandiosity, compulsive lying, hostility and a lack of conscience, but psychopaths are more willing to use physical violence to get what they want, whereas narcissists rarely commit physical assaults, though they occasionally strike out in an impulse of rage. Indeed, Churchwell still brags on his site about the time he was locked up in Rikers Prison for severely beating a man and blinding him for life.
This is my last commentary on him. My other blog—which was not even about him—is closed now due to the harassment that I experienced on a daily basis, so disturbing that I had to close the comment section on both blogs. It is true that he has written literally hundreds of abusive comments on my blogs, including death threats. Of course, it excites him immeasurably to read about this again.
Some of the threats are posted on this site. Here is one:
"SOMEONE ASKED ME WHAT I WOULD DO IF I FOUND OUT WHERE SHE LIVED. MY RESPONSE IS: I WOULD SHOOT HER 1OOO TIMES. EVEN AFTER SHE WAS DEAD I WOULD CONTINUE TO SHOOT."
Sickening, isn't it? I have always known that either he would eventually stop his attacks on me, or I would have to leave the blogs, unless I was willing to tolerate his ongoing hate antics forever. Since he doesn't view me as a human being having feelings, opinions and rights, but as an object to be manipulated for his entertainment, he will never allow me to blog in peace. If I stayed, he would continue to play his disordered mind games: the blaming game, the justification game, the devaluation game, the projecting game, the minimizing game, and so on. He can do them all, there are no limits to the games he plays, and he is convinced that he will always come out the winner, even though men who verbally attack and threaten women are total losers.
Trying to bolster himself by libeling others isn't the way to go, and you might think he would have wised up to that by now. Instead, he spews at the end of his tirades: "YOUR MOVE, DUMMY!" It is as if he is permanently condemned to "mess up people's heads" using a juvenile dictionary.
I have never been able to escape him. He has been the thorn in my side, and the stone in my shoe. I think that he will forever consider me to be a person who failed him, who abandoned his narcissistic needs in 2006. Years after I broke off those silly conversations with him, he still watches me, harasses me, keeps tabs on me, furiously copies everything I write, and alters my words, still plays that 3-year-old phone message, tries to destroy my career, threatens me, tells vindictive lies about me, and stalks my blog. Are you sitting down? A few weeks ago, I received an email inviting me to join him for online chats! His behavior is truly psychotic. I haven't talked very much about his stalking in this post, but it has been ongoing for three years now, and is seemingly endless.
After reposting the psychiatrist's quote regarding Thomas Churchwell's psychosis, I could have ended this long commentary right there, perhaps. As for my belief that another hospitalization is in the offing, psychopaths and narcissists are difficult to treat—if they ever even show up for therapy. In Churchwell's mind, he is not doing anything wrong; if there's a problem, it's your problem, not his. Furthermore, as Dr. Hare points out, all they do in therapy is learn more about human nature, and then use this knowledge to continue to plunder humanity. Therapy works only when someone wants to change and, though psychopaths and narcissists hate their real selves, they don't want to change—they want the world to change. Short of nonstop hospitalization, or neurosurgery, there seems to be no effective (and legal) way to protect society from these people. They typically do not stop their destructive behavior until they are either dead or in jail.
Thomas Churchwell's violence towards me takes the form of verbal assault, which survivors of abuse will tell you is every bit as damaging emotionally as being beaten with an abuser's fists. When he does it again, I won't defend myself. When it comes to words, he will always win in his mind. He has no insight, which makes any effort to confront him on a blog completely useless. Moreover, all the name calling and allegations that he makes about me, and others, are actually true confessions and revelations about himself. He is a great big projection machine. I will ignore it. If you are a blogger and the victim of a psychopathic bully, or narcissist, I hope you will do the same, out of respect not only for your readers, but also for your own well being.
A quote from a satire site, by "Frank the Psychopath":
"I don’t think I feel things the same way you do. It’s like… at my first job. I was stealing maybe a thousand bucks a month from that place. And this kid, he was new, he got wise. And he was going to turn me in, but before he got the chance I went to the manager and pinned the whole thing on him. Kid lost his job, the cops got involved, I don’t know what happened to him. And I guess something like that is supposed to make me feel bad, right? It’s supposed to hurt, right? But instead, it’s like there’s nothing..."
That quote is uncannily similar to comments Churchwell makes on his blogs. Although anti-social types often steal from others, they never experience feelings of shame, guilt or remorse. They are legally sane—they do know right from wrong—but they refuse to accept any responsibility for their actions. Instead, they accuse others of wrongdoing. Dr. Hare refers to psychopaths as being morally insane.
A recap of excuses that Churchwell and other psychopaths use to avoid responsibility in all situations:
* Justifying: "I CAN'T HELP IT. I'M MENTALLY ILL."
* Blame shifting: "YOU ASKED FOR IT!"
* Play Acting: "I AM A VICTIM!"
* Entitlement: "IF I WANT TO DO IT, I CAN."
* Grandiosity: "I AM SMARTER THAN YOU! YOU ARE A DUMMY!"
* Projection: "YOU ARE A BULLY, STALKER, LIAR, THIEF, WACKO!"
And let's not forget this biggie, which is closely tied to all the rest: Leaving out major sections of any incident and inserting his own loony spin. Rewriting history to suit himself.
As we slosh through the cesspool of lies and manufactured excuses, we always come back to what he told Maria Flook in that interview: "I LOVE MESSING UP PEOPLE'S HEADS."
Shouldn't he feel embarrassment and shame for what he has done to me and others? He should, but he has no deep-seated emotions. No empathy, not even a morsel of compassion or concern for other people. Thomas Churchwell is completely amoral, or perhaps, he has the morals of a bright two-year-old. Which brings me back to his diabolical lies. You've heard of a magician's bag of tricks? Churchwell, a failed magician, has a bagful of lies that he uses for the purpose of trying to destroy my life. When he starts to feel bored with one lie, he tosses it back into the bag, and pulls out another. Did I mention that he's been doing this for three years? The following are links, in no particular order, to my archive posts that set the record straight about this psychopath's big bag of lies.The truth is here:
The child porno writer lie
The phone message lie
The Susan and I are the same person lie
The "I never threatened to kill Scarlett" lie
The hate blogger lie
The nudie pictures lie
The photo thief lie
The photo thief lie redux
The stalker lie
The "Scarlett is attacking my family" lie
If I have forgotten a lie, readers, just read my whole blog.
H.M. Cleckley writes in The Mask Of Sanity:
"One almost amusing example of how psychopaths lie can be exemplified by a man who's footprint was discovered at the scene of the crime. "No, that's not my foot" he said, even though everyone knew he was lying."
Before I wrote the first post on this blog, I tried to convince Churchwell to stop telling lies by appealing to his better nature. But I found out that appealing to his better nature was about as effective as spitting in the sea. What you see is what you get: he has no better nature. The fundamental problem, again, is that he doesn't have a conscience. He won't take other people's feelings into consideration and he overlooks an obvious fact, that other people will react when abused or exploited and that most people get REALLY pissed off by being lied to, or lied about. He treats people like dirt.
It is ironic that two of his favorite lies are to call people perverts and thieves. Ironic and so contradictory, in view of the fact his deviant history includes posting lewd pictures of underage girls, and stealing magic tricks (according to several magic forums), and stealing the copyright of my commercial photograph, and boasting that he once was a pickpocket, among other weirdness. Again, these are prime examples of how he projects his own behavior onto others. The pretense that his screwball allegations about me are part of a morality campaign, of all things, and that he is Snow White, is another lie designed to dupe the Internet along with the mental health professionals.
Never in my life have I encountered such a damaging person. If I hadn't stopped carrying his lies around with me like suitcases, I probably would have had a nervous breakdown. There was a period of time two years ago when I remember looking in the mirror and feeling like I was the most worthless human being to ever walk the earth. Churchwell's attacks did that to me. This was when I had recently lost my parents and was dealing with depression, a result of my mother and father dying within 11 months of each other. A couple of years before that, I had lost my fiancé tragically. I was vulnerable, in other words. I actually believed, when I met Churchwell on that message board a few months later, that my young 60-year-old parents would have recovered from the heart disease and cancer, if I had just prayed harder for their recovery and devoted myself to their care 24 hours a day. Believing myself a failure, I was ripe for buying into the awful things that Churchwell was saying about me on his hate sites. I think that is part of the hook of being in the same blogosphere with disordered people; victims want to prove that they aren’t the way the hater says they are. I know this was true for me. I would get so close to the proverbial delete button and then he would say something so outrageous that I couldn’t stand to close my blog without defending my character and proving him wrong. Even after I came to terms with my grief, I continued to defend myself against his lies. Defending myself against his scurrilous attacks, or dodging them like arrows, had become an unwanted habit.As readers know, he told Blogland that I was a pornographer, thief, hater, liar and stalker after I had lost sleep, work, and suffered so much that I ended up in the hospital with pleurisy. Not content with stopping there, he mocked my illness, claimed crazily that I posted he gave me "flu on the Internet" and continued to attack me, even while I was hospitalized. His emotional abuse was (and still is) a strategic move to break me down—and "level the playing field" to make it appear that I am just like him. "Throw enough mud and some of it will stick," is his motto.
Here's a link to an article about stress and the immune system.
Before I soldier on with my experiences, I want to share what happened to a friend of mine from the UK. She had been communicating for over a year with a man who lived in Florida, and during the time of their correspondence and phone calls, he seemed so "sweet, caring, and kind." She mentioned how he had grieved over his dead wife, and so on.
This man asked my friend to marry him, and, to top it off, he promised her that he had a terrific job lined up for her in the city where he lived. My friend believed him and came to the United States to marry him.
At their first meeting she mentioned how it was the beginning of the end, and she should have seen it coming. She told him, after they met at the airport, that she needed to make a phone call, but instead of letting her use his cell phone, he coldly told her to use the pay phone. She noticed how this contradicted his warm personality on the phone and in emails. She said she was shocked, but being naive, she married him anyway.
As the weeks went by, things got worse. She found out that he had lied about the terrific job. Next, she began to get phone calls from two women in Canada who told her that her new husband had been inviting them, via online chats, to live with him! My friend was distraught and told these women that he was lying to them. The women didn't believe it (why do women tend to doubt another woman when she is trying to warn them?), so my friend said, "If you want proof that I am married to him, come down here and you can see for yourselves."
Eventually, she learned from his family that Mr. Wonderful was a pathological liar who had a long history of using women and having his mother cover his tracks. I don't want anyone else to go through what my friend and I experienced. It is my hope that this post will provide a bit of support to others who live, work, or blog with psychopaths. I'm sorry that I cannot also provide a solution, but since a prime characteristic of anti-social people is believing that they are always right, no matter what, they are extremely resistant to change and, unfortunately, tend to get worse as they get older. I know this is true of Churchwell; he is worse now than three years ago, when he started blogging. The key, then, is prevention; learning how to recognize losers, before they can damage you. I hope that more women will become informed, so that they will not become victims themselves.
Pathological liars are also pathological attention seekers. More than anything else, they crave attention. It doesn't matter if the attention is positive or negative, as long as they get attention. Churchwell basks in the "narcissistic hits" (narcissistic supply) that he gets from reading my posts, and from the knowledge that others are reading them, too. Although he denies every terrible truth about himself, he enjoys the attention nonetheless. As Freud said of narcissists, these people act like they're in love with themselves. And they are in love with a fantasy of themselves—or they want you to be in love with their fantasy self; it's hard to tell just what is going on.Lying is the most common complaint about narcissists. Fragile ego, a need for adulation, fishing for pity, and expecting other people to defer to them are also signs of the disorder. Narcissists are quick to blame others when their expectations are not met. They react like hornets to criticism, and when they are rejected, they vilify the person who rejected them. Thus, Churchwell's attacks on me. Their lack of insight is breathtaking and often leads them to wildly misinterpret other people's motives. Churchwell's preoccupation with himself has always obstructed his ability to see people as they really are, obstructed even his ability to perceive bloggers as separate people! For a long time, he was convinced that the bully Susan and I were the same person, even though she and I are nothing alike, obviously.
Psychologist Theodore Milton has written about two primary types of narcissists: the elitists, who often become successful leaders, and the fanatic type, which describes Churchwell. The fanatic narcissist is a severely narcissistically wounded individual, usually with major paranoid tendencies, who has an illusion of omnipotence. These people are fighting the reality of their insignificance and are trying to re-establish their self-esteem through grandiose fantasies. When unable to gain recognition or support from others, they often take on the role of a warrior on a grandiose mission. Thus, Churchwell's obsession to rid the Internet of his perceived enemies, claiming that we are stalkers, thieves and pornographers. He has wrongly accused at least four people of being pornographers. Fanatics can be found among cult leaders, in mental hospitals if their delusions become sustained and extensive, or in prison, if their missions counteract those of society.
Grandiosity can take many forms. Like Narcissus gazing at his reflection, narcissistic men are obsessed with their looks, the same as narcissistic women. One of the first things Churchwell said to me on the phone was, "I hate getting old." But male narcissists are more likely than women to get hung up on the 'specialness' of their work - in Churchwell's case, the "work" is his hate blog, which means if he is spewing on his blog, by definition it is more special and important than anyone's nice blog. People with narcissistic personality disorder overestimate their abilities and inflate their accomplishments, while underestimating and devaluing the accomplishments of everyone else. Churchwell does that constantly. Like psychopaths, narcissists are very envious. They also have those strange religious ideas, in particular believing that they are God's special favorites. God loves them, so they are exempt from ordinary rules; God tells them they are omnipotent, so they can do anything they feel like. Conveniently, the narcissist's God has strict rules for everyone else! Churchwell's recurring fantasy that he is a persecuted Jew fits with his fantasy of being a victim on the Internet, and not the victimizer. Always contemptuous of others, he makes insulting, mocking and crude comments about women, as if auditioning for an episode on Jerry Springer. A person like Churchwell who is quoted in Invisible Eden as comparing a certain part of a woman's anatomy to a computer trackball, is either a narcissist, emotionally retarded, a loathsome misogynist, or all three.But, I digress. The intoxicating high Churchwell gets from reading a post about himself wears off after a few days, or within minutes, and then he must try to provoke another reaction. As he has demonstrated many times, failure to provoke a response from his victims is wounding to him. It makes him feel panicky.
I should point out here that many of his attacks on me failed to get a response. I defended myself against his continuous libel in just thirty-something posts over a period of three years. To some of you, that may seem like thirty-something posts too many, but let me tell you, if your character was being defiled on the Internet, and your livelihood threatened by a determined psychopath/narcissist bent on destroying you, then you just might need to defend yourself occasionally. I learned long ago that keeping silent doesn't stop the abuse. Recently, he posted more libel on a sleazy site that caters to sadomasochists, where, not surprisingly, he is a member. Of course, the link ended up in the Google blog listings. What he wrote about me was hideous, yet this was one of many times when I didn't bother to defend myself. See my archives for the sex "story" that he posted on a kiddie porn website, in which he impersonated a certain male blogger.
His name calling, in particular, has been a sign that I am silently winning one battle, if not the war. He is telling me that I do know what I'm talking about when I describe him as a psychopath.
I take it as backhanded validation when he "critiques" every word in my blog in the nasty style of a psychopath. I also have an idea how Maria Flook may have reacted, had she known that Churchwell plagiarized her insightful chapter in Invisible Eden, describing his brief romance with socialite Christa Worthington, six years before she was stabbed to death by her garbage collector. When Churchwell put that chapter on his blog, readers saw how he had scribbled snide comments over the text and all along the margins, obviously hating what Flook had written about him. (You can download the entire text here and read a brief biography of the author here.) He has spent years trashing this author. Paradoxically, he pimps her book, his obvious purpose being to lure readers to his blog with cheesy tabloid headlines: "YES, I WAS THE BOYFRIEND OF CHRISTA WORTHINGTON IN INVISIBLE EDEN!" On other sites, he makes disgusting comments such as this: "IN INVISIBLE EDEN I AM PEPPERED THROUGH THE WHOLE BOOK AND HAVE MY OWN CHAPTER ON PAGE 288 CALLED "THE AMAZING TARQUIN." Since he desperately wants to be famous, or infamous, he is not above exploiting his short-lived relationship with a woman who was brutally murdered. To those of us who read the book, he comes across as a seedy bar magician, a moocher, unstable, and a source of comic relief for the sometimes meaningful relationships that filled Christa Worthington's short, tragic life. Flook aptly described Churchwell's personality during her interview of him in 2002 as "exibitionistic." Interestingly, she also relates in her book that Churchwell sent her numerous "heated emails that were incendiary, sensational and always wacky." Sound familiar? Now that I have reposted a tiny portion of his bona fide, genuine psychiatric diagnostic assessment in this post, he will step up his written attacks on me, just as he did to Maria Flook and others.Michael O'Keefe, lead prosecutor in the Worthington case, described Churchwell as a "nutcase." There you have it. One guideline for dealing with this type of person is: don't respond, don't interact and don't engage. As I stated above, this is not as easy as it sounds. From my own experience I know it is natural to want to defend yourself and set the record straight. However, I finally learned that trying to reason with him was like trying to reason with a screaming toddler. Of course, toddlers develop and mature and act out for only a brief period, after which they are on the road to becoming grown ups, whereas bullies never grow up. Churchwell's response, upon reading this post, will be more bizarre "critiquing" and name calling; so immature and childish, as to be beyond the belief of any adult.
Yet this is not merely the case of a bully who is unbelievably crude, immature and mean. People who spend their lives attacking people on the Internet are afflicted with a form of sadism. They find joy in hurting others. They are psychopaths. Churchwell's lust for causing pain is evident in what he chooses to write about me and other innocent people. Along with spewing vile lies on his blog, he also irritates everyone by flooding a group with drivel on completely neutral sites. A few months ago, he went to the ABC News website and posted libel about me. This week, it was the Deviant art website. Since it is unlikely that any intelligent person would be favorably impressed or influenced upon reading hate comments written under the guise of "warning" others about a victim, it is obvious that his goal is to find excitement from being a sadistic pest.Psychopaths are loners; narcissists are dependent and clingy. I think it is not going out on a limb now to conclude that Thomas Churchwell is afflicted with both of these disorders. Anti-social people share many of the same characteristics, including grandiosity, compulsive lying, hostility and a lack of conscience, but psychopaths are more willing to use physical violence to get what they want, whereas narcissists rarely commit physical assaults, though they occasionally strike out in an impulse of rage. Indeed, Churchwell still brags on his site about the time he was locked up in Rikers Prison for severely beating a man and blinding him for life.
This is my last commentary on him. My other blog—which was not even about him—is closed now due to the harassment that I experienced on a daily basis, so disturbing that I had to close the comment section on both blogs. It is true that he has written literally hundreds of abusive comments on my blogs, including death threats. Of course, it excites him immeasurably to read about this again.
Some of the threats are posted on this site. Here is one:
"SOMEONE ASKED ME WHAT I WOULD DO IF I FOUND OUT WHERE SHE LIVED. MY RESPONSE IS: I WOULD SHOOT HER 1OOO TIMES. EVEN AFTER SHE WAS DEAD I WOULD CONTINUE TO SHOOT."
Sickening, isn't it? I have always known that either he would eventually stop his attacks on me, or I would have to leave the blogs, unless I was willing to tolerate his ongoing hate antics forever. Since he doesn't view me as a human being having feelings, opinions and rights, but as an object to be manipulated for his entertainment, he will never allow me to blog in peace. If I stayed, he would continue to play his disordered mind games: the blaming game, the justification game, the devaluation game, the projecting game, the minimizing game, and so on. He can do them all, there are no limits to the games he plays, and he is convinced that he will always come out the winner, even though men who verbally attack and threaten women are total losers.Trying to bolster himself by libeling others isn't the way to go, and you might think he would have wised up to that by now. Instead, he spews at the end of his tirades: "YOUR MOVE, DUMMY!" It is as if he is permanently condemned to "mess up people's heads" using a juvenile dictionary.
I have never been able to escape him. He has been the thorn in my side, and the stone in my shoe. I think that he will forever consider me to be a person who failed him, who abandoned his narcissistic needs in 2006. Years after I broke off those silly conversations with him, he still watches me, harasses me, keeps tabs on me, furiously copies everything I write, and alters my words, still plays that 3-year-old phone message, tries to destroy my career, threatens me, tells vindictive lies about me, and stalks my blog. Are you sitting down? A few weeks ago, I received an email inviting me to join him for online chats! His behavior is truly psychotic. I haven't talked very much about his stalking in this post, but it has been ongoing for three years now, and is seemingly endless.
After reposting the psychiatrist's quote regarding Thomas Churchwell's psychosis, I could have ended this long commentary right there, perhaps. As for my belief that another hospitalization is in the offing, psychopaths and narcissists are difficult to treat—if they ever even show up for therapy. In Churchwell's mind, he is not doing anything wrong; if there's a problem, it's your problem, not his. Furthermore, as Dr. Hare points out, all they do in therapy is learn more about human nature, and then use this knowledge to continue to plunder humanity. Therapy works only when someone wants to change and, though psychopaths and narcissists hate their real selves, they don't want to change—they want the world to change. Short of nonstop hospitalization, or neurosurgery, there seems to be no effective (and legal) way to protect society from these people. They typically do not stop their destructive behavior until they are either dead or in jail.
Thomas Churchwell's violence towards me takes the form of verbal assault, which survivors of abuse will tell you is every bit as damaging emotionally as being beaten with an abuser's fists. When he does it again, I won't defend myself. When it comes to words, he will always win in his mind. He has no insight, which makes any effort to confront him on a blog completely useless. Moreover, all the name calling and allegations that he makes about me, and others, are actually true confessions and revelations about himself. He is a great big projection machine. I will ignore it. If you are a blogger and the victim of a psychopathic bully, or narcissist, I hope you will do the same, out of respect not only for your readers, but also for your own well being.My blog recap with photos is on this page.
