Chapter 3 Threaten to Sue/Try to get sued

By Gary O'Brien

So, I started by crafting an idea for the book I would be sending her. I decided the book should be about a writer who decides he simply must kill his agent, and quite possibly his publisher. The writer would be presented throughout the text as a miserable failure limping toward insanity by his own paranoid delusions.
The plan was to send it to her one chapter at a time until she went mad then maybe killed herself. To sue her while this was happening if possible, to hurl her from the roof of her building, or shoulder her off a subway platform, or out into traffic if necessary, if she could not be encouraged to kill herself in a timely fashion. The book itself would keep her off balance, searching for that face in the crowd that would do her in.
I would adhere to the terms of our contract all the while, and use the first person, correct style and of course the active voice.
Before I actually sent her the manuscript, piecemeal, like mobsters send the fingertips of hostages, I did the right thing though, and attempted to get the publisher and the agent to sue me first.
I didn’t want to seem like a deranged lunatic immediately, even though I was one on so many levels now. But I wanted to give them every opportunity to make the story more interesting and having larger companies with larger lawyers sue you sounded like an excellent plot device.
Underdog will ever be popular and now marches into history, shoulder to shoulder with Huck Finn, and the Little Engine that Could not only due to his merit as a doggy superhero, but as the definition of the classic anti-hero who shall remain irresistible to the reader. I wanted it to happen in reality; then I wanted to thinly disguise it in the writing so she knew I was talking about her and only her; I mean, she would never admit what a rotten bitch she had been to anyone, but I wanted to put a skewer into her heart by basing the book as much in reality as I could, right? As Shakespeare’s Hamlet did, right? You recall how he vexed his uncle-stepfather, by staging a play where the villain poured the poison into the ear of the sleeping king? Well, I wanted something along those lines.
Getting people to sue you first is not easy. You want them to lose the suit, of course, but you also want them so pissed off they simply have to sue you just to get it out of their system. Pissing off people in power comes down to their chief weakness: ego.
They need to be addressed as though they are on your level or perhaps a few hundred yards below; but not like they’re evil, more like pitiful. Gutterbums. Hey, precisely the way they’ve been treating you for two years!
When you send a demand letter to them, don’t be abusive with curse words. Remember the night you contemplated suicide and moved beyond anger. Sure, accuse them of things like lying about when a manuscript was mailed, or whatever else it is they’re guilty of, but be slightly annoyed and insulted, as if you are talking to a kid bagging groceries that you are firing for, say, smoking weed in the bathroom and he says “but it’s medicinal!”
A high-powered agent also needs similar treatment. Fire her over email, then send the copy of your termination letter certified so she has to rush down the post office to sign for it, with no idea what it is that you have sent her as she hustles to get it.
Extremely annoying and effective, it burns into her precious daylight of sucking butt on those “weight names.”
When you communicate with them toward the end and they threaten you, oh they will, you must laugh at them, like “Heh-heh. You guys are a hoot,” then dare them to sue you. Here’s an example:
From: gary@mildlypissedandamused.com
To: Lyz@childishheadcase.com
Subject: Your latest.
Heh heh…you guys are a hoot. I noticed your email threatening legal action. Here it is laid out for you so you get it: our deal is dead and you know it, and now you know that I know. (follow the bouncing ball)
As to your empty threat to sue me, I recall the words of Hoffman in Little Big Man when addressing Custer. He said, “You go down there, general. You go right ahead.”
I’ll see you……liz
Love and best, Gar

Draft articles of incorporation, sell your trapped manuscript back to yourself, the corporation, for a dollar if it makes you feel better, but email all this to a friend so it’s timed and dated. Then haul off and tell your agent you have undercut her and she’s not getting a dime from your new sale.
Don’t be afraid. You must remember the evening you spent damned near suicide. You’re reborn now; every day above ground is cherry, even if she does sue you. So go for it. You’ll be able to face off with her in court and take a piece out of her ass, which is a start, right?
Now if she’s stupid enough, at the very least she will take her computer files, every last one of them, and all your e-mails box them up and walk them across Fifth Avenue to her attorney’s office. This is gorgeous because she is burning up an entire day, a day that could have been spent sucking on weighty butts, and she’s dealing with YOUR BULLSHIT.
On some level she knows this is a waste of time, but on another level, the fact you have so overturned the pyramid of dis, every fiber in her being cries for your blood! She simply will have to do something about you. Now it’s her turn to have hallucinatory fantasies about your death!
Now you’re in the driver’s seat. How does it feel? You haven’t been there for two years. Think about going back, or selling out now? Not hardly, right? Yeah buddy. Got them balls back didn’t you.
Likely, her attorney will advise her that she is having her chain yanked by a savvy client who is attempting to goad her into suing him so that getting a court date comes to him at absolutely no cost.
Double knife to the gut is this: her attorney will appreciate this move. For as annoying as it is dealing with all their delays, attorneys are some of the most skillful, crafty, devious sons of bitches on God’s green earth. Their competence, titles and schooling preclude the sort of petty jealousy often seen among insecure writers. They assume they are better and smarter than most people and often times they are correct. But they have the ability to coolly appreciate a skillful move on the part of someone else and if they are not careful, they will whistle and share the appreciation with the one person in that room you mean to do in: your egotistical literary agent from hell.
Picture the scene. Bitch lady walks into her attorney’s office huffing about some goddamned client (AMAZING!) who continues to pox her.
The cigarette stench follows her into the room. Her coarse voice grates as she lays it all out. Down comes the manila envelope file.
“Well this is the latest we heard from him this morning, son of a bitch! Now can’t I do something about this? Do I need this bullshit in my life?”
Five minutes pass while he places a slim digit to his lips or perhaps adjusts his yarmulke, then comes a whistling noise.
“What? What, Ellis? Damnit spill the beans!”
“Hey I got to admit, that’s not bad.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Well look at it, Lyz. He’s either insane or he feels absolutely confident AND he’s trying to coax you into suing him, and here you are trying to get me to do it. Now why would he do that? What is it about this situation you’re not telling me?”
Now, not only is her day of butt-sucking blown, she must drink massive quantities of alcohol to anesthetize herself against the choking anger of having some piss-ant little writer get under her skin so badly. More than likely she will not even return to her office; and the Mexican futbol announcer goes; “Goal, goal, goal, goal, goal, goal GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOaal!”
Her day is shot, so is this evening, and now, so is the next day, which if shows at work at all, will be spent howling at underlings through a hangover if you’re lucky. The beauty in that is, you won’t even have to be there to mispronounce someone’s name or pay long distance charges on a dead phone line to get the ball rolling on all this wonderful retribution.
The Achilles Heel in all this was brought to you by her own overblown ego, twisted back and turned upon itself and lit like a dynamite fuse by her unbridled contempt and disdain for your non “weighty” status. (See Jui Jiutsu for the seminal theory of this type of warfare.)
Now, just as likely, she will not be goaded into suing you. Parting with her money at a loss and making any more of an ass of herself will not be high on her list of priorities, unfortunately. She does have a brain, albeit pickled.
But fear not, these are only the opening salvos and it only gets better. When at last it becomes apparent she will not be goaded into suing you, you are going to turn that around, and threaten to sue her. When that doesn’t work, and it won’t, she will offer a solution, which is what happened in my case.
But two things will happen first. A flurry of emails will commence to get you to do something.
Big tip, in a legally precarious situation, recognize when someone is trying to manipulate you or tweak your anger. When someone threatens you, blandly pretend not to understand the specifics of the threat.
When they ask you for information either give them nothing or deluge them with ---how was it she put it “obstreperous” – demands. When my agent’s second in command, Dorothy “Doddie” Obermeyer used this word to describe how I was behaving it was music to my ears.
I have yet to look up the definition of this word but; well, there’s really no way around it, it simply is my favorite word now. I am going to have it made into a wall plaque and after all this is over it will hang above my desk until the day I die.
I suspect it means belligerent and irascible. She used it to describe my demands to “rectify this situation” which is something they kept asking when they finally figured out how nuts-pissed I was.
“You simply must give us an outline of what it is you want to rectify this situation. There has to be an opportunity for a meeting of the minds on this.”
Amazing! They can spell after all.
So I laid out a timetable, gave them until the end of the week to get the second half of my advance, an acceptance letter, a precise timetable for publication of Rape Flight. I told them to eliminate a clause calling for me to send the publisher the next book I had written for first right of refusal. I demanded another clause, allowing for a co-author of the work, to be stripped. I demanded the manuscript that had reportedly been sent to me to appear at my doorstep within three days. The demands weren’t outrageous i.e. “I want $6 million!” but what they absolutely could not stand was the belligerent tone that was entirely within my right.
In Get Shorty, a thug limo operator demands movie producer Harry Zimm have his two hundred thousand dollar investment back in his hands “by Friday, or you’re fucking dead as disco!”
I adore this line. Every one of my “obstreperous demands” ended with by 5 p.m. Friday, in the hope that in their minds they would hear the phrase from subconscious memory, “or you’re fuckin’ dead as disco.”
Anyway the good part about what I did was it set the record straight that I had given them a chance to set things right. The bad part was, they obviously had been through this sort of thing before because they merely played my game right back to me, ala Dueling Banjos from Deliverance.
The list of obstreperous demands suddenly did not exist, had never been sent. List? What list of demands? Oh, that, well the publisher will never go for any of that. Be serious?
Again, don’t be goaded to wrath or vulgarity. You must realize the impact your list of obstreperous demands had on them: they had to read them and convey them to their attorneys and the publisher which kills the time they could have spent dealing with celebrities in the act of nalgal felaccio. You have to take measure of your little victories and think about the glass being half full.
In any event this sort of thing went back and forth and I never permitted myself to get out of hand. Then another two week calming period came where I took stock of my situation and decided my next move.
I decided to file suit on both the agent and the publisher.
Suing someone means you must issue a formal demand letter beforehand. It’s considered good faith and all that, like a warning shot across the bow. Do this now, or I will sue you. I will know satisfaction, bla, bla, bla. It is the closest thing that our modern society has to a slap across the face with a white glove.
My plan was to thoroughly piss them off but not be so obvious about it that I blew the whole deal. At the same time I wanted the tone to be just right. I wanted it conveyed that I really rather they didn’t respond to my demands, thereby giving me the pleasure to open fire. I wanted to seem reasonable but also wanted to convey all the smiling, insane belligerence of a Fenian with a lit bomb in his hand.
My key line in this was “reduce the risk of likely litigation for your own benefit.” I demanded they return my materials and fork over letters breaking our deal so that I could begin again and sell the material elsewhere.
When you look at this simple request it is really too easy for them and remains a testimony to the arrogance in this business.
At a business cost of $5.95 shipping and handling and the two bits for the sheet of paper and the laser-jet toner to convey the letter, you may very well be done with me, depending on my mood and your swift compliance.
It means you relinquish all rights to a work that you have adequately stated in your mishandling of the situation, is beneath contempt and par. So, give it back and I may be gone. Do this not, and a lawsuit will most definitely result that will likely cost you thousands of dollars to defend against and you may end up losing it anyway, costing you thousands more. I added for spite my predictable line “Kindly have these to me by 5 p.m. Friday.”
Now, it is awfully ballsy and arrogant to chump out over the cost of postage and handling. But if you read over the line “reduce the risk of likely litigation” with an eye toward the pessimistic, you’ll see that this is not much of an offering. What I was saying was, “hey, here’s a thought: what if you broke our agreement at no cost to either of us, AND you did the right thing and sent me my materials back? Maybe, if you do that, just maybe I won’t sue you. Not saying for sure that I won’t. I’m just saying there’s a chance, a glimmer of hope that I won’t.”
With this email I sent them a progression of copied emails I previously sent to my brother in law’s twin brother, a contracts specialist in Atlanta.
Doug Stevens loves to sue people when he’s got a shot at collecting. He has friends in New York who do the same and he collects a finder’s fee for feeding them grist for their mill.
Doug’s attitude is simple. If people screw up badly enough on something so simple as a contract, they deserve to be sued, and hard. They are irresponsible organisms in the biome of business that need to be weeded and pruned by costly lawsuits, paving the way, in Darwinian fashion, for other business entities that know how to read and follow the simple terms of contracts which are conveniently set down in the language of the land, English. His higher calling, or so he will tell you is strengthening American business, paving the way for more challenging litigation. These slam-dunk lawsuits against dumb-asses aren’t challenging enough for him anymore, although they have paid for this huge, four-thousand-square foot manse in Roswell, complete with a carriage gate and antebellum slave quarters that he has refurbished into a gun shack. To hear Doug tell it, anyone who can’t read or follow English needs to be blown to atoms if they have signed documents to the effect that they will do thus and so, then went and ignored what they agreed to.
Doug’s attitude was standoffish at first. He wanted me to be sure I had considered all my options (such as murder, I suppose) before I embarked upon litigation. It can be twice as frustrating as dealing with agents and the bad part about lawyers is, they typically want most of, or even all, the money when it comes time to pull the plug and suck the guts off the victim. That’s just the way of it, he said, and his law firm was no different. He was hinting, but not directly expressing, of course, that I needed to carve out my own slice of the pie by considering all the intangibles; such as the stress this thing had caused me over the course of two years, the strain on my marriage, and so forth.
“Hey Gary, have you and your wife been, you know, okay, during all this time? Is everything all right at home? You see what I am driving at? The question that I am asking?”
I got the two-ton hint. All of that kind of material is only quantifiable in a court of law as a list if itemized damages. It’s fine to say “Oh shit has this been stressful or what?” But having said that, what have you said in a court of law? Nothing. Not a damned thing.
You have to have some baseline to start from; namely times and dates of your visits to a recognized shrink, for starters, and the names of the complicated medications he has prescribed for your problems.
And this is where a little snag came into my plan in that I got some needed therapy and I’ll be damned if I even wanted any.