Saturday, February 27, 2010

Victim sues victim?

Over at WendyMcElroy.com there's a great piece about a lawsuit Valerie Hunter seems to have launched against Sheryl Stack.
...whenever a lawyer says "it is not about the money," my ears hear "it is all about the money." This cynicism is deepened by the fact that, after the incident, Valerie Hunter allegedly and almost immediately called for people to honor her husband by sending donations to her grandchildren's college fund. In similar circumstances, I've heard of paying funeral costs or hospital bills through donations. But her children are adults responsible for educating their own kids and I do not believe the grandchildren were financially impoverished by the incident. Arguably, the opposite is true.

So...Valerie Hunter creates a furor of bad publicity in order to protect her family from bad publicity. She does not care about the money bit she immediately seeks it through various avenues. (Remember, the lawsuit etc. payoffs will be over-and-above whatever she receives as a settlement for her husband's death from insurance and the IRS, whatever pension or other benefits her husband is due, any fees from interviews or other media including books and movies, money from the Crime Victims Compensation fund, etc.) Meanwhile Sheryl Stack's house has been burned down and she is left with the debts that drove him to the brink of insanity to begin with.

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