Twitter Suspends Rush Limbaugh’s $900/Hour Fixer For Extortion, Harassment (UPDATE)

UPDATE: Glicklich’s account blinked on this evening and was promptly re-suspended. This is not a good development for Glicklich, who will be allowed to make a written appeal. Strike two!

Brian Glicklich, the professional troll and PR hack who fronts conservative blowhard Rush Limbaugh’s efforts to silence and intimidate the activists that have hurt his bottom line ever since the talk radio host’s misogynistic rant against Sandra Fluke in 2012, was suspended by Twitter last night. The action followed a series of complaints to the social media website about Glicklich’s harassment and insane behavior, but it may have been finally triggered by my own report late yesterday afternoon concerning this attempted extortion:

In the above tweet, Glicklich has ‘cybersquatted’ a web domain with my name in it and is implicitly threatening to use that website to smear me, affecting Google results for my name with false and defamatory information. (It would have to be false and defamatory because the truth about me would bore people to death.) The offer to give me the domain if I “behave for (a) year” is a clear attempt to silence my reporting on Limbaugh and the successes of the StopRush divestment effort. Although Glicklich is hardly the first person to try this kind of tactic on me, he is certainly the best-paid, charging upwards of $900 an hour through Sitrick and Company, a ‘reputation management’ firm where he is a partner.

If you are thinking “gee, this guy sounds like the worst PR expert ever,” you are not at all wrong, for Glicklich has consistently given his client awful advice ever since the StopRush movement began. His ham-handed, take-no-prisoners methods have played directly into the hands of activists; indeed, I am currently researching how his hostile approach to advertisers in 2012 led to the movement’s amazing success. What kind of publicist sounds off with ‘I’m rubber, you’re glue’ when confronted by their own possibly-felonious messaging? A really, really terrible and highly overpaid one, is who. When I tweeted about his extortion attempt yesterday, Glicklich responded like a third grader:

The extortion tweet was hardly the first example of Glicklich’s bizarre, inexplicable behavior. Indeed, the exhibits have been piling up for a year and especially in recent weeks. One month ago, Glicklich called a StopRush activist in the wee hours of the morning to rant in her ear about a third party she did not know, and whose name she had never heard before. His number was blocked, and he refused to identify himself, but it’s clear from his tweets that Glicklich made that phone call:

Days later, Glicklich also claimed to have a photograph of yet another StopRush activist with that same third party that he named during his early-morning phone call. This is a flat-out lie: she has never physically met the person in question. But the hits have just kept piling up. Last week, Glicklich became so upset at another StopRush activist that he published her name and address on Twitter to invite harassment, a clear violation of the network’s Terms of Service (TOS). What was her crime? Why, she wrote a Daily Kos diary and used the following photo from Glenn Beck’s Facebook page, which shows Glicklich getting married with some of his most famous clients — including Limbaugh — in attendance. (EDIT: we’ve moved the photo temporarily as a result of DMCA takedown/shakedown efforts by Mr. Glicklich.)

What could be causing this clear deterioration of Glicklich’s self-control? Why is his advice to his biggest client so consistently awful? These are questions I have been trying to answer in recent days, and the answers are coming soon. In the meantime, StopRush activists are celebrating the social media self-immolation of their chief antagonist. Stay tuned!