RIDEAU: THE HYPOCRITICAL LITERARY THIEF
Wilbert Rideau’s memoir, In The Place of Justice (Random House 2010), is astonishing not only for the amount of factual errors and contradictions it contains (all apparently missed by Random House proofreaders), but also for the personal arrogance and hypocrisy he displays throughout the book. For example, on page 141 of the final chapter titled “Heaven,” Rideau writes about his uncertain economic situation shortly after his release from the Louisiana prison system in January 2005:
“I try to do this [fight off depression and be happy], but in the wee hours and at other moments I am overtaken by anxiety over our future. This goes on for months until one day an old friend, Meredith Eicher, invites me to a street concert downtown. Meredith’s mother, Elayn Hunt, was the first female director of corrections in Louisiana, in the 1970s. At the concert, she introduces me to Gary McKenzie, an attorney who specializes in bankruptcy law. Gary offers to file for bankruptcy for me to discharge Judge Ritchie’s $117,000 in court costs. We agree to it. Six months later I’m declared bankrupt and free of debt. I’m now apparently worth about $4,500, which I received as a settlement from Time magazine for the years they gave reprint permission for an essay I wrote for them. I contribute the money to household expenses and sleep better at night.”
I almost fell out my comfortable television-watching chair (paid for with hard-earned money and not Soros Foundation charity) when I read about the Time magazine settlement. Apparently the newsmagazine had permitted an essay written by Rideau years earlier to be reprinted without his permission and the publication amicably settled the matter with him. So we know from Rideau’s own mouth that using someone else’s literary work without their permission or compensation is a journalistic “no-no.”
In two previous posts on this website (here and here) I wrote about how Rideau reprinted one of my award-winning articles, which had been published in The Angolite, the official inmate publication for the Louisiana State Penitentiary, in 1989 in a criminal justice textbook titled The Wall Is Strong which was authored by Rideau, Burk Foster, and Ron Wikberg. Rideau and Wikberg were co-editors of The Angolite at the time and Foster was a criminal justice professor at the University of Southwestern Louisiana in Lafayette. In my June 13, 2010 post titled “Wilbert Rideau: A Problem With Ethics,” I described this literary theft episode as follows:
“S.E. Van Bramer, Widener University (1995) defined the literary term ‘plagiarize’ as ‘to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own: use (a created production) without crediting the source viz to commit literary theft: to present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source’ …
“Days before [Louisiana] Corrections Secretary [C. Paul] Phelps left office in March 1988, Rideau got the corrections secretary to sign a ‘memo’ written on The Angolite stationery granting the convict editor the right to sell, market or use any articles, photos, or materials which had appeared in the magazine during Rideau’s tenure as its editor. Clearly, Phelps did not have any legal or ethical authority to give the famed prison journalist the right to sell or market someone else’s work product for his own benefit. But the fact that Rideau sought, and secured, the ‘permission’ to market and sell other people’s work product was nothing short of literary theft by itself.
“In 1989 a Louisiana criminal justice professor named Burk Foster, along with Wilbert Rideau and Ron Wikberg (The Angolite co-editor who replaced me), released a criminal justice textbook titled The Wall Is Strong. The textbook was an anthology of criminal justice articles that appeared in The Angolite, other state penal publications, and several free world newspapers. Rideau and Wikberg compiled the articles from The Angolite which appeared in the textbook.
“Four of my articles appeared in the textbook without my byline. All other articles in the textbook carried the bylines on the respective authors. One of my articles, “A Prison Tragedy,” appeared in The Angolite in 1979 under my byline. I received the 1980 Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association for the article.
“When I learned that my literary work had been [reprinted] in The Wall Is Strong without my permission and attribution to me, I filed a lawsuit against Burk Foster and Rideau in federal court. I settled the lawsuit against Foster after he gave me a written apology and agreed to remove my four articles from the next printing of the textbook.
“Rideau initially denied that any of the articles had been written by me, but after I produced evidence that the “A Prison Tragedy” article appeared in The Angolite with my byline and I had won the Silver Gavel for it, Rideau conceded I had written that article, although he still refused to credit me with the other three articles.
“In a October 26, 1989 article written by Mark Lambert (‘Prison Editor Says an Error Left Credit Off’) that appeared in the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate, said the use of ‘A Prison Tragedy’ without attribution was an ‘innocent mistake’ that ‘slipped through the cracks’ in the selection process.
“First, Rideau methodically lied to Lambert because there’s no way an Angolite article carrying my byline could have innocently ‘slipped through the cracks’ in the selection process. “A Prison Tragedy’ was one of the most prominent, celebrated articles that appeared in the prison publication and Rideau damn well knew who wrote it when he sent it to Burk Foster.
“Second, Rideau’s comments to Lambert implied that he had a right to include the article for publication in The Wall Is Strong without my permission. That was the same defense he employed, and saw rejected, in federal court—that the Phelps ‘memo’ granted the convict editor exclusive rights to use my work in any manner he saw fit without securing my permission or giving me credit for it.”
The lawsuit was filed under the federal copyright infringement statute. Shortly after the lawsuit was filed U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephen Reidlinger was forced to give Rideau a written reprimand and warning about inappropriate personal contact with either the judge or the court. In typical Rideau fashion, the convict editor had written a personal letter to the Judge in a futile attempt to discredit me and influence the outcome of the case. Later in the lawsuit Reidlinger was forced to impose monetary sanctions against Rideau because he refused to obey the court’s discovery orders. The convict editor believed his prison power went beyond a mere federal court!
Rideau has tried over the years to dismiss the lawsuit as “frivolous.” The Magistrate Judge did not think so. He permitted me to conduct discovery against The New York Times, Random House, and the New Orleans Times Picayune. While Magistrate Judge Reidlinger ultimately dismissed the lawsuit without prejudice, he did so only because there was no copyright law violation because none of the Angolite articles had been copyrighted. The court rejected out of hand Rideau’s use of the Phelps “memo” as a defense and stated that I had raised a viable state law breach of contract claim against Rideau and the Louisiana State Penitentiary for the use of my work without my permission. I did not pursue a state lawsuit because I had made my point and got my articles removed from the textbook because I did not want any association with Rideau.
What Rideau did by reprinting my work without permission, or byline credit, in The Wall Is Strong is far more egregious than what Time magazine did by allowing his essay to be reprinted without his permission or proper compensation.
Bottom line is this: Rideau is a literary thief, and the national media has never called him to account for the unethical theft of my literary work and use in The Wall Is Strong. All the journalism awards and media endorsements from The New York Times and Ted Koppel will not undo Rideau’s knowing and blatant literary theft of my Angolite work product—and for him to boast about his “settlement” against Time magazine for its inappropriate use of his essay is enough to gag the “proverbial maggot.”
