Letter to Carlos de Abreau Attorney (Hollywoodnet.com)
John Cones
(Reposted from FIRM Discussion Forum at http://www.homevideo.net/FIRM/dialogs.htm)
"Letter to Carlos de Abreau Attorney
Law Office
of
JOHN W. CONES
1324 Marinette Road
Pacific Palisades, California 90272
310/477-6842
June 8, 1998
Raymond Sutton, Attorney
15233 Ventura Boulevard, Suite 1000
Sherman Oaks, California 91403
Re: Carlos de Abreau's Threatening Letter
Dear Mr. Sutton:
In keeping with my former friend Carlos de Abreau's earlier request to
correspond with you regarding his activities and the Hollywood Network, I do have a
number of questions regarding his recent threatening letter directed to James Jaeger,
with copies to the Internet Service Provider for FIRM and a total of three lawyers (a
bit of overkill, don't you think?):
1. Why was such a vicious letter sent only to Mr. Jaeger and not to me, since you,
I and Carlos de Abreau know full well that all content at the FIRM site regarding Carlos
de Abreau was drafted solely by me?
2. Why was a copy sent to FIRM's ISP? Is that just more of Carlos de Abreau's and
Hollywood's tactics of intimidation (i.e., threatening to take our right of free speech
away just because he doesn't like what is being said)?
3. Can you be more specific with regard to exactly what it is that Carlos de
Abreau thinks is being said about him that is not true? As far as I'm concerned,
nothing has been posted about Carlos de Abreau which is not true, and there's more truth
coming. In fact, I'm reserving an entire chapter in my forthcoming book "How Hollywood
Squelches Dissent" for the Carlos de Abreau story.
4. Do you think a 48-hour demand to remove the posting in question is enough time
to communicate back and forth and work out this perceived problem, or is it Carlos de
Abreau's position that it is he, and he alone, that will determine what the truth is?
5. Why don't you advise your client Carlos de Abreau to take advantage of the open
Discussion Forum at the FIRM site to tell us how displeased he is with my postings
regarding his irresponsible conduct? That's what it's there for. Is Carlos de Abreau
above open discussion of important issues.
6. Can you be more specific as to how in the world telling the truth about Carlos
de Abreau has caused any damage of any kind to his business or to him personally, or is
that just a legal fiction combined with more Hollywood fantasy? What is his business
anyway?
7. Why are you pretending that the issue here is whether I actually got a hard
copy of the accumulated Q&A (which as Carlos de Abreau well knows, is of little or no
value), when the real issue is whether Carlos de Abreau failed to meet his obligation to
deal with me in a fair and reasonable manner, by (1) abruptly dumping the Investor
Financing Q&A service, (2) without discussing it with me in advance, (3) without
providing any reasonable explanation for his actions, (4) refusing to communicate with
me directly regarding the matter (even though I had helped him both with his earlier
book and with the Hollywood Network site), and (5) he claims to have deleted the
contents of the Investor Financing Q&A without doing the reasonable and responsible
thing (i.e, making the contents of the site available to me for transfer to a new site
in electronic format).
Are you going to take the absurd position, that Carlos de Abreau has met his
obligations to me by sending over a hard copy version of the material?
8. If the guy is suffering from "emotional distress" as he claims, don't you
realize that it may be caused by his own frustration with trying to succeed in his
long-time ambition of making it as a film producer in Hollywood, and after being
convinced by his pseudo-friends in Hollywood to dump my Investor Financing Q&A from his
Hollywood Network site, he has been shocked to learn that I do not intend to go away
quietly? On the other hand, maybe he just has a lot of guilt about the sleazy series of
decisions he has made in connection with this transaction, in addition to what he has
done to me and all of the thousands of independent feature film producers out there who
relied on the Investor Financing Q&A as a valuable and free resource.
9. Don't you realize that giving a client legal sounding jargon to put in this
threatening letters, just makes your client look foolish.
10. If Carlos de Abreau wants to avoid any further appearances of wrongdoing and
malfeasance, he should finish the job he started. After taking down all of the content
I had provided for his site for several years, he has failed to also delete the many
search engine references tying me and his site together. So, if someone submits my name
to an Internet search engine, they are still likely to get four or five Hollywood
Network locations, before anything else. Those Hollywood Network references, however,
are dead ends, because Carlos de Abreau has removed all of the content provided by me.
So, for the moment, the lack of thoroughness and follow through of Carlos de Abreau is
causing inconvenience to all persons searching for my materials on the Internet, and
otherwise just getting in the way, causing more harm to my interests. Either clean it
up or admit that harming my interests has been the primary motivation behind the actions
taken by Carlos de Abreau and his Hollywood cronies all along.
11. This latest malicious and threatening letter sent to James Jaeger and the ISP
is just another in a long series of acts of harassment undertaken by Carlos de Abreau in
his attempt to silence my criticism of the Hollywood establishment he holds so dear.
12. If Carlos de Abreau had honest and proper motives in this transaction, he
would have picked up the phone and discussed the matter with me before taking the Q&A
site offline. In the alternative, he would have written me a letter well in advance,
and offered to work with me in transferring the accumulated contents of the site to
another address, so that independent filmmakers across the country would not be deprived
of a valuable informational resource. Carlos de Abreau made a series of bad choices.
If he suffers because of his bad choices, he only has himself to blame.
Sincerely yours,
John W. Cones
JC/pc
cc: FIRM Discussion Forum"
Lawrence Bullock
> (Reposted from FIRM Discussion Forum at
http://www.homevideo.net/FIRM/dialogs.htm)
>
> "Letter to Carlos de Abreau Attorney
>
>
> Law Office
> of
> JOHN W. CONES
> 1324 Marinette Road
> Pacific Palisades, California 90272
> 310/477-6842
>
>
> June 8, 1998
>
>
>
> Raymond Sutton, Attorney
> 15233 Ventura Boulevard, Suite 1000
> Sherman Oaks, California 91403
>
> Re: Carlos de Abreau's Threatening Letter
>
> Dear Mr. Sutton:
>
> In keeping with my former friend Carlos de Abreau's earlier
request to
> correspond with you regarding his activities and the Hollywood
Network.etc. etc.
Now *this* looks interesting...more more...