Friendly advice for predatory loan cheerleader Montel Williams: you need to take lessons from an aging Communist Party USA member on the fine art of character assassination and innuendo.
If you want to defame somebody, make an accusation that sounds conceivable but can’t be easily refuted. For example, given that WaPo media blogger Erik Wemple‘s wife once doubled as a human pooper scooper, according to his own newspaper, somebody who falsely accused the Wemples of indulging a little scat fetish together in the bedroom would sound credible.
Most importantly, don’t say something that a quick Google check would prove an obvious falsehood. But Williams, who has a running feud with The Mirror doyenne Betsy Rothstein, went on CNN’s Don Lemon‘s program Monday night. After, he went on Twitter and accused The Daily Caller of Breitbarting Trump, namely getting paid by the real estate magnate for favorable coverage.
Maybe he should have Googled “Daily Caller” and “Trump” before saying that. Indeed, Montel Williams would have had better luck lying about The Daily Caller if he had said the website is taking money from opposition researchers for the other top GOP contenders.
TheDC just reported exclusively–and really out of the blue since very few people are talking about lawsuits against Trump–that his Central Park West hotel is being sued for race discrimination by a Jamaican security guard who claims a co-woker told him, “You fucking immigrants are ruining the country.”
That story also disclosed that various outposts of the Trump empire have been sued at least 50 times in federal court for employment discrimination. Somebody looking at the piece could easily conclude that the author spent hours trolling through hundreds of pages of court documents to find the most explosive and incriminating lawsuit possible. All true, except nobody but The Daily Caller was paying him for the effort.
Regardless, payola may be lucrative but it is risky.
If Tucker Carlson was desperate for additional revenue, he could have just used his celebrity status to hawk exorbitant and illegal pay day loans to desperate poor people, many black. But I know from personal experience that Tucker has real integrity and would not do something like that. (Note: I would be really insulted if anybody considered the previous sentence a suck-up attempt. Insulted because if I wanted to suck up to Carlson I am a good enough writer to find better language than a rather generic compliment about integrity.)
But never mind integrity.
Somebody would need to be incredibly scuzzy to leverage his celebrity status into a paid gig trying to convince people that 1300% interest loans are an awesome deal.
Who would do something like that?
Montel Williams come on down!
Last year, New York State forced Williams to stop serving as celebrity spokesman for a payday loan company that charged exorbitant interest. “Using Mr. Williams’s reputation as a trusted celebrity endorser, MoneyMutual marketed loans to struggling consumers with sky-high interest rates – sometimes in excess of 1,300 percent – that trapped New Yorkers in destructive cycles of debt,” said Benjamin M. Lawsky, Superintendent of Financial Services.
The company, Selling Source, agreed to pay a 2.1 million dollar fine and not advertise any usurious products in New York
OK. OK. Men are not angels.
Surely, Williams was apologetic when called on the carpet for his poverty pimping.
Nope, Williams offered two curious defenses.
First his spokesman emphasized that the ex-marine was not personally accused of illegality. True enough but, uh, neither was John Edwards when he cheated on his cancer stricken wife. Secondly, the flack claimed Williams he did not know anything about the company’s business practices.
So he was vouching for a product he had not personally vetted? Indeed.
Outside of New York, Williams is now spokesman for the same company that hooks up desperate poor people with lenders. So he probably does not know their interest rates either or general business practices. Yet, the celebrity C-lister assures folks, “Money Mutual’s installment loan lending network is an online cash source you can trust for finding funds quickly and easily.”
Regardless, if Williams wants more money he would have better luck trying to be a paid spokesman for Donald Trump.
The narcissistic real estate developer is going to need all the help he can get when other journalists take a closer look at all the Trump lawsuits exposed by a publication that Williams stupidly claimed was on his take.