Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, the criminologist and author whose exposure of terrorist funding networks inspired a libel suit in England, the subsequent passage of “Rachel’s Law,” designed to protect New York writers from venue-shopping libel tourists, and the Free Speech Protection Act 2009, now before the U.S. Congress, takes sides in the battle over Rogues’ Gallery today in an interview on the web site frontpage.com. “The most recent casualty [of libel tourism],” she writes “is Michael Gross and his intriguing and well researched book Rogue Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money That Made the Metropolitan Museum… The unauthorized book describes among others, a New York socialite Anne E. de la Renta, who serves on the influential boards of trustees New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the New York Public Library. So pernicious are British libel laws, that the mere threat of such suit was enough to kill the book’s sales there and chill its promotion in the U.S. This, as [a] New York Times editorial concluded, ‘is bad for the writer[s] and bad for everyone.'”
UPDATE: Ehrenfeld has also taken up the cause of Rogues’ Gallery at Forbes.com.