The following narrative is true and accurate to the events which took place. All images are excerpted and reproduced under Fair Use Guidelines.
In 2017, I completed and published Michael Morris' book, Beyond Valentino. I agreed to put my name on the book as co-author because this was requested by Michael's literary executor. He felt in this way I could address any issues of liability.
All of the websites targeting us were still online and in full force, but I was then confident Michael's work and legacy would be respected and I could not imagine anyone impugning his posthumous book.
By 2017, seven years after Tracy Terhune and David Bret first allied in their online campaign against us and our work, most all of their original content posted on all their various sites could still be found in any search of my name or of my book, Affairs Valentino. Note that these examples below were first posted in 2010 – 2013 and were still on their sites in 2017.
“The Fraud Files” blog had by then been online throughout the entire seven years, with long, personally insulting and defamatory articles I suspected to have been written by Tracy Terhune. In one example, an article was posted claiming our publication of the S. George Ullman memoir was available online for free. This was false because they were only referring to Ullman's 1926 memoir and neglecting to mention that the 1975 George Ullman memoir had never been published. This was the exclusive content of our book. This article was misleading, false information.
Bret continued to carry on conversations with his alias accounts such as a “Mrs. Trellis” and a “Rothley Pillow”, etc., and also created new alias accounts on the Facebook forums and wrote often referencing our deaths.
By 2017, Tracy Terhune had been running my previously personal blog, Affairs Valentino blogspot for five years; with his obvious intent to deceive my web traffic and defame my book and my reputation. In addition to boasting how he was getting a large portion of my web traffic (see previous post) he continued to post religious and Satanic themed images on the homepage to greet anyone Googling my book's title or my name. By 2017, some of these images had been in place for four years such as these:
David Bret consistently linked to and promoted Terhune's blog posts.
By 2017, Facebook fan forums as celebrity tributes were growing in popularity and this presented an opportunity for Terhune and Bret to expand their actions against us and our work. We were blocked from seeing the forums they administrated and our requests to join were rudely refused.
During this time, I was told on many occasions that if my name, Renato's name or the subject of our books was mentioned on the two Facebook forums run by Tracy Terhune, the mention was promptly deleted and often the “offending” member eliminated from the group.
In this regard, “Cindy Martin” became prominent in policing the forums while bragging publicly how she was “instrumental” in having our books removed from sale. The forums they ran became zones, exclusive of us where all of our work was censored and defamed.
By 2017, David Bret faced collection of the damages awarded to me in the defamation lawsuit he lost the previous year. We retained a legal firm in England and they began the process of enforcing the Italian verdict. During this brief time period, Bret most often did not write my name, but instead devised infinite ways to continue to taunt me such as the use of the image of a Kit Kat candy bar, calling me homophobic, his “looney stalker”, etc.
As much as he has since claimed the Court of Asti verdict was dismissed, it has not been over turned or dismissed. There has been no counter suit and no judgment handed down in which he requested a dismissal of the Asti verdict.
The first order of protocol regarding collections was a “pre-sue” financial review to ascertain any and all of Bret's assets. While this process began, Bret continued to mock the lawsuit as he had for two years:
He also began to harass and bully our attorneys. In the excerpted emails below, which he sent to our attorney, he alleges he never received the verdict until I posted it on this website. Bret was served with a summons and given our lawyer's contact information and the court case number. He contacted our lawyers many times and did not realize courts do not pay servers to deliver verdicts. It was always up to him to engage in the lawsuit.
In regards to our lawyers, he continually defamed them calling them frauds. On a blog post he published on November 8, 2015, he made several false statements including a claim we used a “friend” to pose as a lawyer. This is false. He wrote at length expounding on rambling and inaccurate, and most often incoherent, legal information.
Bret claims the UK postal service did not serve him with a summons and all further papers from the court would be returned. This is false because the UK postal service returned the certificate of service to the Court of Asti with a handwritten note from the postal server saying Bret kept the package but refused to sign the receipt.
Page one of the summons he received.
Bret also claims I asked for damages of one million Euros. This is false as I asked for 60,000 in damages and received 30,000 Euros as damages awarded by the court.
Bret continued throughout the process to harass and threaten our legal representatives.
Here the lawyer sends a memo reporting that Bret has contacted a legal oversight organization:
The following are just two of the many e-mails Bret sent to our lawyers which are now public record as they are included the case file.
Because my husband Renato Floris was acting as publisher and spokesman, Bret began to assault his name online and despite the verdict saying he was to remove any mention of us, he did not do so.
Tracy Terhune greeted 2017 with the following image (below) on his deceitful Affairs Valentino blog:
As I knew Terhune was a supporter of Donald Trump, this was confusing. Was he using my blog and book's title to promote his candidate and moving the focus of his defamation from religion to politics? Or was he trying to convince people I was supporting Trump? This was added to his previous thread of Satanic images greeting people googling my book's title, and I guess all of it being tossed into his “Lake of Fire” by Jesus.
By the end of 2017, Bret was about to lie to the court about his assets claiming he had none, “Cindy Martin” was already spreading the malicious lie on those locked Facebook forums that I took advantage of Michael Morris' grieving family to seize control of his book, Tracy Terhune would begin his ageist litany of taglines such as “fan girl fiction”, “child star 72”, etc. while we held hope we could have our truth be known and our work appreciated.
But my online search was in ruins because of their seven years of defamatory posts. The following posts (examples) were found still cached and online by 2017 and represent but a few of the hundreds of posts they made on many social media venues. After working for seventeen years on Affairs Valentino at that point, this was what my reputation was about online by 2017:
I learned quickly that if I did not post every day, their sick images and posts quickly moved up in my online search. When I did fight back and post our defense, they accused me of bullying them. As 2018 began I was more determined than ever to not be silenced and allow their continuing defamation stand as my truth.