Futter's Folly? Dirty Deed from the Spouse of "Down-with-Free-Speech Cohan"?

Just when you thought William D. Cohan had gone about as far as he could go in worshiping the corrupt disbarred former DA Michael Nifong and disrespecting the innocent, wrongly-accused lacrosse players at Duke, just when you thought he had gone over the top in his Huffington Post piece about free speech going too far when his inadequacies and distortions in THE PRICE OF SILENCE are exposed in one-star reviews on Amazon—just when you think you had seen enough, come the new revelations. 

First, an alert reader has pointed out that several of the few lengthy ***** reviews on Amazon are written by people Cohan thanks in his acknowledgments. Well, we all depend on friends, but some of these friends of WDC obviously were called on after the book began to get serious review, after the early puff pieces had been exhausted. Second, it seems (to judge from the Amazon "Wish List" that WDC's wife ["Deb Futter"] may have gone back, under the alias of D. Retah) and trashed KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor, Jr.’s really admirable 2007 book, UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT. Another of the Cohan camp has already gone back to trash the 2007 book, but having the wife do the dirty work would really be on another level of sleaze and having a wife willing to do the dirty work would be on yet a lower level of sleaze. If D. Retah proves not to be an alias of Deb Futter, wife of WDC, I will apologize, fast! See below:

 From the Amazon reviews of the 2007 UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT--[typo left in]

0 of 13 people found the following review helpful

Terribly written and journalistically unbalanced, May 10, 2014

By 

D. Retah

This review is from: Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case (Paperback)

I do not believe the credentials these writers claim to have-- the book is terribly written and seems not at all jornalistically responsible in that it is so one sided. I think they are utter hacks.

Hershel Parker says:

“Wish List
This list is for: Deb Futter”—I mean, this is what you get when you go to “D. Retah’s” wish list on Amazon--you get the name "Deb Futter"!

As some investigator has pointed out, D. Retah's wish list sends you to the name Deb Futter, the name of the real wife of William D. Cohan, the author of the book on the lacrosse case which Dorothy Rabinowitz in the Wall Street Journal calls dishonest and which many reviewers on Amazon and elsewhere have deplored as contemptible. Deb Futter's husband has recently whined on the HUFFINGTON POST about too much free speech: criticism of his wretched book should be silenced! Would he approve of D. Retah's sneak attack on truly admirable men and fine writers, KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor, Jr. If D. Retah (whoever she is) has any shame, she will delete her contemptible review.

An honest review of the 2007 Until Proven Innocent, mine:

56 of 58 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Richard Brodhead's Moral Meltdown, September 15, 2007

By 

Hershel Parker (Morro Bay, California United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case (Hardcover)

UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT: POLITICAL CORRECTNESS AND THE SHAMEFUL INJUSTICES OF THE DUKE LACROSSE RAPE CASE. UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT is more terrifying than any thriller you will read this year. Stuart Taylor, Jr., and KC Johnson trace what happened when three young men were falsely accused of rape. Rather than being defended by Duke University, they were defamed, threatened with castration, thrown to the rogue prosecutor. Many Duke professors as the "Group of 88" egged on the mob who had begun to harass the lacrosse players. There were almost no heroes at Duke, although a very few professors ultimately spoke out against the rush to judgment which proved to be a rush to the wrong judgment. The women's lacrosse coach Kerstin Kimel is depicted here as the kind of person you wish you had been when you look back at a crisis you lived through. Her decency and bravery shine in this dark book. KC Johnson is another kind of hero: the American professor who sensed that something wrong was going on at Duke and set out to document the events in a blog that ultimately helped turn the tide against the Duke mob. One of the most terrifying sections of this book shows that rather than being punished after the truth was undeniable these professors in the Group of 88 were rewarded with greater control of Duke committees. One of the most exciting sections shows how bloggers became heroes when the national media, including Nancy Grace and the New York Times, had joined the mob. This section gives hope that other national lies will be exposed promptly and exposed repeatedly until the country pays attention. The times have changed for the better in this regard even if the Times has not.
Knowing that Brodhead, the master of sly innuendo, as a literary critic habitually ignored the facts and rushed to judgment, whatever the cost to his victim's reputation (see Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 62 [June 2007] pp. 29-47), I recognized the weakling Taylor and Johnson portray in "Richard Brodhead's Test of Courage": "Confronted with a crisis of epic proportions, with Duke's hard-won reputation at risk, he faced his ultimate test of courage. And in an extraordinary moral meltdown, he threw in his lot with the mob." The only criticism I have of this book is that the publishers should have put "Rape" in quotation marks, since no rape occurred.