Source Sues Michael Lewis, Publisher Over Quotes

Best-selling author Michael Lewis and W.W. Norton, the publisher of “The Big Short,” Lewis’s book about the financial meltdown, got blindsided on Friday by a federal defamation suit filed by a financier who claims that his quotes in the book were fabricated.Wing Chau, the president of Hardy Advisory, LLC in New Jersey, also charges that the book, which is being turned into a movie by Plan B, Brad Pitt’s production company, lays the blame for the sub-prime mortgage disaster squarely on the money man’s shoulders.“In reading Lewis’s account, one could well conclude that Mr. Chau and Hardy, and perhaps a handful of others acting with them, were somehow responsible for the entire collapse of the mortgage market,” the financial adviser charges in his lawsuit.Chau, who says that he’s a son of Chinese immigrants and worked his way up the Wall Street ladder, also takes offense at Lewis’s physical descriptions of him.“[Chau] was short with a Wall Street belly—not the bleacher bum’s boiler but the discreet, necessary pouch of a squirrel just before winter,” the author writes in his book.Lewis also depicts Chau as a third-string financial adviser, “who spent most of his career working sleepy jobs at sleepy insurance companies.”One of the heroes of the book, Steven Eisman, of FrontPoint Partners in Connecticut, who made a fortune betting against collateralized debt obligations, or CDO, which were being sold by Chau, is also a defendant in the suit.Chau claims that Eisman made up quotes during a conversation that the two had in Las Vegas that Lewis then used in his book.“Almost giddily, Chau explained to Eisman that he simply passed all the risk that the underlying home loans would default on to the big investors who had hired him to vet the bonds,” Lewis writes about their conversation.The Wall Streeter denies ever making these comments.Eisman also describes the financial product sold by Chau as “three levels of dog shit lower than the original bonds.”Chau has his own mud to fling at Lewis, whose best selling book “Liar’s Poker” chronicled his own short stint on Wall Street in the 1980s.“By the time he wrote ‘The Big Short,’ the Wall Street that he had gotten a brief glimpse of fresh out of school had morphed—principally with the aid of technology—several times over into something that he did not fully comprehend,” Chau’s suit charged. “The ignorance manifested itself in the false and defamatory statements that Lewis made about Mr. Chau and Harding.”Lewis, whose book “The Blind Side” was turned into a Academy Award-winning movie, and his publisher did not respond to requests for comment.Eisman also did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment.

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Source Sues Michael Lewis, Publisher Over Quotes

Janon Fisher

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Janon Fisher