HIV Innocence Group Truth

Elizabeth Ely has a penchant for telling lies about me. For the most part I have just ignored her over the years. I have been told by several people who know her personally that she is emotionally and mentally unbalanced. Ms. Ely put her unbalanced state of mind on full display back in June of 2014. Reading those increasingly deranged comments fully supports her colleagues’ assertions that Ms. Ely suffers from some sort of mental pathology. I do not know Ms. Ely personally and have never met her, but from my recent experience with her I can say, without hesitation, that Ms. Ely does have an issue with facts, reality and the meaning of the word integrity.

My recent unfortunate experience with Ms. Ely is my own fault. As a result of Ms. Ely’s continuous public assault on my character, I reached out to her via this post in hopes that we could have a rational and mature conversation. My hope was we would find some common ground, Ms. Ely would see me as a human being and as a result would stop spreading lies about me.  Ms. Ely responded and asked me to be a guest on her podcast, How Positive Are You?. As I reported here, that “interview” for her podcast went over like a fart in a space suit. Ms. Ely would ask leading questions and when my responses were not what she wanted to hear she would contradict me, put words in my mouth and then become belligerent when I would call her out on her behavior. She eventually devolved into calling me a sociopath several times as well as lashing out with emotionally angry and false accusations prompting me to hang up on her.

I will not even attempt to correct all the misinformation, distortions and outright lies in that podcast. However, I do want to highlight something that happened after the podcast was posted that perfectly exemplifies Ms. Ely’s shady, duplicitous nature. When I learned that the podcast was finally on-line, I sent Ms. Ely a personal email notifying her that I had requested membership to the HPAY? Facebook page so that I could directly respond to questions from her listeners. I told her I had made the request under the name Newton DeShong. (This is the name of my pet. I have learned from past experience to keep my real name out of any public dealings I have with the AIDS Denialists whenever possible.) I know Ms. Ely received my personal email alerting her to my request because she replied to that email notifying me that she would not approve my request. However, here is what she posted to the HPAY? Facebook page:

Elizabeth Ely

Yesterday at 1:59pm

“Newton DeShong” has been BLOCKED in his attempt to join this group. I have no doubt that he will try other means to get in. Any suspicious activity will be smacked down fast.

Why would Ms. Ely, who claims to be a woman of integrity, post such a deceitful comment on her HPAY facebook page? Why would she feel the need to deceive her readers with such a duplicitous statement? If I am such a horrible person, why would Ms. Ely have to mislead her readers? I will tell you why; just like the parable of the frog and the scorpion, it is in her nature. It is just one more example of her mental pathology. She is simply wired to lie.

Next I will try to clear up some of the gross mischaracterizations and outright lies being perpetuated by Ms. Ely during this so called interview. I originally told Ms. Ely that I wanted to do this interview to find some common ground as human beings in the hopes that both sides could stop treating each other so poorly. She pretended to agree. We communicated several times over the course of several weeks in writing and on the phone and she acted professional, civil and even friendly at times. Once the interview began however, it became obvious that her mission was to ask leading questions in order to manipulate my answers to support her on issues to which we are diametrically opposed. That is not what I meant by common ground. When I did not bend to her will, she became increasingly agitated, emotional and as I stated above, resorted to unprofessional name calling and baseless accusations.

Because I originally wanted to do this interview to clear up the lies that Ms. Ely was spreading about me, I will start at the end of the interview regarding Christine Maggiore.

Christine Maggiore

About a year ago Ms. Ely posted to the Re-Thinking AIDS facebook page that I called Christine Maggiore on the telephone every day for two weeks after her daughter EJ died and called her a murderer. During the interview Ely refused to admit that she ever wrote that because she is a coward and has neither integrity nor conviction. She also said during the interview that I started my first blog, Dissidents4Dumbees, solely as a vehicle to disparage “a dead mother and her dead baby.”  All of that is complete nonsense and Ely made those accusations with nothing to support them. She claimed that someone had told her the lie about me calling Maggiore on the telephone but she refused to reveal any details or specifics regarding the identity of this mysterious person or how they would be privy to such information. And if Ely and Maggiore were such great friends as Ely claims, then whey would Maggiore not convey this information directly to her? Again I will tell you why; they are all lies.

At the end of the podcast Ms. Ely does accurately report that when I wrote D4D I published a post in which I called Maggiore a baby killer. Unfortunately that is true. I have regretted that for many years although I have never attempted to deny it or hide from it. It was not only a poor choice of words; it was also in very bad taste. I can admit that I made a mistake with such an inflammatory choice of words and I have apologized for those words before and I will do so again now: I am sorry that I ever made such a tasteless and tacky statement. It was wrong and I apologize. Yet I do believe that Christine and her husband Robin Scovill are 100% responsible for the death of their daughter Eliza Jane and I stand by that.

HIV Testing

I find it quite funny that Ms. Ely expected me to discuss HIV testing with her. I also find it hysterical that she is so surprised and snarky about it. Ely wrote:

And we’re not talking about those tests and how misleading they are, even though DeShong is a lab professional who runs diagnostic tests for hospitals and says he is working toward a master’s degree in molecular diagnostics. The tests are “off topic,” he says.

Why would I attempt to discuss this topic with a woman who has no education or experience in this field and yet proudly perpetuates her arrogance of ignorance with statements like this:

The basic fact is there is no reliable test for HIV.

I would never discuss this subject with Ms. Ely for the same reason that I would not walk up to a brick wall and repeatedly slam my head into it hoping to create a window and catch a nice breeze.

Bobby Russell Case

I acquiesced on this subject and told Ms. Ely that I do support Bobby Russell. That is true. I support Mr. Russell’s right to file this lawsuit and to follow it until it comes to whatever conclusion is appropriate. The only issue I ever had with this case was the supposed participation of OMSJ. Bobby Russell told me himself that Baker declined to help him financially. After I reported that fact and the post got a great deal of publicity, Mr. Baker claimed that he had actually donated $100,000 to the case. When I brought up this contradiction to Ms. Ely and wondered why Mr. Baker would then abandon Mr. Russell when a paltry 12 Grand would continue the appeal, Ms. Ely had no plausible response.

Clark Baker & OMSJ

I told Ms. Ely that I was not comfortable discussing the lawsuit between me and Mr. Baker without Mr. Baker present. I also explained that I should not discuss the case while it was still on-going. Despite my protesting Ms. Ely forged ahead and in doing so she proved once again that her arrogance of ignorance is her driving force. Oh, and she is lazy when it comes to preparing for an interview.

First Ms. Ely claimed that the lawsuit was legitimate because I had “hijacked” Mr. Baker’s trademarked name by making it part of the url for my website. I explained to Ms. Ely that the case law was on my side and that it was perfectly legal to incorporate the subject of criticism for a critical website. I tried to explain to her that I was certain about this because I had been deeply involved in this litigation for almost two years. Even though I had already won arbitration and had a Federal judge dismiss the suit, Ms. Ely would not hear of it. Even when I explained that I was represented by two of the top attorneys in this country and explained who they are, Ms. Ely would not believe me. This is arrogance of ignorance.

I explained to Ms. Ely that I was represented by two of the best attorneys in the country. Paul Levy has argued and won cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. Gill Sperlein works with Mark Randazza, arguably the best First Amendment attorney in the country. Because Ms. Ely is smarter than everyone, she continued to argue with me and say that I had never actually won the lawsuit “because it never went to trial.”  She also said some nonsense about the case bouncing between judges. Yeah, Ms. Ely is quite the legal scholar.

The last thing I will mention is about OMSJ’s supposed winning track record. Ms. Ely continued to contradict me when I explained that I had researched and meticulously detailed that Mr. Baker was being less than truthful with his claim that he has been 100% successful. My research proves that 33% of the cases are completely fabricated. Ms. Ely protested but she did not provide even one specific example. She knew this was going to be a big part of the interview so why did she not do her own research and find at least one specific example on my blog where I was wrong and why? Again, she feels that whatever she says is true and there is no need for facts or proof.

This extreme arrogance regarding the law mirrors her arrogance regarding HIV science. In her pathological brain, whatever she believes trumps actual facts by actual experts in both fields. This is just not the way a person with a healthy mind or integrity behaves.

On February 25 I wrote this post detailing Celia Farber’s request for donations to Clark Baker and OMSJ at the ReThinking AIDS facebook page to help with his legal battles. Farber’s post garnered lots of enthusiasm from the dissidents and promises to financially help Mr. Baker with the supposed legal onslaught against him. Here is how Ms. Farber hyperbolically described it:

OMSJ is under heavy heavy fire, meanwhile, from pharma-funded lawsuits and harassment.

They are trying to crush Clark. He can crush right back if he has the money. He needs lawyers to fight back against a barrage of bogus lawsuits.

Of course there is no “barrage of bogus lawsuits” against Baker (although he may be facing some deep shit and have to explain his questionable tactics and practices to multiple agencies, but I can’t discuss that at the moment.)

The legal battles that Mr. Baker is facing are not “pharma-funded” nor are they “harassment”. The only harassment suit is the one Mr. Baker filed against me. And there is no pharma money funding me; my attorneys worked pro-bono.

Nor does Mr. Baker “need lawyers to fight back.” Baker is well insulated with a coterie of attorneys. Baker also has a good friend, David Pardo, who is an attorney and has partnered with Mr. Baker in questionable websites to harass and defame Dr. James Murtagh, which I have discussed here. I believe Mr. Pardo would be glad to help Mr. Baker with his legal battles. (Pardo may even find himself to be a co-defendant at some point regarding those websites.)

I am not sure why Ms. Farber has such trouble telling the truth and why she feels the need to create details that do not exist. It would seem that if she is asking for money for a worthy cause she could do so on the merits of the cause.

Just a few days later Ms. Farber announced that she was moving swiftly toward launching a website dedicated solely to funding Clark Baker and OMSJ:

Celia Ingrid Farber The crowd funding page for OMSJ is underway. Likely to launch Monday.

February 28 at 1:40pm

Then there was no update for almost two weeks. The next time Farber updated the RA dissident crowd she said the site was being held up because they were working on a video. Unfortunately I did not screen grab that update when I read it and by that afternoon the update was gone and so was Farber’s personal facebook page. This seems to be a pattern with Ms. Farber. She gets excited about a project or a cause and hypes it, but nothing becomes of it. I do not know if this is just another example of this pattern or if other factors were involved, but the website has yet to materialize.

So what happened to this Crowd Funding Website that Ms. Farber was so excited about? Perhaps the fact that 9 days after Farber first announced this crowd funding idea the Fifth Circuit Court ruled in my favor and forever ended Mr. Baker’s frivolous lawsuit against me. Perhaps my short post announcing the ruling and detailing the exorbitant amount of money Mr. Baker wasted had some effect. I don’t know. But I do hope this post re-invigorates Ms. Farber and she will launch this site. I for one cannot wait to see if the RA dissident crowd steps up financially to help Mr. Baker. I know that Bobby Russell asked for money and in 8 months has received a whopping $705 from a total of 14 people.

I am dying to see if Mr. Baker has lost all credibility with the RA dissident crowd as he has with the legal community.

Clark Baker tried to steal my First Amendment Rights and my websites on three occasions and he lost all three times. It has cost him at least $200,000 and counting and the humiliation of 3 legal entities: Arbitration, Federal District Court and now the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals which writes:

 While we accept all well-pleaded facts as true and construe the complaint in the light most favorable to the plaintiff, we do not accept “conclusory allegations, unwarranted factual inferences, or legal conclusions” as true.

     Based on a careful review of the record, the parties’ respective briefs, and the relevant district opinion, we conclude that the Rule 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss was properly granted on Baker’s Lanham Act claims. Because the district court’s careful analysis thoroughly explains our reasoning, we need not engage in a redundant analysis simply to reach the same result. We therefore AFFIRM for essentially the same reasons as the district court.

While this ruling exhausts all of Baker’s legal avenues against me, this is still not over. My attorneys are asking the court for fees of over $50,000 just for defending me against his original baseless suit.

I would like to thank my attorneys who worked very hard on this case and did all their work pro bono!

Paul Alan Levy

D. Gill Sperlein

Neal A. Hoffman

Gary Krupkin

These men all believe in Freedom of Speech and answered this Popehat Signal within hours without knowing me just because they believe in the First Amendment! I would not have been able to defend myself without this Dream Team and I can not thank them enough for their hours of hard work and patience while walking me through this stressful and lugubrious process!

As I wrote above, the request to have Clark Baker pay fees in this lawsuit is on-going. If you believe in justice, the First Amendment and want to see Clark Baker held financially responsible for bringing a suit that he knew was frivolous and baseless, please DONATE HERE!

Thank you!

The ruling in the appeal of Sgt David Gutierrez came down February 23. I waited until now to write about the decision because I wanted to see how Clark Baker would spin it. I am actually a little surprised that most of the spin has come from other sources, most notably Henry Bauer and Elizabeth Ely, but I will get to that in a moment.

Mr. Baker’s Personal Spin

I. Mr. Baker only left one comment at each of the major outlets that reported this story. That comment was mostly to brag that OMSJ was responsible for bringing about this appeal. That is true and I reported that fact back in December when oral arguments where heard in this appeal. Baker’s original complaint was of legal incompetence against the defense team because they declined Baker’s offer of assistance. However, Mr. Baker has failed to mention that his accusations of legal incompetence were dismissed as being untrue as I also pointed out via this military document.

“The record clearly rebuts the appellant’s claim that his trial attorneys proceeded without expert assistance. The convening authority appointed an HIV expert to assist the trial defense team, and the expert actively participated in pretrial interviews of the Government’s expert who, as a result of challenges by the defense expert, modified her opinions concerning the likelihood of transmission during various forms of sexual activity in favor of the appellant. A voucher shows payment to the named defense consultant for over 16 hours of consultation and records review. The specific error claimed by the appellant that his trial attorneys proceeded without expert assistance is simply incorrect. Rather, the appellant’s argument is essentially a request to try the case again with a different expert. Having considered the record of trial and the post-trial submissions of counsel, we find that the appellant has failed to meet his burden of showing that his counsel were in any way deficient under the standards of Strickland.”

Although the court dismissed this portion of the appeal request the appeal did go forward on the allegation of legal insufficiency of the evidence. So for that reason, OMSJ can be given credit. However, it must not be glossed over, although Baker and all his Spin Doctors have done so, that the appeal was won on the science and not any obfuscation of the science.

II. The major issue I have with Mr. Baker’s spin is one short sentence in Baker’s Press Release:

Testimony from OMSJ defense experts established that the likelihood of heterosexual HIV transmission is close to non-existent, while the military’s own medical expert admitted that HIV transmission is “unlikely to occur when there is only a 1-in-500 chance of occurrence.”

This is an outright fabrication. There was no “testimony from OMSJ defense experts”. The only evidence considered in the appeal was from the original trial and from oral arguments in the appeal. Don’t forget, as I just wrote above, this appeal came about because Baker’s offer of assistance was declined by the defense attorneys in the original trial. OMSJ’s pseudo-experts did not factor into this appeal or the decision. This is just shameful and one more example of what a fundamentally dishonest person Mr. Baker is.

The Spin Doctors – Ely and Bauer

That brings me to the rest of Baker’s Spin Machine; Elizabeth Ely and Henry Bauer. Ely did an interview with the defense attorney Kevin McDermott on her seldom heard podcast How Positive Are You? Mr. McDermott had some less than flattering comments about the original defense team and he said they put on a poor defense. However, McDermott contradicted his assessment of the original team by saying that they basically had no options. McDermott admitted that there was no way they could win. McDermott said the lower court was never going to overturn the precedents to clear Gutierrez and only the appeal court would do that.

McDermott also contradicted his opinion of the original defense team because he used much of their same strategy in his own oral arguments regarding transmission rates and Viral Load. In his oral argument McDermott quoted from the original transcript. If the original defense was so inept, why did he duplicate much of their strategy and work?

Legal Success Thanks to Science

This is a good place to definitively state that this appeal was a legal victory due to overturning shitty case law and it was all predicated on science. This appeal victory had nothing to do with Baker’s Denialist Strategy that “HIV tests are worthless ” or that “HIV science is incoherent gibberish”. The oral arguments can be heard here and they discuss Viral Load, transmission rates and the fact that HIV is now a chronic manageable disease thanks to HAART. The final decision is here and it is clearly based on transmission rates from HIV expert Donna Sweet and the CDC, footnote #4:

4 We note that Dr. Sweet’s testimony is consistent with information on HIV transmission risk published by the Centers for Disease Control. See Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/policies/law/risk.html (last updated July 1, 2014).

The decision also has this interesting and relevant footnote #3:

3 At the threshold, Appellant contends in his brief that he has never been validly diagnosed with HIV, and submits post-trial affidavits challenging his diagnosis. Appellant did not challenge the fact of his HIV diagnosis at trial, and is not entitled to relitigate an essential fact of the case before this Court, which is limited to reviewing “matters of law.” Article 67(c), UCMJ, 10 U.S.C. § 867(c) (2012).

Although this is a great decision and a big step forward in bringing these laws into the 21st century, it should also be said that David Gutierrez acted irresponsibly, selfishly and with a complete disregard for his sexual partners. Just because the statistic risk of infection may be 1 in 500, that does not mean infection could not happen the first time or every time, for that matter.

Bauer

This last little bit of spin is so ridiculous and over-the-top it should be easily dismissed. However, I thought it would be fun to end on Henry Bauer’s blog post. The title, while completely false and misleading, shows just how prone to hyperbole our favorite Loch Ness hunter can be:

HIV/AIDS Theory Cannot Stand Up In Court

The facts have been crystal clear for a long time, that HIV/AIDS theory is bankrupt and has done and continues to do enormous damage to innumerable people (The Case against HIV). But people cannot be forced to look at or admit facts — except (at least sometimes) in court, where HIV/AIDS experts can be cross-examined and their misguided beliefs exposed as such.

I’ll just leave it at that.