Creepy Threats From Jacob Wohl? That Can't Be Right.
It has been a while since we last heard anything about sleazy rightwing jerkbag Jacob Wohl, who hasn't beshitted himself very publicly since April, when he tried to promote a fake sexual assault claim against Pete Buttiegieg. (Instead, the supposed "victim" called Wohl and company "chronic liars" and wanted nothing to do with 'em.) But first-class assholes never really go away; Monday, Will Sommer at the Daily Beastreported that Wohl, or at least his phone, seems to have "branched out into making death threats on behalf of his political allies, telling one woman he would 'torture you so much that you end up killing yourself.'" So everyone gets to ask yet again: How the fuck is that man not in jail?
The details are pretty baroque, as you'd expect in any Wohl fuckbungle.
The story involves California Republican Omar Navarro, a perennial candidate who has run twice against Maxine Waters and lost by enormous margins. But his 2018 run brought in over a million dollars from Trump fans who hated Waters, so you bet he's gearing up for another run. Bit of a problem though: Navarro's former girlfriend, rightwing relationship advice writer (there's a niche for everything) DeAnna Lorraine Tesoriero, was seeking "a restraining order against him after enduring what she describes as months of harassment since dumping him in April."
A former Navarro campaign worker, Irina Chausovskaya, knew Tesoriero and received some threatening text messages from someone who wanted to know whether Chausovskaya would be testifying. They were doozies!
"Don't worry, I'll see you soon," the text message read. "It won't be painful. I'm looking forward to watching your soul leave your eyes."
"I'll make it my mission to torture you so much that you end up killing yourself," the writer of the messages added.
Both women say they've received a whole bunch of threatening messages, but these ones, from a number with a 949 area code in Orange County, were different!
Usually, the messages came from numbers they had never seen before, sometimes with fake names attached. This time, though, there was a clue as to who was behind the latest round of texts.
A search in the TrueCaller app, which collects phone data from users and phone directories, showed the 949 number was associated with Jacob Wohl. The Daily Beast was able to independently confirm the connection.
Calls to that number weren't answered, Sommer says. Tesoriero also has recordings of a man she says was a Navarro campaign worker who said Navarro told him of a plan to hire Wohl to wreck Tesoriero's career.
"He's going to investigate and spend money with Jacob Wohl, to have you like get obliterated, because he's gonna be so pissed because his political career, he said, is gonna be over, if he gets another restraining order," the man in the recording said. "That's what he told me."
The dude in the recording said Navarro also said he'd pay for the dirty tricks with campaign funds, so that might be fun for somebody to nail down. Like the Deep State FBI maybe!
Ultimately, Tesorio was granted a five-year restraining order, although Navarro insists that was a huge miscarriage of justice, nothing more than a "judge going off of someone crying in a courtroom." No telling whether that will hurt his next inevitable campaign against Waters, since wingnuts have a seemingly bottomless desire to throw donations at terrible ideas.
Wohl denies everything, insisting in a series of emails to Sommer that the 949 phone number used to belong to him, but he hasn't had it since November 2, 2018 -- when his attempt to frame Robert Mueller as a "sexual harasser" blowed up. He also offered his completely credible theory of what happened: The ratfucker got ratfucked!
"Navarro allegedly threatened to deploy me to act against the interests of this woman," he wrote. "She then looked up my number in one of those crappy online databases and found my old number to use in photoshopped or otherwise fabricated messages. I've never worked for Navarro and have only heard about this woman's name upon reading the story."
Wohl wrote in another message, "The 949 number DID NOT belong to me at the time the alleged threat was made. You will retract this bogus story or face legal action."
You'd better believe it! Jacob Wohl is a very very credible man who always keeps his word, although Sommer also notes that "In June, Wohl admitted to the Washington Post that one of his previous denials to The Daily Beast was, in fact, untrue."
We're just wondering when the other shoes will drop: Somebody in this whole mess is undoubtedly going to find a way to grift wingnuts off it. Also, we've just overheard in a hipster coffee shop that the Baroque period plans to sue us for associating it with this story.
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