westwaves replied to your post “You may have already answered this question, but in Brooks Browns’…”

Thank you for the detailed response! I always like to play the devils advocate and consider other options nevertheless, but I completely resonate with your point of view.

You’re very welcome, @westwaves! Glad you felt it resonated with you, though I agree that it’s fun to play devil’s advocate and consider the other available options too. Sometimes, doing that can give us some surprising new insights!

You may have already answered this question, but in Brooks Browns’ book, he mentions the day that Dylan handed him a piece of paper folded up I believe, with Erics’ website written down. And they never spoke of it again. A few theories come to my mind, one of which being that Eric and Dylan discussed sharing the website to Brooks. Dylan could have also been warning Brooks, but this random act is very interesting. What are your thoughts on this?

I’ve certainly touched upon it in the past here and here. The story Brooks shares in his book is that Dylan did hand him that scrap of paper that had Eric’s website address on it, telling him to take a look at it and that he couldn’t tell Eric that Dylan had given it to him. That’s one version of it, anyway, because I became aware of the fact that there is another version of it out there that’s backed up by the factual evidence:

In that version, as showcased in the 2004 report into the Brown’s complaints about Eric, Brooks and his brother Aaron were the ones to write the website address down on a scrap of paper after Dylan had told Brooks about the website. That alters a small part of the story here, but in both of these accounts two things remain the same:

1. Dylan was the one to share the information about Eric’s website with Brooks.
2. Brooks told his mom that he couldn’t tell her who had given him the information about the website, because that person was afraid of Eric.

Personally, I’ve always had the impression that Dylan tried very hard to remain friends with everybody. Brooks and Eric were on the outs with each other, sure, but he had known Brooks for a long time and Eric was a good friend too. I think that Dylan felt horribly stuck in the middle there. As anyone who’s ever been in that position can attest, being in the middle is a place where you’re trying very hard to stay neutral (and out of any arguments) and yet a place not everyone can stand seeing you in because they expect you to take their side. I think Dylan saw both sides of the coin at once and decided for himself that he wasn’t going to be their go-between or anything of the sort. However, I think Dylan felt that Eric crossed the line when he began threatening Brooks. Brooks had been a good friend to Dylan in the past and I think Dylan felt that he ‘owed’ it to that friendship to let Brooks know what Eric was up to. Dylan didn’t particularly want to lose Eric’s friendship (or become the target of Eric’s extreme ire as well) so he shared the information about the threats with Brooks while telling Brooks at the same time to please leave him out of it. It suits Dylan’s non-confrontational style to not go to Eric directly and say “hey, man, what the fuck, that’s not cool” in regards to those threats – certainly not when Eric was kind of a hothead who’d just as soon blow up about nobody being on his side. I don’t think Dylan felt safe enough to share his feelings/thoughts about this with Eric, but at the same time I don’t think that Dylan was outright scared of Eric? I think he was scared of losing Eric’s friendship more than he feared Eric himself.

The theory that Eric and Dylan discussed sharing the website with Brooks is an interesting one, and certainly a possible one, but I can’t help but think that that’d be a stupid move to make on their part. Eric had named Brooks on his website and had shared Brooks’s personal information in combination with the threats on there as well, which is generally something that law enforcement takes pretty seriously and could have had far-reaching consequences if such information landed in the wrong person’s lap. Eric had to have known that if the Browns learned of the website’s existence, he would run a risk of having police/the Browns themselves show up on his doorstep while he was already up to his neck in trouble with his own parents to begin with. Judy Brown wasn’t fooled by Eric one bit: he knew he couldn’t deceive her and pull the wool over her eyes the way he always tried to do with his own parents, so I don’t think that Eric would willingly put himself in a position where a confrontation with Brooks’s mom was a strong possibility.