The point of her work, best-selling writer Patricia Cornwell recently told an interviewer, is to speak up for victims of crime. This week a Virginia courtroom heard the 50-year-old writer speak up for herself, as she described how another, less celebrated author, had stalked her on the internet, causing emotional distress and damaging her reputation.
Cornwell was testifying in the libel suit she brought against Leslie Sachs, who alleged on his website that the author of the Kay Scarpetta series of crime novels was a “Jew hater” and “neo Nazi”.
Cornwell told the court: “I said, you know, you can accuse me of a lot of things but hating a group of people or being a felon is beyond the pale.”
The best-selling author of Postmortem, Body of Evidence, and Predator, told the judge she was fearful for her safety following the postings by Sachs.

Legal action
Sachs, the author of How to Buy Your New Car for a Rock-Bottom Price was not present in court and was not represented. Claiming to be a “political refugee”, he says on his website that he has fled to Belgium to escape Cornwell’s legal action.
The unlikely dispute between the two, which was described in court by a psychiatrist as a case of “cyberstalking”, stems from the publication in 2,000 of Cornwell’s The Last Precinct. Sachs claimed that Cornwell had plagiarised one of his books, The Virginia Ghost Murders.
 He wrote postings on his website attacking her and after she won an injunction against him fixed a sticker to the cover of his book reading: “The book that famous Patricia Cornwell threatened to destroy.”
At this week’s hearing Cornwell asked the court to enforce a broader injunction against Sachs, claiming that his writings were libellous and had caused her emotional distress and hurt her reputation. She also seeks unspecified damages.
The latest legal action came after Sachs, who describes himself as Cornwell’s biographer, claimed that the author was under investigation by US authorities.
On his website Sachs writes: “Patricia Cornwell is a woman of many hatreds, a woman who boasted in Vanity Fair magazine that she can get away with murdering people. Here is the real story of Patricia Cornwell — the criminal sleaze, the scandals, the truth, fully backed by documents that you can see for yourself.”
After the hearing Cornwell said there should be more restrictions on internet postings.
“There are so many people who can be damaged, it’s really quite frightening,” she said.