Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Weekend Contributor
I’m sure the readers of this blog remember the Newtown massacre that occurred in Connecticut on December 14, 2012, when twenty students and six adults were shot and killed at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. Not long after that tragedy, conspiracy theorists began to spread stories about the massacre being a hoax. In January of 2013, Gene Rosen, a man who had sheltered six children during the massacre, began receiving calls from people he didn’t know accusing him of lying about what had happened that day…and of his being a “crisis actor.”
At that time, Rosen didn’t know what to do. He said, “I’m getting hang-up calls, I’m getting some calls, I’m getting emails with, not direct threats, but accusations that I’m lying, that I’m a crisis actor, ‘how much am I being paid?’” Someone even posted a picture of his house online. It was reported that Google+ and YouTube accounts were created in his name. Messages about him appeared on white supremacist messages ridiculing him as the “emotional Jewish guy.” In addition, in dozens of blog posts and videos, people claimed that Rosen was a fraud. He even received an email that purported to be a business inquiry, which taunted him asking, “How are all those little students doing? You know, the ones that showed up at your house after the ‘shooting’. What is the going rate for getting involved in a gov’t sponsored hoax anyway?”