Author Gerald Posner has hired attorney Mark Lane to fight allegations of plagiarism mounted by the Miami New Times. The paper focused on Posner following revelations that Posner had lifted passages while writing for The Daily Beast.
Posner (pictured, via) has since resigned from The Daily Beast, but Miami New Times has searched for more examples in his recent book, Miami Babylon. The new legal team argues that a conspiracy exists against the author: “an apparently well financed campaign is being launched to review other books previously written [by Posner] and to contact a publisher with a thinly veiled suggestion that his book be withdrawn from publication.”
In a press release, the authors note an odd twist of legal fate. Both Lane and Posner have written conflicting accounts about the assassination of President Kennedy. Lane criticized Warren Commission Report in Rush to Judgment while Posner supported the report in Case Closed. More from Lane’s letter to the newspaper follows after the jump.
Here’s an excerpt from a letter Lane sent to the Miami New Times: “Since the issue of the search for the truth may be of interest to you and since, as you must know, a committee of the United States Senate years ago and then again more recently, concluded that the CIA, the FBI and other intelligence agencies have assets pretending to be journalists embedded in the major news media, that might be a subject that could attract your attention. Unlike the Posner affair in which no one was harmed, it is that use of the media and the publishing houses that is a threat to our democracy and impedes our right to a free press pursuant to the unambiguous mandate of the First Amendment. That is a campaign that many of us could support, endorse and relish. Our country needs muckraking journalists who can recognize muck worth raking when they see it.” (Via Sarah Weinman)