I feel sorry for Mrs. Gunty, the former Lisa Hope Shapiro. She may or may not have had a clear insight regarding the shadow on the character of her significant other, Murry Gunty, when they married. The two had certainly been doing well in the world of finance, but Murry Gunty has emerged this week as a symbol in the battle for free speech, and whether or not he — Murry Gunty — was guilty of grave ethical violations as a Harvard Business School grad student where he was accused of rigging the influential Finance Club’s election in his own favor, he, or someone close to him seems to have made an error in judgment by asking TypePad to influence blogger Marc Pincus to cloud Murry Gunty’s identity by using only his first name in a recent blog post.
In the comments to Pincus’ original post mentioning Gunty, one Jim Delingco avers,
Murry Gunty runs a fund in Washington DC - Milestone Capital. But suffice it to say that his ethics/morals/etc. have contributed to a whole host of problems for him and that company. People don’t fundamentally change. He was a liar and a cheat at HBS, and he’s continued the same pattern at Milestone. He raised $88M w/ the help of some big DC banker Pincus, then bought a tile compnay that did something like 10x its original investment…but he pulled BS moves and lied his way thought the entire thing…and the investors apparently finally got a taste of his MO. Since then the fund has totally blown up. I spoke with an ibanker at CSFB about that tile deal. They hate him and say that he pissed off the seller so much that it damaged the bank’s reputation.
While this is consistent with information that is currently posted on Wikipedia about Murry Gunty, it is also hearsay and potentially damaging to Murry Gunty’s reputation, whether or not it is true. Who is Jim Delingco? He only has a single Google reference today, and that is a reference to his comment on Pincus’ blog. Can we trust his comment? His comment would have little weight and his opinions regarding Murry Gunty would not have seen the light of day if TypePad had not, as Pincus charges, attempted a heavy-handed censorship of Pincus’ blog post. (In fairness to Six Apart, they managed a quick about face on their original attempt to censor Pincus, but not in time to stop the snowball of Murry Gunty criticism from growing).
Jason Lee Miller examines this further at WebProNews. He says,
If this were a court of law (I’m not a lawyer), and if Mr. Gunty wished to sue you for defamation, or just because he didn’t like what you wrote, his case would get nowhere because of the freedom of the press guaranteed by the Constitution. If it’s true, then it’s fair game.
The part he leaves out is that anybody can sue anybody for anything anytime, and the nuisance value often trumps truth and righteousness. I would hate to have a bigtime investment banker like Murry Gunty gunning for me. Scott Johnson, “Feedster founder and Ookles-promiser,” says,
I can understand that Murry Gunty doesn’t want this infromation to show up in Google — and a blog does that well — but he did cheat. Now you can argue that everyone deserves a second chance but this wasn’t cheating by a Harvard undergrad. It was cheating by someone at Harvard Business School (HBS). Given all the problems with ethics in corporate america and the prevalence of HBS grads in corporate management personally I think calling someone out with a history of cheating and making them visible in Google is a fine thing.
I wonder what the back story is here? When did Murry Gunty become aware of Pincus’ posting? Who attempted to influence SixApart on his behalf, and how and why did they do that? Was Murry Gunty himself foolish enough to think that he could push the rope of freedom of expression in a direction that would benefit him? Will the snowball of Murry Gunty criticism continue to grow and will solid facts be added, or will we continue to re-work the basic material relating to a really sad situation early in Murry Gunty’s professional training?
