blogger interrupted

Part 1 is here.

By June of 2006, the Cleveland Plain Dealer had finally bent to the endless pressure from Sherrod Brown’s campaign to get my record into the media, any kind of media at all.  Sherrod Brown’s wife’s employer obliged, and mentioned the 4-year-old story out of the blue, in their front-page, above the fold, profile of Ohio bloggers, complete with a picture of me from a 2001 story about my trip to work for the Labour Party in the UK.

Net worth: Clever and insightful, but has the sharpest tongue in the blogosphere; trying to rebuild credibility lost when he was convicted of importuning in an Internet sex sting.

It jumped out of the story like a dead fish on the Thanksgiving dinner table.  Despite my numerous attempts to get Naymik to keep that out of the story, it got in, thanks to Jean Dubail, Naymik’s editor.  I freaked out again.  The pain was so enormous.  And I finally shut down Democracy Guy, for good. 

I called up George.  Again, I needed a friend.  I told George that I would remove myself from MTB for the good of MTB.  I believed this shit would ever end.  He agreed, but gave me a little hope, probably because I looked like I needed it.  He said I could come back however, and whenever, I wanted.  He said MTB needed me.  That there was no MTB without Tim Russo.  I couldn’t envision a scenario in which I would be able to take this anymore, but in the end, I found yet more strength to continue. 

I took George Nemeth at his word. 

Taking George Nemeth at his word is a mistake. 

By September, 2006, a venture capital outfit led my Michael Whouley, currently of Dewey Square Group, late of the Al Gore 2000, and the John Kerry 2004 campaign, a man who I’d known while working for Gore in NH in 1998, showed real interest on behalf of investors.  

Whouley’s interest was almost solely because of my own ptiching efforts in the months preceding, before the PD article put me into a coma.  A George disciple had some connection, and through it, I’d pitched MTB to Whouley personally, over the phone, in emails and business plans, repeatedly during the summer of 2006.   And Dewey Square weren’t just shopping around.  The amounts were to the tune of many tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of dollars. 

In the meantime, MTB had moved into some donated loft space in the oh-so-hip Tower Press.  My wounds were starting to heal, and I saw light, for the first time in a long time.  So I got involved again, as much as I wanted to be, just like George said I could and should - trying to line up interviews with people, access to whom, among MTB’s leaders, only I had.

Without my knowledge, this upset George.  Despite numerous attempts to contact him, George ignored me for weeks, until he sent one of his sycophants to call me and complain about my attempts to set up an interview with Lee Fisher.  She told me I needed to step away.  I asked, “How do you think you got the Tim Ryan interview?”  When she told me that the reason I needed to step away was because the Whouley investors were paying attention, and wanted me gone, I lost it. 

Just. Totally. Lost it.

The days, weeks, and months following that conversation were spent between my therapist, my close friends, cigarettes, bottles of liquor, and my attorney.  When you’re so fucked by your own mistakes which stick to you like shit on a pig, so screwed that no one will put you on a W2 form, your friends tell you to start your own business.  When that business gets yanked too, there’s just nowhere to turn anymore.  That nightmare lasted months, spent alone, waiting for anyone to help.  Anyone at all.

It took me a long time to wake up from that nightmare, and when I did, I knew one thing.  The way this will eventually be played out may be decided someday not by friends, or cigarettes, or liquor, but by attorneys.  Not by my choice, but by the facts.  That is, if MTB ever earns one thin dime.  MTB got its Russo-free environment, yes, but that apparently leaves MTB with a chronic lack of competence.  Which has kept the investors, advertisers, and the big interviews, away.  Shocking.

I’ll never really know if George Nemeth is a psychopathic liar, or a friend who sniffed dollars (however fleeting that sniff might have been) and got less friendly in order to chase the money which now eludes him.  Frankly, I’m not really sure which is worse.  All I know is that I trusted someone, and they repaid that trust with duplicity and worse.  Whether or not George Nemeth is in fact a complete phony, I now take that as a given.  Perhaps others should, too. 

Oh, and by the way, memo to MTB ad network members, and their, ahem…”business” associates.  Unless you are prepared someday to pay for representation during hours of discovery depositions, you might want to review your MTB situation.  Just a little free advice.  Nothing a litigant likes more than a potential deep pocket.

More important for me, I’ve come to accept George’s behavior as a fact of my life, an encore performance familiar to me from so many others who have been way closer to me than George ever was.  

I’m Italian.  Proud of it.  Lots of baggage comes with that, like for instance, that  we Italians remember everything, forever.  Specifically, three kinds of people - those who helped us when we needed it, those who didn’t, and those who used a weakness to take advantage of us when we’re down.  George has the relatively unique distinction of having been all three.  For me, that’s a complicated thing to process, but my gut tells me I’ll most remember the latter, and the rest will just be fuel for the accounting.

You may learn about more of those people if you stick around.   But the price for this behavior is huge, and to date, borne only by one person.   It’s a price which will no longer be borne by me alone.  Not anymore…not ever again.

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