Man's first meeting with girlfriend's parents turns violent

I appreciated Peter's post. Given the one other post of Peter's that I can see in conjunction with his post here, I think I like his style.

From my perspective, jgarrison was the unrelated, random, bullying third party.

I hope s/he/it regrets bringing this thread to life (it didn't have one when the link was first posted).

I am not really going to defend "jgarrison". I just think there was something very kind and decent happening here on the part of Reyn, until Peter felt the need to step in to stop it.

Frankly, I was silent for this one (not that my opinion should matter to anyone) but I see nothing wrong or offensive that Peter did here. In fact, I appreciate his contribution.

I recognize clearly you feel differently but somehow there seems to be a harshness about this that I don't understand.

Not at all, Reyn was something like the 10th person to find out, this was an "issue" between many other people before then. Conn Hammes called me repeatedly with a legal threat even though I told him I was in a meeting ("no no let me speak!") and even though we tried to find a solution for him (I told him that if Reyn agreed to remove his post we would, and we did) he started to impersonate our company online and start lying about us*.

He said we had a "verbal contract" to "remove the whole forum" (he means thread) and has been threatening legal action against myself and Peter (he said that Peter defamed him by calling him stupid, again not understanding that truth is an airtight defense against an accusation of defamation) and he has started going around the internet posting claims that I and Peter are criminals and threatening users of our site while posting our contact information next to mugshots of other unrelated people.

For a guy who started all this threatening me about a case of defamation this is, indeed, rich irony.

Vindictiveness is not pretty, but it's exactly what is going to happen now. This man is lying and threatening a swath of people to try to get his crime erased from the internet. Acting like this to the people who actually tried to help you is completely idiotic and entirely worthy of the Streisand Effect that is to come.

Conn Hammes will now not be able to erase this from the internet. He should have thought about that before:

1) beating the father of his girlfriend unconscious and bragging about it to the police arresting him

2) lying while making a series of baseless legal threats.

3) reacting when we did not delete everyone else'd responses here on this post with real defamation.

I am going to document this all extensively, and ensure that it remains within the front page of search results for his name. I am going to do that because it is an easier, and more satisfying response than wasting time and money addressing the defamation he has begun to spread about us and our companies.

My response to him deciding to post lies about me on the internet is going to simply be to ensure that he doesn't get to erase the truth about him from it.

Yes, it is ugly. And sometimes when a nutcase comes around and starts attacking people around you you have to resort to something ugly. We certainly aren't going to ignore it, we couldn't if we wanted to.

This man is calling me like crazy, threatening me and members of our company, threatening our users, lying to them and telling them our businesses are fraudulent because we won't remove all the replies on this thread.

These are actions that deserve a response, and perhaps one that is note entirely lovey-dovey. And he will get it.


* For, example here is what he posted with one of his new accounts to able2know:



He started going around registering accounts under our company name with the same as well. My response is simply going to be to publish his ugly acts and to ensure that they remain in search results for his name. It is a response that is vindictive but I think that it's a relatively mild response among the many that we could take against him now (that he's ironically resorted to actual defamation to try to get us to bow to his demands).

This is why the internet will not forget Conn Hammes. Because given the opportunity to get help doing so he decided to do the most idiotic series of things a person could do if he wanted people to forget it. I just wanted to get on with my work (I have a **** ton to do) and ignore him. We'd deleted the post and all, but no he demanded we delete everyone's derision of him and went apeshit on us in a way that was not possible to ignore.

He brought this on himself, and merely refusing to help him wipe his jackassery off the internet at this stage is a very very mild response to the harassment he has been engaged in the last few days.

Well of course that changes the facts of the situation. I still support reyn, but I support your (Robert's) position more.

I was not going to further respond to this, but I feel it only polite to do so.

First of all, I want to publicly thank Robert, Peter, and anyone else that has been involved with this fated thread. I sincerely appreciate their efforts to sort this business out on my behalf.

I feel terribly guilty about the firestorm of garbage that has grown out of this thread. If I had not originally posted the first post, we would not be where we are at today. I am very sorry for that and regret my actions.

Now, after reading Robert's post above me, I can see that this is causing all sorts of troubles and headaches that nobody needed.

Is this the first time this has happened on Able2Know, where someone threatened to sue someone else over content?

And I just found out that today he is messaging members of my family on Facebook. Way to erase any second thoughts Connor and it's just more to document.

Conn Hammes, each thing like that you do I will just publish in the Conn Hammes Museum and when people ask me why some nutcase is contacting them (btw you got my dad wrong and that was my brother) I'm just going to point them there. At the museum of the Conn Hammes Trainwreck of 2012. "Hey some guy is saying you are a felon?" Yeah, check out this Conn Hammes story. "Hey what's this about this mugshot that isn't you that someone is posting online?" Yeah, that's this Conn Hammes fellow, over here. And so on.

The more you attack me or any companies or persons I am affiliated with, the more you harass my friends and family, the more will be added to this museum. Each time you do something like that I'll add a year to the museum's life (not worth hosting forever).

Your move. In a game of jackassery attempting to erase your jackassery from the internet there is only one way to win: choose not to play.

Personally, I appreciate that Robert and Peter are doing this.

People should not be threatened for posting information from reputable media sources. If the reputable media source retracts the information, the retraction can also be posted by anyone, including a person wishing for the whole thing to be removed.

Complying with these fake nuisance threats will only mean that more of us receive such threats in the future.

Robert and Peter, thank you for standing up against this on our behalf as well as yours.

You didn't do anything wrong, there's nothing to apologize for.



Your post isn't causing all sorts of problems, Reyn. The one causing problems would be a Mr. Conn Hammes. Ham-handed, self-representing legal council in this spectacle. Take a bow Mr. Hammes.



No, it's not even the first time this year. Any site this size with user-generated content surely gets a lot of threats (99% baseless threats by people pretending to be attorneys in my experience across multiple sites). Earlier this year an able2know member (let's just call him "joe") represented us pro bono and was able to go from where his is from, in Chicago, to another city to represent us in a court and protect a user's information. That was really cool of that anonymous "joe" fellow from Chicago.

Just to be clear.....(And to make sure there is another link to the news story)

Are we talking about this Conor S. Hammes?

Man accused of attacking girlfriend's family
http://www.jsonline.com/news/wisconsin/29242149.html

I am sorry, I clearly shot off my mouth without having a clue about what was going on. Please accept my apology Peter.

Okay, thank you for reassuring me.

Interesting.

I have a modest 2000+ friends on facebook who would find the original story amusing and interesting and would probably share it with all THEIR friends if I asked them to. You know, just to get it around

A couple of days ago he wrote and said he is going to stop it and move on, and as long as he does I intend to forget about it. He hasn't apologized to anyone, but as long as he isn't harassing anyone anymore I don't intend to try to bring any more attention to it and intend to move on as well.

Wow. Go, nameless Joe, from Chicago!

Can I ask who created this post ??

I think the reason there is renewed interest is that "gentleman" is question is portraying himself right now as a businessman. When that happens, prudent people do their research.

The "Star" of the article is passing himself off as an upstanding businessman which is likely why he was so actively pursuing having all his dirty secrets aired. He has now solicited the services of a dear friend to "assist" him in his new endeavor. Obviously, my friend neglected to do the research I did.