Michael Kerry Burke is a Shitty Lawyer

An open letter to Michael Kerry Burke, attorney at law.

Dear Mr. Burke,

You, sir, are fired.

I do realize that I have not retained your legal services, nor am I under indictment of any kind, nor have I committed any felonies in the last three or four years that might reasonably be traced back to me. I suppose my wife and I are undertaking a divorce, but that's been kind of a DIY thing from the beginning and we're trying not to involve lawyers. You might say, then, that because I never hired you I cannot fire you either. To which I would reply: Donald Trump does it all the time. So you're still fired.

It's a precaution on my end, but a necessary one, to my thinking. You're probably wondering what you've done to merit pre-emptively being fired. It all goes back to a client of yours named Joe Francis, founder of Girls Gone Wild, and your spectacular mismanagement of his legal issues.

Now, I'm not here to pile it on with poor Joe Francis; there's been quite enough of that going around. Lots of people have lots of unkind things to say about Mr. Francis, and I need not re-iterate them here. As for you, Michael Kelly Burke, I'm not saying you shouldn't take on a well-heeled client just because he's almost universally reviled; nor do I mean to imply that you're the kind of attorney who would give Joe Francis a blowjob in the Girls Gone Wild tour bus potty stall if it was billable at time-and-a-half with the fringe of maybe scoping some of GGW's blandly ubiquitous jailbait titty, as it is no doubt infinitely perkier than what you normally pay for, Michael Kelly Burke, as most people of means within the orbit of Joe Klein--and you're his attorney--experience a thing in their deep heart's core not entirely unlike the experience of a puppy locked in a station wagon parked in front of a grocery store with the windows rolled up on a blistering hot day, and must therefore pay money to strangers in exchange for emotionally hollow and semi-violent sex in lieu of the meaningful intimacy they cannot achieve because, like all those puppies on the outside, they are so very dead on the inside. I'm not here to say any of that, because I think there's already been more than enough negativity surrounding your client Joe Francis. And negativity is not what I'm about.

Consider this more a critique, as the trouble I have with you, Michael Kerry Burke, is purely professional. This past week a highly unflattering article appeared in the LA Times about your client Joe Francis. Again, I don't want to get into innuendo or play armchair psychoanalyst by saying your client is in all likelihood a clinically sociopathic narcissist with a vicious authoritarian streak who, even if he isn't technically raping drunken eighteen year old virgens then he is, at the very least, less than entirely fucking gallant after having sex with drunken eighteen year old virgens. That's the worst kind of innuendo--the kind supported by scads of circumstantial evidence you can only really counter with 'Nuh-uh.' It's totally unfair--not entirely unlike the media raping your client, as he would say.

But that's the hand you've been dealt, and even if it was your dumbass client who pushed all of his chips into the middle of the table with a 3-5 unsuited against 10-J-A flop, you still have to be a professional and play the hand. Or watch the dealer flip the rest of the cards over, I guess, since you're all in. Whatver. Although, as an aside, a woman who reports on the adult entertainment industry probably had at least a pocket pair if she was going all-in. That's an old J-school trick they teach, to make it easier to rape Joe Francis. But you're a professional; I'll give you that much.

If I were your client, I'd expect nothing less. In fact, I'd be a much better client in this particular case because if the LA Times reporter who wrote the story called me for a comment about the alleged rape, I would not call her a cunt, I wouldn't threaten to sue her without running it by you, and I wouldn't threaten to put nails in her coffin, especially after physically assaulting her with a police officer present. I'm sure you'd prefer your client respond with a terse "No comment," and that's what I would have done. Although I'm sure even you can appreciate the delicious irony of your client being so totally juiced on the virtues of the first and twenty-first amendments of our Constitution while completely whiffing on the fifth. If that's not like a black fly in your chardonnay, I don't know what is.

So let's agree that your client isn't as media-savvy or likeable as OJ Simpson. Whatever. Like I said, if your client didn't need damage control you probably wouldn't stay on retainer, and then you wouldn't get flashed with barely-legal titty. You take the good with the bad, Michael Kerry Burke. That said, having your client deserves the best legal counsel he can buy with the money he makes by selling videos of drunken girls taking off their clothes; from the sound of things, he needs the best legal counsel he can get. And you, sir, are not that counsel.

I'm particularly bothered by your response to the rape allegations that surface in the LA Times article. I am quoting this from an email that you sent out in defense of your client:

"In an e-mail, [you] [say] Francis and Szyszka did have sex--consensual sex--and that neither Francis nor anyone affiliated with "Girls Gone Wild" gave her any alcohol. "Neither Mr. Francis nor any of the GGW staff in or around the bus recall Ms. Szyszka making any complaint or comment about Mr. Francis.Neither Mr. Francis nor any of the GGW staff in or around the bus recall Ms. Szyszka making any complaint or comment about Mr. Francis. In fact, Ms. Szyszka was in good spirits after the encounter, and numerous witnesses have stated that she danced with her friends outside the bus for nearly two hours afterward," [You] write []. [You] adds: "Though Mr. Francis cannot speak to Ms. Szyszka's discomfort during the encounter, other news stories have commented that Mr. Francis is reputedly well-endowed."

First of all, nothing in your statement addresses Joe Francis' claim that he never had sex with the girl, and moreover it does not address the girl's actual statement that she actually said no to your client while he was actually having sex with her. That's sort of a problem, from a credibility standpoint. A lot of that's heresay to begin with, no doubt, but it'll sound defensive when you're forced to backtrack on this.

I must say that your rhetorical sleight of hand on the girl's alleged level of intoxication is pretty good. If she'd hopped in a car and killed a family of four your guy would totally be in the clear. Unfortunately, that's not what happened. Your statement also refers to what she did not say to your client's sycophantic toadies immediately after what may or may not have been a sexual assault on his private tour bus, as opposed to what she did say to her friends and family once she and said friends shrank from those bluish spotlights on the GGW cameras that make Joe Francis enough money to keep you on retainer. There's been a lot of ink spilled in pop-culture analyses about why those girls lose their inhibitions around those cameras, but my inclination is to say that there is such a thing as magic in the world, Joe Francis has performed some sacred rite of alchemy, and bottled the stuff to be sold at $9.99 a pop. Truly, we live in remarkable times.

That said, your facile refutation of the girl's actual account--offering her behavior immediately following the incident as evidence she made the whole thing up later--does not take into consideration the behavior of her friends, the nature of the relationship and level of intimacy previously established, and above all her own ability to process what she'd just experienced. I hear that rape isn't the easiest tihing in the world to talk about; that isn't to say your client raped her, it just means her first act may not have been to run into a crowd of girls already gone wild to level the claim, is all. As a matter of fact, your "counter-evidence" manages to skip cleanly off the suface of a deep, well-established and meticulously researched body of social science that fails to exculpate your client. It's part of what's known as Rape Trauma Syndrome; you'd do well to look it up in the future. Professionally, I'd expect a more learned defense from my legal counsel.

This is not to say you weren't crafty; I'll give you that. Unfortunately creativity isn't rewarded in court the way it should be; it's really more like the GGW empire itself, just a mindless repetition of established precedent that keeps the machine creaking inexorably onward. I don't see the Immense Penis Defense catching on anytime soon, as it clearly defies just about every precedent of jurisprudence that I ever learned from watching LA Law, Matlock, and Law & Order. And that's a lot of jurisprudence, even if these days I'm pretty much left with Criminal Intent because original L&O is pretty stale and SVU makes me feel dirty every single time I watch it. I can't imagine you have that problem, Michael Kelly Burke, not in the least. Although you must surely agree with me when I say--although I'm by no means the first to point this out--that Ice T portraying a police officer is just plain weird. But is Vincent D'Onofrio's Detective Gorin the best cop since Andre Braugher on Homicide, or what?

I suppose that's really a matter of taste. As a point of law, let's pretend for a minute that I'm your client, and you're a competent attorney. Now, say I'm arrested for tax evasion. Statement true of false: The best defense moving forward would be that I was raking in so much cash at the time that it may have given the appearance of tax evasion to the layperson or even typical auditor, both of whom know nothing of the joys of lolling around naked in a bed of thousand-dollar bills and probably hate freedom. The short answer is no, stupid.

I don't want to seem narrow-minded on the subject of novel defenses. I'd give the Twinkie Defense a good listen in its particulars, I believe the M'Naughton Laws guarantee some necessary baseline of quid pro quo in the social contract, and DeCSS might be free speech. But even those defenses have limitations built into them; if the Immense Penis Defense caught on, you'd have to deal with the logical entailment that Tommy Lee could never have truly consensual sex. And an America where Tommy Lee can't have sex with damn near anyone he pleases is not the kind of America I want any part of. Although I'd love to see appeals get you to SCOTUS, just for the sake of having Scalia and Clarence Thomas weigh in on the matter.

All the same, Michael Burke Kelly, you're a shitty lawyer, and you are fired. This is purely a business decision; I do wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors.

Yours,
Gabriel