DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

We’ve achieved a milestone here at debris.com: last week I received a demand letter (via email) from a lawyer regarding a piece I wrote in February. It begins,

This office represents Scott Mc______. This letter is intended to be a formal demand for retraction and notice that further publication of defamatory statements regarding Mr. Mc______ exposes debris.com to substantial liability.

Accompanying the hot flash that developed while reading the letter was a desperate question: who is Scott Mc________? The name wasn’t even vaguely familiar. I had to search my own website for it.

Turns out he’s the concierge at the Marriott in San Francisco. I wrote a reaction to a wonderfully revealing cover article in the SF Chronicle Magazine called Power Brokers, in which Mc______ said some things that I found cocky, and a few I found offensive. My article’s title was a play on the French origins of the word concierge; I called it “that’s French for ‘$20, please’.”

But if you’re looking for defamatory language, you won’t find it. Mc______’s attorney specified an allegedly libelous sentence in my article and demanded that I remove it. So I did.

I hear about this sort of thing all the time: someone receives a letter from a lawyer and, seeing no recourse but an expensive battle, complies without a fight. Would I give in so easily? The answer is yes. I folded like an origami crane.

I consulted my attorney first, of course. In her opinion, the sarcastic comment in my piece was not likely to be considered libelous by a judge. But the bigger issue for me was the cost of the battle, and my desire to prove a point. What was it worth to me to fight for my text? In this case, not a lot, for reasons implied in the demand letter: apparently Mr. Mc______ is no longer an employee of the SF Marriott.

How could he go from “power broker” to unemployed in six months? The implication didn’t make sense; a top hotel wouldn’t fire its chief concierge, who just last December had earned the hotel a Silver Plume from WHERE Magazine as “Concierge of the Year”. A moment’s research exposed the story. According to Bruce Bellingham of the SF Examiner,

Scott Mc______, former chief concierge at the downtown Marriott, was laid off by the hotel and was suspended by the Clefs d’Or, the dignified concierge clan, for one year. Scott was apparently a victim of hotel budget cutbacks. But the Clefs d’Or people are more outspoken. “Scott should not have been so indiscreet in his remarks to a Chronicle reporter about how gratuities might be handled,” said one vet of the service industry.

The news changed my opinion. I realized that Mc______’s comments in the “Power Brokers” article had cost him enough grief. I didn’t need to add to his problems. That’s why I rewrote my article without argument. I even toned down some of the comments not identified by Mc______’s attorney, in a good-faith effort to appease Mc______.

As you probably know, I’ve said some dumb things in my time; it’s one of the peculiar joys of being me. I’ve been fortunate that none of my really poorly-considered statements have ended up in the newspaper… which is not to say they don’t get printed, for I write ‘em here all the time. But at least I can change my articles later. In contrast, there’s no reprinting hundreds of thousands of copies of the Chronicle Magazine.

I decided that I didn’t want to cause Scott Mc______ any harm. Per the demand letter, I immediately removed any and all [allegedly] defamatory language from my original article, and this piece is my retraction.

(That said, I’m not sure what the point of writing a retraction is. In print, I can see the value of “setting the record straight.” But online, it seems to me that writing yet another article just reminds everyone of the first one, which might have been better left in the past. But I am not a lawyer, as the saying goes, so I’ll just assume there is some value to them for me to write this.)