# So now the extrtionist's lawyer is playing a new game of extortion

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-now-the-extrtionists-lawyer-is-playing-a-new-game-of-extortion/512927>\
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\
**Created:** [October 7, 2009, 1:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-now-the-extrtionists-lawyer-is-playing-a-new-game-of-extortion/512927 "2009-10-07T13:20:33Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Brainiac](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/8797f3/32.png) [@Brainiac](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Brainiac)\
**Post date:** [October 7, 2009, 1:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-now-the-extrtionists-lawyer-is-playing-a-new-game-of-extortion/512927/1 "2009-10-07T13:20:33Z")

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I wonder if that’s illegal in its own right?  
The lawyer is saying the extortionist’s “defense” will be to expose all the secret diaries and things originally used for extortion.

Since that is not a defense at all, it has to be a new extortion scheme: Maybe we can’t get $2 million off of you, but we can still threaten you with more public shame, for years, unless you refuse to testify and there is no trial and your tormentor goes free, so you lose either way.

Of course, I doubt Letterman will care at this point, but it still seems the lawyer is doing the same criminal act as the original. They should share a cell.

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**Author:** ![Brainiac](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/8797f3/32.png) [@Brainiac](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Brainiac)\
**Post date:** [October 7, 2009, 10:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-now-the-extrtionists-lawyer-is-playing-a-new-game-of-extortion/512927/2 "2009-10-07T22:41:25Z")

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Somebody agrees with me. Glad the idea made it into the headlines.

[QUOTE=New York Times]  
[The Art of Blackmail](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/weekinreview/04schwartz.html?hpw)  
Those confrontations, however, did not cross the line into the criminal realm, he said, because they had been sanitized by lawyering. Attorneys, he noted, can create a legal filing that promises to bring out unpleasant facts in depositions or during trial; a settlement is not, technically, a payoff. He called it “wrapping an extortion threat in a legal cloak.”  
It happens all the time, said Gerald B. Lefcourt, a criminal defense attorney in Manhattan. “Threatened lawsuits, and even filed lawsuits, are often no more than blackmail,” he said.  
[/QUOTE]

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**Author:** ![Isamu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/7c8e57/32.png) [@Isamu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Isamu)\
**Post date:** [October 8, 2009, 7:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-now-the-extrtionists-lawyer-is-playing-a-new-game-of-extortion/512927/3 "2009-10-08T07:07:45Z")

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I don’t know whether the judge has discretion to hold the proceedings in camera (closed to the public), but either way, the story is coming out.

The scandal itself has generated enough interest that every man and his dog now wants to hear about all the sordid details, so the book/screenplay will be written. There’s money in them there words.