A San Francisco man accused of stalking his former employers and threatening to harm them and release naked pictures of their daughters pleaded not guilty today to more than 30 separate criminal charges.
Anatoly Smolkin, 27, was arrested on Thursday and has been charged with 32 counts, including stalking, making criminal threats, assault with a deadly weapon, resisting arrest and battery, prosecutors said.
Smolkin was fired from San Francisco-based TinyCo, a company that makes mobile phone game apps, and began stalking employees there, as well as at another former employer, district attorney’s office spokesman Omid Talai said.
When the companies each hired separate legal counsel, Smolkin then began stalking lawyers at the different law firms, as well as harassing the building management company at 1 Bush St., the location of TinyCo’s offices, Talai said.
He also began threatening the headmaster of the Town School for Boys, a private kindergarten through eighth-grade school in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood that he attended as a child, and spat in the face of a police lieutenant who arrested him Thursday, according to Talai.
In a lively arraignment hearing in San Francisco Superior Court today, Smolkin requested to represent himself in the case, saying the charges were “all trumped up.”
After graduating from University of California at Berkeley, he graduated from Northwestern University Law School in Chicago and was admitted to the State Bar of California as a licensed attorney in December 2010, Talai said.
Judge Richard Ulmer cautioned Smolkin that representing one’s self in court is “usually a really bad idea” that “may do more harm than good,” but allowed him to proceed as his own attorney.
Prosecutor Nancy Tung said Smolkin “engaged in a pattern of harassment, threats and possible extortion” since last November, and posted on Facebook lyrics from rap songs implying he would harm them.
A post on Smolkin’s Facebook profile dated Dec. 10 says he’s “a self-made millionaire, thug living out of prison pistols in the air … now im bout to set the record straight with my AK i’m still the thug that you love to hate.“
Smolkin admitted in court that he threatened to find and release naked pictures of the daughters of his former employers, and sent emails to them, saying “it takes one minute to send emails.”
Ulmer responded, “So that makes it OK to send emails that you’re going to kill them?”
The judge seemed to lose patience with Smolkin by the end of the hearing, saying “you may be a smart guy, but you don’t know what you’re doing in criminal court.”
Smolkin responded that if he is found guilty, that will be a failure of the legal system, not of him, and that he “will serve any jail time and then flee the country.”
Smolkin remains in custody in lieu of $2 million bail, and was also ordered by Ulmer to stay away from the various companies, their employees and their families.
He is scheduled to return to court on Wednesday morning to set a preliminary hearing in the case.
Dan McMenamin, Bay City News
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