Mulieris Dignitatem: Brett Kimberlin’s Heiress Aunt Helping Fund His Tax-Exempt Harassment

28 May 2012

Brett Kimberlin’s Heiress Aunt Helping Fund His Tax-Exempt Harassment

Posted on | May 27, 2012 | 123 Comments and 117 Reactions

FROM AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
Convicted felon Brett Kimberlin is the nephew of a wealthy Maryland woman who has contributed to a foundation that helped fund a 501(c)3 organization of which Kimberlin is the director. Kimberlin’s activities have recently attracted widespread attention because of his attempts to intimidate and harass bloggers who wrote about his criminal history.
Harriet Crosby, 66, reportedly an heiress to the General Mills fortune, was one of the original donors to the Threshold Foundation, which contributed $20,000 to Kimberlin’s Justice Through Music Project in 2008, according to database research I reported May 19.
The Threshold Foundation was started by a group of wealthy devotees of environmentalism and trancendental meditation. The foundation’s “very liberal” view, researcher Ron Arnold has written, “saw American society as rife with injustice and in need of radical transformation.” Threshold has been affiliated with the Tides Foundation, linked to left-wing billionaire George Soros.
A 2009 profile of Crosby in the alumni magazine of the elite Putney School — a private academy in Vermont, where the annual tuition is $46,900 for boarding students — described her as “active” in the tax-exempt non-profit group Velvet Revolution, which Kimberlin helped start in association with liberal blogger Brad Friedman.

Velvet Revolution gained notoriety by making unsubstantiated claims that Republicans stole the 2004 presidential election through vote fraud. A 2007 Time magazine profile of Kimberlin described how he ”found a home in the blogosphere” by “repeatedly asserting as fact things that are not true.” At one point, Kimberlin offered a $100,000 reward for proof of his assertion that President George W. Bush’s re-election was obtained through vote fraud, a reward that was never paid. Velvet Revolution has also unsuccessfully sought criminal prosecution of various public figures including GOP strategist Karl Rove, the head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the late New Media entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart.
The connection between Kimberlin and Crosby — verified by a 2009 article in the Montgomery County (Md.) Gazette — was reported today by Tee Zieldors, who credits independent blogger Seth Allen (whose Twitter account is @Preposterocity) for the tip.
It was Allen’s writings about Kimberlin that resulted in him being the defendant in a lawsuit brought by Kimberlin. Allen’s lawyer, Aaron Worthing, subsequently drew attention to his own experiences with Kimberlin in a 28,000-word account on May 17.
Kimberlin is scheduled to appear in a Maryland court Tuesday for a hearing about a “peace order” he has sought against Walker.

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The National Bloggers Club has created KimberlinFiles.org to help call attention to the Kimberlin case and, as the non-profit goup’s president Ali Akbar says, to enable “supporters to make financial donations to a relief fund as a show of support.”

– Robert Stacy McCain, Whereabouts Unknown