Mendacious Michael Gottesman Tries to Personally Intimidate a Member of the Colts Neck School Board

Thanks to a courageous member of the Colts Neck school board, Robbie Scales, we have caught Mendacious Michael “Hundreds of Millions” Gottesman red-handed trying to personally intimidate an elected school board member. The founder of the NJEA-funded New Jersey Public Education Coalition has been harassing the Colts Neck school board since it passed its “Parental Bill of Rights,” which required school officials to notify parents if their child changes genders at school. Gottesman’s bullying words and personal contact with a sitting board member are alarming enough, but now that a federal district court’s ruling appears to place Gottesman on the wrong side of the law with regard to the “Parental Bill of Rights,” it makes his conduct look particularly egregious: Gottesman is trying to personally bully an elected school board member for vindicating Colts Neck parents’ constitutional rights. That would make his behavior doubly wrong.

Below is a text exchange with Gottesman that Mr. Scales shared with Sunlight:

In the brief exchange, Gottesman provides three instances of attempted intimidation:

1. Open records requests. “… the OPRA and FOIA requests we’ll [sic] prove the truth.” Open-records requests are a go-to intimidation tactic by Gottesman. He has used them before to inundate school boards with administrative burdens — with a particularly egregious result in Cherry Hill — and appears to be threatening to bring the same to bear on the Colts Neck school board.
2. Siccing state authorities on the school board. ” … if any Government [sic] agency or department feels that you have violated anything, the illegitimate actions of your board got national attention, so they’ll probably just take action on their own.” Remember that Gottesman already threatened to sic state authorities on the Colts Neck school board for its “Parental Bill of Rights.” Any threatened state action may well be obviated by the finding of the federal district court, but Gottesman’s intent was clear: create the threat of looming state action over the board.
3. A personal threat? Most troubling of all is Gottesman’s ominous sign-off, “Have a nice life sir.” Is Gottesman personally threatening Mr. Scales? Clearly, Mr. Scales thought so, responding “Not sure what ‘have a nice life’ means, I hope you’re not threatening a school board member? I will alert the local authorities …” But why would Gottesman make such a statement? Surely, he is aware enough to know that such words would appear to be threatening, especially when taken in the context of his overall pattern of harassment of the school board. It’s hard not to conclude that Gottesman’s intent is to intimidate Mr. Scales personally.

Gottesman’s past personal bullying provides context to his current bullying. It’s not the first time Gottesman has tried to personally intimidate an opponent. As Sunlight has documented (here, and here), Gottesman is a proven, serial bully, but one particular bullying episode provides some revealing context to Gottesman’s apparent threats to Mr. Scales.

Christopher Jimenez posted a blog “An inside view of the NJ BOE hearings,” which covered the September 6, 2023 State Board of Education meeting.  Gottesman is described as booing the Moms for Liberty speaker, whereupon “a man behind Michael told him to shut up and let her finish her testimony …”  Here’s what followed:

[Gottesman] burst into a rage.  Mr. Gottesman took out his phone and started to record the man behind him, intentionally trying to intimidate him, although unsuccessfully. All this fuss continued to take place until a science teacher in the audience looked at Gottesman dead in the eyes and told him to stop.

That’s the Gottesman Sunlight knows very well from our own direct encounters with him (Facebook ended up deleting his comment for profanity). But it is highly inappropriate for Gottesman to be trying to personally intimidate an elected member of a school board. Add to that the fact that Gottesman appears to be on the wrong side of the law. Will there ever be some accountability for his (mis)conduct?