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nancydhooper · 6 years

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Kenneth Eng Is On The Other Side of Viral Now

Kenneth Eng is on the other side of viral now, where it's hard to see him.

11 years ago, in 2007, it was easy to see him. He achieved a brief burst of viral infamy for writing a column titled "Why I Hate Blacks," inexplicably published by the now-defunct AsianWeek. He had every quality we require for online notoriety: he did something we feel good about hating, his response to criticism was unrepentant and odd (he defended his column and declared himself an "Asian Supremacist"), and a little digging into his background revealed things we could easily mock, like his authorship of really awful science fiction:

[The Darkaeon] slashes the Universe with a blade of dark flame.

UNIVERSE: AAAAHHH!!

He experienced — and perhaps enjoyed — widespread condemnation and ridicule in blogs and forums, and on sites like Wired and Gawker. A few months later, he enjoyed a short resurgence of infamy when he was arrested for bizarre threats, making the pages of the New York Post and the Village Voice. Then, like a uninspired meme, he slipped from our consciousness, making room for the next freak-of-the-week and the next and the next after that.

Where do people like Kenneth Eng come from, and where do they go after their virality pops like a soap bubble? Surely they differ. But Kenneth Eng came from mental illness, to which he returned. How many other people we gawk at are like him?

The cover of Kenneth Eng's book.

Kenneth Eng's journey to fame and back takes on a very different tone when you start at the beginning rather than in the middle.

Eng is schizophrenic. This is how his lawyer described it in 2008, seeking a probationary sentence on federal threat charges:

Mr. Eng suffers from schizophrenia, a severe, lifelong disorder. He takes an anti-psychotic, with strong side-effects. Yet, with a somewhat grim prognosis for a lifelong affliction, the report notes Mr. Eng is making fair progress on treatment goals. The fact that he is making progress bodes well for him.

Counsel has noted a remarkable softening of Mr. Eng’s affect since he entered the treatment environment. Conversations with him are rather pleasant.

His severe mental illness was well-known years before his brush with modern fame. In 2003, he enraged and terrified fellow students, professors, and administrators at NYU, where he studied film. We know this because he attached much of the NYU email correspondence to his 2014 pro se federal civil rights complaint against everyone he could remember from NYU ten years before. Eng's version of events is not particularly exculpatory: he claims he was mistreated for refusing to work with "Negroes," for using racial epithets, and for proclaiming that he worships Hitler. He also claims to be the victim of anti-Asian racism, but his complaint is full of patently paranoid, bizarre conclusions, and hints at how terrifying he could be to others:

For the past 3769 days, I have wondered about what it would feel like to exact my revenge on this cowardly woman. I will never recover from the damage she and her ethnic group have inflicted on me, and the pain I feel every day because of cravens like her.

The NYU emails he attaches suggest what it was like for the people around him. "I want to go on record that keeping Kenneth could have serious repercussions," wrote one administrator. "It is my belief that Kenneth poses a real threat to the [NYU] community and has the capacity to harm or kill someone," said another. One professor told of getting an insulting, threatening call at home from Eng; another told of two students "so terrified" that they locked the classroom door after Eng left after a heated dispute. This was not always the case: one professor found him "intelligent, creative, talented, and fun to have as part of our class." But expressions of concern soon outweighed these positive reports. Eng was erratic, confrontational, sometimes incoherent, floridly racist, threatening, and generally a nightmare to those around him.

In 2004, after a confrontation in a NYU counseling session, the NYPD detained him and transported him to Bellevue Hospital, forcibly medicated him, and confined him for two weeks. We know this because in 2006 he convinced attorneys to file a civil rights lawsuit on his behalf against New York authorities. Eng dropped the suit based on an undisclosed settlement in 2007. That is the last time, as far as I can tell, that lawyers sued on his behalf; his many subsequent lawsuits are all pro se. But it was not the only time he was confined at Bellevue; he was committed again in 2009. He complains of that confinement in a 2014 pro se civil rights complaint replete with assertions that he was mistreated because he is Asian, because of his racial views, and because he was confined with African-Americans.

A wired article on Eng, typical of the tone of coverage of him.

We all knew perfectly well in 2007 that Kenneth Eng was crazy. But we pointed and laughed anyway.

I knew. I had no excuse not to know. Looking back at forum comments (it was before the time of this now-venerable blog), I see that I referred to him as crazy. That did not leaven my ridicule.

Eng, who was clearly not successfully treated by Bellevue, somehow won a columnist position with AsianWeek. This is consistent with the accounts of many who said he could be brilliant, articulate, and dedicated. He wrote his loathsome and bigoted column, and the paper made the inexcusable decision to publish it. Spectacle followed. Eng doubled down again and again, affirming his racism and proclaiming himself an "Asian supremacist." Journalists and bloggers gleefully dug up his science fiction and his imperious communications promoting it.

The coverage does not age well in light of what we know about Eng's schizophrenia. We knew that he was crazy, but only envisioned him as crazy in an entertaining way. "Deep Inside Kenneth Eng's Brain With His Unfinished Screenplay," teased Wired, promising an "obscure literary treat," and mocking his writing at length. The same author collected what she called "gossip" from NYU and confessed herself "fascinated" with Eng's "bizarre career," concluding "Yup, Eng truly is 'God.' Too bad he gets called names when he leaves the house once a month. Now you too can read his work." Eng later harassed the author, who penned a follow-up telling him he should "chill out." Gawker called him a "wacky Asian racist" in a column detailing his second arrest for bizarre threats. Gawker — which had a Kenneth Eng tag — maintained that tone throughout 2007. "Remember Kenneth Eng of 'Why I Hate Blacks' fame? He sure hopes you do" chortled Gawker when Eng gave an interview saying he thought and hoped he had inspired the massacre at Virginia Tech.

Fox News invited Eng on television to explain himself. The resulting interview is, in retrospect, sick and excruciating.

A few months later, Eng hit the news again when Village Voice published an interview in which he celebrated the Virginia Tech massacre and, decrying racism against Asians, proclaimed he would have done the same thing at NYU if he could have afforded a gun. The Village Voice's tone is no longer quite so jolly, but still strikes me as oddly detached. Eng got more publicity when he was arrested, prosecuted, and sentenced to therapy for threatening a neighboring family with a hammer. This news did not notably change the tone of coverage of Eng. Angry Asian Man (which, as a parent of Asian-American kids, I find to be an indispensable source of information about Asian-American struggles with racism, culture, and advocacy) reported on Eng's new legal troubles rather lightly, referring to him as "everyone's favorite "Asian Supremacist'" "the dragon master," and "krazy-ass Kenny."

But someone was genuinely concerned about Eng's deterioration — his family, and oddly, the federal criminal justice system.

The caption to the federal criminal complaint against Eng.

"Kenneth Eng Threatened A 'White Pussy' With Violence," the Village Voice leered when federal officials took him into custody after his state conviction. The feds — through the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York — prosecuted Eng for an incident years before during his troubles at NYU. The affidavit in support of the federal criminal complaint tells the tale: in 2004 Eng got into a confrontation with another student at NYU who objected to Eng derisively calling another classmate a "Negro," Eng spat in the classmate's face and called him a "white pussy," and in 2005 Eng called the classmate and jeered at him "remember me? I'm the one who spit at you." This call formed the basis of a felony charge of threats through interstate communication.

Two things are clear from the complaint. First, the feds were deeply concerned about Eng. The phone call is an extremely marginal basis for a charge, as they would soon see. And the complaint has information about Eng's Virginia Tech rant, even though that happened years after the charged offense. In looking at the record, it's clear that the feds, Eng's parents, Eng's lawyers, Eng's doctors, and an extremely cooperative federal court were using the prosecution as an instrument to compel Eng to submit to ongoing treatment. Eng's parents had the resources to post a $500,000 bail in one of his state cases and to hire a series of lawyers and psychiatrists, and the government's resources, of course, are formidable. The record reveals six years of everyone involved going to extraordinary lengths to make Eng get treatment, to deal with his relapses and outbursts, and to help him.

But it was not enough.

The first problem, oddly, was legal. Eng fairly rapidly agreed to plead guilty to the charge in exchange for five years probation. But the court, after very thoughtful analysis, rejected the plea, finding that it lacked a factual basis because the mocking call was not a "true threat" and therefore not a violation of the statute. True threats, as Popehat readers know, are threats that are intended, and reasonably interpreted, to be expressions of genuine intent to do harm. Here, Eng called his victim and made fun of him for having previously spit on him. The judge decided, not unreasonably, that nothing about that was a threat of future harm.

At this point, in a standard scenario, the government would have appealed the determination or the defense would have tried to convince the government or the court to dismiss the charges. This was not a standard scenario. Eng eventually agreed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge of interfering with someone's right to education through intimidation. The goal remained the same — his family, his lawyers, his doctors, and the government wanted him to get a sentence of probation with mandatory treatment. When the probation office recommended jail time, the government argued vociferously against it, supported by Eng's own lawyer's bleak assessment of his illness. Let me assure you as a federal criminal defense attorney that this is not a typical course of events.

Eng got his probation and his mandatory treatment. But the next five years were fraught with the sort of repeated problems we should expect with an intractable mental illness. Eng fell in and out of treatment, he was repeatedly cited for probation violations. He was arrested and prosecuted by New York authorities for harassment and stalking, which led to more federal probation violations. The attorneys, doctors, and the judge made extraordinary efforts to avoid prolonged incarceration and to continue treatment — the judge held multiple hearings with physician testimony.

Everyone did everything they could.

It was not enough. In wealthiest country in the history of the world, a country with the power of an angry god, with weight of doting affluent parents and lawyers and doctors and an utterly out-of-character criminal justice system, it was not enough. This is, perhaps, the most grim part of the story, grimmer even than our indifference and casual cruelty. If Kenneth Eng can't be helped successfully, what's the hope for the millions out there in worse circumstances, some of them potentially violent? Kenneth Eng didn't slip through the cracks. He got support that, if you described it in a story, I would dismiss as fanciful. What about people without those resources and without that support?

Kenneth Eng's federal probation ended in 2013. We can trace his life for a while thereafter through his campaign of federal lawsuits. He filed two dozen, all pro se, in 2013 and 2014 in federal court in New York. He sued people for posting his books online, and he sued people for using ideas he claimed he invented, like space dragons or the character name "Terrordactyl" and the concept of a sentient universe. It would be easy to laugh at them, as we often laugh at crazy lawsuits, as we laughed at his bizarre racist rants. You'd need a heart of stone not to laugh at Eng v. Philosoraptor. He did, in fact, get a little coverage of these intellectual property suits. There was no coverage of his other suits — the ones claiming racial discrimination, the ones claiming he was discriminated against because he was a racist, the ones engaging in virulent racism and using racial epithets, the ones relitigating his treatment at NYU and Bellevue and Rikers. His vexatious litigation reveals bits of his out-of-court life in 2014. The suits describe his unsuccessful efforts to maintain work in the face of his inability to interact with others, his public confrontations, his repeated brushes with law enforcement, his subsistence on disability and unemployment payments. The quality of his filings steadily degraded, varying from meritless but coherent and neatly typed copyright claims to enraged, barely legible scrawls incorporating racial epithets into the case captions. Courts dismissed all of the suits, usually by refusing to let him file them without filing fees.

When I was a prosecutor, we used to get lawsuits and motions from prisoners. They stank of cigarette smoke, a stink that penetrated the plain manila envelopes containing them. Eng's lawsuits stink of untreated madness. I might ordinarily mock them. I've mocked ones like them before. It's harder after reading about who he was, who he is.

Towards the end of 2014, with the last of his lawsuits dismissed, Kenneth Eng dropped from sight. I can't find more references to him. I do not have the heart to go beyond the web and research whether he is confined, whether he continues to relapse without notice, whether he's even alive. Maybe he's even better. Maybe.

Why are we the way we are? Is Kenneth Eng a schizophrenic whose illness finds expression through florid racism? Or is he a racist asshole who is also schizophrenic? It makes little difference to the people he abused or threatened or assaulted, the people terrified that he would go on a violent spree, or the people repulsed to see the seemingly mainstream AsianWeek publish his racist screed. It is right and fit that we should support those people and acknowledge how they felt, whatever Eng's motives were. It is appropriate to protect them. But how should we treat Kenneth Eng? Not, I think, with carefree laughter.

Kenneth Eng is on the other side of viral now, and it's hard to see him there. But we can still see ourselves, and the view is not always pleasant.

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