By Matt Stone
Someone tried to blackmail me this week.
I’m not going to tell you who. I’m not going to tell you how he found what he thought he had on me. All you need to know is that it happened, and it didn’t work, and here’s why.
I was thirteen years old the first time I took a drink. Still a kid, already looking for a way to survive what was happening to me at home, before I even had the language for what abuse was. Everything that came after for the next twenty years, every bad decision, every charge, is a kid who found the wrong exit at thirteen and kept taking it, because nobody showed him a better one in time. That’s not an excuse, it’s just the starting point.
Here’s the record, plainly, no euphemisms.
At eighteen, I passed out mushrooms at a lake gathering. A kid there lied to me about being underage. That kid got lost that night. It became a real search, a real emergency, exactly as serious as it sounds. I was charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
I funded the drinking habit by stealing from an employer. Grand theft, later reduced to misdemeanors.
And there was a night I assaulted the person I loved… That’s the sentence. No further detail, no softening, no explaining away what happened or what it wasn’t. Just my horrible actions, carrying their own full weight.
There were probably other smaller things too. It has been almost twenty years. I don’t remember all of it, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise just to look more thorough than I actually am.
I do know that I got held on felony probation status (instead of misdemeanor) for years after, made to jump through every hoop Yolo County could think up, long after any of it should’ve still been open. All of it eventually got dismissed down to fees.
So, let’s actually define the thing someone wants you to be afraid of, because he phrased it as “you have criminal records involving minors.”
Contributing to the delinquency of a minor, California Penal Code section 272, is a misdemeanor. The standard textbook example lawyers give for it is handing a sixteen year old a cigarette. Mushrooms at a party fits the same shelf. That is the actual legal weight of the phrase somebody wanted to dress up and hand you like it meant something else entirely.
Now, here’s the now.
Thirteen years sober.
No open case, no probation.
I’m an AA sponsor these days, standing on the other side of the exact thing that nearly took me out, helping somebody else find a better exit than the one I took at thirteen. I’m a father. A husband. A city official. A journalist. An award-winning author. That’s not a resume built to impress anybody. That’s thirteen years of work, done in daylight, that a man hiding behind a Gmail account doesn’t get to erase with a decades-old misdemeanor record.
Because that’s what he is. Not a source. Not a whistleblower. A tiny man who went looking for an argument about a t-shirt on an article image, a shirt that said protect trans kids, and instead of making an argument, went digging through a stranger’s worst years instead.
He is a known bigot.
He has bigot friends.
Every major medical body in this country disagrees with them about the kids he claims to be so concerned over. He didn’t have an argument for that. He had my name and twenty years of my worst mistakes instead.
He was even stupid enough to send the whole thing from his own personal email address, which tells you everything about how much thought went into it…
Now… here’s the part upon which he did not do the math.
You cannot blackmail a man with a fact he already published himself.
I told on myself first, in my own words, in my own writing, in my own testimonies, years before anyone went looking. There is nothing left in that file that I haven’t already stood in front of, on purpose, in public.
So let me say it as plainly as I know how.
I will not be fucking blackmailed.
The thirteen-year-old who took his first drink to survive something he didn’t ask for, and the man writing this sentence right now, are the same person.
Neither one is hidden today.
That’s the part a Dunning-Kruger candidate with an old court record can never actually plan for.
You cannot threaten a man with the thing he already owns out loud, you morons.
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