His hands are too tiny for the fiddle.
Silly Wolff, the President doesn’t read.
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Finally a situation where FIRST AMENDMENT!!! is actually applicable
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May recall “that” campaign volunteer to fill him in on the schpiel …
Sure, but that didn’t help at all - I read a copy shortly after it was released here, while it was still banned in the UK.
TBH, though, I wish I hadn’t. “Tedious and self-serving” would be a generous appraisal.
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The letter is here:
and is self-evidently just the standard pre-action letter a firm like that would send in any case.
It is remarkably light on what the alleged defamatory statements are but goes on at length about the law of defamation generally and the duty to secure evidence.
In order words, it’s 10 pages of padding to beef up the basic message of “We assert that you have published naughty things (but we’re not going to tell you what they are). Don’t do it again and tell us all about what other naughty things you’ve been up to. We may be demanding huge sums of money or anything else we can think of”.
Not a lot of revision went into the letter.
I would say I hope Trump isn’t getting billed a huge amount for the letter itself (there will hopefully have been all sorts of advice work as well) but I don’t.
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So a form letter from a law firm…That is going to scare publisher’s law firm…
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“Jenkins, run off a response to this, would you?”
Something along the lines of the reply given in Arkell v. Pressdram springs to mind.
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If I got a letter from Trumps lawyers, I would be tempted to use the Private Eye’s legal team too. I don’t think there are many businesses who are less afraid of being sued.
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I always get the impression that Ian Hislop quite likes it.
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I’m reading it now.
I expect it will be fun, unbelievable and horrifying.
Some reactions from the TV new stations this morning:
“The way for Trump to show he really IS capable would be for him to hold a press conference and demonstrate that he isn’t an idiot.” (Me, again-we all know that’s not going to happen, but I’d love to watch it.)
Wolfe said he is accused of having no credibility by the least credible man who ever lived.
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Roy Moore’s horse, surely?
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An impression he wishes to convey because it discourages litigants. Arkell v Pressdram did have something of a silencing effect on some of them. But sometimes PE loses big, and occasionally it deserves to.
Seems legit.
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We elected the rear half of one already.
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I thought it only reached the conceptual phase. But no. Wiki:
The book was then formally announced some weeks later in mid-November 2006 for release on November 30, 2006. … [A]ll 400,000 printed copies were recalled for “pulping”.
I guess it can be done. Of course, ebooks were a different thing in 2006, but it was just a few years later that we got that ample demonstration of nuking an ebook.
So maybe he wasn’t completely nuts after all. Bit of a moot point now, though.
First-amendment lawyer Ken White from Popehat likes to reiterate that a letter from some lawyer claiming you’re libeling person X without actually quoting, with specificity, the allegedly libelous statement(s) is basically posturing, not unlike King Kong beating his chest. Not something to be really afraid of.
This would presumably prompt a reply along the lines of “Dear Sirs, we think you should be aware that some asshole is signing your name to stupid letters”.
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It’s now up to 102 requests!
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There was a scan of a galley copy doing the rounds on the torrent sites iirc.
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