What Happened to Mike Bivins?

Mike Bivins had supposedly left the scene of political extremism.

As of October, Bivins had an administrative job at Oregon Health & Science University, where he had worked since 2006. He and his wife of nine years lived in a high-end apartment building in the Lloyd District. He had ceased the work two years earlier that had brought him some regional notice and bylines in Willamette Week: filming clashes between dueling protesters in the streets of Portland.

In November 2021, he got divorced, quit his OHSU job, cashed out his retirement account, and started living on the streets. This month, he allegedly went on a weeklong, citywide hate-crime spree.

Bivins, 34, is charged with breaking windows and spray-painting a Nazi-referencing death threat at Congregation Beth Israel in Northwest Portland; attempting to set fire to the Muslim Community Center in North Portland while people were inside the building; and breaking windows at another synagogue and a Black-owned restaurant.

He is currently being held at the Multnomah County Detention Center on 11 counts: five charges of second-degree bias crimes, five charges of criminal mischief and one felony charge of first-degree arson.

Friends and former colleagues are left with the same question as his alleged victims: How did he get from point A to point B?

“I am both stunned and horrified,” says Camilla Mortensen, editor-in-chief at Eugene Weekly, where Bivins interned.

Bivins’ ex-wife, Cressida Souvanh, answered questions via text message. Souvanh, who is Laotian, said she’d “never seen a hateful attitude toward minorities with him during our marriage.”

She said a “change in him” was the final straw in their decadelong marriage and that he “became really mean” to her. She has not communicated with him since the divorce.

An examination of Bivins’ social media feeds and interviews with people who know him personally reveal a profound change in the past year. By this winter, a man who had once reported critically on far-right extremism was spewing hateful rhetoric about Jews, minorities, Spanish speakers, and people with disabilities.

People who worked with him are struggling to reconcile the Mike Bivins they knew with the one currently being held at the Multnomah County Detention Center.

“I just feel really overwhelmed and sad,” says Crystal Contreras-Grossman, another former WW freelancer. “I feel like he’s an example of someone the system should be built to help. He is clearly not doing well.”

Bivins was raised in the Tri-Cities area of Eastern Washington and, according to his ex-wife, attended Benson Polytechnic High School in Portland. He tweeted in 2016 that he was in foster care from 2003 to 2007.

He has a bachelor’s degree in communications from Portland State University and wrote for the school’s Vanguard newspaper while a student there. In 2014, he wrote an opinion piece in the Vanguard arguing that President Andrew Jackson should be removed from the $20 bill because of his role in the violent removal tens of thousands of Native Americans from their homelands. He lamented the “ambivalence, apathy and a general lack of respect for what Native Americans endured.”

Contreras-Grossman met Bivins when they were covering Portland protests of the 2014 police shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. Contreras-Grossman and Bivins covered Don’t Shoot Portland meetings together, a protest outside of an immigrant detention center, and even traveled together to Everett, Wash., to report on a campaign rally for then-candidate Donald J. Trump in 2016.

“He always seemed really neutral,” says Contreras-Grossman, who is of Mexican and Pueblo descent. “He would just let his camera roll and not edit it one way or another to make one side look better. I always got the general feeling from him that things like racism are wrong.”

In 2015, he started an internship at Eugene Weekly, where he wrote about marijuana legalization and a handful of protest stories, according to Mortensen.

“As an intern, he was super eager and energetic and on it,” Mortensen says. Immediately after getting hired as an intern, he took it upon himself to copy-edit Eugene Weekly’s entire blog. Bivins didn’t have a car, so he took the train or bus from Portland to Eugene for his internship.

Bivins contributed about 20 stories to WW from 2016 to 2019. He covered far-right extremism, from a Lake Oswego Trump rally to the criminal trial of Ammon Bundy to MAX train murderer Jeremy Christian. In 2017, he wrote that neo-Nazi activity in town such as swastika graffiti on a synagogue raised “dark memories” of skinhead violence in Portland in the 1980s and ‘90s.

After long, stressful days covering protests, Contreras-Grossman felt surprised when Bivins told her he was going straight to work at OHSU.

“I don’t know what he was running on,” she says.

OHSU would not comment on “confidential personnel matters” but did share that the hospital runs background checks on employees before they are hired and additional checks if employees need access to secure high-risk areas, funds, or sensitive electronic information.

His last bylines for WW and Eugene Weekly both appeared in the spring of 2019.

By summer 2021, posts to Bivins’ Twitter account started to seem erratic. Concerned, Contreras-Grossman invited Bivins and his then-wife over to socialize in the backyard in June but never heard back.

Bivins and Souvanh divorced due to irreconcilable differences on Nov. 19, 2021.

Since the divorce, according to a May 9 Multnomah County court arraignment document, Bivins has been homeless and living outside except for two nights a week, when he slept at his mother’s home. His mother lives in public housing in Sellwood with a front door decorated with Mardi Gras beads, artificial flowers, and a small, napping cat figurine. She did not respond to knocks on her door or a request for comment.

He remained active on social media. (He tweeted 93 times on Dec. 30 and 31, for example.) His Twitter account paints a picture of a life spent mostly riding around the city on TriMet while carrying bags of his possessions. He hit the gym to work out and shower, and was “in the best shape ever.” He also said he had “cried more in the last 3 months than in all my life combined” and had a “burning desire to join the military.”

Bivins does not use drugs or have any diagnosed mental health issues, according to the May 9 court documents.

He currently follows only two accounts on Twitter: Elon Musk and Chick-fil-A. On April 17, Twitter locked his account for violating the rules against abuse and harassment.

Bivins turned himself in to the Fox 12 news station on May 4, claiming responsibility for the crimes and making anti-Semitic statements. Since the reporter he hoped to talk to wasn’t available, he agreed to return May 6 for “additional discussions,” according to the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office. Police met him there.

Steps past the still-visible scorch marks near the sanctuary doors at Congregation Beth Israel, a table is covered with dozens of letters of support from the community, including many from students at St. Mary’s Academy and the Metropolitan Learning Center.

“We are reminded that hatred and intolerance continue to infect our world,” Rabbi Michael Z. Cahana wrote to the congregation the night after the vandalism and fire. “Thank [God] no one was hurt.…But the damage to our sense of safety is harmed.”

According to Seemab Hussaini, a congregant at the Muslim Community Center, there has been “constant vigilance” at the mosque, with everyone from the imam himself to congregants volunteering to keep watch over the property since the attack. The mosque has hired an armed guard for its large Friday prayer services.

The attempted arson took place at the mosque at about 6:48 pm on May 3, according to court documents. The day before was the holiday Eid al-Fitr, marking the end of Ramadan, so May 3 was quiet: “We were caught off guard completely,” Hussaini says.

“The greater problem is how a lot of people are getting desensitized by the barrage of far-right messaging in our lives,” Hussaini says. “This is the vulnerability we are all facing when we allow people to consume this type of rhetoric on a daily basis.…It’s really emboldening people who are broken.”