In early August 2021, National Geographic published an article titled “As Germany’s Secret-Police Archive Shutters, Reckoning for Its Victims Continues.”
The piece describes the Stasi, the German secret police who controlled, terrorized, spied on, and harassed the citizens of Communist East Germany from the end of World War II to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
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Reading it, I relived some of my own trauma — not at the hands of the German Stasi, but the American Stasi, who upended my life in the fall of 2018. I recount the ordeal in a forthcoming book, The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi.
In America today, we have an organization that is analogous to the German Stasi. Or rather, it is three organizations that often work together — the legacy media, opposition researchers, and leftist politicians. Like their German counterparts, these groups try to effect political change and exert cultural control by blackmailing, terrifying, and embarrassing their victims.
Unlike the Nazis, the Stasi in Germany worked with artists and writers to help spread propaganda and protect the New Communist Man from dangerous ideas. Similarly, our American Stasi is close to the propagandist in Hollywood and in music, television, and publishing.
The National Geographic piece, written by Emily Schultheis, describes how the German Stasi Records Archive was being absorbed into Germany’s National Archives in Berlin, which would then transfer the files to new locations in Germany’s five eastern states. According to the article, “The archive’s importance in helping people understand their lives is hard to overstate, says Stefan Trobisch-Lutge, a Berlin-based psychologist who founded a practice to help those suffering from the psychological effects of Stasi surveillance. Post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression, and an inability to trust are common among those he works with, he says.”
All those things have also affected me.
This American Stasi launched an attack on me in the fall of 2018, when a high school friend of mine named Brett Kavanaugh became a nominee for the Supreme Court of the United States. They used false stories, rumors, sexual honeytraps, and extortion to try and get me to lie about my friend. In order to make me do this, the media, politicians, and opposition operatives put on trial an entire decade — the 1980s, when Brett and I had been in high school. Our yearbook, the movies we watched, an underground newspaper I co-edited, the parties we had, the sports we played, and even our race were all used as indictments of our character in much the same way the German Stasi would consider jokes subversive and art dangerous.
At the tip of the spear was an accusation that Brett had sexually assaulted a girl named Christine Blasey Ford in 1982, when he and I were 17 years old and she was 15 years old, and that I had been in the room when it happened.
As my book reveals, I was first approached with this news by a reporter, who made the accusation without telling me who was making it, where it allegedly happened, or when.
In the madness that followed, I was living in an America I did not recognize. Georgetown Prep, the high school in Maryland where Brett and I had met, was vilified by journalists who never bothered to call the school for comment or check their work. Elderly people I was helping to take care of found reports at their front doors at all hours. CNN set up a truck at a house they thought was my childhood home, only to discover that they had the wrong address. The Washington Post published a profile of a man who talked about what Brett and I were like in high school, despite the fact that this man had never laid eyes on either one of us. The New York Times made mistakes that would have gotten anyone else fired from a high school newspaper. I received threatening phone calls and emails. Photographs and short videos I had made, some featuring beautiful women and models, were used as examples that I was an enemy of the state.
I felt like Siegfried Wittenburg, a photographer and former East German citizen during the Cold War. Wittenburg was a photographer who captured scenes of poverty, scarcity, and protest, leading the East German government to censor some of his photos. In 1999, Wittenburg read his Stasi file. “I read it like a crime novel,” he told National Geographic. He had been spied on, his every move and the subversive creation of his art noted. According to reporter Schultheis, “The six hours he spent with his file that day were filled with mixed emotions. At times, he couldn’t help laughing at the innocuous details in the file, such as the comments of his that were recorded completely out of context, or the time they reported on his English-language correspondence but wrote they were unable to evaluate it due to the language.” However:
Reading other entries, “my hair stood on end,” he says. Understanding the sheer scope of the surveillance Wittenburg faced was hard to process: Those reporting on him included a union colleague, his boss, acquaintances at cultural organizations, and, most surprisingly, the partner of his wife’s best friend. Seeing the amount of information collected and the way it was gathered—he found proof the Stasi had searched his apartment—he began to understand how tenuous his situation had been and consider the impact on his family: “Just one more false move, and I would have been in prison.”At certain times in the fall of 2018, I was sure they would try to throw me in prison without cause — or worse yet, that I would wind up dead, probably a suicide from the stress.
Liberal talking heads tried to justify the cruelties to which Brett and I had been subjected by arguing that Brett was just going through a “job interview” and that this was not a criminal trial. But he and I had been accused of multiple felonies, including drugging girls and gang rape.
As I recount in my book, after the ordeal was over and Brett’s seventh background check came back clean, I found myself in a dinner sitting next to former House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI). Paul recognized me, and after our bacon and eggs, I asked to speak to him in the parking lot. Like someone who has just emerged on the western side of the Berlin Wall in the 1960s, I could not contain my emotions. Knowing I was probably sounding mad, I told him about the set-ups, the weird occurrences, the shameful politicians, the violations of my rights, the disregard for the truth, the pure evil that drove the people who attempted a character assassination on me and my friends.
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“This can’t happen in America,” I pleaded with the speaker. “It just can’t.”
Right?
Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of the forthcoming book, “The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi.” He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.
