To be honest I think he’s the result of a perfect storm. He’s someone who has practically zero social intelligence, a very low IQ, and has clearly been dealing with untreated mental illness his whole life. I think that, along with growing up in a community who tolerated and excused his bad behaviour are what made him this way. His parents shielded him from the repercussions of what he did in high school. If they’d have left him to face the punishment he was due, maybe he’d have realised that he had to change. Don’t get me wrong - I’m fucking glad that they didn’t because he’s comedy gold.
Honestly, I think Russell was already a lost cause by the time he wrote his "kill list" on the restroom wall.
NPD has its roots in early childhood, but it's still possible to mitigate or prevent its full-blown development as long as it's caught before adolescence. You can still reach most at-risk kids, teaching them empathy, humility, and respect for others, and help them cultivate a genuine sense of self so they don't have to build and defend an empty Narcissistic façade.
Once a kid gets past about age 13, however, the chances of successful intervention drop off dramatically. The patterns are just too well established. By the time they're adults? Forget it. All Cluster Bs are notoriously resistant to treatment, but Narcissists are pretty much a lost cause because they cannot admit there is anything fundamentally wrong with them, and the source of their problems is them, and not others.
Russell had two weeks to sit in jail and think about why he was there. That's more than enough time to recognize that he'd made a terrible mistake, feel remorse that others were negatively affected by it, and ponder what was wrong with him that led him to think that was a good idea. A lot of 18-year-olds in his position probably would have figured all of that out in the first two hours after the cops showed up, but not our boy.
Russell never seems to have had that "Oh, shit--what have I done? I'm such an asshole, and I'm sorry!" experience. He was embarrassed, and felt sorry for himself, and thought it was unfair that he was in jail and his graduation plans were going to be derailed and his life might be ruined over a "joke." Since then, he's lied about what happened, claiming that somebody else did the worst of the writing, but he caught all of the blame. That's not what a guy who has felt any genuine remorse or done any self-examination would do.
His parents didn't make a mistake by hiring a lawyer who got him off without charges; that's what good parents do when their teenagers fuck up, and, as far as we know, Russell had never been in trouble with the law before. He seems to have been a goody-two-shoes kind of kid--while also being a creep (a pattern that still holds). Had his parents left him to face the full consequences of his actions, he never would have seen that it was all his doing. Instead, he would have accused them of abandoning him, claimed the charges as trumped-up and ridiculous, and whined about how his court-appointed lawyer didn't care enough. After being found guilty and sentenced, he would have claimed his punishment was excessive. He can't be wrong, can't be guilty; if he faces negative consequences for his behavior, it's always somebody else's fault. Fake judges. Pop stars and their misrepresentations. Music producers who ruined his song. Mentally-ill trolls here at the Farms.
And, had his parents told him he was on his own after his arrest, he would have come out of that experience even angrier, feeling more wronged, and with less to lose. With a conviction under his belt, even becoming a paralegal would have been out of his reach, so he probably would have been a Walmart janitor all along. And without his delusion that the law is on his side, and that he can successfully weaponize it all by himself to punish public figures for disappointing him, his desire for attention from female celebrities--and to punish and humiliate them when they refuse to give it--might have found much less benign outlets. He's not smart enough to build a bomb, like Bjork's stalker, but he could very well have ended up as one of those guys who climbs over the fence at Taylor Swift's house.
Russell was already a lost cause when he wrote that list of names on the restroom wall. His parents probably had no clue; parents are always the last to see how truly fucked up their kids are. They did the right thing. It's just a shame they ended up doing it for somedody who is utterly wrong.
He's recently mentioned being both jobless and homeless. I don't recall reading what led up to that. More Russ BS, or is he really homeless now?
(edit for spelling)
"Homeless," for Russell, doesn't mean sleeping on the streets while pushing his grubby keyboard and other belongings around in a shopping cart. It means that yet another housemate has told him to GTFO, and he hasn't yet found another place.
"Jobless" may be more complicated. He does always seem to have a job. But he's unable to get what, in his mind, is a "real" job--that of a paralegal, due to our "slander." And he tends to bounce from one menial job to another (none of which really count because they're not paralegal gigs), and he keeps losing those due to incompetence, acting from his feelings of entitlement and exemption (as God's Favorite Idiot, it's totally okay for him to leave a mess after lunch, or take off early), and creeping on attractive female co-workers.
Again, he's never to blame when there are consequences for his idiotic actions; it's always someone or something else. That he's a litigious little nobody who sues female pop stars for discrimination is more than enough to keep him barred from legal jobs, because he can't be trusted with sensitive information, or to not illegally use a firm's access to databases for his own purposes. But no--it's us, and our "slander" (fuck, Russ--
really?! Has the difference between libel and slander
still failed to penetrate that trauma-lumpy head of yours?). We're the ones keeping him from getting the paralegal jobs he believes he deserves.
He finally responds to the Medium article and all he can do is claim that Smith isn't a really journalist despite him having a substantial internet presence and writing under his own name for multiple publications.
Russ, do you think no one else can see the internet? That we can't search names and figure out that YOU are the liar?
He also claims that he hasn't even read the article! So, Russell, if you haven't read it, how do you know it's all lies?
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