For more than a decade, Paul Trummel has peppered online forums and his own Web sites, ContraCabal.com and ContraCabal.org, with spiteful rants against everyone from professors at his graduate school to administrators of the retirement home in Seattle where he lived before a judge tried to shut him up by throwing him in jail.

Far from shutting Trummel up, the 111-day stint in the King County Jail -- "in the same section as the Green River serial killer," as his postings and press releases chronicling his plight have reveled in pointing out -- turned him into an international cause celebre among free speech advocates. Judge James Doerty, who sent Trummel up the river in 2002, meanwhile, became Public Enemy No. 1 of online journalism.

Trummel, a British-born retiree who in the past has written for academic journals and is a card-carrying member of two international press associations, claims that he was gallantly pursuing a journalistic investigation of assorted abuses at his government-subsidized retirement home, called Council House, when he ran afoul of Judge Doerty.

Administrators and several dozen residents told a different story in affidavits and testimony presented to the court. In their view, Trummel was a scary stalker who intimidated and verbally abused residents. His "investigative" techniques included lurking outside apartment doors in the middle of the night listening for sounds emanating from within and summoning elderly women to his apartment for tape-recorded interrogations, under threat of being publicly pilloried if they declined.

He reported his findings about residents and administrators on his Web site and in a newsletter called Disconnections, a play on the name of the in-house publication, Connections. He posted his scandal sheet throughout Council House and slipped it under residents' doors, in defiance of a house rule that permitted posting of notices only on a designated bulletin board.

The administrators of Council House eventually went to court to obtain an anti-harassment order to keep him at bay. Trummel insisted in an interview by e-mail that there is not a "scintilla of truth" to any of the allegations leveled against him. As for the complaints about his conduct in affidavits presented to the court by Council House residents, Trummel asserted that "thugs" in the retirement home's administration "coerced more than 40 senior citizens to perjure themselves."

Doerty didn't buy that story. He obliged Council House, effectively evicting Trummel by ordering him to stay 500 feet away from the building and stop contacting residents and administrators. Even more worrisome, as far as free speech advocates were concerned, Judge Doerty ordered Trummel to remove from his Web site "personal identifying information" including names, addresses and phone numbers of the targets of his attacks.

Trummel repeatedly defied Doerty's orders and ultimately moved an "uncensored" version of his Web site to a new domain name, ContraCabal.org, which he launched from a server in the Netherlands in an attempt to evade the jurisdiction of the Seattle court. Fed up with a defendant whom he at one point called a "mean old man who becomes angry and vicious when he doesn't get his own way," Doerty sent Trummel to jail for contempt.

Though unrepresented in the early stages of litigation, Trummel now has a high-powered team of lawyers working on his appeal, seeking damages and attorneys fees from Council House and legal vindication from the courts. His lead appellate attorney, Elena Luisa Garella, previously represented a man who protested alleged police misconduct in Kirkland, Washington, by posting addresses, home phone number numbers and Social Security numbers of police officers on his Web site.

A Washington state court of appeal heard oral arguments in Trummel's case last November and could issue its decision at any time. But since both sides have signaled an intention to take an adverse ruling to the state Supreme Court, the legal dispute is likely to continue for the rest of this year and possibly beyond before it is resolved.

Free speech advocates and defenders of online journalism have already staked out their positions on the controversy. They have been virtually unanimous in denouncing Judge Doerty for his perceived frontal assault on the rights of freelance investigators to post their findings and opinions on the Internet. Trummel himself has been lionized by some online pundits. But others have rendered a decidedly more mixed verdict on his role in the case -- and his place in the pantheon of pioneers of online journalism.

Doerty the Villain

Judge Doerty made himself an easy target for advocates of the press by committing what appears to have been a slip of the pen in an early round of the litigation. In a ruling in 2001, he asserted that Trummel's claim to be a journalist was "bogus" because he "isn't employed by anyone but himself." Judge Doerty later backed away from that dubious attempt to define who is and who isn't a journalist, asserting in a June 17, 2002 hearing that Trummel deserved to be jailed as a recalcitrant stalker, whether he was a journalist or not. That question was in fact irrelevant, the judge said. "Even if Mr. Trummel was a salaried employee of a world-class newspaper and the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, he would not be able to behave the way he behaved at Council House," Doerty declared.

Doerty didn't correct himself soon enough. Word spread quickly through cyberspace that a judge in Seattle had declared open season on writers who were self-employed and who had the audacity to publish their work on their own Web sites. Judge Doerty was inundated with hostile e-mails from those he dismissed as misguided defenders of press liberties and assorted "cybercreeps and Web tabloids." Some of the e-mails were so threatening that he required those who attended subsequent hearings to pass through metal detectors before entering his courtroom.

His orders against Trummel, which focused mostly on threatening conduct, didn't interfere in the least with anyone's First Amendment rights, he insisted. Trummel "was not ordered to quit writing or to quit publishing in any way," Doerty said. He was, however, ordered to stop publishing information that threatened the privacy of the targets of his invective because, as Doerty saw it, that was part and parcel of the assaultive conduct. "The idea that a protective order cannot forbid certain types of speech is absurd," he explained.

Some of the "cybercreeps" themselves may have overstepped the bounds of acceptable speech with some of their messages, he added. "I cannot put these into the record, because they are under review by court security. E-mails are like cell phone messages. Law enforcement finds the sender every single time," he warned, hinting that the senders, too, might suffer their idol's fate.

Trummel as Martyr

Trummel, indeed, became a hero to online gadflies everywhere. The Web postings that landed him in jail were mirrored on other sites, such as the one maintained by Vicki Richman, who fought a long-running, bitter and ultimately unsuccessful battle to stave off eviction from a Columbia University-owned apartment in New York City.

A National Writer's Union member in New York ran FreePaulTrummel.com during the heyday of the battle in Doerty's court. That domain name has since been taken over by a porn site, no doubt drawn by its heavy traffic, though Trummel has perpetuated the old site on ContraCabal.com.

The American Civil Liberties Union, the American Society of Journalists and Authors and other press associations both filed amicus briefs on his behalf. So have the two press groups that count him as a member, the International Federation of Journalists, based in Brussels, and the London-based National Union of Journalists.

Claire Safran, chair of ASJA's First Amendment Committee, was careful in an interview to explain that the organization jumped into the case in defense of the principle at stake, not necessarily of Trummel himself. "We defend freedom of speech even if it's speech we hate," she said. Indeed, the speech that Trummel has strewn through cyberspace for years has often been contemptible.

The chief target of his wrath used to be Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute of Troy, N.Y., where he tried but failed to earn a doctorate in rhetoric. Out of his outrage over that perceived affront, ContraCabal.com was born. In addition to publishing numerous incendiary diatribes on his own Web site, he has also haunted online forums such as a technical writers list in which he posted a typically rambling screed lambasting one professor after another as inane, illiterate and "a notorious drunk," and the students in the graduate department as a pack of sycophants.

Trashing Council House, its administrators and residents who sided with management in its case against him has been Trummel's all-consuming passion in recent years. His writings bear some of the trappings of journalism. He is careful to sprinkle his accusations with the word "allegedly," as in his assertion that the management allegedly defrauded the state and federal governments prior to the death of resident. And when he contends that the cause of death was "homicide by abuse," he helpfully provides a link to the pertinent Washington state statute. His assertion that the Council House's chief administrator "needs psychiatric diagnosis for a dangerous sociopathic condition," isn't a reckless accusation, he assures readers. He obtained verification from a cross section of residents and a professional counselor, and even checked American Psychiatric Association manuals before settling on that assessment.

In defense of his Web postings, Trummel conceded that he eschews political correctness, "which I consider self-censorship and a societal sop." He's not averse to using "invective" but it "has a definite purpose grounded in logic and reason." As such, he said, it is akin to "iconoclasm or satire, a time-honored genre."

Trummel's long, venomous electronic-paper trail hasn't deterred his defenders from treating him with the utmost professional respect. The brief filed Oct. 15, 2003, by lawyers for ASJA, which calls itself the nation's oldest organization of independent writers, asserted that Doerty's treatment of Trummel amounted to a "flagrant attack on the rights of all freelance writers." The brief singled out the judge's assertion that Trummel wasn't a journalist because he was self-employed. "In none of the fifty states of these United States is there a licensing requirement for journalists. Nor are there other legal or quasi-legal requirements." Some of the most important writers in the nation's history, including Tom Paine and I.F. Stone, were self-published, ASJA's brief declared. "The act of writing -- whether or not the writer is a member of any association or union -- is sufficient. There is no person and no organization that can decide who is or is not a journalist."

One of Trummel's chief online defenders, Declan McCullagh, who was Washington bureau chief for Wired News from 1998 to 2002 and now is chief political correspondent for CNET's News.com, seconded ASJA's broad definition of journalist. McCullagh, who on his Web log, politechbot.com, has portrayed Trummel as an intrepid reporter in peril, said all "folks who like to think of themselves as professional full-time salaried journalists" should speak up for Trummel.

"It's very difficult to draw clean lines between who is and who isn't a journalist and the Internet compounds that problem," he explained in an interview. "So it's in our best interest to take as broad a view [of journalism] as possible. If we start saying that blogs and authors who don't have a certain number of hits per day, or freelance writers that haven't sold any stories in a month, aren't covered by the full force of the First Amendment, that creates a very slippery slope," McCullagh said. "I see absolutely no problem with saying that anyone can be a journalist. And that is in fact true. The First Amendment was not created just for large media organizations. If I understand the history of the late 1700s properly, it was created so that anyone could have a voice."

Others aren't so sure that freedom of the press in America would be imperiled if a character like Trummel were excluded from the ranks of journalists. That, after all, wouldn't mean he couldn't avail himself of the protections of the First Amendment. It bestows the right of free speech on every American, not just journalists.

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, a group that provides legal assistance to journalists in legal trouble, regularly has to make judgment calls about who is and who isn't a journalist. Lucy Dalglish, the committee's executive director, said the Internet has made that process a bit more difficult by lowering the barriers to entry, increasing the number of people who can do journalism.

That has compelled those who must make a judgment call to look beyond tangible signs of membership in the trade, such as the reputation of the employer or the size of the publication's circulation. But ultimately that simply serves to focus attention on what has always been the most important criteria: the writer's intent. The Internet hasn't changed the nature of that assessment, said Dalglish.

"If someone calls and says they work for a Web site, and it covers a variety of issues, and has good distribution and there is a broad base of people interested in what they have to say, and they take an independent view of the issues, then yes, I would consider that journalism and I probably could provide assistance for you," she said.

"But if you have a Web site that is targeted at a specific group of people and the sole purpose of the Web site is retribution against those people, I don't think that is journalism. It doesn't mean you're not a journalist. It means that that particular product you're working on is not journalism. In other words, I look at what your purpose is."

Trummel contacted the committee with a plea for assistance. He didn't pass Dalglish's test and so she turned him down. He didn't take well to being rebuffed. "He thinks I'm the Antichrist," said Dalglish. "He accused me of being a madam and said I have a bunch of little interns who are prostitutes. He keeps threatening to sue me for libel although he hasn't told me quite what we did that libeled him."

Even ASJA, despite advancing the notion in Trummel's case that anyone who writes is a journalist, is considerably more discriminating when it comes to deciding who will be admitted to its ranks. Are Trummel's postings on ContraCabal.com a sufficient achievement to earn him membership in ASJA? "Based on what I know, I don't think so," Brett Harvey, ASJA's executive director, said.

Trummel's Legal Legacy

Despite the uproar over Doerty's attempt to drum Trummel out of the corps of journalists, his own attorney, Garella, agrees with the judge that in the final analysis that issue is irrelevant. "Whether Mr. Trummel is a journalist or an angry tenant doesn't really matter," she said. "He gets the same rights under the laws as anyone else. And we all have the same free speech rights."

She also acknowledged that if some of the allegations about Trummel's actual conduct were proven to be true in a fair trial in which he had an opportunity to confront his accusers, an anti-harrasment order might be justified. But no such proceeding ever occurred, she said. "Judge Doerty immediately took the position that everything Paul did was harassment and threw the book at him before there was ever a trial." Moreover, the orders went beyond restraining his conduct and suppressed his right to communicate.

"I don't think you can ever use any kind of injunctive force to preclude people from engaging in free speech activities and posting complaints about an apartment house on the Internet or complaining to authorities because an apartment violated various state and federal regulations," Garella said.

"It could be very uncivil and impolite behavior and yet that doesn't mean a court could stop them from engaging in activities that are protected. That's where the judge was wrong. He is saying this is so impolite and rude and disturbing to people that I'm going to shut you down and stop you from saying what you want to say. He simply can't do that." The state anti-harassment law he invoked "is intended to stop behavior, not speech," she said.

The lead attorney in the appeal for Council House, Thane D. Somerville, agrees to an extent. Trummel's conduct was always more disturbing to the administrators and tenants than the rants he has posted on his Web site, the attorney explained in an interview last fall with MSNBC.com. Somerville said he would like the appeal court to uphold the Doerty's restriction on publishing names "because we believe ... that also adds to the harassment." But the most important parts of the anti-harassment order are the provisions keeping Trummel away from the residents of Council House, Somerville said.

Garella said she plans to appeal an affirmation of any part of the anti-harrassment order to the state Supreme Court. But if the appellate court restores his right to publish his screeds without judicial edit, some of his fervent online defenders may conclude that they have marched with him about as far as they need to go.