Letter From Richard Sanford - To Bob Stubblefield
Letter From Richard Sanford - To Bob Stubblefield
Richard Sanford
800 South Wells St. #2398
Chicago, IL 60607
September 17, 1995
Mr. Robert W. Stubblefield
The Intellectual Activist
Lincroft. NJ 07738-0262
Dear Mr. Stubblefield,
I have your letter dated 9/7, postmarked 9/13. On 8/31, at your request, I agreed to a settlement that replaced our contract of 7/18. With this settlement we entered into a new contract. You cannot legitimately rescind that second contract once it is accepted.
Although you seem to feel that your offer of 8/31 was generous, please be aware that the settlement was a sacrifice to me because the compensation amounted to less than minimum wage for my time. I did not write the paper solely for the money. I wrote it primarily for publication specifically in TIA for its audience.
Your new offer of paying me for an acceptable (to you) article delivered in time for the January, 1996 issue is hollow. Given your stated opposition to ever publishing anything by me, an objective review of my paper by you would be impossible, and working with you would be intolerable to me. Further, meeting a January issue deadline is virtually impossible now due to prior commitments I have and due to your instruction, through Paul, for me to cease work on the paper three weeks ago. Thus, your discussion of potential payments and refunds of payments is academic.
Anyway, we already agreed on a new contract on 8/31, which you yourself proposed, so why should I consider this new offer? When you haven't kept the first two agreements, why should I expect you to keep a third agreement?
After requesting and gaining my agreement to your settlement offer, you now decide to abrogate it and effectively give me nothing. Forcing an author to sacrifice the publication is bad enough, but forcing him to sacrifice all monetary compensation is a travesty. Inviting a highly qualified professional to work for months with the promise of publication and a modest compensation and then denying him both publication and compensation literally weeks from the final draft, is fraud. If you thought you had any moral grounds for canceling publication, you have now destroyed all pretense at morality.
Your claims that it did not meet editorial requirements and deadlines are transparent excuses conceived after you had already decided not to publish it, as you well know. Two of the foremost scientists in the field have reviewed and praised my manuscript. l have published 50 papers, including one in TIA, and I know that my writing meets the editorial standards of your magazine.
The real reason you want out of the contracts, as you yourself told me, is that I refused to make a statement on the ARI-Reisman issue. Your editors begged me for an article right up to the time someone whispered to you that I might possibly hold suspicious views. Then you suddenly switched your position. To claim now that the quality of the article is reason for canceling the contracts is patently dishonest. You are obviously attempting to manufacture a semi-plausible excuse because your real reason is irrelevant to the contract.
Your assertion that I am an agnostic on the ARI-Reisman affair is false. As you know, I made no statement on the issue to you. You know the difference between agnosticism and silence; and I ask you to refrain from falsely attributing positions to me.
I do not want to support a journal that defrauds its authors. Please cancel my subscription to TIA and immediately send me a check for the remaining subscription amount.
I am turning over the case to my lawyer. Should this case go to court, I will seek far more in fees and damages than the settlement amount you offered and I accepted on 8/31. I will be out of town for three weeks. If you should decide to reaccept the settlement of 8/31, and I find a cashiers check or tellers check for $900 from TIA in my mail when I return on 10/10, I will consider the case closed. Otherwise, I will vigorously seek legal redress for the maximum possible amount.
Sincerely,
Richard F. Sanford