Daniela Hillers Hires a Lawyer to Scold Me!

Hillers still refuses to defend her work, but wants me to stop highlighting her mistakes. That's not going to happen.

It’s now been almost 6 months since Daniela Hillers said she would be publishing a book on the Söring case, and almost 6 weeks since she announced on Facebook that it had been “published”. Still no sign of it.

But Hillers has been active behind the scenes hiring a lawyer to scold me! A few days ago I received an Abmahnung / cease and desist letter from Daniela Hillers’ lawyer. It was the least convincing such letter I’ve ever gotten. Hillers’ lawyer does a lot of hemming and hawing about my “false” and “potentially libellous” (ehrbeeinträchtigend) statements about her, but that’s about it. He refers to emails I sent to Die Welt which specifically identified problematic passages from her interview and cited sources showing her statements were false, misleading, or incomplete. According to him, these are all unfounded accusations intended solely to damage Hillers’ reputation.

Yet the lawyer doesn’t single out even one specific statement I made about Hillers which was provably false. Hillers has never responded to my critiques with any evidence or proof to back her claims, whether in private emails to me or publicly on any of her Internet presences. We can now assume she also was unable to furnish any such proof to her own lawyer. Generally, a lawyer sending a cease-and-desist letter will (1) identify a specific statement you made, and then (2) point to evidence or proof that it is, in fact, inaccurate.

Hillers’ lawyer didn’t do that; he just complained about how my arguments violated her honor. Much of the wording in the letter was similar to the vague complaints Hillers makes about people not being interested “in honest dialogue” or using “disrespectful” language — that sort of fluff. Hillers engages in the same tactic as Söring and many of his supporters: She says things which are mistaken, offensive, or both, and then claims to be terribly hurt and surprised when people point out that she’s wrong and that she’s attacking people’s reputations with no proof.

Suck it up, buttercup. When you trash people’s reputations and spew nonsense, people are going to defend themselves and they’re going to defend the truth. If you want to play by Queensberry Rules, write about gummy bears or paella recipes or cat videos. If you wade into something as serious as a double-murder, you better expect people are going to take what you say as seriously as a double-murder deserves. You’re playing with people’s lives, their personal histories, their reputations, their dignity, and their privacy. Get your facts straight or face the consequences.

Now of course she claims she has gotten things right. Again mimicking her language, her lawyer points to the fact that she has conducted “complete and conscientious research” which renders her statements “as provable as they are true”.

How much of this research can be found in the lawyer’s letter?

I laid out all of my sources (actually not all, just enough to prove my point) in this blog post and in my letter to Die Welt. In return, Hillers has promised that she has tons of proof to support every one of her statements. The problem, though, is that it’s apparently super-secret. I’m sure she does have a briefcase stuffed with documents and affidavits proving her assertions, and she dearly wishes she could reveal to us, but for some mysterious reason it must remain secret.

The lawyer clearly knows this is going nowhere. In fact, he didn’t even attach a standard form for me to fill out and promise I won’t repeat the statements, which is usually a routine part of German cease-and-desist letters.

Here we see Hillers ripping a page out of the Söring playbook: Instead of responding directly to good-faith, evidence-based criticisms, she runs to a lawyer.

I’ll tell her what I’ve already told Söring: Ditch the lawyers, that’s a coward’s dodge. Daniela Hillers, I’m happy to debate you anytime, anywhere, in the language of your choosing. What do you say?