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I want to pre-register a bet and get some opinions on this one. This death threat is absolutely fake, right? The grammar is ridiculous, and the word and phrasing choice is an absolute parody. Everything about it smells like an educated non-english person larping with zero understanding of what the natives actually sound like.
It reminds me of my college professor who smashed her car windows and wrote "brave dykes will never smash the patriarchy" on it to blame frat boys (which worked on the college, but fortunately not the police & insurance agency).
I expect we'll never hear about it if it turns out she wrote it. But I doubt even the met would grab some random local boy and use him as a scapegoat like my college tried In that incident.
We've heard from the prosecution, who make pretty good points about the weird syntax and Africanisms that a white supremacist is unlikely to use. But, going beyond the content of the letter itself, I am led to believe that this isn't likely to be a hoax, at least not a hoax perpetrated by Shola herself. I thus present, the case for the defense.
1. This isn't the only threatening letter sent this week
Trans television presenter India Willoughby also received a threatening letter attributed to National Action. While the content of the letter itself was not published, she described it as "a cartoon drawing of a trans woman being hanged with a grotesque face, gouged out genitals, the wording 'you will never be a woman' written on the chest and a note instructing her to 'kill herself'". I haven't been able to find any evidence that links these two people other than that they both received letters, so it's unlikely that they're both in cahoots. And it seems unlikely that Shola would have written this note herself to make the hoax more believable since that increases the risk of being caught significantly. And it would be quite the coincidence if both people decided to run the same hoax at the same time, or if one of them decided to run a hoax while the other was the victim of a legitimate threat. It is possible that the Willoughby threat was a copycat hoax in response to the Shola threat, but Willoughby doesn't know whether the Shola threat is a hoax or real, and we have to assume that she thinks it's real and that creates similar implausibility issues. More on that below.
2. The letters were hand-delivered
If one is running a hoax, the only obvious advantage to claiming that the letters were hand-delivered rather than mailed is that it limits the scope of the investigation. If you mail the letter close to home then it may generate suspicion. If you mail the letter from elsewhere than it generates a lot of suspicion if it can be proved that you were in the area at the same time. Claiming it was hand-delivered cuts out the post office and allows a letter to materialize in your home without any obvious origin. But this isn't much of an advantage. Claiming the letter was hand-delivered may avoid this problem, but it creates a worse one—it means that the perpetrator was in a specific place during a specific time frame. If you leave the house at noon and the letter is there when you return at 4pm, then you just gave the police a pretty narrow window to check cameras, canvass the neighborhood, and figure out if anyone was at your door during that period. With mail, all you know is that the letter was mailed from a box within a specified geographic range during a specified time period, which is, at minimum, 24 hours. And even if you were to identify everyone who put mail in a public box during that specified time, it would take a ton of work and only generate a long list of people who did nothing more than put mail in a box and whom you'd probably need more evidence to investigate further, let alone the fact that it could have been mailed from a private address anyway making everyone in the postal district a possible suspect. OF course, this is a good reason for the actual perpetrators to have used the mail as well, but criminals generally aren't smart people. They don't think these things out like someone with multiple graduate degrees would. A hoax is by its nature a complex plot meant to achieve certain ends; people who intentionally perpetrate hoaxes generally do at least a modicum of thinking things through. People who send threatening letters are usually nuts and cranks who do it impulsively and without consideration of the possible consequences.
3. Threatening letters don't generate much sympathy
Whenever the Smollett thing comes up here, most of the discussion (rightly) focuses on how hare-brained and poorly planned the scheme was. What isn't discussed as much is how Smollett only went that far after he fabricated death threats that failed to generate the requisite amount of sympathy or media attention. Go big or go home. At least in America, it's almost become an accepted fact that public figures are going to receive death threats from assholes and losers. And even though stories were written about the incident in a number of British outlets, it doesn't seem to be getting a ton of traction. For example, the BBC reported on it less than 24 hours ago, but I only found that story because I was searching for it; simply browsing their website came up empty. I obviously can't be sure of this, but I imagine that if she were physically attacked the story would have had a higher profile.
4. There's no obvious motive
Most people would say that the motive is the same as in any other hate crime hoax, but I'd disagree. Most of these hoaxes are meant to push the narrative that hate is all around us, even in unsuspecting places. The Smollett case is a prime example of this. The alleged perpetrators were MAGA guys who assaulted a gay black man for being gay and being black after they happened to run into him on the street. No intentional targeting, nothing but a guy going about his business who runs into MAGA assholes. Who's the bad guy here? Trump supporters, obviously. There's also the obvious motive that Smollett wanted more money any couldn't get it because he wasn't a big enough celebrity yet and needed to raise his profile, but there's a reason he picked this avenue. We all know that Neo-Nazis and the KKK exist and presumably do terrible things, but the point of most of these hoaxes is to show that mainstream political parties and political rhetoric are responsible too. So why would Shola attribute the attack to a banned Neo-Nazi group that everyone already hates, including the British government? What purpose does that serve? To prove that a group that's known for being horrible and violent is, in fact, horrible and violent? If Shola wanted to use this to make a larger political point, I would expect a larger political point; try to show that these kinds of attacks are symptomatic of Tory politics, or royalism, or something else she's been railing against. Proving that Neo-Nazis are racists won't exactly surprise anybody.
I want to reiterate that this doesn't mean I'm convinced that this wasn't a hoax, or that the points below aren't well-taken. In fact, the British police are investigating this matter, but not at the request of any of the alleged victims, but because they read about it on Twitter. I don't know that this means anything, because the investigation was launched so quickly and because, as I alluded to earlier, it's been expected for so long that controversial public figures will receive death threats that the alleged victims can be forgiven for not doing anything immediately on the assumption that the police wouldn't take the matter seriously. But all this remains to be seen.
They didn't. If you read their tweet, they claim the letter was sent to their accountant. That is what inclines me to believe it wasn't real and is an attempt to jump on the bandwagon of "Me persecuted too!"
You tell me what online nutcase threatener of death and torture bothers sending their threats to the target's accountant rather than, you know, the target directly:
I bet sixty quatloos Willoughby cut'n'pasted it themself and slipped it through the letterbox in a Jussie Smollett move.
Well, firstly it's possible that the perpetrator was able to get the address of the accountant (which in fairness could plausibly be easier to find out) and not Willoughby's home address. In any case though, surely by the same logic that it's odd for someone sending threatening letters to an accountant, it also would be odd for Willoughby to claim she had a letter sent there rather than her home if it was a hoax. Why add in that odd detail, especially when a letter to one's home would presumably be more troubling?
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I did see the part about the accountant earlier and was going to address it but it didn't seem terribly relevant. But since you brought it up, I don't think it's bandwagon jumping because she Tweeted about receiving her letter 10 minutes before Shola Tweeted about receiving hers. If anyone is jumping on a sympathy bandwagon, it's Shola, though it seems unlikely that she'd see the Tweet and then fabricate her own letter within the span of ten minutes. The reason an online nutcase might deliver the message to the accountant may be because the only address they could find was a business address, and the accountant is some kind of business manager. A few months ago I was trying to get an autographed picture of sportscaster Greg Gumbel to use as a fantasy league prize and online information told me that all inquiries should be sent to his agent. If Willoughby's accountant is handling her business affairs, it makes sense that a nutjob would end up there.
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