Gene Rosen helped six kids during the Connecticut school shooting. Now conspiracy theorists are harassing him.
“I don’t know what to do,” sighed Gene Rosen. “I’m getting hang up calls, I’m getting some calls, I’m getting emails with, not direct threats, but accusations that I’m lying, that I’m a crisis actor, ‘how much am I being paid’?” Someone posted a photo of his house online. There have been phony Google+ and YouTube accounts created in his name, messages on white supremacist message boards ridiculing the “emotional Jewish guy,” and dozens of blog posts and videos “exposing” him as a fraud. One email purporting to be a business inquiry taunted: “How are all those little students doing? You know, the ones that showed up at your house after the ‘shooting’. What is the going rate for getting involved in a gov’t sponsored hoax anyway?”
He has to have friends monitor his Internet presence and has to document each threat, every email, all threatening phone calls in case “something happens.”
What did Rosen do to deserve this? One month ago, he found six little children and a bus driver at the end of the driveway of his home in Newtown, Connecticut. “We can’t go back to school,” one little boy told Rosen. “Our teacher is dead.” He brought them inside and gave them food and juice and toys. He called their parents. He sat with them and listened to their shocked accounts of what had happened just down the street inside Sandy Hook Elementary, close enough that Rosen heard the gunshots.
In the hours and days that followed, Rosen did a lot of media interviews. “I wanted to speak about the bravery of the children, and it kind of helped me work through this,” he told Salon in an interview. “I guess I kind of opened myself up to this.”
Enter conspiracy theorists.
The “this” in question is becoming a prime target of the burgeoning Sandy Hook Truther movement, which — like its precursor that denied the veracity of the 9/11 terror attacks — alleges that the entire shooting was a hoax of some kind. There were conspiracy theories surrounding the shooting from day one, but the movement has exploded into public view the past two weeks, and a Google Tends search suggests it’s just now picking up steam. It’s also beginning to earn the backing of presumably credible sources like a professor and a reporter.
Sigh. It’s one thing to be a skeptic and ask questions, it’s another to not believe copious, verified evidence and continue to ask questions simply because the answers don’t complement your opinion.
Luckily, Rosen receives some support.
Because for every angry call or email, there any many many more praising ones: “I get the most beautifully written cards, wonderful calls.” Let’s hope they continue to be the majority.
Agreed.
