Meh, sent my previous post too early by mistake, the excerpt wasn't as
complete as I intended. Here it is again:

/=====
...

Then [Henning Heldt] wrote:
"In a Feb. 9, 1976, memo attorney John Bray of the LF (law firm) Arent,
Plotkin et al wrote to Albert Arent (senior partner) stating that Nelson
Poynter and Gene Patterson called him on Friday (Feb. 6) to discuss the
possibility of suing C of S. Told Bray the SPT had run stories on C of S
in CW (Clearwater) and had received a five day letter threatening suit.
Poynter advised that the C of S had an extreme history of bringing libel
suits against newspapers and mentioned the St. Louis Post Dispatch.
Poynter wanted to file a preemptive suit to counter this strategy.
"On Feb. 11 the suit was filed.
"So what apparently happened is that Paulette [Cooper] planted the idea
with [Bette] Orsini regarding C of S harassment of the press through
suits, the idea got to Nelson Poynter and Gene Patterson who jumped on
it once our five day letter threatening suit arrived with SPT and
decided to launch their own suit in advance."

...
\=====

Bottom line, CoS theatened St. Pete of lawsuit, St. Pete sued for
harassment.

Thought this would make a good retort to the poster's point (despite
being a straw-man argument) where he stated "If you had done some
research into facts in the real world, instead of juggling widgets, you
would have found this interesting fact [blah blah]"

Ultimately the SPT dropped the suit:
http://www.xenu-directory.net/news/library.php?mf=1&yf=1975&mt=12&yt=1979&t=St.+Petersburg+Times+lawsuit

:-)

Ciao,
Raymomnd Hill


On Tue, 2010-02-23 at 22:25 -0300, Raymond Hill wrote:

Re. "Don Surber sides with the Church of Scientology over real world"
http://trueslant.com/barrettbrown/2010/02/23/don-surber-sides-with-church-of-scientology-over-st-petersburg-times/

In case it's of interest to you, just a small comment regarding one
poster's comment where he states that the Church of Scientology "NEVER
filed suit against the St. Petersburg Times."

This might be so, but still, apparently the Church of Scientology
threatened lawsuit in early 1976 against the St. Petersburg Times, and
this led the St. Petersburg Times to file a preemptive lawsuit against
Church of Scientology, as per this old news article:

/=====
Then [Henning Heldt] wrote:
"In a Feb. 9, 1976, memo attorney John Bray of the LF (law firm) Arent,
Plotkin et al wrote to Albert Arent (senior partner) stating that Nelson
Poynter and Gene Patterson called him on Friday (Feb. 6) to discuss the
possibility of suing C of S. Told Bray the SPT had run stories on C of S
in CW (Clearwater) and had received a five day letter threatening suit.
Poynter advised that the C of S had an extreme history of bringing libel
suits against newspapers and mentioned the St. Louis Post Dispatch.
Poynter wanted to file a preemptive suit to counter this strategy....
\=====

Source: St. Petersburg Times (Nov 10, 1979): "Scientologists got secret
files of Times, lawyers"

Regards,
Raymond Hill
Webmaster of www.xenu-directory.net