“This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice.”
~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

The WPI’s lawsuit against it’s former chief scientist continues to cut its swath of destruction through the heart of the ME/CFS community. Dr. Judy was forced to declare bankruptcy yesterday. She has already spent her retirement on lawyers and now she will lose one, if not both, of her two small condominiums, which one still to be determined by a bankruptcy trustee. And most importantly, she isn’t working on our behalf…

Here’s a letter posted this morning on the Messages of Support for Dr. Judy Mikovits FaceBook page (there are several such pages with hundreds of members):

Dear Judy,
It is beyond me that in this day and age this injustice is allowed. I am not a naive person but I had hoped that the 21st Century would bring a greater justice and compassion to the world.
How can these corrupt people be able to ruin, mentally, physically and personally an innocent and truly good individual?
I am deeply sad.

Me too. It is beyond crazy. A travesty of justice. A misuse of the system. The WPI, a non-profit, spent large amounts of money on lawyers to write hundreds of pages of legal documents, to destroy what was in fact their only resource. To what end? They knew there was nothing to get monetarily. An apology? What a joke. Even if they were right, which they aren’t, what would someone interested in the greater good have done when confronted with the problems that Annette Whittemore was confronted with?

In a nutshell, this is where the case stands. The first judge ruled against Dr. Mikovits in a default judgement because she wouldn’t give up her personal email which contained confidential information on many study participants. Then he recused himself to make sure there was no appearance of impropriety, since he had received significant campaign contributions from Harvey Whittemore, who is under indictment for making illegal political contributions and lying to the FBI, not to mention his other business problems: Ex-business partners: Whittemores owe more than $24M. Of course, Harvey claims to have nothing to do with the WPI. So a new judge was appointed. One would have thought that the opportunity would have been seized to right the wrong and run the case as it should have been run in the first place, but no, the judge decided to continue where the old judge left off, leaving the judgement in place, with a “prove up” hearing scheduled for today, to determine an amount, thus forcing the bankruptcy.

The WPI wants Dr. Mikovits to pay for their loss of donations compared to before she was fired. As if they didn’t cause it all with their own actions!! They didn’t have a fund raiser this year because who would be there? They want back her entire 5 years of salary, during which she was desperately trying to, and in fact did, help their daughter. Plus, they want the entire cost of the research program from inception. Oh, and the punitive multiplier for her “bad behavior” since she was fired! And they want their legal fees, so they don’t have to defraud the community and the NIH to pay their lawyers. Of course Dr. Mikovits has no money…

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, not a peep of anything worthwhile, not a paper, not even a kept up website: Research Studies and Clinical Trials. Just pleas for more money. Perhaps for the CEO’s upcoming defense? Although the piece by Casey Schwartz in the Daily Beast, How Research into Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Turned into an Ugly Fight, had the toned down feel of tight editorial control, it did state that Dr. Mikovits was fired after demanding the commercial lab, VIP Dx, stop selling an unreproducible test.

In July 2011 she told Harvey Whittemore of the potential contamination, she says, and expected that the VIP Dx lab would cease testing patients for the XMRV virus. “I just kept saying, stop it, stop it, stop it. We have to sort this out,” Mikovits says. According to Mikovits, the testing did not stop. And after a tense summer, she was fired in September.

Let’s not forget what this is really about, not some imaginary IP in some old notebooks, but the thousands of bogus tests that were sold, some after they knew they were bogus, some paid for by Medicare?

The fall out from it all? The WPI’s legacy, from an advocate of 20 years, posted to FaceBook last night and republished with permission.

My Opinion: We’ve been ized
~by John Herd

The Whittemores overly self-mesmerized
Their grandiosity so fantasized
Just because of money legitimized?
They expected to be idealized

Constructive input demonized
As sound advocates often minimalized
While many amongst us patronized
And those with differing views were ostracized

Obligations amortized
Stupid actions authorized
Moral integrity compromised
“For the sake of patients” bastardized

Sound PR strategies brutalized
With so much about WPI fictionalized
In fake news coverage televised
Fabrications on the Internet digitalized

Research assets cannibalized
Clinically unvalidated test commercialized
Protecting scientific data criminalized
While Judy Mikovits sat in jail demoralized

Judicial corruption legalized
Their lavish travel and living publicized
Questionable scientific integrity sanitized
As their research director was victimized

The whole view of CFS jeopardized
By the WPI saga being so scandalized
An insult to patients already traumatized
From misinformed views of the illness so hypothesized

All WPI’s books should be scrutinized
With all their records analyzed
If they’ve not yet been sterilized
And financial assets vaporized

From the CFS world they should be exorcised
Because they added to our being even more stigmatized
Let’s face it, we’ve been sodomized
But oh how nicely Annette is accessorized

 

Today’s song: Which Side Are You On? Performed by Natalie Merchant

And a modern version of this classic protest song by Ani Difranco