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| Matt Imrie, Sept. 25, 2026. The instruction is not to read. Two new documents are not named. |
Two days after I published The Librarians Is a Permission Slip, Not a Documentary—the long brief that printed, for the first time, Jennifer Tapley’s account of what the film left on the cutting-room floor, and that put on the page the lawyer letter Martha Hickson’s counsel sent the first North Hunterdon mother—a Kansas librarian for teens told his followers not to bother.1
Matt Imrie did not use my name. He used “DK.” He called the brief a “screed.” He said it was “basically a retread of everything he has been saying against Librarians and the people who work in them.” Then the punch line: “For a man with nothing new to say he sure used a lot of words to say it!”2
I read DK's screed against The Librarians so you don't have to! It is basically a retread of everything he has been saying against Librarians and the people who work in them. For a man with nothing new to say he sure used a lot of words to say it!
— Matt Imrie, @mattlibrarian.eurosky.social, Sept. 25, 2026, 11:14 a.m.
He did not dispute Tapley. He did not dispute the lawyer letter. He did not link the brief. He did not quote a paragraph and say it was wrong. He attacked the messenger and instructed the room not to read.
That is the whole play. It is the play parents meet at board tables, on listservs, in American Library Association Office for Intellectual Freedom [OIF] posts, in Emmy films, and now on Bluesky. The profession that calls itself a “firewall for democracy” will not debate a parent document if it can first make the parent radioactive and the document unread.
The keep-out sign is the point. If parents read Tapley, they will see the sequence the Emmy film reversed. If they read the Hickson letter, they will see how a parent who spoke at a board meeting was then handed fourteen days and a hold on her social media, texts, and email. Those two documents are why the brief is long. They are also why a working youth-services librarian would rather you take his word for it that there is “nothing new.”
What “Nothing New” Had to Erase
The September 23 brief is not a mood piece about librarians. It is a source brief about a recruitment film. The new material—the material Imrie had to call a retread so you would not look—is named in the brief itself.
Jennifer Tapley. The film and the 2023 Popular Information short used Santa Rosa County, Florida, as proof that the parent is the mob: a mother, a sheriff’s visit, a librarian under siege. Tapley sent a written statement for publication through Vicki Baggett. I printed it in full. Facts and judgments are hers. The brief does not treat the statement as a court finding. It treats it as the testimony the film did not sit with.3
Her sequence is the opposite of the reel. A detective asked that the book be brought in. She says she was told she would have anonymity. She says the librarian was not the target. The short package omitted that. What followed, on her account, was death threats against her and her daughter, a sheriff’s car in the driveway, a dropped school-board race, and a child moved to another school. Spam, fake campaign names, a greeting card on Church of Satan letterhead threatening her child. Loaded guns by the doors. That is not in the Emmy cut. It is in the brief Imrie told you not to read.4
Martha Hickson’s attorney. The film uses a parent from the September 2021 North Hunterdon–Voorhees board meeting as the face of the attack on Hickson. Four and a half months later, Hickson’s counsel sent that parent a Rule 408 letter: potential defamation suit, accusations characterized as s[*]x crimes, fourteen days to talk, a hold on her social media, texts, and email. The parent did not return to the microphone. The picture keeps the board-night attack. It does not keep the letter, or the silence that followed it.5
That letter is not a “retread of everything he has been saying.” It is a document. The film left it out. The brief put it in. Imrie’s job, in one paragraph, is to make sure you never reach it.
 |
| The page Imrie called a retread: Hickson’s counsel to the first North Hunterdon mother, Rule 408. |
“DK,” So You Do Not Search the Name
Imrie will not write Dan Kleinman. He will not write SafeLibraries. He will not link the brief. He will write “DK,” the in-group initials librarian listservs and Bluesky piles have used for years when they want the tribe to know who they mean and the public search box to come up empty.
That is not manners. That is distribution control. A name is a search term. A link is a click. “DK’s screed” is a closed circle: everyone who already hates the work is confirmed; no one new is sent to the primary sources. The same profession that teaches “access” as a sacrament practices it as a one-way valve. The film may be watched. The parent letters may not.
Amanda Jones, one of the faces of The Librarians, used a version of the same move in the other direction. She titled her book That Librarian and has said people would not put her name—they said “that librarian.” The professional class gets a book title out of being unnamed. The parent who documents the class gets initials so the documentation does not travel.6
Attack First. Debate Never. Do Not Let Them Read.
Look at what the post does, in order.
- Appoint himself the reader. “I read DK’s screed so you don’t have to.” That sentence is the tell. A person who wanted an argument would say, “Read this paragraph and here is why it fails.” A person who wants the file closed says he already read it for you.
- Poison the document before anyone opens it. Screed. Not “brief.” Not “post.” Screed is a verdict on the author, issued so the attachments never get a hearing.
- Deny novelty instead of meeting the pages. “Retread.” “Nothing new.” Those are claims of fact. They are false as to Tapley’s statement and the Hickson letter. He does not try to make them true. He only needs them believed long enough that nobody clicks.
- Mock the length. “A lot of words.” A source brief that reprints a parent’s statement and a lawyer letter is long because the evidence is long. Calling the page count the offense is how you avoid the evidence.
- Erase the name. “DK.” No link. No title. The tribe knows who he means. A search box does not.
That is not debate. Debate would sound like: the Tapley statement is incomplete because X; the Rule 408 letter is ordinary litigation conduct because Y; the film’s sequence still holds because Z. Imrie attempted none of that. Neither did the film. Neither does OIF when it titles a post “Lies About Libraries” and defines “p[*]rnography” out of existence because no single title has been walked through Miller and Ginsberg in a criminal court. Neither did Guy Citron in the Hunterdon Review when the claim was that I was “intolerable” and the school librarians were not.7
The method is stable. When parents put documents on the table, the professional response is not “let’s read the page.” It is: mark the messenger, instruct the audience not to look, and call that intellectual freedom.
The same week as the brief, two credentialed educators put that method on the record in The Hill. Crystal Marull and Vicki Baggett—the teacher and the parent whose names the film also left out—wrote that “trust the experts” was never a commitment to expertise. It was a demand for a specific conclusion. One of them earned the library-media credential she was told she lacked; the analysis was waved off. The other read the assigned novel, found the pages, and then caught more than 12,000 emails demanding she be fired, two lawsuits, and death threats. “If they do that to us,” they asked, “what hope is there for the next parent with no credentials at all?”10 Imrie’s “I read it so you don’t have to” is the short form of the same instruction.
Imrie is one librarian. He is useful because he is typical. The Emmy film is the same move at feature length. The SLAPP docket is the same move with a caption. “I read it so you don’t have to” is the same move in one paragraph.
The ridicule has a function. If the brief is a “screed,” you do not have to read Tapley. If it is a “retread,” you do not have to ask why the Emmy film needed the lawyer letter offstage. If the author has “nothing new to say,” then the breaking news is not breaking, and ALA does not have to answer it. The smear is the answer.
When a profession answers new evidence with “do not read it,” the evidence is the target. Not the word count. Not the author’s feelings. The unread page.
The Librarian Who Wants You to Trust His Summary
Matt Imrie is not a random commenter. He is a youth-services / teen librarian. He has described himself as a Youth Services Librarian in the Midwest and as editor of Teen Librarian (TeenLibrarian.co.uk), a blog he has run since 2006 on public and school libraries and work with teens. He has written from Kansas about “book banners” at Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library—on September 23, 2026, the same week as the brief—insisting titles named in a local fight were really in the Young Adult collection, as if YA were a legal safe harbor for what parents were reading aloud. He signed, as “Matt Imrie / Librarian,” the public list of library workers who agreed Marxism “is not a radical notion” in support of then-ALA President Emily Drabinski.8
He is exactly the professional the film asks you to treat as a firewall. He is also exactly the professional who will not let you see the two documents that break the film’s sequence.
I have written about Imrie before, not because he is famous, but because the voice he uses on parents and on the country is the voice the “trusted expert” branding is supposed to make you ignore. I documented his public line that people who want s[*]x verification in school sports “need[] to get a throat punch and be curb-stomped until they change their shitty life choices.” I documented his “Protest Power” posting and his “Murderous America Genocides Again.” I documented language I flagged to federal accounts as a possible stochastic threat involving “armed forces” and “kidnapped by soldiers,” and a riff about “a librarian who is also a serial killer.” I documented him calling an ICE arrest a “kidnap” outside his house in the Lawrence, Kansas area. Those posts are his. I did not write them for him.9
A man who talks that way about parents and about the country is not a neutral reader of a brief that prints what parents were willing to put their names on. He is a participant. His “I read it so you don’t have to” is not a public service. It is a warning to his own side: do not click through, because the attachments are real.
Vicious is not a vibe. It is the decision to replace a parent’s statement and a lawyer letter with “screed,” and to tell the public the length is the crime.
Read the Brief Anyway
Here is the test. If Imrie is right, Tapley’s statement adds nothing, the Hickson letter adds nothing, and the film’s sequence survives both. If he is wrong, the only reason to call a first-publication parent account and a Rule 408 letter a “retread” is to keep those pages from traveling.
Do not take his word. Do not take mine. Read the documents he will not name.
- Dan Kleinman, “The Librarians Is a Permission Slip, Not a Documentary,” SafeLibraries, September 23, 2026.
- Dan Kleinman, “The Librarians’ Emmy Win Is a Loss for Parents and Kids,” Washington Examiner, September 16, 2026.
- Dan Kleinman, “Shame on PBS: ‘The Librarians’ Is One Big Lie to Parents and Kids,” The Hill, February 2, 2026.
If you can help parents who are being sued for saying the quiet part out loud:
https://www.givesendgo.com/LegalFundForParents
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Endnotes
1 Dan Kleinman, “The Librarians Is a Permission Slip, Not a Documentary,” SafeLibraries, Sept. 23, 2026. Shorter version: Dan Kleinman, “The Librarians’ Emmy Win Is a Loss for Parents and Kids,” Washington Examiner, Sept. 16, 2026.
2 Matt Imrie (@mattlibrarian.eurosky.social), Bluesky / Eurosky, Sept. 25, 2026, 11:14 a.m.: “I read DK’s screed against The Librarians so you don’t have to! It is basically a retread of everything he has been saying against Librarians and the people who work in them. For a man with nothing new to say he sure used a lot of words to say it!” Screenshot on file; reproduced at top of this post.
3 Jennifer Tapley, “My Harassment Over Books,” written statement provided for publication via Vicki Baggett to Dan Kleinman, Sept. 2026, printed in full in the Sept. 23 brief. The brief’s source note treats the statement as testimony the film did not sit with, not as a court finding. Background on the 2023 sheriff’s-office visit and Popular Information package: Judd Legum, “Moms for Liberty Members Call the Cops on Florida Librarians,” Popular Information, Nov. 6, 2023; Madison Arnold / Brittany Misencik, Pensacola News Journal, Nov. 8, 2023.
4 Tapley statement, as printed in the Sept. 23 brief (spam flood; threats to family; Church of Satan letterhead; manifesto blaming school shootings on Christians; loaded guns; sheriff’s patrol). Sequence summary in the same brief: detective asked that the book be brought in; promised anonymity; librarian not the target; short package omitted that; child moved to another school.
5 Sept. 23 brief, section on Hickson and the North Hunterdon parent: September 2021 board meeting; New York Times quotation of the parent from the meeting video; Rule 408 letter from Hickson’s counsel four and a half months later (potential defamation, accusations characterized as s[*]x crimes, fourteen days, hold on social media / texts / email); parent did not return to the microphone. The film keeps the board-night attack and drops the letter.
6 Amanda Jones, That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America (Bloomsbury, 2024); Jones on the title as the phrase used when people would not use her name, as discussed in her own interviews and in the Sept. 23 brief’s Jones notes.
7 Dan Kleinman, “Dan Kleinman Is Intolerable, Not School Librarians Harming School Children; Guy Citron’s Triple Decker Defamation,” SafeLibraries, March 14, 2025. ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom, “Lies About Libraries (Part Two),” Jan. 16, 2026, as cited in the Sept. 23 brief. Kim A. Snyder to The Advocate after the PBS premiere: viewers should be “both outraged and activated”; librarian organizations as “the firewall”—quoted in the Sept. 23 brief from Joy Holden, The Advocate, Feb. 6, 2026.
8 Teen Librarian, “About” (site set up in 2006 by Matt Imrie; Youth Services Librarian living and working in the Midwest; previously school / children’s / teen / youth services librarian in South Africa and the United Kingdom). Matt Imrie, “Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library Targeted by Book Banners,” Teen Librarian, Sept. 23, 2026. “Matt Imrie / Librarian” on the public list reproduced at Dan Kleinman, “List of Librarians Who Agree Marxism is Not a Radical Notion, Support Marxist President of American Library Association,” SafeLibraries, Dec. 27, 2024. Employment as previously reported: youth services information specialist / teen-youth services librarian, Johnson County Library system, Gardner, Kansas area.
10 Crystal Marull and Vicki Baggett, “‘Trust the Experts?’ We Are Experts, and We Were Vilified For Pointing Out Inappropriate Books For School,” The Hill, Sept. 2026. Baggett is also the conduit for the Tapley statement printed in the Sept. 23 brief. The Hill piece is first-person corroboration of the method, not a substitute for Imrie’s post.
—
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Legal Defense for SLAPP Suits Against Free Speech
