Like you I hate the “Stay Classy” meme that is so overused on the Internet, yet as a blogger I know that finding the appropriate response to some of the depths people often sink to on the web is no easy task. There are some things so vulgar and tasteless that unless I was going to film a Vlog of me shaking my head in disbelief or looking totally disgusted the “You Stay Classy” phrase is the only response that can convey the disdain I have for the offenders.

Which brings me to freelance Criminal Profiler and author of Killing for Sport: Inside the Minds of Serial Killers Pat Brown.

Somewhere on the Internet, I forget on which blog, I once defended Brown. The author of a post was complaining that Brown was a dilettante in the world of criminal profiling. I’m unsure of the exact nature of his complaints but he pretty much claimed she was a liar, a fraud and didn’t deserve any respect. I defended Brown, though I was in no way a fan, because at that time I didn’t see what her lack of formal profiling training had to do with her worth as a professional.

But I didn’t know then that aside from formal training in criminal profiling Brown also lacked compassion, common sense and most importantly class, as evidenced by this post where Brown claims that Victoria Lindsay, the girl who was assaulted by 8 teens who video taped the beating and posted it on youtube, deserved what she got:

I am going to be really politically incorrect today. I have been reading up on all the sympathy oozing everywhere on the Internet and in the media for the 16-year-old Victoria Lindsay, the girl who got her butt kicked by six of her friends. Yes, those girls were mean and nasty and deserved to get a jail term. But, for some reason – well, for a pretty good reason – I just don’t feel that sorry for Victoria.

Why? First of all, these were her friends – not strangers and not some bullies from school she had tried her best to avoid. Friends – as in these are the girls I hang out with and live with. Water seeks its own level and I wonder that Victoria – were another girl being targeted – wouldn’t have gone along with the group melee and thrown some punches herself.

Secondly, why were all these girls so ticked off at Victoria? It is said she talked smack on MySpace, saying some really vicious stuff and saying she was going to fight them. So, she flamed these girls publicly, possibly embarrassing them and humiliating them. Then she said she would fight them. Seems like they brought the fight to her and she turned out to be all bark and no bite; she didn’t even throw one punch. She wimped out, took the beating, and begged them to let her go. She wasn’t as tough as she tried to pretend to be.

But, regardless of her behaviors, because Victoria ended up the unhappy loser of this girl bashing, she is being made out to be a totally innocent lamb. I am guessing the trash talk she put on MySpace was just the tip of the iceberg for this girl’s past behaviors. Apparently, she isn’t living at home and her father states in an interview that she has had her share of problems. She clearly admits to her friends during the assault that she had been drunk (during one of the times the girls found whatever she did offensive) and said she had grown up since then.

Hey, this girl is barely sixteen. She has a problem with drinking and she isn’t living with her parents. Apparently, Victoria’s parents want to blame MySpace instead of their lack of parenting that surely contributed to Victoria ending up as a punching bag.

Say what? By Pat Brown’s logic if you’re date raped you’re partially responsible because you were friends with the guy who did it, and thus probably a rapist yourself. By Brown’s logic any victim of a crime that knows the perpetrator is partially to blame for their victimization.

Worse is Brown’s insistence that Victoria Lindsay’s “flaming” of one of these girls is enough to take away Lindsay’s victim status. She’s saying that being bad-mouthed on the Internet is a mitigating circumstance, that talking trash about a person makes you less a victim if they physically assault you later. It’s a vile and childish thesis that would be reprehensible enough if one of the perpetrators voiced it, for Pat Brown, who assumes the mantle of champion for crime victims, a voice for the voiceless, it becomes contemptible.

I’d better lock my doors because the title of this post might bring the wrath of a bat-wielding Brown down on me like the judgment of the gods! Of course I would have gotten what I deserved in Brown’s estimation.

The glee with which Brown dwells on Victoria Lindsay’s brutalization and troubled home life makes her seem less like a professional criminologist and more like a spiteful, catty harpy who sees the young girl through the eyes of someone who has yet unresolved issues with girls she went to high school with. It is the delight of a petty and unkind woman who can’t bring herself to sympathize with a teenage girl who was victimized and humiliated on camera because she doesn’t approve of the scant specifics we happen to know about her life.

It is here that she proves herself a charlatan, a cheap and transparent player on a stage too big for a person so small. The crime-fighting Brown cannot bring herself to even pretend on her free blog that she is disturbed by the violent degradation of a young girl caught on camera, even if that’s what a criminal profiler is supposed to say. If she can’t rise above her vindictive immaturity, her indecent resentment of the girl, long enough to understand why the rest of us would sympathize with Victoria Lindsay than I find Brown’s ability to “profile” anyone highly suspect.

Like a petulant child, Brown demands that we accept her expertise in analyzing the psyche of complex and troubled individuals, yet cannot even look into her simple, jealous, unkind heart and see that her condemnation of Victoria Lindsay is less a product of the teen’s behavior and more the product of Brown’s disagreeable nature.

Pat Brown is a woman who claims, in essence, to be able to understand sociopaths. If she were more reflective she’d see some irony there.

I shouldn’t have defended Brown then, I regret it. I should have taken the time to read all her writings and I would have seen the evidence plainly of what kind of person she is. She’s nothing more than a crime groupie, a self-important armchair criminologist who is as full of venom and contempt for the victims of crime as the criminals themselves. Had she not fancied herself a profiler I’d have no doubt she’d be mailing letters to Manson now, or posting anti-Semitic rants on Dailykos.

As long as she got to express her contempt for someone, she’d be happy. And isn’t that what much of her career is based on? Contempt for the police? Isn’t Pat brown claiming the cops can’t do their job right without her?

Stay classy Pat Brown.