From: Lawrence Krauss cza. To: "Jeffrey E." <[email protected]>, nancy dahl Cc: Lawrence Krauss Subject: Proposed possible letter to solicitors in Australia Date: Mon, 03 Sep 2018 18:25:28 +0000 Proposed letter.. thoughts? Dear .. In February of this year, the online tabloid BuzzFeed published a defaming story about me (as did one or two other news outlets in Australia that picked up the Buzzfeed story). The story had a significant information that was untrue. BuzzFeed had originally planned to run it last Decembe but pulled the story after I provided them with sufficient counter-evidence for them to hold it. After that they revised some of the details, and added other equally untrue allegations. Be that as it may, the story originated in the complaint of one Melanie Thomson, who claimed to observe me grabbing the breast of a woman during the taking of a selfie at a banquet associated with the Australian Skeptics Convention in November 2016. The individual involved in the alleged groping did not file a complaint, or talk to BuzzFeed, nor did she talk to either Australian National University, where Thomson filed a complaint that was dismissed, or Arizona State University, where it was also dismissed. (I had affiliations with both institutions at the time.). After the dismissal, Ms. Thomson approached several news sources and the only one to bite was BuzzFeed, which began their investigation for the story. After the BuzzFeed story appeared in Feb 2018, ASU put me on leave with pay, and sent a press release out about this. Following that, and the BuzzFeed story itself, all external speaking engagements, including an upcoming lecture tour in Australia, were cancelled, book contracts were cancelled, and my positions on a variety of boards were removed. Ms Thomson has been quite public about her claims, which contain a variety of provable falsehoods. Her central claim, which is not directly disprovable, was to see me grab someone's breast from