OnAforums Lawsuit Dismissed: Patrick S. Tomlinson Goes Woke, Broke

The best advice for dealing with harassment on the internet is simple: don’t feed the trolls. Unfortunately it’s a bit of wisdom middling science fiction author Patrick S. Tomlinson refuses to take to heart, and now he’s paying for it in a very literal sense. 

Tomlinson has been handed a substantial legal loss this past week after San Francisco county judge Ethan P. Schulman ordered Tomlinson to pay attorney’s fees and costs amounting to $23,739.25. The payout is the result of the dismissal of a lawsuit filed by Tomlinson’s lawyer’s attempting to subpoena Cloudflare Inc., the company that hosted the website onaforums.net.

The Opie and Anthony fan forum, which had originated as a now-banned subreddit, had been trolling the notoriously touchy author for years. Tomlinson’s attempt to have the identities of the website’s users revealed was quashed following a complaint filed on behalf of 60 John Does, claiming the First Amendment protected anonymous speech; the court agreed. 

As if this wasn’t bad enough, it’s been alleged that the $23,000+ cost doesn’t even scratch the surface of the amount of money actually expended towards this legal tire fire. In a January 21st YouTube video, author Jon Del Arroz mentioned in his commentary on the matter that SFWA had lent Tomlinson $100,000 towards his legal representation, which he has since claimed to be unable to repay. I’ve since attempted to contact SFWA’s communications department asking if the expenditure came from the organization’s legal fund. They have so far not responded to requests for comment. 

Tomlinson has been no stranger to abuse for his internet takes of questionable lucidity. However, to call him a lightning rod for controversy is to give the man too much credit; he’s more akin to a stunted child wrapped in tin foil holding up an antenna in an open field. Tomlinson is of the sort who just can’t seem to let a hornet’s nest go unkicked. He first rose to internet prominence in 2017 on Twitter by reframing the Trolley Problem by changing the setting to a fertility clinic being engulfed in flames and making the choice between a five-year old child and a container of 1,000 human embryos. The person being questioned in this hypothetical only has time to rescue one or the other before succumbing to smoke inhalation. The self-righteous rant that followed aimed at “proving” that pro-life advocates don’t truly value human life launched him into mainstream attention thanks to a healthy dose of derision at his freshman-level understanding of ethics.

Since then, Tomlinson’s various and sundry social media feeds have been an unending font of bad takes, nasally political posturing and near-lethal doses of smug condescension. From referring to Dr. Jordan Peterson as a Nazi because of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ addlebrained writing of the Red Skull to claims of being swatted on suspicion of being a serial murderer (for which there exists not a single shred of Google evidence), the man’s capacity for self-serving embellishment simply cannot be charted.

If one wishes to hear it in Tomlinson’s own words, I invite you to listen to the Thomas Apostle interviews from a few months back, wherein someone claiming to be a HuffPo reporter conducted a two-hour phone interview covering the events of the previous few years. Tomlinson himself has written a lengthy thread on twitter detailing the most recent details of the suit from his perspective, and for now the matter seems settled at least legally. For whatever it might be worth, Patrick; the next time some comment raises the urge to have you roll around in the internet gutter, just let it slide down your back and move on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMyEu3hSjX0&t=679s