They Took My Home From Me

I exposed corruption in a small town government and they violently chased me out of my home.

My name is Matthew Berdyck. I am the founder of a national environmental activism and government corruption watchdog group called SuperfundResearch.org . We use viral marketing to expose cancer clusters, ground water plumes of toxic waste, botched Superfund toxic waste site clean ups, corrupt government officials, and the existence of the 1,336 Superfund toxic waste dumps in The U.S.

A few months ago a local councilman in Front Royal, Virginia approached me with evidence that Congressman Bob Goodlatte (R), the local Warren County Economic Development Association (EDA), and local media were running a fraudulent economic development scheme, claiming to be building a data center on top of the Avtex Superfund toxic waste site via a government contract that later turned out to not exist, alleging that the deal was goingto bring 600 new jobs, and a $40 million dollar influx of business to The Town of Front Royal.

This was bad for the community because local citizens were expecting an economic boom, investing in opening businesses to meet the demand, when in reality there was no contract, which means that the aforementioned boom would never come.  All of these citizens would lose their investments and their livelihoods as a result of this fraudelent scheme. 

My .org ran viral marketing campaigns in the small town of 14,000 people, scoring over 8,000 readers in two days, causing a lot of controversy, and eventually stopping the deal, saving the entire community from certain demise. 

In most normal communities this would make a person a local hero, but in my case, the local government, media, and citizens attacked me.   In this town, which is 97% Donald Trump supporters, they do not care of their leaders are corrupt. 

First, Royal Examiner writer Roger Bianchini published false news articles about us. A small group of citizens took to social media to begin spreading untrue and nasty rumors about me, personally, causing a rumor mill to start, resulting in me being repeatedly bullied and attacked on social media. 

Then the death threats started.

At this point, after being threatened that they were going to kill me and throw my body into a wood chipper, my kitty and I were forced to flee our home.

As we left town, more false news articles were published, the local police received dozens of calls and messages from people trying to get me charged with a crime for being an activist. 

At the same time, they began running blogs about me which are dominating the search engine results for my name, calling me a "serial rapist type," filling the internet with abuse and lies. 

Over the next two months I was virtually stranded on the road, traveling the country desperately looking for another house, because the false news articles and blogs were negatively influencing potential landlords, making it almost impossible for me to find a place to live.

Because I had my kitty with me, I incurred expenses of up to $200 a day, with fuel, meals, pet fees, until roughly sixty days later I found a new house in another state.

While I was gone, they trespassed on my property, broke into my home and car, damaged my vehicle, and then posted photos of their crimes on an anonymous blog and used it to threaten me, all as the local media and government were aware this was happening and activly participating in this vigilante group's efforts. 

The local police did absolutely nothing. We went to the FBI, several national media outlets, and every reputable investigative journalism outlet in the country, but they all of the refused to act.

The group attacking me started harassing both of my business partners, via e-mail, and even publicly attacked the Global Water Center in Milwaukee, just because my business partner's father, who invented an industrial water filtration system that will save lives all over the planet, is associated with me.

Not only are their articles and blogs attacking me corrosive to my life and career, this is one small town's crooked agenda is that is now damaging our powerful enviornmental causes all over the country, so if there is a cancer cluster or toxic incident in your town, they will make you their next victim, just to protect a bunch of old boy network crooks in Virginia, and Bob Goodlatte, the same Congressman who spreaheded the effort to gut the Congressional Ethic Comittee . 

To add insult to injury, I learned that this town has a long history of 1950's style violent retaliation against anyone who speaks out against the old boy network.

Previously, a seventeen year old girl opened a controversially themed donut shop called Naughty Girl's Donuts.  The local Catholics responded to this "house of sin" by threatening her, throwing trash all over the porch of her shop, and then they boycotted her out of business for going to the national media with her story, which was featured on MTV , and Raw Story.   

In the end, my travel expenses came out to around $12,000. Renting my new home cost me roughly $10,000 with first, last, security, and cross country moving fees.  As this was happening, I had to have three emergency dental surgeries in three different cities for an abscess, that got worse and worse because I could not find dental care while traveling, costing me thousands of dollars, just because I couldn't get into a denist to get one $90 filling.

After speaking with attorneys I learned that it was going to cost me $50,000 to file lawsuits over the false news articles, but because the blogs are being run anonymously, that I have no option but to hire a reputation management firm, at a whopping cost of $120,000 a year to fix the damage they have caused to my name and organization.  

That's $192,000 in damages I suffered because I stood up to the corrupt leadership and media in Front Royal and Warren County.

While I understand that there are hazards to the kind of work I do, I cannot expect anyone to just hand me upwards of $200,000 to bail me out of a decision I felt I had no choice but to make, I would at least like to be able recover the cost of travel and renting a new home, because the loss has been intensely damaging for me. 

Our organization raises no money. Over the last three years we've personally spent over a quarter million dollars of our own money educating the country about environmental and government corruption, basically investing everything we had into trying to make this country a better place to live.

In my personal life, I've given away over $50,000 to everything from funding the opening of homelessness organizations, to buying Christmas presents for hundreds of cancer survivors, to paying people's cell phone bills, security deposits, and dental bills, and on and on.

Over the last several years I have done nothing but give and give. Now, ironically, I am the one who needs help.

Your contributions to this effort will be greatly appreciated and will be used to help me restore some small semblance of normalcy, and to help me begin to rebuild my life after this nightmarish series of events. 

Thank you.