One of My Most Vicious Online Trolls Is a Pastor In Rural Saskatchewan
A Lutheran pastor, connected to the Mount Olive Lutheran Church in Regina... just like Jesus commanded. #theLordswork
My grandparents are buried in a Lutheran cemetery.
That’s what crossed my mind, years ago, during a disturbing interaction on Twitter with a Saskatchewan man and Lutheran pastor named Todd Guggenmos.
His Tweets were insulting, vile and crude. His level of vitriol ratcheted every time anyone challenged his hostile and aggressive behaviour, which he freely displayed under his own name and seemingly without any concern over how he was being perceived.
My interactions with him were bad enough that I blocked him right away. Then, beyond hearing from time to time the Reverend had other heinous interactions with Saskatchewan residents online, I never thought about him again.
Til a couple days ago.
The story begins a few years ago, when an account popped up on Twitter called @NotTammyR. As the name suggests, it was an account dedicated to harassing me online.
The Tweets from that account have been breathtakingly vile. Vicious, personal attacks on myself and other Saskatchewan residents, particularly women. Enterprising internet sleuths have now revealed that the operator of the now-deleted @NotTammyR account was Lutheran pastor Todd Guggenmos.
How was Guggenmos’s identity revealed?
The @notTammyR account was supported and amplified by a few Saskatchewan men who aren’t important enough to be named here. It’s attention they want badly and don’t deserve.
Put simply, those men got all jacked up on Facebook and in their frenzy to feed on another online target, outed the Reverend Guggenmos, by name, as the man behind the @notTammyR mask.
I’ve been thinking about changing the name of this newsletter to Only in Saskatchewan.
Residents of Ontario can hurl obscenities and insults on Twitter all day long, if that’s what floats their boats. They will almost definitely never run into their target in real life, or anyone who’s ever heard of their target.
Alberta has four times our population and one city five times the size of Saskatchewan’s largest. Alberta residents still enjoy a reasonable degree of separation, between each other and between their online and offline existences.
This is Saskatchewan, where everybody knows your name…and your mom’s name, your grandma’s sister’s name, your dentist’s name and the name of that woman your dad dated a few times in high school.
Two degrees of separation in Saskatchewan is arguably rare and if you find it, you should probably marry it and give our gene pool a boost.
But back to Todd - when publicly confronted with the findings, he pushed back from his anonymous accounts, spluttering about Photoshop and being framed. When it became clear he couldn’t deny it any further, Guggenmos’s personal social media accounts vanished, as did the @notTammyR account, simultaneously.
A few other notorious and similarly themed anonymous accounts disappeared as well.
Okay Houdini.
ProTip: Deleting both your personal and anon accounts, at the same time, in a panicked response to accusations that you run those anon accounts, is kind of a dead giveaway that yes, you were running said anon accounts.
Reminds me of when my once-toddler used to put his hands over his eyes, convinced he was invisible.
More difficult evidence to refute than the vanishing of Todd Guggenmos’s social media profiles and coincidentally, all the defamatory, debased social media accounts he’s now accused of operating, is stylometry.
“Stylometry uses statistical methods to analyze style in order to determine authorship.” - someone smarter than me.
It’s when written patterns emerge between social media accounts that can indicate joint authorship. So, exactly what you see above. On the left of the graphic you see Guggenmos’s personal account, on the right the @notTammyR account.
There are dozens of examples of stylometric duplicates between Todd Guggenmos’s personal accounts and the @notTammyR account, but I’m not wasting my time or energy providing or explaining more. You have two eyes and common sense and this isn’t rocket science.
Todd Guggenmos feasted on the red meat that was an AM Saskatchewan State Radio host’s decade-long campaign of harassment leveled against me, often amplifying and repeating its messaging from the @NotTammyR account:
Guggenmos Tweeted the above the same day the State Radio mouthpiece encouraged his AM audience to search my workplace online, which Todd failed to mention, in conjunction with my maiden name.
The direct result of Gormley’s direction to his audience was a bunch of phone calls to my workplace from his listeners and multiple instances of online harassment, similar to what Todd dutifully delivered in the screenshot above.
Let’s talk about the State Radio cryptkeeper, apparently refusing to retire into irrelevancy, for a moment.
Regular readers know that six weeks ago I wrote about the decade long campaign of harassment Gormley and his besties have spearheaded against me.
You heard not a word of denial from anyone mentioned in what I wrote, because they cannot deny it. It’s all true, they know it and I have receipts.
Instead, in response to its publication, Rawlco and John Gormley predictably froze. Like a bull in a china shop, they knew any move would trigger a bigger PR disaster, likely resulting in even more testimonials about Gormley’s well-known behaviour to support what I wrote.
I’ll stop writing about John Gormley when his professional behaviour and the personal choices he has made stop impacting my life. Until then, I’ll say whatever I want about him, and if he wants to slam my words instead of my existence from his radio show, social media account, or with me directly, he can fill his goddamn boots.
Men like Todd Guggenmos worship at the white misogynistic male altar of John Gormley and this situation is absolutely a byproduct of years of AM radio dog whistles and public harassment, directed at me by him, his surrogates and his online accounts.
Case in point, the Reverend Todd’s Tweets from the @notTammyR account on August 2, 2022, the same day six weeks ago when I published my story about the harassment I’ve experienced thanks to Gormley.
Guggenmos smeared it as “libel” and me as having “no income” and “bankrupt”, suggesting that’s why I could publish it and not get sued.
I published it and did not get sued because it was not libel.
(BTW - the list of Saskatchewan women who have blocked Trent Lalonde, another Gormley fanatic, on Twitter is also probably longer than the list of women who have not.)
Framing me as having no income and/or living in poverty has been a bizarre sub-fixation these guys have with me.
Gormley degraded me as far back as five years ago as “begging for money on the internet” for doing things like linking a Patreon account to my old blog. A few years later he sneered from the show that I didn’t have “two pennies to rub together” when I, along with hundreds of other Saskatchewan people, criticized his buddy Mike Couros’s archaic, misogynistic fundraising initiative.
My bank balance is fine, thank you, but I find this theme odd and unsettling.
Why do some men to resent a woman’s right to earn money, to the extend they’d deny a woman they’ve never met earns money at all?
Why do some men so desperately need women to be weak?
Anyway, yeah - until a few days ago, a Lutheran pastor, connected to the Mount Olive Lutheran Church in Regina, Saskatchewan, has been operating a social media account to hurl incredibly vile, offensive language and statements at other real, live Saskatchewan residents, for years.
So much bullshit and infighting here runs rampant, in part, because Saskatchewan’s microscopic population rate makes it impossible to escape anything or anyone for long. Our insanely close proximity to each other makes it easy to help and even easier to hurt each other.
Bottom line is that Saskatchewan residents don’t get the luxury of smearing the shit out of each other online, or anywhere else, without real consequences. There are going to be awkward, real life repercussions for those interactions at some point down the road, you can be certain.
How much power you have in real life will protect you from those repercussions for a while - but not forever.
Online trolling is a fool’s game.
As Gormley’s bff Mike Couros learned in December of last year, when he was ran off Twitter in disgrace after a local influencer accused him of displaying behaviour similar to that which triggered the Polytech massacre - it’s a losing one.
In fact many, including myself, attributed the vile words from the @notTammyR account to Lise Merle or Couros. I always said it wasn’t my problem if their behaviour made the accusation credible. Further, all these people are connected, as evidenced by the fact one of the last things Todd Guggenmos posted on the @notTammyR account was a video supplied to him by and featuring Lise Merle and Mike Couros.
Lol. Geniuses, all of them.
The Lutheran Church of Canada is fully aware of what’s going on with Todd Guggenmos and are refusing to comment. I contacted them repeatedly yesterday asking what they planned on doing about these incredible allegations. No response, because they are cowards and what’s actually in the Bible is meaningless to them.
Should Todd Guggenmos be “cancelled”, as his buddies are howling about? Is he now the victim here? Is the fact his son committed suicide an excuse for his unhinged, debased treatment of others?
The answer to those questions are subjective and depend on your morals, I guess. IMO, he has displayed more than enough disturbing behaviour unbecoming a freaking Reverend to not be one, but maybe his friends or Lutheran leaders figure it differently.
In fact, the Lutheran Church of Canada and Guggenmos’s direct report, a Regina pastor named David Haberstock, seem to be protecting their Reverend, who also preaches in Langenburg and other small Saskatchewan towns.
Every one of the individuals backing Todd Guggenmos today are as sick as he is and if they think Jesus has their backs right now, I got news for them.
Raised (but no longer) a devout Jehovah’s Witness, I know the Christian Bible as well as the Lutheran Church of Canada’s leaders. I know they know how many of Todd Guggenmos’s personal behaviours and statements run contrary to Jesus’s teachings, but are far more concerned with optics and protecting their jobs than they are who’s leading their congregations.
It’s disgusting and so very Saskatchewan.
Yet, not one of these idiots have won their battle with me and they never will.
In fact, as I write this, I await news on another male harasser, currently being held on remand but in a bail hearing this morning after being jailed three times in the last two weeks for physically and digitally breaching his restraining order.
That’s all I’m going to tell you today, but let’s just say I’m so out of f**ks to give about these entitled, twisted assholes and will be pursuing criminal harassment charges against Guggenmos as well.
This province is toxic right now and until the tone changes at the top, nothing else will. The toxicity being promoted by State Radio and the State (government) itself is so unbelievably bad that it’s destroying everything our grandparents and great grandparents built for the Saskatchewan that we once loved.
In the meantime, all I know is I will never, ever stop speaking out against what’s going on today in this province, including the names of those specifically responsible for its current moral and ethical death spiral. I will not stop pushing for better from our so-called leaders.
Have a good week,
