I see, by way of a note from Stacy McCain this morning, that Deborah Frisch is out of the slammer.(Warning: Her comments as Stacy quotes, are decidedly NSFW).
Many of you won't recall this saga, but I was around for it as it unfolded some years ago. It involves Jeff Goldstein's Protein Wisdom blog, and Frisch's decades-long obsession with it, with Jeff personally, and with his family. Stacy has been documenting all of this right along, although there hasn't been much to document the last few years. That all changed just recently with her release.
Some background for anyone coming to this cold: Frisch was a tenure-track psychology professor at the University of Oregon. She was denied tenure and moved on to an adjunct position at the University of Arizona. In 2006, she began posting hostile comments at Goldstein's blog — comments that escalated into disturbing references directed at his young son, who was a toddler at the time. Once it came out that she'd been posting the material from a university computer, she resigned.
That should have been the end of it. It wasn't.
Frisch spent the next decade-plus proving that a resignation isn't the same thing as letting go. She relocated to Oregon, where, according to the Eugene Register-Guard's reporting at the time, she took to sending mass emails full of lewd and obscene material to university officials, city and county employees, and elected officials across the region. Anti-stalking orders piled up starting in 2008. She was arrested and released and arrested again — at one point picked up on a new charge mere hours after being released from jail on the previous one, for filing a false police report. Courts twice ordered her to undergo mental health evaluations. None of it stuck as a deterrent.
It finally caught up with her in 2018, when a Colorado court sentenced her to four years in prison for her continued harassment of Goldstein — a harassment campaign that, by that point, had run for roughly 12 years. In his victim impact statement at sentencing, Goldstein made a point worth remembering: Frisch's own defense of her conduct rested on casting herself as the actual victim of an injustice, a persecution complex Goldstein correctly flagged as a marker of an unrepentant mind rather than a reformed one.
She was released from Colorado custody in July 2025. Per Stacy's report this morning, it hasn't taken her long to pick the pattern back up — he documents her showing up in the replies to other people's posts on X with the same kind of gross, obscene material that got her fired and later imprisoned in the first place, including, disturbingly, a sockpuppet account apparently named after one of the three children Lindsay Clancy strangled in the case I wrote about earlier this week. Small world, and not in a comforting way.
I'll leave the armchair diagnosis to people with actual credentials, but the pattern here isn't hard to read even without one: a woman with an actual doctorate in psychology, who has now lost a career, served a felony prison sentence, and been the subject of anti-stalking orders across two states, walked out of custody and immediately resumed the exact behavior that put her there. That's not a lapse. That's a compulsion that nobody — not a university, not a courtroom, not four years behind bars — has yet managed to interrupt.
Whether it takes a fifth or sixth arrest to change that isn't a question I have any confidence in answering. What I do have confidence in is this: the people she's currently targeting have every right to document what's happening, file police reports, and pursue restraining orders through the same legal system that's already handled this exact situation twice before. Thing is, there seems little hope in reforming the woman.
Alas that Jeff hasn’t been actively blogging for quite a while. It’s understandable but regrettable. I always found him to be a worthwhile read, and even told him on a couple of occasions that he should be diving back in, and that I personally miss his voice even to today.
He steadfastly refused, of course, and I got the impression it was to save his family some of the abuse he was taking from her. Of course, it wasn’t just Jeff she was after. Her targets included Jeff’s attorney, Brit Hume, her own lawyers, Michelle Malkin, the Denver Police, various judges, the Screen Actor’s Guild, the City of Tulsa, Jesus, et al and, well, you get the idea.
It seems appropriate to follow on this path, having very publicly looked closely at the Clancy case this morning. As I said in the comment section of that piece, Manson was nutz. But that wasn’t what his conviction was about. The comment, by all appearances, seems to apply for Frisch as well, even though I hadn’t originally intended that link between the two cases.
This continuing saga saddens me. For one thing, Jeff was, back in the day, one of the leading sites in Blogdom, as any of the old hands of the sphere will tell you. That may, in fact, be the reason he was targeted. Any conservative commentator these days is bound to get hate mail by the bushel.
I am also disturbed that apparently, Frisch has not received the help she needs, as evidenced by her going right back at her old behavior the moment she was released.
A commentator to Jeff’s site from 2007 will sound strangely familiar to many, because it describes so much of what we see in politics these days.
What I’ve come to understand, however, is that no matter what *you* do, the internet will supply her virtually infinite audience – and there will always be some misquided someone somewhere, ill or well meaning, who will write about her or to her in response to her rants and ramblings. This will feed her conduct no matter what you do….
Interesting to note that there were indeed a number of defenders of Frisch, notably (and unsurprisingly) TalkLeft, the traffic on which is a mere fraction of its former rate. This also, if unwittingly, describes much of the hateful stuff we see online in social media about President Donald Trump and about anyone who dares to support him, so it’s not as if we don’t recognize the trends when we see them. The old saying about how anyone who takes a position on anything at all will make enemies is true.
Michelle Malkin dove into this one too, back when it was happening — I remember it firsthand, though her site has since been retired, and I can't point you to the original posts anymore. A lot of that era's blogosphere has simply rotted off the live web; Jonah Goldberg's brief mention at National Review is one of the few pieces of it still standing where you can click through and see it for yourself, or what’s left of it. Shows you how long this stuff has been going on, that we can’t even find the writing about in online anymore.
Looked at over the years, these trends are dangerous in the extreme. In my own mind, it is an open question if the authorities are unable or unwilling to deal with these situations. This case is a very illustrative one, exemplifying what I suggested in my daily column this morning: A system that is either unwilling or unable to protect anything or anybody is "guarding" us.
And that, dear reader, concerns all of us.
