More from Lott's wife

Lott's wife, Gertrud Fremling, has responded to a question I put to her about the similarity between Rosh's Amazon review and Lott's writings.

Obviously " ...this is the review:" is a false statement by you. You should have said that "... this is part of the review:" Am I supposed to believe that this was a mere error? And I notice that you have selectively quoted from my website, too, without indicating that these were selected parts. If this is how you choose to deal with me, then I have no reason to continue any debate.

I will answer the general query about the book review once and for all: Especially seeing the left-out part makes it very clear that it is not my husband who wrote it. I even notice the errors of not making a space after the period a couple of times - obviously not an experienced typist wrote this material. As to the part that supposedly is so similar, I do not think that it really is. These are very basic facts he mentions. You must also realize that when writing the book review, my son must have looked at some written material from the book and elsewhere. After all, you don't just pull the figure 3,056 right out of your head. Plus, he must have overheard his dad on the phone a huge number of times when being interviewed by the media.

By using the phrase "selectively quoted" she seem to be implying that yesterday I somehow took her comments out of context. I did not. I left out the part that contained information (about the derivation of the name Mary Rosh) that should already have been familiar to someone following the affair. Nor is it normal practice when quoting from a document to indicate that you have not quoted the entire thing. I also included a link to her comments so any interested person could read the whole thing.

She suggests that the similarity between Rosh's review and Lott's writing might be because both are expressing the same facts. However, the Rosh review expresses them using the same phrases that Lott uses. It is not just the facts, but the wording. And if Lott's son copied the sentences from something Lott wrote, then we have a review at least partly written by Lott and posted with his approval. This does not differ from a review written by Lott in any important way.

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This is an annotated list of John Lott's on line reviews at Amazon and at Barnes and Noble. Most of his reviews were posted anonymously or under a false name, and he used this anonymity to post many five-star reviews of his own books and to pan rival books. When you post a review at…
When I looked at the reviews of More Guns, Less Crime I wasn't sure that this review was written by Lott: If you are interested in the facts, read this book, July 10, 2000 Reviewer: A reader from Miami, Florida A couple of friends of mine have been nagging me to read this book for a couple of…
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