Lemelson Capital Management Releases Response to Wall Street Journal Profile

MARLBOROUGH, Mass., Nov. 2, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Lemelson Capital Management, a private investment management firm, today released the first of two letters to The Wall Street Journal, addressing systematic factual errors, biases and major errors of omission contained in the newspaper's October 27, 2015 profile of Lemelson Capital Management chief investment officer Emmanuel Lemelson. 

The first letter, sent to Wall Street Journal editor Daniel Fitzpatrick who oversaw the reporting of reporter Rob Copeland, who authored the article, appears below:

November 2, 2015

Mr. Daniel Fitzpatrick
The Wall Street Journal
1211 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10036

Dear Mr. Fitzpatrick:

Rob Copeland's recent Wall Street Journal article ("Hedge Fund Priest: Though Shall Make Money," p. C1, Oct. 27, 2015) reads like a directory of fallacies.  Inductive reasoning is used throughout to shift between affirming the consequent, begging the question, poisoning the well and equivocation to set up both false causes and false dilemmas in his story. 

Mr. Copeland conveyed his understanding that participation in the endeavor was predicated on the article being focused of the life of the church, or alternatively the importance of wise investment policy within the context of a Christian ethic.

Mr. Copeland was given access based on his representations that, as his editor, you (a self-declared faithful Christian respectful of the church) would be overseeing every aspect of the story.  I was surprised to learn subsequently that, like so many other misrepresentations, you had not been presented with any of the background correspondence related to the article. 

What was published was a thinly-veiled ad hominem attack based apparently on Mr. Copeland's personal feelings, the insinuation and innuendo of which are wholly unsupported by evidence.

Major errors of omission, mischaracterizations and altered quotes, which I will be detailing under separate cover, are used throughout his article.

Mr. Copeland went to great lengths to suppress evidence –that is, to present only the pieces of evidence that supported his underlying thesis, while omitting the ones that contradicted it – in an effort to draw readers to his personal conclusions.

On two occasions, including during a phone conversation a few days before the article's publication, Mr. Copeland stated that he had the ability to assign negative readership opinion to subjects if he did not get what he wanted (in this case, material non-public information on The Amvona Fund, LP), going as far as to represent that he already had the information he was seeking when he did not.

Is this the standard of reporting and ethical principles to which The Wall Street Journal aspires?

+  Emmanuel Lemelson

About Lemelson Capital Management

Lemelson Capital Management, LLC is a private investment management firm focused on deep value and special situation investments.  For more information, see: http://www.lemelsoncapital.com.

For further information, please contact:

Lemelson Capital Management, LLC
Investor and Media Relations
Telephone: 508-630-2281

SOURCE Lemelson Capital Management

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