FARGO – A Forum News Service story on a conflict between protesters and a counterprotester at Red River Women’s Clinic in downtown Fargo got the Jezebel treatment on Thursday morning, getting featured on the popular Gawker Media blog .
The original story, produced by WDAY’s Catherine Ross, highlights a protester named Nik Severson who has been regularly holding signs referring sarcastically to Satanic worship or ironically calling abortion protesters “Women’s Rights Experts.”
Severson’s presence is alarming to the anti-abortion protesters who routinely picket the clinic, the original story says, and one of those protesters feels like he’s being antagonized.
"He just wouldn't engage. He just kept saying we're oppressive white men who want to control women's lives and stuff,” Bartholomew Schumacher said in the original story. “I don't want that. I just want protection of the innocent."
“That’s a very interesting thing for Schumacher to say,” Jezebel's Anna Merlan writes, “because according to the City of Fargo’s sex offender registry, he is a level two sex offender, convicted of raping a female family member in August 2011. He is required to remain on the sex offender registry until 2039.”
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Jezebel’s post links to the city of Fargo’s sex offender registry and to a Grand Forks Herald article from 2010 reporting about charges against Bartholomew for raping, beating and binding a woma n.
The popular blog, part of the Gawker Media Group, regularly mixes news items around women’s issues with humorous commentary.
