This past week I wrote on my website about Rachel Kennedy and the raid by LAAS on her Lucky Puppy Rescue. Just a day earlier Rachel had reached out to me to thank me for merely asking on Facebook what seemed to me to be a fairly obvious question.

When we did speak on the phone we talked about what happened with the raid itself as well as what went on leading up to this situation. I had a lot of questions and I asked them and she answered them. But with or without speaking to Rachel, some obvious questions should jump off the page.

I proceeded to write what I wrote. Within what I wrote there’s a lot of questions being asked. I asked these questions from the standpoint of seeing Los Angeles Animal Services’ proportional culpability. They played a role here. Rachel is to blame for having as many dogs as she had. For sure. But she also got the majority of those dogs (and countless other dogs that have since been adopted) from the city shelter system. There is a process that they follow. There is absolutely no way that someone in some position somewhere with the city did not equally have a hand in creating this situation. That’s the crux of my article. That’s the crux of what I wrote.

I did not write what I wrote to unequivocally defend Rachel Kennedy as a human being outside of this incident. I do not know Rachel. Was I criticizing LAAS within what I wrote? Hell yes. The criticism was specific.

But see, some people will hear you criticize anything and then just immediately jump to brand you as being anti-that. Am I anti-LAAS, anti-Best Friends/NKLA or anti-city in general? No, no and no. Yet it seems far easier for some if we just put people onto teams. From my observations, a good number of people in rescue seem to operate on all-or-nothing mentalities. You disagree with them on something like mandatory S/N or TNR or low-income pet ownership and you’re all of a sudden branded an “idiot” who gets tuned out on all other issues going forward. Further, hypocrisy will sometimes creep in (and principle out) because some people would rather defend their friends and remain in cliques as opposed to having a little friction on something and remaining friendly anyways.

I say these things because there is a lot of this going on all of the time. This goes on in general and it’s certainly going on with this situation. This situation is complicated and it is layered. It is not Rachel/good, city/bad; or Rachel/bad, city/good.

Within the last 6 days I’ve come to learn much more. I apologize in advance but this is where everything gets convoluted. I’ve taken lots of time to document what follows as thoroughly as I can.

Everything leads me to the response to my article.

The same day that I published, some in the comment section and elsewhere online began to speculate who was behind what happened to Rachel. Kyle Schwab’s name came up. Kyle Schwab is allegedly Rachel’s ex-boyfriend and has been involved with other individuals prior to them too being raided by LAAS. Kyle’s name was coming up so much even before me writing what I did that I just outright asked him if he was involved. He told me to call him and so I did. We had at least an hour long phone conversation which happened before I published what I wrote. He did 90% of the talking, which was mostly cordial, but also felt the need to threaten me twice. Near the end of our conversation he got very agitated when it was clear that I wasn’t swallowing his perspective on all the things we were discussing. Still, nowhere in what I actually wrote do you see Kyle Schwab’s name.

Fast forward about a day and a portion of the comment section began to fill up with what were clearly anonymously created troll accounts. They were all countering the notion from others that Kyle was involved and then personally going after me for allowing an open comment section on my website. They got nastier and nastier as they kept posting. Very little of what they ever said was about the specifics of what I had written. Instead it was deflective and aggressive commentary meant to make sure that everyone knew that I was a moron with poor investigative skills who couldn’t write.

One of the first anonymous accounts that showed up was created to impersonate a woman named “Desiree Golembieski.” About 5 hours later I was actually contacted by the real Desiree Golembieski asking that I take down the impersonator posts. I verified she was who she said she was and then took them down. This fake account continued to repeatedly post and I’d delete each new entry. The next fake account to show up was “Derla Golemshauer,” followed by an impersonator account for “Kim Keswick” (another real person), followed by “Chen Ling Chen.”

What they didn’t initially know was that my website automatically tracks IP addresses. I eventually told them it did and that they should knock it off. They continued. Well, I’ve since taken their IP addresses and mapped out exactly where each account was posting from. Some of the accounts were being shared by different people. It’s quite elaborate but also quite pathetic. At the end of the day, these are grown adults hell bent on personally spinning and degrading what I wrote as well as insulting me for simply daring to defend Rachel Kennedy.

But why? That’s always the question, right? Sometimes there isn’t an answer that makes sense in the moment but with the help of others it’s sure to get clearer and clearer as we go along.

Through IP mapping I’ve been able to pretty clearly decipher that the people repeatedly posting on my website under fake aliases were Jer Edelman, Marcy Janes and Lisa Cowan. The IP geography of each closely resembles where each woman lives (which I’ve confirmed from others while not posting further zoomed images for their own privacy). Not coincidentally, these ladies are each known to harass people online and off at the behest of, you guessed it, Kyle Schwab.

Equally non-coincidental, Desiree provided me with the IP address of Jer Edelman, who used to have access to Desiree’s Facebook account back when they were actually friends. They then had a falling out, Jer tried locking Desiree out of her own Facebook account and has been (along with others) harassing her ever since. The IP address that Desiree gave me points to the same exact location as 3 of the troll accounts posting anonymously on my website. Imagine that. Equally non-coincidental, Rachel told me that Kyle considers Jer Edelman to be one of his best friends. Rachel’s never met her. Equally non-coincidental, Desiree told me that Jer Edelman has had it out for Rachel Kennedy for a while now. Equally non-coincidental, Jer Edelman apparently put up a very cryptic Facebook message just a week or two prior to the raid on Rachel Kennedy, claiming that someone was going to be getting theirs or something to that effect. And equally non-coincidental, I’ve actually heard voicemails that were sent to me that cement Kyle and Jer’s tumultuous alliance. I won’t get into it further, but they exist.

For the record, I personally had no idea who any of these women were until this past week. I’ve admittedly been away from SwayLove and not doing nearly as much as I used to. Yet as they posted anonymously they continued to speak about me in ways that were definitely childish but also highly insightful. Insightful because it sounded like Kyle Schwab, they were talking about me as if (to them) they knew who I was. Again, I don’t know any of these women. However, Kyle has been my “friend” on Facebook for years and we spoke on the phone just days ago about this very situation.

Here’s all the evidence from my first post:

The back end comment section (ordered from earliest to latest).
The back end comment section with IP mapping linking different comments to the different women (ordered from earliest to latest).
The comment thread prior to me deleting it (conversation format).
The comment thread with IP mapping linking different comments to the different women (conversation format).

My initial reach out to Kyle, 5/9.
Kyle’s text message to me, 5/12.
My response to Kyle’s text message, 5/12.

^As you can see, Lisa Cowan makes a brief appearance to call people “idiots” and wants everyone to know that the landlord called animal control. Whether he ultimately did or didn’t, it’s far more complicated than that.

Jer Edelman wants you to know that Rachel is crazy and she seems to have a pretty unhealthy obsession with Desiree Golembieski. She doesn’t like Marla Tauscher (neither does Kyle) and keeps bringing her up. Jer’s the one directly defending Kyle even though I hadn’t ever said his name. She constantly talks about me as if she knows me, but yet she doesn’t. She keeps sarcastically talking about my “personas” and my outlooks on life (reeks of Kyle). She constantly calls me a hypocrite and in no way understands how I use the term “selective enforcement.” She repeatedly overlooks my simple point about LAAS to instead praise them and let them off any hook that they may be snagged on. She thinks that she knows everything there is to know about Rachel’s situation (reeks of Kyle).

Marcy Janes is the longer-winded one who writes up comparative examples that are nothing more than red herrings. She doesn’t quite understand the concept of selective enforcement (neither does Kyle) and likes to take personal shots at me (my appearance, my age, my writing style, my lack of investigative skill). She wants you to know that I’m a conspiracy theorist (Kyle’s big on referring to this as that also), and she wants you to know that I hate the shelter system and have a personal vendetta against everyone who’s trying to make it better. She also wants you to know that I’m purposefully harming the entire rescue community by what I’ve written (even though I’m simply defending an actual rescuer). She wants you to know that I don’t rescue or foster (even though I’ve fostered many), and that I do nothing to help homeless pets. She’s equally condescending and arrogantly dismissive (so is Kyle). At one point she tells me to “stick to selfies” and “be quiet and look pretty.” Again, I don’t even know this woman! She is by far the nastiest one. She also keeps embedding YouTube rap videos from the mid-nineties (Um, Kyle?).

Jer and Marcy heavily speak in Orwellian inversions (so does Kyle) and they are both big on guilt by association (so is Kyle).

Whewwwww. I’ll once again apologize for the craziness of this post. But I needed to move this muddled nightmare off of my Rachel article and give them their own spot to further condemn me.

My take: By using conduits in the form of other females or fake profiles that he can hide behind, Kyle Schwab can then say whatever he wants and not have it visually come back on him directly. This allows Kyle to have plausible deniability while he savages other people from behind the scenes. That’s what I’ve gathered, and this is based on afar observation over a long period of time, my own conversations with Kyle, and the similar content regarding what these aliases say when compared with how Kyle expresses himself.

It’s my opinion that Kyle Schwab and his named minions most definitely had something to do with why Rachel Kennedy was raided by LAAS. I can’t prove the level of their involvement but I can certainly prove that they’ve been attempting to harass me through anonymous means simply for attempting to tell Rachel’s side of the raid (which had absolutely nothing to do with them from Rachel’s perspective). I’m also learning that they’ve done this to many other people. They harass and they intimidate and they threaten in order to keep people silent. Why these women specifically? Hell if I know. Based on something that I heard with my own ears, Jer Edelman seems to be blackmailed by Kyle. I do know that people are legitimately scared of Kyle Schwab because he seems to have some kind of an unofficial link with animal control and has shown that he, for whatever reason, remains above their enforcement of law.

What is actual selective enforcement? Giving someone a verbal heads up and a week or two to get your proverbial house in order prior to animal control dropping by on a complaint vs. animal control showing up unannounced and proceeding to raid you outside of due process. That’s selective enforcement. Knowingly allowing one person to have 20+ dogs while another person cannot. That’s selective enforcement. Knowingly looking the other way on sterilization requirements while enforcing it upon others. That’s selective enforcement. Not citing holier-than-thou rescuers for breeding or selling puppies while using the department to cite others. That’s selective enforcement, as well as deeply hypocritical.

I’ll end stating that people should sincerely learn how to be themselves and dare to stand on their own feet while taking accountability for their own situations. These kinds of callous actions (detailed above) by petty, emotionally irrational grown adults are what in actuality give everyone else involved in “animal welfare” work a bad reputation with at least a portion of the general public. It’s no fairer than any other negative stereotype that exists but it does exist because there are people in existence that surely act unstable, crazy and/or cruelly. I can’t explain why some people behave this way. To me this is not how human beings should behave. All I can do is attempt to coalesce what I’ve gathered into a readable presentation for you to then make up your own mind. Be better to each other and find a level of empathy because we all could benefit.