Sacramento, CA — California’s 3rd District Appellate Court denied a Jackson, CA man’s appeal to overturn a 2020 conviction for mayhem and conspiracy following an extended series of “stalkings” involving an area weatherman.
In 2020, Jackson, CA, resident David Johanson sued KCRA when the weatherman wrongly predicted a beautiful day. According to Mr. Johanson, he ended up getting caught in the rain, causing him to catch the flu, miss a week of work, and purchase medication. He sued for $1,000, claiming that the incident caused him stress.
After losing the case, Mr. Johanson began to harass the TV personality claiming that the weatherman was a part of a “global conspiracy to control the weather” whose “primary goal was convincing the population that global warming was real” with the intent of “distributing elitist propaganda for mind control.”
“People have to understand that there is a coordinated effort to control our weather with the sole purpose of controlling the population,” said Mr. Johanson to 3rd District Judge Jeffrey Bartholomew do later dismissed his motion. “They are controlling everything above us, and the weatherman is a part of this Fake News conspiracy.”
After Mr. Johanson’s lawsuit was dismissed, he decided to take investigative matters into his own hands and start following the KCRA personality [his name has been redacted due to a court order] to, in Mr. Johanson’s words, “find out who’s giving him the orders to make up stuff about our skies.”
For the next year, he secretly, and sometimes not so quietly, trailed the weatherman, recording his every move and publishing his finding to his now-defunct website thetruthabouttheweather.com. Finally, around August 2019, the weatherman noticed that Mr. Johanson was following him and took out a restraining order forbidding the 59-year-old conspiracy theorist from coming within 100 yards of him.
This only escalated Mr. Johanson’s behavior. Mr. Johanson began placing listening devices on the weatherman’s property in the ensuing months. Finally, after discovering other spying devices, he was arrested, tried in 2020, and sentenced to over four years in jail. This year, he filed an appeal, and the 3rd District rejected it and added a year to his sentence for contempt.
Mr. Johanson’ says he plans to appeal once more, even though there is no process to request an appeal in California.
