Well he’s up to his waist in alligators, but His Lordship continues to fight back against all enemies foreign and domestic. Conrad Black today launched a 2.1 million dollar lawsuit against Toronto Life magazine, over an article which as his Lordship's lawyers put it “brought him into hatred, ridicule and contempt”.
The Toronto Life article from Robert Mason Lee was titled “A toast to Lord Black and his arrival in Hell”. An accompanying illustration features Black dropping in at Hell and being met by an assortment of ghouls, devils and demons, apparently giving them a collegial thumbs up upon his arrival. For his artistic rendition, illustrator Barry Blitt has been named as a co defendant in the proceedings with Lee.
The Toronto Life website offers no archived articles available for printing, so a trip to your local library might be in order to examine the July 2004 issue for yourself to see if satire has transcended the barrier of litigation.
For those that don’t want to make the trip, check out the voiceprint audio service, they have an audio version of the article on their archive. But best hurry, one suspects that it’s only a matter of time before the lawyers pick up the phone and say that magic “slander”.
For Mason Lee, a guy that's been knocking around Canadian Journalism for a while the attention may actually be beneficial. A number of google searches for him, as well as look sees in Canadian Journalism and in the Literature site Books Canada , Indigo and Amazon for instance, provided little to no background on him a small listing of his work and that was it. Finally through the services of Alta Vista we were able to learn a bit about the man that has annoyed his Lordship. So as the old saying goes, any press is good press as long as they get your name right.
Suddenly a little known article in a regional magazine will become a national story, if Toronto Life is smart; they’ll be ordering a second press run of the July edition. Short of that, a best of issue for year end might make the perfect Christmas gift, well for everyone but his Lordship and his lawyers.
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