Karen Mathews Davis, Revered Victim of Anti-Government Yahoos, Is Hate Hoaxer

08 Jun, 2017 by Dave Blount

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As much as social justice warriors enjoy indulging in hate hoaxes, these are not fun and games when innocent people get sent to jail for events that may never have occurred:

On June 1, Karen Mathews Davis pleaded guilty to composing fake death threats, mailing them to herself, then lying to federal agents. That fakery could land the 68-year-old in prison for five years, possibly longer if prosecutors take a second look at her career as the heroic victim of right-wing terrorists.

In 1990, she was elected clerk recorder of Stanislaus County, California.

In 1994, Karen Mathews, as she was then known, claimed that members of the Juris Christian Assembly, based in Modesto, had pressured her to remove a $416,000 IRS property tax lien. When she refused to do so, members of the JCA attacked her in her home on January 30, 1994, allegedly cutting her legs, back and neck, firing an unloaded pistol at her head, and then sodomizing her with the gun.

She offered at least four different versions of what happened.

From a photo lineup, Mathews picked out Roger Steiner of Baker City, Oregon. Police found no evidence that he had been 800 miles away in central California the night before and Steiner duly passed a polygraph test. Even so, he was arrested and along with eight others charged with the attack on Mathews.

The media did not provide much assistance in exposing the kangaroo court proceedings that followed.

The Los Angeles Times repeated Mathews' account of a fake pipe bomb and a bullet bearing her name. “It’s not just a crime against me,” she told the Times. “It’s really a much broader crime. It’s an attack on our whole system of government.” It was only a matter of time before Mathews became a celebrity among those who see right-wing terrorists under every rock.

Her lies were also amplified by a left-wing hate group called the Southern Poverty Law Center, by the Public Law Journal, and by the book The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement and the Radical Right by Daniel Levitas. In 2014 she wrote her own book, Terrorist in My Garage: Fighting Terrorism on the Home Front.

As the book’s website explains, the Juris Christian Assembly was “part of a wave of domestic terrorists that roared into the spotlight in the early nineties with the Waco siege and the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City.” Over time, “the mild-mannered 45-year-old mother of two and career public servant became the focus of the group’s ire.” And “when Mathews bravely—and legally—refused to accede to their outrageous demands, she was attacked in her garage, brutally beaten and sexually assaulted.”

How much of her harassment by what she calls “yahoos” is based on actual events is unknown. She has confessed to the court that she is under treatment for mental problems.

As for Roger Steiner, the anti-government villain in her story,

The authorities are on record that they will look at the 1997 case but no surprise that nothing emerged in the recent proceedings. Court officials are not eager to admit mistakes that might have sent an innocent man to prison. His accuser turns out to be an addled prevaricator but those who profess concern for those wrongly convicted have kept their distance. Steiner, 79, is old, male and white, hardly the profile of an accredited victim.

Please welcome Karen Mathews Davis to the Hate Hoax List.