By Niki D’Andrea
David Nahmod, the San Francisco-based blogger who was served with an Injuction of Harassment and a gag order by a judge in Surprise, Arizona (read the full story here), was denied his request to have the gag order removed at a Maricopa County Justice Court hearing on Thursday, September 25.
Nahmod had also prepared a stack of papers he considered “evidence” in the case, including printouts of derogatory comments left on his blog, davidsopenforum.blogspot.com, which Nahmod claimed had all been left by Kathryn Rock, using various pseudonyms. As Nahmod expresses in the reader comments on our previous blog (linked above), he was upset that the judge didn’t seem all that interested in his “evidence” of mutual harassment and upheld the gag order.
Nahmod has vowed to continue his tirade against Rock, who lives in Surprise with her husband, Stephen Polich. He claims Rock “brainwashed” his ex-boyfriend, Beecher Goodwin, into leaving him.
But as New Times discovered, this isn’t the first time Nahmod’s been accused of harassment. Turns out, he was banned from Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco last year for his alleged “harassment.”
According to this story in the SF Weekly, an employee of the store says that Nahmod pushed her into a heated discussion about politics, even after she insisted she didn’t want to discuss politics at work.
Nahmod claimed she called him a “stupid Jew” and filed a complaint with the Human Rights Commission, who decided that the store had a “pretty good record” and decided not to pursue a case after its initial investigation.
Rainbow Grocery also conducted an internal investigation and found no case of wrongdoing on the part of its employees. The cashier also insisted she’d never said any of the things Nahmod accused her of saying.
The Rainbow Grocery Cooperative’s Board of Directors wrote a letter to the San Francisco Bay Times, clarifying that Nahmod was not banned from its store on the basis of this one incident, but because of “his continued documented harassment.”
Nahmod admits to having bi-polar disorder on his blog, and one of his allegations against Rock is that she used Nahmod’s and Beecher’s mental illnesses (Beecher says he also has bi-polar disorder) to turn them against each other. But Beecher told New Times that he is seeing a psychiatrist and taking medication.
“I’m getting help for my problems,” Beecher said. “And I really hope that David will also seek help for his.”
