House Rivals by Mike Lawson Read Free Book Online Page B

Johnson’s blog was the bane of Curtis’s existence. It was a disorganized, unstructured mess that if printed out would run two thousand pages, and it served three purposes. First, Johnson used it as a journal or a diary in which she recounted what she’d done that day in her relentless pursuit of Leonard Curtis. It discussed, in mind-numbing detail, legislation or legal cases she’d researched. She also named people she’d talked to, usually castigating those people for incompetence or stupidity. Marjorie and Bill, therefore, pretty much always knew what Johnson was doing because she told the whole world.
    The second part of the blog was an ongoing rant against the American political system, and Johnson raved about how Curtis manipulated politicians with campaign contributions, took them on junkets, and paid for misleading television ads. She admitted that what Curtis was doing was arguably legal, but she wanted everyone to know how he was using his vast wealth solely to benefit Leonard Curtis as opposed to the common people.
    It was the third part of the blog that was the real problem, however, and the reason for Curtis’s angst. What Johnson would do was look for any legal or legislative issue in the tristate area that affected Curtis. Next, she would identify people who appeared to be pivotal to the legislation passing or failing, or to a lawsuit being decided in Curtis’s favor. Marjorie couldn’t even imagine the hundreds of hours Johnson spent researching and investigating. Johnson’s final step would then be to find some evidence, no matter how circumstantial or far-fetched, that a key person had been bribed, coerced, or otherwise unduly influenced. However, the evidence—if you could even call it evidence—could never be tied directly to anything Curtis had done personally. Nor had Johnson been able to find a single person willing to admit that he’d been bribed or coerced.
    But the problem was that Johnson was right! In the past two years, she had uncovered eleven instances where Curtis had in fact bribed or coerced politicians.
    Marjorie had tried dozens of times to convince Curtis that Sarah Johnson wasn’t worth going after and that he should simply ignore her. She told Curtis that less than fifty people a week read Johnson’s rambling blog. For that matter, they weren’t sure that anybody actually read it; they could just see that less than fifty people a week visited her website—and eight of those people were Bill, Marjorie, Leonard Curtis, and five lawyers.
    One reason so few people read her blog was that Johnson didn’t have the ability to make the complex legal issues she wrote about simpler and more understandable, and the way she wrote wasn’t engaging and put people to sleep. Furthermore, in person, Johnson was rude and antagonistic, and she alienated the people whose help she needed. The bottom line was that no law enforcement organization had been persuaded by her and her incomprehensible blog.
    But Curtis didn’t care. Curtis wanted her stopped.
    So Bill and Marjorie had tried to stop her. They started off with a low-key approach. They had a lawyer send a cease-and-desist letter to Johnson warning that she would be sued for libel if she continued to make blatantly false accusations against certain people named in her blog. Letters from lawyers terrify most normal people. Normal people can envision spending massive amounts of money and time battling a lawsuit, and then, ultimately, losing the lawsuit and everything they own to pay off the lawyers and penalties imposed by the court. But Sarah Johnson wasn’t normal, and the letter from the lawyer didn’t deter her one tiny bit. She posted the letter verbatim in her blog, citing it as an example of the kind of thing Curtis would do to stop any investigation into his criminal activities.
    Next, Leonard Curtis did sue her for libel—and Johnson’s lawyers responded