HUFFINGTON
10.07.12
ANGER MANAGEMENT
In May of 2011, two weeks before he met Kathryn Treadway,
LaRoque took offense to a press
release from the local NAACP that
said Republican obstruction of
unemployment insurance would
harm the state’s African-American population. LaRoque called
the NAACP “racist.” He told local TV station WRAL, “I’m sick of
getting these race-baiting, racisttype action alerts, e-mails, whatever you want to call them.”
In the midst of all of this,
Treadway pulled into LaRoque’s
driveway last year, ready to take
on the job he’d offered.
LaRoque greeted her politely,
according to both of their accounts
at the time, and began fulfilling his
promise to give her work. He got
her started pulling dead tomato
and bell pepper plants out of pots,
then pouring the soil into a big
container so he and his wife, Susan, could reuse it later. After that,
he asked her to clear some fallen
tree limbs from the yard.
Treadway quit after one hour.
“It was just too much. I’m not
used to doing manual labor, and
the crap he wanted me to do was
something two men would do,”
she told The Huffington Post at
the time, adding that she thought
LaRoque deliberately tried to humiliate her. “I’m used to making
$22 an hour. I’m not gonna sit
there for $8 an hour and come
home having a stroke.”
LaRoque paid her $8 in cash,
and she drove home.
“If people need a job, they need
to go looking for a job, and they
need to take what they can get
until they can find something better,” LaRoque told HuffPost after
the incident, vindicated in his
view of joblessness. “I still think
that a lot of those people are not
actively looking for work.”
The online community reacted strongly to a Huffington Post
story in May 2011 about Treadway’s fight with LaRoque. Online
commenters criticized LaRoque
and posted his email address and
phone number at the North Carolina General Assembly.
LaRoque jumped into the article’s comment thread to defend
himself, leaving more than 100
spirited comments over two days.
Most of them calmly answered other commenters’ questions, but in a
few he let his exasperation show.
“Sir you just called my deceased mother a Bitch,” LaRoque
wrote in one comment. “I dare say
you wouldn’t do that to my face...
You are a real ASS!”
“So you want to get rid of the
state legislature?” he said in an-