Arkansas Times | Blue Hog Report
Judge Mike Maggio withdrew from a race for the Arkansas Court of Appeals after acknowledging he’d posted sexist, racist and homophobic comments on a website, Max Brantley reported Wednesday.
Maggio posted under the name “geauxjudge” on a message board called TigerDroppings.com, sharing musings on topics like “rodeo sex,” someone who was “black by injection” and “Why do two men get their weiners cut off to them date each other.”
Matt Campbell compiled a dossier of Maggio’s postings, triangulating personal information he mentioned in his comments with facts about Maggio. In his statement acknowledging the postings, Maggio decried “the politics of personal destruction.”
“It’s more accurate to say the tools of Maggio’s destruction were his own hands at a computer keyboard,” Brantley writes.
In 2012, Assistant U.S. Attorney Sal Perricone resigned after admitting he’d posted under a pseudonym on Nola.com, posts that “trashed federal judges, as well as local and national politicians, including some under investigation by the U.S. attorney’s office,” Gordon Russell reported at the time. That same year, a judge in Idaho ordered the Spokesman-Review to reveal the identity of a commenter.
In January, a magistrate judge in New Orleans said a party in a corruption case could subpoena Nola.com and The Times-Picayune for the identities of other commenters. “It makes it really unclear as an online commenter about how much protection your speech has,” Poynter’s Ellyn Angelotti said.
