In an effort to avoid answering and/or to discredit the questions I have asked about his professional claims Earl de Blonville has disparaged me in many creative ways. They include claiming I am all different flavors of psychopath, that I am dying of prostate cancer, a failure in business and my personal life, a cuckold, an “Aspy” an OCD sufferer an embarrassment to my family and much more. Of all these imaginary “facts” cited by Earl, the most bizarre is Earl’s obsession with the notion that my behavior is because I am a closeted gay man (a “closet queer” in Earl’s own crude words) and my behavior stems from a homo-erotic fascination with Earl and Ripley Davenport. Earl flatters himself incessantly, relentlessly, every time he writes about himself on his vanity websites so it’s creepy but in character for him to imagine he, at 70, is someone’s lust interest.
But what the public should find disturbing about Earl’s obsession with this canard is that he wields it like a derogatory cudgel. Someone needs to tell Earl that in 2020, sneering put-downs like “closet queer” are grossly sexist and homophobic. Like ranting at a mirror, the name-calling indicts the speaker, not the target of the smear. As it happens, I am happily married to the same woman for 40 years. But Earl’s put-downs beg the question: what if I WERE gay, why would being gay make a journalistic interest in Earl’s fraudulent career any less valid? Is it Earl’s view that any LGBQT journalist is automatically suspect in their motives? Only older white, straight men can document, analyze, question, and publish?
“Aspy” and “OCD” are also part of Earl’s repertoire of disparaging put-downs. Earl has repeatedly claimed that I have something called “High-end Asperger’s” and that makes me incapable of empathy. There is no such thing as “High-end Asperger’s”, full stop. Earl plucked that term from his butt. Don’t take my word for it, ask Susan Hyslop of Autism Spectrum Australia (Aspect). Susan also explains how wrong using “Aspy” as a put down is. Here’s how Earl sees people with Asperger’s.
“But not you, Mr Madin, because you are not sane, are you? Far from it. Your repetitive behaviour, basically a one-note opera, has in my case stretched over 7.5 years. That obsessive behaviour, repeated everywhere, clearly marks you as driven by Aspergers Syndrome. And repetition is exactly what your type of Aspys do, because they have limited intellectual comprehension and are easily addicted to repetitive behaviours. Not only repetitive, but your behaviour also reveals another classic Aspy characteristic, a complete lack of empathy for others, making you appear to some to be an inhuman monster. “
In 1984 Earl was the travel companion of a refined older gentlemen, a practitioner of music and divinity, Knight of Malta and OBE. They traveled together through Europe and to Crete to camp and hike. One has to wonder what that older gentleman would make of Earl’s crude, casual use of “closet queer”. (Crete was the site of Earl’s triumphant “First Australian Solo Ascent of Mt. Ida in Winter”. It’s a queer claim (pun intended) in that the climb is a walk up and how would Earl know if he was the first Australian to do it?) Read the first example of Earl’s obsession here, from nearly 10 years ago.
Here are some of Earl’s emails from late May, 2020 which all refer to me.
More Twitter selections from Earl. At least Earl and I share a common disgust with many politicians, including Donald Trump. But the best Earl can offer is homophobic sneering and grotesque food references.
Also of interest, Earl’s use of a device right out of Trump’s playbook, the “I’m reliably informed” which suggests valid knowledge while never naming sources (Trump prefers “many people say”). Earl employs this throughout his correspondence citing unnamed experts, psychologists, police officers, etc.
Finally and ironically, Earl touts the emergence of “free journos” who will set the “inverted paradigm” right. In fact, I am a “free journo”, an unaffiliated researcher using the internet and public sources to document Earl’s long career of bloviation and fraudulent self-promotion. What has Earl to show for all the websites and the failed grand schemes? A Twitter account, an OAP check and a place (owned by his girlfriend) to sleep. Talk about “a forgotten male suffering relevancy-deficiency syndrome”! Shout on, Earl, the mirror has all day.
As part of documenting Earl’s narcissism and lack of introspection, I collected over two dozen (but not all) of the carefully curated headshots that Earl has used in just the last ten years in his self-promotional web pages. Earl changes his headshots on his Academia.edu, earldeblonville.com, Southern Cross University, LinkedIn etc. pages far more often than he changes the text. If you have a web page, ask yourself how often you change your headshot.
But for a narcissist, the only answer to someone posting a collection that starkly illustrates an obsession with your own looks, is to conclude that it is an act of homo-erotic interest. And unlike the casual narcissism of “selfies” so prevalent on Facebook, Earl’s headshots are carefully staged, posed, selected and even photo-shopped for maximum effect. For a man urgently striving to save the oceans, Earl has a lot of time to gussy up his images like this and this and this and this. And the pièce de résistance! (where Earl had his beret-wearing photo taken in a Melbourne restaurant, then photo-shopped himself into the Arctic).