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priya venkatesan
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Muggle Law
Harry Potter authoress JK Rowling keeps suing people! Her latest bit of litigiousness was a dispute about a long-lens photograph of her son, which she wanted banned from any further publication. The suit was originally dismissed, but she just won on an appeal. Next up: those filthy mudbloods.
Harry Potter authoress JK Rowling keeps suing people! Her latest bit of litigiousness was a dispute about a long-lens photograph of her son, which she wanted banned from any further publication. The suit was originally dismissed, but she just won on an appeal. Next up: those filthy mudbloods.
priya venkatesan
bob stokes
Weather Channel Anchor Accused Of Being Leering Dirtbag
Weather Channel anchor Bob Stokes is being accused by a former on-air colleague, Hillary Andrews, of being a sexually harassing, stalkerish jerk. For an extended period of time. Andrews says that Stokes harassed her predecessor out of a job, and then began harassing Andrews even harder, constantly hitting on her and asking her inappropriate questions; i.e., "Will you lick my swizzle stick?" Andrews is now suing Stokes, and two highlights from her court documents are below, describing some of Stokes' conduct. Also, a bonus clip: a colleague forgetting Stokes' name, on-air. Maybe she blocked him out of her mind. More »
ominous doings
Murdoch Too Busy Ruining Newspaper to Testify in Sabotage Case
In the late 1990s, employees of Rupert Murdoch's NDS hacked into EchoStar/DISH Network's satellites, or something, and posted secret security codes on the internet, "allowing criminals to counterfeit the security cards used by subscribers to the DISH Network satellite service." Murdoch was reportedly peeved that DISH Network didn't want him to buy them. Now EchoStar is suing News Corp for millions of dollars, and the judge suggests that News Corp will lose if Murdoch doesn't personally take the stand and deny involvement, which he doesn't really want to do. He's a busy man! Just last week he personally moved that weird single-panel cartoon about business from the Wall Street Journal's editorial page to the "Leisure & Arts" section. "Pepper's move could make way for a more Murdochian brand of editorial cartoon, cartoonists said." [ABC]
pompous tools
Student-Suing Professor Roundly Disliked
Now it's official: everyone involved in any capacity with the Priya Venkatesan affiar annoys the hell out of us. To recap, Ms. Venkatesan was a Dartmouth lecturer who decided to sue her students for harassment or something because they heckled her. She is clearly a pompous tool. Her students are also probably pompous tools. Now a pompous tool who writes for the Wall Steet Journal editorial page weighs in with an indictment against academia. Joseph Rago attended Dartmouth, you see, though he totally didn't like it very much and didn't even try very hard in his classes. Because of post-modernism. Writing papers for lit classes is just like "filling in Mad Libs," he explains. Writing indictments of academia for the Wall Street Journal editorial page, on the other hand, is more like Pictionary. After the jump: amusing student reviews of Venkatesan's class from an internal Dartmouth page. The kids didn't really like her! More »
he's very very rich
Dozens of Women Suing Bloomberg
Michael Bloomberg is the greatest manager ever which is why pundits always want him to run for president. He's sooo great that he left an abusive tyrant in charge of his financial news company, and also that company gets sued every so often for being a hostile work environment for women. Last September, four women were suing Bloomberg LP for wrongful discrimination. Now, it's 58! It seems that whenever a lady employee became pregnant at Bloomberg, they were denied promotions and then received pay cuts. Mayor Mike always claims to have nothing to do at all with his company anymore, but the women filing the suit say he still calls the shots and "contributes to a culture of sexual discrimination." As there have been almost 500 women who've taken maternity leave from Bloomberg since 2002, the number of plaintiffs is expected to grow. And Mike himself is now writing a book about how to be as great a manager as he is. Like his last book, it will probably be ghost-written by his asshole-in-chief Winkler. [NYP]
Dartmouth's Dearth of Dictionaries
Dartmouth Dean of First-Year students Gail M. Zimmerman, in an email to students threatened with a lawsuit by Priya Venkatesan:
Dartmouth Dean of First-Year students Gail M. Zimmerman, in an email to students threatened with a lawsuit by Priya Venkatesan:Questions arose as to our ability to block Prof. Venkatesan's emails. Whether that ability exists or not, it would not likely stop her emails from reaching your inbox given the dearth and ready availability of other free email systems such as hotmail, gmail, and yahoo.Ah, yes. The "dearth and ready availability" of free email addresses. You never cease to impress us, Ivies! [Dartlog via IvyGate]
priya venkatesan
Ivy League Lawsuit Update
In case you hadn't heard, Dartmouth lecturer Priya Venkatesan has dropped the discrimination lawsuit she inexplicably filed against her former students. Hopefully it'll still all end up in the book! (Complete with thinly-veiled Gawker, if we're lucky.) Venkatesan is now a research assistant at Northwestern, btw. [Dartlog]
lawsuits
Ivy League Prof Sues Students For Being Mean to Her
A Dartmouth lecturer is suing her class for discrimination, as she revealed in a series of regrettable and bizarre emails that promptly ended up all over Dartmouth blogs. Priya Venkatesan (Dartmouth '90, MS in Genetics, PhD in literature) emailed members of her Winter '08 Writing 5 class Saturday night to announce her intention to seek damages from them for their being mean to her. The email, and so, so much more, below: More »
crime time
Magic Bra Has Tragic Flaw: Stolen From Ma!
Chest support theft report! Victoria's Secret is known as a BRA store, but is it also a ROB store? Long Island mom of four Katerina Plew says VS gave her the screw after they refused to meet with her about her idea for a new convertible bra, then ripped her off after the tipoff! The company's Very Sexy 100-way strapless convertible bra is really her own patented design, sez Plew—who sued! Now there's a legal meetup over the regal C-cup, cause the inventive mother is offended, brother. The two sides are taking their strapless tort back to court. It's a nuclear showdown on this brassiere throwdown! After the jump, compare Plew's patent plans with Victoria's Secret's own product: great minds think alike, or a thief in the night? More »
lawsuits
Stop Defaming Sam Zell's Trailer Park Company!
Sam Zell, the crazy old man who bought some newspapers recently, is a champion of free speech, which is why he swears so much. So it's odd that he is suing some lady for defamation, right? Especially because the lady is not associated with us, and we have called him all sorts of things! Oh, the lady is Dianne Jacob, who represents the Second District on the San Diego County Board of Supervisors. Sam Zell also owns a trailer park company that has four parks in her district. Recently, they started raising rents. Dianne Jacob said some very mildly defamatory things about them! More »
time for us to bug out
Most of Dan Rather's CBS Suit Dismissed!
Four of the seven counts in the suit brought by Dan Rather against his former employers at CBS have been dismissed. Unfortunately for CBS, among the three remaining counts is the "the $70 million in compensatory and punitive damages Rather is seeking from CBS for breaching his contract." So the vast government conspiracy bit of the lawsuit is apparently without merit, but he'll still get his money (maybe). After the jump, we've embedded the text of the judge's decision. And because that is not very interesting, we've also embedded a rockin music video. More »
neighbors
Odious Attorney Couple Settles Asinine Smoking Lawsuit
Jonathan and Jenny Selbin—two people who deserve one another—are both attorneys and the worst neighbors you could possibly imagine. In February, they filed a lawsuit against their neighbor for smoking in her own apartment, taking her to court even after she bought air purifiers because her smoking was "endangering" their sensitive child. The note they slipped under her door at the time read "As you may not be aware, we are both lawyers and both litigators, for whom the usual barriers to litigation are minimal." That bit made them the runaway winners of our February ""Which snippet from the Times Real Estate section makes you most want to assault the person in the story?" contest. Now, the suit has been settled [NYT]—and the Selbins are concerned about their own reputation. More »
usa! usa! usa!
UK Man Wins Lawsuit Against Website That Was Mean to Him
Peter Walls is the chief executive of a "social housing firm" in the UK. John Finn owns a rival housing firm. One day, Finn started a website called dadsplace.co.uk, and on that website, many anonymous people said many mean, mean things about Walls. They accused Walls of nepotism and sleeping with underlings and other sorts of things like that. Then Walls sued Finn for libel. He just won! He won one hundred thousand pounds, which is around eleventy-billion dollars. Injunctions were filed against two of the anonymous commenters who said these mean things! In other words, being anonymously bitchy on the internet is quite dangerous in England. Which is why there is not really so much of a market for "gossip blogs" there, you see. As Denton just told us, this case "serves as a reminder that the abuse that we take as our god-given right to inflict, or duty to tolerate, is illegal in many places." God bless the U.S.A.. [Guardian]
5wpr
Former Potential Client Now Finds Ronn [sic] Torossian "Nauseating"
We received a lovely email last night from Stephanie Burton, the editor-in-chief of CollegeOTR, a college blog network. Burton tells us that she and her boss were looking for a PR firm to get them some visibility, and someone referred them to 5WPR, helmed by incompetent superflack Ronn [sic] Torossian. When they asked the agency about Ronn's bad press, "They brushed off our concerns about Ronn's reputation and blamed "jilted" news reporters for the bad press," she writes. [An interesting formulation: reporters who dislike 5W for legitimate reasons are "jilted!"] CollegeOTR eventually decided not to hire Ronn and 5W. And now, after learning more about his "Cunt" related history (summed up here)," she says, "The fact that we even considered working with him is more than slightly nauseating." That's edumacational! And after the jump, Ronn speaks out (and gets spoken about)! More »
england's dreaming
Richest Man in Britain Threatens Every Paper in the Nation
Yesterday, the British media went wild with accusations that Gerald Cavendish Grosvenor, the Duke of Westminster, was "Client 6" in the notorious FBI affidavit that exposed the Emperors' Club VIP prostitution ring. About four hours later, every paper than ran that story took it down. Because Grosvenor is the richest man in the UK, and his rich-people lawyers (or
exclusive
The Story Of Ronn Torossian
When Ronn [sic] Torossian, the incompetent superflack and 5WPR CEO who reps characters ranging from softcore porn king Joe Francis to nutty televangelist Benny Hinn Ministries, sued his former HR director Melissa Weiss last week, he was using a classic PR tactic: getting out ahead of the story. Ronn alleged in his suit that Weiss helped an employee leave 5W, thereby violating her contract. But Weiss has her own side of the story: that she was fired because she protested extensive, ongoing labor violations at 5WPR. What we know—because we have the evidence—is that on Friday, Ronn sent Weiss an email threatening, "You will pay for the rest of your life for trying to ruin my business." The subject line read, "YOU STUPID CUNT." More »
exclusive
