Polgar, Truong and Others Sued by Sloan

I wasn't going to publish anything about this law suit, which I read about at Google's groups rec.chess, but it's already cropped up in a posting at Susan Polgar's blog ahd the story was published by The New York Times. Chess Group Officials Accused of Using Internet to Hurt Rivals By DYLAN LOEB McCLAIN Published: October 8, 2007 A lawsuit filed in federal court last week accuses two officers of the nation’s leading chess organization of posting inflammatory remarks on the Internet under false names in order to win election to the group’s board. The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday in Federal District Court in Manhattan, says that Susan Polgar and Paul Truong, who are married and who were elected to the board of the United States Chess Federation in July, posted thousands of remarks, many obscene or defamatory, over the last two years on two public Internet bulletin boards. The suit was filed by Samuel H. Sloan of the Bronx, who ran unsuccessfully for re-election to the board. He said more than 2,000 of the fake remarks were posted under his name. According to the lawsuit, Ms. Polgar and Mr. Truong broke a federal law that prohibits using electronic means to harass or annoy another person. Mr. Sloan is asking for new board elections and punitive damages, among other requests. The suit was filed a week after Brian Mottershead, an administrator of the chess federation’s Web site, posted a report on the group’s discussion forum in which he said he had discovered that the impersonator was almost certainly Mr. Truong. Mr. Truong denied the accusations. “The charges are absolutely outrageous, and it is based on information that was obtained 100 percent illegally from the U.S.C.F.,” he said in an interview Friday from his home in Lubbock, Tex. Mr. Truong said that Mr. Mottershead and Hal Bogner, whose company, ChessMagnetSchool, had been working on the redesign of the federation’s Web site, leveled the accusations after he and Ms. Polgar became dissatisfied with the administration and redesign of the Web site and asked that Mr. Mottershead and ChessMagnetSchool be fired. (The New York Times uses an interactive chess board on its Gambit chess blog that was developed by ChessMagnetSchool.) Ms. Polgar said that she had no idea who the Web site impersonator was, and that she did not have the time to post the messages, given her hectic schedule. Ms. Polgar is a former women’s world champion and the chairwoman of the federation, which is based in Crossville, Tenn. She also is director of the Susan Polgar Institute for Chess Excellence at Texas Tech University in Lubbock and runs the Susan Polgar Foundation, which sponsors scholastic chess tournaments and operates a chess center in Queens. She said Mr. Mottershead and Mr. Bogner were waging a vendetta. “These people started all these accusations the day after I criticized them about their job performance,” she said. Since Mr. Mottershead posted his report, the chess federation’s executive board, including Mr. Truong and Ms. Polgar, have met several times to discuss what to do. Bill Hall, the federation’s executive director, has been asked to hire an independent expert to go over Mr. Mottershead’s findings and report to the board. The existence of fake postings on the two public bulletin boards, rec.games.chess.politics and rec.games.chess.misc, in the name of Mr. Sloan and others had been suspected for some time. But the identity of the impersonator or impersonators has not been revealed. Both bulletin boards are sponsored by Google. The tone of the messages, and the controversy they have created, stand in stark contrast to the usual studied decorum of world-class chess play. Mr. Mottershead’s report said there were more than 2,400 fake postings, and it listed them all, many too obscene to print. Some of the tamer examples included one purportedly from Mr. Sloan saying, “X-rated DVD featuring my wife is on sale now for only $27.95 plus shipping, handling and tips” and one under another name saying that a federation member was gay and “seems to be in love with Sam Sloan.” Mr. Mottershead said that he began looking into the identity of the impersonator before Mr. Truong and Ms. Polgar complained about his work on the Web site. “I don’t like Paul Truong, but there are still the facts that I put out, and those have not been fabricated,” Mr. Mottershead said. Mr. Bogner, asked if he tried to frame Mr. Truong or Ms. Polgar, burst into laughter. “It’s absurd,” he said. “It’s not my job to judge those people.” Mr. Mottershead said that he identified the impersonator by matching up Internet protocol addresses on the bulletin boards with those on the federation’s discussion forum. Mr. Mottershead said that because the I.P. addresses are unique, it was difficult to believe that anyone but Mr. Truong could have been responsible. Mr. Truong said someone could have found his I.P. address and made it look as if the postings were coming from him. David Ulevitch, founder and chief executive of OpenDNS, which provides Internet domain name services, said that impersonating someone on the Internet “happens a lot.” Asked about Mr. Truong’s contention that he could have been framed, Mr. Ulevitch said, “It has been known to happen that someone has impersonated someone else impersonating someone else.” In addition to Ms. Polgar and Mr. Truong, Mr. Sloan’s suit names as defendants the five other members of the federation board, several of the group’s officials, Texas Tech and the federation itself, which is the governing body of organized chess in the United States. “If I ever want to apply for a job, nobody’s going to hire me because there are thousands of obscene messages supposedly from me on the Internet,” Mr. Sloan said. Mr. Sloan is no stranger to the legal system. In 1978, the United States Supreme Court agreed with Mr. Sloan that the Securities and Exchange Commission had improperly suspended trading in stocks that he handled. Then, as now, he represented himself. In 1992, he was convicted of attempted kidnapping in a case involving his daughter, Shamema, who was living with guardians. Mr. Sloan spent 18 months in a Virginia prison. Brian P. Lafferty, a federation member who is a lawyer and a former administrative judge in New York City, said that he believed Mr. Truong and Ms. Polgar were responsible for the false posts, some of which mentioned him, and that he planned to take a complaint to the United States attorney’s office tomorrow. Mr. Truong and Ms. Polgar said they are contemplating filing lawsuits against Mr. Mottershead, Mr. Bogner and possibly the federation. “I have an impeccable reputation, and they are trying to damage my reputation,” Ms. Polgar said. ********************************************************************************** Although I did not see it mentioned in McClain's article, I understand that the ISP address to which the allegedly "fake" postings were traced is in Texas. Susan Polgar and Paul Truong did not move to Lubbock, Texas until, I believe, April or May of this year (it may have been later). Yet the article states that the "fake" messages go back two years. Mr. Sloan stating that the "fake" postings would hurt his chances at obtaining employment is an oxymoron - unless Mr. Sloan has finally decided to clean-up his website(s) and delete all of the offensive material therefrom??? Perhaps he has done this - I don't know, as I have not visited a Sloan website since the year 2000, after having seen enough back then to convince me to stay away. However, someone in the know would probably be able to dig up some of the scurrilous material that Mr. Sloan had posted at his website(s) in the past, even if Mr. Sloan has since deleted it. Mr. Sloan publicized at Google rec.chess an email that Ms. Polgar had sent to one or more members of the Executive Board of the USCF in which she stated that she was not satisifed with the design of the USCF website. He attributed this to hubris on her part. It is an interesting coincidence that Mr. Mottershead and Mr. Bogner leveled their accusations of Polgar and Truong being responsible for the "fake" postings only AFTER this. How did Mr. Sloan get this email? It seems highly doubtful that Ms. Polgar would have sent it to Mr. Sloan as one of the addressees. The "fake" messages go back two years. Did Mr. Sloan make any prior attempts to track down the "imposter"? Did he ever file a complaint with the ISP and Google in an attempt to either block the "fake" messages and/or identify whom the "imposter" was and stop the harrassment? Did he take these steps before filing his law suit? Why did he wait to file his law suit until after he lost his Executive Board seat in the June, 2007 USCF elections? Mr. Sloan evidently links the loss of his USCF Executive Board seat to the "fake" messages that go back two years. Ms. Polgar did not announce that she had decided to run for an Executive Board seat until November, 2006. In my opinion, readers can draw their own conclusions about the merits of Mr. Sloan's law suit. *************************************************************************************** Since writing the above (it's now 10:32 p.m. my time) I discovered that Mig has a blog entry about this subject at his website, The Daily Dirt. I don't understand any of the technical stuff - I'm still "gee mom, it works" around computers in general. But the moral and ethical stuff I understand - and I remember what I read at rec.chess too. I have to ask, along with a poster at Mig's - how did Mig know about this story on October 7th, when it wasn't published at The New York Times until October 8th? Was that just a dating gaff? Seems rather strange to me. But then, all of this seems rather strange to me, darlings! At this point I'm fed up to the hilt and I think we should throw all of the USCF people out of office and start over - or someone PLEASE start a new organization to represent chess in this country. Geez!