Spokane Mayor Nadine Woodward called someone a prick on Twitter, and City Council member Karen Stratton heard all about it.
That wasn't quite accurate. After Woodward tweeted about a phone call she made to Spokane's sister city in Ireland, a prolific local commenter reacted with his usual contempt.
"Look at TV girl's script. For a phone call," he replied on Twitter. "The suit cannot be any emptier. Or the mayor's office."
The mayor responded.
"What a misogynist little *rick," Woodward wrote from her @MayorSpokane account, swapping out the 'p' for an asterisk. "#InternationalWomensDay."
Stratton started getting emails from angry citizens, which she forwarded to the mayor with a note. "I said, 'This is embarrassing,'" Stratton says.
They met the next day, and Woodward was incensed. One of the complaints Stratton had forwarded was from one of the mayor's most vicious harassers. Stratton says Woodward threw down a thick pile of papers on the desk, evidence of the foul comments directed toward her.
"She goes, 'You're going to read every single one, because you're in cahoots with these people,'" Stratton says.
Stratton refused. Woodward raised her voice, quoting obscene passages from the abuse she'd received.
"I heard the c-word about four times," Stratton says, referring to perhaps one of the most offensive and sexist terms in the English language.
Stratton denied knowing the harasser. But the damage was done. Stratton won't meet with the mayor anymore, their relationship a secondhand casualty of internet trolling.
Woodward declined to talk about her meeting with Stratton on the record. She did agree to talk about the broader issue, but only reluctantly.
"Even doing this story shines a light and gives these people a platform and the attention that they're looking for," Woodward says. "I'm very uncomfortable with that."
It's the old internet mantra: Don't feed the trolls. But there's a cost to ignoring it too. It means that a consequential part of politics — where leaders are subjected to a torrent of abuse — takes place unexamined in the shadows.
"In reality, this is what we sign up for when you run for public office," Stratton says. "This is what happens."
But that's the problem. Trolls — those who lob incendiary comments in an attempt to spark a reaction — occupy a hazy gray area in politics between citizen critic and abuser, stalker or harasser. Handling them has turned into a crucial political skill set.
It's why, for this story, we spoke with both local politicians and the trolls who've been attacking them, sometimes for decades.
At times, this nasty and obsessive commentary has caused local leaders to go to the police, arm themselves, and even drop out of politics entirely.
Because, even as Stratton knows that being attacked is part of being in public office, the capacity for the attacks to go beyond rhetoric still occupies her mind.
"There are nights that I sit here and wonder: Is there anyone here with a gun?" Stratton says of City Council meetings.
TROLL GOALS
The criticism that comes from being in the public eye isn't new for Woodward. She spent 35 years as a local TV anchor.
"Women were certainly more criticized, scrutinized and judged because of their appearance... than men were," Woodward says. "You become battle-tested."
She wouldn't lash out. She'd sometimes reach out, personally trying to win those viewers back. Or she'd just ignore it. But today, as social media makes anonymous cruelty more and more common, it's easy to get sucked into the fray.
"When it becomes personal, it's hard not to respond," Woodward says.
Wade through the replies on her official Twitter timeline, and the nastiness comes like a drumbeat. The eyes glaze over the niceties, the attaboys, the Merry Christmases — they focus on the outrage. People call her "Mayor Photo Op," condemn her as a "total poser," "useless," a "narcissist," a "disgrace to Spokane" and a "goddamn monster." She's accused of "normalizing homelessness" and running her "city like a plantation."
Even her most banal tweets, like when she cheered on Gonzaga's basketball team, result in furious replies.
"Cheer?" replied Jim Leighty, a construction worker and former radio DJ. "Like how you cheer on local police when they kill innocent people?"
The only other reply is from Terry Parker — aka "Jewish Space Laser Technician," the troll who spurred the tense meeting between Stratton and Woodward — who tweets a dig against Gonzaga for having housed sexually abusive priests on campus.
Parker's been around awhile. A veteran of both the Navy and the old-school internet message boards. But unlike the old flame wars that Parker may have survived in the '90s, Facebook and Twitter were tailormade to accelerate conflict. The algorithms reward engagement and nothing pulls people in like calling people out.
Write something shocking, Leighty says, and that grabs attention. Attention grabs more attention. Even someone as aggressive as Parker has mixed feelings about the way that works.
"Do you want a social media app directing your emotions, always steering you toward confrontational content and engagement?" he says. On the other hand, it levels the playing field. Leighty requests public records about business leaders lobbing insults too. Their emails, he's found, get "instant responses, meetings set up immediately." They don't get derided as trolls.
He isn't a bully, Parker argues. It's more like he's David, slinging tweets at Goliath.
"She's the mayor of Spokane," Parker says. "I'm an online commentator."
But as a committed self-proclaimed Marxist and leftist, Parker knows power comes in many forms, like economics, race and gender.
DEMEAN GIRLS SQUAD
So it's not hard to see why Woodward —the city's top elected official, a woman with three decades of professional news experience — thought that a man calling her "TV girl" was sexist.
"It gets to the point where you've taken so much, you've hit your point of being able to look the other way," Woodward says.
Parker claims he had originally intended to call Woodward "Lady Writer" — a Dire Straits reference — but felt it was too obscure. "Shocked" by the mayor's reply, he doubled down.
In subsequent tweets, he called her "TV Girl" again and again. One contained a crack about witnessing Woodward stuffing brunch into her "well-used pie hole." In our interview, Parker acknowledged he was "being an asshole."
But sexist? How could he be sexist? He's a feminist, he asserts. He'd written an essay in college calling the "lack of empowerment of women worldwide" the most pressing problem globally. Look at all the women he'd hired and promoted for his tutoring company, he says, and the gender ratio of his Twitter followers.
That time he tweeted to a Portland TV reporter "you all do kinda dress like skanks on air"? Well, he argues, that was just him critiquing the patriarchal industry that infantilizes professional women to appeal to the male gaze.
But then there are his tweets calling U.S. Sen. Patty Murray a "bitch," and accusing South Dakota's governor of a "middle-school girl" head tilt. And the reply to Woodward's "*rick" tweet where he called Woodward "feckless" and the unprintable c-word, and only censored the c.
Ultimately, Parker concludes he regrets calling the mayor "TV girl." Nothing else.
"Write the story of Parker the Sexist Troll," he says in a phone call. "Have at it, buddy."
Woodward says the issue isn't just about her.
"I started thinking about my daughter, who is a young adult," Woodward says. "You have to say something about the type of attacks that women get."
A study, conducted by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, examined the 2020 congressional elections and found that female Republican candidates were twice as likely as their male counterparts to have abusive online comments directed at them on Facebook. Female Democrats, on the other hand, were 10 times more likely to get abuse than male Democrats.
"It discourages women from running for office. It pushes women out of politics," Woodward says. "It leads women to disengage from political discourse."
Kate Burke, a former Spokane City Council member and progressive firebrand, says she has a lot of empathy for conservative female politicians who've been hammered by sexist attacks, like Woodward and U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers.
"When I first started running, I had just this weird respect for Cathy McMorris Rodgers," Burke says. "While I agree with zero percent of her policies and ideology, I do have this in common with her, and I feel for her."
AIRING OF GRIEVANCES
The email, sent in the middle of one of Burke's first City Council meetings, was simple enough: "Is there a chance that you could shut up?"
It came from a notorious and longtime online heckler named Marshall Smith, who's sent many emails to her and other members. Burke should "be quarantined for diarrhea of the mouth," he wrote. He called her "incompetent" and accused her of "psychosis," "incredible stupidity" and being "on drugs 24/7." After Burke publicly revealed her struggles with alcohol, Smith called her "Osama Bin Drinkin.'"
He's also sent unsolicited emails to the Inlander, referring to Burke as "pig commie bitch."
Burke would get anonymous phone calls too, from a voice that she says sounded a lot like Smith.
"Sometimes it will just be him going —snort! snort! snort! — like a pig," Burke says. "Sometimes it will just be like, 'Oh it's you, you big cry baby pig."
On another occasion, Burke says, he left her a voicemail that was just a recording of her talking at a council meeting.
"I treated her badly, just like everybody else," Smith told me when I sat down with him for a lengthy interview at Donut Parade earlier this month. "There was always a group that I'd picked on. I take advantage of people doing stupid things."
Smith, a 70-year-old man with a scraggly white beard, has been at this a long time. Spokesman-Review began banning his various accounts from commenting nearly two decades ago.
At our interview, Smith handed me a manila envelope that, among other documents, included a copy of a handwritten letter he wrote in 2005 to Murray, the Democratic U.S. senator. In it, he described how the government "failed" him after he "left my job behind, my wife, my family, my life. Everything that had any meaning for me."
His anger over this issue — Boeing, a federal contractor, failing to give him his lead engineer job back after he returned from deployment — sent Smith on a collision course with many local leaders, from Murray to U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell to McMorris Rodgers.
"You may think that what happened to me is not justification for my behavior," Smith insists. "But it is."
And yet, for all his outrage over his country's military and government, when Burke didn't stand and put her hand over her heart for the Pledge of Allegiance during her first few weeks of office, Smith was offended.
"It put her on my target list," Smith says.
I press Smith on the offensive posts he's made, and he says he doesn't remember some of them. Other times he smiles — a slight ain't-I-a-stinker smirk — acknowledging the nastier comments he sent.
He says he occasionally uses a fake email account when what he's doing "may be embarrassing" or is "commentary that probably isn't good for public dissemination."
"It gives me a voice without restriction," he says.
But even some of the messages written in his name are libelous. One falsely claimed that a city employee was fired due to "prurient interest in children."
Others are racist and beyond cruel.
When Sandy Williams, the local Black activist and publisher of the Black Lens newspaper, died in a plane crash last year, Smith posted on NAACP chair Kiantha Duncan's Facebook page asking if he could "wear white robes" to Williams' funeral.
And yet many messages are indistinguishable from any other concerned citizen. He critiques the spending on bike lanes, disputes parking enforcement charges, asks for an application to apply to the parking advisory board and complains about the behavior of a city snowplow driver.
Smith says he sometimes feels like — he can't quite recall — who's that character who is good but has the evil person inside him?
"Jekyll and Hyde?" I offer.
That's the one.
TO STOP A TROLL
Former Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich says he got a lot of Marshall Smith emails too.
"Marshall is somebody that a lot of people have a lot of concerns about," Knezovich says, noting that he's worked with some elected officials targeted by Smith, including by providing security for McMorris Rodgers.
Knezovich was never one of those people who believed in ignoring outraged critics.
"It's odd. You sometimes develop relationships with your tormentors," Knezovich says. "I can usually talk to Marshall and get it calmed down. ... If you ignore it, it just keeps growing. If you address it, it tends to kill it."
Other local politicians offer varying, even contradictory advice.
Spokane City Council member Jonathan Bingle, a former pastor, refers to Romans 12, the New Testament chapter all about blessing those who curse you. He talks about inviting some of his angriest critics out to coffee, seeking common ground and understanding.
But if they threaten him? That's when Bingle's approach is a bit more Old Testament. He says he hands them his home address.
"I was tired of the trolling, the vitriol, the lack of civility. I thought the best way for me to combat that was to get off social media."
"I went to Rogers," Bingle says, referencing Hillyard's high school. "You've got something to say? Come say it to my face."
Something dawns on him as he's talking. "I'm realizing now, I've never told my wife that I've done that," he says.
Former Spokane County Commissioner Todd Mielke says he would sometimes make the drive himself. He'd look up the address of somebody who'd left a threatening voicemail and would show up at their front door.
"I'm Todd Mielke, and I'm your county commissioner,'" he recalls, introducing himself, in a cheery voice. "Totally de-escalated."
It's not always possible. After one council meeting in winter 2019, Burke says three or four of her most persistent trolls caught her outside City Hall and started screaming at her.
Former City Council President Ben Stuckart says he watched it happen. "It was scary as hell," he says.
But sometimes the harassment is completely anonymous. Toward the end of 2021, Spokane Council member Betsy Wilkerson, its sole Black member, got an anonymous letter with a racial slur in the address.
Inside was a single copy of a voter information pamphlet. The sender scrawled out a misspelled phrase, "NO RASCITS," and crossed out Wilkerson's face. No explanation, no return address.
"It's just hate. You've seen that before: People's faces are X-ed out or defaced," Wilkerson says. "I knew that was part of the job. I just never experienced how low they could go. A little naive in that department."
While Spokane County Commissioner Al French is dismissive of "keyboard warriors" — the sort of troll who's all caps and no teeth — he knows that threats aren't always entirely empty.
Sometimes they go from generic insults, French says, to "'don't be surprised if I come up behind you. Don't travel by yourself because I'm going to get you.'"
Three times in his two decades in politics, a situation got so acidic that French says he had to contact the sheriff or prosecutor. Knezovich warned him that he couldn't protect him 24/7 and advised him to carry a firearm.
French is a big guy. He's a former Marine. Still, for a few weeks, he says he carried a handgun in a shoulder holster until the fury died down.
Years later, French won't say who'd threatened him or what it was about. Like other elected officials, he worried that uttering the person's name could make it worse, and the cycle of harassment would start anew. Even for leaders willing to take that chance, the safety of their loved ones can give them pause.
"What if somebody wanted to show up to my household when I'm not there and threaten my wife?" French asks.
Increasingly, politicians are being told there are greater risks than losing reelection.
"It's sad we have to live that way. But look what happened to Pelosi," Knezovich says, referring to the October incident when a stranger broke into former Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's home and beat her husband with a hammer.
UNBLOCKED AND UNREPORTED
It's not an exaggeration to say that Donald Trump trolled his way to the presidency. He accused Mexico of sending "rapists" to the U.S., did a mocking impression of a disabled reporter, called a war hero a "loser" for being a prisoner of war — and all the media outrage just sucked away the oxygen from his primary opponents.
But in that nastiness, many of his supporters saw a fighter — someone who would stick it to the self-righteous elites with their hypocritical niceties.
And simultaneously, activists on the left felt that civility — that "don't boo, vote" garbage — was a luxury they couldn't afford.
"It was almost like somebody turned on the Mean Boy and Girl Switch," says Knezovich. "And people lost all ability to be civil with each other anymore."
Even mentioning the word "civility" seemed to make people angry, he says.
But Trump helped change the game in another way too. Some of his most vociferous opponents that he'd blocked online filed lawsuits to force him to unblock them. But that success would mean losing one of the few defenses elected officials have against trolls.
Getting unblocked has become a rallying cry for some of the most controversial local online figures. In 2017, Parker celebrated after convincing Spokane Public Schools to unblock his account. That same year, he tried to recruit those blocked from McMorris Rodgers' Facebook page to join him in a class-action lawsuit.
By early 2019, new legal precedents were emerging from federal courts: The First Amendment meant that an elected leader generally couldn't block anyone from even their personal account if it was regularly used for official purposes.
Smith emailed the news to the City Council and city attorneys: "Councilperson Burke should take notice."
Burke says it was a particularly bitter pill to swallow when the city attorney confirmed she'd have to unblock everyone on her official account.
"It gives them this status: I was wrong and they were right," Burke said. "They get that over me."
Ten minutes after unblocking, Burke recounts, she got 30 notifications from Smith.
Still, for an elected official, there was one more option available: Delete your account.
"I was tired of the trolling, the vitriol, the lack of civility," says Spokane City Council member Lori Kinnear. "I thought the best way for me to combat that was to get off social media."
When 2020 kicked off, she made the move. No more Twitter. No more Facebook. Not a moment too soon.
A KIND OF SICKNESS
When COVID hit in 2020, it was like online flame wars hit an oil field. The stakes of online arguments became literally life and death. One side accused you of trying to kill their business. The other side accused you of trying to kill their grandma.
French says the sheer volume of vitriolic email increased. People were locked down, resentful and stuck at home. They had free time to write, and they were angry.
"A lot of folks took it out on their keyboards," French says.
Across the nation, on both sides of the political aisle, the taboo against confronting politicians at their homes broke down.
Former Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan had misogynistic messages spray-painted outside her house. Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler had his apartment lobby set on fire by protesters. Anti-mask protesters gathered outside the home of Bob Lutz, the former Spokane health officer.
Later that year, as Spokane considered fluoridating the water, a debate broke out on a local anti-fluoride Facebook group about whether they should share the addresses of local officials' homes who were trying to "poison our water."
The thread turned to Burke's public comments about struggling with alcoholism. "She had better be great in the sack with this much crazy," one commenter spewed.
And then another lists Burke's home address, complete with a Google Maps link.
"I legitimately thought these guys were going to come to my house and rape me," Burke says.
Burke says she started posting less online. On issues like the police union contract, Burke says she found herself hesitating to stand up for her beliefs.
"I kept thinking, is it worth it?" Burke says. "Is it worth it to be the sole 'no' vote on this, and get this kind of criticism and reaction? At what cost am I doing this?"
So she stopped. It wasn't the reason she gave when she announced her decision to not run for re-election in 2021, but today Burke says that about "45 percent" of the reason she didn't was the harassment. She hates that it feels like her tormentors won, she says, but she couldn't continue living in stress and in fear. It wasn't healthy.
That's the rub: When you make being able to weather waves of abuse from the community the cost of running for office, it means some people will get priced out of politics entirely.
THE MARSHALL PLAN
Washington state Rep. Marcus Riccelli, a Spokane Democrat, pulls a thick packet of papers out of an envelope and sets it on an Inlander conference room table. Police reports, letters, emailed printouts, background checks.
It's just a portion of the evidence of the way that Smith has targeted him and others, vociferously, off and on for over a decade. They're all chapters in one sad story.
Start with the copy of the yellowed police advisory from 2005 that Riccelli says once hung in Spokane's federal courthouse. It's a mugshot of Smith with a much younger face — rounder, mustached — describing "multiple arrests on the west side for harassment and phone harassment."
That same year, 2005, Spokane County Auditor Vicky Dalton says Smith targeted her after her office provided a statement to law enforcement about how his use of her office's public records violated a restraining order.
"I came home and he was standing in the front of my house, on the other side of the street, making sure that I saw him when I pulled in," Dalton says. (Smith denies her account.)
Then there's the 2010 DC Capitol Police report, alleging Smith yelled racial slurs during one of Cantwell's constituent services meetings in Spokane, angry that the senator hadn't done more to fix his conflict with Boeing. That leads to a screenshot of Cantwell's Facebook account, where Smith publicly and falsely accused Riccelli, then a Cantwell aide, of being a "chimo" — a child molester.
Riccelli had filed for an anti-harassment order issued against Smith. In exchange for Riccelli dismissing the order, Smith agreed to stop libeling him.
Smith, meanwhile, has his own manila envelope with his own documents to share. He shows me a 2009 letter banning him from having any contact with McMorris Rodgers' office. There's a copy of the 2011 Spokane police report he filed against Riccelli claiming that Riccelli was "yelling and harassing" him when he kicked Smith out of a campaign event.
I've seen that one before. He's sent it to the Inlander multiple times over the past decade. In fact, Smith admits he went through Riccelli's campaign finance information and sent the police report to every single one of his donors, using a fake "Friends of Marcus Riccelli" campaign address.
"What could I do?" Smith says. "He gets money from his constituents. Hitting the politician in the pocket is something you can do, legally."
Years went by. Riccelli would get strange letters in the mail from bizarre fake return addresses. Riccelli would hold campaign events, then Smith would report violations with the liquor control board. When Riccelli started Spokane Food Fighters to help feed people during the pandemic, he says, Smith tried to get it shut down with complaints to donors and the health department.
"Just constant," Riccelli says. "I love doing this job, but it comes with some difficulties."
But there's a side to this story that isn't contained in either envelope. The Washington State Department of Corrections, Smith tells me during a followup conversation, had prescribed him a mood-altering drug called Zyprexa after he was convincted for third-degree assault in King County in 1999. Smith had been diagnosed with bipolar depression.
The meds made him sick, Smith says, gave him diabetes. But the depression, he says, was like a fog, "like being in quicksand." He'd sit in his car outside work, unable to move for minutes.
Others have testified that the manic phase of their bipolar disorder contributes to paranoia, delusion, stalking and online harassment. Not an excuse but, perhaps, part of the explanation when it comes to some of his harassment.
Mental health, in particular, is something Woodward sees as linked to the overall issue of online abuse.
"Coming out of the pandemic, the mental health of the community has been impacted," Woodward says.
It's why, in 2021, she proposed launching a mental health task force. In an email to Woodward back then, Smith offered his own suggestion: "I would start with the nut jobs on the city council and some of the really dumbasses on your staff."
But as I review Smith's life with him, in particular his criminal record, Smith is less glib. He takes off his spectacles, his eyes red.
"I just wish I could turn my life back 30 years," Smith says. "All the crap that's happened to me. I don't think I asked for it."
It's not entirely clear how much of that pain is from the things he's done, and how much is from the things he feels were done to him — regret blurs the distinctions.
He talks about the wound left behind by his father, a veteran of World War II, who refused to attend his wedding to an Asian-American woman, his voice breaking when he repeats the slur his father used against his wife. He talks about the loss left behind by the suicide of his brother — injured in Vietnam — in 1985. Every Christmas Eve, his brother's birthday, he puts an extra place at the table.
And yet Smith has used mental illness, suicidal tendencies and racist insults as a cudgel against others.
"I'm embarrassed about a lot of the stuff you brought up," he says to me. "I thought I'd left them behind. They can't seem to go away. ... I may have caused people hurt. Nobody's perfect."
Maybe, I suggest, this could be a new start. It's a new year. He just had a birthday.
"Contrition?" Smith offers. There's a slight note of hope in his voice, of possibility, but it passes quickly. He seems exhausted by the prospect of such an undertaking.
"I'm 70," Smith says. "I'm tired." ♦
This article has been changed to clarify the target of slurs yelled at a 2010 meeting held by U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, and better describe court action state Rep. Marcus Riccelli pursued against Marshall Smith.
