Bubba: A Smash Victim—But Not in a City Without Pity

By Nancy RommelmannRealClearInvestigations
Would possibly well well per chance 23, 2024

1. The Scoop

On November 7, 2023, I was forwarded an email that began, “I know the world is on fire but have you guys read anything else about Bubba Copeland, the Alabama Mayor/Pastor who died by suicide after being outed by 1819 ‘news’?”

The girl who wrote the email was a longtime friend of Fred “Bubba” Copeland, whose suicide at age 49 and what was believed to have resulted in it – the e-newsletter 1819 News publishing a story that revealed Copeland as a secret cross-dresser who several years earlier had published erotic fiction under a pseudonym – had shaken the cities of Phenix City, Alabama, where Copeland was the pastor at First Baptist Church, and nearby Smiths Station, where he was the mayor. It was on a country road 15 miles north of Smiths Station where Copeland fatally shot himself in front of local police on November 3.

The email author, whom I’ll call Laura, was disgusted at the national press for seizing on the story and characterizing Copeland’s “dressing up” and subsequent suicide as symbolic of the perils facing the transgender community. “He liked to cross-dress — who said he was transgender?” she said, referring to articles such as one in the Los Angeles Times titled, “America’s tragic war on LGBTQ+ people extends its collateral damage.” Like many others, this piece showed little interest in Copeland beyond using his suicide to make a point.

Laura did not like her friend’s death being “whitewashed and used as propaganda for trans activists’ gain.” She was also angry at 1819 News and did not want theirs to be the final word.

In closing her email she asked whether anyone might be interested in Copeland’s story. “I don’t know any media people,” she wrote. “No one local will cover it.”

I used to be attracted to checking out what every reporter asks themselves: “Why this story now?” Laura used to be factual, the arena used to be on fire. Israel used to be at war with Hamas. Americans had been confronting the beefy extent of the training losses suffered right by the pandemic, and we had been entering into one other contentious election 300 and sixty five days. And but a publication no person in Smiths Situation or Phenix City had previously heard of had determined to head onerous after a man they’d known nothing about two days earlier, a four-tales-in-three-days campaign that resulted in the man blowing his brains out. It used to be a slay campaign on steroids. What used to be the logic right here? Why had Bubba Copeland felt so desperate? And what pleasure used to be 1819 News looking out to reap after they pointed to Copeland and said figuratively, “Him. Hate him.”

***

If 1819 News was signaling an accurate agenda, so was the Los Angeles Times. Like Laura, I didn’t accept the use of other people’s tragedies to further personal political objectives, no matter how much I might have agreed with them. I believed it idle and unethical that an outlet like the Daily Beast (“Alabama Mayor Kills Self After Honest-Fly Blog Outs His Gruesome-Dressing”) would use Copeland’s death to fuel the culture wars, without bothering to learn anything else about Copeland beyond what salacious details might serve the mission.

The CEO and president of 1819 News had also known nothing of Copeland beyond a few facts, nor—despite the fact that the newsletter operated 130 miles away in Birmingham—had he ever heard of Smiths Station. As a self-proclaimed “soldier of Christ,” Bryan Dawson felt it his duty to repeat Copeland and, after the suicide, claimed to feel no regret about publishing the stories. I emailed Dawson to ask about this. I needed to know whether he’d considered what revealing such information might do to a man’s life, and if he was surprised by the reaction of the people of Smiths Station and Phenix City standing behind Copeland. Dawson didn’t reply, but the author of the story did, telling me he knew, after the story ran, “That 100% I’m going to be unemployable anywhere else.”

***

On December 15, I drove from New York to Columbus, Georgia, and moved into a two-story Airbnb with 12-foot ceilings and a gothic staircase so precipitously steep I thought of Bette Davis pushing Joan Crawford down the stairs in “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” I’d arranged interviews with a dozen people who’d known Copeland, folks sideswiped by his suicide who urged me to know he was a good man; how he’d helped many in the neighborhood, how he “constantly brought the sunshine.”

The woman who told me this agreed to meet in the conference room of the law office owned by a mutual friend of Copeland. She told stories of the Copeland she knew as a teenager, how he “had something of a swagger” and that he was “positively a heartbreaker.”

“He was the shit back then,” she said, despite Copeland “sort of trying to act like a thumb”; he was short and stout and most often throwing rental parties for footballs, despite the fact that he played that, too. All the guys did — you kind of had to.

“But I can’t help but wonder that he had these inner struggles, possibly, that made him feel less of a man,” said the woman. “Or perhaps not up to that he could have been perceived that way, because of how he felt perhaps on the inside. I don’t understand any of it.”

She had not seen Copeland in some months when she received a call from her husband’s aunt, who had seen the usual 1819 News tales, asking, “Have you seen all this about Bubba?”

“I was in shock,” she said, and reached out to him immediately by texts, which she pulled up on her phone.

“I said, ‘Hi there, friend, I can’t remember what you would even be going through right now. I’m thinking of you. Please reach out if you want to talk. I’m on your side,'” she said. “That was at 12:08. At 1:20, he said, ‘No, I’m sorry. I’m hurting so badly right now. Yes, it’s 90% fake and 10% true. I really dressed up like Angela just for fun. I absolutely hate that my private life went public.’”

The girl didn’t hear from Copeland because the 1819 News campaign went into overdrive, when, as she noticed it, “they doubled down, then tripled down, and quadrupled down. I couldn’t believe how out for blood it felt like they were, and how completely unapologetic they were.”

She showed me her final texts with Copeland, several hours before he killed himself.

Lady: “Hi, my friend, I’m thinking of y’all.”

Copeland: “Thanks. Actually in a tense situation.”

The last time she saw her friend was at Vance Brooks Funeral Home, off the 280W by the Walmart. “Closed casket,” she said. “There wouldn’t have been much to see.”

Instead, the entire crowd gathered in the chapel watched a slideshow of Copeland’s life, along with a photo of him with President Trump, taken after a deadly tornado struck the station in 2019 and Trump came to assess the damage.

“In fact, when Trump came and I saw that photo of Bubba, I sent a message, I told him I was upset,” she recalled. “He said, ‘I had to play the part.’”

Another station where residents of a deep-purple Southern state had been going against the assumptions the media made about them: that they were an intolerant monolith who would automatically reject Copeland. The people I met weren’t filled with white rural rage, some weren’t Trump supporters, and none were going to reject a man several of them had known their entire lives over, as Laura put it, “some unusual kink he and his partner had.”

“If it’s confined to the marital bedroom, I don’t care,” said Donny Brown. I was visiting with Brown, his partner Pam, and their grown son Luke in their home in Phenix City. Over holiday Chex Mix, Brown shared his theory about why Copeland had become a target.

“I think that was an opportunity for 1819,” he said. “Society has a huge appetite for scandal and smearing people. Everyone wants to go viral over something.”

“No person had heard of 1819,” said Pam. “Each person’s heard about them now.”

The household praised Copeland’s generosity. Pam mentioned he’d been the neighborhood’s “Person of the Year” in 2020. Luke recalled that after the fridges in his home had gone out from a power loss, Copeland let him toss the spoiling meals in the dumpsters behind The Nation Market, the convenience store and gas station Copeland ran, and also the station where Copeland had given Luke, then an awkward youngster, his first job as a stockboy.

“As a guardian, you love those who love your kids, and Bubba cherished Luke,” said Brown. Still, as an ordained minister himself, he wrestled with what his longtime friend had been caught doing, and what exactly the neighborhood might have expected, had Copeland lived, to react to it.

“Now, for certain, homosexuality does streak in opposition to the Bible. There will not be any longer any getting spherical that,” he said. “Make I build someone luxuriate in that in management in the church? I affect no longer judge so. But they’re welcome. I would welcome someone in my church.”

“Being a pastor, being a mayor, you would even be opening yourself up to attack for no reason,” said Luke. “And being how colorful of a man Bubba used to be, it doesn’t appear he would possibly be that … I don’t know if careless would be the way to put it.”

Reckless, per chance?

“Reckless,” he said.

“Reckless, mm-hmm,” said Pam.

“Reckless, yeah,” said Brown.

Pam handed me a container of homemade peanut brittle on my way out the door.

“1819,” she said, “is liable for his suicide.”

I stayed a week in Alabama. I had my hair done in a salon owned by the woman whom Copeland had used as a model in several of his erotic tales, a woman he fictionally murdered in order to steal her identity and sleep with her husband.

I met with a 17-300 and sixty five days-extinct who told me that after his occupy father hung himself in the yard, it used to be Copeland who showed up straight away to comfort him and his household. “Anytime there used to be a suicide, he would possibly perchance be available in the market to console,” he said.

And I drove halfway across Alabama to sit down with Craig Monger, the author of the 1819 News stories, a man who not long before had been addicted to hard drugs and who began to tremble as he recalled calling Mayor Copeland to give him an explanation, “We’ve got images, we’re going to run a story.”

Laura thought this was terrible, and only more so after Esquire ran an extended feature about Copeland, “Honest-Fly Media and the Loss of life of an Alabama Pastor: An American Tragedy“, which included several emails 20-300 and sixty five days-extinct Carter Copeland had sent to Craig Monger.

“I’m Bubba Copeland’s son. What you’ve got performed is no longer any longer by any come journalism,” he wrote, after the initial story broke. Carter didn’t receive a response to the e mail, nor to the message he sent Monger after his father’s suicide. “You and your colleagues took my father from me. … I hope the Lord’s judgment for you is swift and deliberate.”

“How dare he no longer reply to Carter? Coward,” Laura texted me. “Monger can were a pawn. Idk. It’s all so disgusting. I genuinely salvage loads more hatred for 1819 than I even conception doubtless. … I hope [Bryan] Dawson rots in the hell he perceives is true and he needs each person else to burn in.”

2. The Wrecking Crew

Piggybacking onto Copeland’s suicide would possibly perchance also wish been a easy call for the Los Angeles Cases and any outlet that noticed it as a mandate to vocally assist a pro-trans space, striking Copeland’s flesh to the conceptual possibility of, “Would you rather salvage a are living daughter or a tiring son?”

But why, I wondered, had 1819 News thrown the grenade? And who supplied the ammunition? I agreed that writing about a public official’s peccadilloes was a fable. If, for instance, the press discovered that Mitch McConnell secretly wore women’s clothing (an intriguing image to conjure, for certain), it would likely be written about. Still, I expected a news organization to first ask itself, why are we doing this? What is the purpose here? Is it incumbent upon us to leave any fragment of a person’s private life private, or are we inviting and perhaps obligated to tear down that wall, to throw our full weight behind a man’s back and pry open the door to private glory?

It wasn’t as if you were going to stumble across the erotica that Copeland published in 2017 and 2018 under the pseudonym Brittini Summerlin, among the 46,000 items on FictionMania, a community for ‘followers of transgendered fiction.’ You would likewise have to sift through nearly one billion Reddit users to find the images of Copeland posted of himself wearing women’s clothing. There was deliberation on the part of whoever had gone digging, and I tried to imagine the person, items in hand, realizing they had the power to likely upend a man’s life and wrestling with the ethics of doing so.

1819 News was evidently unencumbered by such concerns.

“1819 needs to be the morality police,” Bill Britt told me. Britt is the editor-in-chief at the Alabama Political Reporter. He told me that practically all of the state’s different news sites, alongside AL.com, had been critical of the doggedness with which 1819 News pursued Copeland, publishing an opinion piece after his suicide titled, “Copeland’s secret life is none of our business.” The piece quoted Larry DiChiara, a former Republican congressional candidate in Alabama in 2016, saying, “I simply want to ask you these who think it silly to publicly ridicule him, ‘Are you happy now?’” I would learn that Jay Jones, the Lee County sheriff who was intimately involved in the aftermath of Copeland’s suicide, had phoned 1819 News editor-in-chief Jeff Melancholy before the first story’s publication and said, of Copeland, “Hi there, he’s a good guy, don’t do this.”

Let’s catch up. 1819 News started in 2020 as a podcast, with funding by the Alabama Policy Institute, a conservative think tank whose website says it “protects equity, freedom, and families by investigating, initiating & informing about public policy solutions.” API provided the initial funding to launch 1819 News and hired Bryan Dawson as CEO and president. In a 2021postDawson explained, in effect, why he’d been given the job: “Because of my background in news and media, I know many people who work in the political sphere in Alabama, so I was able to gather information about what was actually happening.”

What political acumen and media ride Dawson possessed, he would needed to salvage picked up on the cruise. In a 2019 article for Newsweek titled, “From Breaking Inaccurate to Redemption: The Tale of Bryan Dawson,” he recalled his onerous childhood, his cocaine and meth addiction, and, in 2007, his beating a suspected snitch virtually to death with a padlock. Charged with attempted slay, aggravated theft, and extortion, Dawson faced 384 years in jail. He would wind up serving 12 years, right by which length he dedicated himself to Christ, reconnected alongside with his 8^th-grade crush and married her, and within two years used to be hired by 1819 News.

“API needed a media outlet,” said Bill Britt, and that if the public hadn’t heard of 1819 News, state and local politicians certainly had. “It has outsized influence since the politicians listen,” he said. “It’s, ‘We can write about you if you don’t do our bidding.’”

That bidding would flip out no longer to consist of going after a cramped-town Alabama mayor. Within the wake of Copeland’s suicide, API released a press delivery letting the public realize it had formally separated from 1819 News on December 31, 2022, and no longer had any “correct, editorial or monetary affiliation” with the news space. As for a come 1819 News continued to pause afloat, Britt said it had “gotten one other million final 300 and sixty five days.”

“It’s not known [from] who, but it’s political,” he said, adding, “I just keep thinking, what did Bubba do to make this a news story?”

To hear Bryan Dawson describe it, he had no choice. Upon 1819 News receiving a tip that included a link showing Copeland cross-dressing, Dawson felt it his duty to alert the community, to be, in the words of someone I spoke with, “a soldier for Christ with an Uzi.” On apodcastthree days after Copeland’s suicide, he and 1819 News editor-in-chief Jeff Melancholy dismissed the idea of not reporting on Copeland as naive and dangerous.

“AL.com basically came after us, ‘How dare we?’ I have a little, how dare they? And then they’re trying to make [Copeland] out to be almost a George Floyd martyr,” said Dawson. “I stand by our reporting 100%; I’m not backing down an inch. We did exactly what we were created to do.”

“You genuinely look at this and you wonder, what happens if I change the story and all the repercussions?” Melancholy said. “What happens if I don’t change the story?”

The immediate answer is, barring accident or illness, Copeland would still be alive, still be mayor of Smiths Station, still be a husband and father and stepfather to his partner’s two young daughters. No crime had been committed, and after the first batch of images was released, the congregants at First Baptist Church in Phenix City did not seek to condemn their pastor. In a sermon delivered after the initial 1819 News article, Copeland told those attending the Wednesday evening service, “Yes, I actually took pictures with my partner in the privacy of our home in an attempt at humor because I know I’m not a handsome man. Nor an extraordinary woman either.”

That should have gotten a laugh but didn’t; people were too unsettled, if not so unsettled that the church’s Facebook page didn’t immediately flood with variations of, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” People seemed ready to meet Copeland where he was.

‘Mayor, We Have Images’

There was also the intuition to catch villains. The most apparent target was 1819 News, at whom people aired their disgust online: “Oh look, some more pseudo-Christian hate-filled scumbags … wait till your closet skeletons come out,” and “I hope 1819 gets gawked out of existence. They know what they did. They killed a man,” and “Who gave the tip? How did they get this information? Is there an underlying political agenda?”

“So it used to be uncommon, and that genuinely did play into it,” said Craig Monger, as soon as I asked what he would possibly perchance define me about who’d sent 1819 News the records about Copeland. It had been six weeks since Monger cold-called Copeland and said, “Mayor, we now salvage images.” 5 weeks plus two days since Copeland dedicated suicide, also the day that Monger, whose byline used to be on the first four articles, started receiving death threats.

In a Tallassee, Alabama, coffee shop across the road from a historic sign commemorating Tallassee Confederate Officers Headquarters, Monger explained that on October 30, 1819 News received a Reddit link from someone who’d provided them information before, a tipster whom, in the story, Monger would say only that the person operated in political circles and, if he disagreed with someone’s political ambitions, could also leak damaging information to the press.

“But Bubba Copeland had no political ambitions. He wasn’t running for state representative,” said Monger. “It appeared like this guy who gave us his tip had this magnificent conception that this was wrong behavior and he needed someone to write about it.”

Monger followed the Reddit to an Instagram started in 2014 under the name Brittini Blaire, whose bio read, “A Transitioning Transgender Curvy Lady, that loves Smiling, Clothes and Shoes! Let’s chat: IG brittinisummerlin.” He noticed images of Copeland wearing women’s clothes and chat messages he’d shared with admirers. He found the erotic fiction. Monger, who spent most of his childhood in China as the son of American missionaries and who now describes himself as Calvinist Baptist (“We’re essentially Presbyterians that don’t baptize our children,” he explained), thought Copeland posting the images and erotica on social media was “reckless.”

Monger worked on the story for less than a day before he got Copeland on the phone and asked, “Is this your Instagram? Are you Brittini Blaire?”

A Hobby I Make to Reduce Stress

Monger, who’s over six feet tall and built like a hockey player, started to tremble as he told me this. “I was audibly apprehensive and even still am,” he said, of cold-calling Copeland. “I said, ‘There’s no need to beat around the bush. Is this you on Reddit and Instagram, as Brittini Blaire posting these things?’ He initially said, ‘No, never heard of it.’ I said, ‘Would it surprise you to know that this person is taking photos for your rental, for your partner’s clothes?’”

Copeland started to talk then, telling Monger, “It’s a hobby I use to relieve stress” and “I genuinely feel plenty of stress” and “I’m not medically transitioning” and “It’s just a small part of a character I’m playing.”

With affirmation the images had been of Copeland, Monger said 1819 News “felt obligated” to flee the story. He then gave Copeland “a courtesy call,” to pronounce the story would put up the next day.

“This call was worse,” said Monger. “He knew he was trapped.”

An Charm Not to Crawl the Tale

Copeland asked 1819 News to not flee the story, that it was no one else’s business, that the tales were magnificent fiction, that he’d deleted all his social media.

“I know what a desperate person sounds like,” Monger told me, if not with a ring of victory, more resigned, as despite the indisputable reality that this is magnificent what you affect in the news business.

Which is good, I say, given how he got into the news business. Monger had already told me of his own desperations: how he’d struggled since age 11 with drinking, with crank and meth; how a bum ear saved him from enlisting in the Navy, how he’d worked fast food jobs and driven an 18-wheeler before being sidelined by a back injury in 2021. It was soon thereafter, not yet 30 and newly married, that Monger met Dawson at church.

“We had very similar backgrounds, and so we naturally became friends,” he said. Dawson told him about 1819 News and offered him a position as a staff writer. It was Monger’s first job in journalism. It turned out to be better for him than driving a truck. He could support his growing family and write about issues important to Alabamians, such as removing books that might appear LGBTQ-friendly from public libraries. 1819 News does not shy away from embracing Scripture. A photo on their website shows staff in a prayer circle, and I could understand how men who had struggled with personal demons, like Monger and Dawson had, might feel drawn to their expression of faith, might need to hold onto it for dear life, lest they be reminded of or pulled back into any darkness.

But I wondered the build grace slot in, the build “Make unto others as you would salvage them affect unto you,” and whether the dogma they’d long-established for themselves, and by extension for their publication, made tamping down compassion for Copeland a no brainer, made it easy to brush apart the sheriff announcing, “He’s a correct guy, don’t flee this” and make contact with from an increasing number of frantic mates and household warning that Copeland used to be in a perilous station.

Monger was home alone when he learned of Copeland’s suicide. “There’s no precedent or training for this,” he said. His partner and young children were away, which was fine as well, because the death threats had started to flood his work email, and people had been posting his home address on social media. He knew then that he was “going to be unemployable anywhere else.” He was at the center of the whirlwind he had started, the man who spews hate, and although the tremor in his hand might have suggested otherwise, Monger told me, “Looking back, I don’t see myself doing anything else.”

3. Bubba

Until October 31, Bubba Copeland’s week followed a predictable pattern. He attended and led services at First Baptist Church. He spent time in his office as mayor of Smiths Situation, a town with one stoplight and a Esteem’s Dart Discontinue, a gasoline and convenience retailer that Copeland had been influential in bringing to town, a coup locals still dispute. From there he would drive ten miles to The Nation Market, whose sign at the entrance promised “Fresh Meat and Produce,” despite the fact that the day I was there, there were steaks marked “Reduced for Quick Sale” and a young woman at the register who looked as if she’d had a rough night.

That may have been fine with Copeland, who was known to hire people who didn’t fit the mold of small-town Alabamian. Copeland knew something about this. He had been dressing in women’s clothes in secret for more than 20 years. Since no later than 2014, he had been living online as a transgender woman. If the East Alabama Chamber of Commerce awarded Copeland its ‘Person of the Year Award’ in 2020, online he received a familiar form of validation. Instagram messages show Brittini Blaire flirting with admirers who complimented her blooming curves, her pleasant rear.

Whether the communion Copeland experienced with strangers online gave him strength or made him overcompensate, the result was the same: He was the one who got up early before church to fix the Smiths Situation stoplight when it malfunctioned, who showed up at your home when your father hanged himself in the backyard. It may indeed have been that helping others was a way to outrun what he perceived as his own dark secrets, but from what people told me, he was also simply a good man, a man whose online presence and whose role as community leader had been, for a long time, able to coexist in harmony, a harmony that ended when 1819 News cracked down hard and did not let up.

Copeland’s stepdaughters had been out trick-or-treating when the call came from 1819 News, letting him know his private and public worlds were about to collide, that by morning the next day, the persona he had created – to relieve stress, to find enjoyment – would likely be paraded as a symbol of degeneracy.

Craig Monger told me he thought Copeland had been “reckless” to post his content on social media; that he would need to face the consequences. I do not disagree. But accountability requires someone or something to enforce consequences. Each of Copeland’s spouses was aware of and accepted his cross-dressing. His parishioners, while confused, knew he was telling the truth when he told them from the pulpit, “This is not who I am.” As devout people, they trusted in God’s mercy and believed it was not their place to judge. I recall Copeland found this a comfort.

But I also wondered whether he had brought about his own downfall, whether he had left it online for anyone to find, in the expectation that he would and should be punished.

Punishment turned out to be something 1819 News was adept at. They published seven stories about Copeland, three posthumously, accusing him of being “very ill,” labeling his behavior “an abomination,” and urging him to “be ashamed.” Perhaps the campaign was an attempt by staff to atone for their own past transgressions, to prove to whatever deity they believed in that they were doing His work. Others saw only cruelty. As a local reporter later observed, “Bubba was down, and they just kept kicking and kicking and kicking. It wasn’t enough for them to merely condemn him. They needed to hurt him.

Whether what 1819 News did was for political purposes, to gain influence in the media landscape, or to contrast their understanding of Christianity with Copeland’s in order to fill his void, could be debated and in the end doesn’t matter. The result was a man trapped in a hate cycle constructed by those who needed others to be seen as tainted so they could feel righteous.