JB Handley's Latest Frivol.

JB Handley has thrown the gauntlet to Paul Offit and sued him and the publisher of Autism’s False Prophets for ‘false light invasion of privacy’, whatever that means. The piece makes for fascinating reading.[HERE] According to the authors the crux of the matter lies at point 3:


“3. To stoke the fires of this controversy, to sell more copies of his book, and to place supporters of his pro-vaccination views in a more favorable and sympathetic light, Offit fictionalized the exchange between Seidel, a supporter of Offit's views, and Plaintiff, one of Offit's sharpest critics. Offit accomplished this fabrication by creating a made-up "plea" by Seidel for Plaintiff to stop promoting a certain autism therapy. Offit then falsified a "response" to this phony "plea" by quoting, completely out of context, a message that Plaintiff had posted on a different message board in response to an entirely different topic.”

So in the middle of a work of non fiction there is this piece of fiction expressly designed to make JB look really bad. I wonder what the courts will make of it. Does he look so terrible? As is usual in any of AoA's productions there is the occasional gaffe, like this one:

“If you don't like what we have to say, stop listening.We will bring the full resources of myself and Generation Rescue to stop this. We will sue you for libel and we will go after your homes and assets. My lawyers live to investigate and sue people like you.This will be your only warning.”

Did they really want the courts to know how fond of litigation JB is? Wouldn’t appear to be all that helpful to this upstanding businessman wanting to look like an offended party.

It’s a very rambly piece and hard to know what they're trying to string together given that though Kathleen is a non party in a hamfisted way there is an attempt to tie in neurodiversity to harassment of Gen rescue’s angels. But acknowledging that the harassers remain unidentified and then stringing it to unknown neurodiversity proponents is a bit of a stretch, but not for this crew apparently.

Needless to say, Columbia University Press and Paul Offitt aren’t taking this at all seriously and maybe the court’s will treat this as a piece of frivol.