Daniel Walters was surprised to see an incoming call from Washington state Rep. Jenny Graham (R) on Aug. 27. The Spokane, Wash., journalist wrote a story that day about Graham sharing false articles on Facebook, including a story claiming that thousands of missing children are kept in dungeons and raped by demons.
But Walters was unable to pick up in time. When he called the state representative back, she unleashed a barrage of hateful insults.
“You c---------!” Graham said twice. “Don’t ever call me again.”
Before Walters could get some answers as to why Graham was upset, the line disconnected.
For days following the phone call, Graham took to Facebook, posting attacks against the reporter and calling his story false. On Monday, Walters wrote a follow-up piece in the Inlander, an alt-weekly newspaper in Spokane, fact-checking his earlier story and including the full recording of his interview with Graham, as well as the audio from a threatening voice mail she left him.
“What I was more concerned with was: Did we get anything wrong? Was there any sort of trust that we violated? Was there anything significantly unfair or inaccurate?” Walters said in an interview with The Washington Post.
Walters began reporting the story about Graham last month, when he noticed she had shared several articles from websites publishing false information and promoting theories also pushed by QAnon, a baseless right-wing conspiracy theory that Satan-worshiping pedophiles are plotting against President Trump and running a sex-trafficking ring.
Among the stories Graham shared were one falsely connecting vaccinations to autism on a website that promotes QAnon conspiracies, and another from a blog that includes a video claiming that Democrats are “possessed by demons” and “hate humanity,” Walters reported.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/09/15/jenny-graham-qanon-threaten-journalist/