Randall Lane on Libel Suit: ‘I Stand By Every Line’

Publisher-turned-author says he has “physical documents to back it up”

Randall Lane, the publisher-turned-author who finds himself at the center of a $100 million libel suit, responded to those allegations over the holiday weekend.

"The suit, which gets my name wrong, doesn't specify what they object to," Lane wrote in an e-mail to TheWrap. "So it's hard to respond, other than I stand by every line, and have the physical documents to back it up.

Last week, AVT Inc., the company Lane — former owner and publisher of Doubledown Media — alleges in his new book paid former baseball star-turned-finance guru Lenny Dykstra to plug its stock, filed a $100 million libel suit against Lane, now an editor-at-large for the Daily Beast.

"We are simply not going to allow anyone to publicly defame AVT in this matter without taking action against them," the company’s founder, Shannon Illingworth, said last week in a statement.

In his book “The Zeroes,” Lane claims Dykstra was secretly paid $250,000 by AVT to plug its stock on TheStreet.com, the website owned and operated by CNBC “Mad Money” host Jim Cramer.

Cramer told TheWrap last week he "knew nothing" of the arrangement.

Comments