Smear Campaign

Chapter 39
Smear Campaign

In the autumn of 1994, I think it was, three years after I had resigned from the Defamatory Cinema, two young friends said that they had decided to volunteer. Yes, that cinema had volunteers in addition to paid staff. A few years later I saw a movie called Clueless and the characters of Tai and Cher reminded me slightly of these two young friends. So, I shall call them Tai and Cher. I said something like, “Well, enjoy yourselves. It’s a beautiful building. But be really careful. You can’t trust those people. Whatever you do, don’t mention my name, because if you do, you’ll get into trouble, and I don’t want you to get into trouble.” I joked that it would be fun if they could sneak in a microcassette recorder and capture the stories about me, since I was really curious, but that was just a joke, because I knew that they couldn’t do that and wouldn’t even if they could. Then, I think it was two evenings later, Tai shrieked at me on the phone, at length and in quite some detail. Yes, they had asked about me, right away, and she and Cher were taken aside for a debriefing. The guy who debriefed them had previously been friendly with me. He reminded me a bit of Scott Peterson, and so I shall call him Scott Peterson. Scott Peterson told them to keep away from me, and he told them precisely why, with all manner of crazy stories. If even a single one of those stories had been true, I would have been locked away immediately and forever. Tai shrieked that I was never to talk with them ever again, and then, after maybe 30 minutes of shrieking, she slammed the phone down on me. I called Cher, and she hung up on me as well. Okay, so the stories were worse than I had thought, and far less believable than I had imagined, and they were repeated just recently, and I had the name and the date and the specifics. And my two ex-friends were so hopelessly stupid that they should never have been friends in the first place. It was years before I could come to terms with that and think realistically again. It was years, also, before I understood that the Defamatory Cinema (like Penthouse and like my day job) operated as a cult.

Now, I was extremely fond of those two young gals. They meant the world to me. There was nothing romantic going on, no hanky panky, despite what various people suspected. I thought that, if I were a daddy (which I am not and would never want to be), I would be endlessly amused and entertained were I to have two daughters like that. Tai was a pain in the neck, but I liked her anyway. Cher was different. She was the type for which I have a weakness. Despite her attempts at putting on a façade of contentment, I could see that she was in terrible emotional pain. She was clinically depressed but did not even know it. I instantly recognize children and teens who have that. Others never notice it at all. I can spot it from a block away. I can spot it because I experienced it. Whenever I see someone like that, I want to make friends. Why? Because when I was younger, I so much wished that some adult, somewhere, would recognize what I was experiencing and, quietly, say something so simple as, “I see it. I see it in your face. Nobody else sees it, but I see it. I can see the pain that you’re living through. Everyone else blind to it, but I see it so clearly. Let’s talk.” Just a ten-minute intelligent heart-to-heart would have been life-changing. That never happened. I knew, for certain, that, absent emotional support, Cher would soon become a drunk and/or a druggie, and/or she would kill herself. All her family and “friends” ceaselessly talked down to her and poked fun at her. She was perpetually surrounded by people, but all those people, Tai included, treated her as though she were garbage, an idiot, an annoyance, a mascot useful only as the butt of jokes. So common. So horribly common. Any sense of satisfaction was impossible in that milieu. Witnessing that was painful for me, not just emotionally painful, but physically painful. That is why I always made it a point to treat her only with dignity and the utmost respect. Unfortunately, we were never alone together. I am certain she would never have allowed me to be alone with her. Those who were with us were invariably family and “friends” who were causing her harm, intentionally or unintentionally. I desperately wanted her to come to understand that there was someone she could turn to, who would accept nothing in return. When she finally reached that tipping point, which I could sense was imminent, I wanted to catch her before she fell. Nobody else would do it; of that was I certain. That’s the background.

Now, nobody was going to believe two ditzy young gals, and, if a lawyer or judge were to question them, they would just cave and deny everything. “No, we never said that. We never heard any stories. Nobody said anything about him. Swear on a stack of bibles cross my heart and hope to die.” To protect myself, I wanted this on the record. The following Saturday morning there would be an orientation meeting for new volunteers, and so I hired a private investigator to attend. Chances that Tai and Cher would be around at that time were fairly high. Because they had created a scene, chances that someone would have a discussion with them were fairly high. Chances that the PI would overhear any of this were fairly low, but not negligible. So, I took time off from work and hired a PI. I entered what had once been a lovely house but was now a run-down office. An enormous, dour, sour guy let me in. I complimented him on the house, and he gruffly said “Thank you,” without a hint of emotion. He breathed heavily as he read through my story, and he told me off, saying that my story was libelous. Well, how else could I possibly tell the story? The fee to open the investigation was a nonrefundable $600, and then it was, I think, $500 an hour to continue. I paid $1,100, cash, which was about all the money I had, and which was infinitely more than I normally had. He introduced me to his PI, a guy who looked just like Martin Mull, and who, unlike the enormous guy, seemed rather cheerful. He heard me out and took notes. He asked for instructions, and my instructions were really simple: “Just show up as a new volunteer, follow the orientation, do whatever sweeping or cleaning or other duty that is asked of you, and keep your ears open. If you don’t hear anything about me, fine. If you do, take accurate notes. That’s all.” He agreed. I emphasized that this was a one-time-only opportunity. Things were still volatile. After Saturday, things would calm down again. He understood. As we parted, he said that I would hear from him the following Monday morning.

So, Monday morning came around, and the PI called me while I was at my desk at the office. “Sorry. I didn’t go. I had a cold. Maybe I can go next time?” I hit the ceiling. “THERE IS NO NEXT TIME!!!!!” “So, you don’t want me to continue the investigation?” “THERE’S NOTHING TO CONTINUE! YOU MISSED IT!” I was in a rage, screamed out of the office, and drove around aimlessly for the rest of the day, fuming the whole while.

When I calmed down a little bit, a very little bit, a few days later, I phoned the gigantic dour/sour guy who breathed heavily to ask for a refund for nonfeasance. Nope. Only the $500 for the second hour would be refundable. He sent me a letter, explaining that the investigator had not performed his duties because I had requested him to discontinue, and further saying that he would not refund the $500 until I signed and submitted the enclosed receipt, by which I would claim that I had already received the $500. I didn’t dare sign such a receipt.

That’s when it dawned on me that I had done everything wrong. Private investigators are hired by corporations to spy on employees. I broke the rules. I was an (ex-)employee who hired a private investigator to spy on a corporation. That was a no-no. I decided that I had little (read: no) respect for private investigators.

Just afterwards, because of work obligations, I was at a one-man play at the local university. With me were some coworkers and acquaintances, among them a lawyer I knew slightly. I took him aside where we could not be heard, and I asked him for advice, because I really had no idea what to do. He suggested that I file a defamation suit, and he said he would be happy to represent me, gratis. He told me to serve the summonses, and doing so was bizarre. As with being high on carburetor cleaner, I just couldn’t stop giggling, and those who were with me found my giggles contagious, and we acted like more like drunken rowdies than serious professionals. Yet those giggles did not at all represent my emotions, which were an indescribable torment. Then the lawyer dawdled. He refused to return my calls. About half a year later he called to shout at me that he could not afford my case unless I coughed up more money than I owned. I scraped up what I could and borrowed the balance ($500, I think) from my mother. A week or so later, I was at the office when he unexpectedly phoned. The first word out of his mouth was “Bingo!” He had just spoken at length with two witnesses, two witnesses I was worried about, because they had hated my guts from the first time we had met some years before. They confirmed that, yes, wild stories were circulated about me widely, and they gave some details, which got my head to spinning. I had never imagined such stories. They were utterly ludicrous and some were even physically impossible. Then my lawyer apologized. “I thought you were lying so that you could get some money out of them. But you were telling the truth. I had no idea.” What could I say? I had never asked him to take my case. He had offered to take my case, gratis, even though he thought I was telling a pack of lies? Then he went silent again and ignored my messages. At eleven o’clock on the night before the final day that the statute of limitations was still active, he called me on the phone, screaming, telling me off for waiting until the last minute. I drove to the office and got there at about midnight, to have access to email and to a fax and printer. He faxed me the text to print, and I saw that he had radically reworded what I had written and changed the meanings. The complaint, as he reworded it, made me look like a braindead immature moron, one who enjoyed exaggerating to get attention. I told him that he had to restore my original meanings and not to exaggerate. The original was hideous enough; he didn’t need to make it worse. He adamantly refused. I worked at this all night and into the next day, and he told me to file the case at the County Court rather than at the County Clerk’s office. That made me suspicious. I printed the forms at the office and ran off second copies just in case. By then it was about three o’clock. I dashed away about two hours before closing time, and it would take me nearly two hours to reach the government offices. I filed the papers at the County Court, but the clerical staff there were entirely confused and did not know what to do. A ha! It was a trick! I then raced my car to the County Clerk’s office and filed the other copy literally seconds before closing time. The gals at the counter knew exactly what to do, they stamped them and submitted them, and then I had to go away because the doors were closing.

There was the usual first round, with the usual motion to dismiss, this time with a difference: The lawyer for the Defamatory Cinema charged that my defamation suit itself constituted defamation against his client. The lawyer for the Defamatory Cinema made no attempt to assert the truth of the rumors about me. That, in itself, I thought was telling. All that monster had to do was prove that the rumors were true, and he would have won. Slam dunk. In one single hearing, it would have been over, effortlessly. One bit of evidence, one credible witness, and I would have been done for. He didn’t even try, because he knew that there was no truth to those rumors whatsoever. We had credible witnesses on our side, and the cinema had nothing going for it, apart from lots of banging on the table and strained attempts at technicalities. All the evidence was in our favor. No evidence was in favor of the cinema. (I was secretly hoping that the cinema’s lawyer would attempt to settle and ask for terms. My terms would have been simple: Fire and bar everyone who spread rumors about me, prominently publish their names and the reason for their dismissal, offer me a public apology, pay my lawyer his costs, reimburse my costs, and find suitable well-paying employment for me in an unrelated firm, preferably in City Hall, where the cinema had plentiful contacts. I would have settled on those terms. Of course, I knew that would never happen. Justice in the US is a blood sport; it’s a fight to the death. Amicable settlements are unheard of in the US.) My lawyer made an initial argument against the motion to dismiss, but he would not permit me to attend the hearing. I did not understand why until just afterwards, when he called to say that he would no longer represent me. Apparently, he had accepted a bribe. Either that or he just didn’t want the bother and surrendered. He told me to sign a document prepared by the cinema’s attorney by which I would admit that my case had been frivolous, and, further, by which I would agree never to mention the name of the cinema, never to mention the names of anyone involved, and never to mention any events in any way connected with that cinema, on pain of severe legal action. I refused to sign. So, flat broke, I had to withdraw, which is why my name is mud in that part of the world.

I decided that I had little (read: no) respect for lawyers. Detested them. All of them. Well, in years since, I have worked alongside some lovely lawyers. Still, despite the lovely experiences, that one tumultuous experience left me with a bad taste that will never go away.

Note: In casual conversations, in the years prior to any talk of a legal suit, the lawyer had impressed upon me that he was drowning in debt and that he had just purchased a home/office that he was having trouble paying for. He also seemed to have hinted at domestic frictions, though I couldn’t be sure as to his exact meaning. My guess is that, after he offered to take my case for free, he realized that he was wasting his time. That is why he ignored me until the last possible moment, that is why he tried to trick me into filing improperly, and that is why he withdrew from my case. Thoughtful of him, yes? Had he not been a charlatan, he would have given me intelligent advice when I asked for it. What do I mean by intelligent advice? I did not know three decades ago. Now I know.

Intelligent advice:

There is a remedy for defamation, but it is not a judicial remedy. You could try a judicial remedy, but it would not work; I promise you it would not work. Unless the cinema is suing you, or unless criminal charges are filed against you, just ignore the whole thing.

Let me explain.

If friends turn on you over a rumor so obviously false as this, they were never friends; they were scatterbrains. You will never win them back, and eventually you will be grateful that they got out of your life. You’ll soon lose more friends over this, too. Lots of people will stop talking to you. That’s part of life. Let them go. They will never want to check if the claims are true, because it gives them deep satisfaction to be outraged without a scintilla of evidence. They will forever reject any evidence that contradicts the story that they enjoy. The story is now part of their dogma, part of their religion, and nothing will make them give it up. They truly enjoy believing scandalous stories, especially if those stories are told by people who have no credibility, and even more especially if those stories can knock others down to size, and nothing could ever make them feel better. It makes them feel superior to believe the worst about others, despite all evidence to the contrary. These are not deep, thoughtful people. They are terribly insecure, and it makes them feel good to tear others down. There are countless people like that, and those are the people you need to avoid.

Think about it: Would you rather not know the ugly truth about your friends? Would you rather not know how easily they could come to hate your guts, based only on the preposterous words of a total stranger? If they hadn’t met that particular jerk, they would have heard a different story from somebody else, and the result would have been identical. Would you rather not know how gullible and idiotic they are? You’re thinking about their good points, and I’m sure they have good points, I’m sure they can even be sweet with certain people in certain circumstances, but I’m seeing their underlying evil, and you need to avoid their evil. It is impossible to fix people like that. They are damaged beyond repair. They cannot come to their senses. Ever. Impossible. They will never mature. When they reach their seventies, should they live so long, they will not be any more sensible. They will be the same as they are now, but probably nastier. You cannot help them. Nobody can help them. They are beyond reach. I know you have a lot of affection for them and want what’s best for them. I know you’re trying to see things from their point of view. I know how hard it is to shut off affection, but you have to shut it off, because they will never get well. You’ve now seen them at their worst, and you need to accept that their worst is the reality; that is who they are. The people you thought you knew do not exist, and they never did.

Think about this, too: Even without having met them, I can guarantee you that they have never contributed anything to this world, and never will. Do they help those in need? Do they do research? Do they educate? Do they rescue stray animals? Do they involve themselves in good causes? Human rights? Hunger? Homelessness? Anything at all? Would they help a friend who has had some bad luck? Of course not. It would never cross their minds to help anyone, no matter what. Have you ever known of them to perform a selfless act? I didn’t think so. They would never in their lives perform a selfless act. Don’t even talk to them again. If they call, hang up. If they knock, close the door on them. They will do you no good, not now, not ten years from now, not fifty years from now. They will never change, and they will continue to believe whatever they choose to believe. Evidence means nothing to them, and it will never mean anything to them.

You should know by now that whispering campaigns are common in almost all workplaces, and, contrary to everything you’ve heard, the worst possible defense against them is an offense; the best defense is just to get away from that toxic environment.

The smear campaign will make it extremely difficult for you to get another job, at least in this part of the world. You need to keep something in mind: If employers are so dense that they don’t want to hire you because of obviously bogus rumors, then those employers are no good, and count yourself lucky that they don’t want you. They would have brought you nothing but grief. It would be much easier, anyway, to get a job five hundred or a thousand miles away from here.

Don’t let the cinema staff’s stupidity and childishness drag you down and consume all your thoughts. The cinema people are trying to drive you crazy, they’re trying to make you say or do something angry, which will convince everybody that you’re unreasonable or even unbalanced or delusional. Don’t let them do that. They’re trying to provoke a reaction out of you. Don’t fall into that trap, because they’re lying in wait for you. Also, as you can see, they’re playing divide-and-conquer, and you should never participate in that game.

Remember: There are no legal charges against you. Set your alarm clock for every hour, and every time it rings, say to yourself, out loud: ‘There are no legal charges against me.’ Do that every day for the next year. It’s freeing. That’s the best news you could possibly have. It’s actually cause for celebration. That in itself is your triumph. You have already won. Don’t give up that victory. That sort of a victory is a cold comfort, but a cold comfort is better than no comfort. The cinema never filed charges against you because it doesn’t have a case against you. You’re in the best position possible, and so if you don’t fall into the trap that the cinema has laid for you, this will all blow over in a few years. Just keep plugging away at your life and your hobbies, because this conflict will eventually prove itself irrelevant to you.

A legal conflict, on the other hand, would explode out of all control and would take over your life; it would drain your bank account and put you into a tremendous debt that you would never be able to pay off. Once you exhaust your credit, you would have to withdraw your charges, and you would then be a laughingstock. Chances of winning are about zero. Judges do not take kindly to an individual’s personal problems. Judges take kindly only to corporations, the bigger the better. Even if you do win, you would have only a Pyrrhic victory and you would never get your money back. You’d be bankrupt. Even if you do win, the slanders have already been spread far and wide, and they cannot be unspread, they cannot be unheard, they will not be unbelieved, and they will not stop circulating. Welcome to the club.

There would be no upsides to a legal conflict. None. At least, not for you. Nothing good would come of a legal conflict, and it would not clear your name; in fact, a legal conflict would just make you seem guilty; it would bring attention to the cinema and to its calumnies, a lot of attention, and, take my word for it, nobody would ever believe you again. To file a legal action, you would need to repeat the cinema’s slander, on the record, in writing, in public, and then that slander will be a libel that will be associated with you forever. It could well be reported in the news, and the average reader would skim the articles and associate your name with a crime, because the two would appear next door to each other in the same headline. That is all anybody would remember, and yes, everybody would remember. When you lose the case, and you would almost certainly lose, your reputation would be shattered forever.

You’re understandably worried that, with so many people believing this nonsense, someone will call the cops and you’ll be arrested. Let me assure you that chances of an arrest are close to nil. You’re not committing any crimes and you do not give the appearance of committing any crimes. If crazy people call the cops, they won’t be able to provide any specifics, and the cops would ignore them. If you file a lawsuit, on the other hand, there would be a much greater probability of arrest, because you will have brought attention to yourself and to the slanders. Everyone, especially the police, will be on the alert, and your defendants will have a strong motive to prove their points by getting you falsely arrested. You tell me that this cinema and the nearby police departments are very close and work hand-in-glove? Watch out! Don’t go there. If by some crazy circumstance you’re arrested anyway, which is not in the least likely, call me and I’ll do what I can to have the charges dismissed, because if what you’re saying is true, the charges would be fake anyway, obviously fake and easily disproved. Anyway, I would be willing to place a bet with you right now, right this minute, a bet for a thousand dollars, that you will not be arrested. Are you game to make that bet? I could use an extra thousand dollars, you know.

There will always be people who will say the most horrible things about you. There will always be people who will accuse you of crimes that never happened. You will always have so-called friends who will believe them. That’s part of life. There is no getting away from it. Lies are protected by the First Amendment, and gullibility is not a criminal offense.

So long as nobody is physically attacking you, so long as nobody is threatening you, so long as nobody is jailing you, so long as nobody is pressing charges against you, just laugh it all off.

I can tell that you’re all twisted up. That’s perfectly normal. You want to shout from the mountaintops how terribly wronged you were. I understand. Don’t do it. The more you talk about it, the worse you make it for yourself. The more you talk about it, the more suspicious people become of you. Just keep your mouth shut. It’s hard to do. I know that. Keep your mouth shut anyway. Don’t talk about it with anybody, ever. If you keep your mouth shut, this will all disappear. The smear campaign has been going on for three years now, and it might go on another three, or even six, but it will wind down. Shallow people with puny minds will find other fake scandals to occupy their petty thoughts.

You want justice. You want the cinema people to pay for their wrongs. They will never pay. Their lives and their business will be blessed, and the more people they harm, the more blessed they’ll be. They won’t be investigated. They won’t be charged. They won’t be reprimanded. They will be protected by the authorities, especially by the authorities whom they defraud. They will be celebrated, they will be profiled in magazines and newspapers, City Hall will bestow honors upon them. Again, that’s life. It’s horrible, but it’s life. So be it. The sort of justice you crave will never come to be, so please don’t obsess on it. The only justice that would come to be is a free and honorable life for you.

Most people have survived this and much worse. I know that it’s impossible for you to imagine now, but in a few years you’ll calm down and learn to be at peace with what happened, and then you will be much stronger, much more resilient, and much wiser. Besides, this is an opportunity. You can start life anew now. Toxic friends are gone. A toxic employer is gone. You are free from them. Don’t stand your ground. Standing your ground is the principled thing to do, but it’s a fool’s game, because standing your ground would turn everybody against you, and it would probably get you assassinated.

Start over, start a new life, afresh. Don’t even stick around this place. Get away from the memories, which will just poison you. Move to a different city. Move to a different state. Right away. Start packing as soon as you get home tonight, to make your decision real. Don’t take the same kind of job, for heaven’s sake. You’ve had bad experiences in cinemas, and your luck won’t change at different cinemas. Find a different line of work.

As soon as you move, join some clubs. You like frogs, so join a herpetology club. You like mice, so join the Rat & Mouse Club. You like history, so join a history club. You like hiking, so join a hiking club. You like Native Americans, so attend their open events. Surround yourself with new people. They won’t know about any of the nonsense here, so don’t bring it up. Don’t taint yourself. Don’t even mention this place again. This place should be dead to you.

Don’t let those ghouls sink you. That’s what they want. They want to sink you. Don’t give them the satisfaction. You can still fly away. So fly.

That would have been intelligent advice. I would have accepted it and avoided all this idiotic drama. Heck, I would even have paid him maybe two hundred dollars in appreciation of that intelligent advice.

Three people, one by one, individually, took me aside where we could not be heard, and they filled me in on something. “Do you know why they’re giving you so much trouble?” No. “They’re Nazis!” They told me that the managers, in their youth, had goose-stepped up and down Main Street in Nazi parades prior to WWII, and that their allegiance had never changed, and that they had brought their kids up that way, too. They were notorious for this. What I had just experienced was their standard modus operandi. The managers had had many victims over the decades, and I now learned some of those stories.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDclCIFQML8

I saw The Wizard of Oz, and I thought it was a thoroughly dreadful movie. I hated every moment of it, and I remembered almost nothing from it. Yet I saw that garbage three times. Why? The first time (on network TV, I think) because I was curious, and when it was over, I said to myself, okay, that’s enough, I got it, never need to see that rubbish again, thank goodness. The second time I had no choice because I was assigned to project it. The third time it was social obligations that dragged me to it, kicking and screaming. Sorta worth it, though, because June Foray introduced herself to me and one of the Munchkins told me a joke that I can no longer remember. As for the movie itself, I was glad when it was over. I did not and do not remember any “flying monkeys,” for I deliberately put that nauseating piece of offensively stupid trash out of my mind and memory. Yes, it is true, everybody else on the planet adores that putrid movie and thinks it one of the greatest of all cinematic achievements. I am not everybody else. Afterwards, I learned that L. Frank Baum had advocated the total extermination of all American Indians. That made me hate the movie even more.

https://youtu.be/XOXhri6c4AA

Continue to the next chapter.