Milwaukee Settles With Former Sci-Fi Writer Patrick S. Tomlinson for $575,000 For Swatting Calls
The City of Milwaukee has agreed to pay $575,000 to settle a federal civil rights lawsuit filed by former science fiction author Patrick S. Tomlinson and his wife Niki Robinson. The case, Robinson v. City of Milwaukee, 2:24-cv-00264, documented 45 police responses to the couple’s home over two years driven by false emergency calls, none of which were real.
The facts of the swatting campaign are not in dispute. Milwaukee Police Department officers knew the address was a deliberate target. Court documents show one officer said he “thought the call might be fake,” another testified he “knew there wasn’t an emergency,” and a third said “We know. We know,” when told the address should be flagged. One officer sent a memo asking dispatch to mark the home as a “Swatter House.” A supervisor declined. The swatting worsened after a CBS58 news report on the situation. During at least one response, officers held Tomlinson at gunpoint and handcuffed him.
That institutional failure is real and the settlement reflects it. A police department that had documented knowledge its calls were fabricated and refused to flag the address, resulting in repeated armed responses to an innocent household, created genuine civil liability. Individual officers were granted qualified immunity. The city was not.
Tomlinson is a former Tor Books author whose publishing career ended after In the Black in 2020, his last book with the publisher before the relationship concluded. He has since functioned primarily as a left-wing political activist and Twitter agitator, spending years in sustained online combat with critics who were offended about his awful take stating he never found Norm Macdonald to be funny while threatening legal action against people who mocked him.
The escalation in online fighting led to the swatting originated in 2018 when Tomlinson posted that he did not find comedian Norm Macdonald funny. Rather than ignore the resulting mockery, Tomlinson engaged repeatedly with every antagonist, threatening critics with jail time and filing legal actions that consistently failed.
Tomlinson filed a defamation suit against 60 anonymous members of an online message board. The case was dismissed as frivolous. A San Francisco judge ordered Tomlinson to pay $34,762.25 in opposing attorneys fees. Tomlinson publicly refused to pay the judgment, which resulted in contempt proceedings. By the time the matter was fully resolved he had paid $83,736.99, more than double the original court order, to the forum owner known as Quasi.
It has been widely reported and alleged that the Science Fiction and Writers of America (SFWA) provided approximately $100,000 toward Tomlinson's legal costs for the OnA Forums lawsuit. SFWA did not respond to requests for comment on the matter. The funds came from a professional organization representing working science fiction writers, used to pursue a lawsuit a judge subsequently dismissed as frivolous against an anonymous online message board.
Tomlinson also attempted to obtain a restraining order against an individual online. A judge found the claim ludicrous and denied it.
The $575,000 settlement sounds substantial. After federal civil rights attorney fees, which in cases of this complexity and duration typically run between 35% and 45% of the settlement, the net recovery to Tomlinson and his wife is unlikely to exceed $315,000 to $375,000. The city will fund the payment through a budget amendment expected to take approximately 90 days, meaning the money arrives in mid-August at the earliest.
Some online have speculated that Tomlinson called in the swatting calls himself or hired an agency to do so on his behalf, though none of this has bee nconfirmed to date.
None of that changes who Tomlinson is or what his track record outside the swatting case looks like. A man with a history of using the legal system as a weapon against online critics, who burned through over $100,000 in SFWA funds pursuing a lawsuit a judge called frivolous, who was dropped by his publisher, and who has spent years threatening people on social media with jail time, now collects a settlement from a city whose police department genuinely failed him.
What do you make of the Milwaukee settlement? Let us know in the comments.
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