Last month, bizarrely, the Twitter Red Guard discovered the 2014 campaign to take down the PGR, thanks to typical dissembling by smarmy Jonathan Ichikawa. Of course, Ichikawa lied about lots of it and misrepresented his own misconduct and that of his wife, Carrie Jenkins, including their role in inciting--based on falsehoods--a mob to bully me. I've written about this in the past, for example, here and here, but I'll recap the basics here (see the prior links for details, evidence, further links). Feel free to link this on Twitter if and when this nonsense starts up again. Readers who wisely avoid Twitter and remember these events can skip this post.
1. On July 1, 2014 I posted a sharp critique of some misleading job placement ranking data. On July 2, other blogs began attacking me for this criticism. Carrie Jenkins (British Columbia) also took to the web to make clear that in her view such criticism was not permissible in our profession and that, therefore, she viewed my blog post as "unprofessional and unethical," and that, in consequence, she was no longer going to treat me as a "normal or representative member[] of" the profession. Later, on July 2, Prof. Catarina Novaes also joined the criticism, pointing me to the response by Jenkins, which she characterized, obviously correctly, as “reacting to what many perceived as Brian Leiter’s excessively personalized attack of [the job placement] analysis.” Even one of Jenkins’s close friends admitted to me what was obvious at the time, namely, that her post was aimed at me. Ichikawa continues to lie about this, unsurprisingly.
2. On social media, Jenkins had long impressed me as a bit of a "sanctimonious ass" and this was certainly par for that course. I sent her a derisive e-mail asking for clarification about what exactly she was going to do to me. There was no legal threat in this e-mail (leave it to naive philosophers not to know what a legal threat looks like): I was mocking her sanctimonious nonsense.
3. A normal full professor, holder of a Canada Research Chair, might have ignored the e-mail or retorted in kind. Not Jenkins. This single e-mail unleashed a remarkable chain of events. Jenkins and her colleague Alan Richardson, plus Ichikawa, began organizing a petition to denounce ("cancel") me and derail the in-progress 2014 Philosophical Gourmet Report (PGR). (The effort failed: the 2014 PGR appeared, and I remained as an editor of it.)
4. In September 2014, one week before the PGR surveys were set to begin, they released the petition, which claimed, falsely, that the single derisive e-mail had "very serious" effects on Jenkins, "impacting her health, her capacity to work, and her ability to contribute to public discourse as a member of the profession." None of this was true.
(a) She continued to "contribute" as a "member of the profession" actively in the subsequent months. In August, she spoke at a conference in Washington; in September, she gave a talk to a department in New Zealand; in October, at Alberta; in November at Purdue.
(b) Strikingly, half her departmental colleagues declined to sign the petition denouncing me. Initially, Richardson and Jenkins had bullied more into signing, but when their colleagues pushed back, they backed down: five of her colleagues who had been bullied initially into signing then withdrew their names before publication! As one told me, Jenkins was a bit of a "drama queen." They knew or suspected this was all bullshit, or that the response was wildly disproportionate.
(c) Given the false statement of facts, I hired one of Canada's best defamation lawyers. Paul Schabas of the Blakes law firm in Toronto (he has since been appointed to the Ontario Superior Court). (Ask any Canadian lawyer about Mr. Schabas.) Mr. Schabas, after reviewing the facts, agreed I had a cause of action; if he had not, I would have let the matter drop.
(d) The final proof that Jenkins & Ichikawa were not telling the truth came in the reply from their lawyer. Their lawyer did not argue "justification" (i.e., that the statements in the petition were true or even "substantially true"), but only that the speech was "lawful." Amusingly, their lawyer is co-author of a treatise on Canadian defamation law which explains why he advised them not to plead the defense of truth: "[A] failed plea of truth may aggravate the plaintiff's damages or underpin an award of exemplary damages. It may also lead to a more substantial award of costs against a defendant."
(e) An amusing sidenote: Ichikawa is obviously no longer talking to this lawyer, who would have informed him that by reposting the false allegations on Twitter, he restarted the statute of limitations against him. Smarmy, but not smart.
5. Nearly two years later, some maniac decided to send excrement in the mail to several of those involved in the preceding saga. (The best news account came, ironically, from the CBC, which didn't simply repeat the Jenkins/Ichikawa spin.) One of the envelopes had a return address of my law school; it was mailed on June 23, 2016 from the large Chicago zip code that includes O'Hare airport. It was a matter of public record that I was speaking at a conference in Germany on June 24, so the person stalking me thought it would further help frame me to post it the day before. What the stalker didn't know was that I had left for Germany on June 22, so was not even in the country on June 23.
6. To those without malice towards me, it was obvious I had nothing to do with this vile stunt. The philosopher David Velleman (then at NYU), who had the misfortune to get such a package, was the first to alert me to it in an August 27, 2016 e-mail:
A few people have received packages of excrement from someone using your law-school address.... I assume it can't be you -- which means that someone is trying to embarrass you. I don't know if there's anything you can do about it, but I thought you would want to know. Some of the recipients have reported the packages to the police.
The philosopher David Wallace (Pittsburgh), responding to reckless anonymous accusations against me on another blog, wrote:
Are people seriously supposing either that, (a) Leiter himself is sending offensive and illegal packages to his adversaries and including his own return address; or that (b) overly radical allies of Leiter, inspired by and in agreement with his views but thinking that he’s being too moderate in his actions, decide to act on his behalf *and to frame him for the action*?
I don’t really see any plausible way of interpreting this as anything other than third-party malice....
A law blogger at the Washington Post noting the same facts as Wallace, agreed that someone was "trying to frame or embarrass" me, since "whoever sent the packages was quite ham-handed in their efforts to connect them to Leiter."
7. I contacted the police seeking help to identify the perpetrator. My lawyers also retained a forensic handwriting expert who confirmed from media photos of two different envelopes that the handwriting was the same. Further investigation narrowed the list of suspects to three, from whom we attempted to secure handwriting samples. Only one complied: philosopher David Barnett, formerly of the University of Colorado. Barnett had admitted to others (and subsequently to me) that he had sent excrement in the mail in the past (seriously!). His handwriting was not, however, a match to that on the envelopes. Two other suspects (including one of the alleged recipients) declined to cooperate, and my lawyers advised me that we did not have enough to proceed against them. There are more details in the updates here for those who are interested.
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