(12 August 2024)
Dear Ms. McGee,
As you know, two of my cell phones remain in the custody of the Wilmington Police Department, and I write to request that you authorize them to return my property as soon as possible. They claimed to have been “done” with their “imaging” of the phones, and have said on two occasions that it was “the D.A.’s office” which had the authority to “release” my cell phones.
My most recent encounter with Detective Cowart was at WPD headquarters just a few days ago, actually, and he seemed to have been texting with you. He said you had told them that I needed to “request” the return of the cell phones, or perhaps even to file a “motion”. While I will, of course, do everything and anything necessary to effect the return of these devices and the vital files and records which they contain, it would be nice if you could just return my property without the need for additional written application.
Leaving aside the many unanswered questions where these “proceedings” are concerned, allow me to say that I object to this malicious prosecution in the most emphatic and serious fashion.
This may be what you all do “for a living”, Ms. McGee, but this is not an ordinary situation, and your experience as a prosecutor in this case is precisely the source of your disadvantage. While it would entail a measure of courage as well as humility on your part, you would be entirely justified to dispose these cases via “voluntary dismissal”. There is even the obscure method known as “nolle prosequi”, which I suggest you take a few minutes to research and contemplate.
Please don’t ignore me: just let Thom Goolsby know what I need to do to get my phones back. Thank you for your time and attention.
Yours sincerely,
Dawson Gage
p.s. Lastly, I should remind you of the unfulfilled “public records requests” which might still be somewhere inside the DA’s office. It’s also worth pointing out that my “handwritten correspondence” is also “public record”.
(18 August 2024)
Dear Ms. McGee,
Attached you will find all of the emails from my “SENT” folders on multiple different email accounts which contained “isabelle.shepherd@gmail.com” among the “recipients” or the “CC list”. This is following on the several previous “bundles of evidence” which I have taken the liberty of voluntarily furnishing to the State, hoping that the records of the trial court (and if need be, the record-on-appeal) will include as much of the documentary record (of my communications and correspondence with the so-called “victims”) as possible. Given that I keep fairly extensive electronic records and archives of everything I do, this turns out to be a very substantial and complicated body of text.
The odds of you taking the time to read it all, and thereby to come to your own conclusions about “protected speech vs harassment”, seem very low indeed. And yet the fact of my providing all these supposedly “harassing writings”, which you and your gang allege to have “no legitimate purpose”, would seem to suggest that I am nowhere near as guilty (which is to say, as “wicked” or “morally wrongful”) as you and your defamation-crew have been maintaining for years.
The raison d’etre of these unusual criminal statutes is generally understood to be “protecting victims”, but that means that if there was never any real “threat”, that your “plaintiff-victim-witnesses” have been playing the system with prosecutorial permission. Between my cases, and “real stalking” and “real domestic violence cases”, it is obvious that mine does not fit the frame of stereotypes and expectations which prosecutors as well as the educated public are known to make use of.
Once you admit that it is possible to imagine that the likes of Ms. Shepherd could be induced/coaxed/manipulated/recruited to carry out a campaign of sheer character assassination under the guise of “stalking accusations”; once it is possible to imagine a 50B or 50C plaintiff who far from being the paragon of the “reliably virtuous” (or “virtuously trustworthy”) witness, is in fact nothing other than a perjurer, someone for whom a solemn oath to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” is a kind of antiquated ritual emptied of its dignity and significance. This is because “domestic violence” and “stalking” prosecutions do not believe in or admit to the existence of an “objective reality” or some idea of “what really happened”. No, in these 21st century witchcraft+show-trial proceedings, the victims are meant to perform their parts, and that is what I wish to avoid.
I understand that at the heart of the paradigm of “domestic violence & stalking prosecutions” is the idea that “guilt” and “innocence”, just like “truth” and “falsehood”, are outdated concepts which should be replaced by an absolute prosecutorial commitment to inflicting the maximum penalty upon the marked men you designate as “stalkers” or “abusers”. Which is to say that what you are doing to me, and in the process warping the minds and personalities of these extraordinary young women, is completely reprehensible and unlawful in every conceivable way.
Thus do I address you with yet another expression of righteous indignation and outrage. As you know, Ms. McGee, I am someone who is capable of speaking and writing for himself in a thousand different styles and voices. It seems a little ridiculous to try to send me to prison for the words (the sentences, the paragraphs, the daisy-chain-text-message-letters) I texted to Ms. Shepherd’s phone number as published on her website “isabelleshepherd.com“, and yet not even have the intellectual curiosity and ethical bearing to read what I send to your email. Previous “discovery materials” reveal that your “victims” and their workplace-and-social-network-support-folk take (what I would describe as) a very vain and narcissistic attitude to the writings which they presume to censor and criminalize.
By which I mean that in most of the cases, what you have is a print-out of something I wrote, with someone having gone through with a goddamn highlighter to “count the number of times I use the name “Isabelle Shepherd””, as if this were some kind of criminological method for diagnosing “erotomanic delusions”. No, madam DA, that’s sheer laziness and stupidity: just because I mention Isabelle’s name does not mean that intended to “harass” her thereby. What you see throughout my writings, be they “text message chains” or the kind of journalistic non-fiction prose-works I had on my old website “dawsongage.net“
You seem to have been very confident that the panic and hysteria in the zeitgeist about “domestic violence” and “stalking” would enable you and your “witnesses” to fabricate whatever false narratives of “victim-hood” you chose. This is not to say that, by some damnably-bourgeois standard of “life difficulty”, these women (leave aside the jealous males like Mr. Carter and Mr. Hackney, to say nothing of Mr. McKay…) haven’t “had their lives turned upside down” (your own phrase from court on 15 May, one which we have heard before as a generalized hyperbole about the “victim impact”. ) Yes, perhaps I turned their lives upside down with a torrent of profound and well-written text messages. I am prepared to admit this, but not to any criminal offense, because my text messages cannot be criminal just for the fact that various people (even women) have claimed to experience “fear” or “life-turning” or “difficulty sleeping” or even “not feeling safe anymore”. This is because these emotions are completely beyond my control, while the writings themselves would not, on the face of it, seem to have anything which would cause an “average person” to feel fear.
I don’t mean to taunt or disrespect you, Ms. McGee, but there is no conflict-free or politically-correct way to describe this situation, both the objective truths of social and interpersonal history which envelop the “writings” in question, or even the writings themselves (which for the unlettered stranger or even the literate juror might could use some interpretation and commentary.) No, there is no easy way to do this, but I have embraced a way of life in which nothing is expected to come easily. You might think you have the advantage over me, ma’am, but I maintain my innocence in fact as well as law, and maintain with certainty that my writings and correspondence were constitutionally-protected and not an offense under criminal law. Having heard me describe the proceedings in this way, do you really want to pretend this isn’t happening, and sleepwalk towards a jury trial? Rest assured, Ms. McGee, this case is more important than all your other cases put together. If you wake up and rise to the occasion you have the chance to play an extraordinarily benevolent and noble part.
If you are so reckless as to disregard my sincere pleas for “voluntary dismissal”, and otherwise to persist in this malicious prosecution, you might find yourself disbarred. Indeed, criminal liability for what you have done and are planning to do is not out of the question, so know that I mean every word I write here, and that I am Dawson Gage, and nothing–nothing–gets past me. I suggest you take my word for it.
Yours faithfully,
Dawson Gage
p.s. Since it would be difficult to figure this out without me telling you so, be aware that almost ALL of the attached emails were “broadcast emails” in which Ms. Shepherd (and/or Ms. Oden as seen from the previous “Char Oden email collection) is only one of several, sometimes as many as several dozen recipients. I suspect that the reason you all have so far made no mention of any of these “broadcast emails” in your presentation of the “facts” of the case so far, is that the general fact of these emails, as well as any number of things you could read in them, make it absolutely clear and certain that the author of these texts/letters/emails is a non-violent man. No woman, nor any “reasonable person” of whatever sex or class or culture, has any reason to fear violence from Dawson Gage. I am a disciple and student of the life and works of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and I preach the “philosophy of non-violence” to all I encounter. I know that may sound strange to someone like you, but it is, in more than one sense, “the truth”.