Did “Turtleboy” Aidan Kearney Admit He Sexually Harassed a Student For Revenge?

Last week we reported that one of the recent victims of Aidan Kearney’s pattern of sexual harassment was his former student at Shepherd Hill Regional High School. We started this blog as a parody of him, and as much as we enjoy mocking his shitty writing, we felt it was important enough to break character when we saw his unprovoked attack. Our post received a lot more attention than we thought it would, so we’d like to thank everyone who helped spread it. Something like 4,000 people saw it and it was shared over a thousand times on Facebook. Maybe those aren’t the 1,000,000 readers Aidan Kearney pretends to have, but it’s not bad “from a blog no one reads.”

One person who pretended not to notice was Aidan Kearney himself. Don’t let him fool you. Not only did he quietly try to hide evidence connecting him to TurtleboySports, it appears he left a comment explaining that it was revenge.

“Ubaldo Ksen” is a fake Facebook profile named in part after one of Aidan’s obsessions (we assume it will be deleted soon). He seems to know a lot about why Aidan would be mad at this girl! “Ubaldo’s” comment sounded familiar to us. Turns out Aidan often writes the exact same thing on TurtleboySports and elsewhere online:

Aidan also couldn’t stop himself from responding to us indirectly: “Newsflash – taking screen shots of something you said on a social media site has never been and never will be sexual harassment.” Several other people have expressed the same concern to us, so we’d like to address that.

First, the Massachusetts Attorney General agrees that using someone’s social media posts against her can be part of a stalking and harassment campaign: “unwitting victims may post” “data on social networking sites including . . . personal interests, and photographs.” Aidan stole control of those posts from her. Before, if they began to receive attention she didn’t want, she could have deleted them. Now that’s up to him. A lot of people will say she could have been more careful with her privacy settings, which we might agree with, but we’re against victim-blaming here.

Second, our intent was not to make a legal case, but a moral one. People smarter and better paid than us can hash out whether Aidan Kearney’s actions were indeed criminal. In our view, Aidan’s choice to publicly broadcast and amplify his former student’s sexuality is easily harassment. He shared her name and photos throughout the post, and commented on her looks and whether he’d be interested in having sex with her. In a since-deleted Facebook thread he encouraged his fans to make comments about her and to dig up even more of her personal information. It’s the same thing he did to the Buffalo fan who had the bad luck to sit behind him at a game.

Because of his prior harassment, he knows full well what it’s like to be a woman on the internet. Had Aidan and his victim been strangers we would have considered this creepy and borderline harassing behavior. Knowing that just last year she was Aidan’s high school student, though, makes this case clear cut in our opinion.

Lastly, aside from revenge, Aidan’s explicit purpose in sharing her information was to shame her. He didn’t like what she wrote about current events — on her own Facebook page, we’ll remind you; she didn’t contact him at all — so he held her sexuality up for public ridicule. Does this meet the legal standard of harassment? Maybe not, but in our view it is unquestionably a case of de facto harassment. Whatever he claims, he didn’t want to have a rational discussion about politics; he wanted to frighten her into shutting up and going into hiding, and this was how he sought to achieve it. Then he gloated about it, and proudly sought another victim.

Aidan’s behavior is malicious. He likes to use people’s gender and sexuality to attack them. He likes to take his petty personal enemies and “make it so when someone Googles their name,” Aidan’s smear job “pops up first.”  He posts home addresses. He bothers his victims for months on end.

So sure. We didn’t catch him spying on girls’ showers or anything like that. But Aidan’s behavior must count as sexual harassment by social norms if not the law, and he thinks it’s justified. He’s proud of it.