Rand Paul's CIA-Linked Data Mining Backer (And "Psychological Kidnapping" at Stanford)

Ellie Clougherty, "psychologically kidnapped and raped" at Stanford.

NYT has an extremely extended feature piece where you can learn more about the relationship between Ellie Clougherty, while she was a student at Stanford, and billionaire Joe Lonsdale. her mentor while she was at the University, then any well-adjusted person could possibly want to know.

If NYT would had covered the claims that Saddam Hussein had WMDs with as much research, the US likely would have never gone to war against Iraq.

We learn, for example, these details:

After sightseeing in Rome, Lonsdale and Clougherty were together in the hotel room they were sharing when she started dressing for evening Mass. Lonsdale came up behind her and kissed her, touching her neck and hair and telling her she was beautiful. She had told him she was a virgin. Both agree they had sex...


Growing up in the suburbs of Fairfax County, Virginia, Clougherty thought at one point about becoming a nun. She set that idea aside by age 15 as she became interested in neuroscience. By then she was also a professional model...

 After meeting in New York, Clougherty and Lonsdale struck up an intermittent, bantering email correspondence. Lonsdale mentioned that he had a serious girlfriend. But when Clougherty went back to Stanford in the fall of 2011 for her junior year, he asked her to meet him at a Palo Alto bar for a drink. “I’d love to get together and learn more about your ambitions,” he wrote...

Clougherty’s emails to Lonsdale welcomed his attention. “HAPPY VALENTINES DAY JOE LONSDALE!” she wrote. “I hope to spend more time with you in the near future! Your kindness, integrity, desire to make the world a better place and willingness/confidence to make it happen is severely unique and an incredible thing to witness.” ...

Joe Lonsdale and Ellie Clougherty in Rome, March 2012.

[After Rome], When Clougherty got back to campus in April, she had a newly glamorous life. Lonsdale sent cars to pick her up at her dorm so she could meet him in San Francisco....

Around the same time, Anne [Clougherty 's mother] was emailing with Lonsdale about his plans to buy a new house. During that summer, she came out to look at real estate with the couple and attended the wedding of Lonsdale’s father. Lonsdale’s younger brother and other relatives complained that Anne was inserting herself into every corner of his life, and worried that she and Clougherty were after his wealth. But he brushed them off. “They thought I was a naïve guy screwing up, but I was in love,” he said...

Lonsdale spent Christmas with Clougherty at her family’s home. They fought about a number of things, including the fact that he didn’t bring her a Christmas present. When he got home, Lonsdale broke up with her over email. When she returned to Stanford in the beginning of January, they started seeing each other again for what they called a trial period. Jane [a friend of Clougherty’s] told Clougherty that she thought it was a bad idea for them to get back together. She says Clougherty told her that Lonsdale wanted to have sex “all the time” and that during it, he would put his hand on her throat. She didn’t think her friend was ready for the sexual relationship that Clougherty said Lonsdale wanted.

On Jan. 7, she texted Anne: “I’m scared for Ellie. I don’t want her with Joe at all. In fact, I worry about her safety. The guy is a jackass. What’s going on there? I feel like I may be the only one at school who can look out for her.”

“I think you r the only one who looks out for her,” Anne said..

And then it ended this way:

Clougherty decided she wanted to “escape.” She met Lonsdale in a Palo Alto park in late February, and they broke up while Anne and Jane waited for her in a nearby wine bar. When Anne went home a few days later, Jane tried to help Clougherty by deleting Lonsdale from her Facebook account and taking her out bowling and for ice cream.

“There has to be zero contact,” Jane texted Anne.

On March 1, Clougherty went to Stanford’s counseling center. She said that Lonsdale had forced her to have sex when she didn’t want to and also talked about the man who accosted her in the restaurant bathroom when she was 10. The university psychologist noted in a report that she “seems to have symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder from current and past trauma.” ...

Before she went into therapy, Clougherty told me, she didn’t want to admit even to herself that she had been raped. She wanted to believe that the relationship was loving, and she also felt she had a lot to lose. “It was like I could call him a rapist, and I could get judged and get in big trouble and not know how to handle it or I could say, ‘He’s great, look at these emails, I want to date that person,’ ” she said. “Trauma therapy was the first time I felt allowed to talk about how I felt.”

In the course of the therapy, Clougherty came to reject the term “relationship,” or even “abusive relationship,” to characterize her year with Lonsdale. She now calls it a “psychological kidnapping,” a term she came up with after watching a video about domestic abuse on the Internet, and she says she was raped every time she and Lonsdale had sex.

Stanford has investigated and Lonsdale is now calling Clougherty a nutjob. He has also been banned from the Stanford campus:

In response to Clougherty’s lawsuit, Lonsdale mounted a swift counterattack, calling it “a vengeful, personal attack by a disturbed former girlfriend” in an email to friends and associates. He also said that Stanford’s investigation was “a Kafka-esque nightmare.”

And so it has come to this:

 In January, Clougherty filed a civil suit against Lonsdale, accusing him of sexual abuse. She called his behavior “violent and deviant,” saying he employed “psychological manipulation and coercion” including “isolation, sleep deprivation, food deprivation.” She also accused him of “strangling her, slapping her, scratching her, yanking her by the hair so hard that he would lift her torso off the bed and slamming her body against the walls and bed boards.”...The lawsuit states that she “wrote him numerous emails and love letters to let him know how much she cared about him in the hope that it would end the abuse.”

Beyond the absurdity of suing a guy, who happens to be a billionaire, and accusing him of sexual abuse, while sending the guy love letters during the year long relationship. there is a Rand Paul angle to this story. In the very, very long feature, NYT splips in:

Along with starting and financing companies, he [Lonsdale] has continued to embrace libertarian causes and recently joined the finance team for Senator Rand Paul’s possible Republican presidential campaign.

Jennifer Rubin and National Review have jumped on this Rand "angle":

Rand Paul Financial Backer Lands in NYT Crosshairs http://t.co/wJ7tDyLHcl via @NRO
— Jennifer Rubin (@JRubinBlogger) February 16, 2015

But, what I find most  disconcerting about the Rand connection to Lonsdale, is not Lonsdale's relationship with Clougherty, but just how Lonsdale made his billions. And yes, that very long NYT feature tells us how:

As a Stanford student, he [Lonsdale] edited the conservative Stanford Review, where he encountered Peter Thiel, its co-founder. Lonsdale advanced in a group of male libertarians who saw the valley as a meritocracy built on pure talent. When Lonsdale graduated in 2004 with a degree in computer science, he went to work for Thiel, who created PayPal. Helping the company fight hackers, Lonsdale learned about weaknesses in the government’s surveillance systems and saw a business opportunity. “In the valley, people thought we were crazy, because you’re not supposed to build a business based on deals with the government,” he told me. “We had this very divergent big mission.”

With early funding from the C.I.A., Lonsdale helped Thiel and others start Palantir. ” ...[T]he company developed powerful data-mining software for surveillance and won contracts with hundreds of law-enforcement agencies, including the National Security Agency and the Defense Department. In 2009, Lonsdale went on to other ventures but retained a stake in Palantir, whose value would climb to more than $9 billion.

And that my friends is an indication of some of the "libertarians" backing Rand.

Of course, Rand can take Lonsdale's  money and ignore Lonsdale's policy views, but it is very unlikely that Lonsdale is funding Rand without expecting him to put out. You know what I mean?

  -RW