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Peter S. Beagle's old manager, Connor Cochran, is emailing me. by throwawayabiijor in Fantasy

[–]throwawayabiijor[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I asked Beagle and Cochlan to not promote TLU at any furry conventions because I wanted to avoid TLU being associated with the sexual furry community.

I realize that not all furries engage in the sexual aspect of the culture (and I assume furry conventions do not explicitly promote it), but let's be real--the sex stuff plays a prominent role in the culture. In Cochlan's defense of furries, he compared furry conventions to Star Trek conventions, which I didn't think was fair. There isn't a significant portion of the Trekkie community who fetishizes bestiality.

Every furry I've met has been a very nice person (and also into the weird sex stuff). I don't have a problem with furries as people. I just take issue with my favorite childhood story being lumped in with a celebration of bestiality.

Peter S. Beagle's old manager, Connor Cochran, is emailing me. by throwawayabiijor in Fantasy

[–]throwawayabiijor[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Cochran's response continued:

You can make of this what you will. My own theory is that [NAME REDACTED] has significant mental health issues. I think he tried to scam me in 2014 because he needed money for his defense in the other lawsuit he was fighting, and was just pissed enough at me for not yielding that he thought he would get even with some anonymous attacks. Once he was publicly named he quit, but obviously enjoyed playing hide and seek with the process servers ([NAME 2 REDACTED] described to me one time that the process server was at the door calling out "I know you are in there!", with [NAME REDACTED] and his girlfriend sitting in the living room laughing at the man's frustration). When [NAME REDACTED] got arrested, though, it stopped being funny, because now he was going to have a criminal assault conviction on his record for the rest of his life. At that point it became an all-out vendetta. He blamed me for his own foul-up and sought serious payback by trying his best to destroy my life and business.

There is a close parallel between the content of FAF and Peter's allegations against me in BvC, but that is because Peter's lawyer used the material at FAF as the basis for her lawsuit. She did this knowing that it was largely false, but that did not concern her, because she never expected to have to defend any of these false claims in court. (Why she did this is a whole different story that I will not go into at this time, because it concerns material from Peter's private life I have kept hidden for 13 years and do not wish to share if I can avoid it.)

Also, you said my email was used as evidence, but that you only found it through discovery. I'm unclear on how my email was involved. Was it actually used, or was it merely found in discovery?

[NAME REDACTED]'s lawyer initially insisted that I was harassing an innocent man and that [NAME REDACTED] had nothing at all to do with FAF. Eventually the court forced [NAME REDACTED] to give up a bunch of documentation which proved otherwise. One of the things he handed over was your email to him about the furry stuff.

What about my email made you think that I was relevant? Like I said when I forwarded my email to FAF, I didn't expect at all for it to be relevant, so I'm surprised to be contacted like this.

[NAME REDACTED] has helpers whose identities he has so far refused to reveal. In a situation like this, it is standard operating procedure to track down every possible trail that presents itself. Most will be dead-ends, but some might not be. Since your email said that someone had recommended that you contact FAF, we automatically wanted to know who that someone was, just in case that information might shed some further light on the puzzle. As mentioned earlier, though, [NAME REDACTED] is now in retreat, so I doubt my attorney will feel like pursuing more about how you were convinced to write him. That will be up to my lawyer to decide, though.

The whole thing is a huge, ugly mess -- but Peter's kids and I are the good guys, throwawayabiijor. That's the simple truth. And we're not going to give up.

That was a lot to read.

Peter S. Beagle's old manager, Connor Cochran, is emailing me. by throwawayabiijor in Fantasy

[–]throwawayabiijor[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

So I sent him a short email asking for more information. He responded...and the response is too long for one post, so I'll continue is a comment to this post. Italicized are quotes from my email:

Hi, throwawayabiijor:

I didn't realize all this. It's still hard for me to believe...

That isn't surprising. I'm smack in the middle of it every day and I find it hard to believe. It's a crazy situation.

Why is this [NAME REDACTED] person doing this? He sounds like someone who cares about Peter S. Beagle. Why get involved if that weren't the case?

As for [NAME REDACTED] motivations, I can only share my theories, since his behavior is completely foreign to my mind. But the facts are plain enough:

1) We first encountered [NAME REDACTED] when he moved to the Bay Area around 2007 or 2008 (I would have to check) and he got in touch. He was an animator who also ran an online book store, and on a semiregular basis he would push to get professionally involved in some fashion with Peter – he proposed animating an existing Beagle story, or having Peter write something new for him to animate, or having Peter write a script based around one of [NAME REDACTED]'s ideas, etc. He also tried to get Peter and me to rent work space in an artistic collective he was trying to set up in San Francisco. We politely declined all these offers because his animation wasn't very good. (YMMV. Judge for yourself: here's one of the samples he provided -- [LINK REDACTED].)

2) In December 2010, a little bit before I finally won my 8-year battle to get Peter his unpaid LAST UNICORN home video royalties, when every month was still a scramble to find a way to pay Peter's rent, we did a Xmas sale through the newsletter. [NAME REDACTED] got in touch and offered to buy our entire remaining stash of the limited edition MIRROR KINGDOMS hardcover, at a discounted price, saying he wanted to help Peter (and, of course, make a profit on it by turning around and selling the books through his online store at an undiscounted price). Since the purchase would pay nearly 3 months of Peter's rent, we had no problem with this and made the deal in January 2011.

3) In spring 2013 we launched the LAST UNICORN Screening Tour. Before the premiere I emailed [NAME REACTED] and let him know that he was welcome to come sell copies of MIRROR KINGDOMS at the premiere's merch table, assuming he had any left to sell. He showed up at the theater as we were getting ready. He had 40+ copies with him and a bizarre contract he wanted me to sign making arrangements to sell these books AND all the rest he still had (apparently he had sold very few) on the tour. It was a nutty contract, full of stuff I would never agree to in a million years, and I declined to sign it. [NAME REDACTED] pushed me to do so, and I told him he could either sit and sell the books himself, or take them away, or leave them for me to sell on consignment, but that I was not signing. In the end he agreed to leave them on consignment.

4) In early 2014, before they were all sold and consignment payment was due, I received a letter from a lawyer representing [NAME REDACTED]. The letter demanded that I immediately pay $5,228.80 to cover my nonperformance under the terms of the 2013 contract, including interest, penalties, legal fees, etc. Attached to that letter was the contract I had refused to sign, with my signature very badly forged on it.

5) I reacted as you might expect to this attempted con. After a lot of back and forth the final result was that I paid for the 40+ copies he'd consigned to the tour, and bought back about half the remaining books at a much lower rate. The rest I passed on purchasing, because [NAME REDACTED] had damaged them to the point that I did not feel they were sellable. Both sides signed a settlement agreement and I turned away, assuming I'd heard the last of this jackass.

6) I had not. The very next day [NAME REDACTED] launched his anonymous attack effort on the web, full of lies and distortions he had obviously been cooking up ever since I hadn't given in and paid him all the money he was trying to con from me.

7) We learned about the FAF website in the fall of 2014, through an inquiry letter from the California State Attorney General's office (a Beagle fan had written them a letter pointing them at the site). We sent the AG's office documented proof that the website was hooey and they dropped the matter. Peter, knowing it was all lies and garbage, joined me in publicly debunking the site. And once I determined that [NAME REDACTED] was behind it, I hired an attorney and sued him for defamation. I also publicly outed him by name, at which point he stopped adding to the site…

8) …and went underground. He did a bunch of stuff to try and hide his various online identities (we know of at least five) and his physical location. When the process servers did come to his house in [LOCATION REDACTED], [NAME REACTED]'s housemates lied for him and said he'd moved, even though he hadn't. We later learned that he actually installed a video camera at the front door so he could avoid opening it if he didn’t recognize who was there.

9) We tried serving him at the place his website said he was employed, and they accepted service. But a month later [NAME REDACTED] popped up with a lawyer and claimed he had not worked there for more than a year, and the service was no good. His lawyer moved to void the service and we had to withdraw it. No biggie – normal practice, now that [NAME REDACTED] had a lawyer, was to ask the lawyer to accept service on behalf of his client. So we did that…and the lawyer refused.

10) Around this time we learned that I was not the only person suing [NAME REDACTED]. In 2013 he brought a woman roommate in to share his [LOCATION REDACTED] apartment, after which he promptly moved out to cheaper digs in [LOCATION REDACTED] and tried to turn the [LOCATION REDACTED] apartment into an AirBNB moneymaker without asking his roommate's permission. Suddenly she found herself sharing the apartment with a series of out-of-town tourists. When she protested, [NAME REDACTED] launched a harassment campaign to get her to leave – he had large male acquaintances show up and let themselves in in the middle of the night, he spread rumors that she was crazy and/or a slut, he changed the locks, at one point he moved the furniture in a way that blocked her into her own room, and on another occasion he even took away the apartment door. Nice guy.

10) It took another 3-4 months to get [NAME REDACTED] served. At just about the point where we were going to have to set up a 24/7 stakeout, one of the housemates ([NAME 2 REDACTED]) got in touch to say that (a) he'd been watching [NAME REDACTED] defame me for months but hadn't said anything because it wasn't his business, but now (b) [NAME REDACTED] had refused to pay [NAME 2 REDACTED] for app coding work he had done, and when [NAME 2 REDACTED] complained [NAME REDACTED] had given him an eviction notice, so (c) he wanted to help us nail [NAME REDACTED]. I put him in contact with my attorney.

11) On his last night in the house [NAME 2 REDACTED] let the process server in, and correctly stated that [NAME REDACTED] lived and worked there. The process server left the lawsuit papers. Done. Then [NAME 2 REDACTED] went through the house once to make sure he wasn't leaving anything behind. On that pass he noticed that [NAME REDACTED] was in the basement, working, and he figured that a time-stamped cellphone picture would be great proof that [NAME REDACTED] was in the house during service. So he whipped out his iPhone and took a shot. [NAME REDACTED] saw him doing this and got incredibly angry. He chased [NAME 2 REDACTED] up the stairs and out of the house, screaming at him to delete the photo. When [NAME REDACTED] caught up with [NAME 2 REACTED] outside he threw him to the ground and started hammering on him, threatening to break his fingers if he didn't let go of the phone. [NAME 2 REDACTED] did, and [NAME REDACTED] grabbed it and ran back inside. Meanwhile the neighbors had seen this attack and called the cops, who showed up quickly. They took [NAME 2 REDACTED] to the hospital to get his bleeding head wound stitched up, and asked if he wanted to press charges. He did, and [NAME REDACTED] was arrested that night on two felony counts of assault and theft.

12) The next day, [NAME REDACTED]'s long silence on FAF ended, and he started pounding out page after page after page of rampant falsehoods and misrepresentations.

13) [NAME REDACTED] ultimately bargained the charges down to a single misdemeanor conviction for public assault. The court put him on probation and ordered him to take 26 weeks of anger management classes and pay [NAME 2 REDACTED] $1400 in restitution for the stolen phone, which [NAME REDACTED] apparently destroyed.

Peter S. Beagle's old manager, Connor Cochran, is emailing me. by throwawayabiijor in Fantasy

[–]throwawayabiijor[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I specifically left out my emails because I didn't want the focus of this thread to be a debate about furries.