Jarrod Ramos, the man who allegedly killed five staff members of the Annapolis Capital-Gazette, is sadly, terrifyingly typical, at least to anyone who ever worked at a newspaper of any size. Court records available online paint a picture of an angry misogynist of the classic type, the angry reader of the classic type, and the angry online presence of the newly classic type. Then, he picked up his shotgun and went for a ride.

The run-up was sad. The denouement is terrifying. The whole thing is typical.

Jarrod Ramos. Twitter

It all starts on July 26, 2011, when Ramos pleaded guilty on a charge of criminal harassment. On duty was Eric Hartley of the Capital-Gazette. Five days later, he wrote this item under the regular feature, “Anne Arundel Report.”

From the court records:



The article was entitled, "Jarrod wants to be your friend." The article, in its entirety, read:



"If you're on Facebook, you've probably gotten a friend request or message from an old high school classmate you didn't quite remember.



"For one woman, that experience turned into a yearlong nightmare.



"Out of the blue, Jarrod Ramos wrote and thanked her for being the only person ever to say hello or be nice to him in school.



"She didn't remember him, so he sent pictures. She Googled him, found a yearbook picture and realized they apparently did go to Arundel High together.



"He was having some problems, so she wrote back and tried to help, suggesting a counseling center.



"'I just thought I was being friendly,' she said.



"That sparked months of emails in which Ramos alternately asked for help, called her vulgar names and told her to kill herself. He emailed her company and tried to get her fired.



"She stopped writing back and told him to stop, but he continued. When she blocked him from seeing her Facebook page, he found things she wrote on other people's pages and taunted her with it, attaching screenshots of the postings to some of his emails.



"She called police, and for months he stopped. But then he started again, nastier than ever.



"All this without having seen her in person since high school. They never met until they came to court a couple of months ago.



"Last week, Ramos, a 31-year-old federal employee, pleaded guilty in District Court to a misdemeanor harassment charge.



"Judge Jonas Legum, who called his behavior 'rather bizarre,' suspended a 90- day jail sentence and placed him on probation, ordering him to continue in therapy and not contact the victim or her family in any way.



"The case is extreme. But it provides a frightening look at the false intimacy the Internet can offer and the venom that can hide behind a computer screen.



"'I read about this all the time, where Facebook conversations, email conversations, start out fine and then take a turn where they become nastier over the course of time,' said Ramos' lawyer, Christopher Drewniak, 'And this is apparently one of those situations.'



"The victim, who asked that her name not be printed, said she lived in fear for her safety for months.

The piece went on to detail the harassment in which Ramos engaged, predominantly online. The woman he was harassing believed that he somehow was involved in her having lost a job. Again, from Hartley’s courthouse account:



"His messages rambled, calling her 'a bipolar drunkard leading a double life' and saying 'Expletive you, leave me alone' though she hadn't written him in months. He told her she was afraid to let a man get close to her and discussed her family, friends, job and Rotary Club involvement–all information gleaned from the Internet.



"In January, the victim went to court to get a peace order and file charges. Finally, he stopped for good. Ramos, a tall, thin man with long hair he wears in a ponytail, did not speak at the hearing and did not return a call for comment left with his attorney.



"He has a degree in computer engineering and has worked for the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics for six years, Drewniak said. He had no previous criminal record.



This kind of thing is the meat on which local newspapers feed. There are always stories to be found in the local courthouse, and Hartley was sharp enough to notice that there were larger issues to be explored in Ramos’s case. It’s one you put in your notebook, and then you put it in the paper, and feel good about how you did your job that day.

Anyone who’s ever worked at a newspaper in any department has a Jarrod Ramos story to tell.

Except for the fact that Jarrod Ramos was one of those readers who can’t let anything go. Anyone who has worked on a daily newspaper in any era is familiar with them, and the smaller the newspaper, the more intense the confrontation. Ramos sued the newspaper and Hartley, personally, for defamation. He represented himself pro se, which is rarely a good idea, as a variety of judges in the Maryland courts made clear to him.

At the motion hearing, Judge Lamasney probed the appellant to point out a single statement in the article that was actually false or to give a single example of how he had been harmed by the article. He could not do so. Judge Lamasney's ruling was clear:



THE COURT: All right. Mr. Ramos, I'm going to grant the defendant's motion to dismiss this case. And it will be dismissed with prejudice. And I'm going to grant it for the following reasons: You are required in your complaint to state a claim with sufficient specificity.



MR. RAMOS: Your Honor –



THE COURT: I'm talking now.



MR. RAMOS: Yes, I'm sorry.



THE COURT: And dismissal is proper only if the facts and inferences, even if proven, would not entitle the plaintiff to relief. And that is what I am finding in your case, that you do not lay out a prima facie case for defamation or for invasion of privacy, or being placed in the false light.



And the reason I'm finding that is that there is absolutely not one piece of evidence, or an assertion by you that the statement was false.



The one statement you refer to concerning the rambling and referring to messages that you answered when there had been no contact comes directly from the statement of charges, where she writes, most of his messages are just pages of ramblings regarding my friends, family, job, Rotary Club involvement.



And it goes on to say that you tell her to leave you alone, and you haven't responded for months. That comes right out of a public document…Correct, both that the article was simply not defamatory, that it was based on public record, that you haven't alleged that it was false, and that the article appears to be substantially accurate, and it would fall into the privilege which would make any complaint unsustainable, because they reported a criminal case. They reported a matter of public interest.



Judge Charles Moylan, Jr. of the Maryland Court of Public Appeals read these transcripts with interest and proceeded respectfully to pile on.



A discussion of defamation law would be an exercise in futility, because the appellant fails to come close to alleging a case of defamation. In his five-page brief, the appellant devotes two and one-half pages to legal argument. He never alleges that any basic fact contained in the article about his guilty plea is actually false. He claims only that "Hartley's column fails the test of fairness because he editorialized on the story's meaning." There is no allegation of any specific harm that he suffered as a result of the article. He simply described the harm as "incalculable, unforeseen, and potentially unknowable." That does not do it. The appellant is pro se. A lawyer would almost certainly have told him not to proceed with this case.



It reveals a fundamental failure to understand what defamation law is and, more particularly, what defamation law is not. The appellant is aggrieved because the newspaper story about his guilty plea assumed that he was guilty and that the guilty plea was, therefore, properly accepted. He is aggrieved because the story was sympathetic toward the harassment victim and was not equally understanding of the harassment perpetrator. The appellant wanted equal coverage of his side of the story. He wanted a chance to put the victim in a bad light, in order to justify and explain why he did what he did. That, however, is not the function of defamation law.

(Yes, even in a story like this one, BOTH SIDES!)

Ramos apparently then took to the electric Twitter machine to rage against his victim, Hartley, the newspaper, and Judge Moylan for a few months. Then he allegedly loaded his shotgun and went downtown.

Capital Gazette reporter Chase Cook, right, and photographer Joshua McKerrow, left, work on the next day’s newspaper while awaiting news from their colleagues. Getty Images

The story of a shooter with a grudge against a newspaper is getting a lot of run, and it’s easy to see why. Anyone who’s ever worked at a newspaper in any department has a Jarrod Ramos story to tell—the ringing phone you don’t want to pick up, the letters with the alarming spelling, and, now, the many platforms of social media. Most of those people never pick up a gun. Jarrod Ramos did.

However, it’s essential, I believe, to take this story back to its origins—an angry misogynist who engaged in a vicious campaign of slander and harassment of a woman who just tried to be nice to him. Misogyny is the one thing that’s part of too many of these stories. Well, that and the guns.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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