{"id":6769,"date":"2016-03-20T16:25:39","date_gmt":"2016-03-20T20:25:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/?p=6769"},"modified":"2016-03-20T16:25:39","modified_gmt":"2016-03-20T20:25:39","slug":"the-journalist-and-the-troll-this-man-spent-two-years-trying-to-destroy-me-online","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/the-journalist-and-the-troll-this-man-spent-two-years-trying-to-destroy-me-online","title":{"rendered":"The Journalist and the Troll: This Man Spent Two Years Trying to Destroy Me Online"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Dune Lawrence<\/span><\/a> | March 16, 2016<\/p>\n

\n

Photograph by Christaan Felber<\/p>\n

I saw the photo first, me in a bloody wash of red with \u201cRACIST\u201d pulsing over my face. A couple of clicks brought me to this:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cIn the darkest shadow of Bloomberg\u2019s glossy office building in Manhattan, you may find a woman by the name of Dune Lawrence\u2014a \u2018journalist\u2019 who has built a career on writing salacious articles about China.\u201d<\/p>\n

That was my introduction to TheBlot, a website I hope you\u2019ve never heard of. The article went on and on: I\u2019d been kicked out of China for poor job performance and eked out a living on minimum wage. My appearance was ravaged by \u201cyears of consuming hormone-packed fried chicken and stressing over money.\u201d Now, I\u2019d found a way to save my sinking career by writing negative articles about China and taking kickbacks from short sellers. In a cinematic scene set at Kentucky Fried Chicken, this Internet version of me laid out a strategy: \u201c\u2009\u2018Bashing the Chinese could be a profitable niche for me,\u2019 Lawrence said to a source while biting off a juicy chicken leg quarter at KFC. \u2018The Chinese don\u2019t vote, the Chinese don\u2019t sue people, they just sit there taking the s—. How much better can it get? I am making a living out of it!\u2019\u2009\u201d<\/p>\n

It was difficult for me to keep reading. In addition to all the lies, the story was laced with creepy sexual imagery: I\u2019d had my \u201cpanties ripped off\u201d and was like \u201ca dog wagging her tail trying to attract a mating partner.\u201d I felt overwhelmed; it was as if something heavy were pressing into my forehead. I wanted to fight back, and I also wanted to hide. I haven\u2019t been able to do either.<\/p>\n

The story, published on Jan. 8, 2014, had the byline \u201cJohn Sterling.\u201d The site\u2019s other articles were an odd mix of celebrity gossip, entertainment news, and stabs at reporting on serious topics such as drug marketing. It wasn\u2019t exactly high journalism, but it looked professional, not like some amateur blog. Google seemed to think so as well, because the story instantly went to the top of the results when I searched my name.<\/p>\n

In September 2015 the FBI arrested the man behind TheBlot, one Benjamin Wey. Not for smearing me or the other people he imagined were his enemies. He\u2019s primarily a financier, and he was charged with securities fraud and other financial crimes involving Chinese companies he helped to list on U.S. stock markets. The U.S. Department of Justice alleges Wey pocketed tens of millions of dollars in illicit profits that he funneled through associates overseas and back into accounts in the U.S. Wey denies the charges. A trial has been set for March 2017.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, TheBlot\u2019s lies about me still pop up online. The same is true for a young woman who won an $18 million judgment against Wey and his companies for sexual harassment and defamation, a journalist who wrote about her, a retired Nasdaq official, and a Georgetown University law professor. As Wey, 44, awaits trial, he regularly posts Blot articles calling all of us, and others, frauds, racists, and extortionists. He\u2019s found a way to exact revenge with few consequences, and he\u2019s milking it.<\/p>\n

I met Wey in September 2010, when he sailed into the Bloomberg offices for an interview. He wore a suit, and his black hair was short and slick. He maintained a studied smugness, as if his publicist hadn\u2019t e-mailed me cold to pitch the visit. I was a reporter who\u2019d recently lived in China; Wey wanted some positive press for his business helping companies there raise money here.<\/p>\n

Everything about him seemed rehearsed, from his posture\u2014chin down, fingers tented\u2014to the way he used my name in almost every sentence. China\u2019s economy was growing at roughly 10 percent a year, and Wey portrayed this as a sort of personal validation. \u201cThe philosophy is very simple,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you believe China is going to continue to grow as it has, who\u2019s going to bridge the gap between the two countries?\u201d The answer, obviously, was Benjamin Wey.<\/p>\n

\"feat_wey13__03\"

Wey outside the Manhattan courthouse, where he was found liable for sexual harassment and defamation. The $18 million judgment remains unpaid. Photographer: Natan Dvir\/Polaris<\/p><\/div>\n

Still, the life story Wey sketched for me was fascinating. He said he\u2019d arrived in the U.S. from China in 1992 with $62 in his pocket, then bootstrapped his way to Wall Street riches. A few years after our meeting, Wey would tell a longer version of the story in a document he claimed was a business school case study. His father died when he was 10, the story went, leaving his mother to raise him alone on $120 a month in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin. Wey considered English the key to his future. He rose at 5 every morning to study, then biked 90 minutes to school, all the while reciting English phrases. One day it paid off: He struck up a conversation with a foreign couple on a bus. They hailed from Texas\u2014a word that had an almost mystical ring to him. This chance meeting led him to college at Oklahoma Baptist University.<\/p>\n

Success followed success. First, he founded and ran a campus catering company with a gross profit margin of some 95 percent. Next, while still at school, he brokered shipments of silk boxers, Brazilian sugar, and Russian fertilizer. After graduating, he got himself hired as a China adviser at Ashton Technology Group. It\u2019s hard to know what to believe in Wey\u2019s \u201ccase study,\u201d but he did work at Ashton.<\/p>\n

In the late 1990s he opened a consulting business with partners in Beijing, and in 2003 he founded New York Global Group (NYGG). That\u2019s the business Wey was promoting when I met him. NYGG advised mostly small and midsize private Chinese companies looking to list in the U.S., Wey told me. He emphasized that he turned away 99 percent of potential clients. Staff accountants, he said, performed as much as 11 months of due diligence, and then, for companies deemed worthy, NYGG engineered mergers with \u201cshells\u201d\u2014companies that are all but defunct but still publicly listed. Such a transaction, called a reverse merger, transformed the Chinese entity into a U.S. public company overnight. Hundreds of Chinese companies had taken this route\u2014and so, Wey pointed out, had Berkshire Hathaway and Texas Instruments.<\/p>\n

Wey was saying one thing about Chinese reverse-merger companies, but the market was saying another. Short sellers were raising doubts about the accounting at many of these companies, and shares in some were falling. Wey was an assertive defender of the companies and accused the shorts of illegal market manipulation. I\u2019d read up on Wey and knew he\u2019d had his own regulatory issues: The state securities regulator in Oklahoma had accused him of failing to tell clients about his consulting relationships with companies whose shares he was touting. Wey was censured and agreed to a ban from the securities industry in the state, without admitting or denying the allegations.<\/p>\n

I met with Wey again in November 2010, and the next January I wrote a story for Bloomberg Businessweek<\/em> about short sellers and Chinese reverse mergers. It mentioned Wey and NYGG. In January 2012 the FBI searched NYGG\u2019s office. Wey wouldn\u2019t comment at the time, and the FBI didn\u2019t give any details.<\/p>\n

After that, I heard only occasional news of Wey. A friend who\u2019d read my stories on reverse mergers mentioned meeting him. In September 2013 the friend showed me a group e-mail Wey had sent saying he was an alumnus of Columbia Business School and touting the case study about himself. Columbia had published it, Wey wrote, and was planning to use it \u201cin the training of global leaders for years to come.\u201d The attached document, titled \u201cBenjamin Wey: Global Entrepreneur,\u201d appeared to be on letterhead from Columbia\u2019s CaseWorks series and listed a Columbia Business School professor and Wey himself as the co-authors. This was the story that included such details as the 90-minute bike ride to school and the nice couple from Texas.<\/p>\n

The study is not a Columbia publication, according to Christopher Cashman, a spokesman for the business school. \u201cThe document you have is not a case study and was not published by Columbia Business School,\u201d Cashman wrote in an e-mail. \u201cIn fact, no research or case study about Mr. Wey has ever been published by Columbia Business School.\u201d The professor credited as Wey\u2019s co-author declined to comment.<\/p>\n

The document opens with Wey waving goodbye to his Columbia classmates on their last day together. They\u2019re headed toward the subway, while Wey hops in his Maserati to get back to Wall Street. The rest of the narrative mostly sticks to Wey\u2019s personal triumphs; it does touch on the Oklahoma trouble, describing it as politically motivated and saying Wey accepted the censure because he was no longer doing business in the state. Still, the story notes, news of the censure gave his enemies fodder. The lesson, Wey quotes Wey as saying, is that \u201cperception matters more than facts or reality.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the time Wey distributed his case study, I was working on a story about a former client of his: AgFeed Industries, a Chinese animal-feed company embroiled in bankruptcy, a shareholder lawsuit, and a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigation. Wey didn\u2019t respond to my calls or e-mails. I reconstructed some of his involvement from Internet searches and turned up a press release from NYGG saying it had helped AgFeed raise $86 million in the U.S. My story came out in December. Less than three months later, the SEC sued AgFeed and its Chinese executives for allegedly fabricating revenue\u00a0from 2008 to 2011. The company settled without admitting liability and agreed to return $18 million in illicit profits.<\/p>\n

Wey e-mailed me on New Year\u2019s Day 2014. He said he was seeking comment for a series of investigative articles about short sellers and fraud, and he had a list of questions for me. Here\u2019s a sample. (All correspondence from Wey in this story is presented as he sent it, uncorrected.)<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you have no business background and neither have you obtained any education in the field of accounting of business, how could you have derived conclusions on your own involving complex global business matters mentioned in your various articles?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were told you were \u2018emotionally scarred\u2019 while living in China and you are racially biased against the Chinese people. Is it true?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSources told us that you have an active business activities outside your Bloomberg employment. What are those business activities? How are you able to support your lifestyle? What compensation have you received from stock short sellers, hedge funds, and other tabloid writers?\u201d<\/p>\n

He ended with: \u201cThis is the time for you to come out clean, Dune.\u201d<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t respond. He followed up two days later with additional prompts, including \u201cSources told us you have gained a lot of weight due to stress.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wey had already started tweeting that I was implicated in \u201cmassive frauds.\u201d When Bloomberg\u2019s lawyers sent him a letter telling him to take down the tweets and stop defaming me, he fired off another long e-mail. \u201cYou are a tabloid writer, a sensational woman, a total loser with absolutely no sense of morality,\u201d read the message, which nonetheless went on to say that \u201cthis is just the beginning of endless efforts to express our opinions forever, and continues the debates of our differences in civility.\u201d<\/p>\n

I knew something was coming, so I kept Googling my name and Wey\u2019s name to see what it would be. That\u2019s how I discovered my star turn on TheBlot.<\/p>\n

I was rattled for days. I couldn\u2019t focus on a story I was reporting about\u2014as it happens\u2014online privacy and anonymous browsing. Still, some things struck me as absurdly funny. Wey tried to drum up traffic to the story with a tweet claiming I was implicated in a \u201cnew Bernie Madoff fraud.\u201d His e-mails, which kept coming, referred to \u201ctwits\u201d instead of tweets and to Bloomberg\u2019s outside law firm, Willkie Farr, as Wilkie Fart.<\/p>\n

Wey\u2019s name wasn\u2019t on the story, but he wasn\u2019t trying too hard to cover his tracks. The website\u2019s terms of use identified theblot.com as part of FNL Media, which a copyright form placed at the same office address and floor as NYGG.<\/p>\n

As I looked into how to get Wey\u2019s vile material off the Internet, I saw that FNL\u2019s business registration listed Holland & Knight, a respectable law firm, and a firm partner, Neal Beaton. That gave me some hope\u2014maybe someone there would be willing to talk sense into Wey. I reached out through Bloomberg\u2019s lawyers. The message came back\u2014sorry, can\u2019t help. (Holland & Knight says, through a spokesperson, \u201cOur involvement with FNL Media was only in relation to the formation of the company in 2013.\u201d)<\/p>\n

I had no better luck with the companies Wey used to spread Blot posts. The site had a Facebook page, and Bloomberg\u2019s legal team tried to get Facebook to remove references to me. No response. (The \u201cRACIST\u201d photo was in TheBlot\u2019s photo stream when I checked as I was writing this story. I reported it and got an automated response saying Facebook would remove anything \u201cthat doesn\u2019t follow the Facebook Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.\u201d It\u2019s still there.) When I complained to Twitter that Wey\u2019s account was abusive, I got a response from Twitter Trust & Safety, telling me Wey wasn\u2019t violating Twitter\u2019s rules and to block his tweets so I couldn\u2019t see them. I sent in more examples of Wey\u2019s tweets, and Twitter suspended his account. He was back in less than three weeks. Someone opened a Twitter account impersonating me. The only follower was Benjamin Wey. Twitter did block that one.<\/p>\n

My husband was enraged and impatient: Couldn\u2019t we do something? How could this guy be allowed to get away with this? My mother worried this was all just a prelude to something worse\u2014violence, physical harassment. I soothed them the best I could, and I kept looking for help.<\/p>\n

Friends and colleagues told me appealing to Google was pretty much hopeless, and I found that to be true. I couldn\u2019t figure out how to report the stories as defamatory, although there was a \u201creport images\u201d option that I\u2019ve been using to no avail for two years. Later, Google forwarded me its official policy. In the U.S., the company removes search results from its index only in very specific situations involving images of child abuse, copyright infringement, or exposure of sensitive information such as Social Security numbers. Google will also respond to a court order identifying pages or content as defamatory.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t sue for defamation. I talked to people about it, and all of them told me the same thing: It would be long, invasive, and horrible, and Wey would likely use the opportunity to further attack my privacy and reputation.<\/p>\n

Wey kept at his trolling, with at least four more stories devoted to me, plus references in posts about his other targets. Whenever a new image of me came online, a Blot article followed, with the same insults stamped over the image: FRAUD, DUMB, RACIST, INCOMPETENT.<\/p>\n

There were real consequences. My husband and I were turned down for homeowners insurance; the underwriter told my husband I was \u201chigh-profile.\u201d I traded cards with another journalist at an event, and the next day he e-mailed to ask what the heck I\u2019d done to make anyone so angry at me. I felt as if I had a dirty little secret. I\u2019d forget, and then moments like that would upset me again. Not many people bothered to ask for my side of the story. Maybe that was because not a lot of people saw the Blot stories\u2014the entire site got only 50,000 views a month. But I imagined people I contacted for work, especially native Chinese, coming upon the Blot posts. How many of them would return my calls or e-mails?<\/p>\n

I wasn\u2019t the first person accused of racism on TheBlot. Before me, there was Michael Emen, a Nasdaq official. In 2011, Nasdaq delisted a Wey client called CleanTech Innovations. (The decision was overturned by the SEC in July 2013 after the company appealed.) A piece labeled \u201copinion\u201d appeared on TheBlot focusing on Emen\u2019s role, alleging abuse of his powers, discrimination, and racial profiling. \u201cMichael Emen Reveals Racism at Nasdaq\u201d is still at the top of a Google search on his name.<\/p>\n

Similar \u201cinvestigations,\u201d as they were tagged, began to appear regularly on TheBlot. The attacks reflected Wey\u2019s obsession with what he saw as the unfair treatment of Chinese companies by the U.S. media and regulators. TheBlot went after Roddy Boyd, a freelance reporter who\u2019d doggedly analyzed accounting irregularities at U.S.-listed Chinese companies; Jon Carnes, a short seller; Francine McKenna, who wrote about AgFeed on her accounting-focused blog; and a pair of Barron<\/em>\u2019s reporters who\u2019d covered reverse-merger companies and Wey\u2019s business. The accompanying graphics grew coarser and coarser, including photos of toilet bowls full of feces.<\/p>\n

TheBlot found a new target in July 2014, a Swedish woman named Hanna Bouveng. She met Wey at a party in the Hamptons in 2013. Not long after, he offered her a job at NYGG, a visa, and a chance to stay in New York. She accepted. A lawsuit she later filed alleged that Wey, who was married with children and almost 20 years her senior, pursued her relentlessly, buying her tight clothes that he asked her to wear at the office and forcing her to share a room with him on business trips. Eventually, the suit said, she slept with him, and when she declined to keep doing so, he fired her. Bouveng sought $850 million in damages.<\/p>\n

TheBlot spewed out inflammatory articles and lurid illustrations about Wey\u2019s latest enemies: Bouveng, her lawyers, her friends, even a New York Daily News<\/em> reporter who wrote a brief item about the lawsuit. Just a sample of the headlines:<\/p>\n

\u201cOp-Ed: Hanna Bouveng, Cocaine User Caught with Cocaine and Gun Criminal, Swedish Shame\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBank Fraud Dooms Morelli Alters Ratner Law Firm, Bankruptcy, Lawsuit Charges, FBI Investigates\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBarbara Ross, Racist NY Daily News Writer Fabricated Judge\u2019s Order, Prejudiced Journalist Benjamin Wey\u201d<\/p>\n

Bouveng\u2019s lawyers tried to persuade the judge in the case to stop Wey from continuing to publish defamatory articles, asserting that they amounted to retaliation and witness intimidation. Wey\u2019s lawyers argued that this would infringe on Wey\u2019s right to free speech. The judge didn\u2019t rule on this aspect of the case until after the trial was over, when he said the money judgment made it a moot point. Many of the stories remain online, updated with new material.<\/p>\n

\"feat_wey13__02\"

Bouveng is \u201cpleased that the U.S. government is pursuing a criminal case against Wey,\u201d says her lawyer. \u201cHe will ultimately get what he deserves.\u201d Photographer: John Marshall Mantel\/Zuma Press<\/p><\/div>\n

The trial became tabloid fodder as Bouveng testified about her sexual encounters with Wey. (From her testimony: Q. Did you kiss him? A. No. Q. Did you hug him? A. No. Q. Did you reciprocate in any way? A. No. Q. How long did it last? A. A few minutes.) For Blot watchers like me, it also revealed Wey\u2019s methods. He really had established a website, hired writers, and published articles just to have a platform for his attacks. The site\u2019s former editor-in-chief testified that all Wey really cared about were the pieces on his enemies and that he tacked on comments under fake names to push the articles further up in search results.<\/p>\n

A jury awarded Bouveng $18 million last June. She has yet to receive any money, according to one of her lawyers, David Ratner. Wey\u2019s tweets after the verdict in Bouveng\u2019s lawsuit spun defeat into victory: \u201c#GRATIFIED #financier @WeyBenjamin DEFEATS #extortion #hannabouveng FALSE sexual assault, retaliation claims, VICTORY.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ratner sent me a comment from Bouveng, saying she is \u201cpleased that the U.S. government is pursuing a criminal case against Wey. He will ultimately get what he deserves.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the day of his arrest in September 2015, Wey appeared in federal court in Manhattan to hear the charges: securities and wire fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud and wire fraud, failure to disclose ownership in excess of 5 percent of companies\u2019 stock, and money laundering. Wey manipulated Chinese companies and investors, according to the Justice Department, taking hidden stakes through family members and front companies, then manipulating trading in the shares to benefit himself and his family. The indictment outlines how he allegedly took a cut of almost every transaction as he shepherded companies such as Deer Consumer Products and CleanTech to U.S. listings. He owned hidden stakes in the shell companies used for reverse mergers, which then became shares of the new entities. He hid these stakes in offshore entities, through which he parceled out stakes to friends and family to boost the number of shareholders to the threshold required for a Nasdaq listing. He also used these offshore entities to conduct fraudulent trading, at times artificially inflating share prices and then selling to generate millions in profits. He caused stock and profits to be transferred overseas through accounts in Switzerland and Hong Kong. (Wey\u2019s Geneva-based banker, Seref Dogan Erbek, was also charged. He is at large.) The money returned to the U.S. and eventually to Wey, often, the indictment says, as nontaxable gifts to Wey\u2019s wife, Michaela.<\/p>\n

On Sept. 15, Wey pleaded not guilty to all charges. He\u2019s also a defendant, along with his wife and several other people associated with NYGG, in a civil suit filed by the SEC at the same time as the criminal complaint. Wey and his wife haven\u2019t filed a response in the SEC case and are seeking to have it stayed until the criminal case against Wey is resolved.<\/p>\n

Wey is also battling lawsuits stemming from TheBlot. A Georgetown law professor named Chris Brummer sued him in April 2015. Brummer had the poor luck to be an arbitrator in a Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (Finra) disciplinary action against two brokers who sold shares of Deer Consumer Products without disclosing to customers that they were paid consultants for the company. Deer was a client of Wey\u2019s. Finra barred the two brokers from working in the securities industry, and Brummer was on a panel that upheld the decision in 2014. Stories on TheBlot appeared promptly, pillorying Brummer as a fraud, calling him an Uncle Tom (Brummer is black), and accusing him of being involved in pump-and-dump stock schemes.<\/p>\n

Wey responded to Brummer\u2019s lawsuit with a motion to dismiss. It contends that Wey didn\u2019t write the posts and that the suit is a \u201ctransparent attempt\u201d to chill free speech, because no reasonable reader would interpret the articles as fact, rather than opinion. The motion notes that \u201cit is undisputed that the Posts are available only on a sensationalist internet blog.\u201d Preposterous though this might sound, especially given Wey\u2019s regular declarations that he is an investigative journalist, it appears to be designed to cloak Wey and TheBlot in the mantle of the First Amendment and protected free speech.<\/p>\n

Brummer wouldn\u2019t talk to me, but one of his lawyers, Whitney Gibson, agreed to discuss defamation in the online era in general terms. Internet companies, he told me, are protected under a clause in the Communications Decency Act that says no provider or user of an \u201cinteractive computer service,\u201d such as a website, a hosting company, or a search engine provider, can be held liable for third-party content. That allows companies to ignore the headache of arbitrating right from wrong and fact from fiction online, for the most part. It also leaves Brummer, and all of us, vulnerable to the likes of Wey, who disguised many of his attacks as stories submitted by anonymous readers. Decades into the Internet Age, there\u2019s no surefire method to get defamatory material taken down if the person responsible for it is ready to put up a fight.<\/p>\n

Earlier this month, Brummer\u2019s lawsuit cleared a major hurdle: The judge ruled against Wey\u2019s motion to dismiss and specified that Wey hadn\u2019t shown the Blot articles should be protected under the Communications Decency Act. It\u2019s a victory, though Brummer still has to prevail in the overall case\u2014and in the meantime, the Blot articles stay up.<\/p>\n

Almost everyone I contacted for this story, including Emen, Brummer, and others who\u2019d been attacked on TheBlot, chose not to comment, and I understand that decision. What\u2019s the upside? I know what the downside is: more attacks. It took me a long time to decide to write about my own experience, because I just wanted to avoid any more interaction with Wey. But I did have to give him a chance to comment for this story, particularly on the origin of the Columbia \u201ccase study.\u201d I e-mailed the lawyers representing him in his various legal battles, and in less than three hours, I got a 1,600-word response from Wey. This is just a piece:<\/p>\n

\u201cHowdy! Ni Hao! Hello! I am Benjamin Wey\u2014your old friend. You know me well so let\u2019s get to the point. I am an independent investigative reporter and I like TheBlot Magazine (www.theblot.com)\u2014Voice for the Voiceless, millions of readers a year. Investigative reporters are evaluating publishing new stories about you, your peculiar money entanglements with illegal stock short sellers (Roddy Boyd, Jon Carnes etc) as their bribed mouthpiece, your alleged extramarital affairs with a man calling himself \u2018niu bi\u2019\u2014\u2018a cattle\u2019s d—\u2019\u2014in Chinese on your own Twitter page, as well as your racist attitude towards the Chinese people. Because you just reached out to me again after two years of peace, you just did yourself a favor by reviving our interest in you.\u2009…<\/p>\n

\u201cYou mentioned a non-published Columbia Business School research paper. I recall you and your sex partner Roddy Boyd collectively published a tabloid hit piece on this matter in 2013 in the NY Post. You said the Columbia paper was never published. Then how did you get a copy? How did you get hold of a draft Columbia University internal document? When and how did you hack into Columbia\u2019s computers? How did you steal Columbia\u2019s documents? Who else was involved in your theft? Come clean please so our readers can judge. How long have you been stealing documents from your employer? You know, theft is a pattern.\u2009…<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have 18 more questions for you to answer. Each answer can be a separate, featured article. Dune, to save you time, let\u2019s start with the above list. Okay? Our dealine for your answers is 5 pm, Feb 24, 2016. As it is said, \u2018a thief remains silent\u2019. If you do not respond, we will report to our readers such.\u2009…<\/p>\n

\u201cDonald Trump said the main stream media is full of dishonest people. I have to say I agree with him. You are one of those duckings feeling like some white swan. There is no swan lake in my life to dance around, okay? I know your tricks and how you \u2018media\u2019 people think. I am one of you, a fearless reporter and I have buckets and buckets of ink\u2014more than you do.\u2009…\u201d<\/p>\n

I wrote this story because I have a platform to fight back. How can I, with the resources and reach of a global magazine, let him intimidate me? It\u2019s my job to write about Wey. Still, I\u2019m not looking forward to what\u2019s coming next.<\/p>\n

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Editor:<\/b> Daniel Ferrara
\nWeb design:<\/b> Tracy Ma, Steph Davidson and Toph Tucker<\/h5>\n

Source: http:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/features\/2016-benjamin-wey\/<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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