One of the key ways Donald Trump has kick-started the American economy is by existentially subsidizing the growth industry of #Resistance Twitter accounts spinning wild conspiracy theories about connections between Trump and Russia, and, sometimes, Weird Twitter. Among Trump-conspiracy accounts, none is quite as fascinatingly batty as Louise Mensch’s, the founder of the conservative-content farm Heat Street, whose status as a former British member of parliament has made her the respectable face of Carrie Mathison–style corkboard-threading. Now, one target is fighting back.
According to BuzzFeed News, Cassandra Fairbanks, a frequent target of Mensch’s wide-ranging and all-encompassing conspiracy theories, filed a complaint with law enforcement this week, following months of dubious allegations about Fairbanks’s work as a Russian operative.
In a complaint with the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, Fairbanks said that Mensch “has been engaging a months long campaign of cyber stalking and harassment against me. She has published outlandish claims about me ranging from accusations of plastic surgery, to sex scandals, to allegations of treason.”
Though she is American, Fairbanks works for Sputnik, a news agency owned by the Russian government.
One lengthy blog post, which Mensch caught wind of, alleged that Fairbanks tried to seduce Anthony Weiner in order to orchestrate a situation in which the FBI would seize his phone, leading to the letter James Comey released shortly before the election.
Mensch’s hit rate with her conspiracy theories is so far fairly low: Last week, she claimed legendary pro-Trump botnet creator MicroChip was the pseudonym of a California man named Michael Anderson. Her evidence? Anderson resembled the Instagram celebrity whose photograph MicroChip uses as his avatar. Yesterday, meanwhile, she accused beloved Twitter comedian @Leyawn of being a Russian agent because he made a joke involving Photoshopped images of Mensch tweets.
Speaking to BuzzFeed, Mensch doubled down on her theory about Fairbanks’s ties to Russia.
