Generally, I do not encourage suing the press, in general. In the past I have seen nothing come of such efforts and it ends up making the reporter a focus of attention, and then everything he says gets even more attention. So as a PR thing, typically I just think it backfires.
But in this case, I think it could be a crime. I think they should be discussing it with lawyers to raise with certain legal authorities. I also think AF crossed a line with the intimidation, which he can claim has some sort of journalistic justification, but they probably should at least discuss with attorneys the possibility of some sort of claim and injunction. I would suggest that they go beyond their usual counsel and seek also the opinion of a top first amendment lawyer who hopefully is not conflicted by it being The Boston Globe.
The difficulty here is that freedom of the press and the first amendment is very strong and that press gets HUGE leeway to do all kinds of bad things to get the story. The focus is always on the story. So far though, the reporter doesn't really have the tory that would justify this kind of behavior and he instead, intervened to intimidate a very important presenter from being there and then he attempted to use her not being there to manufacture another story. The intimidation is problematic to me. It seems like it was intimidation based upon a kind of fraud since he really has no basis to threaten either NWBO with fraud or Dr. Liau, at least based upon his reporting after the presentation. At least I have not seen anything indicating anything other than his ongoing claim that only PFS counts... which is not a claim of fraud of any sort and appears to be flatly wrong.
I do not know if they can do anything and their lawyers may tell them the case is weak. Even a prosecutor would likely not want to go after media for a case not involving national security. But you never know. They should explore it as much as possible, without letting it distract them so much that it delays anything with DCVax, which I think is a difficult thing. This kind of thing can cost a lot of money, and as we know, they need to use their funds carefully right now. So that should be a consideration as well. So if they just went to the authorities and wrote initially a very clear letter to The Boston Globe, outlining the wrongdoing, that might be enough for now. But they probably can't sit and wait for the reporter to keep engaging in this activity. They might also let other authorities know about this including the FDA and SEC.
AI
