The sheer joy that attends the beginning of spring training is tempered a bit this year, for me at least, by the messy situation in which the owners of my beloved New York Metropolitan Baseball Club have been entangled. The owners, Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz, did a great deal of business with Bernie Madoff over the years. They made several hundred million off these dealings, apparently, but they still had an estimated $500 million invested with Madoff went the Ponzi scheme went belly up. An attorney for the legions of those who lost money with Madoff is trying to recover funds from those who emerged on the plus side. (Madoff told the Times this week that while he suspected that several big banks knew his game, the Wilpons “knew nothing.”)
I know nothing of the merits of this case, but I do know Fred Wilpon. We have, in fact, become friends in recent years. He and his wife, Judy, are fine people–thoughtful and modest. The connection between us began with Fred’s interest in helping the returning veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to find psychological counseling, if they need it, and jobs. He has led major league baseball’s efforts to launch a national program for returning veterans. He has asked my advice about this from time to time, knowing that I spend a lot of time writing about the military, especially downrange in Afghanistan–and he’s also asked me to join the Mets on their annual visits to Walter Reed hospital.
So I’m not an innocent bystander here. But I have another reason for being sympathetic. I faced a major lawsuit 15 years ago…
It was a nuisance suit. A librarian in Harlem sued me for $120 million, claiming that I’d sullied her reputation by portraying her as a character in Primary Colors who had sex with the novel’s main character, the governor of a southern state who was running for President. I’d never met the woman. I couldn’t pick her out of a lineup. The suit worked its way through the system and was eventually thrown out by the judge, as having no merit.
That didn’t stop a full-blooded feeding frenzy from taking place. NBC interviewed the woman on Dateline, directly after the Super Bowl. The New York Times ran story after story about the lawsuit–including an op-ed by a novelist who had been successfully sued in a libel suit. The press accounts universally assumed that I was guilty…of something.
I couldn’t respond to the charges, on the–excellent, it turned out–advice of my attorneys. I had to allow the nonsense and innuendo and, well, libel against my name to stand. I figured that part of the plaintiff’s hope was to make my life so painful that my publisher and I would negotiate a settlement. We didn’t negotiate and we won–but it was a costly, depressing and, at times, terrifying experience. In the end, our victory received none of the attention the lawsuit had stirred up in the first place. Neither NBC nor Dateline ever reported that the lawsuit they’d publicized turned out to be without merit. The New York Times had other lawsuits to publicize, other op-eds to run; now that I was free to talk, no one was interested in interviewing me. I imagine that most people who heard or read about the suit believe, to this day, that I was guilty…of something.
Which brings me back to Fred Wilpon. I haven’t talked to him about this situation. As I said, I have no sense of the merits of the case. But I do know that he’s probably very much constrained by his attorneys about what he can and can’t say–and that those suing him are hoping to make the process as painful as possible so that he’ll enter into a negotiation to keep the thing from going to court. (Mario Cuomo has been named as an arbitrator in the case, so it’s possible that some sort of haggle is taking place).
And I also suspect that a great many of the stories about various baloney-slingers like Donald Trump hoping to buy the Mets are sheer nonsense. Wilpon has said he would sell a minority share of the team; he has denied offering anything more. Absolutely zero evidence has been presented that he did anything wrong.
All of which is to say that my colleagues should be extremely careful about what they write in these sorts of situations. I know it’s baseball and New York, and it’s spring, and no one has thrown a pitch for real yet and so there’s a lot of space to fill in the tabloids. And I know that these sorts of lawsuits are difficult for journalists to report on, when one of the parties refuses to talk. But it should always be remembered: an accusation is not a conviction, silence does not always mean guilt–in fact, in the circus of the law, those making the noise are often those who should be trusted least.
