NYC woman held in psych ward for saying Obama follows her on Twitter
Kam Brock of New York City was trying to get her car out of a police impound lot when she mentioned that President Obama follows her on Twitter. Her intention in bringing it up was to tell the NYPD that she is a good person, because, she says, "Obama follows positive people."
But the police didn't believe her, and rather than looking at Brock's Twitter account to see if she is among the 644,000 people the president follows, they forcibly committed her to a three-day stay in a psychiatric ward.
The hospital also didn't check Twitter and refused to discharge Brock unless she would state that Barack Obama does not follow her account. After finally being released, Brock is now suing the NYPD and the hospital for falsely imprisoning her — and medicating her against her will — and then handing her a $13,637.10 bill.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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