Blogger Ben Holder, alias the Troublemaker, has received some unwelcome scrutiny in my reporting of how the controversy surrounding Greensboro police Officer Julius Fulmore has been framed in the community. He fires back by assembling a litany of examples of my purported "journalistic malpractice."
Holder doesn’t cite any passage of my reporting that states that Officer Julius Fulmore was exonerated of criminal charges. In fact, I reported in yesterday’s YES! Weekly that the Guilford County District Attorney declined to pursue criminal charges against Fulmore. This information is thoroughly non-controversial.
Holder writes that I leave out certain facts about polygraphs administered to Fulmore and Weidman. I contend that I have highlighted the relevant facts in this and many other stories.
Yes, I have written that a page from an internal affairs by Cpl. N. Davis was “presumably” written by Detective Scott Sanders. As Holder knows from interviewing me, I was given this page in a stack of documents that lawyer Amiel Rossabi described as being produced by the defendants in a libel case by Fulmore and Lt. Brian James against Jerry Bledsoe and The Rhinoceros Times. There was no malice in my suggestion that this page might have been written by Sanders; it was simply conjecture from the best information available at the time. At the time, I did not have the full document and could find no one, including Rossabi, who could enlighten me as to the authorship of the page. I now have the entire document and have clarified that it was written by Davis.
Holder’s obsession with my misunderstanding about the page describing Fulmore’s polygraph clouds the point that this document contains some very interesting information. Holder’s readers might like to know, for instance, that the accounts of Fulmore, a female friend who admitted to having sex with him in the room at the Red Carpet Inn and a male employee who later used the room are entirely consistent. The allegations by Brenda Weidman, a prostitute and informant, that Fulmore had sex with her and provided her with drugs could not be substantiated by investigators. For example, the specific page on which Holder is so fixated contains this statement: “The results excluded Ms. Weidman’s DNA as a match for that present on the used condom, but did not exclude Detective Fulmore’s DNA as a match for that present on the used condom."
The administrative report on Fulmore wraps up with this conclusion: “The facts revealed Ms. Brenda E. Weidman was the occupant of room#310, and had been residing there for five consecutive days prior to June 2. The facts revealed at approximately 1730 hours on June 2, Detective Fulmore and [name redacted by author] used room#311 to have sexual intercourse and vacated the room at approximately 1930 hours. At approximately 2330 hours Detective Fulmore met with [name redacted by author] and gave him the key to room#311. [Name redacted by author] occupied the room from approximately midnight until 1000 hours on June. 3. Detective Fulmore did not return to the room.”
There are many facts available from which to select in this extensive investigation. Smart readers can discern from the wide array of journalistic reports, which are relevant.
As for Joya Wesley’s statement to me that she was unaware that Holder wore a wire for the police while presenting himself as a reporter for the Carolina Peacemaker, the point is that Wesley, then the editor of the newspaper, along with commentary editor Hal Sieber and co-owner Vickie Kilimanjaro, contradicted Holder’s statement that his editors were aware of his undercover police work. Whether Wesley believed there was a possibility that Holder wore a wire or not is beside the point. Most people do believe he wore a wire for the police.
My reporting for the wire story, in which I shared a byline with Amy Kingsley, that Holder met with Al Stewart, then an investigator for the Guilford County District Attorney and a former police vice captain, to discuss a request by police to wear a wire during his interview with Dunlap comes from a background source. Regrettably, I am unable to name that source.
