Have you ever been accused of something you didn’t do? And been accused by someone who is a direct competitor who is attempting to wreck your business and your reputation with a loud and frivolous lawsuit? And have it play out publicly all over the internet and local media?
Well, on Tuesday afternoon I became the accused and now under the microscope of live social media, many of you have made it here to my blog to read “what Nestor thinks” about this crazy attack on the integrity and reputation of WNST.net, a company I’ve spent 27 years of my life building to serve Baltimore sports fans just like you and me with quality information, analysis and community spirit and engagement.
In case you haven’t heard, WNST.net is under attack, getting served what we deem to be a baseless lawsuit in Baltimore City Circuit Court regarding Jennifer Royle, an employee of my two main competitors over the last year. Her allegations are so outrageous that my mind can’t get around how these baseless accusations could ever enter a court of law but such is the state of the American judicial system.
“Anybody can sue anybody for anything” is more than just a credo I’ve heard or read elsewhere. Today, I learned that this is sadly very true.
I just hope that “presumed innocence” is implied and applied but I know better. That’s not the way the internet works in 2011 for people in my line of work.
So, in an effort to give our side of the story – and I’m sure we’ll have our day in court – this is my attempt to answer all of the questions I’m being asked by the tens of thousands of concerned friends, fans and members of the Baltimore sports community.
By the way, none of this is new or a big secret. Everything I will write below is easily searched and verified on the internet. All of this information is quite public because we serve the community.
My attorney, Steven L. Miles, has been addressing this myriad of crazy claims ever since I was issued a warning shot six weeks ago from Jennifer Royle and then provided many inquiries and opportunities to “settle” this lawsuit – meaning WNST.net writes Royle a check with a lot of zeros — without the public embarrassment of having to write a blog like this to defend the invisible. If I just paid her, we could “make this go away.”
Meanwhile, her attorney, who works for my old landlord during my radio career in the 1990’s at Law Offices of Michael Hodes, has declined to provide a shred of evidence that support many of these outrageous claims and allegations.
If you keep up with Royle’s running soap opera on her Twitter and Facebook pages, not to mention her now-defunct blog at MASNSports.com, you’ll see that she’s far more “engaged” with her readers, fans, followers and detractors via vitriol than anything you’ll ever read on the comment boards at WNST.net or anywhere in our social media space, which is by far the largest in the state of Maryland for local sports.
When you’ve been doing this as long as I have – 27 years serving Baltimore sports fans with honest information they can trust – you learn to have “skin like an armadillo.” That was Rex Ryan’s famous line and it’s never been more true than today.
When you are a public figure and give your opinion for a living, anonymous people write and say mean things about you. People say awful, hurtful things and prejudge. Some people – the real cowards – take to the internet and spew filth of all kinds in every direction. As a person who has been truly victimized on more occasions than I care to admit over my last 20 years on Baltimore radio long before there were message boards or comments under blogs, I understand the nature of being a public figure who speaks his mind in Baltimore opining about sports business, media and the community.
It’s a small club, those of this who do this for a living in 2011. And it’s an even smaller club for Baltimore people who own their own multimedia conglomerate and trade off of their integrity. (As a matter of fact, I’m the only member of that club.)
And as many amateurs out there who are writing blogs and opining oft-times loudly and erroneously, what sets WNST.net apart is its legacy as a place of open communication, honest reporting, fair news judgment and integrity in everything we do – from how our listeners, readers, friends, followers, sponsors have reacted as we’ve grown into the largest online sports web and media community in the region per any measurement you’d care to take from Twitter to Facebook, from Google Analytics to Alexa, from text subscribers to e-newspaper subscribers.
You can search anywhere on the internet you like and you will not find a shred of evidence that we’ve ever said or done anything more than tell the truth about her journalism skills and her outlandish behavior
