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From Ed Chang, 8/10/05:
I just came upon this ridiculous rant in regards to a model whose career I have followed for many years now. For someone who claims to be so open-minded and intelligent you certainly succeeded at destroying that persona in this tirade.

First off, the majority . . . literally . . . of what you have stated is wrong!

There was no runway show in the Dominican Republic! It was in New Jersey!

She did not run to media sources to gain publicity-they contacted her! She was not even on Montel Williams! The producers had merely contacted her, no decision had been made as far as I understand!

Her new website CourtneyUncovered.com which even you stated is in development had OBVIOUSLY not been around when she was employed as a case manager! So she obviously wasn't doing both careers simultaneously! (Maybe she decided to launch a website because she realized that there was money to be made? That makes an economist, not a publicity whore . . . you halfwit!)

And to any news or media outlet that she has spoken to she has NEVER mentioned her website! So, how is she going to illicit [sic] publicity or traffic to the site if she fails to mention what she is building or fails to even use the modeling name that she has created . . . Courtney James is not the name she used on Fox News now is it? In fact, NOTHING pertaining to any alternative modeling careers was made mention of at all was there? So, any chance at becoming "headline material" is really null and void there isn't it?

I think that if you consider yourself to have any journalistic expertise what-so-ever [sic] maybe you should thnk [sic] about getting your facts straight before you carry on and on about untruths!

Don Riemer replies:
For someone who has simply "followed this model's career" you seem to have a lot of insider information, which makes me suspect this letter comes from someone close to Ms. James who's lying about that relationship. A few thoughts in relation to it:

Though Plunce does bill itself as a journal, in the old-fashioned meaning of that word as a daily diary, that doesn't make me a journalist, in the sense of a news reporter. Closer to a blogger.

I don't make any claims about my own intelligence; I leave that for the reader to judge.

Here's where I got the twisted and "wrong" notion that Ms. James had organized a model/runway show in the Dominican Republic:
Rock Confidential: Tell me about the model/runway show you organized in the Dominican Republic.
Courtney James: I organized Project Vixen: a model search / runway show at a nightclub. The model search was intended to select new models for participation in the runway show of Lollipop Lingerie's line of dancewear and lingerie and for inclusion in the 2006 SIRENS calendar which is being shot in the tri-state area and in the Dominican Republic.
Ms. James doesn't correct the interviewer's statement that the show took place in the Dominican Republic, which she could easily have done. So, at the moment, she's on record as agreeing that this happened in that country.

I'm curious as to how those media outlets, especially Fox News, found out about this story and contacted her. Certainly the social-work organization that fired her didn't call them up. Could it be because Ms. James—no "publicity whore," you declare—wrote to Marie-Claire after getting booted out of her job and "told them what had happened because I thought that in light of all of the issues surrounding indecency and censorship the readers might like to know. Unbeknownst to me, they reran the photo spread AND my letter." Gollygosh, what a surprise that must have been! She wrote a letter to let the mag's readers know what had happened, and the mag ran that letter! Who could have anticipated that? (But surely this letter to the readers of Marie Claire doesn't contradict your assertion that "She did not run to media sources to gain publicity.")

And here's where I got the peculiar idea that she'd appeared on the Montel Williams show (which I never watch):
Rock Confidential: What's this I hear about you appearing on Montel AND Oprah?!
Courtney James: Oprah and Montel's people called me within a week [of getting fired] to book me for the shows! I turned down Oprah (yes...I did, I know its crazy) because I felt that her conservatism may be detrimental to my reputation, I didn't know how she was going to spin it and I am not that much of a media-whore that I was willing to sellout for a few minutes of press . . . so I chose to go with Montel because his "pitch" was much more "sympathetic."
If this appearance never took place, she certainly doesn't make that clear in her statement.

In the interview she gave to Rock Confidential, from which I've taken the above exchanges, and which I cited and quoted in my original post as a source (proper journalistic practice, by the way), Ms. James discusses her soon-to-open new website at length, and names both it and her existing website, with links from that article to both sites. I have trouble reconciling that with your forceful if ungrammatical assertion that "any news or media outlet that she has spoken to she has NEVER mentioned her website."

True, the Fox News story didn't mention her adult sites, nor her "Courtney James" pseudonym. However, it didn't take much online sleuthing to find that pseudonym, the Rock Confidential interview, and her two sites—including the existing one, CourtneyNJ.com (which is fully developed, accepts donations via PayPal, and has clearly been online for some time). Three keywords in Google, a mouseclick or two, and I had all of that. If I could do that, so could anyone else—her social-work clients, her employers, their funding sources, the government agencies that license the organization for which she worked. Not to mention real journalists and tabloid muckrakers.

The plain fact is that Ms. James got canned from her social-work job because she decided it was appropriate to pose for profit in full frontal nudity for an internationally circulated magazine at the same time as she held down a social-work job involving children, without first clearing that high-profile public activity with her superiors. I consider that either brainless or duplicitous—take your pick, chum. The irresponsibility of that behavior, which evidently you don't care to discuss, was the main subject of my original post.

And her whining in public with her husband about the terrible injustice of all this smacks of (I'll use a psychoanalytic term here, in deference to Ms. James's B.A. with honors in that field) puer aeternus: the state of perpetual adolescence, which can afflict women as well as men.

Unless, of course, she's actually a very savvy publicity whore milking the situation for all it's worth—which you, who have only "followed her career," swear she's not.

Having one's story featured on Fox News makes one, de facto, headline material. That's a working definition of the term.

Ms. James, by the way, states "I believe that anyone who wants to bear a child should be required to undergo psychiatric evaluation as well as extensive parenting classes." Probably a good idea, if not logistically feasible. I'd certainly enjoy reading a psychoanalyst's assessment of her behavior in this situation. I'd expect the term "in denial" to come up frequently.

I've corrected my post to indicate that Courtney James is her stage name, that (on your say-so—don't make a liar out of me) the runway show happened in New Jersey, and that the Montel Williams appearance is still in the discussion stages. Journalist or not, I'll stand by the rest of it.

P.S. Deciding that there's money to be gained by pursuing some course of action doesn't make one an economist. If it did, every entrepreneur from your local car dealer to Martha Stewart would qualify as one. Nor does a B.A. in psychology make one a psychologist. Ask the licensing bureau of any state in the union.