From my blog from March 5, 2004

I get a lot of e-mail asking me the status of my legal action against Dan Brown. Here's my long-winded answer.

In America today, we have come to see the courtroom drama as the bloodless equivalent of the gladiatorial, Wild West, high-noon, quick-draw, mano-a-mano, shoot-out. It is our politically correct, modern-day morality play where we can take sides, root for evil versus good with the winner taking all the loser being formally declared by the judicial powers of the court to be ... well, a loser.

So conditioned to this are we that we see courts as great drama (Grisham, Turow etc.) and have come to expect that ALL justice comes through the Delphic wisdom of the courts. News media see court drama as a sure seller, audience draw and an easy, safe way to gather and disseminate all the dirty details.

Legal stories are easy because so much of the material is already written down and available to anyone with enough money to pay the $1 per page usually extorted by the courts. From there, it's a matter of reading the juicy parts and stitching them into a story. It's good copy and already pre-digested by both sides so that it's unnecessary to dig for facts or to exercise much in the way of critical judgement. This despite the fact that truth is frequently sacrificed by the opposing sides in a trial, each working to spin, shape, and slant the evidence toward the all-important element: winning.

In this atmosphere, the law if frequently NOT about justice and courtroom testimony is often NOT about the truth. When I was a journalist and when I taught Journalism at UCLA and Cornell, I emphasized that a good reporter was always skeptical of ALL sides in a story or a case. I pushed them, and myself, to look for the real story beyond the rip-and-regurgitate statements, court filings, press releases and other communications that MUST, by their nature, be self-serving.

It's also a very safe way to report a controversy. Enterprise reporting entails a risk of getting things wrong and because American society has grown so accustomed to suing for every injustice or perceived injustice, making a mistake, or simply reporting true things that cast people in a light they do not like is a lightning rod for a libel suit. Publishers and broadcasters don't like libel suits. Even the most frivolous can be expensive, time-consuming, distracting hassles. I've learned that bringing litigation involves the same things.

But in American law, the reliance on the records of an official governmental body is the perfect shield to libel, thus the lust that editors have for court cases where one party can call the other whatever they please and reporters can report it with impunity. This is a key reason for many of the outrageous statements made by attorneys in court.

A lot of this insight has developed over more than 35 years of writing news. But some of the most enlightening has come from the past six months of walking through my own legal case involving the massive similarities and outright duplications between the bestseller, The Da Vinci Code, and my own novels, The Da Vinci Legacy (likewise a bestseller), Daughter of God and The Linz Testament.

This piece is not so much about the merits of that case as it is why the interests of justice demand that I delay the lawsuit filing for one year rather than filing immediately.

I've only recently made that decision, but it has been several months in the making and comes down to my belief that truth is more important than money. By "truth" I mean having the facts of the situation available for the world to see and make its own decision about whether or not Dan Brown plagiarized my novels.

I am fortunate to have had many conversations with a very large, powerful and respected Los Angeles entertainment law firm who recognized that I did not have the financial means to pay them the estimated $500,000 to $1 million in their fees that they (and other firms) estimated it would take to win a case over the largest publishing company in the world. Their fees would be in addition to the estimated $100,000 in expert witness fees and another $150,000 in other fees -- expenses they would expect me to make a substantial contribution to.

It is vital to understand that law firms undertaking a case on a contingency fee basis are entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. They see money to be made and invest their capital accordingly. Doing so also requires having a reliable partner in their plaintiff and this is key reason I have suspended my work with them and decided to delay filing the suit.

I am deeply appreciative of the time the partners of this law firm have spent with me: tens of thousands of dollars worth had I been paying. However, in recent weeks, the talk had turned to what might happen if, as often happens, Random House were to offer a settlement.

Despite the damning and incontrovertible nature of the evidence , a settlement would offer my law firm the fastest, easiest path to substantial profits for their time. It was clear, however, that like most settlements, this one would come with a gag attached. Already, I had reluctantly taken down a message board and other discussions of the issue, refused media interviews and preemptively gagged myself because, legally, no one wanted me to give away our strategy or "show our hand." Already it was clear that this process was about winning rather than the truth.

However, I was a beggar in a sense: contingency fee clients have some influence, but it is limited. If I was going to be a good partner in this entrepreneurial exercise, I needed to go along. I did.

But when the concept of settlement came up with the perpetual gag attached, it was too much for me because getting the truth out to the public is far more important to me than the money. For this reason, I will be releasing one of the expert witness reports along with the supporting data detailing more than 500 instances of duplications and striking similarities including several "smoking guns."

This does not mean I intend to drop the law suit. Under U.S. law, I have three years from the point of infringement (the publication of The Da Vinci Code in early 2003). That leaves me two more years to file and I intend to do so.

In addition, the expert witness report to be released contains only an estimated 40 percent of the analysis, thus leaving us with a substantial, un-revealed body of forensic evidence for trial. Settlement is not in my vocabulary.

My predilection for extra-judicial justice has been shaped by my past. As an investigative journalist, I have helped expose and put away malefactors that the police and courts had missed. More recently, I received more than a fair degree of justice by using the World Wide Web.

Some two years ago, in response to execrable DSL service, broken promises and misleading statements from SBC (then known as Pacific Bell), I started a consumer protest web site called PatheticBell.Com. The site quickly became a lightning rod for hundreds of consumers with similar problems. SBC personnel who believed their company was wrong also made helpful posts. Plaintiff's attorneys and their investigators began trolling the site for class action clients and harvesting the data for lawsuits.

So far, PatheticBell.com, has provided data and named plaintiffs in at least three class action law suits that have cost SBC millions. I've received no more than any of the other plaintiffs in the class (amounting to a couple months credit on my DSL) but that does not matter: I got justice for myself and hundreds of thousands of other consumers. I raged against the machine and won and that is what counted.

And that is the attitude and philosophy that I am carrying with me into the controversy with Dan Brown.

It ain't about the money; it's the truth.