For those readers who disbelieve that people hack and stalk journalists for their work, here’s the mother of all cases – Barnum & Bailey’s 8 year vendetta against Janice Pottker. I blogged it before but wanted to re-post this section from the Salon article in which it was described, because it shows that what was done to Ms. Pottker was only the tip of the iceberg. Barnum & Bailey’s behavior toward contract workers and animals was even worse.
Mind you, Ms. Pottker would never even have known had B&B not got into a fight with someone else.
Ergo, bloggers and journalists who don’t have political backing are better advised to forget their injuries, stay away from those who’ve injured them, and allow the fates..or the furies... to step in…
Surprisingly, they often do.
Jeff Stein:
“If Jan Pottker’s reporting on the circus turned up enough dirt to lead Ken Feld to launch a vendetta against her, according to a sworn statement by Joel Kaplan, the private security man and wire-tapper for a Feld Entertainment subsidiary, there were worse things going on than Pottker or even PETA could have imagined.
Angry that Feld had failed to pay him, Kaplan first sent a threatening letter to Feld saying, in essence, according to three sources who read it, “I’m the last man you want to piss off.” When that didn’t work, he gave an astounding deposition, under oath, about his duties at the company, which later made its way into the Pottker case file.
“What I did [was] illegal. Immoral, unethical, a long list,” Kaplan testified on April 22, 1998. “Very long list. Do you want some of those?”
“Yes,” Feld’s lawyer said. What followed was a long list of charges against the circus that would seem to stretch credulity, and which is not backed up by any specific evidence from Kaplan. But Kaplan swore to it all under penalty of perjury.
“We had … sexual assaults; pedophiles on the show; we had, you know, thefts; we had people we basically threw out of the buildings; we had people that didn’t even have clothes on their backs.” Later, Kaplan added, “We had people, pedophiles, taking kids in, the performers, taking them into trailers. We had some vendors who raped a few and the concessionaires in the building, and it was on and on and on.”
In Kaplan’s telling, the circus sounds more like Sodom and Gomorrah than Barnum & Bailey. But Kaplan had only begun. “We knew that drugs were actually coming (in) from the show side, working men, the performers,” he added after a break. “Mr. Feld was told that.” But they were not allowed to test the performers, he said. He also claimed that the working men were selling drugs to the food and concession vendors.
Kaplan continued with stories of “despicable living conditions,” and drug problems that led to tragedy. “We had two people die on the train, from overdoses.”
Many employees were “undocumented aliens,” Kaplan went on. “We had criminals, people with extensive warrants out for their arrest working as working men under assumed names.” As director of security for the concessions arm of the circus, Kaplan said he was closely involved in that. “[W]e started doing criminal checks in the later years.”
And when sick employees filed for workman’s compensation, he bugged their rooms, put electronic tracking devices on their cars, surveilled, harassed and otherwise helped the company outlast hard-pressed claimants until they’d take any crumb that the company offered, he testified.
And that was just the treatment of people. “We had some real problems with the elephants,” Kaplan testified. “I was told [by the circus veterinarian] … that about half of the elephants in each of the shows had tuberculosis and that the tuberculosis was an easily transmitted disease to individuals, to human beings. The circus, the elephants, were transported all throughout Florida, which is illegal to do that in the State of Florida.”
From “The Greatest Vendetta on Earth,” Jeff Stein.