— One way to terrorize people in America, when there aren’t any widows to kick around and you need to beat-up on somebody, is with frivolous lawsuits. Check this by one of the targets of war profiteer Rall’s random rage (FREE DIRTY DANNY!)
And I was just one of many who were appalled by this specious hatchet job. When Russ Smith, the publisher of the New York Press wrote an editorial criticizing Rall’s Voice feature, I was overjoyed to contribute the accompanying illustration, which depicted Rall as a small dog urinating on a bronze statue of the Pulitzer Prize-winning MAUS author. In hindsight, I wish I’d let that illustration be the final expression of my disgust with Rall’s anti-Spiegelman slam-piece, but I let my strong feelings about the Voice feature get the better of me.
Rall brags in one of the articles that a year doesn’t go by when he’s not taking someone to court. He’s a great national treasure (of Iraq, maybe.)
Rall’s exact quote, from Andrey Slivka’s NY Press piece on Rall v. Hellman back in Sept. 1999, went like this: “Well, my shtick is that I litigate. I have a lot of lawyers, and I never hesitate to use them. I don?t think I?ve been not in court a single calendar year.”
The odd thing is, when we had him in for his deposition, my lawyer asked Rall about this. Rall admitted he’d only been in court once before, many years earlier, over some dispute with his landlord.
I’m sure Rall’s much more careful with the truth when he writes those “editorial columns” of his.
The dispute with his landlord wasn’t over that fridge Rall pushed off the roof, was it?