… yesterday’s New York Times account of Elie Wiesel’s having crushed a play about him through the use of legal threats is compelling.
Wiesel and Bernard Madoff were fellow trustees of Yeshiva University. They occasionally dined together. Wiesel invested lots of his money with Madoff. There’s every reason they should appear in a play together.
But Wiesel doesn’t like appearing in a play with Madoff, and he has, with remarkable vulgarity, gone after its writer, an artist who, as she says in the article, “can’t get sued, there’s no way I could afford it.”
The word for Wiesel’s behavior is disgusting.
After UD leaves Rehoboth Beach, she goes to Upstate New York, where she has a house. Not far from that house is Stageworks/Hudson, where she and Mr UD will go to see the revised version of this play, Imagining Madoff. Unable to deal with Wiesel’s threats, the writer has removed his name from her play’s list of characters. But UD gathers that his spirit, if you will, lives on. We shall see.
Meanwhile, as is so often the case when people act in the way Wiesel has acted, Imagining Madoff is receiving far more publicity than it would have if it had run as originally written.
July 21st, 2010 at 8:08AM
To be honest, UD, I think that you are getting played. As one of my lawyer friends says, anybody can sue just about anybody for just about anything. Getting it past the filing stage and into court, let alone winning the case is orders of magnitude more difficult. This is about a playwright working some PR; undoubtedly the “sexually tinged memory of Wiesel’s time in a concentration camp” was designed to evoke just such a response. Read between the lines here:
“Ms. Margolin said she had initially hoped that Mr. Wiesel would find the play compelling and thoughtful. But after she sent him a copy, Mr. Wiesel replied with a letter in April, saying he found the play to be “obscene” and “defamatory,” and in which he threatened to enlist his lawyers to stop its production. According to Ms. Margolin and her lawyer, Mr. Wiesel and his foundation’s representatives never specified what they considered obscene or defamatory.”
Wiesel’s attorney sent the ritual “we’re gonna sue you” letter that she had hoped to elicit. The fact that they did not offer specifics of their objections is a good sign that they knew perfectly well that it would not fly in court. That a Yalie faculty member, wired into the East Coast academic-cultural elite, is worried about getting legal representation for such an obvious non-starter of a suit is laughable.
July 21st, 2010 at 9:03AM
I suppose you might be right, tp, but I doubt it.
For starters, this Yalie faculty member is, if I’m not mistaken, far from a tenured well-paid sort — She’s got a Yale connection, to be sure, but it’s a pretty tentative one (I’m happy to be corrected if I’m wrong about this).
Second, Wiesel may have real reasons to be worried about this play drawing attention to his Madoff connection. At the very least, continued attention to his deep financial involvement with Madoff could damage his morally impeccable reputation. Of course he knows a lawsuit isn’t likely to go far. All he needs to do — all he did — was threaten one.
Wiesel is a massively wealthier, better connected, and more influential person than Margolin. She had – and still has – plenty of reason to fear him.
July 21st, 2010 at 10:02AM
As is usually the case with well-known playwrights/creative writers, she is an adjunct professor, but her connection is prominently played up on her Yale Theater Dept. page. She is not some prole who is going to lack for an attorney. As a public figure, Wiesel also would have the additional burden of proving malice, not only falsehoods. If she were really worried about getting sued, would she so thinly re-write the play that the Wiesel-type character remains so obvious? She is about as “deeply shaken” by this as I am by Dean Cruella DeVile accusing me of “unfairly judging” administrators.
Wiesel has every reason to be cautious about people using his name to make money. There are plenty of anti-Semitic kooks and Holocaust deniers who will be happy to run with her fictional “sexually tinged memory of Wiesel’s time in a concentration camp” and use it to discredit him.
July 21st, 2010 at 1:16PM
Wiesel is Good Guy (TM), Margaret. Don’t “threaten the narrative.”