What is going on?

Sep 6 2011 in Court Case by Helen

It is with a heavy heart and a troubled conscience that I undertake the writing of this perhaps long overdue post. It has never been my intention to lay bare the details of the lawsuit which was filed against me last year by cyberschool owner Mimi Rothschild, her husband Howard Mandel, and their business, Learning by Grace, but the time has come to respond to her unmitigated and outrageous claims, and to her increasingly threatening and damaging actions against me and many others.

In early 2010, Mimi Rothschild, Howard Mandel, and Learning by Grace filed their original lawsuit against Heather Idoni, a homeschooling mother and a widely respected businesswoman, who published a commentary in her newsletter which criticized the Rothschild-Mandels’ multiple interlinked cyberschools. I did not know Heather personally, but I was aware of her good reputation within the homeschooling community for truthful accuracy in her newsletter, and so, on August 13, 2010 I reported the lawsuit in Home Education Magazine’s news blog, expressing my opinions about Mimi’s business practices and tactics against people such as Heather.

In late fall, 2010 I received an email from Heather stating, in part, that she had received notice of a new filing by Mimi attempting an amended complaint to join me and Home Education Magazine to the lawsuit as defendants. Having been threatened with lawsuits by Mimi many times over the years, I did not take Heather’s warning seriously, primarily because at that time my attention was focused on my father’s failing health. To the best of my knowledge Mimi Rothschild have never followed through with her threats in the past, and I fully expected that she was once again merely playing a game of brinksmanship.

A few weeks later I was notified that Mimi Rothschild, Howard Mandel, and Learning by Grace had, indeed, filed to include me in their lawsuit against Heather Idoni. Turning to friends for advice, I secured attorney John McKay, of Anchorage, Alaska, who in turn made contact with an attorney in the filing state of Pennsylvania, Robert C. Clothier of Fox Rothschild LLP in Philadelphia. Our first step, over protests from Mimi Rothschild’s attorney, was to remove the lawsuit from the jurisdiction of the state of Pennsylvania to the U.S. Federal Court.

The following weeks and months were filled with emails, phone calls, updates, new filings, and all of the legal activities which accompany any lawsuit. What we were piecing together was the truth about what’s been said about Mimi. It still, to this day, jars my sensibilities to review the sheer outrageousness of this situation, and it only got worse the deeper we dug. The Rothschild-Mandels’ penchant for threatening lawsuits against anyone who crossed them had cowed everyone into submission and silence. No reasonable person wants legal action taken against them, and their noisy ongoing threats had allowed the Rothschild-Mandels to function more or less unchallenged for many years.

During the process of moving forward with the lawsuit, there were repeated attempts by Mimi Rothschild to contact and harass our witnesses, while requests for discovery documents were met with either inaction or submissions of thousands of pages of useless and unrelated documentation. Nevertheless, in July we received notice that the plaintiffs were interested in entering negotiations for a settlement, and we responded that we, too, were interested. So, after more exchanges of information and assurances that a settlement was sincerely being sought, my attorney and I traveled from Alaska to Pennsylvania; while Heather traveled from Michigan and her attorney, David Gibbs, came from Florida. The settlement conference was set for August 24, 2011, in the Federal courthouse in Philadelphia.

Long story short, the settlement discussions broke down when the plaintiffs sought the inclusion of a new demand, the removal of a blog post I’d written in 2008 which had never been part of the lawsuit. The day after we left Philadelphia the plaintiffS’ attorney filed a motion seeking leave to withdraw as plaintiff’s counsel, citing irreconcilable differences with his client.

Soon after that Mimi Rothschild began a vituperative series of blog posts railing against me, Heather, and whoever she thought might be connected, supporting, related to or in any way associated with us. The blisteringly written posts would escalate in shrillness and audacity over the next few days, and while she has clearly been editing them in afterthought, her posts are steadily escalating in outrageous rhetoric and unreasonable accusations.

Not content to write abusive posts about the defendants in the lawsuit she’d brought, on September 2 Mimi Rothschild placed a series of phone calls to the owner of the server on which the Home Education Magazine web site was hosted, abusing him verbally and threatening to involve him in the lawsuit unless the Home Education Magazine web site was removed from his server. Taken by surprise at the beginning of a holiday weekend, and shocked by the venomously intimidating threats, the server owner complied and our website was shut down.

Thankfully, we were able to move the Home Education Magazine website to a new server within a couple of hours. We are still resolving serious problems associated with the unexpected move, but the core of our site is running again. The whole incident was a distressing and eye-opening example of how far the plaintiff, Mimi Rothschild, would go in her efforts to compel compliance with her increasingly unreasonable demands. And, true to form, in her blog posts after the shutdown, Mimi has feigned innocence and surprise at the developments she orchestrated.

Mimi now claims that she has filed an antitrust claim alleging that the defendants engaged in a “group boycott” against plaintiffs. And on September 7 she announced that “Ann Zeise Under Investigation for Possible Conspiracy to Restrain Trade.” Many of our readers will recognize our friend Ann Zeise as the owner of one of homeschooling’s premier websites, A to Z Home’s Cool Homeschooling.

We do not know where this strange and unsettling case will go next, but we will keep our readers informed as it progresses. We appreciate your support, prayers, and good wishes for a fair and equitable resolution.

Helen Hegener, publisher
Home Education Magazine

http://homeedmag.com

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