Enrich is a veteran business reporter at the *New York Times*; he's reported extensively on high finance and sleaze, and has a knack for piercing the Shield of Boredom that protects finance crimes from scrutiny. His 2017 book *The Spider's Web* manages the nearly impossible trick of making the LIBOR-rigging conspiracy - which involved trillions, but in ways that were so baroque that hardly anyone noticed - comprehensible:

memex.craphound.com/2017/09/24…

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In taking on the libel-industrial complex - a network of shadowy, thin-skinned, wealthy litigation funders; crank academics; buck-chasing lawyer lickspittle sociopaths; and the most corrupt Supreme Court justice on the bench today - Enrich is wading into dangerous territory. After all, he's reporting on people who've made it their life's mission to financially destroy anyone who has the temerity to report on their misdeeds.

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As such, Enrich's writing is *extremely* cautious, sometimes comically so, but always intentionally, in a way that highlights the absurd chilling effect his subjects are attempting to induce in all of us.

The book primarily concerns itself with the effort to overturn *Sullivan*, a 1964 Supreme Court case that established protections for media outlets that report on public figures and commit minor factual errors, provided that the errors were neither negligent nor malicious.

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Since *Sullivan*, media outlets have held the upper hand when reporting on public figures. While *Sullivan* isn't a license to simply make stuff up about celebrities, politicians and business leaders, it does mean that if a reporter makes a minor misstatement, it's on the subject of the reporting to prove that the error was negligent and/or malicious.

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Before *Sullivan*, most defamation litigation happened in state courts, and southern courts allowed lawmakers and cops to sue newspapers that reported on racial terror campaigns during the civil rights fight. The judgments involved were so large that many media outlets simply gave up on reporting on the intimidation, violence and murder taking place in the Jim Crow south.

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True to form, Clarence Thomas has led the charge to dismantle a law that was key to the struggle for rights for Black people and other disfavored minorities. In Enrich's telling, Thomas's animus for *Sullivan* started during his confirmation hearings, when Anita Hill described his relentless sexual harassment of the lawyers who worked for him, including Hill.

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Being the subject of a media firestorm that painted him as a disgusting, cruel sex-pest seems to have inspired Thomas in a decades-long campaign to find a case that would let him tear down *Sullivan*, so that wealthy people could once again intimidate reporters into silence.

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Of course, Thomas's hatred for *Sullivan* only grew when *Propublica* revealed that he had taken numerous "gifts" from wealthy "friends" who had business before the courts, revelations that will forever make Thomas's name a synonym for corruption.

Ehrich's cast of characters includes a clutch of whiny, ultra-rich axe-grinders, who finance (often in secret) lawsuits that are designed to chip away at *Sullivan*.

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Some are international looters or corrupt ex-Soviet oligarchs, but others are ideologues, committed to the principle of impunity for the powerful.

He also introduces us to the lawyers who wage these battles.

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As you might imagine, the kind of lawyer who sits up at night figuring out how to help wealthy, powerful people destroy their critics is often a crank themselves, with "colorful" personal relations that Enrich reports on with meticulous prose, including the many denials and non-denials his subjects sent when he sought comment.

As with his LIBOR book, Enrich does yeoman duty here unpacking complex matters that would be dull in a lesser writer's hands.

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The litigation strategies devised by *Sullivan*'s enemies are always convoluted and are sometimes clever, much like the litigation strategies used to kill campaign finance limits (*Citizens United*) and abortion rights (*Dobbs*). Indeed, many of the financiers, think-tanks and lawyers behind those plots are also would-be *Sullivan* slayers.

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The best of these legal gambits are actually rather clever - locating innocent people who've been genuinely wronged by *Sullivan* (as the saying goes, "hard cases make bad law") and then using them to undermine *Sullivan*, without actually helping them in any way. It's positively fiendish.

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We're in a moment when a lot of powerful people are getting far more powerful, and abusing that power to commit wildly corrupt acts. The only way we'll know about this is if the press can freely report on their misdeeds. *Murder the Truth* is a vital guide to the next *Citizens United*, the next *Dobbs* - a campaign to take away your right to know about the *next* assault on your rights that plutocrats will launch.

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I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel *Picks and Shovels*.

Catch me in SAN DIEGO on Mar 24:

mystgalaxy.com/32425Doctorow

And in CHICAGO with PETER SAGAL on Apr 2:

exileinbookville.com/events/44…

More tour dates here:

martinhench.com

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