This post introduces the fauna and flora of false accusation: spiders and nuts. Spiders are subtle, and their webs are hard to see. Nuts…aren’t subtle at all.

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These claims made in 2014 by North Carolina teacher Marty Tackitt-Grist about her neighbor Larry Smith (which plainly suggest everything from delusion and paranoia to abject maliciousness) were matter-of-factly posted to a Facebook page maintained by ABC’s 20/20. Despite her claims’ being manifestly defamatory (Smith has never been charged with “embezzlement”) and wacko, besides, Tackitt-Grist received a solicitous response from ABC and was indulged for years by the police and the courts. Smith, a former lawyer in his 70s, has filed a number of actions to attack rulings in her favor that nominate him a “stalker,” and all of Smith’s appeals to reason and law have been offhandedly dismissed by the courts as “frivolous.” Noteworthy is that Tackitt-Grist, an instructor at the…