A state Representative threatened to sue the Colorado Times Recorder last week, in a screed laced with misspellings, delusions of grandeur, and an apparent misunderstanding of the very thing she hopes to sue us for. In other words, exactly the kind of fare we have come to expect from Douglas County’s Brandi Bradley.
Though the Trumpian outburst reaffirmed everything we already thought we knew about Rep. Bradley, it also revealed something new: that she doesn’t know us half as well as we know her.
Here’s what happened.
Last Friday, my friend and colleague James O’Rourke published a news brief looking at two pieces of anti-transgender legislation slated for introduction in the statehouse. One of those bills, which has not been introduced yet, was announced by Rep. Bradley in her newsletter last week.
The bill, which Bradley calls the “Defending Youth from Sterilization, Psychological Harm, and Irreversible Alteration,” or “DYSPHORIA” Act, aims, in Bradley’s words, “to protect children from being groomed into life-altering and harmful decisions.”
The bill’s topic is not a surprise coming from Bradley: anti-trans activism is the foundation on which she has built her legislative career. She is a chapter leader for the obsessively anti-trans Moms for Liberty advocacy group, and made press last year for her willful mischaracterization of a transgender name-change bill. On the platform formerly known as Twitter, Bradley has attempted to link gender-affirming care to mass shootings (something she would never dare link guns to). She even got into a radio debate about trans people last Friday, the same day James posted his story about her upcoming legislation.
You can imagine our surprise then, when Bradley started firing off litigious emails and social media posts in response to the piece, that her primary complaint was James’ characterization of her bill as…anti-trans.
“Well, it appears your Lock [sic] the basic understanding of slander,” Bradley’s email to James began. The misspelling and errant capitalization of the four-letter-word “lack,” is not the only bit of comedy in that opening line. Bradley also packed it with a punch of inadvertent irony: she means to accuse James of libel, not slander – which she doesn’t appear to understand.
“I intend to not only file an ethics complaint against you, but also turn this article over to my attorney,” Bradley continued. “I intend to publicly shame you on my page…”
Though it’s not clear who Bradley thinks she would file that ethics complaint with, we’re happy for her lawyer to take a look at the piece. It might provide an opportunity for him to explain a few things to his client. As to the public shaming, Bradley carried through on that threat, posting a lightly spell-checked version of the email diatribe to her Twitter account 11 minutes after sending it to James.
The rant continued, climbing to a self-aggrandizing peak before rapidly descending into incoherence.
“I will not tolerate it, and I will not allow it. I am a representative [sic] of the state of Colorado and you will show me some respect. I have never once said I intend to introduce a piece of anti-trans legislation but your [sic] woke everyone [sic] and your false narratives continue to interfere with the truth as you write your pathetic articles.”
Bradley’s ire is rivaled only by her lack of comprehension. For starters, her accusation that James is peddling “false narratives” rings hollow. James’ piece cited ample sources, while Bradley’s tirade cited none. And the implication that a bill cannot be factually labeled “anti-trans” if the sponsor has not referred to it as anti-trans is nonsense on its face. Words have meanings, and Brandi Bradley does not get to decide what they are.
James thinks he might understand Bradley’s problem with the term. “I would not be surprised if Bradley’s objection to the ‘anti-trans’ characterization is based on either the idea that ‘there’s no such thing as trans kids,’ or some sort of rhetorical weaseling like ‘this doesn’t affect the rights of trans people, it just affects school curriculum,'” he told me.
As to respect: it’s earned, Brandi, not given on the basis of titles.
“I think what was most telling was her demanding respect on the basis that she’s a state Representative,” James told me. “An elected official using her status to demand softened coverage from a journalist, and the implicit threat therein, is definitely something.”
The most important thing Bradley misunderstands, though, is her own place in the process: Bradley’s toleration and allowance play no role in what the Colorado Times Recorder publishes. As an outlet with a years-long track record of covering bigots and extremists in public life, we expect Bradley will remain on our radar.
If she doesn’t like that, she is welcome to make good on her threat and sue us. But let’s be honest, it’s clear that Bradley does not intend to do so. Her legal threat was not meant to be followed by legal action, it was meant to intimidate us. And to that we say, you must be new here.
CTR’s team of journalists and researchers did not just happen to wake up one day and decide to cover extremism for no reason. If we wanted lives free from nuisances, threats, and actual dangers, there are other lines of work we could have chosen. We could each be covering human interest beats in mid-sized markets without a care in the world. But that’s not what we chose.
Instead, we chose to do the kind of work which attracts threats. We chose not to cede the information space to the extreme, the propagandized, and the deluded. Does Brandi Bradley think no one has ever threatened to sue us before? That we haven’t seen this play countless times from subjects equally aggrieved by our accurate reporting? Bradley’s fellow Douglas County conservative Joe Oltmann practically makes a habit of it.
And that’s just table stakes. Lawsuit threats? Brandi, we get death threats. At least half of our team has been doxxed by Proud Boys or neo-Nazis at least once. We still show up for work every day.
All of that to say, Bradley’s heavy-handed attempt to intimidate us barely registered on the Colorado Times Recorder’s scale of threats. Indeed, it may have had the opposite of the intended effect. Far from convincing us to steer our coverage away from Brandi Bradley, I wouldn’t be surprised if her threat made us more interested in her work than ever before.
