Peter Shaver, January 2014
Peter Shaver is an entertainment attorney who had been recommended to me by Rozz Rezabek. Mr Shaver was charging me, I believe it was $35/hour for consultations. After being introduced to him at an annual “Day of the Dead” party that he held, and that Rozz had brought me to, I had seen Shaver privately maybe two or three times total regarding music rights issues and I had also taken a class (probably a 1-3 hour class) on music rights issues that he had held. The class was open to the public, cost a small fee.
My interactions with Mr Shaver seemed to be positive. On my final meeting with him, which was probably in late 2013, I showed him a video of Courtney Love performing her song “Honey” live and said I thought there might be a message for Chris Newman (who had known her in the early 1980s) in that song. Then I showed him a copy of the Flying Heart contract I had from March 3, 1988. Mr Shaver made himself a copy, presumably to keep for his/my files.
I can’t recall if by this time I was already concerned that the contract may have been linked in some way to Nirvana’s first contract with Sup Pop, but I suspect I hadn’t noticed that yet. I do remember mentioning something to Mr Shaver about having some kind of concern about Tobi Vail, but he brushed it off saying that he represented her and that she “wouldn’t have time” for any kind of adversarial behavior towards me or us. I thought maybe, but was not completely certain, if Mr Shaver had confused Tobi Vail, who was living in Olympia, with her sister Maggie who was located in Portland. Maggie Vail, at the time, was running a business called Cash Music. In any case, after more and clearer evidence surfaced of adversarial behavior by the Vail sisters and other local musicians, I later came to see this, and other relationships, as an undisclosed conflict of interest by Mr Shaver. But at the time, I thought that Mr Shaver was being honest with me, and I recall giving him an extra $20 for the visit, because I thought his rate of $35/hour was unreasonably low, and I happened to have enough money at the time to do this. This was before I came to understand that there were coded messages in numbers. I now think that it is possible that my adding that extra $20 may have been taken by him not as appreciative, but insulting.
After first discovering evidence of spying on January 20, 2014, I suddenly began to experience what can only be described as overt, aggressive, organized stalking and and menacing behaviors by people all over Portland. This included people following me on foot, many of whom seemed to wear certain types of clothing to identify themselves to each other (backpacks, especially black backpacks were the main thing I noticed), and aggressively, in cars. There was also a lot of subtle double-entrendre and other types of coded social media harassment, a lot of which, in retrospect, must have been a response to research/analysis I was posting on my blog, which included looking at and analyzing what I had discerned was coded language, and which I thought, at the time, was limited to our community in the Pacific Northwest. This was a bit confusing as I had been checking stats on my website and I couldn’t see evidence that more than a handful of people had seen my blog. I do recall there being a lot of hits from Russia and and a number from China in those years, which at the time I had assumed were some kind of spam or web search crawlers.
I can’t recall exactly when I first tried to contact Mr Shaver to address what I’d discovered about Sub Pop, Nirvana, and Chris’ early recordings in early January 2014, but it must have been a few days before I discovered the surveillance, because I recall speaking to Mr Shaver briefly on the phone, and then calling back and being told by him, or via a recorded message, that he was leaving town for a week. This would have been the first time that Mr Shaver was not available to speak with me within 24 hours of a phone call. This also seemed to fit a pattern; other people (for example, Nathan Jorg who said he was delivering a car to Texas, and Tom Robinson who said he went skiing) were leaving town around the same time, each for 1-2 weeks. Once I discerned that there had been electronic surveillance going on inside our home, attempted to report it to police, and as a result narrowly avoided being put on a psychiatric hold (January 20, 2014), things began to feel like they were reaching a crisis level. By the time Mr Shaver returned and called me back, probably sometime around January 23, 2014, I was suspicious of him as well, and the reason I was suspicious had to do with a number of his behaviors.
I did share with Mr Shaver over the phone that I suspected he was not being up front with me. I remember him saying something on the phone like “I could lose my license.” I had lost my trust in him. Months later after failing to find another attorney who would help me, I thought maybe what Mr Shaver had to offer was better than nothing, and contacted him again, only to receive an angry and somewhat confusing rebuff.
The reason why I say the letter is somewhat confusing is not because Mr Shaver didn’t want to continue working with me. That was his prerogative. What was confusing was the reference to “insulting and absurd accusations” and this idea that I had been “insulting and unappreciative.” All I recall was expressing tentative suspicion that Mr Shaver had not been up front with me.
this web page updated 7 August 2022