Andrew Breitbart was a man who loved to toss around the word “big.” His websites—Big Government, Big Hollywood, Big Journalism—are clearinghouses of conservative ripostes to mainstream politics, entertainment and media that attempted to tear down what he saw as a domineering left-wing narrative. He operated with endless bluster and the content on his sites have been the sources of controversies that have upended Congress, ended careers and ruined personal reputations.

Breitbart, who died Thursday at his home in Los Angeles at age 43, was also a man of big statements. Always the rabble-rouser, his pugnacity never seemed to wane. At a party full of his fellow right-wing bloggers last month during the Conservative Political Action Conference, Breitbart told his admirers the secret to successful muckraking and mudslinging was “to be a warrior.”

The next night, Breitbart let out a war cry of his own when he burst out of the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel hosting CPAC to unload upon a group of Occupy protesters. He screamed at the top of his lungs for over a minute, repeating imperatives like “Behave yourselves!” and “Stop raping people!” The rant was caught on video by Emily Crockett, a reporter covering the Occupy movement. It didn’t take long for the clip to go viral, nor was it long before Crockett found herself the latest target of Breitbart’s slings and arrows.

Since his death, Breitbart’s legacy has been called one that raised the profile and impact of partisan, citizen-driven journalism—he helped found The Huffington Post before setting out on his own network on the other end of the political spectrum. But it’s also a legacy of countless verbal fistfights. Below, Crockett writes about her role as one of Breitbart’s last combatants:

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“I enjoy making enemies,” Andrew Breitbart wrote once. His fans called him a “happy warrior.” He was constantly spoiling for a fight.

More than that, though, Breitbart was constantly seeking an audience. More than a journalist or even a provocateur, he was a performance artist.

If you watch an interview he gave two weeks before his death, you’ll see a steel-eyed, hypomanic, histrionic filibusterer—but you’ll also see a monologist at work, refusing to be interrupted in his tale.

Breitbart found truth in fiction, as many artists do. In order to reach people—to make them listen, to his message or just to him—he spun what he deemed useful fantasies, where his political opponents always wore black hats and twirled pencil moustaches. Breitbart knew the power of myth, of righteous anger and, most of all, of repetition.

His problem, of course, was that he worked in the wrong genre—one whose conventions require reason and facts to come before persuasion and passion. Throw out those conventions, as he did, and stories change. Lives and reputations are ruined before anyone knows what has happened or how.

I’ll say he was an artist, and I’ll even say he was a skilled artist, but I won’t say he was a good artist. Certainly not one who took responsibility for the statements he was making or the reactions he intended to elicit.

Last month, Breitbart enjoyed a week or so of making a new enemy: Me—a nobody of a novice reporter who happened to train a camera on him when he erupted in lunacy toward the Occupy movement outside the Conservative Political Action Conference.

I doubt the CPAC performance was staged, but the Twitter tour that followed certainly was.

When he called me a “scurrilous wench,” I was amused. He even had some basis for his beef—I was a little hasty in the way I reported on a video that seemed to suggest he was drunk the night of his rant, and had to walk it back some.

But then he tried to re-write his “Stop raping people!” farce as a serious national drama about the Epidemic of Occupy Rapes. As if he’d ever raised a particular stink about sexual violence that didn’t directly damn his political opponents. As if calling an entire movement “freaks and animals” is fair to the rape survivors (or the majority of nonviolent men and women) who are a part of that movement.

By the time Breitbart started asking me if I would personally hold down an Occupy rape victim to further my career, I was less amused.

And least amusing: the above tweet came a day after I mentioned to Breitbart that I’m a rape survivor. (It was a long time ago and I’m fine, but it’s still a fact. I took the tweet about it down because, well, some people on the Internet are terrible.) Breitbart grudgingly gave me the benefit of the doubt, only to continue on with the Two Minutes Twitter-Hate accusing me of denying rapes—which, in case it bears citing, I didn’t do.

So even before his grave is dug, and even knowing his penchant for panache, I wouldn’t feel too badly about calling him a shameless, raging bully.

Still—I was floored, and saddened, by the news of his death. Dickish as he was to me on a seemingly personal level, I knew him as a performer, not as a person. He had people who cared deeply for him, including a wife and four kids. It turns out he and I have at least one mutual friend.

He will never see, nor retweet, another insult, or know who will win the 2012 election, or make another spurious smear-documentary using footage without permission, or step outside into more of this gorgeous unseasonable sun.

And on a more frivolous level, I doubt any of his many virtual targets, myself included, will ever have another “arch-nemesis” of the same scale. Who actually wants to see the Joker or Magneto go away forever?

I wondered aloud at one point what would happen if he and I attempted to have a deliberately civil face-to-face conversation with no name-calling. To just hang out in the wings. I’ll never know.

He was deliberately uncivil in his public life and called his black-hat political nemeses plenty of names. He fancied himself a hero but loved to play the martyr, and he was torturous to the national narrative. He has any number of minions ready to take his place—Dana Loesch made a decent understudy recently with her “once penetrated, always penetrable”-style defense of Virginia’s invasive abortion ultrasound bill.

It’s truly sad that he’s gone, but perhaps sadder still that his legacy will live on.

Emily Crockett is a freelance writer in Washington.