[Eric Paddon]

I can only say that I can relate to the problem of seeing a disturbed individual do crazy things on the Internet in an effort to smear one's reputation. It was not related to Galactica, but the circumstances are similar to what this Langy is doing to you.

One of my sidelights in life at one point was studying the JFK Assassination and earning a reputation for myself as one of the leading anti-conspiracy voices in forums devoted to it. It was during that time that I first became acquainted with a college student from VA named David Henschel. He was posting mostly innocuous stuff there but what got us into further contact was the fact that we both had a mutual interest in the old game show "What's My Line?" which was at that point starting to re-emerge to a new generation on the Game Show Network. He had in fact obtained from the Goodson-Todman vault some rare episodes of the show with their original commercials and was kind enough to trade them to me, in particular the key show where panelist Dorothy Kilgallen, who was a gossip columnist of the day, appeared on the show as she always had for 15 years, and then mysteriously died hours later, the apparent victim of a drug overdose.

Now this is where it starts to get complicated, but it's key to understanding what happened next and the misery that followed for me. There are some people in the land of conspriacy wackdom who think that Dorothy Kilgallen's death was somehow connected to the JFK assassination because she had covered Jack Ruby's trial and rumors were circulated about her "blowing the story open" which somehow required her to be "silenced."

The theory is a lot of junk like so many other conspiracy articles of faith. And it was not long afterwards, while doing research for my dissertation at the National Archives in MD, that I decided to take some extra time to go through all the JFK files that have been released in the last ten years. I went through FBI report mentioning Dorothy Kilgallen, and from that research I was able to write an Internet essay "Dorothy Kilgallen And The JFK Assassination" that effectively debunked the conspiracy claims.

That alas, was the beginning of my troubles with Mr. David Henschel, who I soon realized was a deeply disturbed individual with an insane and I mean INSANE obsession with Dorothy Kilgallen's life which included believing in the whole conspiracy silliness. Suddenly, he wasn't being friendly any longer and I lost track of him. Fast forward several years, and I'm posting in a game show forum where discussion of "What's My Line?" is rampant, and then the matter of Kilgallen and her death comes up and I dismiss the conspiracy craziness. Next thing I know, some crazy person is posting invective filled posts because of my stance. I try being reasonable with this person, but suddenly after a while some of the things this person is saying sound very familiar and I realize that this is none other than David Henschel (who I might add was stealing the ID of a female poster from the JFK days and pretending to be female!).

Well, I then decided I'd had enough of his stunts and I publicly outed him, openly referring to him by his real name which brought a lot of insane wacko denials etc. but then another game show forum member traced his ISP or whatever back to the same domain to some e-mails from the days when he used his real name and everyone else saw him for what he was. He then afterwards became a regular nuisance in the game show forum anytime the name Kilgallen came up but then he started carrying it further by openly revealing private details about my life that he only could have gotten from doing some traipsing into areas he had no business getting into unless he was engaged in something bordering on stalking.

And that wasn't the end of it. Some years later, I discovered that this person would register at other places using my own name as his handle for the purpose of making off the wall posts designed to create the impression that Eric Paddon is a psychotic lunatic who has been in a mental hospital or prison. He would also register at places like imdb and use phony monikers using the name of my mother, which he could only have gotten by stealing or getting access to a personal record of mine at my old grad school, and he even somehow got hold of my Social Security Number. I consider it a miracle that he has never used that information for something really sinister or criminal, but truthfully I don't think he has the brains to try something like that, he just likes to revel in the fact that he's done this kind of stunt to try and make my life miserable.

About two years ago, I saw him up to his shenanigans at imdb making off the wall posts using my name and I then decided from that point on to trail him everywhere he went using that account so I could make posts declaring that the "Eric Paddon" who posted there is a disturbed individual named David Henschel. I didn't let up in this, and in the meantime I had some irate words for the imdb people who shamefully give you no means of recourse to phone them directly to let them know that this kind of identity theft has been going on. I could report his posts and get them taken down but I could never get his damned account banned because there was no mechanism in place for me to demonstrate his fraud (and similarly when he was registering Yahoo accounts with my mother's name, I had no recourse to get Yahoo to ban those accounts without involving my mother, which I had no intention of doing since this is not the kind of thing I would eve reveal to her).

Eventually, my hard press back in which he realized that I was going to out him by name at any venue where I saw his stunt I think finally sunk in and he backed off. He still engages in his weird games of using fake aliases at a number of places (and this includes multiple fake IDs so he can have ersatz conversations with himself) but he's at least no longer making my life miserable. But it's a sad comment on how someone who seemed to be normal when you first had friendly contact with him could then reveal such a warped mind later on, just as I'm sure there were many who first thought Langy was basically okay and then saw this crazy side manifest itself over time.