On 25/03/07, Daniel R. Tobias dan@tobias.name wrote:
Apparently, literary agent [[Barbara Bauer]] has sued a number of people and organizations, including the Wikimedia Foundation, for defamation because of their involvement in making or publicizing allegations that Bauer's services are a scam because she insists on payment up front from authors (where normal industry practice is for agents to collect only after the author's works sell) and has apparently sold few or none of her clients' works to anything other than vanity presses. She has made it onto the Science Fiction Writers of America's "20 worst agents" list (they're another of the defendants in the suit). She has a long record of threatening suits against sites and forums that criticize her, at one point demanding a billion dollars for unauthorized use of her name as the title of a forum thread asking a question about her business practices. http://forums.writersweekly.com/viewtopic.php?p=44820
If anybody's interested, the suit is docket number L-001169-07 in Monmouth County, New Jersey, where it can be looked up here: http://www.judiciary.state.nj.us/acms/disc/CV0227W0E.ASP It's one of the many court sites that make it a pain to link to their stuff because they use a form-post interface for document retrieval.
The "notification" we got (I assume formal will follow later) was someone posting the following to [[Barbara Bauer]]:
----
On March 23, 2007, Bauer filed a suit with the Superior Court of Monmoth, New Jersey, asserting claims for defamation and interference with prospective business advantage. Wikipedia is among the 15 defendants named in the suit. Docket Number L-001169-07 Bauer etal vs Glatzer etal, http://www.judiciary.state.nj.us/acms/disc/CV0227W0E.ASP
----
Note the details of the allegations aren't available, just the bare facts of the docket. We're in good company - the other fourteen named defendants include the two Nielsen-Haydens, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (membership 1500), and various other people working in the field of "anti-scammer activism" (as it were). As far as I can tell, we're the only ones to simply report on it who are listed. I don't envisage the suit being successful.
[Bauer's page has since been deleted as "a bloody disgrace. Full of 'allegations" of who said what on message boards", a viewpoint which certainly has some merit.]