Agent Jarred Weisfeld visited Macmillan Publishers earlier this year, shopping former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich’s memoir–despite the fact that he would soon file an unrelated $10 million defamation suit against publisher.
The NY Observer went behind the scenes on the Blagojevich book deal, which did not end up at Macmillan. The article interviews Weisfeld–founder of Objective Entertainment–about his lawsuit against the publisher for “malicious, false, defamatory and anti-Semitic statements” made in a forthcoming biography of Ol’ Dirty Bastard. An unidentified “senior-level employee” at the publisher said the book was not rejected because of the lawsuit.
Here’s more from the article: “[Weisfeld said] ‘I was like, ‘This is the most selfless thing an agent can do, come to a building where they say all this nasty anti-Semitic stuff about you in a book.” Mr. Weisfeld said he took the meeting at Macmillan because he’d been given reason to believe that St. Martin’s would pay ‘big money’ for the book.”