Soering (again) on the Hunt for Respectable Proxies

Has he convinced a prominent German journalist and a world-renowned lawyer to stake their reputations on his word? That won't end well.

As anyone familiar with the case knows, Jens Soering’s go-to strategy is to convince celebrities or prominent professionals to echo his own arguments. Some of Soering’s supporters come up with their own arguments (which Soering gratefully takes on board), but others have released statements on the case which owe an obvious debt to Soering’s own style, which is easy to recognize given the millions of words by Soering currently available online.

Annabel H. confirmed this in the podcast The Soering System: she described it as zuarbeiten — “working towards” someone. Soering routinely sent supporters and journalists “memos” he composed in the third-person about such subjects as DNA or the sock-print, etc. The memos are superficially impersonal: “Soering maintains that X is true. What does the evidence say?”. The target of this zuarbeiten could then pick and choose which arguments of Soering’s they felt like endorsing and make any changes they deemed necessary.

There was often a lively back-and-forth behind the scenes to determine just how far the proxy would be willing to go — either in arguments he himself would make, or in arguments Soering broadcast which might reflect poorly on his supporters. For instance, Soering included a chapter on lynching in Bedford County in his .pdf pamphlet “The Soering Case made Simple” (including photos of actual lynching victims) and suggested that Bedford County’s reverence for the Bedford Boys — a group of local young men who died in World War II — may have prejudiced the entire county against him as a German. This went too far for several of Söring’s Virginia allies, and the chapter was removed from later editions.

There’s nothing wrong with zuarbeiten, every lawyer and PR representative does this. If a proxy is willing to help you make your case, you want to smooth the path as much as possible. As long as the proxy carefully examines the draft and makes appropriate corrections, there is no issue.

But how to find a proxy? Soering once had a wide range to choose from. But few of the prominent celebrities who used to endorse his claims have spoken up recently. John Grisham published a book about wrongful convictions which did not even mention Soering’s name. Amanda Knox publicly retracted her support for Soering’s innocence claims. So he’s been forced to reach out to contacts from many years ago, during the Golden Age of his innocence claims (from the release of “Killing for Love” in 2016 to January 22, 2020). Perhaps these people reached out to him independently, but I think it’s more likely he reached out to them, teasing the prospect of “major revelations” about his case — see my two previous posts.

If I were approached by someone trying to get me to amplify defamatory claims supported by no proof, I would back away nervously while maintaining eye contact. Yet Soering has located two people who seem to be taking these allegations seriously. One of them is a world-famous lawyer. I can’t provide any more information than that at this point. The other is a famous German journalist. This person has published several well-received books and been on every German talk show a thousand times.

I just received a very strange contact and email purporting to be from this famous journalist. They claim to be in the “initial” phase of a project involving Soering, Haysom, and Hammel. The email bears many stylistic and substantive hallmarks of Soering’s intervention, although I don’t think he would have misspelled Annabel H.’s name. The email is so bizarre and amateurish that I’m not sure it actually came from the journalist. It also mentions the same defamatory allegations recently lodged by a member of the Haysom family that the lawyer also amplified. If I can confirm the email is in fact from this person, I will describe it here. You won’t want to miss that!

Of course if you are one of these two people reading this now, I would urge you to avoid publicly associating yourself with defamatory claims, supported by no evidence, put forward a person suffering from mental health issues. Not only is it morally objectionable, it may well be illegal. There’s still time — a few days — to step back from the brink. None of this need ever see the light of day. The ball’s in your court.

Needless to say, if these persons inform me that they intend to continue helping Soering amplify these allegations, all bets are off, and I’ll go into the story in depth right here, or perhaps in a news portal. As Justice Louis Brandeis put it, the best disinfectant is sunlight.