For about eleven months spanning 2009 and 2010, I coached a runner from Massachusetts named Kim Duclos, during which time Duclos qualified for the 2012 Olympic Marathon Trials and improved her personal bests dramatically. After she paid me for the first two months, I agreed to coach her for free because of running-club connections and the fact that she was basically broke. (So was I in those days.) At the end of that period, she was having personal difficulties, and after dropping out of the Chicago Marathon, she plain ghosted me. Life went on.
In the summer of 2013, having missed the Olympic Trials the previous year, Duclos got back in touch with me and vaguely apologized, asking for a second chance and sounding upbeat about a comeback. I agreed to work with her again, but told her this time I would need to be paid. She promised that this would happen. It never did, and the rest of 2014 consisted of occasional exchanges in which I would ask her specifics about her running and she would change the subject to the alleged perversions of her boyfriend and life-funder. Eventually, in January of 2014, I told her that our professional relationship was over.
Though this was really a mere formality, Duclos reacted as if I had ruined her life. She immediately began spreading rumors within our former mutual running club that I had gone on a bender and threatened her. She spent the next several months littering running forums and even Reddit with falsehoods, posing as various people whom I had supposedly taken money from without delivering them any coaching. She exploited the fact that I had a known drinking problem, greatly exaggerating the legal problems I got myself into as a result and doing everything in her power to make sure I would lose what she believed was my only source of rent-paying income—Internet coaching.
Then, that September, she convinced her caregiver/boyfriend/trust-funder to move to Boulder, where I already was, and where she proceeded to redouble her frantic, anonymous ruination campaign. She started a blog the next spring devoted almost entirely to her fixation with Kevin Beck, whom she named without naming. (She later deleted the whole thing, but not before I made a mirror copy on Blogspot.) Throughout 2015, she trumpeted announcements about being enrolled at the University of Colorado and pursuing a computer science degree, another lie. She even claimed to be the owner of an imaginary company called KSD Tech Solutions that had existed since 2002.
Throughout this time, I stayed publicly quiet, but collected various screenshots and had multiple exchanges with others whom Duclos had sucked into her vortex of unfounded hate. Then, in February 2016, I posted a page to my website containing an explanation of everything that had gone on since the 2009 day I had started coaching Duclos, including the aforementioned screenshots and other evidence of her malfeasance. I linked this to a public post on my Facebook page, knowing Duclos would soon see it.
A few nights later, I got a call from the Boulder Police Department asking me where I had been that afternoon. The reason? Someone named Kim Duclos had accused me of threatening her from a pick-up truck. As it happens, Duclos had reacted to my exposure of her calamitous undertakings by losing her squash, calling the cops, and inventing a story about me hectoring her from a truck that day while she was running near her apartment. Why she decided on a kind of vehicle she knows I've never owned has never been clear.
During this willful, conscious provision of a false report to a police officer, the female officer listening to this account of imaginaty harasment encouraged Duclos to seek a restraining order against me on Monday morning. I was surprised that she did, and even showed up for the court hearing, because that hearing was assured of being a disaster for her. I had an alibi for the time of day the nonexistent truck incident “took place”—an outcome Duclos was weirdly unprepared for—and her whole story about our history was flimsier than soaked Kleenex.
The only reason the judge didn’t slap her with lying under oath is that this virtually never happens in basic restraining-order cases in which one of the parties is clearly a loon with a grudge, but probably not actually dangerous to the other party (not living together, no romantic history, etc.).
The judge instructed Duclos to stop torching me online while essentially admitting there was no way to prevent her or anyone from being an Internet dirtbag.
And nothing really changed.
Duclos spent the next few years lying about her running and education and jobs and me and everything else, then deleting these likely drunken offerings after numerous people had already downloaded them.
She and her fella moved last year, apparently to San Francisco. But since 2017, Duclos has provided some charming moments.
Such as: If you’re struggling, get over it.
Just as a general indicator of this person’s cognitive processes:
This is Duclos speculating about me having no income and waiting for my girlfriend’s mother to pass away so that she and I could have the house to ourselves, a theme she visited consistently over the years.
And here’s a projection-laden tale of her own personal finances:
It goes on and on and on. Like Lorenz and Strout, Duclos takes out her demons on whoever or whatever is convenient, but she reserves special poison for other women. This was a theme throughout our coaching relationship.
I’m guessing Duclos has forgotten all about this magnificently falsified curriculum vitae. Since that page is likely to disappear within an hour of the posting of this article, you can view it on the Wayback Machine. Duclos never got a degree from C.U. and most everything else on her slate of claimed achievements and skills is arrant nonsense.
When I decided to delete my personal website last year, I deleted along with it almost all of my published Kim Duclos-related material, although you can suffer through portions of the audio of our mutual court appearance here. This was basically an act of mercy combined with a test: Would Duclos lose her obsession with me if I pretended she had never existed?
It seems not. Duclos’ Twitter feed, which I hadn’t seen for over a year until yesterday, consists, hilariously, of the retweeting of output from people I have a habit of trashing, often right after I have published something about them. I say “hilariously” not because of the quasi-stalking factor, which isn’t funny at all, but because Duclos was quick to establish her starkly non-Wokish bona fides early in the previous presidential administration.
I live in a fantasy world where Kim Duclos offers a sincere-sounding apology to the various people she’s targeted, mostly Lize Brittin, and the whole thing falls into the dustbin of unfortunate pairings between humans who didn’t turn out to play well together. That is not going to happen.
But while a nutjob perpetrating an unfounded personal smear can be a manageable event in one’s life, watching as America’s journalists have adopted precisely the same tactics as Kim Duclos is something else. You shouldn’t have to have been a target of this kind of behavior to understand that is has no place in civil society, much less in the field of journalism. Yet not only is gaslighting like this never punished when it comes from the Wokish, it is encouraged and celebrated.
I know I keep justifying my focus on the systematic misdeeds of the media by pointing out what an obvious problem this represents for the entire world, but there will always be a strong personal driver. People are allowed to screw up in human ways, and I can be as good about forgiveness and overlooking imperfections and honest mistakes as anyone else. But this life-upending shit? Either it goes away, and people start answering for their nonstop lies, or I get noisier and noisier until people start paying the price for their actions in other ways.
So far, I have been nothing but my better self on this blog and off it, compared to the range of available options. Maybe I’ll be able to take a breather from these “attacks,” but only if the real patriarchy--the spineless, mindless cretins controlling the bulk of the culture-wars conversation—starts cleaning up its collective act.