Dear Author: Romance Book Reviews, Author Interviews, and Commentary

Individuals who are, or once were, associated with PublishAmerica are suing  the Preditor & Editors site for libel. Barbara Bauer is an agent who claims that P&E libeled her by calling her a scammer.  Victor E. Cretella, an attorney with PublishAmerica and a member of the Maryland Bar, is suing P&E for harming his reputation.

Barbara Bauer is on SFWA’s twenty worst agents list.   NielsonHayden also noted that Barbara Bauer is a “well known scam agent” and so did Miss Snark.  As everyone and their cousin on these sites note, calling someone a scam agent is defensible if it is the truth.  (I don’t think it’s entirely accurate to say that it is not libel if it is the truth. Truth is just an absolute defense to libel).

On the P&E website, it claims that Victor E Cretella infringed on a contract.  I am not sure how you can infringe on a contract.  You can breach a contract.  You can tortiously interfere with a contract but infringe?  In any event, this is a bit more interesting.  Apparently some had made complaints to the Maryland Bar Association regarding Cretella’s activities as PublishAmerica’s attorney.  Any complaint made to an …

Good name in man and woman, dear my lord, is the immediate jewel of their souls: Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing; 'twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands; but he that filches from me my good name robs me of that which not enriches him, and makes me poor indeed. William Shakespeare, Othello, Act III, scene iii.
When I started writing about defamation a couple of weeks ago, I quickly realized that it was much too complicated of a topic to stuff into one large blog post. It’s not just complicated but it is also confusing with technical issues that can make or break a case but are not easily understood.
One major element of a defamation case is determining if the defamation is "per se" or "per quod". The easiest case to prove is the defamation per se. The hardest, by contrast, is defamation per quod. Here’s the difference in pratical terms. The courts have decided that there is a certain set of words that is just so bad that just merely uttering the …