#ScoobyGang Chronicles #4: The backstory of Broadsword_6

Louise Mensch and her #ScoobyGang minions continue to drag the name of a Gold Star family through the mud in an pathetic attempt to score points against her critics. Thomas McNally is solely responsible for dragging that family's name into this sordid mess. Mensch and McNally are gaslighting everyone here to distract attention from the campaign of intimidation they are waging against Robin, Laura, and others who have spoken out against them.

This post has been adapted from the one I originally planned to publish this past Saturday. I held that story back for various reasons but primarily because I was aware that Eric Rosenwald was finishing his story The Legend of Broadsword Six. If you have not already read that story, you should do so now to better understand what follows. I am writing this to explain my role in this mess (which is not without fault) and provide some additional information and context. I hope that this will put an end to entire affair and people will see Louise Mensch for the truly despicable person she is. Go ahead and sue me, you slanderous charlatan!

The plain and simple facts here are:

• Thomas McNally is the one who dragged a Gold Star family into this mess.
• Louise Mensch is the one who continues to use that family as a prop in her grotesque attacks on her critics.
• Despite Louise's lies, the Gold Star family is unaware of any of this and out of respect, everyone should hope that remains so.

The backstory behind the Broadsword_6 investigation

Cast of characters:

Broadsword_Six, an "anonymous" internet thug named Thomas J McNally.

Eric Rosenwald, a journalist and a True Detective.

Corpsman Innocent, who was tragically killed in action a decade ago.

Sailor Innocent, the brother of Corpsman.

The Marine, a veteran who knew Broadsword_Six was a fraud.

The Prankster, a friend of the Captain.

The events of late June

As I have have discussed in previous posts, Louise and the band of goblins who do her dirty work became increasingly desperate as her critics grew louder and more prominent figures on Twitter began speaking out against her. Around the middle of June, we became aware that their tactics were becoming increasingly crazy. They were no longer content to try to silence critics with ridiculous slanders on Twitter; they had begun bullying people to silence them. We tracked their activity, identified who was involved, and what they were planning. The threats and actually doxxing began at this point. We alerted targeted victims and filed countless reports to Twitter, all to no avail. In the case of at least one of Louise's targets, I know for a fact that doxxing could be potentially deadly because of factors wholly unrelated to Twitter. This was a dangerous situation and we were on our own because of Twitter's failure to act.

The Broadsword_Six account (BS6) was at the center of this conspiracy. I had been contacted several time over the past month or so by Eric Rosenwald who had been been trying to unravel the truth behind all the various lies BS6 was using to promote the idea that he was some sort of elite super-soldier. Anyone who has spent any time around the real deal immediately saw through his childish posturing and that is what had piqued Eric's interest. Eric was at this time convinced that BS6 was in fact a "Thomas McNally" (which turned out eventually to be correct) but the actual Thomas McNally he had identified at this time was a gamer kid from New England. I was highly skeptical that this was BS6 because of the photo posted in Twitter of his wrist (with the shamrock tattoo and the memorial wristband.)  Eric and I went back and forth over the evidence we had collected for a period of weeks, but we couldn't come up with a theory that fit all the evidence that we had. In retrospect, knowing now what we do about the history of Thomas J McNally and his penchant for using different names and identities, this confusion was understandable.

During the final week of June, with the threats against people escalating, the discussions about the real identity of BS6 became much more urgent. Eric had introduced me to another person he was working with: The Marine. He had also become suspicious of BS6's various hints at his alleged history as an elite veteran; however, unlike Eric and I, he had actually spoken privately with BS6 because he had been on the inside of the Bogwench's cult. Among the three of us, we now had more information but still no mutually agreed upon theory of exactly who BS6 really was. At various times, he had dropped hints that he was Marine Recon and other times he had clearly been hinting that he was Sailor Innocent (posting the picture of the memorial wristband.) Like I said above, it was all very confusing: none of theories the three of us came up with fit all the evidence.

The Captain's mistakes

The wristband photo with Corpsman Innocent's name on it continued to haunt the Captain and sometime in the middle of the last week of June, someone (I can't remember who) mentioned to me that there was a surviving brother. I went and read the obituaries and memorial posts on the web and quickly found the name of Sailor Innocent. After a few fits and starts, I located the long dormant Twitter account that belongs to Sailor Innocent and also his Facebook account (dormant as well, but updated in 2016.) Several of the details from Facebook matched up very well with what I knew of BS6 (location, interest in helicopters, guns, etc.) I shared what I had found with both Eric and The Marine. Because of our concerns over the privacy of the Innocent family, we realized we had to get this one right. We all looked over the evidence we had in front of us and came to the conclusion that Sailor Innocent was BS6. I still don't know if we were played here (it seems suspicious that BS6 left the identifying photo of the wristband on Twitter for so long, but it also seems bizarre that he had the name Thomas McNally on his BS6 profile in May) and fell into a trap that had been set for us. I know personally that a simple misunderstanding led the Captain astray. I believed that access to the black memorial wristbands was limited to immediate family members (this maybe have been true at one time, but they are now easily available on the internet.)

Eric, the Marine, and myself were convinced that Sailor Innocent was BS6 at this point. Evidence that has emerged since that time has convinced us that we were in fact wrong. I believe that the story that Eric has published on his blog is accurate and that Thomas J McNally is BS6. Still, we were concerned about making sure we had it right before we did anything with the information out of respect for the Innocent Family. We expanded the group of people looking at the evidence to a small group of trusted people. Everyone who was read in on all the evidence agreed that they believed Sailor Innocent was BS6.

The SoftswordThreeInch account

Believing that our friends were in real danger and with Twitter not at all responsive to our repeated reports about the threatening behavior of BS6, the smaller group that I have been working with (which did not include either Eric Rosenwald or The Marine) felt the information we had was a potential tool we could use to deter BS6 (and others) from further escalation of his threats. The question was how to do it without bringing any further harm to the Innocent family. We hit upon the idea of creating a BS6 parody account. The idea was scatter a few clues around the account profile so that it would be readily apparent to BS6 himself that we knew who he was. The hope was that this knowledge would alert him to the fact that any threatening actions he took would be immediately linked to his real identity. Perhaps he would simply decide that being Louise's henchman was not worth the trouble and he would go away?

Before we went ahead with this plan, we stopped and discussed again whether we might be wrong about Sailor Innocent and how that might play out. Remember, at this point, we were near certain that Sailor Innocent was BS6 and that our friends were in danger. The only other possible explanation for what we had found that seemed remotely possible was that we had it all reversed and BS6 was Thomas J McNally and he had dragged the Innocent family into this mess (which in fact we now believe to be the truth); we made the decision to go ahead with our plan on the basis that whichever scenario was true, BS6 would be alarmed at learning we had uncovered this information.

The Prankster created the SoftSwordThreeInch account with a picture of the real Sailor Innocent on it and had the account follow the defunct SailorInnocent Twitter account. We also included a link to the dormant Facebook account; this was a group decision and one we all regret now. We were anxious to make it perfectly clear to BS6 the extent of the knowledge we had about him. We took the account live, the Prankster began tweeting at people in the #ScoobyGang orbit and drawing attention to it with a parody version of the kind of crap BS6 spews all over Twitter. A few hours later, we noticed this:

It looked to us like our little plan had worked; we had scared BS6 off of Twitter. We mistakenly took it for confirmation that we were correct that Sailor Innocent was really Broadsword_6. Even though we turned out to be wrong about that, why did Broadsword_6 delete his account upon learning that we know the name and details of Sailor Innocent? Why would that freak him out enough to run and hide. If his ownership of the memorial bracelet was legitimate, he could have cleared the matter up with a simple explanation. Instead he locked down his account for several days and then snuck back onto Twitter with a protected account. What was he so worried about hiding?

At the time though, we all took it as absolute confirmation that we had correctly guessed his correct identity. To maximize our advantage, we began immediately gloating. This wasn't just an outburst of adolescent behavior on our part, it was designed to maximize the deterrent effect of our success on the rest of the Bogwench's goblins to head off any further threats at our friends. In the midst of all this chaos, we made the second regrettable mistake in this story: we should have immediately taken down the parody account with its identifying information about the Innocent family. Unfortunately, we didn't do this and the Facebook link remained on the profile until the morning of July 1st. Anyone who had seen the Broadsword_6 wrist tattoo could figure out the significance of the information there and reach the conclusion that Sailor Innocent was BS6. Our mistake and we lost control of the information that we had been so careful to protect. The name of Sailor Innocent was unfortunately out in the wilds of Twitter and given what a complete asshole Broadsword_6 had been on Twitter many people we didn't even know starting spreading it around. Once information is out there on Twitter, it's out there. Louise is trying to make some hay at my expense here because I did tweet out the name at least once. I shouldn't have done that and I regret it now. In my defense, at the time I genuinely believed that it was in fact BS6's real identity and that his actions on Twitter had dishonored veterans.

The aftermath

We were genuinely alarmed that we had lost control of the information we had tried to handle so carefully. On the morning of July 1st, we removed the link to the Facebook page from the parody profile. We shared what we had learned with the potential victims of BS6's abuse in case he took further action. The following day, as is documented in Eric's article, threatening phone calls were received by Robin and because BS6 is an idiot one of those calls was made without his number being blocked. That number almost immediately led us to conclude that we had been totally wrong about BS6's identity and in fact Eric Rosenwald had been right all along: he was Thomas J McNally. During the couple of days of confusion after he left Twitter, McNally took down his real Facebook page but we have evidence of its existence. All of this information was turned over both to Twitter and to law enforcement at this time. For some completely inexplicable reason, Twitter has allowed the BS6 account to be re-activated and he has posted tweets gloating about his harassment of Robin. I have no idea what the hell is wrong with Twitter, but they need a serious reality check in my opinion.

What has followed since has been a Mensch-led shitstorm of epic proportion that absolutely NEEDS TO STOP RIGHT FUCKING NOW.

The Bogwench has threatened to sue me and others, she has defamed us by claiming that we have dishonored a Gold Star family, she has lied about being in contact with the Innocent family, and she has relentlessly goaded poor Robin (who is in a state of extreme distress here because of the threats and further public harassment) into public fights that have made everyone look bad. This is textbook gaslighting.

The Captain is seriously pissed off here and this is his attempt to get the facts out so that people realize that this is bullying and harassment coming from one side of this dispute. This is not a she said/she said misunderstanding. Everyone involved needs to shut the fuck up before this gets worse and people should take the time to learn all the facts before they run their damned mouths with their ill-informed opinions.

I apologize for the rough tone of all of this and the language that I used here. This was no fun to write and I'm sure it was no fun to read.

I am going to close with a tweet that was sitting at the top of my mentions this morning. I will have much more to say about this later.

The Captain knows more than he has let on and, as God is my witness, the people responsible for this bullshit are going to be revealed.