Son of ‘Dr. Laura’ Accused of Publishing Sadistic War Posts on MySpace
NOTE: Due to a server shutdown on May 22, 2007, the original version of this article was permanently deleted from our database. What follows is back up of a draft of the original. All comments posted to this article were lost.
Laura Schlessinger, the rightwing radio hatemonger, is back in the news. Last week, she told military families to stop whining about life at home while their loved ones are deployed:
“He could come back without arms, legs and eyeballs, and you’re bitching?”
Now Schlessinger’s son, Deryk, who is serving in the military in Afghanistan, is accused of publishing horrific graphics and messages on his MySpace page:
The MySpace page, publicly available until Friday when it disappeared from the Internet, included cartoon depictions of rape, murder, torture and child molestation; photographs of soldiers with guns in their mouths; a photograph of a bound and blindfolded detainee captioned “My Sweet Little Habib”; accounts of illicit drug use; and a blog entry headlined by a series of obscenities and racial epithets.
The site is credited to and includes many photographs of Deryk Schlessinger, the 21-year-old son of the talk radio personality known simply as Dr. Laura.
On one hand, it’s not surprising that a parent as filled with hatred and rage as Laura Schlessinger would produce a child who is a monster — nonetheless, what Deryk allegedly posted here is beyond shocking:
“Yes . . . F–ING Yes!!!” said one blog entry on the Schlessinger site. “I LOVE MY JOB, it takes everything reckless and deviant and heathenistic and just overall bad about me and hyper focuses these traits into my job of running around this horrid place doing nasty things to people that deserve it . . . and some that don’t.”
Deryk Schlessinger seems to imply he may have participated in, or at least was aware of, war crimes and atrocities:
Deryk Schlessinger’s Web site indicated the 21-year-old soldier is stationed in Kandahar, Afghanistan, where, the site’s author writes, “godless crazy people like me,” have become “a generation of apathetic killers.”
The site indicated Schlessinger’s team has survived numerous mortar, rocket and roadside bomb attacks. It also included several graphic cartoons. In one of the stick drawings, a top-hatted man laughs as he rapes a bound and bleeding woman in front of her family. In another depiction, a man forces a boy to perform oral sex at knifepoint as the child’s mother pleads for her son’s life.
Laura Schlessinger often couches the hatred she spews, especially toward gay people, in rhetoric about “family values,” but her son’s alleged posting about horrific acts he may have participated in is not the first time the reality of her own failings as a family member have made news.
In December 2002, the body of Schlessinger’s estranged mother was found in her apartment months after she had died. Schlessinger’s critics claimed she was a hyporcrite “as she had often chastised listeners who said they had broken off contact with their families, calling them selfish.”
Update: The BRAD BLOG reported in September 2004 that Deryk Schlessinger was among the young GOP goons who were caught on tape roughing up protesters at the Republican Convention in New York.
