Positive Liberty

Ladies and gentlemen, the Positive Liberty staff cordially asks you to disengage your irony meters before continuing. Further use may result in irreparable damage.

Oh, and the setup for this one is long, but the payoff is exquisite.

Two days ago I received the following e-mail. I’ve bolded the relevant part:

ReputationDefender, Inc.
2023 Cherokee Parkway
Suite #18
Louisville, KY 40204

January 23, 2007

Dear Mr. Kuznicki,

We are writing to you in behalf of Christine Parascandola. She has asked us to contact you and see if you will consider removing the content about her at:

http://positiveliberty.com/2005/12/cada-vez.html

Please allow us to introduce ourselves. We are ReputationDefender, Inc., a company dedicated to helping our clients preserve their good name on the Internet. Our founders and employees are all regular Internet users. Like our clients, and perhaps like you, we think the Internet is sometimes unnecessarily hurtful to the privacy and reputations of everyday people. Even content that is meant to be informative can sometimes have a significant and negative impact on someone’s job prospects, student applications, and personal life. We invite you to learn more about who we are, at www.reputationdefender.com.

When our clients sign up with our service, we undertake deep research about them on the Internet to see what the Web is saying about them. We find sites where they are discussed, and we ask our clients how they feel about those sites. Sometimes our clients express strong reservations about the content on particular websites. They may feel hurt, ashamed, or “invaded” by the content about them on those sites.

As you may know, more and more prospective employers, universities, and newfound friends and romantic interests undertake Internet research, and the material they find can strongly impact their impressions of the people they are getting to know. When people apply for jobs, apply for college or graduate school, apply for loans, begin dating, or seek to do any number of other things with their lives, hurtful content about them on the Internet can have a negative impact on their opportunities. At some point or another, most of us say things about ourselves or our friends and acquaintances we later regret. We’re all human, and we all do it!

We are writing to you today because our client, Christine Parascandola, has told us that she would like the content about her on your website to be removed as it is outdated and invasive. Would you be willing to remove or alter the content? Simply removing mention of Ms. Parascandola’s name would protect her privacy while preserving the impact of your thoughtful article. It would mean so much to Ms. Parascandola, and to us. Considerate actions such as these will go a long way to help make the Internet a more civil place.

Thank you very much for your consideration. We are mindful that matters like these can be sensitive. We appreciate your time.

Please let us know if you have removed or changed the content on this site by sending an e-mail to: daves@reputationdefender.com.

Yours sincerely,

Dave S.
Reputation Defender Service Team

Blog neighbors Hubbard and Amber recently posted a few things about the firm and its CEO; it seems he can’t even defend his own online reputation. Quoth Amber:

I know Michael Fertik, the CEO of this absurd company. He sat in front of me in one of my 1L classes. He was a pretentious gunner who wore lots of Armani. The last time I saw him, he was standing in the D.C. Metro bitching about how haaard it is to be summer associate because he had firm events practically every night. I think my response was something along the lines of “yeah, it sure sucks to be massively overpaid for a summer sinecure and expensively entertained non-stop.” I don’t think this was the reaction he was expecting. He’s ridiculous and I hope his company tanks.

…If anyone wants me to take down this or any other post because it hurts their wittle feelings, they can bite me.

So for just $29.95, you can pay this guy to clean up your Internet reputation. Which Mrs. Parascandola apparently did.

For the record, here are the relevant parts of the post I was asked to remove:

Cada Vez

Or, a glimpse into the absurdly overregulated world of nighttime entertainment.

Background: For longer than anyone has been alive, U Street Northwest has been a center of nightlife in Washington, DC. It’s home to revered cultural establishments like the Lincoln Theater — but also to the 9:30 Club, The Black Cat, and many other popular destinations. In short, it’s the place to party in Washington…

U Street is also home to Cada Vez, a restaurant that hosts live latin music and a once-a-week gay and lesbian party.

There’s also dancing — and that’s where the trouble begins.

Cada Vez is licensed as a restaurant; under the terms agreed to by the owners, it must draw at least 45% of its income from food, it may not play rock or hip-hop music, and the floor area used for dancing may be no larger than 10′x15′. It’s also subject to all of the other regulations that restaurants holding a liquor license normally face.

Add a few disgruntled neighbors, and the result is a clear-cut case of regulatory harassment:

[Manager Chao Charles Zhou] counts about 180 inspections from various agencies over the past two years. “We’ve had ABRA visits. We’ve had Health Department visits. We’ve had fire-department visits, zoning-department visits – we even had Department of Public Works visits about our recycling plan,” says Zhou. “At the end of the day, they could not substantiate anything besides ‘Oh, you have a few people dancing outside of the box.’”

Ah yes, “dancing outside of the box” — perhaps the venue’s most heinous straying from the tenets of its original paperwork.

Make no mistake about it: These visits aren’t aimed at ensuring that Cada Vez is a sound, upstanding establishment. Often coming at a pace of three inspections a week, their intent is simply to run the place out of business. How do I know? A pair of private citizens has been phoning in continual complaints — and DC law is written such that all citizen complaints, even anonymous ones, must be formally investigated. The duo, husband-and-wife team Mark and Christina Parascandola, has also videotaped the establishment and its patrons and filed complaints against another venue hosting gay-themed events. This last is just a coincidence, I’m sure…

This sets up a scintillating trifecta of irony:

1. You don’t move to U Street for peace and quiet. You move there because you expect, and indeed hope, to find people going out late at night. No one who knew anything about city life in DC would have said otherwise at any point in the last century: If you want peace and quiet, then move to the suburbs like I did. If you want nightlife, and many people clearly do, then move to U Street.

2. You don’t make yourself a community activist and then expect that your reputation will always remain pristine. When you try to shut down someone’s business, the owners and patrons alike will be upset. There will be publicity, not all of it appreciative. This isn’t a case of “we’re all human” as the letter from ReputationDefender claims. This isn’t a case of “oops, I got, like, soooo mad at my ex-boyfriend that I posted those ’special’ pictures on MySpace.” Sure, we’re all human, but few of us have tried so hard for months on end to shut down neighborhood businesses:

The Parascandolas are part of at least three “groups of five” that have filed protests with the city’s Alcoholic Beverage Control Board opposing the renewal of Cada Vez’s liquor license on grounds that the establishment draws large nighttime crowds that disturb the neighborhood.

A “group of five” is required to have legal standing to ask for license revocation. Apparently none of their efforts have succeeded (link goes to a search of the DC database of revoked licenses).

3. You don’t videotape people leaving a gay and lesbian venue — and then complain about some schmuck on the Internet ruining your reputation. Truly, I think this is one of the most hypocritical acts I have ever seen as a blogger.

I imagine being videotaped leaving a gay-themed party or event. I trust I’d be there with my husband, and if prior experience is any indication, we’d both feel like leaving well before midnight, just the two of us. At least one of us will be sober enough to drive; neither will be so drunk as to be an embarrassment. So nothing to hide or be ashamed of there.

But others aren’t so lucky: Videotape of someone leaving a gay bar can mean the end of a career. It can mean the end of a reputation, even if the taper didn’t intend it that way. It can mean blackmail, broken family relationships, and profound hurt to all involved. As ReputationDefender might put it,these people may feel “hurt, ashamed, or ‘invaded.’”

You’re playing hardball, Mrs. Parascandola. You’ll pardon me, then, if I am not so concerned about your precious reputation.

I only have a couple of loose ends to tie up before I go.

Is the information from my post “outdated,” as the complaint declares? Certainly — in the sense that it relates to an event from 2005. But in this it’s no different from any other current event of that year, and I’m not about to take down the entire archive.

Is the information inaccurate? Perhaps. But as far as I know, my sources — the Washington City Paper and the Washington Blade — have printed no retractions of their stories.

In a letter to the police, the Parascandolas have openly admitted the frequent nature of their citizen complaints:

In a Nov. 23, 2004 letter to the ABC Board declaring their protest against Remington’s, the Parascandolas charge that Remington’s “plays loud dance music late at night, which can be heard in nearby residences.” The letter states that the Remington’s owner and employees “have been unresponsive to our numerous requests to address the noise problem and our attempts to work with them to achieve a resolution.”

Can I prove that every anonymous complaint came from them? No. But one establishment gets a flood of complaints, and they just happen to live next to it. Then they go to another neighborhood, and over there, the place that they live next to also starts getting a flood of complaints, some of which are signed, and some of which are not. Gee… I wonder… Meanwhile, here is the response from police and neighbors, back when the Parascandolas lived on Capitol Hill:

Sgt. Brett Parson, commander of the police Gay & Lesbian Liaison Union, said members of the GLLU and officers from the First Police District, which serves Capitol Hill, became familiar with the Parascandolas due to their frequent calls to police about Remington’s.

“I’m not aware of any time when we found any violation of the law,” Parson said.

The Parascandolas’ house is one of four attached town houses located in the “L” shaped alley that separates the houses from Remington’s and other businesses on Pennsylvania Ave, SE. The alley ends at the wall of the Remington’s building, which protrudes into the alley and abuts the property of the house next to the Parascandolas.

In telephone interviews, the owner-occupants of the three houses in the alley owned by residents other than the Parascandolas said they have not been bothered by noise from Remington’s.

On re-examining the issue — which I confess I’d all but forgotten in the year and a half that has elapsed — I find that the Blade has acknowledged only one mistake in its original story: The Parascandolas did not physically enter the gay and lesbian party at Cada Vez. The newspaper stands by its other claims, including that they videotaped the patrons outside. The most charitable thing I can say is that the Parascandolas dispute these claims. Now that I’ve linked to that letter as well, I consider that my responsibilities to reconsider are fulfilled.

So there you have it. I warned you about the irony meter.

Trackback URI |