The Olympic Herald arrived in Clallam County the way such sites usually do: polished pages, confident headlines, and a promise to tell readers what nobody else would. What its publisher did not count on was that a handful of Port Angeles residents would do the one thing the operation depended on nobody doing.
They checked.
Eight months ago, a poster on the local Reddit community r/PortAngeles2, writing as u/CrabtrapAndPine, published a short review of the new outlet under the headline "Monetizing defamation blogs - OH,OWD." "I was somewhat excited to see a new local paper being promoted in the other Port Angeles sub," the poster wrote, "but a bit of poking around and the ruse unravels rather quickly."
The thread laid out what the poking had found. "The domain was purchased two months ago, and redirects to a substack blog," the poster wrote, describing the site as "a one-man op dedicated exclusively to re-tweeting defamation under only the thinnest pretense of passing for citizen journalism." The publisher, the poster alleged, "owns several LLCs for the purposes of monetizing content and shielding himself from personal liability for the publishing of libel."
Then a commenter named him. "If anyone else is just catching up," wrote user bingbano, "Its the Olympic Harald [sic] written by a guy named Anthony Tomashefsky."
The catch
The thread's most damaging contribution was not a name. It was an omission, caught by a commenter who had read more court paper than the Herald's author apparently expected anyone to read.
"Here is a perfect example of the Olympic Herald misleading the public in Port Angeles," wrote user Famous-Finance9192, describing a Herald article about reporting a Sequim man, Ben Mavy, to Wyoming authorities for wildlife-license violations. The article, the commenter wrote, "includes only a small snippet of court documents. I've posted photos of the full court record showing that he was actually there (and charged) for stalking and harassing Ben Mavy…. who also happens to be his girlfriend's ex-husband."
The full court record now speaks for itself. Clallam County Superior Court case No. 25-2-00595-05 shows that a stalking and anti-harassment protection order, in effect through Aug. 26, 2027, was entered against Tomashefsky on Aug. 26, 2025, after a hearing he did not attend; that Commissioner Brian Parker reviewed 55 pages of Tomashefsky's emails to Wyoming officials and concluded his "methods and his motives cross the boundaries of the permissible"; and that Judge Brent Basden, denying revision on Oct. 21, 2025, found the record "amply supports" the stalking and harassment findings. The Herald has published 425 posts, according to its own sitemap. 109 of them naming Judge Basden, 58 naming Commissioner Parker, and 17 naming Mavy, according to TROH's review of the archive. The protection order its publisher lives under has appeared only framed as a "legal attack" on the Herald itself.
The same commenter posted what he called a public warning, alleging the Herald's author "previously operated a business called Advice Chaser, which has dozens of reviews from people claiming they paid between $6,000–$14,000 upfront and never received the services promised," and noting that the company's listed address "was traced back to a storage unit on Taylor Cutoff Road in Sequim, not a business office." Both claims check against public records: the Better Business Bureau profile for Advice Chaser LLC lists 40 Taylor Cutoff Rd., which public listings identify as Sequim Self Storage, and a New York court entered a $42,128 default judgment against Tomashefsky and the company in February 2024.
A genre, not a publication
The r/PortAngeles2 poster also flagged something bigger than one blog: "There are quite a few of these 'watchdog' type substacks popping up here in Clallam County, always with a specific editorial skew."
That observation has aged well. Another Substack-based outlet, Clallam County Watchdog, now publishes alongside the Herald with a similar taste for attacks on county officials. There is no evidence tying Tomashefsky to that publication, its own about page names a different author and discloses that he managed a campaign for a county commissioner candidate. But that disclosure is itself the point: readers who know who is writing, and why, read differently. The Herald offers no such disclosure. Its author's byline appears on its pages; his litigation history and business record do not.
A separate thread on r/portangeles. "Olympic Herald, Basden, Parker = what's going on?", shows the same community instinct at work. A resident asked whether there was "any truth to these stories," and a top reply described the Herald as "a blog platform created in Substack about a week ago." Neighbors were doing basic sourcing questions out loud: Who wrote this? What does it leave out?
The media-literacy lesson
The original poster was explicit about the goal: "My goal here has been to increase media literacy," even advising readers to use an archived snapshot rather than give the site monetized clicks, and cautioning that anyone should "always take a reddit burner account's review with a grain of salt."
Another commenter, KRK-en, put the stakes plainly: "I keep being appalled by the degree to which people are convinced by these 'articles.' Seems our schools and other institutions aren't properly teaching critical reading and thinking skills."
The thread drew 45 upvotes and 11 comments, modest numbers anywhere else, but a meaningful share of attention in a small local forum. And its claims were not vibes. TROH verified the thread's checkable assertions against primary sources: the domain record (olympicherald.com was registered Dec. 26, 2025, two months after Basden's ruling, exactly as the thread's timeline implied), the storage-unit address, the New York judgment, and the protection-order file. Each one matched.
A small town does not need a newsroom to defend itself from a bad-faith press. It needs a few neighbors willing to read the whole document, check the address, and say out loud what they found. Port Angeles, it turns out, has them.
This article relies on public court records and public complaints. TROH welcomes a response and will publish it in full.