Bob Ellis, meet Jason Berry, the man formerly known as Ashe Dambala. He'll take you up on that coffee and has a few questions for you.
Berry decided to dispense with pseudonym for this news story; the anonymity wouldn't last anyway, he said. Berry said he's never hidden his identity out of fear, but as a way to encourage dialogue about corruption in a city where few problems are addressed head-on.
He is not related to the other local writer named Jason Berry, who wrote "Lead Us Not Into Temptation, " "Up From the Cradle of Jazz" and other books.
Berry, the man behind the American Zombie blog, works for an information technology company. He also co-directed a documentary on the pre-Katrina woes of New Orleans public schools, called "Left Behind." He calls himself Dambala, he said, after a snake god -- one mucking around in the snake pit that is City Hall.
Ellis said he intended to sue his accuser for libel, but needed to confirm his identity first. The whole dust-up underscores increasing tensions both locally and nationally between no-name bloggers and the targets of their at-times vicious prose and unverified allegations.
Is it going too far to ask if placement on the front page of the Monday Viewpoint edition relies, at least in part, on a story's personal significance to well-connected attorneys like Bob Ellis? I mean compare this to the Uncle Rico scandal which got a couple of front-page runs in the T-P. It dropped every lawyer-politico in the book PLUS it involved Hollywood and football. Somehow this story doesn't quite live up to that standard. Maybe it could go in one of those side blurbs the paper usually reserves for "medium-sized" oil spills, but for the front page, I want to see at least two Saints players and a guy with his girlfriend's corpse in his trunk.
On the other hand, I can kind of see the editor's point in running an above-the-fold double feature of a Zombie story in the right column and an Indian burial ground in the left. But, unlike Walgreens, I'm still not quite ready for Halloween.
Even so, I find it a bit chilling to learn that Mr. Ellis would take these steps against an individual who has basically just been airing out information about city officials and their business relationships and asking valid questions regarding that information. When his information turned out to be faulty or incomplete, he corrected it. In fact, sorting out the truth from the bullshit seemed to me to be the point of the exercise in the first place.
Plus he couldn't have been too far off since we now know that some of his questions are being asked by federal investigators. And other questions of his are also being asked by the Times-Picayune... about Bob Ellis... as recently as this weekend.
Are the feds and the T-P next in line to be sued? Or can we only expect individuals with limited resources to be intimidated in this fashion?
Note: Anonymous sources tell us that T-P reporter Molly Reid put this story together using incomplete and inaccurate quotations from individuals speaking on completely different topics from and well in advance of the matter their words are applied to here. But I guess she didn't use any "vicious prose" so nobody will sue her.
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