Crime novelist tries to ward off Internet attacker

Massachusetts novelist Patricia Cornwell is the first to say that life has been good to her. From small-town beginnings in the mountains of North Carolina, she has gained world fame and wealth beyond her wildest dreams with a string of huge-selling crime thrillers.

But dreams-come-true can have their nightmare side, and now some of the fear a reader finds in Cornwell's books is showing up in her life. She moved three times in three years and now lives near Boston, and she seldom leaves the house without a bodyguard. "I've been stalked before," she said in an interview, "but I never felt there were people who wanted to harm me."

For the past seven years, a man has been filling websites with a relentless stream of vitriolic accusations against Cornwell: that she is a "Jew-hater" who follows Hitler, bribes judges, is conspiring to have him killed, and is under federal investigation. He has made no direct threats, and for a long time Cornwell ignored him. Last month she sued him for libel, hoping to shut him down, and Tuesday a federal judge ordered him to pull his attacks off the Internet.

Celebrities have been criticized, harassed, and harangued before. What is unusual about this case is both the persistence of the person behind the attacks and his use of the Internet, which has allowed him to lash out at his target from beyond the reach of the courts. The case also highlights a dilemma of the Internet age: how to defend against libel when the defamer can so easily hide.

The story began in early 2000, when Cornwell was living in Richmond, Va. She was about to publish "The Last Precinct," her 11th novel about medical examiner Kay Scarpetta, when she learned that Leslie R. Sachs, also of Richmond, was putting stickers on his self-published novel, "The Virginia Ghost Murders," calling it "The must-read gothic mystery that preceded Patricia Cornwell's newest bestseller." In letters to Cornwell's publisher and agent, Sachs -- after reading promotional material for "The Last Precinct" -- accused her of "copying" his ideas and alleged that she "appears to have made use of my plot and storyline." Cornwell sued him for libel in federal court. US District Judge Robert E. Payne ordered Sachs to remove the stickers and stop using her name to promote his book.

Sachs then started a campaign of attacks, using various websites, against Cornwell and those he accuses of conspiring with her against him, including "the infamous rogue judge" Payne, his own former lawyer, the Bush administration, the FBI, the media, unidentified thugs, US corporations, and the legal profession. In his online autobiography, he says he fled to Canada in 2004 to escape "the Patricia Cornwell gang," then settled in Brussels, where he says he lives as "a refugee." As recently as May 10, he tried to write some of his charges into Cornwell's biography on Wikipedia. He has tried to sell his own attack-filled biography of the writer to publishers, then posted it on the Internet. In March he posted a statement that US Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald is investigating Cornwell for fraud, bribery, and extortion, with indictments likely to follow.

Fitzgerald has said there is no such investigation.

A mild sample of Sachs's writings: "Patricia Cornwell, egged on by her lawyers, paid a reported half million dollars to finance a programme to ban, jail, and murder Dr. Sachs, and this criminal scheme was also backed by the Penguin Pearson publishing corporation that sells Cornwell's books. Thus an array of criminal forces -- the Bush gang and US politicians and their allies; Cornwell and her big publishing company, and Jew-hating judges and lawyers taking bribes and getting paid by Cornwell -- all joined in trying to hide the truth about the sleazy Cornwell, and in trying to crush and destroy Dr. Sachs."

Cornwell is not so much afraid of Sachs himself but of others who might believe his accusations and come after her, though that has not occurred. During her interview with a Globe reporter at her lawyer's office in Boston, a bodyguard waited outside the door.

"I'm trying to keep a cap on my anger, because anger makes you sick," she said, "and I don't let myself get hateful because that just poisons you. But when a schoolyard bully punches me in the nose, I'm going to have to hit back. These are insults to my character and my spirit. I am not a bigot. You don't call me a follower of Hitler. You don't say I'm about to go to prison. This is a virus; it replicates like crazy on the Internet."

Cornwell, 50, grew up near Asheville, N.C., and married one of her English professors. She worked as a crime reporter for the Charlotte Observer and in 1981 moved to Richmond. In 1984 she published a biography of Ruth Bell Graham, wife of Billy Graham, who had befriended Cornwell as a child, then she decided to write crime fiction.

Divorced in 1989, she published her first Scarpetta novel, "Postmortem," in 1990. It was a hit, and most of her 22 later books -- 15 of them Scarpetta novels, including "Book of the Dead," coming this fall -- have been huge bestsellers, bringing her millions in advances (one three-book contract was for a reported $25 million). With public attention, not all of it wanted, she moved to a gated community in Richmond. She supported several Republicans politically and became friendly with the first President Bush.

Sachs is not the first to blame Cornwell for his problems. In 1997, Eugene Bennett, an FBI agent, received a 23-year prison sentence in a plot to kidnap and kill his estranged wife, who had acknowledged a lesbian relationship with Cornwell. The year before, Bennett had taken a minister hostage in a Manassas, Va., church, using a fake bomb made of Play-Doh , then tried in vain to entice his wife -- also an FBI agent -- to the church. Bennett pleaded insanity, saying he was driven crazy over his ex-wife's relationship with Cornwell.

In 2001, soured on Richmond, Cornwell sold her property and hit the road. She said "a huge factor" in her leaving was fear of the intensifying vitriol of Leslie Sachs. She had felt stalked before, she said, "but never by anyone this hateful and destructive. I said, 'I'm going somewhere where I can be more anonymous.' " She lived in four states -- "I've been a drifter, trying to find a place that felt like home." Three years ago she moved to the Boston area, where she married her partner, a Jewish woman. The Globe agreed not to name the town she lives in.

Leslie Sachs, 52, grew up in Chicago, graduated from Harvard cum laude in 1975, then earned several other degrees, including a doctorate in religious studies from Catholic University of America. At some point he moved to Richmond. In his 20th Harvard anniversary report, he wrote: "Virginia is a good place in which to be a gentleman of antique sensibilities. And I do feel a part of that lost Jeffersonian world, with a spirituality of warm personal Deism, a love for animals and the countryside, an appreciation for fine personal firearms and the liberties they protect."

He published two books about buying cars, and started his own publisher, Pussycat Press, to distribute his novel, "The Virginia Ghost Murders," in 1998. Cornwell said she had never heard of it before someone told her about the stickers on it mentioning her name.

Though his presence in Belgium is unconfirmed, Sachs responded readily to e-mails.

Asked why Patrick Fitzgerald had signed a letter, filed with the Richmond court, saying Cornwell "is not now, and has not been, a subject or a target of any investigation" by his office, Sachs denounced the US attorney as "a political guy serving the US corporate rulers." Asked a few personal questions, he fired off several bitter rants. "Even if you have to write phoney [sic] and biased articles to keep your job," he wrote, "even if you feel you must kiss up to USA corporate gangsters to remain employed -- why are you taking such sadistic and Heinrich-Himmler-like pleasure in abusing a victim of those criminals?"

Cornwell has two high-powered libel lawyers -- James W. Morris 3d of Richmond and Joan A. Lukey of Boston -- and Sachs has none. Even so, muzzling him may be a tall order. He disdains the US legal system and was not represented in the Richmond court. It is not clear how Judge Norman K. Moon's order could be enforced abroad or on the Internet.

Lukey intends to take Moon's order to Internet service providers and search engines, and ask them to put up a link, so a search that turns up Sachs's allegations will automatically lead to the court order that found them to be false, rather than try to get them to remove Sachs's pages from the search results. Already a Google search using "Patricia Cornwell" turns up news stories and blog comments reflecting her side of the battle.

And she has millions of fans. One wrote, "I hope that the pitiable and embarrassingly inadequate Leslie Sachs will be held fully accountable for the damage he's caused Patricia Cornwell." Even if she can't shut him up, she might be able to drown him out.

David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com.