Tomlinson’s terror
Tomlinson’s troubles began after he posted a casual remark on Twitter in 2018 saying he’d never personally found the comedian Norm Macdonald very funny. As
The Daily Beast reported, the tweet caught the attention of online trolls who soon began to harass, stalk, impersonate and defame Tomlinson and his wife, using a website of their own along with social media accounts on Reddit, Twitter and YouTube to target the couple and invite others to pile on.
Their harassers mostly converge on a website that’s cloned elsewhere so participants can migrate rapidly if their forum is ever banned by a service provider.
Since The Daily Beast report, the harassment escalated both online and offline.
The couple was mostly recently swatted at their home on Tuesday, bringing the total of swatting incidents to 43. Tomlinson’s parents, who are senior citizens, also suffered swatting at their home about 2 hours outside of Milwaukee this year.
“It’s taken away our sanctuary,” Tomlinson said of the constant harassment, adding: “We don’t feel safe in our own home. We don’t know when the door’s going to get kicked in.”
Tomlinson described one incident: “I make my way downstairs to find that there are half a dozen police with pistols drawn, shotguns, AR-15s, all pointed and flashlights all pointed at my head. I am pulled out of the house, and then on my own front porch I’m immediately handcuffed.”
Besides misusing emergency services, impersonators also fraudulently called the couple’s natural gas provider, We Energies, to have their heat cut off during cold Wisconsin nights on two occasions, most recently in March, according to records shared by the family.
"We woke up with our breath visible indoors. Temperatures were in the 50s in our house,” Tomlinson said, putting the couple and their pets (two cats and a bearded dragon lizard) in danger.
False threats using the couples’ names have also reached a favorite local Irish pub twice this year, causing police to bring bomb sniffing dogs to the bar during a Marquette game on one occasion.
Swatters also called in a false bomb threat to the American Family Field, the baseball stadium where the Milwaukee Brewers play, on a night when Tomlinson had publicly posted that they would be in attendance. And on Dec. 10, 2022, false bomb threats mentioning Tomlinson caused the evacuation of thousands of fans from a
Patti Labelle concert at the Riverside Theater in Milwaukee.
The couple says they have spent tens of thousands of dollars in the last five years in a bid to protect themselves. Among other items, they said they purchased high-end home security systems, personal defense weapons and more.
Tomlinson and Robinson filed a lawsuit against the owners of an online forum that their stalkers have used to target them. But their case was never heard by the court because they had no names of website owners to sue. They sent a subpoena to obtain those names to a web services provider, Cloudflare, but that was quashed. They were forced to withdraw the suit and now say they owe more than $50,000 in legal fees to the very people attacking them — enough to possibly bankrupt them, the couple said.