BREAKING: Playboy Playmate is Suing BlogNYC for $100,000

Wait, we're being sued by Martin Siegel of Brown Rudnick? The same guy that defended Ken Lay in his bankruptcy proceedings? Rock! We really are the good guys! We also may be the first website in history to officially be sued for saying that we "owned" someone. Pwned!

I know some of you have been asking about what's going on in the Stephanie Adams case, sorry for the delay but we were waiting to hear back from Stephanie and her Lawyer Martin Siegel. Well we finally heard from them, and to the sound of jaws dropping all over NYC, nay the world, Martin Siegel has signed his name to a laughable complaint alleging that we have libel and defamed and ruined Stephanie Adams.

Possibly the most ludicrous part of the lawsuit is their claim that she is not a public figure, presumably because it's much harder to prove libel and slander against a public figure. They're making this claim despite everything she has posted on her THREE FUCKING WEBSITES ABOUT HERSELF boldly declaring that she is a "Playboy Playmate", a "spokesmodel", a "celebrity author" as well as prominently displaying news clips about herself and providing a media and press inquiries link. Also, in the initial letter we received from her lawyer one of the complaints was that we claimed to have "communicated with Stephanie herself" rather than her PR DEPARTMENT. How many "private individuals" do you know that have a fucking PR DEPARTMENT?

Please everyone, Stephanie Adams is merely a simple, private person, can't we all just let her be? Are we in the fucking Twilight Zone?

Now here comes the fun part. Since Stephanie Adams and Martin Siegel chose to go forward with this lawsuit, we get to do a fun little thing called discovery.

"Discovery? That sounds like fun, how can I get involved," you say. Easy. We have to think of anything and everything we want to know about Stephanie Adams' life that even remotely relates to our case. Her book sales, how much money she makes, etc. So if you have any questions that you think would help us defend ourselves against this baseless lawsuit please send them to defend.freespeech@gmail.com.

Also, and this could be important, one of the claims that Martin Siegel makes in the complaint is that Stephanie Adams never put up on her MySpace account for people to come here and "bash" us regarding our original article about her. She has since taken it down, I copy/pasted it word for word, but didn't take a screencap of it so if anyone remembers seeing her MySpace post and are willing to testify or sign an affidavit please let us know at defend.freespeech@gmail.com.

More Fun with Stephanie Adams, Martin Siegel and Brown Rudnick

Martin Siegel is taking his ball and going home, he doesn't want to play with us anymore because we are open and public about our correspondence. Click here to read Martin Siegel's response to our initial request that he specify exactly why he is suing us. It basically says that he doesn't want to because we keep publishing all of their "correspondence".

Siegel says, "Your client persists in publishing communications by you and me on his blog". Communications between "you and me"? Other than the original threatening letter and the initial summons we've heard nothing but crickets since we retained an attorney. That does not communication make Mr. Siegel.

Maybe we'd just like to know why the fuck we're being sued. Does Martin Siegel and Brown Rudnick have something against free speech? You want to keep something secret on Tuesday that must be made public on Thursday? Fine, we'll wait, but what we will not do and what we have refused to do since the beginning is give up our right to free speech even in the face of intimidation and bullying!

So stay tuned, we should have something fantastic to print on Thursday considering we actually get a complaint from them, which I have my doubts about.

That was our response to the letter. You can see the official response from our lawyer, Neal (champion of free speech) Johnston after the jump. For the complete backstory of check out our Stephanie Adams archives.

Martin S. Siegel, Esq. Brown[ Rudnick Berlack Israels LLP 7 Times Square New York, NY 10036

Re: Adams v. Poling

Dear Mr. Siegel:

I have a statement from Mr. Poling indicating that prior to my becoming involved here, indeed, prior to the service of the summons, you and he had a telephone conversation where he pressed you to identify what was wrong with his June 7 posting, and you responded by telling him that it was clear to you that he could not afford to litigate, and
that if he didn't take down the posting about Ms. Adams as she wanted, he would be sued. He was so served.

The summons bore your name and the name of your firm, Brown Rudnick, a sizeable institution which has to be taken seriously.

It was at this point that my son asked me to step in. I did.

I imagine you would be delighted to see this matter melt away. In May, a similar threat to Richard LeCour worked: he removed all reference to your client from his blog, Richard's Ramblings. However, this time it didn't work, and it's not going to work again.

Now that it has gone this far, James Poling is not going to be satisfied until he gets an apology from you, a general release from Ms. Adams, or a complaint. Any complaint, of course, must satisfy the provisions of 22 NYCRR 130: you must sign the complaint, and by doing so certify that the paper is not frivolous.

It will not be so easy to get out of this mess except with an apology and a general release.

If litigated, your claim is going to be litigated in what the French still call en pleine air. I have asked what it is in Poling's posting that your client objects to. If you serve a complaint, you are required to be quite specific about that. CPLR R 3016(a). The complaint is a public document. It is due on Thursday. I simply cannot imagine that you would want to be secretive now about information you must disclose this week.

You object that my client "continue[s] to joke about what [you and your client] regard as a serious matter." Though he tried to do so with good humor, Mr. Poling regards the First Amendment issues you have raised as very important. Me too. It is for this serious reason that Mr. Poling insists that the discussion be public.

Sincerely yours,

Neal Johnston
NJ:ig

cc. James Poling

Martin Siegel, Brown Rudnick and BS oh my!

Just to keep you all up to date on the latest happenings, here is the newest letter from my lawyer to Martin Siegel of Brown Rudnick Berlack Israels LLP fame. Mr. Martin Siegel was the one who told us, after we received the initial letter threatening to sue us, that "it looks like you don't have enough money to fight this, so just go ahead and take everything down."

It seems that perhaps their tune has changed slightly because since Neal Johnston took on the case as our attorney and we personally served Martin Siegel with papers, we haven't heard a peep out of him or Stephanie Adams. They do realize that filing a summons does not a lawsuit make don't they? You actually have to file a complaint and let us know what the hell you're suing us for!

Martin S. Siegel, Esq. Brown Rudnick Berlack Israels LLP 7 Times Square New York, NY 10001

Re: Adams v. Poling

Dear Mr. Siegel:

I wrote to you last week asking that you identify the defamatory material in the Defendant s postings, even before you serve your Complaint. You have neither answered nor acknowledged my letter.

A key element of defamation is injury to the plaintiff. By going even this far in a litigation, the claim is made that the defendant published something which caused an economic injury to the plaintiff.

Publication here was on the internet. If the material was injurious last week, it will be injurious next week too - and it will still be there, unless and until something is done about it.

But, we don t know what it is.

If my client defamed yours, he wants to eliminate that defamation immediately. If he published a falsehood, he wants to correct the error. He would want to right the wrong, whether or not he were sued. But we can do nothing without knowing what the problem is.

Please, for my client s sake and your client s sake: what is the problem?

Sincerely yours,
NJ:ig
cc. James Poling

Along the same lines, a generous reader has offered to send us over a free copy of Stephanie Adams' book, Empress, which we are excitedly waiting to review.

Even the books description of itself almost makes you giddy with anticipation:

"Never before has a book been written that depicts the life in ancient Rome from an intensely sapphic perspective. Never before has a book been written that tells the story of a woman's journey to the highest rank of nobility in ancient Rome along with the love and devotion of another woman."

Never has a book been so down the stack at Amazon that you can't even find it by typing in the title, you have to look for the author instead. Try that with any other book you can think of.

Also, in case you're ever interested in publishing a book of your own, try Stephane Adams' publisher. All you have to do is completely format the book in MS Word yourself according to their rigid guidelines then send them a check or money order for a deposit and voila', you've got yourself a published book (or 16 published books).

I'm so naive. I always thought publishers paid you to publish your book, not the other way around.

Is Stephanie Adams a Lying, Bullying Bigot?

We are by no means setting out to give a definitive answer to that question, but we do intend to provide some compelling evidence that would seem to suggest that the above statement may be true.

One of the truly wonderful things about being sued is that if Martin Siegel ever actually comes up with anything more than a summons, we get to do a fun little thing called "discovery". That's where we get to find answers to these and many more questions about Ms. Adams. She has to provide all the documents we need to defend ourselves against this baseless lawsuit. And we plan on defending ourselves diligently even if it means keeping Martin Siegel and the law clerks at Brown Rudnick very busy.

One thing we know is true, Ms. Adams was a Playboy Playmate...14 years ago. Although you might think it was last month if you went to her website as much as she mentions it. In fact it's the first thing she lists to describe herself, "Playboy Centerfold - Spokesmodel - Celebrity Author". I graduated high school in 1992, maybe I should plaster that on the front page of all my websites.

Playboy does maintain the philosophy of "once a playmate always a playmate" so I wonder if Playboy would condone their playmate behaving in such a despicable manner.

As you all know Stephanie Adams is suing BlogNYC for defamation, libel, slander and false statements among other things. All of which is intended to scare us away. Although suing someone for all three of those things is sort of like suing someone for walking fast, jogging and running slowly.

The lawsuit came about when we did a write up about Stephanie Adams suing the NYPD for $5 million for use of excessive force after she allegedly lost her temper and threatened a cab driver (keep that in mind it will come in handy later).

While we were at first excited that Stephanie Adams broke our cherry and decided to sue us, we were a little let down that this wasn't her first go around with madness. It all started with this letter from Martin Siegel of the highly esteemed Brown Rudnick law firm in Manhattan. Then it seemed to just spiral out of control.

First off, we have already shown that either Stephanie Adams or someone using the goddessy mailing system and the same IP address as well as claiming to be her PR department is the same person who also posted in our comments section, under at least four different names. One of the comments being, "Get your hands out of your pants and use it to scroll down her web site for a change," (that too will come in handy later).

Second of all, the e-mails and the fake comments all took place right around the time Stephanie Adams herself was posting on her MySpace site calling me an "amateur" and asking for people to come and "bash us" and saying that "good always defeats evil".

On her website goddessy.com Ms. Adams sells advertisements. $300 (for three months) or $100 (one month special offer). We're still not quite sure how that's a special offer, but anyway...we clicked through nearly every page we could find on her site and didn't find one advertisement. The only reason why that's particularly odd is because on the site, Stephanie claims that goddessy has "millions of visitors from all over the world who come to our web site and our community is growing rapidly."

Who wouldn't want to advertise on a site with millions of visitors? I guess there seems to be some discrepancy between what she considers millions of visitors and what Alexa Traffic rankings considers millions of visitors. According to Alexa rankings (which ranks websites according to their traffic) goddessy.com is ranked 3,723,582. By comparison, our "amateur" site is ranked 36,173. That's about 3,687,400 higher than Ms. Adams' goddessy site which claims to have "millions of visitors" or if you're better with graphs you can take a look at the one below. BlogNYC is in red, and goddessy, where you can find it, is represented in blue. We aren't pulling in millions of visitors a month and we're still completely kicking the shit out of her website so you can only imagine how long it would take her site to get "millions of visits".

Way back in 2002 a certain website, which for now will remain nameless but can also be backed up by witnesses and documents, innocuously criticized Stephanie for using "blue text on a black background" making her website difficult to read. What followed was three years of torment and threats from Ms. Adams. Along with posting the persons personal information all over the internet, they were subjected to e-mails with gems like these:

“You need glasses. The background is navy and the text is blue. You are no one but the old, ugly little Jew I met in Italy with Mario (who wishes you were Italian). Get a life and stop wishing you could be with me (or communicate with me) because not only are you are a troll, but you have too much time on your hands (when your small shriveled up dïck is not in them jerking off thinking about me).

Btw, neither the person who wrote the blog entry nor the person who e-mailed her were Jewish and to this day are clueless as to where that term came from.

"You are Mario’s jew friend. Why don’t you stop jerking off to me and buy a hooker!?"

GODDESSY makes over 70 million dollars a year and surely does not need the help of an amateur.

"Apparently, you have been looking up information on several of my web sites and are a deranged, ässhölë who came from a mother who was probably a hooker and a father who was probably an alcoholic. You sound like the type and any if you send any further e-mails, they will be forwarded to my security department, who by the way, WILL find out who you are, where you live and more. BEWARE!!!”

"By the way, you and your Jew friend are both old, poor, ugly, short, jealous, demented, lonely trolls who are still wishing you could be with a woman like me. You are so unworthy, you’re not even good enough for me to shït in your mouth. Try to be happy, if you can, because you will soon have to answer to my Uncle. It might not be directly, but from what he told me today, you will be getting the message soon… You will soon have your hands cut off for it.”

“Your daughter is going to grow up and become a crack whörë for men to fück her up her äss at $1 a pop. That’s what you taught her, Dïck!”

“You sound like a jealous fäg! Why don’t you get a sex change, Dicko?”

That's just a small sampling of what this person was put through for nearly three years.

Then there's the case of Stephanie Adams vs. Wikipedia. Apparently Stephanie was all in a frenzy because the Wikipedia entry about her mentioned that she offered Tarot card and love readings. She became so outraged that the moderators had to ban her for "personal attacks"

User GODDESSY is via her own admittance the person of who this Wikipedia article is about (Stephanie Adams). User Goddessy has been blocked and banned by several moderators and administrators. User Goddessy has made several severe Personal Attacks and been warned and kept attacking.

Also, if you do a DMOZ search for goddessy.com the result you get is, "Tarot Card Readings By Sorceress".

Does anyone else see a pattern here? In every instance we could find, and there are quite possibly many others, Stephanie Adams is the one who seems to have serious anger management issues. A blogger, Wikipedia, a cab driver, the NYPD, BlogNYC...there is one constant in all of these stories.

All rather odd behavior for someone who claims, on a poster of herself that she is trying to pawn off for twenty bucks on her website, "love = pride". Strange, because after reading all of this it would seem that Ms. Adams has very little of either.

You Got Served: BlogNYC Retains Legal Counsel to Defend Its Right to Free Speech and Squash the Frivolous Lawsuit Filed by Stephanie Adams

It's both a sad and happy day here at BlogNYC. My official reign of pretending to be my own lawyer has officially come to an end. My parents were so proud of my time as my own fake attorney. Alas, I have passed on the baton to a real attorney, One Mr. Neal Johnston of Johnston & Johnston LLP.

Here is the official BlogNYC response to Martin Siegel from the official attorney of BlogNYC (btw, that picture above is of me personally serving Martin Siegel with our response):

Martin S. Siegel, Esq.
Brown Rudnick Berlack Israels LLP
7 Times Square
New York, NY 10036

RE: Adams V. Poling

Dear Mr. Siegel:

I enclose a Notice of Appearance in connection with the above litigation. Please get me the Complaint as soon as you can.

In your letter to Mr. Poling you state that if he should fail to accept receipt of your email "summons" you "would have no choice but to ask [your] process server to serve [him] personally."

That statement is not exactly true. You have a number of other choices. You could serve him by mail, CPLR §312-a. You could whistle Dixie. Or you could swallow the $210 cost of the Index Number and turn your attention to something of slightly greater relevance to some issue of substantive justice.

I'm quite serious about the latter point. If you actually do come up with a complaint, I suspect it will be the most embarrasing single document to come out of Brown Rudnick this year - and the year is no longer young. I am reasonably confident that your firm will wind up looking considerably more foolish than does your client, and, unlike your client, you will not have the excuse of not knowing any better.

Sincerely yours,

Neal Johnston

Mr Johnston has taken pity on us and taken on our case pro bono and has been very supportive. There are however certain costs that we will have to come up with so don't be afraid to throw a few bucks in the defense fund to help us defend our right to free speech. And just in case Mr. Johnston needs any help, which I doubt, there are a few lawyers chomping at the bits to take on this case for free who have all said they more than willing to out in any way they can.

Stephanie Adams Sues BlogNYC, It's Official

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE "OFFICIAL DOCUMENTATION" THAT SAYS SHE IS SUING IS FOR $100,000

Just got this via e-mail (note it was sent to james.the.lawyer@gmail.com) You can click here to see the backstory and why this Playmate who's already suing the NYPD is now suing us Also, a note that Dave pointed out in the comments, her lawyer is Martin Siegel the guy who represented Ken Lay in the Enron bankruptcy:

Dear Mr. Poling: Please be advised that, on June 20, 2006, Ms. Stephanie Adams started a law suit against you by the filing of a Summons with Notice in the Supreme Court of the State of New York. Under the Court's procedure and statute, we are required to serve that summons upon you. Your last e-mail requested that we communicate with you at this e-mail address. However, I can only serve you with the summons by e-mail, as requested by you, instead of personal service, if you acknowledge in writing that "I acknowledge that, on June 22, 2006, I personally received the Summons with Notice, dated June 19,2006, in the case of Stephanie Adams v. James Poling, Index No. 108616/06, signed James Poling (manual signature required). In order to acknowledge service, you must return the signed acknowledgement to me by U. S. Mail, with your actual manual signature. An electronic signature is not sufficient under the rules- it must be a handwritten manual signature. If I do not receive an e-mail from you by 9:00 a.m., Friday, June 23, 2006, stating that you received the Summons and that you have sent a manually signed acknowledgement back to me by U. S. mail, I will have no choice but to ask our process server to serve you personally. Martin S. Siegel.

So yeah, anyone know any good free speech lawyers? Also, if you'd like to kick in a few bucks to our legal defense fund feel free, we can use all the help we can get.

BlogNYC's Official Reply to Stephanie Adams' Attorney Martin Siegel

Check out the Stephanie Adams archives for the full backstory leading up to this letter.

VIA EMAIL ONLY AS WE ARE TOO LAZY TO ACTUALLY MAIL THIS
Mr. Martin Siegel
Brown Rudnick Berlack Israels LLP
7 Times Square
New York, New York 10036

RE: Stephanie Adams vs. BlogNYC

Dear Mr. Siegel,

I am not an attorney but I will be acting as one on my own behalf until I find one I can pay in hugs and karma. While this is James Poling, the blogger, I am acting as James Poling the lawyer and ask that you refrain from any further correspondence with my client, James Poling the blogger. As you can see by new e-mail address, james.the.lawyer@gmail.com, I will now only accept any correspondence from you through that e-mail address. It really helps us keep things straight around here. Any correspondence to any other email address will not be acknowledged.

You claim that we claim to "own" Ms. Adams and we in turn claim that that claim is utterly preposterous. Not only is it illegal to own people, we find even the suggestion morally reprehensible, and even if you could own people, which thank God you cannot, we would never, ever own Ms. Adams.

You furthermore claim that we claim that Ms. Adams communicated with us personally, again, we claim that your claim is absolutely without merit. Although we may have unknowingly communicated with her and just not known it, you may be on to something there. According to Amazon.com her Book GODDESSY: 2007 Psychic Reading Predictions for Every Astrological Birth Sign claims that "Unlike most horoscopes or readings, these predictions apply to every individual, regardless of religion, race, sex or sexual preference. You know your past. You know your present. Allow me to tell you your future. GODDESSY is the first ever to bring you Yearly Psychic Reading Predictions in a book format." If she could do that, it is quite possible that we have unknowingly communicated with her on a level which we can not yet comprehend.

You say that Ms. Adams has authorized you to commence legal action against my client, James Poling the blogger. That makes us laugh as we will demonstrate here...lol...lol...lol. My client is a very busy and very important blogger and does not have the time to be pretending to be his own lawyer.

If you feel from what you have said that you actually have a case against my client (which is actually me the blogger) then not only do I fear for the well being of your law firm, I say bring it on. My client is a good and decent citizen, for the most part, and will not be intimidated into giving up his right to free speech by a woman who claims to be a "Sorceress" and uses bullying lawyers to try and intimidate people with her baseless lawsuits.

Good day to you Sir.

I said Good day to you Sir!

Very Truly Yours,

James Poling (the lawyer)

*DISCLAIMER: I am not in any way a lawyer, but for the context of this letter I play one since I am technically still representing myself.