The Burns Letter

Dear Webmaster,
I am writing to let you know that I object to the use of my name in the article at http://www.theuniversalseduction.com/articles/knight.html. What Ms. Knight-Jadcyk says in her brief reference to me is, at best, a distortion and at worst an outright lie.

I am speaking of this sentence, after the links to her many obsessive diatribes about Vincent Bridges: “We already knew from the research of Terri Burns that his publishing credentials were false.”

This sentence barely touches the tip of the iceberg of distortions and personal vendettas that seem to pervade the work and writing in Ms. Knight-Jadczyk, vendettas that most recently have resulted in her (or one of her supporters) sending one of her Vincent-bashing articles which had my name in it, as well as some private e-mails, to the Chancellor at the university where I work, and to the Wisconsin Board of Regents. If not for my other actual research concerns, limited time, and the fact that she seems to have some mental health issues that I do not care to exacerbate, I would have taken legal action against her the first time my name appeared on her public web site.

In any case, my “research” did not show that Vincent’s publishing credentials were false. They showed that he had written far more than he’d claimed to. I’m working for Vincent now editing a book and have done research work for him in the past; if I thought her accusations were true I certainly wouldn’t keep working for him. In fact, Laura finds the notion that I am working for Vincent quite offensive, I’m sure she certainly did everything within her power to prevent our association, and to smear him to any of a number of other people, in the publishing world and out of it.

What Laura has done in the sentence where she mentions me is seize upon the one “credit” problem I did find, from an old bio, and run with it for going onto ten months, while ignoring all “research”–basically, all the rest of what anyone found–that showed Vincent has many publishing credentials.

When I and others - including Vincent himself - provided information about his publications she did not change any of her statements. And now, given the self-contradictory comments that Laura, Ark, “Dame du Lac” (a likely pseudonym for Laura, used in several spam e-mails and Usenet postings) and their followers like Andrew Rowland have made in other places, I should perhaps not be surprised to see that Laura is now using my name in a context that implies I agree with her smear campaign against Vincent Bridges. In fact, I’m appalled by it.

Laura announced in her egroup last July that she planned to “deal” with Vincent by “systematic harassment,” and she has certainly done so. But secondarily, she has harassed those who questioned her harassment. When “Dame du Lac” started posting about me on Usenet and e-mailing the above-mentioned pastiche of articles and e-mails to my bosses here, I was dismayed but not surprised. Her behavior could be (or perhaps, is) a research project in and of itself.

All of this is of course part of a much larger story, but not one I have time to write about at the moment (I leave this Friday morning with a group of students on a field trip and we don’t return until Memorial Day). If it ever happens that you are interested in hearing a different view of the cultish and paranoid world of the Cassiopaeans, or receiving an article about my involvement with Ms. Knight-Jadcyk, please let me know. As soon as I have some free time, likely mid-June, I plan to sit down and write it up, and I would wager the story I have to tell might surprise a few people.

Sincerely,
Teresa Burns
Associate Professor of English
University of Wisconsin–Platteville