Hell's Angel of the Month: Oprah's Act of Contrition

I had received a tip about how Oprah Winfrey, the “Queen of All Media” these days (or “Con of All Media” since she can pass off just as much vulgarity as Howard Stern without incurring the wrath of the FCC), was finally going to fess up and admit she totally blew it with her relentless defense of her inclusion of James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces” to her Book of the Month club (or whatever the heck she calls it) that has every publisher in the land screaming “instant money” when one of their books hits pay dirt. Needless to say, I hit the remote faster than you can say “Favorite Things” and watched.

Let me start by saying the following – I don’t mind Oprah if only for the fact that her daily dose of self-help therapy is a lot cheaper to con millions of viewers into all this crap about "re-affirmation" than those bandits known as “psychotherapists” (and I find the ability to parse the last part of the phrase as “The Rapist” to be amusing to say the least.) And she’s in the city that makes great deep-dish pizza. Oh, alright. I’m covering my ass here because my wife wants tickets so I can’t afford to get on Oprah’s, er, “merde” list yet.

The Oprah broadcast was about 1 part laughable mixed with 2 parts vulgar and really failed to pass the “smell test” – that of “would this show ever have happened if some tabloid didn’t go even deeper than “The Smoking Gun” as to exposing the blatant frauds in the book (yes, James, frauds. Not “lapses of memory” or whatever bullcaca the lawyers for the publishing company told you to use) forcing Oprah et al to capitulate or risk losing millions in an inevitable class action lawsuit?”

So what we got was a three-ring circus of “yeah, I screwed up but I really had the best of intentions”. Or, as they put it repeatedly, Oprah crying “I’m embarrassed”, publisher-cum-snob (and a pretty dumbass one at that) Nan A. Talese smacking all her readers with a firm ruler over the tops of their hands by explaining how a memoir falls somewhere between a fiction and an autobiography which exempts it from any fact-checking whatsoever, and Frey mumbling more non-decipherable gobbledygook than David Schwimmer in the film “Kissing a Fool” (which Frey wrote during a part of his life that he hasn't doggedly tried to expunge before anybody picks up on the ruse.) Actually, it was here that the smell test really was starting to look ugly – whereas a real interviewer like Bill O’Reilly would have strangled him, Oprah went all restrained.

Now here’s the fun part. None of these three get the “Angel of the Month” honors. See, there was one guest noticeably missing and that certainly wasn’t anybody at the offices of “The Smoking Gun”, who probably busted a gut watching this episode. That person would be one Martin Singer. Mr. Singer is a an attorney with the firm Lavely & Singer in Los Angeles – a well-known “got to have them” joint for big celebrities (according to their publicity, Brad Pitt, Arnold Schwarznegger, Kelsey Grammer, and Catherine Zeta-Jones amongst them) taking issue with tabloid publications. It was Mr. Singer who partook in a zealous effort to stop “The Smoking Gun” from even discussing the investigation of the questionable details in Frey’s book. The letter is quite amusing if only because, undoubtedly, Frey (or, more likely, the publisher on his behalf) is out of pocket for thousands of dollars for a 5-page rambling which constantly cuts and pastes excerpts from prior cases likely used countless times in other (threatening) letters and a frequent-verging-on-monotonous use of the phrase “you will be exposed to substantial liability”.

You can make even a slight case for Frey making a mistake – 400 pages of documents done under a drug and alcohol-induced fog might lead one to forget the word “novocaine” in the description of your front teeth root canals (which this writer has had and which I can say, unequivocally, that the size of those novocaine needles alone is pretty impossible to forget under any state of mind.) You can even say Talese and Winfrey just goofed up – after all, why let the truth get in the way of a good story if there’s a buck to be made off of it either from readers or advertisers. However, what is the excuse for someone actually versed (or so we’d like to think) in the field of law engaging in the low-brow activity of uttering threats without even investigating an iota of what exactly you are defending your client against? Are you going to tell me that a LAW FIRM couldn’t at least call a county courthouse in Ohio to confirm an 87-day jail sentence? Or review these so-called 400+ pages of documents that Frey alleged to have had to back his story up? Any joe on the street who has ever had to deal with being a plaintiff knows that the first thing any two-bit lawyer asks for is every single bit of documentation and then some to back the charge.

If Random House was skirting it’s obligations to make a fast buck, fine. They’ll suffer in terms of future book sales or trust. Or at least Talese had “some” guts putting her ass in front of a television camera to all but concede that she let emotions (and sales) get in the way of prudence. Where’s Mr. Singer or his firm with an apology? A retraction? Anything?!?!?! What on earth did they “rely” on before they pulled the legalese variation of bullying – pure and simple?

Spare Oprah and Random House the e-mail. The place that needs to be bombarded is Mr. Singer’s office at his law firm. Let’s see if they can take what they dish out. At the very least, they need to furnish some answers of their own – starting with whether they were ever privy to the documents in question (which they obfuscate in the letter to “The Smoking Gun”) and, even more importantly, whether they have a legal relationship with Tarese, Winfrey, or associated entities – which might explain the sudden televised atonement.

TAGS: oprah James Frey books legal

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Hell's Angel of the Month: Oprah's Act of Contrition

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