I know we’re all on tenterhooks about Milo Yiannopoulos’s legal struggles with Simon & Schuster, especially now that he’s acting as his own attorney.
No? So what are you on tenterhooks over? (And what are tenterhooks*, anyway?)
From today’s Publisher’s Market:
Attorney Milo Doesn’t Get Far In First Hearing
Milo Yiannopoulos made his first appearance in court Thursday playing the role of his own attorney, with little success. So far, Judge Barry Ostrager is siding with defendant Simon & Schuster in allowing them to designate some of the materials in discovery as for “attorney’s eyes only” — and will not give Yiannopoulos access, regardless of his role.
“Those documents frankly have nothing whatsoever to do with the substantive merits of your case,” Judge Ostrager said, noting they contain “proprietary financial information.” S&S used Milo’s own loose words in defending their need to keep certain documents away from him. He told the world on Facebook Live that his publishing imprint Dangerous Books was going to “take not just all [S&S’s] best authors, but all of the best authors of all the conservative imprints in this country.” As a result, S&S attorney Elizabeth McNamara writes, they needed to protect “documents that contain competitively sensitive information that bear no actual relevance to this litigation.” She tells the court fewer than 5 percent of their documents were designated in this fashion, detailing the general categories of publishing information covered.
While Milo has claimed he parted ways with his professional attorneys so that he could see the confidentially-designated materials, he said yesterday, “I don’t want to spend half million grinding through that process rather than doing it myself.” Outside of court to the press he accused the publisher of “filing publicly and then leaking to the press documents intended to ridicule and demean me.” No one needed to leak any documents, such as the annotated manuscript with editorial comments, since they are posted to the court’s public docket regularly.
S&S said in a brief statement after the hearing, “We’re pleased that the court has reaffirmed its prior decision regarding document production in this case. Any and all designations were made in good faith and fall within well-known parameters for discovery in similar cases.”
*Tenterhook, noun, in a state of nervous suspense. ORIGIN, first meaning a hook used to fasten cloth on a tenter, a framework on which fabric was held taut during manufacture. — From Compact Oxford English Dictionary, which is a little too compact for my liking.