Stephen Leather accused of cyberbullying by fellow thriller writers
The bestselling thriller writer Stephen Leather has been accused of “smearing” and “cyberbullying” two fellow authors in a lengthy online campaign described as “despicable” by one of its alleged victims.
Over the past week, the authors Steve Mosby and Jeremy Duns have each alleged that Leather is behind websites set up to attack them. On 4 January, Mosby blogged about the launch of the site fuckstevemosby.com, which featured an exhaustive collection of the times he swore online. Mosby claims that the site was set up by Leather. Duns, the author of the Paul Dark spy novels, then blogged a lengthy analysis of the reasons why he believes Leather is behind a series of sites abusing him – including the claim that the recently established site fuckjeremyduns.com briefly redirected to Leather’s own site about his character Spider Shepherd.
Sock puppetry and fake reviews: publish and be damned
Read more
Duns accuses Leather of running a campaign against him since 2012, when Duns publicly endorsed a campaign against “sockpuppeting” – the practice of promoting one’s own books online under fake identities. At the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival that year, Leather admitted to creating multiple online profiles, telling the audience: “I’ll go on to several forums, the well-known forums, and post there under my name and under various other names and various other characters.” Duns writes: “I asked Leather on Twitter how he justified deceiving people into buying his books on the say-so of comments they had believed were from genuine fans of his – rather than simply from himself in disguise. In response, Leather quickly blocked me and became personally insulting.”
Duns later interviewed the crime writer Steve Roach about Leather’s online behaviour, after Roach made less than positive remarks about one of Leather’s books. When Nick Cohen wrote about the Roach story in the Observer, Leather complained to the Press Complaints Commission, but his complaint was dismissed.
Advertisement
The anonymous sites set up to attack Duns are intended, Duns writes on his blog, “to simply sling as much mud my way as possible and hope that something sticks, and to make it so that if anyone Googles me – readers, potential readers, publishers, producers, etc – they might be influenced by the fact that apparently lots of people hate me and I am a Terrible Person Who Has Done Lots of Terrible Things … The fact that the accusations are false and in most cases fairly obviously so doesn’t matter much, as there is nothing I can do to take them down (I’ve tried).”
However, Mosby’s discovery that the fuckjeremyduns.com site redirected to one of Leather’s own websites, Duns writes, means that Leather has “left a trail leading right back to his door”.
Sign up to our Bookmarks newsletter
Read more
“It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out what happened here. Stephen Leather set up the site fuckjeremyduns.com to smear me, but by mistake he included a redirect to another of his websites, spidershepherd.com, about his series character Dan ‘Spider’ Shepherd. He quickly realized the goof and so deleted the site he had planned to smear me with, meaning it reverted to the registration page. But Steve Mosby got that screenshot first, when it still redirected,” writes Duns.
“In 2012, I helped bring wider attention to Leather’s sockpuppeting and cyber-bullying. Four years later, Stephen Leather is attacking me and a writer he even shares a publisher with … by sockpuppeting and cyberbullying. I think his behaviour is not just grossly unprofessional but pathetic and really pretty despicable. I can only hope that either his publisher or someone else intervenes to try to persuade him to stop it.
Duns’s blog has received the support of authors including JK Rowling, who, along with Leather, is published by Hachette. “A very disturbing read about a fellow @HachetteUK author,” tweeted Rowling. “If true, this is shameful behaviour.”
