Freelancer being sued by bankrupt mag to return paycheck

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January 12, 2004

A Freelancer Tale: Paycheck Clears; Suit Demands It Back
By DAVID CARR

The legacy of the Lingua Franca, a literate magazine for academics and like-minded folks that closed in 2001 and went into bankruptcy, lives on, but perhaps not in the way that its contributors may have hoped.

The bankruptcy trustee in charge of the case, Robert Geltzer, has served summons to many freelance writers who collected fees from the magazine when it was in its death throes. The demand: If the fees are not returned, he is threatening to sue.

Joanna Smith Rakoff, a writer who worked as a Web editor and wrote for University Business Daily, an affiliated publication, had her first substantial article for Lingua Franca published just before the magazine folded. Two years later, she has been told to return the money for the work she did. The money is to be directed to "secured" creditors, rather than freelancers, who are the unsecured kind.

Ms. Smith Rakoff, who has written for The New York Times, said she had received a note demanding that her $1,550 fee be returned in 10 days - or else she would be sued and forced to pay the money back. "I feel angry and betrayed," she said. "This thing has taken over my life. I can't afford to pay it and I can't afford not to do anything about it because then there will be a default judgment against me."

Kay Murray, the general counsel at the Authors Guild, an organization that represents the interests of published authors, said she considered the effort to reclaim payments from freelance articles both silly and unprecedented.

"Never in the 10 years that I have been here has a debtor attempted to get money back from writers," she said, pointing out that the sums involved are hardly significant. None of the fees, to her knowledge, were above $5,000.

Ms. Murray said that the lawsuits against the writers were in various stages - some have been filed and answered, while others are just now being served.

"It certainly seems unfair," she said. "These freelancers did the work and were paid the fees that they bargained for. They delivered what was asked of them."

Lingua Franca had a checkered business history - the circulation was about 20,000 at its peak, but had a literary reputation that belied its size. It received a great deal of attention in 1996 when it broke the news that Alan Sokal, a New York University physicist, had hoodwinked a humanities journal into publishing a bogus essay that was a jargon-laden parody of the work of literary theorists.

A call to the Mr. Geltzer, the bankruptcy trustee, was not returned.
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I haven't heard of anything like this before, but it's troubling. Even if an eventual suit gets thrown out, the poor freelancer still has to cough up the money for a lawyer.