As our battle with the New York Times continued, I decided to upgrade some of my equipment. I bought an IBM PS/2 386‑55SX with greater speed, more RAM, and a larger hard drive. Also, since I had not owned a car since the runaway cab totaled my Thunderbird during the summer of 1989, I went to an auto auction in Washington, looking for another Thunderbird. Instead, I wound up buying a very large 1979 Jeep Wagoneer with four-wheel drive.
Meantime, with U.S. District Judge John Garrett Penn under fire from the Washington Post for his newly discovered backlog of cases, my attorneys—Roger Simmons, Steve Trattner, and Ed Law—and I had a conference call about Penn's endless delay in ruling on the Times's motion for summary judgment. At that point, we almost didn't care which way Penn ruled. We just wanted our case moving again. Regardless of how he decided, the losing side would appeal, and we assumed that, sooner or later, the case would wind up with the U.S. Supreme Court.
In order to jump‑start Judge Penn, Simmons filed a motion to lift his order to stay discovery, concentrating, in part, on a direct personal connection I had discovered and documented between Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher and chairman of the New York Times, and the mobbed‑up NFL team owner, Edward J. DeBartolo.
Times attorney Bruce Sanford responded with fury in his January 27, 1992, opposition to our motion, stating:
Moldea makes the wholly preposterous suggestion that former New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger would be an important witness. His statements in support of this theory are not merely speculative, but patently false. Sulzberger has not been to a professional football game since the Giants left New York some 18 years ago, does not have any "relationships with NFL owners." . . . . There neither is, nor could be, any legitimate reason for seeking discovery from Sulzberger, and the Times would vehemently resist such a transparent attempt to harass the head of the family that controls the Times.
Obviously, we disagreed with Sanford’s claim and pushed the issue—because we had the hard evidence of the association between Sulzberger and DeBartolo, which, indeed, had nothing to do with football. And we believed that the Times actually knew what we had.
Immediately after receiving our motion and the Times's reply, Judge Penn suddenly shut everything down on January 31 by granting the Times's motion for summary judgment.
Officially, our case was now dismissed.
But we experienced no trauma over this action. Three days later, Roger Simmons filed our notice of appeal, already realizing that nothing about our case against the powerful New York Times would be routine.
As Simmons went through the process of preparing for our appeal, the press—still not taking our case very seriously—continued firing shots at me.
In one of the funniest instances, Judith Colp, a feature writer for the Washington Times, called and asked if I would sit down for an interview about the case. I was acquainted with her husband, so I agreed to meet with her after receiving permission from Simmons.
Because my apartment looked like it had been hit by a thermonuclear device—with papers and books everywhere—I balked when she wanted to come to my home. Instead, I told her that I would be willing to come to her newspaper's headquarters on New York Avenue.
"What about your documentation?" She asked. "I'll need it for my editors. . . . Why don't you just throw it in a suitcase and bring it with you?"
Agreeing with her suggestion to haul a suitcase to our meeting, I met with Colp who seemed very nice and professional.
In her April 23 article in the Washington Times, trying to portray me as a nutcase, she wrote: "Mr. Moldea has become, well, obsessed with his case. He meets a reporter toting a large briefcase filled with files and videotapes."
After the WIW board of directors passed its resolution supporting me in the litigation, I decided to approach other writers' groups, hoping for official consideration and professional legitimacy.
Earlier, on September 4, 1991, I had gone to the most unlikely writers' group of all for support: the National Book Critics Circle, the trade association of America's book reviewers.
I contacted Jack Miles, the president of NBCC and the editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and explained the case to him. He was obviously aware of the dispute and expressed an interest in examining our materials, so I sent him a package of information. He also suggested that I become a member of NBCC, which I agreed to do.
On January 16, 1992, Miles called to tell me the results of the NBCC's board of directors' meetings on January 9‑10, saying that the board had decided to form a three‑person committee—composed of Miles; Patricia Holt, the book editor for the San Francisco Chronicle; and Carlin Romano, the book editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Later, after a seven‑month examination of the facts of Moldea v. New York Times, the committee proposed three options to the full NBCC board—all of which were critical of the manner in which the Times had handled my situation.
However, when the board met to decide which of the options to accept, its members balked. Miles later wrote an article in the Los Angeles Times, saying:
After much consideration, the board decided to take no position on the matter. Thinking as reviewers faced with the prospect of future litigation if their work struck an author as defamatory, some on the board tacitly sided with the New York Times . . . Others on the board, perhaps thinking of their vulnerability as authors to essentially unaccountable reviewers, tacitly sided with Moldea, who claims: "If I win this case, the worst that can happen is that reviewers and other opinion‑writers will suddenly have a responsibility to be accountable for what they write. Any writer who cannot live with that should not be in this profession."[1]
After the interesting result from the NBCC experience, I sent similar requests to two other organizations, in which I had long‑time memberships: the Authors Guild and Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE).
However, like NBCC, both the Authors Guild and IRE refused to take sides.[2]
As a result, I simply declared victory, telling journalist Debra Gersh of Editor & Publisher during an interview, "Officials from all three of these organizations reviewed the key documents in this case. If the facts didn't support what I've been saying all along, these organizations, especially the NBCC, wouldn't have hesitated to kick my ass and defend the New York Times.”
ENDNOTES
[1] Jack Miles, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Endpapers: Sticks and Stones: Can a Review Be So Bad It Is Libelous?” April 3, 1994.
[2] I pitched similar proposed investigations to Professor Robert D. Richards, executive director of the Pennsylvania Center for the First Amendment at Penn State University and Henry R. Kaufman, executive director of the Libel Defense Resource Center. Richards refused to conduct any investigation of the case in a letter dated September 9, 1992; Kaufman refused to conduct any investigation of the case during a telephone conversation with me on September 16, 1992.