"For better or worse, she wished the lawsuit were done with. 'It’s in God’s hands now,' [Olivia Hussey] said."

"'It’s all in God’s hands in the end.' Even if it failed, she said, she’d be okay. 'Most people on their deathbeds, even the most evil people, have to say, What have I done? And what was wrong? And what did I do right? I’m not afraid to die because I’m not scared of my reckoning.' She’d made her share of mistakes, and sometimes she wondered whether filing the lawsuit was one of them. But she could live with that. 'Nobody’s perfect,' she said. 'If we were perfect, there’d be no need for all this charade, this illusion that we call life. If we were perfect, we’d all be angels.'"

From "Romeo and Juliet Was a Tragedy/In 1968, Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting were the world’s most famous teens. In 2023, they sued Paramount for abuse" by Lila Shapiro (New York Magazine).

The lawsuit, filed the day before the Child Victims Act expired, is based on the idea that Hussey and Whiting were traumatized by the way the director, Franco Zeffirelli, forced them into appearing naked. They say the movie is "essentially pornography," "a poisonous product," and "evidence of a crime."

For a billionaire, didn't he get $1 million worth of gratification out of this?

The case was “intended for a political purpose” & showed “continuing pattern of misuse of the courts by Mr. Trump and his lawyers,” undermining rule of law & diverting resources.

Perfect description of Trump & his lawyers' (& his supporters') tactics.https://t.co/q8rjr7EA7P

— Mark S. Zaid (@MarkSZaidEsq) January 20, 2023

 

It's only one 44,000th of what Musk paid for Twitter.

"The OW Hook (in Oh Why) is the central part of the song and reflects the song’s slow, brooding and questioning mood. ... [T]he OI Phrase (in Shape of You) plays a very different role..."

"... something catchy to fill the bar before each repeated phrase ‘I’m in love with your body’. The use of the first four notes of the rising minor pentatonic scale for the melody is so short, simple, commonplace and obvious in the context of the rest of the song that it is not credible that Mr Sheeran sought out inspiration from other songs to come up with it. As to the combination of elements upon which the defendants rely, even if Mr Sheeran had gone looking for inspiration, then Oh Why is far from an obvious source, given the stark contrast between the dark mood created by the OW Hook in Oh Why and the upbeat, dance feel that Mr Sheeran was looking to create with Shape.” 

Wrote the judge, quoted in "Ed Sheeran wins Shape of You copyright court case" (London Times). 

Sheeran is also quoted in the article. He wants people to know how much it hurts to be sued for copyright infringement, to be portrayed as a “magpie.” He's hoping that because he took on the burden of fighting the lawsuit rather than just settling, there will be fewer claims like this in the future.

Here, I put the 2 songs together in a playlist so you can compare. Sheeran admits he understands why the writers of "Oh Why" thought he'd ripped them off, but he had not, he says, heard the song before he'd come up with the idea used in "Shape of You."

"We have to be very cautious in our celebration of these lawsuits, because the history of defamation is certainly one in which people in power try to slap down critics."

Said Yochai Benkler, "a professor at Harvard Law School who studies disinformation and radicalization in American politics," quoted in "Lawsuits Take the Lead in Fight Against Disinformation/Defamation cases have made waves across an uneasy right-wing media landscape, from Fox to Newsmax" (NYT). 

“The competitive dynamic in the right-wing outrage industry has forced them all over the rails,” Mr. Benkler said. “This is the first set of lawsuits that’s actually going to force them to internalize the cost of the damages they’re inflicting on democracy.” 

Mr. Benkler called the Smartmatic suit “a useful corrective” — “it’s a tap on the brakes” — but he also urged restraint....

The article also quotes the First Amendment lawyer Martin Garbus: “Will lawsuits like this also be used in the future to attack groups whose politics I might be more sympathetic with?” And yet:

Mr. Garbus, who made his reputation in part by defending the speech rights of neo-Nazis and other hate groups, said that the growth of online sources for news and disinformation had made him question whether he might take on such cases today. He offered an example of a local neo-Nazi march. 

Before social media, “it wouldn’t have made much of an echo,” Mr. Garbus said. “Now, if they say it, it’s all over the media, and somebody in Australia could blow up a mosque based on what somebody in New York says. “It seems to me you have to reconsider the consequence of things,” he added.

Wow! We are really losing the old-time devotion to free speech that stressed standing up for the principle especially when you disagree with what the speaker is saying. Both Garbus and Benkler know what they are giving up and make reference to the old way of thinking... right after they say they support burdens on freedom of speech. Just not too much! We need "a... corrective" and a bit more acknowledgment of "the consequence of things."

Here's the Wikipedia page for Martin Garbus. His eminence in the field of free speech law is mind-bending.

"When I found the treasure, it ended the hopes of the many people around the world who wanted to one day find it."

"I understand both the disappointment and disbelief many have and are experiencing and do not take personally the vitriolic comments made about me or the conspiracy theories that some seem to find comfort. But, to be clear, I am not and was never employed by Forrest, nor did he 'pick' me in any way to 'retrieve' the treasure. I was a stranger to him and found the treasure as he designed it to be found.... I do not see myself as being better than anyone else who searched for the treasure because I found it. I do not think more or less of anyone based on how close they were to its location, and I don’t think anyone else should either. This treasure hunt was not a referendum on anyone’s intelligence or abilities. Rather, it was a fun challenge based on figuring out what the words of a poem meant to the elderly man who wrote them, and nothing more than that. I do not care to spend my time disputing anyone’s convictions about where the treasure was. Everyone is entitled to their opinion in the United States of America. But when they sue me, they cross a line. This is an abuse of the court system...."

From "A Statement on the Disclosure of My Identity" by Jack Stuef (Medium), via "Adventurer who discovered hidden treasure left by eccentric antique dealer is unmasked" (WaPo). See also, "The Man Who Found Forrest Fenn's Treasure/The decade-long hunt captured the world's attention, but when it finally ended in June, everyone still wanted to know: Who had solved the mystery? This week, as legal proceedings threaten his anonymity, a 32-year-old medical student is ready to go on the record" (Outside Magazine).

"Let’s not have any lectures about how the president should immediately, cheerfully accept preliminary election results from the same characters who just spent four years refusing to accept the validity of the last election."

Mitch McConnell, the majority leader of the Senate, said today, quoted in the NYT. 

"President Trump is 100 percent within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities and weigh his legal options."

That's some big support for President Trump, and it severely undercuts all the news reports I've been seeing about various Republicans who've supposedly been leaning on Trump to concede. Only 4 Republican Senators have publicly congratulated Biden — Susan Collins, Mitt Romney, Lisa Murkowski, and Ben Sasse.

Here's something that occurred to me as I was recording my podcast today. (You can listen here.) I was reading this post — where I said I wanted "some clear-headed analysis of whether Trump's holding out and fighting will help or hurt the Republicans in the Georgia runoffs." 

"The call for Joe Biden isn’t… Who was it called by? All the, Oh my goodness. All the networks. Wow. All the networks."

"We have to forget about the law. Judges don’t count. All the networks, all the networks, all the networks... thought Biden was going to win by 10%. Gee, what happened? Come on. Don’t be ridiculous. Networks don’t get to decide elections. Courts do.... Of course courts set aside elections when they’re illegal. In this particular case, I don’t know if there’s enough evidence to set aside the entire election. Certainly not around the country, maybe in Pennsylvania...."

Giuliani struggles to inspire hope in a coming barrage of litigation. (Transcript.)

"I don’t know how many other multimillionaires are out there, ready to devote the limitless resources at their disposal to supporting pyramid schemes run by dangerous criminals."

Said Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis of Federal District Court in Brooklyn, quoted in "Clare Bronfman Is Sentenced to 81 Months in Nxivm ‘Sex Cult’ Case/'Will you never stop?' a former member of the group asked Ms. Bronfman, a Seagram’s heir, who used her family fortune to intimidate critics of Nxivm, prosecutors say" (NYT).

Nine victims of Nxivm spoke with emotion about how their lives had been destroyed by Ms. Bronfman, leaving behind ruined marriages, careers and reputations. Some of them said Ms. Bronfman sued them relentlessly, drove them into bankruptcy and even persuaded local prosecutors to initiate criminal charges against them....

I didn't watch Trump's interview with Chris Wallace, but I'll read the transcript.

Why didn't I watch?! I told myself to watch, but I did not. I've turned away from watching the news on television. It's becoming a real aversion. I prefer to get my information from reading, so let's look at this transcript. I'll just do a few excepts, I think:

WALLACE: But -- but this isn't burning embers, sir? This is a forest fire.

TRUMP: No, no. But I don't say -- I say flames, we'll put out the flames. And we'll put out in some cases just burning embers. We also have burning embers. We have embers and we do have flames. Florida became more flame like....

Ugh. They're debating about the metaphor — the ember/flame distinction.

They don't talk about Mexico.... But you take a look, why don't they talk about Mexico? Which is not helping us. And all I can say is thank God I built most of the wall, because if I didn't have the wall up we would have a much bigger problem with Mexico....

He wants to tell you about this wall he built "most of."

They have a dispute about how high the "mortality rate" is in the United States. I think that means the number of deaths in proportion to the population (not in proportion to the number of detected cases), and the website I look at puts the U.S. in 10th place. Wallace said we were in 7th place. Trump asserts, "I think we have one of the lowest mortality rates in the world." That's just wrong and Wallace tells him so. Trump doubles down, "I heard we have one of the lowest, maybe the lowest mortality rate anywhere in the world."

That sound crazily wrong, but he might be thinking the "mortality rate" is the ratio of deaths to cases. We do so much testing that we get a very high number of cases, and that causes the percent who die to look very low. Trump asks Kayleigh to get the numbers and insists, "I heard we had the best mortality rate... number one low mortality rate." Knowing this disarray looks bad, he says: "I hope you show the scenario because it shows what fake news is all about." Ridiculous to attack Chris Wallace like that, to call him "fake news" to his face.

"The people from Hopewell Township who crashed on our road sued Cessna for—as I understood the complaint—not making a cockpit of sufficient structure to withstand the forces that injured them."

"I was subpoenaed to testify. There would be a deposition in my office in East Pyne Hall, on the Prince­ton campus. My office was not a boardroom. It sorely lacked space for me, two lawyers, and a court stenographer. We were crowded in there for upward of an hour, and I learned early on that I was meant to testify but not to tell a story. I was bubbling mad. How could anyone even imagine suing Cessna for Cessna’s role in the crash? As the court stenographer tapped along, I tried to say as much, but was quieted by the lawyers as my words were inserted edgewise. This seemed to be a story to tell, to investigate, to amplify, to enrich with detail about flight rules, liability law, aircraft design, women priests, women rabbis, and varying portraits of one subject by sixteen writers, but beyond this brief outline the disparate parts of 'The Airplane That Crashed in the Woods' seemed as resistant to the weaving and telling as they had been with an audience of two lawyers and a court stenographer."

From "Tabula Rasa/Volume One" by John McPhee (in The New Yorker). This is a collection of "saved-up, bypassed, intended pieces of writing as an old-man project, the purpose of which is never to end" — modeled on Mark Twain's "old-man project," his autobiography.

I chose the snippet above because it says something apt about the difference between how writers and lawyers process the raw material of life. But I'm interested in the overarching concept of the "old-man project" (and I, an old woman, am fine with the way old man McPhee didn't bother to include old women in the concept).

From a 2013 New Yorker article about Twain's book:

Its forbidding size and freewheeling structure have puzzled and infuriated generations of researchers who have descended into the archives, hoping to find a finished memoir and instead discovering ten file feet of musings, interspersed with letters and newspaper clippings. Twain insisted that his sprawling memoir not be published until a century after his death, in 1910, so that he could speak freely about everyone and everything. But he couldn’t resist publishing excerpts in the North American Review before he died. And, in the decades since, more has trickled out as editors have waded through Twain’s papers to uncover pieces that they considered worth publishing.

McPhee's idea of the "old-man project" is that it's a way to stay alive, so it's not just long and sprawling. It's impossible to finish. That's the idea. I get it. It's like blogging.

"Trump campaign sues The New York Times for libel over Russia opinion article."

CNBC reports.

The lawsuit, which was filed in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan, claims “millions” of dollars in damages, but does not give a specific monetary amount.

Filed in state court. The defendant could remove to federal court, however. The case arises under state law, but there's diversity jurisdiction. I'm trusting this NYT article, which says that Trump is now domiciled in Florida. [ADDED: As someone mentions in the comments, it may be that the named plaintiff isn’t Trump but the Trump campaign. The would change the jurisdiction analysis. I have trouble seeing how the campaign has a defamation claim.]

Here's the NYT article with the alleged defamation:  "The Real Trump-Russia Quid Pro Quo/The campaign and the Kremlin had an overarching deal: help beat Hillary Clinton for a new pro-Russian foreign policy" (March 27, 2019). It begins:

Collusion — or a lack of it — turns out to have been the rhetorical trap that ensnared President Trump’s pursuers. There was no need for detailed electoral collusion between the Trump campaign and Vladimir Putin’s oligarchy because they had an overarching deal: the quid of help in the campaign against Hillary Clinton for the quo of a new pro-Russian foreign policy, starting with relief from the Obama administration’s burdensome economic sanctions. The Trumpites knew about the quid and held out the prospect of the quo.

Run down the known facts about the communications between Russians and the Trump campaign and their deal reveals itself. Perhaps, somewhere along the line, Russians also reminded the Trump family of their helpful cooperation with his past financial ventures. Perhaps, also, they articulated their resentment of Mrs. Clinton for her challenge as secretary of state to the legitimacy of Mr. Putin’s own election. But no such speculation is needed to perceive the obvious bargain reached during the campaign of 2016.

From the CNBC article:

The lawsuit, in its opening sentence, noted the article’s subhead and Frankel’s lead paragraph. “The Times was well aware when it published these statements that they were not true,” the suit said.... “There was no ‘deal’ and no ‘quid pro quo’ between the Campaign or anyone affiliated with it, and Vladimir Putin or the Russian government,” the suit stated.

Eh. There was a "deal" and a "quid pro quo" in the special sense defined by the author. This is the same idea of "quid pro quo" that was relied on by the Democrats when they impeached the President. There didn't need to be any outward expression of a deal or a this-for-that. It was only within the President and the foreign leader's mind, and we can infer what it was. There's an immense difference, however, between a writer in private newspaper spelling out his inferences for readers who can proceed to think for ourselves and using the machinery of the government to force the President into a legal proceeding that would deprive the people of the leadership of the person we chose in the last election.

And by "we," I mean we as a group. I did not vote for Trump, but I respect the group effort —  the immense slog — of electing a President of the United States. We're going through the process again, and it's a mind-boggling, multi-year ordeal. It's horrible to think of messing with the result using an intra-congressional legal device.

This gets my "lawsuits I hope will fail" tag. Freedom of speech, you idiots.

"President Threatening to Sue Everybody..."

Everybody?! Easy to make jokes on that headline, which appears at Drudge, but let's click through. It's The Daily Beast, where the real headline is: "With Impeachment Looming, Trump Is Threatening to Sue ‘Everybody Who Pisses Him Off’/The president is reverting to his bad habits" (by White House reporter Asawin Suebsaeng).

The "everybody who pisses him off" quote comes from "one senior White House official."

The President has threatened to sue CNN (and I can't imagine that CNN finds this threatening as opposed to good, invigorating PR):

See letter by attorney Charles Harder sent to @CNN President Jeff Zucker and EVP David Vigilante on behalf of Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. pic.twitter.com/bs6sUYoBdC

— Michael Glassner (@michaelglassner) October 18, 2019

"If our defense rests on my ability to explain what a play is without sounding condescending, we’re completely screwed."

Said Aaron Sorkin, as quoted by Aaron Sorkin, writing about the litigation that almost thwarted his stage adaptation of "To Kill a Mockingbird" (The Vulture).

I thanked [Tonja Carter, the executor of Harper Lee’s estate]... and told her how honored I was to be working on the material. I told her she was going to be part of a thrilling night in the theater. Then I told her that drama has rules, no less strict than the rules of music — 4/4 time requires four beats to a measure, the key of C-major prohibits sharps and flats, and a piece of music has to end on the tonic or the dominant. “The rules of drama,” I said, “were written down by Aristotle in the Poetics in 350 BC. These rules are four centuries older than Christianity. A protagonist— ” Yeah, we got nowhere.

Tonja Carter said to [the producer Scott Rudin] and me, “I think you both hate To Kill a Mockingbird” (which would explain the three years we spent working on it), and we faced the scary possibility that we weren’t going to be able to do the play. It’s not that we thought we were going to lose the case — the lawyers were confident we would win — it’s that Scott and his investors couldn’t go into a production under a cloud of litigation, and with every passing day we were getting closer to losing our theater to another show. Was it possible that a person could win a lawsuit just by filing it?

A faux naive question!

At one point Sorkin exclaims, “The play can’t be written by a team of lawyers." And though Sorkin kind of "wished we’d gone to court so I could hear a federal judge decide what imaginary people would and wouldn’t do," there wasn't money-wasting time for that, and the case was settled:

... I finally said, “If Tom Robinson and Calpurnia are taken off the table as issues, I’ll cut ‘Jesus Christ’ and ‘Goddamit,’ Atticus won’t have a rifle in his closet, and he won’t drink a glass of whiskey after the trial.”

"A judge in a California federal court dismissed Clifford’s defamation lawsuit against the president. That lawsuit was always a sideshow."

"It was based on a single Trump tweet, from April 2018, regarding Clifford’s claim that Trump was behind an alleged incident in 2011, when an unknown man threatened Clifford to keep quiet about the tryst she allegedly had with Trump.... Judge Otero said he is concerned that allowing defamation suits like this to proceed against the president 'would significantly hamper the office of the President. Any strongly-worded response by a president to another politician or public figure could constitute an action for defamation. This would deprive this country of the "discourse" common to the political process.'"

From "The Donald 1, Stormy 0" by Jay Michaelson (The Daily Beast).

A sketch years later about a nonexistent man. A total con job, playing the Fake News Media for Fools (but they know it)! https://t.co/9Is7mHBFda

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 18, 2018

UPDATE: Horseface!

“Federal Judge throws out Stormy Danials lawsuit versus Trump. Trump is entitled to full legal fees.” @FoxNews Great, now I can go after Horseface and her 3rd rate lawyer in the Great State of Texas. She will confirm the letter she signed! She knows nothing about me, a total con!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 16, 2018

"The Democratic Party on Friday sued President Donald Trump's presidential campaign, the Russian government and the Wikileaks group, claiming a broad illegal conspiracy to help Trump win the 2016 election."

"The multi-million-dollar lawsuit filed in Manhattan federal court says that 'In the Trump campaign, Russia found a willing and active partner in this effort' to mount 'a brazen attack on American Democracy,' which included Russian infiltration of the Democratic Party computer network... The suit alleges claims that include conspiracy, computer fraud and abuse, misappropriation of trade secrets, trespass and other violations of the law."

CNBC Reports.

Now that there's a lawsuit, it's time to think about counterclaims. I'd like to see what the defendants would come up with using an equally aggressive, far-reaching approach to using the courts to promote your political cause.

A Los Angeles Superior Court judge orders Starbucks to put a cancer warning on its coffee because of a chemical — acrylamide — produced in the roasting process.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Elihu Berle wrote, "Defendants did not offer substantial evidence to quantify any minimum amount of acrylamide in coffee that might be necessary to reduce microbiological contamination or render coffee palatable... Rather, Defendants argued that acrylamide levels in coffee cannot be reduced at all without negatively affecting safety and palatability.”

Courthouse News Service reports.

According to court documents, defendants did not dispute that acrylamide was a byproduct of the roasting process, but Judge Berle concluded they failed to meet their burden of proof that acrylamide was at “no significant risk level.”...

[California’s Proposition 65 under the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act] allows an express exemption from liability for naturally occurring chemicals found in food, but those exemptions do not apply to carcinogens that form during the cooking process. The fact that defendants did not add the carcinogen was not enough of a defense, according to the court.

Apparently, you're also getting acrylamide in "potato chips, French fries and some forms of bread."

Defendants’ experts provided risk assessments of the carcinogen, but they did not consider what effect it has when found in coffee. And a report from a laboratory on acrylamide provided evidence that was “unreliable and inadmissible because the analytical chemistry method” was novel and used techniques that were not accepted in the scientific community, according to the court.

Warnings on everything — remember when that was a comic meme?

I don't know when this happened...



... but here's Cracked in 2009 when the comic idea was quite stale, "If Everything In Life Came With Warning Labels" — including a woman's ass with a warning label and a warning label that has a warning label that has a warning label that, etc....



IN THE COMMENTS: Beach Brutus said:

Seems like the burden of proof is inverted here. The State says you have to post a warning unless you prove the dosage is too small to be harmful. If the State wants to compel speech it should bear the burden of proving the product dosage is too high.

Mark said...

Then, of course, South Park beat us to it decades ago with its warning label before every episode cautioning viewers how offensive it is and should not be viewed by anyone at all.

I said, "I'll bet Mad Magazine did it in the 60s" and then remembered a cover from from 1962 (when Mad, which I'd discovered on my own at a news stand, was a stunning revelation to me (it shaped the whole course of my life)):

"'Clock boy' Ahmed Mohamed's lawsuit against Irving ISD, city dismissed."

My clock says that took too long.

Why didn't Maureen Dowd's article on Uma Thurman explain what happened to Thurman's legal claim over the car crash (which is portrayed as Quentin Tarantino's fault)?

Yesterday afternoon, I put up a post about the first half of Maureen Dowd's article about Uma Thurman, which is about Thurman's accusations against Harvey Weinstein, but I only flagged "the strange story about the car crash."

Dowd has an amusing way of writing, but sometimes it seems as though she's got a technique for obscuring questions and omitting information. This article is especially puzzling. First, why didn't Dowd stick with the Harvey Weinstein story? Dowd mentions at one point that she's talking to Thurman at 3 a.m. on the second day of the interview. What didn't make the cut? In yesterday's post, I highlighted quotes from Thurman that showed — even though the headline called Thurman "angry" — that Thurman had "complicated" feelings that included what sounded to me like guilt over allowing other women to fall into Weinstein's clutches. Where is the depth of analysis on this subject?  

Halfway through, the article switches to the topic of a car crash that occurred in the making of the movie "Kill Bill." Here, the villain is Quentin Tarantino (whose name does not appear in the article title or subtitle, which promise to give us the story of Thurman's outrage at Weinstein). The problem with Tarantino has nothing to do with sexual harassment or even anything personal. It's completely professional: Tarantino the director was a taskmaster who talked her into driving a car down a dirt road at 40 miles per hour when she wanted a stuntperson to do it:

“Quentin came in my trailer and didn’t like to hear no, like any director,” she says. “He was furious because I’d cost them a lot of time. But I was scared. He said: ‘I promise you the car is fine. It’s a straight piece of road.’” He persuaded her to do it, and instructed: “ ‘Hit 40 miles per hour or your hair won’t blow the right way and I’ll make you do it again.’ But that was a deathbox that I was in. The seat wasn’t screwed down properly. It was a sand road and it was not a straight road.” (Tarantino did not respond to requests for comment.)

There is embedded video at the link — film shot from the back of the car — showing Thurman attempting to control the car and driving it into a palm tree.

“The steering wheel was at my belly and my legs were jammed under me,” she says. “I felt this searing pain and thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m never going to walk again,’” she says. “When I came back from the hospital in a neck brace with my knees damaged and a large massive egg on my head and a concussion, I wanted to see the car and I was very upset. Quentin and I had an enormous fight, and I accused him of trying to kill me. And he was very angry at that, I guess understandably, because he didn’t feel he had tried to kill me.”

Clearly, Thurman had grounds for a lawsuit, and we're not told when Thurman got a lawyer and how the lawyer initially interacted with the production company Miramax. Dowd employs a jump cut, straight to this:

Two weeks after the crash, after trying to see the car and footage of the incident, she had her lawyer send a letter to Miramax, summarizing the event and reserving the right to sue.

So there's already a lawyer. It's 2 weeks later, and they'd like the footage, but everyone knows of the potential for an expensive lawsuit (and the need to keep Thurman on board finishing the movie and promoting it).

Miramax offered to show her the footage if she signed a document “releasing them of any consequences of my future pain and suffering,” she says. She didn’t.

Signing a document and paying a settlement? Obviously, the footage is evidence in the lawsuit, so if the lawsuit is not settled, the footage will come out in discovery, so what happened? Dowd says absolutely nothing and just makes it sound as though Thurman and Tarantino had a long personal struggle:

Thurman says her mind meld with Tarantino was rattled. “We were in a terrible fight for years,” she explains. “We had to then go through promoting the movies. It was all very thin ice. We had a fateful fight at Soho House in New York in 2004 and we were shouting at each other because he wouldn’t let me see the footage and he told me that was what they had all decided.”

Her mind meld with Tarantino was rattled??? There was a lawyer in the picture. When you're suing somebody or threatening to sue somebody it's not a matter of a rattling mind meld! Rattled mind meld sounds funny, and tort lawyers in car-crash cases sound dull. It's like Dowd is swerving us into a palm tree because continuing to drive at 40 miles an hour down the dirt road isn't interesting. But what the hell happened? A lawyer dropped in, but get that guy out of here! Bring back Tarantino! Here's an exciting sceen: Soho House, shouting, a fateful fight!

Lest you think about the boring lawyer, here's a very long sentence. See if you can read it. It may cause you not to think about the other question that could be nagging you — why does Thurman's old grievance about a moviemaking car accident and a mysterious settled/not-settled lawsuit belong in an article about what Thurman knows about the sexual harassment reckoning and Harvey Weinstein? Here, read:

Now, so many years after the accident, inspired by the reckoning on violence against women, reliving her own “dehumanization to the point of death” in Mexico, and furious that there have not been more legal repercussions against Weinstein, Thurman says she handed over the result of her own excavations to the police and ramped up the pressure to cajole the crash footage out of Tarantino.

Dowd's answer to my question is: The Reckoning reminded Thurman of this other dispute she has with Miramax. It can be portrayed as similar because it happened to her body, but one story is about a man who (she says) intentionally imposed sexual violence on her body, and the other is about a different man who (at most) meant no harm but was a link in a causal chain that ended with her crashing a car into a tree.

I would add that the stories are also similar in that evidence remained suppressed for years, but one involves Thurman herself declining to go public with accusations (and herself becoming causally connected to the sexual abuse of other women), and the other involves film footage that was relevant to a subject that Maureen Dowd is hiding from us: the at-least-threatened lawsuit over the crash.

“Quentin finally atoned by giving it to me after 15 years, right?” she says. “Not that it matters now, with my permanently damaged neck and my screwed-up knees.”

Atoned? I'm assuming Miramax suppressed it as the lawsuit progressed — "permanently damaged neck and my screwed-up knees" means, in lawyer talk, very high damages. Thurman had a lawyer, threatening a lawsuit, so it wasn't a personal relationship anymore.

And I wonder what's going on now. Is Thurman still trying to collect damages and using Dowd and the NYT? Is there a pending lawsuit? Why didn't her lawyer get the footage years ago in the normal (and very boring!) process of discovery?

This drama about Tarantino atoning himself — unrattling the mind meld — by turning over the footage is offered for our amusement, but to me it's ridiculous, because I'm seeing this phantom lawsuit and wondering whether that's the main thing going on now.

As she sits by the fire on a second night when we talk until 3 a.m., tears begin to fall down her cheeks. She brushes them away.

“When they turned on me after the accident,” she says, “I went from being a creative contributor and performer to being like a broken tool.”

So there's Dowd, lured into Thurman's "elegant apartment in River House on Manhattan’s East Side" by the promise of a story about Harvey Weinstein's sexual abuse (and, perhaps, Thurman's complicity in the abuse of other women), and what Thurman wants is something else entirely — to go on about a tort case.

“Harvey assaulted me but that didn’t kill me,” she says. “What really got me about the crash was that it was a cheap shot. I had been through so many rings of fire by that point. I had really always felt a connection to the greater good in my work with Quentin and most of what I allowed to happen to me and what I participated in was kind of like a horrible mud wrestle with a very angry brother. But at least I had some say, you know?” She says she didn’t feel disempowered by any of it. Until the crash.

"A class action that seeks only worthless benefits for the class and yields only fees for class counsel is no better than a racket and should be dismissed out of hand."

Wrote 7th Circuit Judge Diane Sykes for the 3-judge panel that threw out the case against Subway that was premised on the restaurant's promotion of "footlong" subs that were not always actually a foot long.

The litigation began after Australian teenager Matt Corby in January 2013 posted a Facebook photo showing a Footlong sandwich he bought was only 11 inches long, not 12....

By the way, Sykes "is considered to be near the top of Trump’s short list" of potential Supreme Court nominees, according to a Politico article from last January. She used to be a justice on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and "was part of a legal movement that helped set in motion a conservative transformation of the judiciary in her home state."

"The visceral instinct to physically attack a person who has just attacked you is strong; the surge of adrenal hormones makes it feel possible and necessary."

"That circuitry is increasingly vestigial, but overriding it and playing the longer game requires an active decision," writes James Hamblin — in "How a Man Takes a Body Slam/In an assault in Montana, two very different ideas of masculinity" (The Atlantic) — praising the Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs for his "judicious, prescient reaction" to the body-slamming he seems to have received from Greg Gianforte.

Hamblin likes the idea of "redefining strength" by accepting, in the moment, that one has been "physically overpowered" and not getting caught up in "the idea of masculinity as an amalgam of dominance and violence." Instead, Jacobs, speaking "as if narrating for the audio recorder," said “You just body-slammed me and broke my glasses." He also "started asking for names of witnesses to the assault who will be assets to his case as it plays out in courts of law and public opinion," and reported the incident to the police.

Of course, Jacobs's choices were not merely a matter of overcoming physical impulses and meritoriously eschewing violence. I don't know how much of an impulse to retaliate on the spot he may have felt. I don't really know how violently he was hit. I don't even know if he did something first toward Gianforte and Gianforte was doing the old tit for tat retaliation. But narrating the audio, dropping it on line, going to the police, and taking names for litigation purposes is also a form of dominance. Some people would even call it violence. Why, here's an article in The Atlantic from just last June: "Enforcing the Law Is Inherently Violent/A Yale law professor suggests that oft-ignored truth should inform debates about what statutes and regulations to codify."

You know, if somehow I were given the choice between getting body slammed and getting charged with a crime and the question were How hard would the body slam need to be before you'd prefer to get charged with a crime?, I'd say pretty damned hard. And I'm just a little old lady. I'd rather be body-slammed than get sued in tort. If you body-slammed me, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't hit you back.* But I'll tell you one thing: If you sue me, I will defend to the hilt, and —  where ethically appropriate — there will be counterclaims.

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* And I have been body-slammed, at rock concerts, when I was trying to stand out of the range of a mosh pit and some young man came flying out obliviously. And sometimes it was intentional, an effort to provoke non-moshers to listen to the music the properly physical way. But I didn't call the cops or take names or file lawsuits.

IN THE COMMENTS: EDH says:

A "body-slam" is lifting someone completely of the ground and then driving their body to the ground.

It's not the same as "slam-dancing" on the periphery of a mosh pit, where one person slams his body into someone else's.

Wait. Let's get some shared understanding here. Does anybody think Jacobs intended to refer to the professional wrestling move? Here's a careful, precise demonstration of what that is: