Brad Love, Michelle Erstikaitis, and Luka Magnotta

This is going to be a little bit rambling and surreal. Please bare with us.

Most of our readers are aware of who Brad Love is. For those who don't know who he is, he's a 55ish year old man who has been, for decades, mailing racist screeds to public officials. Not just one or 10 or 100, but 1000s (one wonders where he finds the time). His harassment of politicians and public officials goes back more than 20 years in fact (we will provide excerpts from an article below detailing this fact):

'Scurrilous' mail nets 20 days in jail 

Toronto Star - Toronto, Ont
Farrell Crook
Feb 16, 1993 

A Mississauga man has been jailed 20 days for mailing "scurrilous" material involving racial and ethnic minorities to two Toronto-area members of Parliament.

...
The Brampton judge said he was not imprisoning Love, 35, for the views he holds, but for using the mails to send two MPs scurrilous material.

Langdon said he doubted whether either recipient of Love's letters, Mississauga South MP Don Blenkarn or External Affairs Minister Barbara McDougall from Toronto, "was much chagrined by the material.

...
Love, already in custody awaiting trial for assault, had pleaded guilty to two Criminal Code charges of using the mails for the purpose of transmitting scurrilous material.

He sent 20 letters to Blenkarn's constituency office over a four- month period ended Feb. 3, 1992, and 38 letters to McDougall's office between Feb. 25, 1991, and March 11, 1992, Peel assistant crown attorney Colleen Sym told the court.

"I don't think his views are shared by right-thinking Canadians," the judge added. "I don't think the ills of this country can be attributed to any racial or ethnic minority."

But he didn't just focus his rage on public officials. He also targeted the media for not writing the stories the way he felt they should be written:

When bigots buttonhole the newspaper

Toronto Star
Feb 13, 1999

WHAT'S THE worst part of a news ombud's job? The answer can vary: no two days of uproar in a complaints office are the same.

But high on my list is having to listen to voices of intolerance in a city that takes pride in its diversity and aims to be a model for the world.

...
 Consider Caller 1. His name - Brad Love - is ironic, considering what he has to say and how he says it.

Love wants The Star to report the race of every criminal suspect. Turns out he's primarily interested in one race and one religion.

"I can take care of myself," he says. "I'm a big boy. None of these f-----' n-----s are going to f--- with me."

Love says The Star, with its policy of not printing racial labels unless the description includes useful details (scars, tattoos, a limp), lets criminals get away with mayhem.

He rejects the explanation that the paper tries not to stereotype visible minorities - notably young, black males - by constantly implying they're all offenders.

"That goes over great with the human rights board and the B'nai B'rith - they make a good living discovering racism where it really ain't," he avers. "But not great for us real Canadians."

...
 He says he's not alone. "Believe me, there are thousands of people who think just like me. But they don't have the time, and they don't care to write the letters. Me, I'll take you guys head- on.

So Love, who has sent hand-scrawled news clippings to the newsroom and once got 20 days in jail for mailing scurrilous material to MPs, says he'll seek justice at the Ontario Press Council. "You bastards don't scare me worth a s---, man" he says. "You know I'm right."

As mentioned above, Love is no stranger to those who follow this blog. Last May he was again convicted of harassing public officials and sentenced to 18 months. However Love still appears to be free and has continued his campaign of harassment, now in part focused on making the lives of Fort McMurray residents miserable. And Paulie, one of his biggest boosters, continues to promote him as an oppressed political dissident. However, we noticed an interesting twist at the end of Paulie's most recent missive:

Wait. What was that?

Yep. That's right. Michelle Erstikaitis.

We've written extensively about Paulie's inexplicable relationship with Michelle Erstikaitis. When she was in detention and awaiting trial and a possible dangerous offender designation, Paulie claimed she was in reality a, "White Nationalist" being persecuted for her beliefs. The truth is Ms. Erstikaitis, who has since been declared a dangerous offender, is a deeply disturbed woman who's history of legal problems go back a number of year including those related to was obsession with Paul Bernardo and her conviction for threatening the mother of one of Bernardo's victims:

A woman accused of threatening to kill Debbie Mahaffy will return to court Jan. 7 for a bail hearing. The woman, 19, was remanded in custody yesterday. Police say someone called 911 on Dec. 27 and threatened to kill Mahaffy, whose daughter Leslie, 14, was murdered by Paul Bernardo in 1991. Michelle Erstikaitis, of Hamilton, is charged with threatening death.

Now according to Paulie Erstikaitis is not just a former political prisoner, but has been elevated to the status of free speech campaigner.

This isn't the first time Erstikaitis' name has been mentioned on this blog during the past month:

Since we discovered that Erstikaitis had attended the Doug Christie memorial organized by Lemire and Paulie, perhaps we shouldn't be to surprised that Paulie has decided to continue to use Erstikaitis for his own purposes. We don't know why Paulie has decided to hitch his wagon to Erstikaiti. Maybe he has an arrangement similar to that which he had with other young women (allegedly)? Perhaps she has been able to manipulate Paulie into believing she is a WN? We don't know. What we do know is during the memorial, Paulie said something that proved to be a little ironic:

That Paulie would mention the Bernardo case given the presence of Erstikaitis at the Christie memorial might provide some irony, we wonder if also knows the Magnotta mention is also ironic?

Like Erstikaitis, Luka Magnotta was someone who, at times, appears to have tried to associate himself to the WN movement, though this seems to have been more of an attempts at self promotion. Also like Erstikaitis, Magnotta had an obsession with the Bernardo case, though his obsession seems to have been focused primarily on Karla Homolka than on Paul Bernardo. At the time we even mentioned what we saw as parallels between Erstikaitis and Magnotta:

As we think more about Magnotta, there is someone we covered in this blog who also had a rather dubious claim to being a persecuted White Nationalist.

Michelle Erstikaitis ring a bell?
 
As disturbed as Erstikaitis is, nothing she has done rises to the of violent depravity that Magnotta has engaged in, but there are still some parallels in addition to their respective claims of being "White Nationalists" despite any real evidence to support  their claim other than their own words. The most significant might be the obsession with the Bernardo/Homolka case. Erstikaitis was obsessed with Paul Bernardo to the point she would contact and threaten his victims' families. Magnotta appears to have started the rumour that he was dating Karla Homolka once she had been released.
...
Until we have clear evidence either way, we really can't say that Magnotta is a White Nationalist any more than we could have said Michelle Erstikaitis is a White Nationalist. Likewise, we certainly can't claim (and despite what the "Ottawa Citizen" article would have you believe, we didn't claim this) that the murder of Jun Lin was motivated by racial hatred.

We never considered the possibility of any sort of link between Erstikaitis and Magnotta other than the similarities outlined, but it seems there may very well have been one after all.

Four years ago, Erstikaitis made the following comments on a YouTube video tribute to the victims of Bernardo and Homolka:

But it wasn't only these two who responded to her comments:

It seems pretty clear that this individual is likely Luka Magnotta himself posing as a fan of his. And as was his practice, mentioning his name online in an attempt at viral marketing himself.

We evidently were not the only ones who noticed this, though she didn't realize it until years later:

We don't think that Erstikaitis' and Magnotta's relationship, such as it was, was anything more than two individuals who's mutual obsessions resulted in crossed paths online. Erstikaitis's response to this information though however further indicates someone who is very sick and should be under the care of dedicated mental health experts.

Paulie, you aren't helping here.