Oh, dear. It looks as if there will be one less pretty face in the shrinking group of stragglers who show up at the semi-annual IBMS Master's Societygatherings, hosted by Mocktor Leonard Coldwell, former b.f.f. of serial scammer Kevin Trudeau. Not that the 2014 T-Day weekend "mega-seminar" attendance in Charlotte, NC (the most recent event as of this writing) was terribly impressive...
...particularly in comparison to the ginormous (or GIN-ormous) crowds that Lenny was able to draw -- mostly by default -- when he was still scamming with Kevin in the Global Information Network (GIN). He still uses this pic for his social media cover photos, though it's doctored a little to make it look like it was purely a LoonyC Chumpions event:
My point is that increasingly, it appears that IMBS-ing U is not doing very well at all. Why, I didn't even see co-founder and Supreme Partner Peter Wink in the pics of this latest event, in contrast to the happy-couple photos that were snapped at the IBMS wingding a year ago:
Maybe Peter was hiding behind the camera for the whole thing (that seems very un-Wink-like, though). Or maybe his wife didn't let him go. Or maybe Peter stayed home to roll up his sleeves and make yet another desperate stab at becoming a New-Wage A-lister instead of just a serial pimp.
Or maybe it has finally dawned on him that surgically attaching himself at the hip to someone like Coldwell was the stupidest move ever in a career filled with questionable moves, although the screen shot above would tend to negate that theory. Maybe he put that shot up to placate Lenny or circumvent any questions or raised eyebrows regarding his seeming absence from the little huddle in Charlotte. Someone please find out if "Captain Winky" (thanks, Kenneth Reimer) was or was not at the IMBS-ing U event and tell me, and I will correct, clarify, or retract as necessary.
Be that as it may, Peter was not the one I had in mind when referring to "one less pretty face." It appears that LoonyC has had a falling out with one of his former trophy girls: the lovely young Liana Werner-Gray, founder of the Earth Diet and author of a book by the same name, and winner of the Miss Earth Australia pageant in 2009... okay, so apparently she wasn't exactly Miss Earth Australia 2009 after all (that was Melinda Heffernan), but she evidently was in the contest. Most of her publicity material reads something like this blurb from the LianaWernerGray.com site:
She was named "Miss Earth Australia" in 2009 by People's Choice, the third largest beauty pageant in the world. During the same competition, she was also awarded "Best in Environmental Speech", "Green Achievers" and the "Innovators Award."
That sort of sounds as if she won the whole shebang, and that is apparently how most people -- myself included -- interpreted it. Maybe it is just a poorly structured sentence. But I am told that the People's Choice thing is sort of the equivalent of Miss Congeniality. Still, it's an honor, and I still think Liana is very pretty.
The girl fight between Ms. Earth Diet and Mr. Bourbon Diet only broke out fairly recently, although I sense that it has been brewing for a long time. Maybe Lenny tried to stick his filthy bourbon-soaked paw up Liana's miniskirt one too many times. Maybe underneath her pretty smile and cheery demeanor she harbored a growing revulsion to Lenny. Or maybe there were some business deals that went sour. I honestly don't know. But until recently, all looked hunky-dory on the surface; Liana was a speaker at the aforementioned tiny IBMS gathering on T-Day weekend (and here's another publicity shot of that).
But something happened... and it seems clear that as of now Liana and Lenny are on the outs, and Lenny has been Facebooking his rage again. (Liana has actually been pretty silent, but then she has more to lose at this point. Lenny has nothing to lose; he has already revealed to the world that he's a nut job.) He chose December 7, the day that Liana had a book signing in his neck of the woods, Charleston, South Carolina, to rage under his own name on the timeline of his friend Sarah Barendse:
I'd take that "served with the official legal documents" thing with few grains of Himalayan pink salt if I were you, though. Lenny's a great one with the bluster about people getting served with legal documents and whatnot. More on that below. (And it's Barnes and NOBLE, you moron, not "Nobel.")
Lenny found other things to fuss about regarding Miss Earth Diet, including something about her snubbing the "taxi cap" service he ordered for her. You'd think that a rich man like Lenny would have sent the very finest private car service for his star speaker -- a stretch limo at the very least. But apparently not.
And Lenny's good and faithful servant, little Amy Chappell King -- who renounced her parents more than two years ago and ran away from home to join the Coldwell circus -- piped in as well.
All things considered, the things Lenny and Amy were going on about seemed quite petty.
Lenny wasn't content to Facebook-fume under his brand name; he did so under one of his favorite fake names as well: Rudi Kauder. He must have truly thought he was writing incognito on this December 7 thread, but as you'll see, I called him out there, and I'm calling him out again here.
Here's more about Loony as Rudi.
And earlier this year he also popped in on one of Omri's Facebook threads:
The thread containing "Rudi's" catty comments disappeared from Sarah's page soon after I called him out; at least, I can't see it any more, and soon after that Sarah posted a message about how she was tired of people posting under fake names. She wrote, "...if you don't have the balls to say what you want to say as yourself then you likely have no business saying it......that goes for everyone."
But Rudi was on a roll, and he waddled right on over to Liana Werner-Gray's public Facebook page. This is also from December 7, 2014:
I would have called him out there as well, but had recently been banned from commenting on Liana's page, and I'll 'splain why in just a moment. Fortunately the intrepid Armza Kimbo stepped in, as did this really cool guy I know named Ron Kaye. As of today (December 16) the whole thread is stillup there on Liana's page. But I wouldn't be too worried about it if I were Liana; it just makes Lenny look stupider.
I know only bits and pieces about some of the conflicts that have been going on, and almost nothing about the part that directly involves Lenny, though I can probably make a pretty educated guess. The conflict that I do know about involves Sarah Barendse, who had a complaint about Liana's Earth Diet "coaching" scheme. And I actually spoke up for Sarah on Facebook. Here is the link to my comment(and here is a link to the main thread). Believe me, my participation raised a few eyebrows. Some folks were justifiably confused. How could I be so anti-Lenny and yet seemingly pro-Sarah on this one, given the close friendship and business relationship between Sarah and Lenny?
It's simple. I was seeing things through the filter of my own years of observation, and I've seen numerous cases of other people being misled or actually screwed by similar "coaching" schemes. I have also seen many cases of people -- men as well as women -- who became insufferable divas after reaching a certain level of New-Wage stardom, forgetting their friends and business partners who helped and supported them on the way up the ladder. Rhonda Byrne (The Secret), anyone? (Closer to home (since I once knew him personally): Joe "Mr. Fire" Vitale, anyone?)
Accordingly my very first thought was that Sarah could possibly have a legitimate gripe about Liana's Earth Diet Coach scheme, details of which are here -- and possibly about Liana's behavior as well. And so I wrote a supportive comment on Sarah's Facebook timeline and even nosed in on related threads on one of Liana's Facebook pages. My comments were quickly deleted from Liana's page, and I was blocked from further participation.
It's no news to me that Sarah has been an enabler of Coldwell for more than two years, and she and I have had our conflicts as a result. But we are civil to each other these days, and notwithstanding any issues we may have with each other, she did speak up on my behalf when Loony was accusing me of killing his dog. So there's that. On the pages where she has admin authority, she also deleted some of Lenny's posts that were endangering me because he posted my address and cell phone number. I'm sure Lenny was not happy about that.
Notwithstanding the above, I see now that I may very well have stuck my nose in the controversy prematurely, before I fully realized that Lenny might actually be behind a lot of the agitation. I am a little slow on the uptake at times. But I did not see the Loony posts until after I spoke up for Sarah. Even so, I'm not retracting my semi-supportive statement of Sarah. It is possible that she and some of the other prospective "coaches" may have had a legitimate gripe; I simply don't know. That's between these individuals and Liana. I will say this: even Sarah has since written that many of the Earth Diet Coaches' pages seem to be up and running, though she insinuates that there are still some issues with people who want a refund of the $399 fee that they paid to become part of the coaching program.
Sarah explained on her blog post that after some back-and-forth, she got her $399 back, so it would seem that in her case, the issue probably isn't lawsuit fodder. In her original blog post she also wrote that she has an issue with Liana not paying her for social media and graphic design work she did for Liana -- but again, that is between the two of them and isn't necessarily lawsuit-worthy at this point.
But even so, it appears that Lenny is waving around lawsuit threats, because... well, that's what he does. For any and everything. In this case it's a recipe for comical disaster if I ever saw one. If anyone does have a legitimate legal issue with Liana's coaching scheme or with her, Lenny is only messing things up for them if they get at all involved with his dramas.
Many of you may remember what happened -- or didn't happen -- with those "class action suits" against GIN and Kevin Trudeau, which Lenny was supposedly orchestrating back in 2012. He totally hosed it for any potential plaintiffs who eagerly and hopefully boarded his scamtrain, and possibly he hosed it for anyone else (other than the government) who may have had a valid legal case against Katie. But it was no skin off of Lenny's back: more than likely he grabbed hundreds if not thousands of names for his mailing list. And he was able to make himself look like a hero, for a while anyway, to no telling how many shell-shocked ex-GIN members. (I wrote a little bit about that on my first Lenny post in May 2012.)
So the big story here is not about Sarah and the other Earth Diet coaches or would-be coaches. That was only my portal to getting marginally involved in some Facebook kerfuffles, foolishly or otherwise. The big story is that Lenny now seems to be on the warpath against Liana, bound and determined to "expose" all of his former promotional partner's alleged lies and deceptions. The entertainment value in that alone is enormous, since any missteps Liana may have made pale in comparison to Lenny's blunders, lies, and worse. While we're waiting for the popcorn to finish popping, let's snack on a little bit of perspective.
Putting it all in context
It's a given that in general, New-Wage coaching/affiliate schemes often over-promise and under-deliver. At the risk of overstating the blatantly obvious, a "coach" of this sort is little more than a brand ambassador, and "coaches" have to march to the beat of the brand. I am reasonably certain that very few can ever really quit their day jobs, if they're lucky enough to have one of those -- whether they are an Earth Diet "coach" or an Access Consciousness "facilitator" or a "life coach" through Kevin Trudeau buddy Coral Thomas Grant's "Secrets to Life Coaching" scheme, or for that matter, a "certified" IBMS Coach (which will set you back many thousands of dollars for a basically worthless "certification"), or even if they become involved in a boiler-room (in this case, Prosper Inc.) scheme like Joe Vitale's "Miracles Coaching." (What... you didn't really think Joe does the actual coaching himself, did you?)
As I noted above, I don't even have to know much about Liana -- and I really don't know much about her -- to be pretty certain that any deceptions she may have committed, either on her own or at the behest of publicists, agents, publishers, image consultants, etc., are small potatoes compared to the whoppers that Coldwell has been telling for decades. And for that matter, the money that any of the prospective Earth Diet coaches may have spent to join the team is trivial in comparison to the many thousands you'd have to spend to be one of Coldwell's IBMS "coaches." (Yo, Dr. Tom, you are truly a sucker.)
But back to Liana. I'll admit that I never really bought her story about curing herself of a precancerous throat tumor. She goes into some detail about her health problems in her book, but those deets are still something you pretty much have to take on faith. Beyond that, though, I have no particular objection to her Earth Diet message or her cookbook, which was recently picked up by major New-Wage publisher Hay House.
If you are a New-Wage author/speaker/guru/content provider, being picked up by Hay House is a very big deal, so from a purely marketing and platform-expansion standpoint it is quite an impressive accomplishment, if you're inclined to be impressed by such things. But since Hay House has also published the works of imaginary-friends scampire founders Esther and (the late) Jerry Hicks of Abraham-Hicks fame, as well as numerous other New-Wage gurus whom I have snarked about on this blog (like this clown), I think that the Hay House bar for integrity and honesty in their authors is set pretty low. Truth, in other words, isn't a priority at Hay House; marketability is. I get that. Fair enough. Hay House is a bidness, and exists to make money.
Apropos of the above, it seems that little Lenny is trying to give Queen Louise a run for her money regarding the "true causes" of various diseases. Louise, as many of you may know, earned her original fame decades ago by publishing a list of physical diseases and what she opined were their true emotional/spiritual causes, along with affirmations -- or "new thought patterns" -- to correct the disease in question. The list was first distributed via a booklet called Heal Your Body, which in 1984 was expanded into the perennial New-Wage/McSpirituality/alt-health bestseller You Can Heal Your Life.
Flash forward to Lenny on Facebook, December 12, 2014:
Compare to this (and here's the link to the article from which I took the screen shot):
I wonder if it is just coincidence that Lenny is currently posting about the specific emotional "causes" of a specific type of cancer, or if it is just another sneaky way of trying to steal a little thunder from Liana through attempting to steal thunder from her famous publisher. Or maybe that's too subtle for Lenny's little mind. I dunno.
Whatever you might think of Louise Hay's list of diseases and the emotional/spiritual causes (and the "new thought patterns" to help heal them), there's no denying that she has been much, MUCH more successful over the years than Lenny. (And interestingly but not surprisingly, caged Kevin Trudeau has been flogging Louise's work via his Facebook fan page, e.g., on this December 13, 2014 thread, and on this December 5 thread, on which he also flogs Abe-Hicks and Rhonda Byrne's infofrauducts, among many others.)
But I digress. Even as my main objection to Liana is not her Earth Diet message, it is not her Hay House affiliation either. My big objection is and always has been to her alliance with Leonard Coldwell. I mean... ugh.
Omri seemed to sum it up very well, back in January 2013.
But there's a larger context to all of this too. Decades of observing the New-Wage/selfish-help/McSpirituality/alt-health industries -- which have increasingly become part of that larger entity that some of us bloggers call Scamworld (thank you, Salty Droid) -- have convinced me that branding throughout these industries is built almost entirely upon illusion... or to put it more bluntly, on deception, misrepresentation, and bald-faced lying.
Now, if these industries and their gurus billed themselves merely as entertainment and entertainers, this probably wouldn't matter too much, ethically or legally. But when you are clearly in the business of selling people advice on how to live their lives, and you are promising or at least strongly implying that youhave the keys to health/wealth/happiness/emotional healing/spiritual fulfillment -- and you're marketing your own accomplishments and life as "proof" of the validity of your claims -- you should be held to a higher standard of truth than, say, a Hollywood celebutante who looks pretty but acts ugly.
I wrote about this issue here a few years ago; go read it now if you haven't already. I'll wait.
In various ways over the years, I have played on the theme of the sweet little lies that gurus tell about themselves in order to market themselves and their frauducts and flopportunities. (This is one such post, from earlier this year.) If there's one thing I have learned in the eight-plus years that I've been blogging about New-Wage/selfish-help/McSpirituality/alt-health, and the many years before that when I was participating, observing, and later satirizing the gurus and the sub-cultures, it is this: Scamworld gurus and wannabes fluff their resumes. Rare is the one who doesn't.
And they do it not only with exaggerated claims of accomplishments (complete with phony degrees, in many cases), but also, quite often, with a big dramatic backstory about how they came to be a peddler of whatever it is they are peddling. In most cases the details are vague enough, and/or the events of the backstory are far enough removed in time and/or distance, to make verification impossible. Sometimes the stories are totally woo-ish and involve other-wordly entities or miracles from on high, removing them even further from the verification process. Think of Abrascam-Hicks, or of Access Consciousness founder Gary Douglas and his partnership with Rasputin and a few disembodied entities no one ever heard of...
All that is necessary is for the backstory to be wow-worthy in some way -- it has to be, or it wouldn't work to convert wide eyes into wide-open wallets (and/or, in many cases, wide-open legs).
The gurus are working at an advantage anyway in most cases, because many if not most of their marks don't even want to bother with trying to verify those backstories -- particularly if the guru in question is likeable or attractive, or makes audiences feel good about themselves, or reinforces their beliefs and biases. For many people, in other words, the facts don't matter if the story is good. (Where have we heard that before on this Whirled?)
The point, of course, is that having a dramatic backstory is almost a requirement to really make it in Scamworld. Everyone from Tony Robbins to Rich Dad Poor Dad author Robert Kiyosaki to Internet marketing scammer Brendon Burchard has a story. You can see capsule versions of some of their backstories in this article about the 25 most influential Scamworld gurus of 2014. (You don't hear Tony's rags-to-riches backstory so much any more, because he's so well known that he doesn't need that story any more to draw people into his funnel. But he used to tell it all the time.)
And the other point -- bringing it back home -- is that in the dramatic back-story area, as well as the resume fluffing, I'd say Liana has a long, long way to go before she catches up to the veterans.
The same goes with the getting-too-big-for-one's-britches area; again, to cite but two examples, see links to Rhonda Byrne and Joe Vitale above (or in this sentence, if you don't feel like scrolling). Maybe Liana has been acting like a diva. Maybe all of the attention she's getting has thrown her off course a bit. I really don't know.
I'll grant that where Liana is concerned, at least some of her critics could be simply jealous or envious. Since Liana is from Oz, I'll honor her by bringing up an expression that my Aussie friends tell me is popular in their part of the world: "the tall poppy syndrome." Sometimes this expression is used to describe the tendency that some people have to want to cut down anyone who is successful, whether the successful person truly deserves criticism or not. Sometimes, though, it refers to the justifiable humbling of someone who is flaunting their success and being arrogant. There are various shades of meaning to this expression, which may or may not apply to Liana. Again, I don't know.
But I know this for a fact: not everybody who criticizes a "successful" person is doing it because of envy and jealousy. And that is another point that prompted me to horn in on conversations that were probably none of my business on Liana's Facebook pages. Sometimes -- quite often in these industries, in fact -- people have legitimate gripes about the criticized person's teachings, practices, or behavior. It's not surprising, because these industries seem to attract more than their share of the egotistical, the narcissistic, even the sociopathic or psychopathic. (Not that I am in any way suggesting that Liana is a sociopath or a psychopath, of course. I reserve such judgments for the likes of Lenny.)
But the point is that sometimes it's not about cutting down a poppy simply because it's tall and lovely, but because it's obnoxious or toxic. Even so, an accusation of jealousy is often the first line of defense that New-Wage gurus and their fans and followers use against their critics.
As you probably know, I get that fairly frequently myself because of this "hater" blog. In fact, I've gotten it quite a lot from Lenny, and I'm anything but a "tall poppy." Here's how Lenny started off the New Year 2014 on Facebook:
And Lenny couldn't have been more wrong about me, or about Bernie, or about "James" (actually he meant Jason, aka Salty Droid. At that time, he didn't mention Omri because, apparently, he was still operating under the wacky delusion that Omri and Jason are the same person.).
Does Lenny have a legit beef with Liana? I don't know... but I'm thinking probably not.
Liana may very well have snubbed Coldwell in some way, but it's hard to tell whether he has a legitimate (as in lawsuit-worthy) complaint or not. Knowing Lenny's past history, though, I tend to think not. All Sarah would say on her December 1 blog post about the matter was this:
Up until now I have kept this out of the public because of Liana’s professional affiliation with my very good friend Dr. Coldwell who was supposed to be working with Liana to open the Earth Diet Bakery and Cafe… Apparently though Liana has decided that loyalty and friendship are worth less to her than money as a bigger investor has come along…..Yet she snapped up the opportunity still to speak at the [latest IBMS Master's Society] event, taking every chance to promote herself while stepping on others.
Well, jeez, if it's mainly about the Earth Diet Bakery and Cafe, I wouldn't be too concerned if I were Liana. Lenny has apparently been making big promises to people for years. Some of you may recall that he was going to help his little buddy Abe Husein open an organic fast-food restaurant back in 2012. Abe was trying not to get too pumped about it but clearly was, and said that "Dr. C" was going to talk to him about it in earnest once Coldwell got back from Germany. I let Abe know that the Internet trademark and business registration listing sites are riddled with information about failed Coldwell enterprises. Abe didn't seem to think that was any big deal. Well, heck, see for yourself. This is from November 3, 2012:
But after that thread, we never heard another peep from Abe or Lenny about the big plan.
And Lenny has mouthed off about so many other things over the past couple of years -- that 130-acre "health resort" he supposedly purchased, for instance -- and has then said nothing more. So I think that anybody who takes any of his business propositions or ideas seriously is only fooling herself or himself.
In other words, if Liana wants to open the Earth Diet Bakery and Cafe, she can probably use her own star power to do it, without giving Lenny another thought.
A closer look at some other Lenny gripes about Liana
Regarding the Alive New York Expo: In one of his comments to Sarah under the nick "Rudi Kauder," Coldwell mentioned the Alive New York "Hoax and scandal." It may have been a hoax but it really wasn't a scandal -- just another New-Wage con (or maybe just one of those "good ideas" that the people with the idea were too crooked or inept to bring to fruition). I wrote about it on this blog post last year.
At the time the "scandal" happened in April 2012, Lenny was righteously siding with "my dear friend Liana Werner-Gray," who he said was a co-founder of the Alive NY event. Lenny was totally blaming the other co-founders, Josh and Anna Scurry, for the mess-up. "They took her money and as I see it they screwed Liana over."
Liana was even touted by Mike Adams and Lenny as being the "whistleblower" in this matter.
As per usual, Lenny was shaking his little fist back then and threatening to sic his legal team on the Scurrys. But apparently Lenny is now blaming Liana for being one of the screwers instead of one of the screwees.
Quite honestly, I don't know who did what to whom, but at the very least, the Alive NY incident would seem to be yet another indication that Liana does not choose her business partners very wisely.
Regarding the lawsuits that are supposedly flying around now, at least according to Lenny: As for those legal sabers Lenny is apparently now rattling, I know next to nothing about that, as I noted above. But as most of you who have been following this and a few other blogs probably know, Lenny has a long history of either lying about legal action or filing groundless lawsuits. Remember the false alarm about his lawyer "finishing off" the "marinated troll/droid" (Salty Droid) and his "playmate" (me) back in December 2012? If you don't feel like reading the entire post linked to in the previous sentence, here is a direct link to a screen shot of Lenny's lie, which, as I noted, he wrote in December of 2012 -- more than two years ago.
(In case you're wondering, Salty and I have not yet been driven to the poorhouse, and neither one of us is dining on dog droppings yet, though I am constantly almost stepping in catdroppings, due to a certain spiteful pooper in our household. And none of us lives in a trailer either, though actually I think trailers are pretty cool (and here's a very cool book about them). Maybe LoonyC just isn't "dont" with us yet.)
More recently, Coldwell told his fans that his lawyers have been dealing with me for four years. But I've never heard a peep from any of them.
And do you remember Lenny's impotent threats to sue Bernie O'Mahony at GINtruth?
And even when he does occasionally follow through with his legal saber rattling... remember his unsuccessful lawsuit against Salty Droid and Omri Shabat?
Then, of course, there was that German lawsuit initiated by Lenny in the late 1990s against a German cult expert, Karin Patow-Froese. Lenny lost the lawsuit, though he has claimed otherwise. Here is the English translationof the document that has extensive information about the lawsuit.
Less well known is a South Carolina lawsuit in which Lenny sued his former business partners for infringing on his intellectual property rights and for hacking his web sites; the suit was dismissed, apparently because one of the defendants actually owned all of the rights to the very property that Lenny was suing over.
Lenny has been involved in a few other civil actions too, including one against a transport company that was responsible for moving some office equipment to Germany back in the early 2000s.
At any rate, the records available on the Charleston County SC Clerk of Court's public index really don't seem to support Lenny's frequent claim that he never, ever, ever lost a battle in his life.
There may be a smattering of other lawsuits here and there, but from what I have seen, I'd say that Liana probably does not have much to worry about from Lenny's "legal team" or any of the other supposed lawsuits that he says are coming at her from Australia and all over. More than likely he is just blowing hot air. However, since Liana is a woman and he's clearly a misogynist (notwithstanding his ladies' man shtick, and notwithstanding that he used to slobber all over her), she can probably expect some more vicious, catty attacks from him.
But legal action or no legal action, I think that Liana's association with Lenny was a huge mistake and could possibly be an ugly pink splotch on her career for years to come (the "pink" is in honor of Lenny's favorite shirt and tie color). Even so, I suspect that his very public railing against her -- even apparently turning some of his own former friends and allies against him -- will put an even bigger black splotch on what is left of his career.
Pass the popcorn.
Catty little Lenny
To me, the truly popcorn-worthy part of this is that Lenny, using the ridiculous cover of Rudi Kauder, has been going all mean-girl on Liana on Facebook, making fun of her looks and so forth ("humongous feet and hands Male like NO lips and too tiny teeth"). WTF, Lenny? He seems to have conveniently forgotten that he joyfully used her as a prop to shore up his own sagging ego for years. In addition, he proudly embraced Liana's narrative that his advice/protocol was a source or inspiration in her own healing process.
On the other hand, it appears to me that Liana also shamelessly used Coldwell to expand her own platform -- although it is equally obvious to me that she was always destined for bigger things than being a speaker at meetings of a GIN ripoff club (that would be IBMS, of course). She always had several irons in the fire, having lived in New York for a few years and being involved in acting, modeling and so forth. If she did actually do something to cheat Coldwell in some way, business-wise (which at this point I seriously doubt), that makes her just as wrong as he. But that's between the two of them.
What's clear is that for an extended time Lenny and Liana were allies, promoting each other all over the place, even as recently as the October 26, 2014 NAVEL Health Expo in New York. Here's Liana's blog post about it... and here's mine.
So as lovely as I think Liana is, and as nice as her message about healthy eating and environmental awareness seem to be, there is that Lenny thing. It may not be quite the turds-of-a-feather deal that it was when Lenny started opening fire on his ex-buddy Kevin Trudeau, or for that matter when Lenny and Fred Van Liew started taking potshots at each other. I'm open to hearing more, from all sides in the controversy. But as I recently told someone who was puzzled about my speaking up for Sarah and who asked me where I really stand, if someone forced me at gunpoint to choose sides I would choose Liana over Leonard Coldwell any day. That may be damning with faint praise, but truly, it's the best I can do at this point.
Oh, yeah, and I did order her book, The Earth Diet. It looks interesting. I'll let you know what I think of it.