I am a firm believer that companies that sue critics (whether the critics are journalists, customers, forensic accountants, or otherwise) have something to hide.<\/p>\n
This was the case with Medifast Inc., a multi-level marketing company that sued me (and others) for $270 million<\/a> nearly five years ago. (They suffered a resounding loss against me<\/a>, lost again on appeal<\/a>, and now must pay my substantial attorneys fees… which of course they are claiming are inflated…. disregarding the fact that huge fees are a result of the need to defend against their shady litigation tactics<\/a>.) Medifast didn’t like the fact that I expressed my opinion of its business model and business practices.<\/p>\n Other companies have tried such tactics:<\/p>\n I could go on, but you get the idea.<\/p>\n In an article at TheStreet.com last week, Herb Greenberg reminded us of the lawsuit brought by Hertz against Audit Integrity<\/a> in 2009.\u00a0 Audit Integrity published a report that listed 20 companies it thought had a high risk of filing bankruptcy<\/a>. At the time, Hertz had just posted a $1.2 billion loss for the prior year. And now we see that Hertz needs to restate its financials for 2011, 2012, and 2013<\/a>.<\/p>\n Here’s the takeaway: When companies are threatening, suing, and otherwise acting aggressively to silence critics, expect that there are problems they are trying to hide. For the companies listed above, there are\/were problems with their products, business models, management, or operations. The critics were bringing those problems to light, and we certainly can’t have that!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I am a firm believer that companies that sue critics (whether the critics are journalists, customers, forensic accountants, or otherwise) have something to hide. This was the case with Medifast Inc., a multi-level marketing company that sued me (and others) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[824],"tags":[1768,1129,2451,1682,897,1414],"class_list":["post-13111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-consumer-protection","tag-interoil","tag-mark-shurtleff","tag-medifast-inc","tag-medifast-lawsuit","tag-monavie","tag-timothy-sykes"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Z0e-3pt","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13111"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13111\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n