I pointed yesterday to a dispatch from the Dallas Observer about Ralph Isenberg, a fellow who seems to be a bit, um, forward. Turns out, he doesn’t limit his threats to Observer writers. In the comments to that Observer post, our own Georgia Fisher related a similar encounter with Ralph Isenberg:
I write for Oak Cliff People, a sister pub of D Magazine, and had a near-freaking-identical experience with Isenberg a few months ago. He broached the subject of his wife, then went off the deep end — screaming, shaking, calling me a bitch, threatening me legally, telling me my career was all but ruined … you get it.
He was enraged and out of sorts to a degree that could’ve easily beget physical violence. I don’t say this for dramatic effect, either; It was just obvious, and made me feel sorrier than ever for his wife.
All the while, Isenberg left a couple of immigrants to sit near the receptionist’s desk, quietly waiting on him for 45 minutes (they’d made an appointment), and finally tried — still howling and sweating and panting — to drag them into our one-sided fight.
Anyway. Over the course of the next few days, he blew me up with text messages, trying to coax me into a trip back to the Bank Tower (though he’d supposedly “alerted security to never allow [me] on the premises again”) and take a second stab at the story – the same one, more or less, that the News printed this past Saturday. And finally, after sending about eight text unanswered text messages, he gave me a line about having problems with his “medication.”
Nice, huh?
Makes me wonder just how much the Dallas Morning News regrets publishing this glowing profile of Isenberg on January 21.
