It’s morning in blogger David Milum’s household on Jot-em-Down Road in north Forsyth County and Milum is in his kitchen, his war room, off on another unholy tear.
“That judge was nothing but trailer park trash,” Milum is saying, his Forsyth-born drawl in full throat, his eyebrows dancing.
“He was a wife swapper and a cocaine user! Half the time he was on the bench he was druuuunk! His face just glowed red, like it was about to bust!”
The judge is deceased. He was never charged for any of the behavior Milum claims.
None of that, of course, has stopped Milum, 62, from posting those — and scores of other sordid, outrageous, and ferociously written allegations (his signature icon on his site is a snarling Rottweiler) — on aboutforsyth.com during the past nine years. Nor has $200,000 in libel judgments stopped his posts.
The website, he says, is a forum to expose and root out corruption in Forsyth, the Northside county of 175,000. But, he admits, it’s also about revenge.
Nine years ago the welder turned wrought iron gate dealer was arrested and jailed on a “behavior warrant” sworn out by a Forsyth County commissioner who said Milum scared her in a confrontation outside the county administrative building.
“That day I vowed to get even,” say Milum.
Getting even has not been pretty, or inexpensive, for him.
After taking over the website in 2002 (he bought the address from a politico using it for political campaigns), he’s made hundreds of open records requests to the county for everything from county tax records to e-mails.
He’s used those records and a network of whistle-blowers and unidentified sources to break stories and fuel vicious personal attacks against, among many others, Sheriff Ted Paxton, an assortment of judges and county commissioners.
In the process Milum, in 2006, became the first blogger in America to lose a libel suit for posting on his blog that his former attorney delivered bribes from drug dealers to judges.
That suit cost Milum $50,000. The same year he lost another libel suit filed by a former county employee Milum accused of corruption. That cost him $150,000. But he’s hardly missed a lick — or a nasty bite — since.
People tell him he’s crazy, and he’d be the last one to dispute that, he says: “Yeah, I’m crazy! You have to be crazy to risk your livelihood, to risk losing everything you have, to risk your safety and the safety of your family to do what I do. But I can’t help it. It’s my mission.”
It’s hard to measure if that mission is working.
He’s had some big hits. In 2004, he filed an ethics complaint against former Gov. Sonny Perdue for misusing a state helicopter to take his son to a football game at North Forsyth High School. Attorney General Thurbert Baker agreed, ruling it was an abuse of taxpayer aircraft.
Last spring, after he published the sexually and racially charged e-mails of county planning director Jeff Chance and the county investigated Chance, he was fired from his $92,000-a-year job.
That firing is still tied up in court and also has set in motion probable changes in the procedures of the county Civil Service Board. But the nastiness of his missives undercut Milum’s best work, said Canton attorney and friend, Steven Abernathy.
“David has incredible information and a fair portion of it is on the level,” says Abernathy. “But the problem is people discount it because he’s out there on a tangent.”
None of the targets of some of his most recent and virulent attacks — Forsyth Commissioners Brian Tam and Patrick Bell, Sheriff Paxton and former Forsyth planning director’s attorney, Eric Chofnas — would comment for this story for fear of giving credence to his work, they said, or giving him more ammunition to launch a counter-attack.
Milum’s rantings and open records requests have put county attorney Ken Jarrard in a difficult position. Jarrard is bound to follow state law and respond to the requests. Then he has to watch as the blogger often uses the documents to string together a narrative he can’t prove to skewer county officials, who are Jarrard’s bosses.
Jarrard describes his relationship with Milum — who has an average of one open records request every week for nine years — “the way I described it in a deposition: respectful.”
County Planning Commissioner Joe Moses and Commissioner Jim Boff — neither of whom has yet been the target of Milum or his website — said they see a purpose in his work, even if it’s often ugly and uncomfortable to watch.
Boff said he regrets that “a lot of things that Milum writes are hurtful to bystanders. But, he also reports a lot of facts that the public wouldn’t otherwise hear about.”
Milum said he’s not on the vendetta that he used to be. “I’ve turned from vengeance to civic duty,” he says. Still, he is not surprised the politicians he claims he’s exposed, and excoriated, wouldn’t comment for this story.
“They know I’ll take what they say and use it against them,” he said.
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