December 30th

William Parker (Managing Editor)
The Newspaper's name and address is withdrawn. It is an "established" national newspaper.

Parker,

My delay in replying to your evil and poisonous letter of 13th December is due to sicknes. At least Mr. Kelvin MacKenzie had the decency to write to me, saying your comments should not have been made.

The contents of your letter reveal you to be probably one of the cruellest and wickedest specimens of the human race.

You had been informed of my devotion to the late Robert Maxwell and were therefore more than fully aware of my status as a bereaved party and someone suffering grief.

Armed with this knowledge your second paragraph displayed hypocrisy of the vilest order on your part, as well as a degree of sadism unequalled in even the most repellant actions cited on the pages of the Marquis de Sade.

You used the work "bully". In the very circumstances in which you wrote to me, you showed yourself to be one thousand times more of a bully than the late gentleman of whom you spoke so much dastardly ill with such uparalled and unnecessary vicious spite and vitriol.

In case you do not posess a dictionary, allow me to tell you precisely what a bully is.

A bully is a person who wilfully hurts someone who is powerless to hit back and who does so unprovoked. A bully kicks his victim who lies helpless and bleeding in the gutter and who is too weak to retaliate. Flashman was such a man. He roasted the backside of a frail boy half his size, knowing the smaller boy could not defend himself.

A man who writes vitriol to a crecently bereaved woman, dragging the beloved memory of the man she revered, through the mud and on top of that, having the nerve to tell that woman to choose her friends more carefully, is far more than a bully. He is a professional sadistic torturer, the kind of man who would ram a carving knife into a sleeping dog for kicks, the kind of man who would outshine Ivan the Terrible, Caligula and Sadam.

I knew Robert Maxwell for twenty five years. He saved my life when I was dangerously ill. I lived in his house rent-free for one year and I also worked for him for a period of time. While I am prepared to admit that he sometimes had a tendency to be a bit bossy (in that he always got people out of bed before 11am), he was most certainly not a bully in any sense of the word. In fact he was one of the kindest men I have ever met in my life. In addition he helped save us from the shackels of Nazism and probably what you find most repellent about him is that he started with less than little man like you and got further.

As for your accusation that he was a "thief", this is so utterly ridiculous that I don't think anyone could possible take you seriously. He borrowed the funds due to the recession and national emergency. Had the recession ended in his life time, he would have most certainly repayed them as he did on countless occasions in the past. As for your bizarre remark that he "wrecked the live of countless people" I advise you to look at yourself, Parker, and to the infinite misery that you have so cruelly inflicted on me.

You probably are not well educated enough to have heard of a Russian writer called Turgeniev but his words stand in my mind: "if you have a vice, be sure to speak of that vice in others in order that others may see you to be without vice".

Examine your own soul, Parker if you've got the guts. You are an evil, bldgeoning, blustering bully, a sadist and the foulest order of coward. Those who inflict pain on the innocent are always paid back in kind in the end and you are not too lofty to be exempt from that law of nature.

What I am really trying to say in short in this lengthy letter is that you are rotten to the core, you're a festering disgrace to the very ethics of journalism and to your country - and last but not least, you stink.

Dictated by Miss Berry and signed in her absence