Back in OC, journalists wonder who gets to be anonymous?

While at OC Weekly, I wrote this piece about a hardcore Republican activist who played a kind of high-end sock puppetry with himself–wrote on the right-wing OCblog under the name “Jubal” and congratulated himself on the same site and elsewhere on the net under his real name, Matt Cunningham. Though he worked for the county’s most powerful conservatives, Cunningham played the part of Man-of-Danger with great enthusiasm, once appearing on TV with his face in shadow and his voice freaking digitized. Seriously–all so that he could electronically fellate the gray men running Orange County. Cunningham was livid that I’d outed him.

Now comes this column from the OC Register’s Frank Mickadeit: turns out that last week Cunningham posted online the names of sex-abuse victims in a widening Catholic Church scandal that may yet bring down OC’s bishop, the infamous Tod Brown.

Cunningham tells Mickadeit the whole thing was an “stupid accident.” Stupid? Victims attorney John Manly (full disclosure: a District Weekly investor) thinks it was purposeful and malicious, likely part of Cunningham’s ongoing campaign to defend the powerful and crush the rest of us. In that letter, Manly dropped the gentlemanly language of the bar and asked Cunningham a question we’ve wondered for years: “Are you insane?”

Tags: abuse, conservatives, fellate, John Manly, Jubal, Long Beach, Matt Cunningham, Mickadeit, molest, OC Weekly, priest, scandal, sex, Swaim, Tod Brown