My AmazonReview of "The Reasonable Woman," allegedly by Wendy McElroy

[caroljane]

I still cannot comprehend how someone can copy the writing of another person, nearly word for word, and pass it off as her own -- while basking in the praise of her readers. It absolutely astonishes me.

Ghs

I can't comprehend how it must feel, to relive such a betrayal by someone you trusted. You have said it is making you sick, that I can understand. I hope there will be an easement. Injustice is too strong to nurture.

[George H. Smith]

I still cannot comprehend how someone can copy the writing of another person, nearly word for word, and pass it off as her own -- while basking in the praise of her readers. It absolutely astonishes me.

Ghs

I can't comprehend how it must feel, to relive such a betrayal by someone you trusted. You have said it is making you sick, that I can understand. I hope there will be an easement. Injustice is too strong to nurture.

Thanks for the moral support. Your words are greatly appreciated.

Although I don't wish to beat a horse that won't die, people need to understand how much intellectual and professional support I gave to Wendy through the nearly 10 years we lived together. When I first met Wendy in 1975, she had little interest in philosophy and had read nothing in the field, other than Rand. She was interested in literature -- especially in writing poetry, which she was very good at -- and in Reichian therapy (and Freudianism generally). That was basically it.

I worked with Wendy very closely for years on intellectual issues, especially on her writing skills on philosophical issues. I reviewed and edited all of her writing up until around 1982, and I sometimes insisted that she rewrite things from scratch, such as her intro to the anthology, Freedom, Feminism, and the State. I also suggested the extensive index to Liberty (Benjamin Tucker's anarchist periodical) and provided her with a complete run of that rare publication. (She worked on this for three years, using thousands of index cards.)

Wendy was always grateful for my help. In fact, she used to call herself "Little George," because her writing style and manner of dealing with ideas came to resemble my own in many ways, though she later developed her own voice. She showed her appreciation by dedicating both Freedom, Feminism, and the State and her Liberty Index to me. But later, long before the plagiarism scandal broke, I noticed that, in a subsequent reprint of the anthology, my name had been deleted and replaced by Brad's, who had nothing whatsoever to do with that project. I also recall seeing a reprint of the Index. That dedication had been changed as well.

I didn't understand what was going on, but I knew something was afoot. Then there was that miserable period when I first obtained a copy of TRW (Sharon brought a copy to JR's beer bust), as I sat in a chair skimming it, shaking my head and feeling like I was going to vomit. Having taught the FOR classes for so many years, I knew most of that material by heart; and the experience of reading my own words in a book with her name on it was the closest thing to a Twilight Zone experience that I ever hope to have. It was simply indescribable.

Then, after I went public in 1998, came the the clincher. In Wendy's final, desperate excuse, she claimed that she had actually co-developed all of my FOR material, had co-written the FOR transcripts (which makes no sense), and had even co-taught the classes (even though many dozens of witnesses could testify to the contrary). That gullible fool Kinsella then repeated this "justification" in his various legal threats, claiming that Wendy had a right to use her own material. Did Kinsella ever think to ask Wendy: If you co-developed and co-wrote all that FOR material, then why did you supposedly erase all of it from your hard drive in 1994? Why would you delete your own material, and begin writing it again from scratch?

Obviously not. Instead, Kinsella probably said, in the voice of Disney's Goofy, "Yup, Yup. That makes sense to me."

Never mind that I was teaching those classes a full year before I even met Wendy. Never mind that Wendy had no experience in the area I was working in, so it would have been insane for me to "co-develop" anything with her. Never mind that, in TRW (142), Wendy wrote:

The next two chapters are devoted to examining a unique intellectual therapy group created by the philosopher George Smith, in which I was fortunate enough to participate.

Exactly. I created FOR, I, and I alone, taught every single class -- and Wendy was merely a participant. (Since we lived together, and since I held classes in my living room, she would often sit in on them, frequently as an observer rather than as a participant per se.) But never mind any of this, and much more. Wendy transformed herself into a "co-creator" of many years of my work, and that fool Kinsella swallowed this ludicrous lie, hook, line, and sinker. So have some other libertarians who have only Wendy's lie to go on, and have made no attempt to ascertain the facts.

From our years of living together, Wendy knew -- because I had stated it often enough -- that, for me, there was an Original Sin for writers, namely, to claim the work of others as one's own. This is something I could never tolerate. Over and over again, I preached the imperative of giving credit where credit is due. Above all, I could never understand how people could take pleasure in the praise they receive for work that is not their own.

Wendy knew this for a number of reasons. For example, I sometimes related a story that happened shortly after I separated from my first wife. She had agreed to debate Sharon Presley, of all people, at a libertarian supper club in Los Angeles on the rights of children. My ex was (and presumably still is) a highly intelligent woman but not especially methodical in her philosophical thinking, to put it mildly. I therefore suggested that she write her initial presentation (of 20 minutes)out in advance and then read it, rather than speaking extemporaneously, which almost certainly would have been a disaster. She agreed.

Then, the morning of the talk, at around 10 a.m., my ex called me in a panic. She had written some things out, but would I help her "revise" the talk? I sensed trouble ahead, but I told her to come on over. She arrived in around 20 minutes and showed me an absolute horror of a manuscript. I looked it over for a few minutes and said, "There is no way I can revise this. It's a mess. Go away and take it with you, and I will write a 20 minute talk for you from scratch. You can pick it up at 4."

I spent the next 5 hours writing the damned thing, and it was very good, if I do say so myself. My ex showed up exactly at 4, and was relieved when I handed her the pages. The debate was at 7, so I said, "Look, you have 3 hours before you will read this. But I wrote it, and it doesn't sound like you, nor is this the way you think. So whatever you do, don't read it cold tonight. You need to spend at least an hour reading it aloud to yourself, so it will sound natural when you deliver it tonight. Otherwise you will stumble though the thing, and Sharon will pulverize you."

I went to the supper club, and when my ex delivered the 20 minute talk I had written for her, it was obvious she had not practiced it in advance. I was embarrassed for her, but the material itself was so strong that she got a lot of compliments afterward. (I will not comment on the possible motives of all those guys who had in their sights a very sexy and single Objectivist nude dancer -- a real rarity. )

Anyway, I apologize for the long story, but here is the punch line.

After my ex and I retired to the bar for drinks, she went on and on about how the audience loved her talk, how she had received many compliments on the rigorous arguments, and how it was one of the best things on the subject they had ever heard. Meanwhile, I am sitting across from my ex, listening to this self-hype, staring down into my bourbon and stirring the ice with my finger, and shaking my head. Then my ex got annoyed. She said, "What's what the matter? Didn't you like it?"

I was very tempted to say, "Yeah, I liked my talk, which you read word for word but didn't bother to practice, very much" -- but I knew better than to start something with that fiery redhead who loved to fight. I said instead, "It was very good. I had something else on my mind." And that was that.

When I told this story to Wendy, I said what astonished me was not that my ex read something as her own without crediting me -- for she had my permission to do this -- but that she took genuine pleasure in receiving so many compliments about ideas and arguments that she had absolutely nothing to do with. Within the span of a few hours, my ex had somehow convinced herself that she, and not I, had actually written the piece. She really seemed to believe this.

This sort of thing does happen, and Wendy knew very well how I felt about it. This is what makes her plagiarism so personal. Wendy is an excellent writer, and she could have easily rewritten my FOR material or quoted me when appropriate, in which case I would have had no objection. What Wendy did, she did deliberately and for a reason -- a very personal reason. And this is why I have responded on such a personal level.

Ghs

[Brant Gaede]

George, there is a grace in this whole situation: no children were involved.

--Brant

it's usually about money; here, about ideas, with the court records supposedly sealed

[George H. Smith]

George, there is a grace in this whole situation: no children were involved.

--Brant

it's usually about money; here, about ideas, with the court records supposedly sealed

Wendy and I separated amicably in 1985 and remained friends for some years. This conflict, which emerged years later, is not about ideas. It is about flagrant plagiarism, pure and simple. The same conflict would have arisen if Wendy had merely been a friend, though in that case I may not have entrusted all my FOR material to her.

I had my problems with Wendy, as she had her problems with me. That is normal. But even after Wendy and I did stop speaking (around 8 years before the plagiarism scandal), I never imagined she would publish seven years of my work under her own name.

As I have said, Wendy later claimed that I had defaulted on our agreement, because I had not "reviewed" a mythical polished draft that she supposedly gave to me, sent to me, or whatever, within 6 weeks, so all rights to my material supposedly reverted to her, and she was legally free to publish my material under her name alone.

This is pure bullshit, of course (for several reasons), but note how this excuse concedes that Wendy did in fact publish my writing under her own name, while claiming she supposedly had the legal right to do so. It is an outright confession that I did in fact write at least half of TRW.

Note also how this excuse (one of 3 that Wendy gave) contradicts her claim to have erased all of my FOR material from her hard drive in 1994. According to her "default" story, she had a polished manuscript in hand, one suitable for publication, and she had full rights to everything, owing to my supposed default. But did Wendy publish that manuscript? No. For some inexplicable reason, she deleted "her" entire book from her computer in 1994 and proceeded to write the same book over again from scratch, while using the same large chunks of material from my FOR transcripts that she had used in the manuscript that she had supposedly deleted.

Things get even worse when you consider Wendy's first line of defense. Shortly after I began sending out parallel passages in 1998 between FOR and TRW, Wendy claimed that she had kept a "journal" (i.e., extensive notes) while participating in (i.e., sitting in on) FOR classes, and that she had drawn from that journal while writing TRW. Hence the remarkable similarities between TRW and FOR.

Wendy never produced this journal, of course, because it doesn't exist, but consider the implications:

Why would Wendy need to keep a journal if, as she later claimed in her third excuse, she had in fact co-developed FOR and co-written the FOR transcripts? Since when does a person need to take extensive notes on their own material? And what are the odds that a journal would duplicate many dozens of pages from the FOR transcripts?

One last thing: which I have noted before. If you read the "11raw" file that I posted earlier, you will see that that FOR transcripts are exactly that: they are transcripts from tapes that I recorded during my FOR claasses. They are not "drafts" in the conventional sense, so they could not have been "co-authored" by anyone. How would it have been possible for Wendy to "co-author" my spontaneous comments and conversations with my students?

I have said many times that Wendy has convicted herself by coming up with at least 3 contradictory and absurd excuses. This is why she stopped responding in 1998 after she hired Kinsella. Even this incompetent attorney must have realized that Wendy was hanging herself, so Wendy thereafter said that she could not make any further comments on the advice of her attorney, because of an impending lawsuit against me (and several other people who forwarded my emails) for libel and defamation of character.

I said in 1998 that I was skeptical about whether Wendy ever intended to proceed with that lawsuit. Rather, she hired Kinsella as a thug (and that's all he is) to threaten me and others with dire consequences if we didn't shut the hell up.

This also provided Wendy with the excuse to stand mute, and I can't say I blame her. After sticking her foot in her mouth three times with three contradictory excuses, even she must have realized that it was time to shut up.

Wendy was also smart enough not to post her original reponses on her website. Rather she posted a highly truncated and heavily revised version, one that omits many of her obviously ridiculous claims from 1998. Unfortunately, I don't have her original responses on my computer, but I found several of them in that pile of printouts that I mentioned the other day. When I get the time, I will post these, so people can see for themselves how Wendy was lying through her teeth, given how many times she changed her story.

Ghs

[Martin Radwin]

George,

Here's an idea that is probably completely impractical, but it does kind of appeal to my sense of justice.

Take all of the work you have done over the years on this subject, put it all together, and publish a book, "Fundamentals of Reasoning", by George H. Smith.

Given the mountains of evidence you have, I don't think that Wendy would entertain the notion of suing you for plagiarism.

Martin

[Brant Gaede]

George, this kinda makes me wonder if there is something about being a feminist that would exclude a masculine collaboration?

--Brant

[sjw]

George,

Here's an idea that is probably completely impractical, but it does kind of appeal to my sense of justice.

Take all of the work you have done over the years on this subject, put it all together, and publish a book, "Fundamentals of Reasoning", by George H. Smith.

Given the mountains of evidence you have, I don't think that Wendy would entertain the notion of suing you for plagiarism.

Martin

Sounds like a good idea to me... Why not do this George?

Shayne

[Brant Gaede]

George,

Here's an idea that is probably completely impractical, but it does kind of appeal to my sense of justice.

Take all of the work you have done over the years on this subject, put it all together, and publish a book, "Fundamentals of Reasoning", by George H. Smith.

Given the mountains of evidence you have, I don't think that Wendy would entertain the notion of suing you for plagiarism.

Martin

Sorry, she could instead make enough stink with George's publisher that the publisher would simply back out. Maybe as an eBook.

I think you're missing George's basic point, however, of getting out from underneath her, which needs more than another book.

--Brant

[George H. Smith]

George,

Here's an idea that is probably completely impractical, but it does kind of appeal to my sense of justice.

Take all of the work you have done over the years on this subject, put it all together, and publish a book, "Fundamentals of Reasoning", by George H. Smith.

Given the mountains of evidence you have, I don't think that Wendy would entertain the notion of suing you for plagiarism.

Martin

Sounds like a good idea to me... Why not do this George?

Shayne

I've been considering doing this for some time -- not as a book per se, but as copies of the printout. I mentioned that I found my printed version of the FOR files -- 10 in all, but not the "11raw" file that is posted above -- from 1998. Here is what I wrote on the title page:

The Fundamentals of Reasoning

By George H. Smith

October 2, 1988

With an Appendix: Public documents concerning the charge of plagiarism made by George H. Smith against Wendy McElroy in her book, The Reasonable Woman (Prometheus Books, 1998)

Note: This is the original "Fundamentals of Reasoning" Manuscript. It is taken from a 5-1/4" floppy disk dated "Oct. 2, 1988." The original was in Wordstar 3.1, and has been converted to MS Word 6. Except for changing the double-spaced text into single spacing, nothing in the original has been altered. No effort has been made to correct typographical errors, misspellings, and the like.

Additional copies are available for $30.00 each, postpaid. Make checks and money orders payable to George H. Smith, and send to [my old address in S.F]

[i don't recall why I didn't follow through with this plan, but I think it was because I got a serious writing project and so turned my attention elsewhere. As I recall, the only parties to whom I gave copies of my FOR files were Prometheus Books and a handful of friends.]

Here's the problem: I do have all this material on my hard drive, but most of the chapters are in the original Wordstar format that I have not been able to convert. I knew, however, that I had the MS Word 6 version (from which my printout was made) on one of those obsolete 3-1/2 inch high density diskettes. That's why I rummaged through a bunch of boxes yesterday and found the printouts of the FOR files and a bunch of other material I had forgotten about.

I also found a diskette titled "Wendy," and I am virtually certain that this is where I put the MS Word version of the 10 FOR files. But since I cannot use this diskette on my computer, I will need to take it to some local computer geeks who can transfer all the material to a CD, from which I can then print as many copies as I like. (Even if this is not the diskette with the converted FOR files, I know I have it somewhere. It's just a matter of more searching.

There is another problem, namely, that I am experiencing something of a financial crisis at the moment and am basically living on fumes. I really don't have the money to do anything with this stuff now.

But what I would be willing to do is this:

If anyone is interested enough in reading the original version of the 10 FOR files (I have already posted the 11th) to pay me $40 for it, I will sell copies of the printed version for that amount. After receiving enough money to have the diskette checked out and its files transferred to a CD, I will use that to print out the copies. If it turns out that the "Wendy" diskette does not contain those FOR files, and if I am unable to locate fairly quickly the diskette that does, then I will simply xerox the printout I have and mail that instead. (This would obviously cost me more to do, but I could still make some money.)

I will sign and number all copies of the FOR files that are purchased. As noted above, I used single-spacing instead of the original double-spacing, so this turned a 200 page manuscript into a 98 page manuscript.

Thus if you would like to receive a interesting historical document and help out a "starving" writer at the same time, write to me at simikro@comcast.net and I will tell you where to send the check for $40. But please give me a little time -- perhaps up to a month -- to get everything to you. I would like to include all the relevant emails from 1998 as well, including as many of Wendy's responses as I can find and the lengthy threats I received from Kinsella -- and it will take a little time to find all this stuff.

Note: Those of who have purchased my CD Files Project (i.e., all my unpublished material for $1000) need not do this, since I promised to include the FOR files as part of the package. At that time I didn't realize that the FOR files on my hard drive were old Wordstar files, most of which I was unable to convert. This is why I have delayed sending the second disk. When I am able to access the files from that "Wendy" diskette, I will include them on the next Files Project disk. If the worst should happen and the disk has somehow become corrupted over the years, so that I cannot even access the MS Word version of the FOR files, I will send you a complimentary copy of the printout. Thanks for your patience in this matter.

Ghs

[Brant Gaede]

I used to use Wordstar on my CPM Kaypro 4 computer. I purchased this computer 27 years ago and it's still in almost brand new condition. I don't think there's enough compatibility here for any kind of transfer. I also have my first DOS computer, which I'm sure has Wordstar, but I haven't turned it on in over a decade. I got that sucker over 20 years ago. I'll research Wordstar to Word conversion programs.

edit: That was easy, George, just Google Wordstar to Word and get a free program.

--Brant

Edited June 12, 2011 by Brant Gaede

[George H. Smith]

I used to use Wordstar on my CPM Kaypro 4 computer. I purchased this computer 27 years ago and it's still in almost brand new condition. I don't think there's enough compatibility here for any kind of transfer. I also have my first DOS computer, which I'm sure has Wordstar, but I haven't turned it on in over a decade. I got that sucker over 20 years ago. I'll research Wordstar to Word conversion programs.

edit: That was easy, George, just Google Wordstar to Word and get a free program.

--Brant

No, it is not that easy.

Years ago I sent all my old floppies to Suzanne Riggenbach (JR's wife), who works with computers for a living and is very handy with them. She used a Wordstar conversion program, but was only able to convert around half of my old files. The others had apparently become corrupted over time.

I then spent a lot of time working with every conversion program I could find, in the hope I could convert what Suzanne could not. Nothing worked.

Ghs

[Greybird]

After repeatedly dipping into the 300-plus entries of this thread — I can't say that I've even been able to follow the personae without a proverbial scorecard — I'm as perplexed as I was months ago.

Are you simply venting your frustration? Are you crowdsourcing this to get additional material for use in a copyright-infringement lawsuit? Are you wanting to publicly, for the record, discredit Wendy's reasoning abilities and moral stature? All of the above? None of the above?

Nothing made me read the thread, and nothing should prevent you from posting whatever you want in "your corner." Yet I'm having a great deal of trouble divining either your motives and aims, or what this document dump does to enlighten those who haven't known you up close for several decades.

I simply confess my confusion, and am asserting no claim on or about the matter. Including, frankly, and with my not having read the material involved myself, about what was plagiarized. I've respected both of your talents over the years. If you are intending to bring Wendy down, you'll need to provide more of a road map through this material.

[George H. Smith]

While looking through that pile of papers, I found 14 stapled pages that contain most of the emails that I sent out in 1998, including at least one that I don't have on my hard drive.

I think Sharon Presley provided me with these copies, since they are the emails that she posted on a feminist list. This means that they are dated, and though the date that Sharon posted something may not be exactly the same date that I initially sent out the email, it will be very close.

A while back I asked if anyone had a copy of "WIGGLE, WIGGLE, SQUIRM, SQUIRM." This was an email that I didn't have on my computer, and I recalled it was quite funny. I was delighted to find a copy in the Sharon papers.

I will need to type this from scratch, but it is worth it. Why? Because early on, Wendy tried to explain why I would launch a vicious unwarranted attack on her by claiming that I was her "ex-lover" who still longed for her. As you will see, I ridiculed this bit of unbelievable vanity. This is an amusing post.

Email Message posted May 27, 1998 to randian-feminism list by George H. Smith via Sharon Presley

Date: Wed, 27 May 1998 23:45:20 - 0700

WIGGLE, WIGGLE, SQUIRM, SQUIRM

Part One of Another Reply to Wendy McElroy, Plagiarist

By George H. Smith

Wendy McElroy's latest effort to defend her plagiarism is one of those things you have to see to believe, and even then it is hard to believe. So here we go again, attempting to find our way through a cloud of dust.

I begin by bestowing a favor upon our beleagured plagiarist. The poor woman would dearly love to defend her position further -- thereby refuting her heartsick "ex-lover" who is attempting viciously to destroy what he can no longer have -- but she cannot. Indeed, she cannot even reply privately to interested parties who may ask some embarrassing questions. Why? Because her "ex-lover" has supposedly threatened to take legal action against her (perhaps because, grief strick after oh-so-many years, he longs once again to gaze upon her beatific countenance, if only in court.)

I cannot in good conscience deprive our beleagured plagiarist of further opportunities to defend her literary purity, so I hereby make this public pledge: On my word of honor, I will not initiate any kind of legal action against Wendy McElroy. This lets her off a hook she was never on, so she can now explain to her heart's content. Perhaps she would like to begin with the following points:

1. Let's begin with some little lies and then work our way up from there. McElroy twice refers to the 5" floppy disk which contains the Fundamentals of Reasoning transcripts. First she says that her publisher (Prometheus Books) has repeatedly requested a copy of this disk from me for a week and a half. Then she says that I had informed Prometheus that I could not read the "alleged" 5" floppy disk from which I claimed to be reading [when I posted parallel passages]. The facts are as follows:

I went public with this scandal on Tuesday, May 19 and contacted Prometheus Books the same day with an offer to send a copy of the disk. I also said that I had no immediate way to copy from a 5" disk to a 3.5" disk, so it might take a day or so to find someone to do it for me. I offered to Fed-X it overnight, but Prometheus said first-class was fine. I Fed-Xed it anyone on Thursday, May 21, and they got it the following day.

There was no week and a half, no repeated requests, and no problem with reading the disk. Just three of McElroy's lies -- little ones, to be sure, but a good start for her nonetheless.

2. Things get curioser and curioser in McElroy's garbled explanation of how a good deal of my FOR handout (written in 1974, a year before we met) ended up nearly verbatim in THE REASONABLE WOMAN.

Her first claim is that I failed to copyright this five page handout, so it was in the public domain -- there to be stolen by any ethically-challenged writer who would not hesitate to publish someone else's writing under her own name. There's a little known way to handle this kind of thing -- I believe they're called quotation marks, which are usually followed by a tiny little number which refers to something else called a footnote. But then maybe I'm just one of those old-fashioned types who don't like taking credit for something I didn't write.

So far as I know, the Lord's prayer has not been copyrighted or registered, so perhaps McElroy can use it in her next book. If caught red-handed, however, she will doubtless claim credit as co-author, having had a close relationship for many years with an ex-lover named Jesus.

So does McEroy claim to have copied from this handout or not? Who knows? I still can't figure out her "kitchen sink" style of explanation. She speaks as if she slaved over piles of FOR handouts as co-writer, editor or whatever, yet she neglects to mention that I distributed one -- and only one -- handout throughout all those years of teaching FOR. And this single handout was distributed during my first year of teaching, fully one year before we had even met.

But wait -- there is yet another possible explanation, or at least I think there is. Maybe McElroy got the material from her extensive intellectual diary that she wrote while an FOR participant. (Notice how the mysterious diary has popped up all of a sudden, having received no mention in her previous reply. Hmmm...) Now let's get this straight. She has this handout, right? So she copies by hand these five single-spaced pages into her "diary," and from there "13 similar sentences" may have inadvertently found its way into her book.

Or -- yet another possibility -- maybe that material had been "indelibly imprinted on my mind," genius that she is.

Or--and this is my candidate -- maybe she just fucking plagiarized the stuff.

I hate to end this installment on a serious note, but I should mention something about McElroy's mysterious diary. (I never saw or heard of it during the ten years we lived together.) The FOR diary -- actually, it was called the intellectual journal, and was a combination of notebook and diary -- was written entirely outside of class, and was concerned mainly with personal matters -- goal-setting, brainstorming, intellectual doubts, and the like. No one -- and I mena no one -- took notes during the sessions themselves. This would have been virtually impossible, given the interactive nature of FOR, and I would have stopped anyone who tried. Are we then to believe that McElroy spent hours writing in her diary after each class, and, with each and every golden word that tumbled from her "ex-lover's" mouth "indelibly imprinted" on her mind, was able to duplicate my presentation nearly verbatim?

Moreover, why would McElroy have even done such a thing, if, as she claims, she was a co-developer and at times a co-writer of the material itself? Since when does a person write something, give it to someone else to read, and then take notes of her own material? Well, I suppose this line of reasoning makes more sense than most everything that McElroy has to say.

There is much more to come in future installments, though I don't know how much longer I can maintain my sense of humor. But here's something to think about in the meantime. In her first reply, McElroy claims to have started writing her book in 1994, having erased all previous FOR material etc., from her hard drive. She clearly left the impression that she started from scratch, armed only with her amazing memory. No mention of extensive notes or anything like that. Yet now she introduces her mysterious diary. Is it only me, or do others get the impression that she's making this up as she goes along?

WILL McELROY EVERY BE ABLE TO LIE HER WAY OUT OF A PAPER BAG? WILL HER EX-LOVER PINE AWAY UNTO DEATH BEFORE HE DESTROYS HER CREDIBILITY AS A PLAGIARIST? WILL McELROY EVER LEARN TO WRITE A COHERENT DEFENSE?

TUNE IN TO OUR NEXT INSTALLMENT, COMING SOON TO A COMUPTER NEAR YOU.

Ghs

[George H. Smith]

After repeatedly dipping into the 300-plus entries of this thread — I can't say that I've even been able to follow the personae without a proverbial scorecard — I'm as perplexed as I was months ago.

Are you simply venting your frustration? Are you crowdsourcing this to get additional material for use in a copyright-infringement lawsuit? Are you wanting to publicly, for the record, discredit Wendy's reasoning abilities and moral stature? All of the above? None of the above?

Nothing made me read the thread, and nothing should prevent you from posting whatever you want in "your corner." Yet I'm having a great deal of trouble divining either your motives and aims, or what this document dump does to enlighten those who haven't known you up close for several decades.

I simply confess my confusion, and am asserting no claim on or about the matter. Including, frankly, and with my not having read the material involved myself, about what was plagiarized. I've respected both of your talents over the years. If you are intending to bring Wendy down, you'll need to provide more of a road map through this material.

I'm just trying to get everything down as a matter of public record. People can make of it what they will. This is very complicated story, but if someone wishes to take the time to read carefully what I have posted (and will post in the future), the details should become clear.

I wasn't able to present everything in a chronological systematic manner, because I didn't have immediate access to all the documents from 1998. I am attempting to correct that now, and that's why I have been posting more.

If this controversy doesn't interest you, or if it confuses you, then I suggest that you not follow this thread.

One reason I am setting up my own website is so I can have a section that traces this controversy in a systematic and dispassionate manner. I have been using this thread more-or-less as a trial run.

One reason for all the confusion is because Wendy's original explanations were so garbled, confusing, and contradictory. If you wish to alleviate your confusion, I suggest that you write to her and request that she post all of her original 1998 emails, unaltered, on her website. That would show the incoherent muck that I had, and still have, to deal with. Of course, Wendy would never do this, because she knows that she would be condemning herself.

Ghs

[George H. Smith]

I simply confess my confusion, and am asserting no claim on or about the matter. Including, frankly, and with my not having read the material involved myself, about what was plagiarized. I've respected both of your talents over the years. If you are intending to bring Wendy down, you'll need to provide more of a road map through this material.

Are you suggesting, after everything I have posted on this topic, that Wendy did not in fact plagiarize from my FOR material? Are you fucking serious?

So why do I have to provide the "road map" for people who are not willing to read things for themselves? What? You don't think that poor little Wendy needs to explain anything? -- that she can stand mute? Why don't you bitch to her for a change? Why don't you demand details from her?

Either Wendy is a plagiarist on a massive scale, or I am a vicious, lying S.O.B. Your respect for one of us will have to go -- so take your choice.

Ghs

[Brant Gaede]

Consider this comment my "official" endorsement of everything George Smith has said about Wendy McElroy and the book The Reasonable Women. I have indeed seen the evidence of the plagiarism and am satisfied that George's allegations are true. If I were not totally convinced of this, I would not risk my reputation this way. It's a sorry state of affairs, very sad to see, but there it is.

Thanks, Sharon. I very much appreciate your support.

You know, of course, that you have just committed libel and defamation of character against Wendy the Pure, and so may be subject to an attack by Wendy's vicious but not very bright lapdog, Stephen Kinsella.

Consider this comment my official endorsement of the position that Sharon Presley is a great lady.

Ghs

Thanks, George. You know I support you 100% and I'm not afraid of Kinsella. They can't prove libel because everything you say is true. Defamation? Hard to prove and frankly, Wendy will come out looking so much worse than you once the controversy makes the rounds. She would be the loser. Would they dare risk that?

Some things are worth repeating.

--Brant

[George H. Smith]

Steve,

I understand that all these details can be confusing, so I'm going to make this very simple by quoting a section from one of my 1998 emails titled "The Lighter Side of Plagiarism." I posted the entire email earlier in this thread, but it may have gotten lost among all the other stuff.

I contend that the evidence presented below is sufficient in and of itself to convict Wendy of plagiarism. To understand this, you only need to understand that, according to Wendy, she deleted all of my FOR transcripts from her computer in 1994 and then wrote TRW from scratch. As Kinsella put it in one of his legal documents:

...Ms McElroy *did not* copy any portion of FOR in preparation of TRW and, indeed, had disposed of all of her copies of FOR before beginning writing TRW in 1994.

Are you with me so far? Good. Now carefully read the two passages from TRW that I quote below, and my explanation of how they got there.

A problem arises when a person copies from someone else’s material, namely, the plagiarist may not understand what the original writer was getting at and so may misconstrue his meaning. There are two notable examples of this in the eight pages of parallel quotations that I distributed earlier.

The first appears on page 5, beginning with the sentence “But!” (This is italicized in both my original and in Wendy’s copy.)

Smith: “But!, Popper pointed out, you can disprove a theory by observing one single white swan. Therefore a theory which cannot be verified, can be disproven. All it takes is one counterinstance, one counter factual condition and the theory is proven false.”

McElroy, p. 211: “But! Popper pointed out, you can disprove the theory by observing one single white swan. Therefore, a theory that cannot be conclusively verified can be absolutely disproven. All it takes to falsify a theory, such as “Swans are black birds,” is the presence of one swan that is not black.”

.

Consider the thrice-accentuated “But!” in this passage – the first emphasis consisting of a single-word sentence, the second of placing the word in italics, and the third of using an exclamation point. The context of this passage scarcely justifies this kind of rhetorical device, to say the least. It would be more suited to a pamphlet written by an evangelical preacher, e.g., “Believe as you like. But! You will suffer the agonies of hell for all eternity.”

I never intended for this “But!” to appear as part of a published manuscript. For one thing it reeks of cheap theatrics ( which may explain why Wendy included it in her book.). This passage is a verbatim transcript from one of my Fundamentals of Reasoning classes, where I was speaking off the cuff, without any notes in front of me. . When looking through the transcript, however, I realized that this was in fact a misinterpretation of Karl Popper, so I inserted the “But!” to remind myself that this passage needed to be reworked at a later time.

Professional writers will know what I mean. All of us have flags that we insert in early manuscripts as an alert not to leave the passage as is. That was my purpose in inserting an italicized “But!” in the comment about Popper. (Incidentally, when I knew her, Wendy had never read even a page of Popper or anything else on the philosophy of science.) Popper did not in fact claim that one counterexample could always disprove a theory. He was fully aware that theories can and often do incorporate apparent counterexamples by resorting to ad hoc explanations, and that a theory long-established is never likely to be discarded on this basis (nor should it be, according to Popper). . .

At the time I read this passage in the transcript, I had not figured out a way to do justice to Popper’s approach, so I tagged it for later revision. I needed to bring in the notion of a “crucial experiment,” but hadn’t yet figured out a way to explain this in a non-technical way. (Indeed, I considered cutting out the section on Popper altogether, owing to the complexities involved.)

All this, of course, went right by Wendy while she was busy lifting my material. She included the “But!” as if were meant to be part of the finished manuscript!

A similar example occurs on pp. 7-8, where I inserted a note to myself in the rough draft of my FOR transcripts.:

Smith: “Note: this is quite different from saying that they could not be refuted because they were correct. Instead, the theories were constructed in such a manner as to eliminate any possibility of disconfirming cases.”

Again, I inserted this note in the discussion of Popper, because I felt that something else needed to be explained in more detail, when I undertook a rewrite. In my loose and informal account of Popper, I had not mentioned that he viewed his falsification test as a “line of demarcation” between science and philosophy (or, to use his word, “metaphysics”). . The main problem was that I do not really agree with Popper on this issue, though I found his approach useful as a kind of informal test. I therefore felt I should explain my disagreement in more detail. Some propositions cannot be falsified because they are self-evidently true (such as the laws of logic), but I don’t regard these as “unscientific.” Moreover, Popper’s falsification principle suffers from the same flaw as all such quasi-positivistic criteria, viz., the principle itself cannot pass its own test. Hence I inserted a note to remind myself that I needed to take these (and other) issues into account later on.

True to form, however, Wendy forged ahead in her plagiarism, oblivious to the significance of my “Note.” Thus she wrote:

McElroy, p. 214: “It was not that Freudian theory could not be refuted because it was correct, but that the system of theory was constructed in such a manner as to eliminate the very possibility of disconfirming cases.”

Exactly what does it mean to say: “It was not that Freudian theory could not be refuted because it was correct….etc..”? This passage borders on gibberish; certainly Popper never said anything like this. Rather, Wendy simply removed the word “Note,” and, instead of realizing that there was a problem with Popper’s approach -- one that I needed to flesh out at a later time -- she blended my remark into her text with no understanding of its meaning.

This is not only plagiarism, this is incompetent plagiarism.

Okay, Steve -- as a person who respects Wendy so much, can you provide a plausible rebuttal to my argument? To do this, you must keep in mind Wendy's claim that she did not have access to any of my FOR transcripts while writing TRW, and that she wrote all of TRW from scratch.

So please explain to me how Wendy's But! passage and her Freudian theory passage ended up in TRW. Do you think this was sheer concidence? Do you think Wendy was telling the truth when she claimed to have written TRW after having erased all of my FOR material from her computer?

I say Wendy was lying through her teeth, and that she did in fact have my FOR material in front of her while writing this stuff.

Forget everything else I have posted and focus only on this. Can you concoct any explanation that is favorable to Wendy, even in theory? If so, I would very much like to see it.

Ghs

[Brant Gaede]

I used to use Wordstar on my CPM Kaypro 4 computer. I purchased this computer 27 years ago and it's still in almost brand new condition. I don't think there's enough compatibility here for any kind of transfer. I also have my first DOS computer, which I'm sure has Wordstar, but I haven't turned it on in over a decade. I got that sucker over 20 years ago. I'll research Wordstar to Word conversion programs.

edit: That was easy, George, just Google Wordstar to Word and get a free program.

--Brant

No, it is not that easy.

Years ago I sent all my old floppies to Suzanne Riggenbach (JR's wife), who works with computers for a living and is very handy with them. She used a Wordstar conversion program, but was only able to convert around half of my old files. The others had apparently become corrupted over time.

I then spent a lot of time working with every conversion program I could find, in the hope I could convert what Suzanne could not. Nothing worked.

Ghs

I hate to post out of self-knowing ignorance, but can you convert an old Wordstar doc. into a new Wordstar doc.? Maybe then it might then be accessible to a Word conversion.

--Brant

[George H. Smith]

I used to use Wordstar on my CPM Kaypro 4 computer. I purchased this computer 27 years ago and it's still in almost brand new condition. I don't think there's enough compatibility here for any kind of transfer. I also have my first DOS computer, which I'm sure has Wordstar, but I haven't turned it on in over a decade. I got that sucker over 20 years ago. I'll research Wordstar to Word conversion programs.

edit: That was easy, George, just Google Wordstar to Word and get a free program.

--Brant

No, it is not that easy.

Years ago I sent all my old floppies to Suzanne Riggenbach (JR's wife), who works with computers for a living and is very handy with them. She used a Wordstar conversion program, but was only able to convert around half of my old files. The others had apparently become corrupted over time.

I then spent a lot of time working with every conversion program I could find, in the hope I could convert what Suzanne could not. Nothing worked.

Ghs

I hate to post out of self-knowing ignorance, but can you convert an old Wordstar doc. into a new Wordstar doc.? Maybe then it might then be accessible to a Word conversion.

--Brant

I have no idea, but assuming that all the FOR files (in MS Word) are on that "Wendy" diskette I mentioned (and I believe they are), there should be no problem. I just don't have the time or desire to fiddle with those old Wordstar files any longer.

Ghs

[Brad R]

Unlike many who have expressed an opinion on this matter, I have the advantage of having witnessed most of it first-hand. Allow me to recount the sequence of events.

Not long after Wendy and I moved to Canada, Wendy approached George with the suggestion that they turn the "Fundamentals of Reasoning" course into a book. In 1989 they signed a contract to be co-authors. (I did not witness the signing of the contract, but George himself has confirmed its authenticity.)

The unwritten agreement between them was simple: Wendy would write the book, and George would get it published. At the time, Wendy was relatively unknown, having had written only the Index to Liberty and Freedom, Feminism, and the State; George had a much more prominent name, and an "in" to a likely publisher, Prometheus.

Wendy wrote a first rough draft of the manuscript, and a second finished draft, and sent them to George. George claims not to have received the latter; I know that it was written -- because I proofread it -- and that it was mailed.

(George has acknowledged on this forum that Wendy wrote the first draft, which he calls the "transcript," and that he was too "busy" to work on the second draft. By his own accounts, his only writing contribution was to re-write either one, or three, of Wendy's chapters before sending it out to a publisher.)

Some time later, George informed Wendy that Prometheus was not interested in the book. From comments he has made here, I conjecture that in fact George was not interested in submitting it to Prometheus, preferring a different publisher; when that publisher declined, he took it no further.

At the end of 1991, for reasons unrelated to the FOR project but involving a breach of trust on George's part, Wendy broke off all contact with George. Wanting nothing more to do with him, Wendy packaged up the FOR materials -- manuscript, disks, and tapes -- and sent them to George. (I mailed the package.)

A few years later -- after the completion of XXX -- Wendy expressed a renewed interest in writing a book on reasoning, by herself. Being familiar with "clean room design," I suggested that she erase all trace of the FOR manuscript from her computer, so that she would be forced to write it from scratch. She agreed, and as I am her computer "tech support," I took responsibility for the erasure. So I know those files were deleted.

I believe it was Wendy's agent who suggested that a book on reasoning would flop, but a book on reasoning for women would be salable. I watched as she wrote this, and proofread each chapter as it was completed; I also proofread the two subsequent drafts. Finally, Prometheus accepted the book, and The Reasonable Woman was published.

In May 1998 George sent an email to Wendy, threatening legal action, and demanding money as the price of his silence. Wendy refused, and facing a legal threat, asked a libertarian attorney of her acquaintance, Stephan Kinsella, for a referral. Upon learning the details, Mr. Kinsella took the case on personally, and sent a "cease and desist" letter to George and a few of his accomplices. Mr. Kinsella also provided Wendy with a legal analysis which she could post on her web site.

Anyone who has observed the legal process knows that an attorney will try to present multiple, independent lines of argument. So it is with Wendy. Her primary defense is that TRW was written with no reference to the FOR manuscript; and I can attest first-hand that that was truly the case. But a second, independent defense is that Wendy was contractually a full co-author of the FOR manuscript, and morally and legally entitled to draw upon that material in future works. (It would appear that George used some of that material in his Atheism, Ayn Rand, and Other Heresies, and Wendy has never objected to that use. Contrary to George's claim, Wendy has never suggested that because George missed some six-week deadline, the rights "revert" to her.)

Speaking for myself, I conjecture that what has really annoyed George is that, when researching TRW, Wendy read behind George for the first time...and discovered that much of the FOR material had been taken, uncredited, from other authors such as Antony Flew, Mortimer Adler, and Brand Blanshard. When Wendy identified such, she credited the primary sources in TRW. Do read the extensive footnotes for yourself.

That is the story, as I witnessed it. I shall not discuss this further here, but I will leave you with two closing thoughts. First, if you have not read TRW for yourself, then you are deciding this case on hearsay, not evidence. Second, do be skeptical of any "evidence" that suddenly appears on a computer hard drive, thirteen years after the start of the controversy.

[Brad R]

P.S. This is the relevant passage from the post on page 9.

Several years went by until, late in 1988, she sent me a disk containing what she had promised to do. (Again, I acknowledge the work she did here; indeed, I promised to give her credit in my FOR book.) This is the disk from which I quoted previously. The original floppy has a label attached with McElroy’s handwriting. It reads: “FOR Book, Oct.,2, 1988.” .

Note that this date is more than ONE YEAR before McElroy and I signed the contract on November 29, 1989. THE MATERIAL ON THIS DISK, FROM WHICH McELROY TOOK MUCH OF HER BOOK, IS ENTIRELY MY OWN. McElroy did nothing more that transcribe and arrange that material.

This rough draft of my FOR book sat untouched for some time, because I was still busy with other things. McElroy encouraged me to work on it during a number of our phone conversations (again, to her credit), stating that it had commercial potential.

Finally, around one year after she had sent me the disk, McElroy proposed the following: She would take responsibility for writing a polished draft and contribute two or three chapters of her own, if I would be willing to list her as the second author. This seemed reasonable to me at the time (and still does), since I seriously doubted whether I would be able to finish the FOR book on my own in the near future.

Shortly thereafter, Wendy presented me with the contract, which we both signed. She also said that she would be sending her chapters in the near future, and encouraged me to write a finished draft of the first three chapters, so we could submit a proposal to a publisher. I spent a couple of weeks doing so and wrote to Nathaniel Branden asking if he would write an advance letter to one of his publishers, asking them to consider it for publication. He did so. I submitted the first three chapters, but they were rejected.

[Brant Gaede]

That is the story, as I witnessed it. I shall not discuss this further here....

Good idea.

--Brant

[George H. Smith]

Well, I finally flushed one of you guys out of the shadows. Too bad Wendy sent you to do her dirty work, but she learned her lesson in 1998.

For those who don't know who Brad R. is, he is Wendy's husband. Let's take Brad's claims one at a time. It may take me several posts to cover all this.

Unlike many who have expressed an opinion on this matter, I have the advantage of having witnessed most of it first-hand.

You witnessed almost none of it first-hand. Almost everything you think you know you heard from Wendy, and she lied to you, just as she lied to everyone else. You were nowhere in the picture during my FOR years (1975-82), and the crux of this controversy is whether Wendy plagiarized from my FOR transcripts, which she had transcribed from tapes I gave to her before she moved to Canada. I never got those tapes back, btw.

You probably know many people who attended the first year of my FOR classes, before I even knew Wendy. You probably know Caroline Roper-Deyo, for example, and she will tell you that I was teaching FOR while I was living on Van Ness (in Hollywood) with Diane (my first wife), long before Wendy ever entered the picture. Indeed, Caroline contributed some useful suggestions to FOR, and she also helped with my "Forum For Philosophical Studies" in 1975, while I was giving monthly lectures at Larchmont Hall.

Go ahead, Brad -- contact Caroline and ask her if Wendy had any role whatsoever in the creation or development of FOR. Or don't you have the balls to learn the truth?

Wendy claims that she co-created and co-developed the FOR material. I notice that you are conspicuously silent on this issue, Brad. So what do you think? Is there a chance that dear Wendy was telling a big fib? Or do you believe everything she says, regardless of the evidence?

Of course, Brad won't address any of these key questions. As he says at the conclusion of his post, "I shall not discuss this further here." Of course you won't, Brad -- and for good reason.

Now on to the specific points in Brad's post:

Allow me to recount the sequence of events.

Not long after Wendy and I moved to Canada, Wendy approached George with the suggestion that they turn the "Fundamentals of Reasoning" course into a book.

This is absurd. I had been planning to turn FOR into a book for many years; indeed, I had discussed these plans with a number of people during the first year of teaching FOR, before I even knew Wendy. This is why I recorded every single class from day one. I wanted access to all of my extemporaneous remarks, as well as to the remarks of students, when I finally got around to writing the thing.

Wendy, in order to encourage me, offered to transcribe the tapes before she moved to Canada. She just didn't get around to it until after the move.

In 1989 they signed a contract to be co-authors. (I did not witness the signing of the contract, but George himself has confirmed its authenticity.)

The unwritten agreement between them was simple: Wendy would write the book, and George would get it published. At the time, Wendy was relatively unknown, having had written only the Index to Liberty and Freedom, Feminism, and the State; George had a much more prominent name, and an "in" to a likely publisher, Prometheus.

Wendy would write the book? Are you nuts? Have you even read the agreement we signed? The book was to be co-authored, and I was to receive primary authorship.

So is this Wendy's new official line? -- that I wasn't even to be involved in the writing of the book on reasoning at all? -- that my name would be used because I was better known than Wendy, and that my only role was to find a publisher?

I didn't think the Wendy line could get any nuttier than it was, but I was obviously wrong. You are going to look like a fool when I post Wendy's original 1998 emails, for your new Big Lie is flatly contradicted by a number of things Wendy said.

Wendy wrote a first rough draft of the manuscript, and a second finished draft, and sent them to George. George claims not to have received the latter; I know that it was written -- because I proofread it -- and that it was mailed.

Wendy never wrote a first draft, or any draft. All she did was to transcribe parts of my FOR tapes and give me those transcripts on a floppy disk. She did contribute something in the sense that she had to go through a lot of tapes, select the better parts, and then transcribe them. That was a lot of work, and I thanked her for her work, stating that I would give her a credit in my FOR book.

This was around a year before I asked Wendy if she would like to contribute three chapters and work on a polished draft (which I would then review), for which I would give her secondary authorship. This is when the character of the projected book changed somewhat. It would be broader in scope than my original FOR material, so I had a lot of work to do as well. This is why, in my letter to Tarcher, I gave the book the working title of The Psychology of Reasoning.

This was the unnamed book that Wendy and I had in mind in our agreement. Although my FOR material would constitute the core of the book, we would both add new stuff. Neither of us ever did this, however. After I called Wendy with the news that NB had contacted Tarcher with a recommendation on my behalf, she said that she didn't have the time to work on our book, because she had recently gotten a grant from the Roy Childs Fund to work on her own book on porn. I was frankly annoyed, but I went ahead and sent the proposal to Tarcher anyway, after writing a polished draft of the first chapter, which was based on various parts of my FOR material. After Tarcher rejected the book, I dropped the project, and Wendy and I never discussed it again.

One of Wendy's chapters was to deal with the application of my FOR material to women specifially, and another was to be on statistics. (I liked the first idea, but I wasn't crazy about the second.) I don't recall what her third chapter was supposed to be about, but I never saw any of this stuff.

Wendy also inserted a bunch of cutesy quotations at various parts of the FOR transcripts, and I told her I didn't want to include those in the final manuscript, but this became a moot issue when both of us dropped the project.

As for the mysterious "second finished draft" that Wendy supposedly sent to me, where is it? Wendy must have had it on her computer somewhere, so produce it, or at least post sections from it. Or are you going to tell me that Wendy deleted her own book from her hard drive in 1994 and proceeded to write the same book over again from scratch?

Okay, so if Wendy sent a polished draft to me, there must have been some correspondence about it. So have Wendy post the letters she wrote to me about this mysterious polished draft. Suppose she sent me a final draft with a cover letter. What did I supposedly do? Did I ignore it? Okay, if I did, she surely would have written to me again. So where are these letters? Indeed, you cannot produce even a scrap of evidence about this mysterious final draft. If you claim to have read one that was sent to me, then you are lying -- a habit you may have picked up from living with Wendy for so long.

Again, if you really did read this mysterioius final draft, then where the hell is it? It is insane to think that Wendy would have destroyed a book that, according to you, she wrote herself (both the first and final drafts).

You are going to have to do a lot better than this, Brad.

I don't want to make my replies too long, so I will pick this up in a subsequent post.

Ghs

[caroljane]

Anyone who has observed the legal process knows that an attorney will try to present multiple, independent lines of argument. So it is with Wendy.

Anyone who has observed the impact of PARC will recognize it too.

[George H. Smith]

To continue:

(George has acknowledged on this forum that Wendy wrote the first draft, which he calls the "transcript," and that he was too "busy" to work on the second draft. By his own accounts, his only writing contribution was to re-write either one, or three, of Wendy's chapters before sending it out to a publisher.)

Here is the relevant part of my earlier post:

When McElroy and I separated in 1985, she suggested that I should rework my FOR material into a book. I was very busy writing tapes at the time, however, and didn’t see how I could get the time. She then volunteered -- and for this I give her credit – to transcribe dozens of tapes from years of classes, eliminate duplicated material, and divide everything into preliminary chapters. This sounded like a good idea, so I gave her the box of tapes to take with her when she moved to Canada, along with copies of the many notes that I had accumulated over the years.

Several years went by until, late in 1988, she sent me a disk containing what she had promised to do. (Again, I acknowledge the work she did here; indeed, I promised to give her credit in my FOR book.) This is the disk from which I quoted previously. The original floppy has a label attached with McElroy’s handwriting. It reads: “FOR Book, Oct.,2, 1988.”

I called this a "transcript," because that's exactly what it was. It was a verbatim transcript taken from my FOR tapes. It included Q&A and even jokes that I told -- one of which ended up nearly verbatim in TRW.

Brad, in a subsequent post, posted part of my email from 1998, but notice how he did not include the first paragraph that I have posted here -- the one that specifically says: "She then volunteered -- and for this I give her credit – to transcribe dozens of tapes from years of classes, eliminate duplicated material, and divide everything into preliminary chapters."

Instead, Brad began his quotation with this sentence by me: "Several years went by until, late in 1988, she sent me a disk containing what she had promised to do. (Again, I acknowledge the work she did here; indeed, I promised to give her credit in my FOR book.)"

Brad then uses this incomplete passage to defend his conclusion: "George has acknowledged on this forum that Wendy wrote the first draft, which he calls the "transcript," and that he was too "busy" to work on the second draft." (My italics.)

I've got news for you, Brad. Transcribing the words of another person does not qualify as writing the first draft of a book. A secretary is not the same thing as an author.

Are you really this dense? Or are you being duplicitous, having conveniently deleted the key paragraph in which I explained what Wendy actually did. In any case, I never referred to a "first draft" written by Wendy. I was merely referring to her verbatim transcriptions of my FOR material.

Many authors dictate their early drafts and have the recording transcribed by a secretary. This does not make the secretary the writer or author of the first draft. Got it?

God help me, I am dealing with a fool. I never thought I would say this, but you really should check with Wendy before defending her any more. Even Wendy would never have committed a blunder like this.

At least OLers can now see for themselves the kind of crap I have had to deal with for years. One off the wall claim after another, some of which make no sense at all.

Ghs