Matt Barber’s Liberty Counsel is offering to defend George Alan Rekers against the senseless defamation claim against him! The Miami New Times story on Rekers and his rentboy, says chairman Mathew D. Staver, “was a completely arranged setup,” which, like, duh.
George Alan Rekers Finds Allies In Likeliest of Corners
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Cam
This guy is an attorney? The facts of how he came to hire the guy are irrelevent. If you leave a vile of crack and a pipe on his doorstep and sit out in his bushes, and he opens the door and smokes the crack and you get a picture of him. did you set up the situation? Yes. Does it change the fact that he smoked crack and you have a picture to prove it? No. Nobody would be able to set up Rekers hiring a male prostitute and traveling with him if Rekers hadn’t……hired a male prostitute and traveled with him. He’s just hoping that if he blathers these stupid comments long enough some few people will believe him.
BamBam
YES, YES! HAVE A LAWSUIT! MAKE ALL THE FACTS OF THIS CIRCUS PUBLIC! IT’LL BE SOOOOO ENTERTAINING!
B
No. 1 Cam wrote: “This guy is an attorney? The facts of how he came to hire the guy are irrelevent.”
It might be relevant – articles claimed he found Lucien on rentboy.com and that might not be true. There are several ways a third party could have set Rekers up by either sending Rekers a link and/or an HTML-formated email message that could have misled him. Doing it convincingly would take enough effort to discourage most practical jokers, so while possible, it is really a long shot – Rekers would have to find a “smoking gun” to convince a jury.
To verify this, I just did a quick test, getting to the “send email page” for one rentboy. While I didn’t actually send anything, I copied the URL of that page and used the ‘back’ button to get to my personal home page. Then I deleted all cookies for rentboy.com (so it would lose track of me*). I found that I could go directly to that “send email page” without seeing rentboy.com’s home page and without being asked any questions. There were some images making the intention of the site pretty clear, but many people have “tunnel vision” when looking at web sites and filter out the images and animations as “visual clutter” when using the sites for particular purposes. That could have fooled Rekers, but it would make him look rather dumb to a casual observer (it takes the sort of tunnel vision that caused confusion in the “butterfly ballot” in the 2000 presidential election in Florida).
A much more convincing, but more difficult approach is possible too, based on what is in the page source: you might be able to create a modified page that would delete all the visual hints but still submit the message to rentboy (they could filter out such attempts by looking at the referral header, but not everyone does that). If that were done, Rekers could legitimately be fooled. It is, however, somewhat dependent on what mail client he uses and how well his mail client handles HTML 4.x.
In either case, Lucien would have thought the email came from someone who entered the rentboy site, so Lucien could be telling the truth as far as he knows about how Rekers contacted him when the reality is actually different.
* while deleting cookies usually is adequate, if rentboy tracks IP addresses too in order to determine who accepted their terms of service, the test I did would not have caught that – I’d have had to use a computer at a different location.
WalkderDC
No. 3 · B
No. 1 Cam wrote: “This guy is an attorney? The facts of how he came to hire the guy are irrelevent.”
It might be relevant – articles claimed he found Lucien on rentboy.com and that might not be true. There are several ways a third party could have set Rekers up by either sending Rekers a link and/or an HTML-formated email message that could have misled him. Doing it convincingly would take enough effort to discourage most practical jokers, so while possible, it is really a long shot – Rekers would have to find a “smoking gun” to convince a jury.
_____________________
B, you’ve been defending this guy on a few threads. You need to read the original articles. Rekers ALREADY ADMITTED that he hired him. He first denied, then admitted he knew the boy was a male prostitute. And additionally the boy has said they engaged in “Erotic” activity, and that the only place his profile was up was Rentboy, and that Rekers initial e-mail came to him through that. He also provided the e-mails to the paper. It’s done, Rekers is toast, and I hope he does take it to trial. I would LOVE to have this in the news much longer, and I would LOVE to have all the closeted homophobes become terrified that we actually ARE out there setting them up.
Lanjier
Yea, good luck with that one. I am just sorry it won’t be on Judge Judy: “Are you some kind of nut? Get out of my courtroom. Case dismissed.”
PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS
So wonderful to see these rightwing scumbags so blinded by Gay hate they jump at any chance they feel will harm us. Every single news story since the cavemen wrote on the walls with charcol was generated by a “tip”. Most of these lunatics have at least the common sense to forsee the dozens of skeletons that are gonna be tumbling out of that pathetic piece of shit Reekers hatefilled closet. The more of these scumbags who board the sinking SS Reekers the better…….
M. Mooney
Do note that Miami New Times has now published an audio file of Rekers speaking with a reporter: http://blogs.miaminewtimes.com/riptide/2010/05/rekers_on_the_record.php
He doesn’t seem easy to defend.
B
No. 4 · WalkderDC wrote, “B, you’ve been defending this guy on a few threads. You need to read the original articles. Rekers ALREADY ADMITTED that he hired him. He first denied, then admitted he knew the boy was a male prostitute. And additionally the boy has said they engaged in “Erotic” activity, and that the only place his profile was up was Rentboy, and that Rekers initial e-mail came to him through that.”
First, I haven’t been “defending” him, but rather pointing out that people are jumping to conclusions.
No 7 had the audio tape of Rekers converstation with the reporters (just heard it a few minutes ago). He said next to nothing, claiming to have had surgery, needed someone to go with him, and that he only learned the guy he hired was a male prostitute after they reached Europe. Rekers ignored the reporters comments about penis length and other details. He claimed to have searched for a travel companion using google, but provided no information of the exact search terms (if he even remembers) or what sites he went to. A test I did yesterday indicated that you can get to pages on rentboy.com without answering any “agree to” questions if you have the URL of the page, at least for pages to contact individuals. It’s certainly possible for Google (or some other site) to have given Rekers a link to “Lucien’s” rentboy.com contact page, particularly if he mentioned “travel”.
Rentboy contact pages seem to have pornographic images on them, which looks bad for Rekers, but many people filter out images as “visual cutter” and really don’t see them, particularly if the images look like advertising (one set of guidelines for web sites states that you shouldn’t put important information in a box at the top of a web page the same size and shape as a typical banner ad because users have learned to filter those images out).
So Rekers has a possible excuse. It’s just not a very compelling one. It sounds more like “the dog ate my homework,” but sometimes (not very often) the dog really does eat the homework.
If you listen to the tape, Rekers sounds a bit muddled, kind of slurring his speech a bit. It almost was like he was hitting the bottle in terms of how he sounded, but regardless, I wouldn’t read too much into it. At the start, he didn’t seem to be paying too much attention and was possibly trying to figure out what they wanted to talk to him about (probably assuming it was about something he wrote). He seemed a bit off balance when they asked about his companion, and might have been trying to figure out if that guy had been blabbing.
Given how short the phone call was, he could have reasonably assumed that they were giving up and were not going to write anything.
B
No. 4 · WalkderDC wrote, “B, you’ve been defending this guy on a few threads. You need to read the original articles. Rekers ALREADY ADMITTED that he hired him. He first denied, then admitted he knew the boy was a male prostitute. And additionally the boy has said they engaged in “Erotic” activity, and that the only place his profile was up was Rentboy, and that Rekers initial e-mail came to him through that.”
… I thought I posted a follow up remark and it somehow evaporated. First, I haven’t been defending Rekers, but rather pointing out that some of the inferences people are drawing are false in the logical sense – reasoning errors, just like there were a number of errors in attempts to prove Fermat’s last theorem until a talented mathematician finally produced the first valid proof.
If you listen to the interview (See the link on No 7), Rekers initially was trying to figure out why they were calling (probably thinking it was a question about his “work”). When they asked about “Lucien”, he acted like they were talking about the luggage handler he claimed to have hired. Then when they talked about “Lucien” being a male prostitute, he said he only found out about that after the trip had started. If “Lucien” moonlighted (daylighted?) flipping burgers, you might have gotten a similar response if you called his boss.
Also Rekers speech sounded slurred on the tape. My first impression was that he had been drinking, but there are many other explanations, including just being tired or having woken up after a nap.
It’s also possible that Rekers found a link to “Lucien’s” “send email” page on rentboy.com via his claimed google search (listed either by google or another site), and went to that directly, not noticing the pornographic images as he filled out the form (that may sound unlikely, but in reality many individuals filter out things that look like ads when going about tasks like filling in a form to send web-based email.) If Rekers found such a link, “Lucien” would not be able to tell the difference between that and someone who reached the “send email” page from rentboy.com’s home page.
Regardless, the conversation was so short that Rekers might have thought the reporters had lost interest and decided there was no story there. They didn’t say so, but did cut the conversation short and thanked him for talking to them. It isn’t surprising if Rekers forgot about the phone call until the news article came out.