Brad R

For those who might be interested, Wendy has updated her page at http://www.wendymcelroy.com/reason/libel.htm to include her 1998 correspondence with George. I am taking the liberty of posting here, in full, his original email to her, in which his threat of legal action against Wendy and/or Prometheus is quite clear.

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Date: Sun, 17 May 1998 15:30:13 -0700

From: Laura Kroutil <vamp97@sj.bigger.net>

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Subject: W. McElroy, Plagiarist

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Wendy,

You had better read this letter, and read it carefully. You are in

extremely serious trouble, legally and professionally. Your professional

career is in your hands, and it reeks of death. I am accusing of

extensive and deliberate plagiarism.

Both you and I know that most of “your” Reasonable Woman book is sheer

unadulterated plagiarism. And though I half expected you to pull this

stunt some day, I thought that you would at least be clever enough to

cover your tracks better. I suspect that, upon hearing that I had lost

“everything” in storage some years ago, you figured I no longer had

access to my original notes, drafts, etc., from those years that I

taught Fundamentals of Reasoning – and therefore would be unable to

prove any charges against you. Wrong. I HAVE IT ALL. Every handwritten

note and outline, every typed segment of lectures on canary-colored

paper (many of them with dates), every printed handout, and all those

verbatim transcripts that you made some years ago of the tapes from

dozens of classes – a volume of material that fills nearly two file

boxes.

This is why I was able to give several FOR classes for Sharon Presley

about two years ago – and, by the way, I do have tapes of those classes,

which sound strangely like a prevision of “your” book. Maybe you can sue

me for my psychic ability to foretell what you would write in the

future, word for word, even before you knew what it would be. Or, let me

guess – you wrote all this some time ago, and I stole it from you. Or –

I know, you actually wrote this in 1972, I wrested it from you

psychically in 1973, and then began using it in 1974, one year before we

actually met. Yeah, that’s the ticket..

You seem to have forgotten that I customarily opened a session from

extensive notes, often reading for the first forty minutes or so. Hence

what you recalled as my extemporaneous discussions might leave you in

the clear, because you have the tapes, not me. But I have THE ORIGINAL

MANUSCRIPTS from which I read, which then ended up on the tapes, then in

the transcripts you made, and finally in “your” book. Even O.J. would

have been convicted with this kind of blood-trail. .

Before reading further, you may wish to scan the second transmission

coming shortly after this, which quotes line by line from “your” book

and the handout I wrote for the first class in 1974, one year before I

even met you. This took me less than an hour to cull. I have sketched

around ten additional pages of the same kind of miserable stuff, and I

can produce all the original documents to back it up. If this becomes a

legal battle – as it very well may – I presently estimate that I can

specifically nail you on at least HALF of “your” book. And I don’t mean

your version of my ideas (that covers an additional one quarter, with

the remaining quarter being the only thing you actually contributed. ) I

mean, in many cases, identical word for word, line for line, paragraph

for paragraph. What you see here is only the small tip of a very big

iceberg. This is not only plagiarism, this is stupid plagiarism.

Couldn’t you have at least taken the time to paraphrase a bit, rather

that just changing a word here and there? And what of the hundreds of

people that took that course over many years? Did you figure that they

wouldn’t recognize my material, even though some of them still have the

original handouts themselves?

I was amused by your comment when you suggested that the “intellectual

therapy” chapters were based on your recollections from attending five

sessions. You did indeed attend a number of sessions – mainly because we

lived together, and you had nowhere else to go -- but your account is

based entirely on the verbatim transcripts of my classes. You failed to

note – gee, I wonder why --that you have dozens of tapes from several

years of classes, and that you typed them up word for word a long time

ago – often three or four versions of the same class. You have literally

hundreds of pages of verbatim transcripts, AND YOU SENT COPIES TO ME,

dummy. These constitute the core of your entire book – often with

identical sub-headings, for example (one of many) all that stuff on

types of error, the entire text of which is nearly verbatim in “your

book” and the psychology of reasoning (exactly the same as one of the

sessions, as is most of the text.) But – and here is one among many of

your screw-ups -- I have, not only the printouts, but the ORIGINAL

FLOPPIES WITH LABELS IN YOUR (GREEN) HANDWRITING, WITH YOUR LETTERS AND

NOTES TO ME INCLUDED.

You quote me extensively, as I interacted with the participants, but

always as the “facilitator” and as “she.” So, after screwing me, you

proceed to castrate me. (Freud would have been very proud.) Of course,

if you had been honest, and prefaced the quotes with “George Smith,”

people would have wondered why on earth you were quoting me so

extensively without permission. And, of course, you add your own touches

of pure fabrication from time to time – things that never happened

except in your imagination. What’s that business about charging only a

modest fee? I was charging $120 per person by the time they ended,

hardly a modest fee for the early 1980s. Those classes were pure

business, as you well know, and I made my living off of them for seven

years, even opening up a suite of offices on Sunset Blvd. under the

name, “Forum for Philosophical Studies,” during which I gave those

classes twice a week for nearly two years. You attended no classes

during those two years, yet the material I revised for them specifically

somehow found its way into your book..

Morever 5 single-spaced typed pages on the Types of Error were not

written until after we separated in 1985, when I held classes in my

place on Franklin Ave. I wrote that stuff immediately after one of the

classes in 1986. You had no direct knowledge of that class. Instead, you

simply took my notes and inserted them in “your” book under the same

heading and in the same words -- and I mean verbatim. That’s some memory

you’ve got.

If you feel you are in the right, then send that box of tapes to

Prometheus, and let them listen to everything first hand – unless, that

is, those tapes have mysteriously disappeared. And if you claim never to

have had those tapes, then how in the hell did you transcribe those

hundreds of pages that are in my possession? From memory???? When

leaving the scene of the crime, you left behind footprints so large

Godzilla could stand in them and still leave room for your ego.

I can no longer publish my own material, because it would look as if I

have stolen from you. THIS IS SEVEN YEARS OF MY LABOR ABSOLUTELY RUINED

BY YOU. And you knew very well that I was planning to publish this as a

book. I do not want to sue Prometheus for damages, even though this may

be my only recourse. They were innocent victims in all this. You played

them for fools, violating your contract extensively and explicitly, in

which you guarantee that the material you gave them is original. You

knew exactly what you were doing. This was all clearly premeditated and

deliberate. (That must have provided a nice chuckle for you, but what

are you going to say now ?–that you somehow inadvertently copied huge

chunks of your book from someone else, but are very sorry and promise

never to do it again?)

If I have to sue Prometheus (two attorneys have told me they are fully

liable for what they publish, even without knowledge of the plagiarism)

they will doubtless turn and sue you for fraud, breach of contract etc.

(hence the clause in your contract where you swear to originality). If

this happens, you may be looking at one big fucking lawsuit, in which

case you will be “slam-dunked” (as one of those lawyers put it, after

looking at just a fraction of my evidence.) Publishers do not

appreciate being defrauded like this. I will happily provide them with

everything I have when they take you to court. These are no incidental

slips, as when a writer may inadvertently quote someone else from a

repressed memory. This is page after dreary of page of outright,

clear-cut plagiarism.

I doubt if any book in recent decades has contained such an

astonishingly large amount of word-for-word duplication of someone

else’s work – easily 75 pages nearly verbatim, with dozens more

consisting of nothing more than superficial rewrites, which are put in

the same order, with the same structure, sub-headings, phraseology,

arguments, and illustrations. It simply boggles the mind.

I will admit, however, that those clever quotes sprinkled throughout the

book are entirely yours, and you deserve full credit for the hours you

spent thumbing through some quotation dictionary. Cute touch, and so

typical – like taping a pretty little bow on a package of stolen

merchandise, before delivering it to the unsuspecting publisher. . .

If you want to avoid this messy situation, you can buy my rights to

the material outright for a lump-sum payment of $10,000 (U.S. dollars),

which I must receive no later than Tuesay, May 26, 1998. That’s not

much for stealing seven years of someone’s professional labor, so you

are getting off cheap. Enclose a release with the check, and I will sign

it and return it to you immediately.. That let’s you off the hook

legally as far as I am concerned, and I will not take legal action

against Prometheus or you.

You have two days to e-mail me your reply, which I must receive no later

than 9 a.m.(PDT), Tuesday, May 19, 1998. I will take a non-response as

a refusal, and immediately set the gears in motion. I will begin by

Faxing a copy of this letter to Prometheus, along with an expanded

version of the parallel quotations, and with copies of the original

documents. And that’s just the beginning.

If you agree to the settlement, I must receive a certified check for

$10,000 no later than (to repeat) Tuesday, May 26, 1998, or all bets are

off.

If you have any doubts about this, then show the brief list of

quotations to your Hubby, or some other friend, and watch their faces

drop in horror. Talk about the bloom falling from the rose. Welcome to

the real world with real consequences, where people can turn even

against a cute little Shirley Temple, and see her other face.

It’s entirely up to you. You have until this Tuesday morning, 9 a.m., to

get back to me by e-mail.. If not, Prometheus will have copies of

everything within the next hour, and I suspect you will receive an

“urgent” phone call shortly thereafter.

I am dead-serious about this. Don’t imagine for an instant that I am

simply blowing off steam. I put up with your other antics for years

without fighting back, but that was personal. This is professional, and

you know very well how I strongly I feel about this kind of thing.

Consult your self-interest, and do what you think is best. I prefer the

settlement, even though I stand to lose a great deal of money in the

long run. I don’t relish a long and ugly legal battle, but I am fully

prepared to take it on. And, believe me, you will lose, and lose big

time. Just the little bit of material I am sending is more than enough

to prove the legal case of plagiarism, but I’m talking about dozens of

additional pages. And it seems to me that the least you can do is to let

Prometheus off the legal hook on which you have so unceremoniously

impaled them.

You can start writing letters to all your friends, telling about some

horrible thing I’m doing to you, etc., etc., etc. It won’t make any

difference. The documents are there to back up everything I say in cold,

hard print.. This is not a my-word against your-word dispute. This is

about hundreds of pages of documents written by me, and plagiarized by

you wholesale. Period.

You have less than two days to think it over. After that, there will be

no turning back, for either of us.

George

The interlinear parallel quotations will be sent in second transmission,

within the next 20 minutes.

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.

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.

For those who might be interested, Wendy's 1998 reply to Smith's allegations is still on-line at her web site:

http://www.wendymcelroy.com/reason/libel.htm