If you call the number for the Mountain Communities Family Resource Center on a Friday this month, you will hear that their hours of service to those most in need in our community have been cut by 20%. From mid-September through the end of October, their office has had to close to the public on Fridays.

The Mountain Communities Family Resource Center is the organization that provides emergency assistance to families who have lost jobs and have hungry children—the group that puts together the Toys for Tots program and maintains the community food bank while arranging for services that benefit everyone, such as the Medication Take-Back program, counseling services for veterans, youth leadership programs and initiatives to make these mountains a healthy place to raise children.

But the Family Resource Center is now closed on Fridays for six weeks, including all this month. What has happened? Have cut-backs in funding caused the 20% loss in services to our mountain residents?

No. The loss of services to the community’s most vulnerable is the work of one smart man who appears to have limitless self-esteem and some charisma, but few ethics.

Gunnar J. Kuepper has demanded that the Family Resource Center buy his services. If they refuse to advertise with his start-up email newsletter, he told the executive director and an employee, it is they who are responsible for his snowballing financial problems.

They said, “no thanks.” And they stuck to it.

The need for the Family Resource Center to cut back on its services to the community this month is due to Kuepper’s private war against the center.

October is National Bullying Prevention Month. Perhaps it is time to speak out more clearly about what is occurring here and how it is affecting our town.

A Bully’s Threats

Kuepper tried to intimidate the Family Resource Center executive director this year, saying that if her organization advertises with The Mountain Enterprise without advertising in his GBU Mountain News he would go speak with her funding sponsors. Tejon Ranch Company, for instance, has helped with the Color the Mountain 5K Fun Run. The event raises money for scholarships to send young teens to leadership training conferences to help prevent drug abuse in our community.

In September 2014, Kuepper, who is about 54, told staff for the Mountain Communities Coalition Against Substance Abuse (McCASA) that it is the fault of the Family Resource Center that he cannot afford to replace his broken computer, because the center did not advertise with him.

Executive Director Anne Weber Burnaugh said in an interview it would be a poor use of her limited funds to be associated with a product that has earned such a bad reputation.

Extortion Attempts

Kuepper came into The Mountain Enterprise office to introduce himself in the summer of 2011. He said photography was his hobby. Like hundreds of others over the years, he asked if he could submit some of his photos shot around the community. In May 2012 The Mountain Enterprise newspaper learned Kuepper—who we once allowed to use a press badge for fire coverage—was secretly trying to sell access to our pages, taking money from an organization to submit pictures to the newspaper as news, not informing the editor that he was actually serving as a paid publicist.

The Mountain Enterprise does not sell news stories. We have firm policies separating advertising and news reporting. We work hard to avoid even the appearance of conflict of interest so readers can trust their community newspaper is reporting objectively, not influenced by whether people are advertising or not.

When Patric Hedlund, the editor, learned what he was doing, she immediately stopped accepting all submissions from Kuepper, and requested return of our press credential. He did not return it for several weeks. He retaliated with threatening letters demanding money for publishing photos he himself had asked the newspaper to publish for free.

Our California Newspaper Publishers Association attorney told us that Kuepper’s threatening notes to The Mountain Enterprise “are extortion letters.” In the past year, he has sent similar letters to other businesses, a filmmaker and nonprofit public service groups.

He now writes notes to news sources and advertisers of The Mountain Enterprise, telling them that this editor is “the enemy.” He tells people that the newspaper “is closing down.” People have come to our office, saying how sorry they are that we are leaving.

This is false. This company will be entering its 50th year of service to this community next August. You are invited to the party.

But the ugliness continues.

On September 22 Kuepper, a German citizen who says he is in the United States on a green card, referred to The Mountain Enterprise story about the shooting of a bear in Pine Mountain by saying to a McCASA employee, “…Where I come from, if someone [referring to Patric Hedlund, the story’s reporter] writes something like that about the local [authorities], they just take them out into the woods and nobody hears from them again.”

Anne Weber Burnaugh asked him to leave her office.

Unlawful Detainer

Kuepper’s newsletter has not taken off as a paying business in a year and a half here. Kuepper’s previous Los Angeles-based business, Emergency & Disaster Management, Inc. went under after he sued the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, before dropping his case in 2009.

American courts have become familiar places to Gunnar J. Kuepper. In the past four years, he has been taken to court three times as a defendant in civil proceedings of which we are aware. He has been evicted at least twice in Southern California for “unlawful detainer”—failure to pay one’s rent.

Kuepper skipped out on thousands of dollars in rent he owed for his apartment in West Los Angeles. Court records show that he failed to appear to answer for past-due rent and what the court called “daily damages” on a motion filed December 22, 2010. He did not show up in court on January 31, 2011. On June 6, 2011 a Notice of Unlawful Detainer was returned as undeliverable.

Frazier Park Gains a New Neighbor

Kuepper had driven up the freeway, just across the Kern County line, to set up shop in Frazier Park.

Three years later, on May 22, 2014 Frazier Park property owner Wesley Searcy also had to take Kuepper to court to obtain an unlawful detainer verdict against him.

When we interviewed him in July, Searcy was still furious about losing eight months of rental income and having to go to court to regain possession of his own property. Searcy claims Kuepper left the place “damaged and filthy.”

“He owes me $6,000,” Searcy said. “Gunnar talks a good talk, as you know. I read his biography on the internet. I thought, ‘He sounds good.’”

“He paid on time for a year and a half, then he slipped behind, then stopped paying altogether,” Searcy added.

Linkedin Claims

Linkedin—an internet site for business networking—appears to make no effort to verify the claims made on its site. Kuepper claims on his Linkedin profile to be the current Region 9 president of the International Association of Emergency Managers (IAEM). The page reads: “2000-Present (14 years).”

This came as a surprise to Nick Crossley, who is the actual president of IAEM District 9.

Crossley, a professor of Emergency Management at the University of California at Davis, said Kuepper was dropped from his unpaid, volunteer position with the Region 9 board when the membership revised its bylaws to adopt term limits for regional presidents. This ushered Kuepper out of the Region 9 position.

When we first met Kuepper, he often bragged about his fights with other IAEM board members, calling them “hillybillys.” He chuckled, agreeing when we expressed surprise at how much he appeared to enjoy the conflict.

Stalking Fears

In December 2013, a gifted young artist and her new husband obtained a temporary restraining order (TRO) against Gunnar J. Kuepper for alleged stalking and threats.

Court documents show the couple, both in their 20s and raised here, said Kuepper told them he would kill the artist’s husband and “take her.” In the restraining order request they said Kuepper was photographing their house and told the artist that “he had a camera that could see through curtains.”

The artist said during the hearing that it’s possible Kuepper may have been “joking,” but it frightened her because he had shown her a handgun earlier and told her he carries it with him all the time.

Kuepper told the court he hasn’t possessed a gun for 20 years. But he had bragged to the editor of The Mountain Enterprise in 2012 that he is always armed. [This newspaper could not locate a concealed carry permit in Kern or L.A. County in Kuepper’s name.]

Kuepper claimed in court that his reason for pursuing the artist was because he is a ‘news reporter’ and he wanted to question her about an October 25, 2013 DUI arrest.

But why did he wait nearly two months—until December 20, 2013—before putting anything about this “news” into his email newsletter?

The day he pressed the ‘send’ button was exactly one day after the artist obtained the temporary restraining order against him on December 19.

His actions appear to be retaliation. Retaliation is not news reporting.

The artist and her husband did not bring witnesses with them to court. The judge vacated the restraining order. But the case illuminates troubling aspects of Kuepper’s motives and his methods, consistent with a pattern that is now well-documented.

Victims Unite

Little by little, behind the scenes, the targets of GBU Mountain News’ bullying and petty shakedown attempts have begun sharing notes and compiling files of his threats.

A history emerges of Kuepper threatening a growing list of struggling local nonprofits and public agencies that provide services to community children, small businesses, artists and families, including the Mountain Communities Chamber of Commerce, the Center of the World Festival, Focus Central, Let’s Live Local, the Family Resource Center, El Tejon Unified School District and more.

He has tried to intimidate some of the oldest and most respected businesses serving the community. When they tell him they are not interested in advertising with him, he has implied he will wage a public smear campaign against their business. Other times, he has told groups that if they do not buy advertising, he will not cover their events.

By early 2014, Rachell Unell had recorded 20 complaints from Chamber of Commerce members about Kuepper’s unprofessional behavior, the former chamber president reports.

Kuepper tried to bully an organization providing affordable training in the arts to local children. He complained to the director that the group had not advertised with him. He said he’d researched the value of the founder’s home (her husband had been a successful Hollywood actor), implying that if published, it could look as if the grant money obtained to provide summer arts camps was used for personal gain. This horrified the co-founders, who donate their time to make this service available to local children.

A board member for the Center of the World Festival asked an online lawyers forum for help, explaining Kuepper appeared to be suing the nonprofit for $2,000 because he didn’t want to sign their standard speaker’s contract. The festival did not allow him to perform without it. He followed with a volley of emails threatening lawsuits. In 2014 he continuously accused the nonprofit of violating laws, driving the board into despair.

Politicians’ sidekick

Meanwhile, Kuepper has sought to maintain a highly visible affiliation with Supervisor David Couch and his staff when they visit the mountain—tagging along like a sidekick and best friend—providing implied weight to Kuepper’s threats against local nonprofits that must sometimes apply for county grants or assistance.

Two weeks ago, a teacher called the newspaper from a local school, complaining that Kuepper has intimidated school administrators with threats of lawsuits. Instead of standing up to him, are administrators who exhort children not to be bullies submitting to Kuepper’s hectoring and forcing teachers who do not want to deal with him to do so? There is nothing in the law that justifies this.

Anne Weber Burnaugh of the Family Resource Center has ignored Kuepper’s threats, but now locks the doors of the separate McCASA office so he cannot barge in unannounced. She has notified the sheriff’s substation that she may need to call for assistance.

Retaliation

In what appears to be retaliation for Weber Burnaugh’s refusals to meet his demands for payments, Kuepper has now filed an overly broad public records request at the El Tejon Unified School District (the fiscal sponsor for the the Family Resource Center) and the FRC itself, demanding years of records, correspondence, notes, meeting minutes, budgets, proofs of payments, grant applications and audits—plus contracts going back 14 years.

There are no allegations of wrong-doing, and no questions about the center’s books that the director refused to answer.

It appears that it is to punish the Family Resource Center, and to cause harm, that Kuepper is recklessly abusing a tool used carefully and with respect by legitimate journalists.

It is to comply with this request that the FRC has had to shut its doors on Fridays, putting personnel to work to go through records, redacting private information and making copies for Kuepper’s fishing expedition.

Rest assured that, as fishing expeditions go, Kuepper will say he has found something. The community will need to ask itself this question: Is Kuepper serving the public interest, or is he continuing his patterns of retaliation and self-interest that are damaging our community?

Bully Free Zone

Frazier Mountain High School has a sign over its front door: “This is a Bully Free Zone.”

Perhaps we need to have a similar sign at the entryway to our community, and show that we mean it.

When threatened with intimidation tactics, you can just walk away.

Caption:

Like a scrapbook of a sad downward spiral, these are clips from legal documents for three of Gunnar Kuepper’s court dates in the last four years. Two are for evictions; one is a temporary restraining order for alleged stalking and threats.

To see full stories with photos, please go to The Mountain Enterprise e-Edition

(login required)

Have your newspaper delivered via mail and include internet access! Just call 661-245-3794.

Or step out and get it now! This story and others are available right now in The Mountain Enterprise at these locations:

Frazier Park
Frazier Park Market
Frazier Park Post Office
Don’s Liquor Market
Caveman Cavey’s Pizza
Frazier Park Pharmacy
Alpine Lumber & Hardware
La Sierra Mexican Restaurant
Factory Direct Appliances
Ace Hardware / Frazier Park Lumber
Falcon’s Nest Restaurant
Big John’s Restaurant
Tecuya Feed
The New Coffee Cantina

Lebec
Sam’s Liquor Market
Flying J Denny’s entrance
Shell Gas Station
Chevron Gas Station
Los Pinos Mexican Restaurant
Clinica Sierra Vista
Lebec Post Office
Ridge Route Antiques

Lake of the Woods
Midway Market
Mountain View Market
Mike’s Pizza Co.

Pinon Pines
At the mailboxes

Pine Mountain Community
Pine Mountain Post Office
Pine Mountain General Store
Bear Claw Bakery
Mommy’s Roadhouse Restaurant
Pine Mountain Pizza Co.
Cafe Silva Bella
Pine Mountain Clubhouse (Bistro entrance)

Gorman
Carl’s Jr.
Gorman Plaza Market

West Antelope Valley
Antelope Acres Market
Wee Ville Market
Fairmont Market

This is part of the October 10, 2014 online edition of The Mountain Enterprise.

Have an opinion on this matter? We'd like to hear from you.