The World Is Our Forum

Anyone who has ever attended a 12-Step program has heard talk about speaking one’s truth. Things happen in life that are unfair. People do terrible things to one another. Misunderstandings occur. People get away with all sorts of misdeeds and unconscionable behavior. And the aggrieved person often has very little recourse when such injustices happen. We are told, in programs like AlAnon and CoDA, that we have to speak our truth. But finding a place to speak it often seems futile.

That was before the internet and blogs.

I have known Jane Daniel for several years. She is one of the kindest, warmest, most decent people I know. When she began to tell me about the nightmare web of lawsuits she was involved in I thought she was exaggerating. I did a search online one day and found the Appeals Court Decision in the Social Law Library Portal. Reading it I was shocked on several levels. I could not believe that the things she was accused of could have been done by someone like Jane. But even more than that I was stunned by the hyperbolic and faintly hysterical language used in the report. Accusations that she “drove a wedge” in the relationship between the two authors and that the jury “pierced the corporate veil”. It read like something out of a 1970s true crime novel. A really bad one.

There was a time when such a document would be buried in some dusty courthouse and the losing party would be doomed to get on with life as best she could. But in this era of mass communications such is not the case. Jane Daniel is a brilliant woman, a fine writer, and a meticulous record keeper. She has chosen to deal with the gargantuan judgement against her and all its attendant complications by speaking her truth. She has been working on a book for awhile but publishing it as a blog on the internet is creating a remarkable ripple in the world of independent publishers and in the legal community as well.

Jane’s blog went live on Monday and so far this week she has had close to a thousand hits and this doesn’t count what has gone out on RSS feeds. The blog has been discussed on seven internet discussion boards that I am aware of and articles about it have been published on legal blogs such as Law.com Blog Watch which gets over a thousand hits a day from legal professionals. She has received calls and emails from a variety of both e-publications and paper-pubs asking for articles and interviews. Readers have written to say they are fascinated by her story because they, too, have been involved in horrific lawsuits and have been trying to write about it. There have been many offers to crosslink blogs to broaden the audience. In less than a week readers from literally all over the world are reading her truth as she speaks it.

There was a time when people like Jane who had been involved in such a horrific situation would eventually reached a point where they had no more recourse. They were out of options. Now the internet has provided a vast community of people who are interested, want to help, want to know more.

We are living in an era when independent publishing houses like Jane’s Mt. Ivy Press are springing up everywhere. All those publishers need to hear Jane’s story. We are living in an era when even best-selling authors have to present a marketing plan along with their books to major publishing houses and the thought that a small press could get whacked with a $33 MILLION judgement — especially after getting interest from both Disney and Oprah — is mind-numbing.

And there are so many questions in this entire story. As a small publisher myself the first thought in my mind is whatever happened to the admonish caveat emptor? Why wasn’t Misha, who hadn’t even written a word of the book when she met Jane, not responsible for choosing Mt Ivy to work with? Where is her responsibility in this?

And then there is the question of authenticity. That question has been raised many times. Holocaust scholar Lawrence L. Langer called Misha’s story “preposterous” and historian Raul Hilberg called it “impossible”. What if the entire case that has cost Jane’s family hundreds of thousands of dollars was all based on a lie? Will we ever know?

This is what I believe: when you speak your truth miraculous things happen. Jane is a very brave woman and she has chosen to speak her truth on her BESTSELLERtheBook.blogspot.com blog. In less than a week hundreds of people have read what she has to say so far and are coming back for more. Other bloggers and discussion groups are writing about her. Despite the judgement of the court, many of us have questions and now that this remarkable forum of the world wide web is available to us, we DO have an option. We DO have a place to be heard and, more than heard, affirmed.

Justice Louis Brandeis once said that sunlight is the best disinfectant. And with the internet as a forum there is an entire world of sunlight available to the wounded. Disinfecting those wounds has just begun.

Thanks for reading.