Via Kevin, MD, this article on the New York Personal Injury Law Blog from Eric Turkewitz about how the plaintiff’s attorney discovered Flea’s blog and was able to discover his identity:
So I called plaintiff’s counsel, Elizabeth Mulvey, of Crowe & Mulvey to find out. She told me she was tipped off to his blog by another attorney. How did the other attorney know? Because Flea had blogged about a subject that Mulvey had spoken on some time back and the other attorney realized that she had the case. Flea had unwittingly given out the identifying information when he discussed her talk. On this cached version of Flea’s site, you can see his comments discussing Mulvey on April 28th.
With that information in hand Mulvey scoured his blog for helpful information, much the way any attorney would review writings produced by a witness for the other side. She found a post where Flea referred to Nelson’s Pediatrics as the bible of pediatrics. (I have the 11th ed. from 1979 on my own bookshelf.) So she asked him on the witness stand if he considered Nelson’s the bible for pediatrics. He said no. Lawyers call that a “prior inconsistent statement” that allows us to confront the witness with the other statement. That meant asking him if he was Flea and confronting him with the blog posting.
The first question in my mind was why he would have written that it was the bible for pediatrics and answered “no” on the witness stand? What a fatal mistake that was. If he had given a consistent answer the door would not have opened for her to bring in what he wrote on the blog, which brings me around to this: What you write will bite if you aren’t writing what you truly believe. Making a statement that a reference work is the ‘bible of anything’ is a strongly expressed opinion. Why write it if you don’t believe it? And why deny it under oath? Was there some sort of treatment or diagnostic protocol in Nelson’s Pediatrics that Flea didn’t follow?
Update: I found the reference by having Google Reader pull up the entire feed for his blog. Here’s what he wrote, with my emphasis added:
I went back to my other bible, Nelson’s Textbook of Pediatrics. To my surprise and delight, Nelson’s says you can use polysporin or bacitracin ointment nightly for one week!
Did Flea believe what he wrote on his blog or did it just make good reading? In retrospect, reading through some of the cached posts, I’m starting to think that the adulation and recognition his blog received went to his head.
We’ve only heard one side of this story, but from what I’ve read so far, it seems to me that the plaintiffs had a really good attorney who had pinned Flea in a corner with his own words after Flea walked over and stood in it. The takeaway for me is to be absolutely 100% sure that what I’m writing is true, and where I express an opinion or belief to make sure I say so. While I’m not likely to be sued for liking one camera over another or one website better than another, I will definitely be reviewing some of the other categories on this blog to be sure they don’t cross any lines. I know I believe what I wrote, but I need to be sure I expressed it in terms of opinion rather than fact.
Technorati Tags: Flea, blogs, blogging, transparency
