Uri Geller
A letter from Uri Geller's lawyer to James Randi.
Geller settles Jackson libel case
Michael Jackson's friend Uri Geller has settled a legal case over tabloid claims the pair wanted to use positive thinking to solve the credit crunch.
Uri Geller and Michael Jackson were close friends
The Sun has issued an apology and full retraction, and agreed to donate to Geller's charitable foundation, said Belfast-based libel lawyer Paul Tweed.
The story included a false claim he contacted Simon Cowell with a plan to halt the economic downturn.
The Sun's apology read: "We now accept that our story was without foundation."
It said: "We wrongly reported that Uri Geller had collaborated with the late Michael Jackson on a recent project."
Mr Geller consulted Mr Tweed, who has successfully represented him in previous libel cases, following an article published last December - six months before Jackson's sudden death.
Discover's apology
May 2009
Uri is absolutely delighted that Discover magazine are to publish the above-noted retraction in response to a complaint filed by his lawyers regarding totally false and defamatory allegations. The retraction and apology reads: "The August 2007 issue of Discover magazine included an article entitled "Whatever happened to Uri Geller?". This article incorrectly reported that the Knesset had branded Mr Geller a disgrace to the State of Israel. We apologize for this error". I am very satisfied with this outcome and vindication of my reputation.
San Francisco Judge dismisses case against Uri Geller
Press Release
Alschuler Grossman
Stein & Kahan LLP
Clarifications of some legal issus
US Ruling makes libel in cyberspace punishable
This article appeared in the New York Times, Dec 18, 2000
Click to read the whole article
Explorologist Ltd v Brian Sapient aka Brian J Cutler
Opposition to the Motion to Dismiss
An apology with a financial five-figure settlement
In my February 4 Computer Chat column, I atempted to express Uri Geller's colourful involvement in the paranormal with what I intended to be an amusing and inofensive wordplay, exchanging "psychotic" for "psychic". I did not intend to suggest that he has any kind of a mental disorder, and I offer my sincere apologies. I do in fact admire his powers, I'll watch his law suit against Nintendo with interest. I shall stick to what I know.
An Apology from James Randi
Randi had to instruct his publishers to place an erratum in his book. The following are the misleading statements which I found in Randi's book.
On page 9: Seven lines from the bottom by using the words "brought to court." this suggested that myself Uri Geller and Shipi Shtrang were physically taken to court, which was not the case. A legal action was brought against me, with the judge accepting on behalf of the court an amount of money sent in anonymously which settled the charge.
Next on page 154: Line 11 - it would have been accurate to say I Uri Geller was dismissed from an officer's training course". There is no evidence or reason to make the suggestion that I was cashiered.
On page 198: Line 24 it should state "charged through the courts, and a settlement was made in favour of the plaintiff."
On page 215: In paragraph 3, reference "f": I Uri Geller was not, technically, "tried in a court of law and convicted" but was charged through the courts, with a settlement being made. The plaintiff in this case had charged that I Uri Geller was performing tricks rather than producing paranormal feats. The judge awarded the plaintiff only the price he had paid for admission to my show.
I shall reproduce for the purpose of clarity, the complete text of the July 1971 article as it appeared in the Jerusalem Post.
Legerdemain ruled Breach of Contract
Beersheba - The Magistrate's Court here yesterday upheld charges that Uri Geller, the self-proclaimed telepathist, was guilty of breach of contract in that he promised to perform feats of telepathy, parapsychology, hypnotism and telekinesis, while in fact he merely employed sleight-of-hand and stage tricks.
Geller was ordered to foot costs of £20 and to repay the plaintiff - Uri Goldstein, a mechanical engineering student at the University of the Negev - the £7.50 Goldstein had paid for a ticket to one of Geller's performances.
The court ruled with the plaintiff that Geller's performance - in contrast to his advertised promises - constituted a breach of the contract defined by the purchase of a ticket to the performance.
An excerpt from Uri Geller Magician or Mystic by Jonathan Margolis (Time magazine's European correspondent)
Published in the UK by Orion Books (1999) in the USA by Welcome Rain (2000).Accordingly, perhaps Uri began from the late Seventies to rely on legal muscle rather than any psychic power to pursue his fervent desire not to be, as he saw it, cheated or defamed. He even became something of a law junkie.Through an ever expanding file of legal cases against his perceived enemies, he gathered a team of committed lawyers in the US and Britain, who understand him and have become wise counsel to him in both the legal and the personal sense. In the USA, Richard Winelander, a Baltimore attorney, took over the Geller file by accident when an ex-colleague, Don Katz, was disbarred. 'I'm a criminal attorney,' said Winelander. 'I don't even believe witnesses. But I believe strongly in Uri. He's a genius, and he's my buddy. He managed to stop me smoking fifty a day, and the spoon-bending is real. It is totally unbelievable.'In New York his attorney and friend Robert Fogelnest keeps an eye on everything that is written and said about Uri Geller. Robert Fogelnest is immediate past President of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and lectures on courtroom skills with a nationally famous Wyoming trial lawyer, Gerry Spence.In London, Uri's barrister is the eminent Q C, Jonathan Caplan, another classic high-flyer - and strong believer in the paranormal and UFOs. His solicitor in Britain is Gordon Hausmann, a fluent Hungarian and Hebrew speaker who is married to an Israeli and has been involved in UK trials of anti-Israeli terrorists. In Europe, a Zurich advocate, Ulrich Kohli, who is also a Swiss Army lieutenant-colonel and a thriller writer, looks after Uri's interests. Another close Geller adviser is a retired Federal Judge in Santa Barbara, California, Lee Holden who, like a lot of lawyers, was highly sceptical of Uri when he first met him, but now credits him with being 'one hundred per cent real' - and says his life changed dramatically by adopting Uri's positive thinking techniques. It is perhaps unsurprising, given such a range of family friends in the law and a father so fascinated by law, that Daniel Geller, at just 17 and a prefect at his private school near Reading, currently hopes to make his career as a European commercial lawyer.The important thing about Uri's cases as far as 'the big picture' is concerned is that none have involved proof or disproof of the paranormal, and almost all have involved James Randi's excitable turn of phrase, In 1990, he sued Randi and a Japanese publisher for Randi's claim in a Japanese magazine that Dr Wilbur Franklin of Kent State University committed suicide because he was so ashamed when Randi discredited Geller. In fact, Franklin had died of natural causes. Randi was ordered by the court in Tokyo to pay half a million yen (�2,500) for the insult while the Japanese publisher settled out of court with a high six-figure sum - in dollars, not yen. Geller successfully sued a newspaper in Hungary, in which Randi had been quoted accusing him and Shipi of being swindlers. Uri explained that he was bringing the case because he was embarrassed that his Hungarian relatives might have read the comments. The newspaper had to publish a retraction and pay damages and costs. Uri sued Randi and CSICOP for a comment in the International Herald Tribune that his 'tricks' were 'the kind of thing that used to be on the back of cereal boxes when I was a kid'. In the US, he sued Timex for featuring a metal-bending performer in an advertisement, claiming this effect was his trademark. In London, Florida and Hawaii, he sued Victor Stenger, a sceptical scientist living in Hawaii, and Prometheus Books for writing falsely that he had been arrested in Israel for misrepresenting himself as a psychic. Uri only regretted not suing Randi in the 1970s for inventing the story of Uri being convicted of a crime.The Timex case failed. In the Prometheus case, over the alleged arrest in Israel, Uri gained a written apology and acknowledgement of error from both the American and British branches of CSICOP. In the States, the Herald Tribune case had to be dropped when his then lawyer Don Katz failed to file on time, while the argument that Randi was an agent of CSICOP was rejected. This led Uri, ironically since he was the plaintiff, into having to pay CSICOP $82,000 as part of a global settlement of all the cases, although in the long run, both CSICOP and Randi seem to have been more damaged than Uri by the six-year legal morass. Randi continues to maintain that he won all the cases Uri brought. A lot of Uri's mis-management of cases was clearly the fault of Katz, his original Baltimore attorney, who seems to have been almost psychotically stressed out when he made an error on an unrelated case for which he was briefly disbarred. Katz's co-counsels' insurers repaid Uri most of what he lost over the case.A case not directly involving Uri, but which would not have happened without him, came to court in 1993. Five years earlier, Randi had referred in an interview to Eldon Byrd being 'in jail as a convicted child molester', Byrd sued in Baltimore, with Winelander as his attorney. At the 1993 trial Randi accused Geller in passing of blackmailing him with a transcript and a tape that appeared to be of Randi having intimate sexual conversations with teenage boys. Randi said in explanation that he had been working on behalf of the telephone company in its attempt to track down a minor who had been making obscene calls to his home. After a discursive trial, the jury found Randi guilty of libel with malice, but awarded no money to Byrd, having discovered that Byrd had a past conviction for possession of pornography. Randi has since repeatedly claimed he won this case too.If Uri Geller's 'semi-retirement' in the USA looks more like a whirl of activity, it has taken a somewhat hyperactive form in Britain too, where he lives in a state of permanent reinvention. He came to Britain when crime and shootings in the USA had made him and Hanna doubt that it was where they wanted to bring up Daniel and Natalie. On an aeroplane he met Clement Freud, a distant relative on his mother's side, then a British MP, who suggested he settle in England. The Gellers needed little persuading.Although Uri gives the impression that over the past fifteen years he has been quiescent, his own account of his activity - prompted, as ever, by Randi and his claims that 'Geller is finished' - belies the idea of retirement. 'In the past ten years,' he said, 'I've written seven books, which have been translated into dozens of languages in thirty-three countries. I am working on five more books. I write eight different columns for magazines and newspapers, including The Times, My website has received as many as 400,000 hits in one day, A full-length motion picture about me by Ken Russell and distributed by Disney was sold to sixty countries in three days at the American Film Market. I have starred in countless TV specials and commercials, been written up in recent months in Newsweek and Sports Illustrated. And the latest Nieman Marcus catalogue in the States uses my name - without having asked me - to advertise a new range of silver cutlery. I don't mean to brag, but it's a damned funny kind of "finished" Poor old "Amazing" Randi continues to imagine things.'
Click here to read the book online for FREE !
Uri meets Randi April 1999 On Monday April 12th 1999, at 9:20 AM New York time, Uri Geller saw James Randi standing with a producer of the American TV program "Inside Edition", outside the cordoned area where magician David Blaine was buried. Uri was standing with his wife, two children and Shipi Shtrang, his brother in law. Shipi who was filming the event on a professional sony video camera. Uri walked over to James Randi, who was just a few feet away, extending his hand in greeting. Randi refused to shake Uri's hand. Uri asked Randi "why aren't you shaking my hand Randi?" In turn, Randi answered "because I hate your guts". The producer looked a bit embarrassed. All this has been captured on video. All of Uri Geller's attorneys have been notified about this interesting and revealing remark.
Marcello Truzzi, Eastern Michigan University, conclusion.
Uri Geller wins Japanese legal action.
Uri Geller wins legal settlement.
Apologies by Montcalm publishing corporation.
Further apologies to Uri Geller in the High Courts
1992 G 395IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE QUEEN'S BENCH DIVISION BETWEEN URI GELLER Plaintiff and PROMETHEUS BOOKS INC PROMETHEUS BOOKS (UK) (a firm) EDDINGTON HOOK LIMITED VICTOR J. STENGER Defendants;
AFFIDAVIT OF MICHAEL HUTCHINSON
AFFIDAVIT OF PAUL KURTZ
It is reported that Mr. Uri Geller and the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of the Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) have now reached by mutual agreement a comprehensive settlement in relation to the last remaining law suits between them. This follows earlier settlement of the action against James Randi and Mr. Geller`s agreement not to pursue the 500,000 Yen award obtained by him against Randi in the courts of Japan. The Japanese publishers who printed Randi's remarks about Uri Geller settled out of court with Uri, paying him an undesclosed very large amount of money, comparable to that which would have been obtained in the American Courts. The settlement reached with CSICOP includes dismissal of the case pending in the English courts against Prometheus Books, Victor Stenger, Paul Kurtz and others. This case was shortly to be set down for trial. Paul Kurtz is the Chairman of CSICOP and the manager of Prometheus Books (Defendants in the English Action). Mr Kurtz and Prometheus have agreed to send a letter confirming that they issued an "errata" in all editions of the book, "Physics and Psychics" since they first learned of the error in 1992, and will ensure that any future edition will not contain those erroneous statements. In an edition of its publication Skeptical Briefs, CSICOP claimed it had incurred Two Hundred and Fifty Thousand Dollars ($250,000) in costs defending the libel actions against it. Another individual defendant claims to have incurred approximately $250,000 in costs defending himself from various libel actions. In June 1992, Kurtz had issued a sworn Affidavit, stating inter alia: Prior to publication [of the book] neither I nor anyone employed by (Prometheus Books, Inc.) were aware that there were any errors in "Physics and Psychics" and I never knew that it contained the words complained of until I heard from the solicitors for the Plaintiff. ...I now understand that it is untrue ... I unreservedly apologize to him both on behalf of myself and the first defendants [Prometheus Books]. Uri Geller stated: I welcome this global settlement of the remaining law suits which arose for the purpose of protecting my name and reputation in various countries where I am well known, against what are now accepted as unjustified attacks. I have accepted Mr. Kurtz` apology, and feel that justice has been done, and my reputation vindicated. My immediate future plans include the forthcoming release of the film inspired by my life story, "Mindbender" directed by Ken Russell and starring Terence Stamp. I have also accepted invitations for television and "live" appearances, and I am currently preparing a TV special with Sir David Frost. Gordon Hausmann, Geller`s principal UK solicitor says: It is sensible for Mr. Geller to settle these disputes, in spite of a strong and compelling legal case, which I believe would have been upheld by the Courts, in order to end protracted litigation in different jurisdictions, and come to an amicable settlement. However Mr Geller continues and will continue to call to account those who defame him. There are a few publications and books that contain inaccurate and libelous statements about Uri Geller, those will eventually be dealt with through the courts. Almost every country has different libel laws and individuals who libeled will have difficulty hiding behind the statute of limitations. In the USA some laws vary from state to state.
Statements
Ruth M. Liebesman Attorney at Law
475 Park Avenue South, Suite 3300, New York, NY 10016, USA
Tel. 212 683 8000. Telecopier. 212 683 9422Statement
We are happy to let people believe or disbelieve as their conscience dictates. Unfortunately, a few people are very threatened by what Uri can do, and do not want people to believe what we know; that what Uri does is real. As a result, some of them are willing to make up almost anything to discredit him. Some of the lies have been beyond reprehensible, many of them have been without any factual basis. But that's where I come in. I protect Uri from the lies.
Richard Winelander Esq.
Litigation and Consultation
Bar Admissions: U.S. Supreme Court; U.S. Courts of Appeal; 3rd; 4th; 11th & D.C. Circuits. U.S. District Court; MD; D.C.Suite 400, 19 East Fayette St., Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21202.
Tel. 410 576 7980. Toll free 1-800 757 2878. Panafax 410 685 5825. Pager 410 471 8272.Statement
After years of being the Legal Guardian of Uri Geller's Psychic Domain, my philosophy as Chief Litigation Counsel has become relatively simple. If a skeptic or any individual defames my client, breaches a contract, or tortiously interferes with Uri's Business relationships, I will act immediately to protect my client's interests, by bringing to bear the full force of the law.
ROBERT FOGELNEST
ATTORNEY AT LAW
SUITE 3300, 475 PARK AVENUE SOUTH, NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10015
TEL (212) 683 8000 * FAX (212) 683 9422
Immediate past President of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL)
