In Defense of Neil Brick, Psychotherapist

The summons was packed into the mailbox of a previous address — two residencies ago, in fact — on a Wednesday afternoon. The hearing was to be on Monday. It was only happenstance that I found out that the organizer of S.M.A.R.T. (Stop Mind-control And Ritual-abuse Today), Neil Brick, was trying to sue me at all.

As the paperwork, aside from being grossly improperly served, was also dated a couple of weeks previous to its delivery, this seemed like a rather underhanded attempt to avoid my replying to the suit. When I eventually had the opportunity to read over the summons, I could see why this may have been the tactic.

The case was weak. In fact, it was non-existent.

“Defamation” was the claim, and many quotes of mine were pulled from internet sources in an attempt to support it. Even quotes that are not mine at all were included in the summons, though Brick and his lawyer apparently felt confident enough in their origin to attribute them to me. Among these quotes are comments that are no longer online at all! As for the quotes that were written by me… I stand by them, they are founded in fact, and they certainly don’t constitute defamation.

Ironically, this all stemmed from a report I wrote about one of Brick’s conferences where I heard him deliver a speech in which he encouraged vigorous debate with skeptics against his position. It was his own failure to successfully do just that which caused him to seek legal remediation — an injunction to prevent my writing my writing about him or his organization — instead.

Here’s how it went:

Having entered the hotel slightly after the opening speaker of S.M.A.R.T.’s twelfth annual Ritual Abuse, Secretive Organizations, and Mind-Control conference began, I was told by a large woman sitting behind the registration table that I would have to wait until I could be properly registered before entering. I took a seat just outside the open door of the conference room where I could observe the full proceedings within. Brick stood at the podium. As I described him later in my subsequent “defamatory” report, he is a “small man in his 50s with a greasy dark curly comb-over, large thick glasses, and a voice that sounds exacly like Elmer Fudd (without the impediment of pronouncing his Rs as Ws).”

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