Most of you won’t remember this. It happened in the days of yore, when we had 5-digit user numbers or lower, Keith Olbermann was on MSNBC every night, and Bill O’Reilly was the undisputed king of cable television. Way back then, while George W. Bush was President, O’Reilly didn’t apologize to anybody, he didn’t back down, though he had settled one lawsuit involving a loofah and some falafel. Until, that is, he apologized to me, live, on the air, for something on Daily Kos.
It started in February, 2007, when I wrote a diary entitled Holocaust Denial, Anti-Semitism, and other Daily Kos HATE Meta. The year before, we’d been through yet another mess in Lebanon, and, while criticism of Israel’s policies were then and always are valid, a certain amount of anti-Semitism had gone from creeping in around the edges to stomping around our playground in hobnailed boots, loudly demanding everybody listen. So I wrote that diary, linking and quoting some of the more blatant anti-Semitism on the Big Orange Blog, hoping it might change the atmosphere.
A note here. I’ve always blogged here as “dhonig,” my first initial and last name. Anybody who was around there and cared to figure it out knew exactly who I am, by name, and even by profession. I wasn’t blogging anonymously, not even trying. Not just that, but my business is law, and my name is a definable asset.
I didn’t know what happened until my phone started ringing and my email exploded. Bill O’Reilly did a show in August, 2007, attacking Daily Kos, the entire website, as anti-Semitic. And how did he do that? By posting all the quotes, and attributing them to me. Yup. I was trying to call out a very small minority of Daily Kos users as anti-Semitic, to try to clean up the place. And O’Reilly claimed it stood for everything you could find here, and that I’m the guy who wrote actually uttered them.
What really got me was, he decided to attack me by using a quote that accused Jews of being both greedy and cowardly, more interested in making money than joining our nation's armed services. As Wrote back in 2007:
O'Reilly hit the Powerball Fuck-Up. Why? Well, you figure the odds.
First, how many bloggers use their real name? I use "dhonig," which is not only my first initial and last name, but is also EXACTLY the same as my professional email. How many? Maybe 1 in 1,000? 1 in 10,000? Call it 1 in 5,000, just to pull a number out of the air.
Okay, how many bloggers are also attorneys? better odds there, as we seem to be overrepresented. But how many are also actual litigators, people who's names show up on Westlaw searches on top of cases in Federal Courts of Appeal an the Supreme Court? Perhaps 1 in 500? That seems overly conservative, but let's go with it. Okay, multiply them together. We're already at 1 in 2.5M.
How many Jews blog? Yeah, a lot, but we're less than 2% of the total population. Even if we're represented at double that rate, we're still talking about 3 per hundred, or 1 in 33. We're up to 1 in 8.5M already.
Then it gets really fun. You see, add into consideration the actual statement about Jews that was accredited to me. It had to do with cowardice, unwillingness of Jews to serve their nation. Oops. My father, you see, is an Army vet. My Grandfather was one of the first Americans in Europe during World War I, and my other grandfather was in the Navy in the same war. But it gets better. My stepfather was a veteran of World War II, Korea, AND Vietnam, and now rests at Arlington National Cemetery. How many bloggers can say that? Maybe 1 in 10,000? 1 in 825 BILLION now.
But wait, there's more.
My father-in-law is a Holocaust survivor. That's pretty much a conversation stopper when you call me an anti-Semite, don't you think?
So on August 15, 2007, pretty pissed off, I wrote a diary, Bill O’Reilly Defamed Me. I wrote:
Now it is important to note that I post under my own name, not a pseudonym. I think it is probably also worth noting that I am a litigator, and licensed to practice law in three states and many federal jurisdictions, including Courts of Appeal and the Supreme Court. Not only is the O'Reilly broadcast defamatory, but I actually have the skills and wherewithal to do something about it. Whether I will or not is a different story, and one worth thinking about it.
And you, my friends, encouraged me to take action.
Then, the next night, Keith Olberman got involved. You might remember his show, and the regular series, “Worst Person in the World.” His producers apparently picked up on the Daily Kos story (or one of the many stories that popped up all over the internet about the incident). He described what happened, named O’Reilly “The Worst Person in the World” (for neither the first nor last time), and ended by saying (and I’m paraphrasing):
And here’s the interesting thing, Billo. Mr. Honig is a lawyer, licensed in the three states and the US Supreme Court. And he thinks you defamed him.
That seemed to get some wheels moving. Pretty soon, we got a question — “Would you like Michelle Malkin (remember her? She was one of the right’s earlier Hate Hotties.) to apologize tonight, or would you like Mr. O’Reilly do to it himself his first night back from vacation?
So on Wednesday, September 5, 2007, Bill O’Reilly did something I’d never seen him do before, and have rarely seen him do since. He apologized, live, by name, on the air. On his first day back from vacation. I had the video once, but it’s lost in the haze of the past.
So that’s my Bill O’Reilly Defamed Me story, one I’ve thought of often in the last few days.