Where Are You?

NOTE: As of September 23, 2009, this post has been edited in
accordance with a court-mediated settlement. The names of the
contractor and his excavation subcontractor have been replaced with
pseudonyms.

If you're reading this, we're back online and you don't have to wonder what the heck is going on. The deal is this: on Friday our lawyer got a note from Contractor A's (that's the guy who likes to make his former clients sign non-disclosures to keep them from telling the world how much of a scumbag he is) lawyer asking us to remove "defamatory" statements from this site. That's Friday, May 27, by the way.

There are basically two kinds of defamation: statements which are not true, and statements which are true but which the subject had reasonable expectation of remaining private. The latter really cannot apply to business dealings, which is why things like confidentiality agreements and non-disclosure agreements exist. We had signed no such agreement with Contractor A (the one who got so upset when we changed this site to refer to him as a dimwit instead of by his real name that instead we're just going to call him Contractor A and also give you more of the real, nasty story you've all been waiting for).

So, that means they thought there was something untrue on the site. Looking through our posts that mention them, I could not find anything that is untrue, or a place where we said anything with willful disregard for whether it was true or not. We figured they didn't have a case at all, but you know what? We wanted our foundation done, and they were not able to make any kind of statement about which parts they believed to be defamatory, so we took the whole site down. Now it's back up, if you're reading this.

I refuse to lie by withholding the truth. Contractor A (whose children should change their names as soon as they reach their majority, and pretend to have been raised in a shed in somebody's back yard rather than admit to being related to him) threatened to sue us for writing honestly about our dealings with them on this site. That's where we've been. Now read on for the saga, and maybe by the time it's done it will have a happy ending.

posted by ayse on 06/02/05