CHRIS RICKERT
A Racine man has been charged with felony stalking for sending a number of increasingly aggressive emails to Wisconsin Supreme Court Chief Justice Jill Karofsky.
The nine emails Ryan T. Thornton, 37, of Racine, sent Karofsky between Aug. 2 and Oct. 1 refer to her as a derogatory term for a person with intellectual disabilities, advise her to “eject yourself from office” and threaten to make her home address public, among other things, according to a criminal complaint filed Monday.
They were sent in conjunction with about 15 emails and 70-plus threatening calls to the state’s Office of Lawyer Regulation, which handles complaints about Wisconsin lawyers and judges and whose decisions are ultimately subject to the approval of the state Supreme Court, the complaint says.
Investigators found that Thornton was upset with a lawyer who represented him in a 2019 criminal case and unhappy that the OLR had not taken action against him.
According to the complaint:
State Capitol Police talked to Thornton in August, when they asked him to stop contacting the OLR and Karofsky, and Thornton agreed to do so.
He didn’t, and Karofsky told police that she felt intimidated by the emails to the extent that she was sometimes afraid to get her mail from her front door. She said that she asked for police escorts to her seats at recent Milwaukee Brewers and Wisconsin Badgers games.
Karofsky told police that she’d received numerous threats since first becoming a Dane County Circuit Judge in 2017, but “that she had never had someone continuously send emails to her after being told to stop by police.”
In a difficult-to-follow interview with Capitol Police at the Racine County Jail on Oct. 9, Thornton said the OLR was staffed by a “bunch of criminals,” complained that his former attorney had an 11-page manifesto concerning him, and complained that OLR Director Timothy Samuelson and Karofsky have a 250-page appendix related to his case.
He also said he believes there is a state conspiracy to drive up property taxes and that hospitals and probate courts are “getting paid for people to die.”
“‘Tell Jill, man, she better start running or something for the hills of the feds because it’s a conspiracy,’” he told police.
Online court records show Thornton’s only past felony conviction was for strangulation and suffocation in a domestic abuse case from 2019 in Racine County. His bail in the stalking case was set at $85,000 on Monday.
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