Writer ‘swatted’ 47 times over casual diss of Norm Macdonald in 2018: ‘Trying to destroy my world’
A sci-fi writer says he’s been “swatted” 47 times by haters dead-set on ruining his career — because he publicly admitted to not finding “Saturday Night Live” star Norm Macdonald funny.
Patrick S. Tomlinson of Milwaukee, Wisc., says he has become a poster boy for online harassment run amok, enduring no fewer than five years of vicious Web harassment and “swatting” cop calls to his home, after his casual 2018 comment.
“You can’t fathom the amount of clinical obsession that grips these people,” the 43-year-old author told the Independent of his haters in a story published last week. “Trying to destroy my world is their full-time lives.”
Tomlinson said the coordinated campaign of torment against him — intended “to destroy my career, marriage and drive me to suicide” — has included armed police showing up to his home nearly four dozen times, sometimes after receiving fake calls that he had committed murder.
He was once handcuffed naked on his porch — and another time swatted four times in one day, with the final episode resulting in police pulling guns in his face, the outlet said.
Tomlinson’s nightmare started when the sci-fi writer and part-time standup comic took aim at Macdonald, the late legendary deadpan Canadian comic best known for anchoring the NBC show’s “Weekend Update” segment in the 90s and his roles in films like “Billy Madison” and “Dirty Work.”
“Hot take: I’ve never found Norm Macdonald funny and was pretty sure all my comedy friends who did were either nuts or screwing with me,” Tomlinson posted on X, then known as Twitter, in September 2018.
After the tweet, Tomlinson found himself locked out of his verified account because a 30,000-member Reddit group of fans of the canceled radio show “Opie and Anthony” mass-reported him to the social network for breaching community standards, according to the article.
Tomlinson’s social accounts on other platforms were also soon the targets of false complaints and vile impersonations by the group, who had reportedly taken to harassing LGBTQ community members and left-wing commentators, as well.
The author was then doxed by the Redditors, leading to death threats being left on his phone. Stalkers reportedly began following him to public appearances, photographing him and telling his publishers that they had kidnapped his wife.
Macdonald never responded at the time to Tomlinson’s 2018 tweet targeting him.
Instead, the star waited till 2019, two years before his death, when someone paid him to record a Cameo to blast Tomlinson’s innocuous opinion of him.
“I want you to stop picking on your friend Pat,” Macdonald said in the clip, which lives on YouTube. “After all, his only crime was that he didn’t find Norm Macdonald funny.”
The comic then added, “Wait a minute here, I’m Norm Macdonald.
“Hah! And I am funny. Please continue insulting that fat loser,” he jokingly continued.
Around that time, the swatting against Tomlinson ramped up in earnest, the writer said.
Tomlinson’s harassers continued their perverse campaign on new.onaforums.net, posting 40,000 threads and about a million comments focusing on what the victim called a “total, clinical obsession with my every tweet, thought, public appearance.”
Stalkers created a Craigslist post with Tomlinson’s address that stated he was kidnapping African-American children and “grinding them down to make pepperoni,” an allusion to the outrageous Pizzagate conspiracy theory that targeted Hillary Clinton when she ran for president in 2016.
In May of 2020, cops showed up at Tomlinson’s home late one night demanding to know where “the children” are, according to the report.
The police showed up 46 other times, with one incident ending with the author “handcuffed naked on our porch with six guns in my face,” he said during a 2022 Twitter thread.
“They use the site to coordinate new attacks, execute, and then brag about the crimes and suffering they’ve inflicted,” Tomlinson wrote of his tormentors.
The harassers also flooded Amazon and Goodreads with fake bad reviews of Tomlinson’s many books.
The “swatting” tactic has recently been notably used on public figures such as GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley, who last month revealed she was victimized by swatters twice in two days, with armed police showing up to her house responding to bogus calls reporting murders there.
Other lawmakers, judges presiding over Donald Trump cases and even the White House, had all been recently victimized in similar incidents.
As the sick campaign of harassment against Tomlinson continued, the author’s loved ones also found themselves in the crosshairs of the swatters, with his elderly parents reportedly falling victim to them three times.
His wife was reportedly impersonated by someone who sent racist e-mails to Marvin Toliver, a black man who champions social equality. Toliver later took to Instagram to say the e-mails did not come from her, but the stunt had reportedly already led to her being temporarily suspended from her job.
Cyber security expert and University of Cincinnati assistant professor Gregory Winger told the outlet that until cops crack down on the swatters, Tomlinson’s life is endangered by repeated encounters with heavily armed police.
Winger contends that the keyboard cowards should be charged with attempted murder and terrorism.
“You have to treat it like a domestic terror cell — they get off on creating chaos and trying to harm people. And in order to keep chasing that high, they are only going to escalate,” he said.
Tomlinson said he ended up buying his wife a gun for Christmas “just so she could feel more at ease.”
The Milwaukee Police Department declined to provide a response to the outlet about why it had not taken measures to prevent serial swatting attacks at the Tomlinson residence and denied an open records request, citing an FBI probe into the harassment.
