sandAlfoan

sandAlfoan is the handle used here as the canonical name for the second person in the 2010 campaign against David "Lefty" Schlesinger (see the sockpuppets overview and the Lozza timeline). He is a different person from Brandon Lozza; he cycled through many handles across several platforms and years, pasting the same dossier under each. His claimed legal identity is Schlesinger’s assertion and is unverified.

Provenance marks: “per Schlesinger” = from Schlesinger, the campaign’s target, not a neutral source; “assessment” = our inference; “no source yet” = not backed by a retrieved document.

Handles

• SandalFoan / “sandala lafoan” on LWN (2009)
• sandAlfoan on the Phoronix forum (2010)
• ZQB in the comments of Lozza’s boycottlefty blog (2010)
• el_condor_pasa on the OpenBytes blog (2010)
• Melanie Saffka on The Ralph Retort (2015)
• “victim of david lefty schlesinger aka stonemirror” on Historia Discordia (2016)
• “Sandy”, as Schlesinger addresses him

The spelling varies; the persona does not. The same package (the Victor T. Cypert statement, the Kathy Sutphen emails, a claimed count of victims) is pasted under each, and el_condor_pasa links back to the LWN comment, tying the names together (assessment).

Claimed identity

Schlesinger claims sandAlfoan is one man who changed his legal name twice: born Jason Christopher Hughes, renamed Manuel Luis Arsupial, then Michael Rudra Nath, harassing him since about 2003 (per Schlesinger; the real identity is otherwise no source yet):

…obtaining a legal (sorta: he actually committed perjury) name change to MICHAEL RUDRA NATH from his previously-changed name (also under circumstances of perjury) of MANUEL LUIS ARSUPIAL, the name he’d assumed after his birth name of JASON CHRISTOPHER HUGHES went south for him…

Cross-platform attestation, and the method

sandAlfoan’s persona predates Lozza’s involvement and shows a consistent tactic: injecting the same reputational attack into unrelated venues. On LWN in December 2009, under “GNOME ponders its code of conduct,” a subscriber (alex) posted a mild, on-topic remark about Planet GNOME feeds:

The “Planet” concept is a nice one […] Looking at it today however was a lot more interesting as 90%+ of the posts seem in some way Gnome related.

A guest as SandalFoan answered that unrelated comment with a dossier of attacks on Schlesinger, the same grievance that would surface on Phoronix two months later, “stonemirror,” Kathy Sutphen, a feud “since at least 1996”:

David “Lefty” Schlesinger aka ‘stonemirror the great and terrible’ (his own chosen appellation) has been behaving in a vicious and literally demented manner online and in person since at least 1996 […] began with the stalking of Kathy Sutphen, which is well documented.

A third party, the Kubuntu-forum moderator “GreyGeek,” treated him as Schlesinger’s long-standing foe and asked whether he was the bookseller Schlesinger had quarrelled with:

Are you the book seller that he had a quarrel with?

LWN’s editor removed it as off-topic:

There will be no more of this here. I am getting tired of people using LWN to throw darts at each other.

The same dossier reappears elsewhere under other names. On OpenBytes in June 2010, el_condor_pasa pasted the identical package and linked back to the LWN comment:

Everything I posted is documented fully, in Schlesinger’s own words and in the testimony of his many, many victims. The count is approaching twenty now […] Again, this is all meticulously documented.

It kept resurfacing for years. In March 2015, during GamerGate, The Ralph Retort reran it (reframing Schlesinger as an “anti-GamerGate SJW”), with a commenter Melanie Saffka posting the familiar material. In 2016, on the Robert Anton Wilson / Discordian history site Historia Discordia (whose editor notes Schlesinger himself made an “OHO card” for RAW in the mid-1990s, placing both men in the occult-publishing milieu the “bookseller” and “occult e-books” threads come from), a commenter styled “victim of david lefty schlesinger aka stonemirror” posted a line-by-line rebuttal that lists Brandon Lozza among Schlesinger’s “victims”:

I have the testimony of Schlesinger’s victims - Brandon Lozza, Aaron Rosessto, Wan Hughes, Kathy Sutphen, and many more.

That he counts Lozza a fellow victim, a separate person, is itself evidence the two are not the same (assessment). The method, an unprompted reputational attack dropped into an unrelated discussion and shut down by the moderator, is the harassment pattern itself, a disruptive smear dressed up as a campaign for justice (assessment). It continued past these venues: in 2011 the same kind of stalking allegations against Schlesinger resurfaced in comments on a blog post by Jillian C. York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Writing style

sandAlfoan writes in manic, profane, absurdist invective rather than argument:

cuckoo KOO KOO […] seven cuckoos crow for the dismal and rabid KOOK

His own posts are not occult in tone; the only occult note is the insult “kook occultist” aimed at Schlesinger. The one genuinely occult-flavoured posting, a fake-Necronomicon chant, is from the unresolved Schlesianer handle, not sandAlfoan, and is not evidence about his voice. This register is the main stylistic contrast with Lozza, who is clipped and legalistic (assessment).

His accusations against Schlesinger (all contested)

In the readable posts, the lurid accusations against Schlesinger come from sandAlfoan (and his ZQB handle): that he called Richard Stallman a rapist; that he was a pedophile, pornographer, drug abuser, and “dildo vendor”; that he stole and published nude photos, pulled a marriage license from court records, and stalked Kathy Sutphen and the accuser’s family; and that he ran the sites boycottboycottnovell.com and extinct-marsupial.org. Representative:

marketing chump, alleged pedophile, grandiose sociopathic liar, incompetent software developer, part time DILDO VENDOR, stalker, thief, kook occultist, mega-Troll, Methodist and madman megalomaniac

He crossed a line stealing nude photos of me and publishing them […] his scouring of civil court documents to acquire my marriage license, etc. He used this information to harass and stalk my entire extended family including my now deceased grandmother.

examine the testimony of Kathy Sutphen, who Lefty stalked nearly into a hospital with his vicious extortion demands and menacing, threatening emails.

As ZQB, on Lozza’s own blog, he carried the “dildo vendor” motif:

ask Schlesinger about it, as a professional part time dildo salesman… He could probably even get you a good deal on one at his “Intima Girl Old Time Country Dildo Hut…”

Schlesinger names both sandAlfoan and Lozza as the source of the pedophile accusation against him:

who’s alleged that I’m a pedophile, exactly? Aside from you and Brandon Lozza, I mean.

Schlesinger’s counter-claims and rebuttals

Schlesinger makes his own claims about sandAlfoan (his account, not independently verified): that the man fraudulently registered the domain stonemirror.org with bogus contact details, filled it with pro-NAMBLA material, and demanded $3,500 for it; that he pirated occult and esoteric e-books; and that he falsely described a Nagoya graduate student, a family guest, as a “Tokyo prostitute”:

I have maintained the domain stonemirror.net for close to a decade. A few years ago, I happened to mention in my blog, prior to going to bed one evening, that I thought I’d register the domain stonemirror.org as well. He fraudulently, all of the contact information was bogus, registered that domain before I’d woken up, put my name all over it, filled it up with pro-NAMBLA material, and demanded that I pay him $3500 for control of the domain.

By the way, are you still peddling those CDs of “rare and esoteric eBooks”? The ones that the Estate of Robert Anton Wilson, New Falcon Press, the Estate of Christopher Hyatt, Fulghur Press, Gareth Semple and Xoanon Publishing are after you over for your ongoing infringement of their copyrights?

(stonemirror.net is Schlesinger’s own long-held domain and “stonemirror” is a nickname sandAlfoan used for him; the fraudulently registered one was the different stonemirror.org.)

Schlesinger’s rebuttals to the personal smears: that he is Buddhist, not “Methodist,” and 53 and healthy, not the infirm old man described:

I am, in fact, 53 and in excellent health. I did a 140 km. walking pilgrimage over the course of a week this past summer in Tokushima Prefecture on the island of Shikoku in Japan, visiting 23 Buddhist temples…

The Victor T. Cypert relay

The Victor T. Cypert statement, a sworn-statement-style post claiming Schlesinger stalked Cypert around 2003-2004, was posted by sandAlfoan, not from an account of its own, which is why the Cypert question collapses into the sandAlfoan-versus-Lozza question (see the overview):

My name is Victor T. Cypert. In 2003 - 2004 I worked as the resident computer programmer for the American Federation of Musicians in Hollywood, CA (Local 47.) […] If you need an affidavit, a sworn statement, or some other document attesting to what transpired between myself and Mr. Schlesinger, I will be more than happy to provide one.

A search during this research found no independent trace of Victor T. Cypert (no source yet).

His own claimed grievance

sandAlfoan casts himself as a long-standing victim of Schlesinger, with a grievance predating Lozza’s Mono quarrel:

why dont' you dare to criticise mono, then you can be a VICTIM of Lefty and find your personal photos from 1998 published on his harassment websites!

I have ignored Lefty for years on end […] his insanity has amalmagated “me” with the dozen or so other mentally ill bloggers he harrasses- chiefly one self styled ‘aktiophi’