“25 July: Public Radio” == nothing rhymes with Orange Street / where once or twice / I keep the beat / of your advice / drumming / behind my navel / something makes the tea sweet / but take a swing / so here repeat / to be a king / thriving / among vocations / touching where our ears meet / the summer verbs / should secrets neat / laid on the curbs / slaving / in your programs” –Dawson Gage, summer 2017

"...who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury..."

Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”

“I’m with you in Rockland / where your condition is getting serious and is reported on the radio…”

–Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”

“One only has to imagine the sinister possibilities of radio.”

–George Orwell

“two-headed boy / with pulleys and weights / creating a radio played just for two / in the parlor with a moon across her face / and through the music he sweetly displays / silver speakers that sparkle all day / made for his lover who’s floating / and choking with her hands across her face…”

Neutral Milk Hotel, “Two Headed Boy”

“But the people as a whole retain their interest in free speech by radio and their collective right to have the medium function consistently with the ends and purposes of the First Amendment. It is the right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of the broadcasters, which is paramount.”

Supreme Court of the United States, in “Red Lion Broadcasting v. Federal Communications Commission” (1972)

STATE of NORTH CAROLINA in the GENERAL COURT of JUSTICE

COUNTY of NEW HANOVER SUPERIOR COURT DIVISION

[CITY of WILMINGTON]

WILLIAM DAWSON GAGE

plaintiff

v.

MICHELLE RHINESMITH,

THE FRIENDS OF PUBLIC RADIO INC.

defendants

*COMPLAINT*

——————————————————————————————————————-

Plaintiff William Dawson Gage complains of defendants as follows:

I. Introduction

This is an action for defamation brought by an independent writer, scholar, and political figure in Wilmington, North Carolina who has been falsely and deceptively misrepresented as a dangerous and mentally ill man, and who has also been unjustly subjected to civil injunctions, with criminal prosecutions proceeding therefrom, which were obtained through the deliberate expression in writing and speech of falsehoods with the intention and result that the defendant suffered unjust incarceration and a loss of reputation, friendships, material wealth, and was denied the opportunity to register as a candidate in the elections for North Carolina Senate to be held this year. The defamatory falsehood that originated among the staff of WHQR Radio, whose offices are located on the third floor of a building on N. Front Street in downtown Wilmington.

II. Parties, Continued

As said above, the plaintiff, aged 30 years, most of which lived in the city of Wilmington, has experienced a concerted as well as multi-pronged effort to deprive him of his liberty, and the basis for this effort has been a certain rather consistent set of defamatory falsehoods maintained and spread by the defendant. In practice this meant several parties not named who, though it is not known who they are necessarily, quite certainly participated in the defamation of the plaintiff, for it would not have been possible for the named defendant, station manager Michelle Rhinesmith, to have acted and spoke/written entirely on her own in her false or tendentious and in any event deliberately defamatory representations to the courts, to her colleagues, and to the board of directors which governs her staff’s activities.

III. One Natural Person one Legal Fiction / Domestic Corporation

The named plaintiff in the civil injunction obtained last November against the plaintiff, the action which Judge Noecker pursuant to the Workplace Violence Prevention Act is held here to be responsible in her own right for the wrong done to Mr. William Dawson Gage by her deliberate defamation of him. This reflects the fact that Ms. Michelle Rhinesmith signed her own name as the plaintiff in the W.V.P.A. paperwork, taking responsibility therefore as the “employer” of the named and unnamed staff who were allegedly threatened by Mr. Gage’s conduct, which was described, not wholly inaccurately, as a series of correspondences with a handful of people on the radio station staff and a handful of visits to the premises of the station offices, which are not merely a workplace environment but are also a venue for public events such as concerts, art shows, and visits by outside radio personalities. The people who are most often the ones to attend these events, which are open to the general public, are those who listen to the radio station and especially those who support it with financial contributions. WHQR are the call letters for the flagship station which is broadcast on 91.3 FM from Wilmington, the letters are said to stand for “Wilmington’s High Quality Radio” and in recent years this has meant two separate formats, one news talk with jazz and pop, the other classical music. The former has been renamed HQR News, and in addition to being a vector for the delivery of the well-known slate of national-level programming produced elsewhere by the constituent stations of National Public Radio, HQR News functions as an editorial entity and a partner with other local media institutions in certain kinds of public affairs journalism. (……………….)

IV) The Friends of Public Radio Examined

The attribution of responsibility for the wrong done to the plaintiff is a complicated matter, but one which plaintiff shall attempt to address the ambiguity of this corporate entity and the proper resolution of the claim that the Friends of Public Radio are responsible for the acts of defamation by two different station managers and an uncertain number of station staff. The actual attribution of guilt must necessarily encompass the entire organization, though it is mostly passively, and not actively, that an organ of the media can defame a person. The Friends of Public Radio vest their authority in a Board of Directors and something called the Cultural Advisory Board. Strictly speaking, however, the “employer” of the paid station personnel is the aggregated listener-supporters, not the station manager. The Station Manager, not being in any way an owner or a board member, can be relieved of her duties just like any employee might. One assumes that a unanimous vote of the governing Board would be enough to fire any rogue employees, then again, the proceedings of this board are quite obscure indeed. It was in May 2017 that plaintiff had his argument with station manager Cleve Callison about several subjects. Plaintiff was unconvinced that Mr. Callison had the authority in any conceivable way to forbid him from associating with members of the WHQR staff. As far as plaintiff was concerned this amounted to placing significant restrictions on plaintiff’s freedom of association, but this is only one aspect of the ordeal, which would soon thereafter became suddenly far more severe. Just days after the unfortunate disagreement with Mr. Callison, the WPD executed their first “custody-taking” operation to involuntarily commit plaintiff to New Hanover Regional Medical Center prior to transporting him to Forsythe County to the Old Vineyard Behavioral Health Hospital in Winston-Salem. There, over the shared phones on the walls of the common-area, the phones they turn off and on depending on when you’re on “free time” or not, but on the phone my mother told me that Rob Zapple, who is not only county commissioner but sitting member on the board of directors of WHQR / Friends of Public Radio, that Zapple had called her, not the other way around, and had conveyed to her that Isabelle Shepherd had expressed an unspecific and unspoken concern about the plaintiff’s appearances at WHQR. Hannah Gage apologized on behalf of her son and attributed the “behavior” in question to being off “his medicine”, which in any event was not the case, but as he was in hospital under lock and key the controversy among the controlling voices at WHQR about what to do about Dawson Gage, this conversation took place while I was 4 hours away, taken forcibly from the city which otherwise might actually never find occasion to leave. By the time I got back I had gotten further word that there was a special meeting of the board of directors called just because of me. Digging through the by-laws found on the WHQR website, I became curious whether the meeting had been an open, ordinary meeting, whose minutes would be made available to the public upon request, or a closed emergency meeting. What ended up happening is that whatever kind of meeting it was the minutes of the meeting, what was said, who was there, is the conversation over? Clearly it wasn’t over in May. Summer arrived and the GenX water crisis became a topic that WHQR devoted substantial airtime and reportage to, and this only underlined the point that plaintiff had been trying to make in his overtures and messages to station staff in the months leading up to May 2017: WHQR has an obligation to cover stories that active listeners and financial contributors find worth covering. The proper operation of a listener-supported radio station requires that the listeners be capable of driving the activities of the station to a higher level. This is what the plaintiff had in fact been hoping to address with the board prior to his first involuntary commitment. The plaintiff will be requesting testimony from Mr. Cleve Callison and Mr. Rob Zapple about their possible role in the decision to have plaintiff Mr. Gage committed and this can be compelled according to the provisions of NCGS Chapter 132. The vitally important point that plaintiff aims to establish in the adjudication of his complaint is that a so-called “public” radio station cannot censor, nor blacklist, nor otherwise defame and ignore and threaten with police violence, that WHQR had no rightful basis for any part of the campaign to demean and defame Mr. Gage over many months. The imputations of a dangerous mental illness are paired with false allegations, however muted, that Mr. Gage was already guilty of unlawful conduct towards radio station personnel prior to the obtaining of the injunction under the Workplace Violence Prevention Act. The vernacular implication of the injunction procured by Mrs. Michelle Rhinesmith is that she and the staff under her authority had good reason to fear that plaintiff was a plausible threat to commit violence in their workplace. Thus the necessity of guarding WHQR with the threat of police involvement. This plaintiff contend with the utmost sincerity and severity: never did he either commit the rather hazily invoked offenses known as “stalking” and “harassment”. The over-zealous and indeed deliberately abusing and dishonest use of these terms in accusations against the plaintiff would come to be a common denominator in all four of the civil injunctions obtained against Mr. Gage. They are all rooted in the defamatory falsehoods that Mr. Gage “has a mental illness and is a threat to himself or others”, or the false allegations that he had “violated a valid protective order”: he did no such thing and was not mentally ill, but painfully clear and lucid in his comprehension of the horrifying situation around him (…………)

(…….)

V. Dawson Gage was a Friend of Public Radio.

An almost ironic aspect of this defamation of character case is the reality that the plaintiff was a financial contributor and very devoted listener t o 91.3 FM. He had given a $50 donation in 2016 and at the end of that year he paid $180 (?) for a “day sponsorship”, in which he was able to select a short message to be read aloud a few times during the day, and chose a message honoring his late brother Stedman, who like his brother was an avid listener of the radio. The question of how much a contributor ought to give annually (monthly? daily increments?) is left open, and during pledge drives we might hear, or might not, mention of the member being in “good standing” or not. This is deceptive, however, since regardless of who contributes to the station, which may or not buy influence into the operation of the station and the content of the programming, the station is offered, like all radio, free of charge to the listener, and this raises the interesting question of how many people listen but do not contribute. Counting listeners is one useful feature of the listener-supported model, it reassures the radio people that they aren’t talking to nobody all day. The informal ban on Mr. Gage’s visiting the otherwise open-to-the-public premises of WHQR was something that the plaintiff wondered might expire with the departure, which was announced in approximately mid-June [2017], of Cleve Callison. A new manager was selected from a pool of candidates from mid-level public radio all around the country. This was done in clear opposition to the prospect of an internal candidate. At any rate Michelle Rhinesmith was selected to replace Mr. Callison, and the transition was made in approximately August. Sometime during the summer Isabelle Shepherd departed from WHQR after about 3 years on the staff as graduate fellow. On what might have been her final day, June 25, she spoke in the air in the morning about how radio had “infiltrated [her] poetry” and how she would never want to work in commercial radio, but as it turned out she did not want to work in radio at all. She also turned her efforts thereafter to the campaign of Caylan McKay for city council. Coverage of Mr. Gage’s intention to participate in the municipal elections had been one of the topics about which Callison and plaintiff had their argument in May. The election coverage of the city council and mayoral elections reflected the brutally enforced conformity that was achieved by the violent removal of plaintiff from the political scene and indeed his removal from society for more than 50 days over the course of 5 involuntary commitments. The working hypothesis of the plaintiff is that absent this original defamatory speech and writing in the offices of WHQR, there would not have been sufficient support for the violent seizure of plaintiff’s person and the denial of his fundamental rights. The hostility and baseless accusations of unlawful conduct or else of a generally disreputable insanity of unspecified type, it is the very vagueness and the barely perceptible condescension, dismissal, deceptive accounts of what actually happened and all of this to intended to accomplish the defamatory banishing of the plaintiff from the scene of Wilmington’s High Quality Radio. This was intended to be defamatory by those who participated in and acceded to Mr. Gage’s defamation, and he seeks a remedy for this wrong done to him by the Friends of Public Radio Incorporated. It should be understood that Ms. Rhinesmith is named as a defendant in her own right in order for the board of WHQR to have the option of reaching a settlement with plaintiff separately from Ms. Rhinesmith.

Let us now summarize the several components of the defendant’s campaign of defamation, which have a sure standing in the the interpretive framework of defamation law in North Carolina. The secret meeting of the board of directors in May 2017 would be the first occasion when unambiguously defamatory (mis)representations of the plaintiff were circulated among the governors of WHQR. The rather more mysterious matter of who truly felt threatened among the several “young women” who might have been the most eager to obtain this “restraining order”–then again they might not have even cared–this will have to be revealed through questioning at the hearing of this complaint. In particular the timeline for the obtainment of the injunction and the spread of this information, the fact of the W.V.P.A. “restraining order”, within earshot of Carter Elisabeth Jewell. By the time plaintiff face(d) Ms. Jewell in Court on 16 February [2018], Ms. Jewell was able to ground her argument for the granting of her own “restraining order” by making reference to the two “other young women” who had obtained restraining orders. Ms. Jewell also testified to the effect that her own procurement of the 50B protective order was inspired or prompted by the suggestion of one of the members of the Board of Directors of [the] Friends of Public Radio. So having established the connection between the defamatory hostility and unreasonable dislike of Mr. Gage and the series of involuntary commitments going back to May 2017, the commitment episode of February 2018 becomes all the more troubling. The deliberately deceptive allegations of 50B violations made by Carter Jewell says after the issuing of her “emergency” protective order accomplished the plaintiff’s incarceration from 13 February through 18 February, on which day the WPD once again took plaintiff from his home in a violent “custody taking” operation. This occasion, after several days held in the Behavioral Health Wing of the ER, plaintiff was transported by New Hanover County Sheriff’s to the Vidant Health Behavioral Health Hospital in Kenansville, NC Duplin County will make for 3 different counties in which plaintiff has been an involuntary inpatient held by violent force. The complicity of law enforcement in the implementation of the outrageous IVC law makes them the strongest advocates of the law’s merits. At the beginning of this summer the General Assembly passed substantial amendments to the IVC law which make it clear that the scope and reach of the law and the frequency of its invocation are planned to rise and rise. The law enforcement expect that they will have to take custody of more and more allegedly dangerous people with mental illness. The fact that they take place in all 100 counties, and the way that the system of behavioral health hospitals and clinics is spread all across the state, and given the common practice of transporting patients long distances from home to an alien hospital (………………..) suffering of the patient in these institutions. It is indisputable (…….)

(……)

VI. “Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness Against Thy Neighbor”

If the necessary characteristic of all defamation is falsehood, we have to ask how we can tell when someone is telling a lie. It is furthermore difficult to understand the motivations that drive mendacity, given that some lies seem to have no purpose, but on other occasions their purpose is all too clear. The concept of “false witness” is based upon an understanding of how severe it is to commit this sin, for we here confront the distinction between mere lying and perjury. Lying may be wrong but it is not considered a common law crime. On the other hand, lying about someone in print or on the air might be the basis for a defamation of character action, as we have here. The plaintiff would have the court take notice of the subtlety of the defendant’s deception, and here the exhibit of the defamatory statements is a public document, the hand-written statements attached by Ms. Rhinesmith and an unknown collaborator whose handwriting sets him/her apart. Held by the clerk of court in New Hanover County and by other organs of local law enforcement, this document is unsuppressable evidence that the defendants not only committed the act of defamatory writing on a piece of sworn testimony before a judge of the General Court of Justice, the defendants went on to appear in court to obtain the W.V.P.A. order ex parte. Judge Davis, who was presiding that day, said that the absence of a respondent meant that he could incorporate the complaint and grant the protective order in its entirety without any need for him to read it. So it went. Since that time the plaintiff has obeyed the illegitimate order that he obey this unconstitutional civil injunction, since the possibility that the Wilmington Police Department would nevertheless enforce and draft an arrest warrant for the slightest allegation of violating the order, in any event with some trepidation he has followed the order, but with the filing of this action this non-communication shall come to an end, and the longstanding disagreements between the manager and perhaps other personnel and board members of WHQR and the plaintiff Mr. Gage will be adjudicated in court or out of court, cordially or rudely, honestly or mendaciously, eloquently or with ugliness. These matters will be known soon enough when the hearing of this matter comes around. In the meantime, let it be known that the plaintiff hereby does complain to the utmost that the defendants must atone and apologize for their long-term effort to assassinate the character and defame the personality of William Dawson Gage. The effort to make up for the damage done can be handled by any such station personnel as feel contrite about their complicity in the harm done to the plaintiff. Strictly speaking, however, the responsibility for the restitution that the Friends of Public Radio will likely have to pay to plaintiff must be disbursed by an act of the board of directors. In recognition of the severity of the harm done to plaintiff by the wanton writing and speaking of defamatory falsehoods by Mr. Callison and Ms. Rhinesmith, Mr. Gage seeks compensation for the hospital expenses that accompanied his involuntary commitments, the expensive legal counsel and the payment of bail bondsmen necessary by the other prongs of the defamation machine, which would go on to repeat the false accusations and misdiagnosis again and again. The testimony of Carter Jewell on 16 Feb. is sufficient to suggest an explicit connection between the board of WHQR and the IVC of plaintiff on any and all of the 5 occasions. It is necessary to at least imagine a possible scenario whereby somehow the Carter Jewell DVPO violations, the first two that is, which were charged in a pair and lumped in with second-degree trespassing at the offices of Carter & Carter and a hit-and-run on Orange St. that the STING Center might or might not have caught on tape, but the crucial question is whether the accusers of these crimes were in touch with the parents of the plaintiff, who were once again the petitioners who took out an affidavit to obtain his IVC. The unavoidable reality is that the timing of the incarceration for Carter Jewell’s 50B order coincided so tightly with the subsequent IVC, and together they combined to guarantee that plaintiff could not register for the primary election for NC Senate 9. Both Ms. Jewell and the plaintiff’s parents were aware of the plaintiff’s long-standing and public intention to run for this office, and they were likewise both aware that the filing period was in February. It remains unnecessary then to posit a direct connection, since in any case the motivations of the parties who both got Mr. Gage kidnapped from his home and incarcerated, both petitioning could not have been unaware that their defamatory false witnesses to law enforcement would accomplish plaintiff’s incarceration regardless of his protestations and with no chance for any alternative outcome. Later on, on the night of Bill Saffo’s State of the City Address, plaintiff had another conversation with Commissioner Zapple outside Wilmington City Hall. This was the first chance plaintiff had had to take up the matter of WHQR with Zapple, and he did so, Zapple was politic and sympathetic, reflecting an inclination, at least a slight one, to understand the matter from a gender-political standpoint, and see that here was a man being defamed in gendered terms, but Zapple decided to insist that on some level I must have done something wrong. This meant asking that the first step toward healing be a letter of apology by me. I made it clear that I would do no such thing, seeing as I had done nothing wrong. I did not know to whom I would address a letter of apology and even if I did I still would have nothing to say sorry. “There is no sorry to be sorry for”, yea? Plaintiff said as much to Commissioner Zapple, who stupidly praised Bill Saffo’s absolutely atrocious speech (although the concluding slogan “to transmit the city!” had a certain crooked majesty to it, and it evokes the notion of the city as a radio signal. Transmit the city, but what about the county? Can the County be Transmitted, Commissioner Zapple, are you going to write a letter of apology to me, that’s right, it’s entirely appropriate, or so I say, but answer my question, for that matter where on Earth is Isabelle Shepherd, when is she going to speak frankly about what she knows about all this, it’s more than she admits. Nevertheless the exclusion of Ms. Shepherd from this complaint reflects the fact that by the time the defamatory injunction was obtained Ms. Shepherd had long since left WHQR. It is unclear whether or not she ever worked under the management of Michelle Rhinesmith…

VII. Slander vs. libel, defamation by/through radio stations

The traditional understanding of defamatory falsehoods has been that they are either slander–spread by the spoken word, one person to one or more others at a time–or else libel, in which the defamatory statements are committed to writing and find their way into publication and circulation. These two modalities of defamation differ both in their medium of transmission but also in the extent of their spread/distribution. This is where radio is quite peculiar in light of the jurisprudence concerning defamation. To discuss someone on a radio program (involves) entails the spoken word, but with radio many people can listen, and if there were uttered any defamatory falsehoods it would be impossible to know how many people were misled by the utterance. What we are trying to apprehend here is the precise profile, in terms of the people affected, of the extended effort to defame Mr. Gage. In order to demonstrate not only the falsehood of the representations in Ms. Rhinesmith’s fraudulently obtained civil injunctions, but also that these falsehoods were repeated on at least several occasions in the time since November 2017 and in the process new and essentially innocent parties were infected with the defamation virus, if only implicitly, and this passive dimension to the process of defamation cannot be overlooked or underestimated. Once it has been established for the sake of argument that the plaintiff is the kind of person who deserves to be banished from the otherwise Public offices of so-called Public Radio, and once it has become known among the staff and leadership of WHQR that William Dawson Gage is both a law-breaker and a dangerous masculine mental-patient, once it has been arranged that a single phone call to the WPD will be all that is necessary to get Mr. Gage violently evicted from the premises of WHQR should he appear, perhaps, to protest his mistreatment at the hands of the fools at the Friends of Public Radio, and once it has become no longer interesting to discuss the matter of the defamed figure, then the defamation campaign can enter the passive stage. After the civil injunction, rooted in the tissues of defamatory falsehoods uttered knowingly and maliciously by the station manager Rhinesmith and her un-named co-conspirator whose handwriting appears in the injunction paperwork; once this injunction had been successfully obtained, the ongoing effort requires merely that WHQR staff go on acting as not only as if plaintiff had been rightfully, happily, logically banned from the otherwise idyllic confines of the WHQR offices, not only is the plaintiff banned, but banned from a station that DID NOT WISH TO REPORT ON THE BAND. It would be a compelling answer to this complaint were it the case that 91.3 had broadcasted a brief news item to report to the listeners, indeed to the Friends of Public Radio, that for the first time in the history of the decades of WHQR the board and the manager had taken the astonishing step of prohibiting a listener and financial contributor from ever being heard on the radio, indeed, from ever coming near the location of its production, or from speaking to the staff. This outrageous prohibition is unique in the history not only of this public radio station, so-called, but it is likely at least an outlier and likely an unprecedented measure among the entire of American Public Radio stations. It would be interesting to know whether the brother and sister stations around the country which produce programs that are heard on WHQR here in Wilmington, what do these other radio stations think about the allegedly dangerous man who has such a keen interest in getting on the radio or in any event talking with the staff who operate his local public radio station? Off to the side, we do have the example of WUNC 91.5, which is a rather more influential radio station in the landscape of American public radio, as these these things go, and while the reception of Mr. Gage’s overtures, rather more limited, to WUNC, it must be said was not altogether friendly, what is inescapable is that WUNC did not proceed, in response to communications by Mr. Gage, to procure a defamatory civil injunction on the strength of knowingly false testimony. There may well come the day when WUNC and perhaps other radio stations will be the venue for an airing and discussion of these matters over the broadcast airwaves, which is where the matter ought rightly to be contested. It is not necessarily even the mendacity of these radio-station operators and their corporate board that seals the matter of this complaint for defamation of character. It is not merely that they have lied, but they lied on purpose, they did so with malicious defamatory intent and indeed they were well aware and pleased with the unlawful incarceration of Mr. Gage that followed in the wake of his disagreements with the two different managers of WHQR. Here we can begin to conclude this complaint, which is not to be confused with a comprehensive recitation of the story of plaintiff’s dealings with WHQR. It might be necessary when this case is heard for one or more players in this drama to tell their… (………….)

VIII. Defamation per-se, falsehoods, illnesses, and malices

An important component of any civil action for defamation of character seeks to establish the precise wrong for which the plaintiff seeks a remedy. The defendants might or might not wish to dispute the claim by plaintiff that the now protracted campaign of defamatory representations by the Friends of Public Radio, Inc. (Zapple, Callison, Rhinesmith, and what about Ms. Shepherd, will she say?) was not only real, and not only were the claims about the plaintiff false, but that they actually caused harm to the plaintiff. On this front, plaintiff appeals to the well-accepted notion, acknowledged on many occasions by the courts of North Carolina, of “defamation per-se” whose harmful impact need not be established with tedious empirical proof of the harm done. This concept of “defamation-per-se” marks off types of defamation which, it might be said, are considered indefensible. Nevertheless, just in case the General Court of Justice should prove skeptical about the argument that the falsehood and malice and medicalized derogation of plaintiff, plaintiff includes the following replies to several possible responses by the defendants that attempt to deflect the charge of defamation.

Firstly, it is sometimes said that some people’s reputation sinks to a level of esteem so low and a level of disdain and disrepute so high that it is inconceivable that WHQR’s efforts to defame could not have made a difference by the time they occurred. The argument along these lines would maintain that, and not at all because of WHQR, by the time they took notice of the Mr. Gage his reputation was already terrible. This might well have been the case, but we cannot even let this eventuality deflect the necessary conclusion that Mr. Gage is the victim of a defamation conspiracy of which the Friends of Public Radio, Inc. and Ms. Rhinesmith are merely a significant part. They distinguish themselves from other parties, natural persons and legal fictions, here in Wilmington who have also defamed Mr. Gage, but the WHQR defamers were the first to take these defamatory falsehoods into court and commit them ot paper as sworn testimony, under oath, strictly speaking a flagrant act of perjury, but leave that for the criminal justice system, it will be found in the hearing of this case and in the rendering of this complaint unto those who ought to heed it that the plaintiff has suffered egregiously in the time since the procural of Michelle Rhinesmith’s defamatory civil injunction, and it is also clear that the criminal prosecutions of plaintiff cannot be disentangled from the clearly demonstrable false witness borne against the plaintiff by personnel who serve at the pleasure of the Board of Directors of the Friends of Public Radio. The minutes of the board meeting that discussed Mr. Gage, a copy of Ms. Rhinesmith’s written statement , and the testimony of the several known and unknown participants in the WHQR wing of the generalized conspiracy to defame the plaintiff through the malicious proliferation and maintenance of falsehoods intended to cultivate fear of the plaintiff and justify a violent attitude to him and an absolutely uncivilized disregard for his constitutional rights, for his basic liberty, and for his good name which the mendacious Ms. Rhinesmith must in fact have some measure of warped respect for after all, since she knows it isn’t like she made it out to be. The defamatory narrative of William Dawson Gage’s interactions with this radio station is of such a subtle and ideologically confusing nature that it will take some considerable imagination to understand how a handful of essentially boring and intellectually pedestrian radio personnel, who ought to have recognized a true Friend of Public Radio, instead saw an enemy, and an opportunity to commit a true act of personal destruction against an innocent man who has had to suffer greatly on account of this decision to mark him as an enemy of public radio. If the initial reading of this complaint should be met with anything but understanding and enough provisional agreement for the matter to reach the courtroom, so long as the day comes, and none too soon, that the truth about the plaintiff and the defendants false witnesses against him will not only come to light, but make it onto the audio recording that will be made when this case is heard in superior court. The possibility that this case might someday be reported on the radio would be one of the several desiderata that the plaintiff would take as a welcome sign that the curse upon him is being reversed, the damage slowly undone, and that his local “public radio” will again be worthy of that name once it no longer treats him as an outcast, a threat to women, or men for that matter, no matter what else me be said about the plaintiff, if there are any people who could ever be said to be “Enemies of Public Radio” the plaintiff is not one of them, would never be an enemy of that, for as long as it’s truly public–terrestrial radio is always public, it cannot be concealed–and truly radio–no one knows who listens–then plaintiff will be….

IX. Gender Ideology and its Relation to Defamation of Plaintiff

Embedded in the civil injunction procured by Ms. Rhinesmith, and indeed in the entire ethic and worldview which underpins or frames the disregard for the plaintiff by the several representatives of the Friends of Public Radio, it is necessary in order to understand precisely how and, perhaps, WHY the defendants pursued their campaign to defame Mr. Gage. After all, the malice attributed to defendants by the plaintiff in this complaint requires some kind of explanation, for malice by definition is not random, nor accidental. The reason for the apparent feelings of distaste, dislike, impatience, dismissal, condescension, pretentious lack of interest, it is these sensations and attitudes rather than fear that truly characterized the supposedly frightened personnel of WHQR. The truth is that there was a decision by someone at some point to cast the plaintiff in a defamatory light in terms that would resonate with a certain ideological prejudice about the nature of men, human males of the age of majority, that is, and in particular–though this may not have played into it, there is a stereotype about men, and specifically white men, and even more specifically so-called heterosexual cis-gendered men, which is to say men who are just interested in women, there is an ideology which postures as feminism but in fact is just an excuse for the patriarchy of the likes of Tolliver Cleve Callison. What plaintiff contends is that it owed to a derogatory stereotype or ideological fantasy about what men are like in general and what especially the male writer/intellectual is like. It is inconceivable that a woman who had made the same overtures and outreaches to WHQR staff would have been dismissed and treated with the same hostility that Mr. Gage experienced for little more reason than that he has a Y chromosome. The fact that plaintiff is indeed a young man interested in young woman ought not to have been considered especially noteworthy, let alone unsettling, by the personnel of WHQR. After all, he was not especially secretive or shy about his romantic interest, however casual or low-key it might have been in the grand scheme of things, for Ms. Isabelle Shepherd, who he had become acquainted with, strangely enough, on the chat service of the Tinder dating app. Assuming that Ms. Shepherd’s interest in Mr. Gage was extinguished with the dwindling off of their Tinder chat, plaintiff did not see anything untoward or impolite about visiting her workplace since it was after all an office open to the public during daytime hours and for special events and if one can listen to the voice of a woman on the radio it ought not to be outrageous to seek her out for a conversation in person. Radio personalities, however great or small, should not be upset or unsettled that listeners (as if plaintiff were just a radio-groupie, yeah, OK!) might want to sit down and talk talk talk. SO the matter of MS. Isabelle Shepherd’s emotions where plaintiff is concerned will be important in isolating the locus of responsibility for the acts of defamation committed by Friends of Public Radio, Inc. An admission on the part of Ms. Shepherd who remains a non-defendant only on the assumption that she will nevertheless give sincere and accurate testimony in this matter when the appointed day comes, yes an admission that her fear of plaintiff was unfounded and that the issue was more to do with the plaintiff’s personal attractiveness, or else not, according to the standards of Ms. Shepherd. One hopes that this was not the topic of discussion when the Board of Directors addressed the plaintiff’s correspondence with the station staff, since plaintiff does not need to hear whether Wiley Cash agrees with Isabelle’s taste in men, leave aside whether Ms. Shepherd voted for Rob Zapple in the primary and whether anyone will admit that the ultimate motivations for the conduct of all involved in this saga of defamation, that the motive for this offense must be, at the end of the day, a political motive, even if this anti-communist feeling is a hate that dare not speak its name. Instinctive hostility to a man of the radical left is likely the unspoken factor which will need to be revealed by the testimony of those involved, whose politics are self-evidently those of National Public Radio which spurns and scorns the left from the liberal center (……….)

X. Defamation by radio station is actually a crime in North Carolina

An obscure provision of North Carolina law suggests the possibility that there might be such a thing as criminal defamation; in the special case of defamation by/through a radio station, the law requires that either the prosecutor (criminal defamation) or the plaintiff (allegedly the defamed) give 5 days notice to the radio station before filing the charges/civil actions(s). This is made difficult in the present case given the existence of the no-contact order which is said to apply to the entire staff of WHQR. The injunction that forbids contact and visitations to the premises of WHQR’s office gives a misleading impression of who, in fact, is the “employer” of the staff who work at 254 N. Front St., Suite 300. Ms. Rhinesmith has a certain amount of administrative control over the office of the station, but strictly speaking her authority, like all managers at the end of the day, premised on an acceptance of her leadership. It is unclear how and why Ms. Rhinesmith might be able to fire her “employees”, since it seems likely that any such decision would get the attention of the Board of Directors. Hiring and firing decisions are made very rarely. The ambiguity of the organization of the WHQR office is that no one on the outside can say with any certainty who is in charge, and this should be taken into account in the case of Ms. Rhinesmith. What plaintiff will demonstrate in the course of time will be the hostility devoid of any reasonable basis in the plaintiff’s character that characterized the generalized stance of WHQR vis-a-vis plaintiff. IT was impossible to discern whether or not Cleve Callison was speaking with the confidence of his colleagues, who might not be quite “his” employees. The possibility of a successful overture (to receive coverage of important stories in which plaintiff takes an interest) to someone other than station manager Callison seemed sufficient reason to bristle at the prohibition Mr. Callison sought to impose on plaintiff to cease contact with the entire staff of WHQR. Even the volunteers? Even the volunteers. This was May, however, and by the time fall came around the defamed plaintiff was kidnapped by WPD two additional times in the final weeks prior to the municipal elections. It was immediately after the election, in which Mayor Bill Saffo won a landslide victory, that Ms. Rhinesmith walked into the courthouse to procure her defamatory civil injunction. It is entirely unclear whether, as was the case with Cleve Calllison, Ms. Rhinesmith was aware that in the spirng of 2017 Mr. Gage had been making preparations to challenge Saffo in the mayoral election. After spurning his requests for coverage, given the fact that he was the only candidate whose intentions had been made clear, Saffo did not announce until July, Callison begrudgingly admitted that once the filing period was over, if Mr. Gage was indeed a candidate, then WHQR would consider covering him in its brief bits of local news bulletins that you get on 91.3 FM. THe contingencies of the filing period in the summer as well as the lingering defamatory impact and loss of self-esteem stemming fron the first IVC of plaintiff in middle May. As rehearsed above, it is absolutely certain that the decision of plaintiff’s mother and father to petition (the method is an affidavit, in fact) a magistrate to send the police to kidnap him and “commit” him to hospital was influenced by the station Manager Mr. Callison and Board of Directors member commissioner Rob Zapple. At that time, or so it appears, Ms. Shepherd had not opened communication with Mrs. Hannah Gage over the phone, but Zapple and, in the background of it, Callison, both of them made second-hand references to the discomfort experienced by Ms. Shepherd in response to plaintiff’s handful of visits and a handful of emails. The implication of this discomfort, however, would have to be that the plaintiff presented a plausible threat or risk of unlawful “behavior” who needed to be shooed away and kept away by the police if necessary. The unspecified lawbreaking referred to in Ms. Rhinesmith’s injunction was simply assumed as a procedural formality, as in “Mr. Gage has already broken the law, the order is to get him not to do it again”, this is the fallacy and the falsehood, the deception that Ms. Rhinesmith perpetrated on the court with her tendentious, deliberately defamatory distortionary account of what she knew of plaintiff’s history with WHQR. Ms. Rhinesmith expended $150 of the approximately 1.2 million dollar treasury at the disposal of the Friends of Public Radio , Inc. Half of that goes for the fees paid to National Public Radio for the package of syndicated programming carried by WHQR. The budget allotted to the compensation of the station staff is not known to plaintiff at this time, but the rewards which ought to be afforded to the plaintiff should be estimated with reference to this substantial budget, most of which might not be necessary for the success of the radio station. Which is to say that the restitution for the wrong of defamation might take the form of cash payments, but an alternative scenario is also suggestive. This would be that the Board of Directors of the Friends of Public Radio could negotiate a settlement that would successfully make amends for the wrongs described in this complaint, and this would take shape like so. The current arrangement leaves the interested listener unrepresented… (…………)

XI. Can Defamation Be Reversed and How?

The aim of the plaintiff in his efforts to establish some kind of informal influence over the editorial policies of WHQR was clearly a legitimate political and vocational action on his own behalf. As an aspirant radio commentator, the plaintiff had every reason to curry favor with the staff who would be able, at some uncertain future day, to admit the plaintiff onto the broadcast airwaves. This ought to be a serious matter which the personnel of WHQR respected, but as it turned out the reactionary hostility of the station manager Callison prejudiced the rest of the station staff, who, plaintiff argues might not have been so inclined to denounce and dismiss plaintiff Mr. Gage had they not had their Boss telling them negative things about him. In the context of Mr. Callison’s management it would not have been easy, if possible at all, to express the contrary view that plaintiff might well deserve coverage on WHQR. Thus did the opinion of a single station manager, connected with the pliable Rob Zapple as the conduit on the Board of Directors for the anti-Dawson Gage effort. The secrecy which surrounded the meeting where Mr. Gage was discussed has not been seen through, and it will remain of great interest exactly who on the board was there for this meeting, and who said what. It is unclear whether Mr. Callison or Ms. Shepherd were there to address the board or whether Commissioner Zapple had to summarize and relate the respective negative attitudes of these two members of the station staff. It is possible that others on the staff concorded with the opinions of their manager, but it is also possible that there was little chance to challenge the representations of Callison. One wide-open mystery in this situation is the opinion of News Director Rachel Lewis Hilburn. One would assume that Ms. Hilburn’s authority within the office would have been enough to overrule Ms. Shepherd if she were all along (…..) in her complaints about Mr. Gage. But we should not assume that it was that it was Isabelle Shepherd who originated the decision not merely to give plaintiff the cold shoulder, but to threaten him with unspecified severe measures–mostly calling the cops–and it seems more likely that Mr. Callison gave an impetus and the force of his management authority to the general sentiment which was allowed to develop in his office. This was a fantasy or hallucination, or maybe just a bullshit story, to the effect that this Dawson Gage character, he’s not our kind of guy, not our cup of tea, or not anymore, he’s creepy, he’s stalking Isabelle, this is harassment, or at least it’s gotta be some kind of illegal there’s probably a restraining order you can get you have every right to get a restraining order go on and get one. This gives a general sense of the kind of defamatory judgments were over time aggregating in the institutional space of WHQR. If anything was said about the plaintiff, it would be held to be in keeping with the necessity of the plaintiff’s psychiatric incarceration, the claims that he is dangerous and even the dismissive attitude that has him as merely distasteful, not power dinner material, not one of the cool kids and not go(ing) to be on the city council don’t think so, every single day that goes by with WHQR hiding behind the defamatory civil injunction procured by Ms. Rhinesmith, with each day that the station stands behind the actions of its manager the plaintiff is defamed ever more. To remedy the wrong done to plaintiff an acknowledgement of falsehood, of the misuse of medical language, and the element of deliberation and purpose that underlies every mendacity committed by the defendants. It will come to light in the trying of this case how the different players on the Board and in the station office felt about the no-contact order. It is interesting to ask whether the manager decided to ask her people, call them colleagues or subordinates or employees whatever, whether she asked them their opinion prior to walking to see the Clerk of Court, or whether she simply informed them of the order once it had been obtained. Did she go to the board before she went to court? Did the Board weigh in at any point with an opinion distinctive from that of Ms. Rhinesmith? Does the station manager speak for the Friends of Public Radio, and what about her predecessor, because here we have both managers, who never really talked about it, one assumes, united in their commitment to defaming Mr. Gage, and this continuity of attitudes is what makes the culpability of the governing board a fairly certain matter. If the Board had wished to stop the station managers from acting so disrespectfully and officiously and haughtily not to say rudely and stupidly toward the plaintiff. The presumption that they are qualified to speak about the “mental disturbance” identified inside the mind of the plaintiff by the……….

*FINIS*