When a writer is censored, hacked, sabotaged, monitored, and other helpful accounts.
Updated 7/15/2025
How U.S. Congresswoman Lateefah Simon lost a job…
You can find this updated previous paywall article under Editor’s Notes.
*You will be monitored. I have never read such strict rules in an NDA. — Remark by one of the lawyers working on my civil lawsuit, many summers ago.
9 minute read
Too angry to ask what he meant exactly, I stared instead at the documents before me.
Only one thing was missing from the NDA, I thought: no carrier pigeons.
The rigid gag order took me by surprise, but it should not have.
Based on police reports, I dictated an article about what took place leading to the lawsuit, but set it aside until the case ended… at the request of the lead attorney.
Unfortunately, the defense lawyers learned about the draft.
I refused to sign away the literary rights to the incident. The defendants were not going to tell me what I could or could not write about…
Eighteen months earlier
Attacked during a routine errand one afternoon because of an admitted store error, the incident took place before a large crowd and was caught on tape.
Pushed and pulled 25 feet with a tight grip on my wrist, at 5’3′, losing my balance, and hanging at an angle in the stranger’s grasp…
Charges were filed, but the assailant fled.
At the time, a full-time adult college student on summer break, I did not use a computer for assignments; instead, I wrote longhand.
Later that night, sharp pain and swelling in my hand appeared…
An ER physician diagnosed a wrist sprain and had my lower arm bandaged…pain meds were excluded for intolerance.
Eighteen months later
En route to court-ordered mediation, a driver failed to yield and broadsided the vehicle in which I was the passenger.
Months later
The opposition relented, and the NDA was revised to read that if the real names of the defendants were not used, I could write about the case.
“You may write under your name,” another attorney advised. But I used a pen name. For a while, the true crime memoir landed on a bestseller Kindle list in three legal categories.
Using the true crime memoir, I extracted chapters and wrote a supplemental PDF lesson for students and adults about the marketplace and racial profiling… meanwhile…
Strange and disruptive situations, including reinjury, kept happening, further delaying plans…
1. Shadowbanned from marketing platforms. No explanation.
Rethink, reflect, and reimagine ways to market outside the reach of algorithms, gatekeepers, and conservative rules on reporting factual racial issues. Own your platform.
Think inside and outside the box. Innovate. Improve marketing skills. Evaluate companies such as *SkillShare for starters.
*No affiliation.
2. Niche Creativity logo found attached to a mugshot of a murder suspect and a news photo of a naked male fleeing from police… on a major platform, on a group board for second-grade teachers, where I contributed news stories about pint-sized entrepreneurs.
Not good. Alerted users in the board forum.
The hacker used crime stories from the same TV news station that I had sourced for entrepreneurial content.
Support restored only partial access without explanation. The login entry is still blocked to my archived content.
3. Key communication, from emails, sales copy, and articles, found with obvious errors missing from my final drafts.
A hard copy printout before sending or taking a screenshot offers some protection.
4. In 2021, my supplementary lesson on racial profiling, first published in 2014, was removed from a primary sales platform without warning after seven years.
Issue: Howard Zinn’s textbook quote about slave masters’ conduct was deemed unacceptable, but the quote has been included since 2014.
Declined robo offer to remove the quote and resubmit…reread tip #1.
Unfortunately, this meant the available format left was three times more costly, with the majority going to middlemen.
5. Niche Creativity email address hacked.
*Learned not to link one’s business email address to personal ones or vice versa. Not to
depend on the site host, which may provide email, to advise of widespread hacking.
Ensure the email has high-level security. Check the internet for company breaches periodically.
6. My Hire Me page: Found riddled for months with typos and formatting issues, despite being checked and approved via screenshare by a veteran publisher and a SCORE counselor before posting.
Page corrected, but again found in total disarray. Bought an SSL certificate and upped security. Pulled the Hire Me page permanently.
7. Submitted an independently published title about the lawsuit to a major book distributor with an industry reputation for strict production guidelines.
The manuscript passed inspection and went live, but the title was discovered to be ruined with typos not present in the original submission.
I pulled the title permanently.
8. *Two niche magazines published my classified ads for an entrepreneurial title before the lawsuit. Later refused my ads for the same updated title. No explanation. Reread #1.
*Both publications are now defunct.
Note: The list above is only 10 percent of the documented incidents that have occurred…
Billions of Americans are hacked annually. Censorship for writers of color has increased. Things happen.
So it was, I thought, a terrible run of bad luck complicated by a long-term injury and the resulting financial challenges.
Incidents did not all happen at once.
Then, in 2022, a records request and accidental release of several thousand pages revealed that the life-changing run of bad luck was anything but…
Conclusion
I know for sure that many twists and turns experienced in my civil lawsuit could have been avoided had I learned about non-police racial profiling as part of life skills.
Race was not discussed in the household as I grew up.
Attending schools in good areas in the U.S., living in two countries, and several parts of the U.S. through my teens, in retrospect, did nothing to enlighten me.
Much of what I knew or thought I knew about race came from what I read, assumed from TV, and based on my experiences. What I did not understand was that those experiences were not typical.
As a plaintiff for four years in a racial profiling case, I learned the hard way. Only 10 percent of crime victims can take their case to civil court.
Starting next month, content on this page will focus on useful, overlooked takeaways from past and present, including pop culture, business, legal, and medical topics with overt and covert racial themes.
SOURCES
*Ethnic studies freebie with printable lessons and two answer keys.
https://nichecreativity.com/ethnic-studies-freebie/
Howardzinn.org
*A People’s History of the United States – Howard Zinn
*The Writer Got Screwed (but didn’t have to): Guide to the Legal and Business Practices of Writing for the Entertainment Industry, by Brooke A. Wharton, March 1997, Harper Perennial.
In 2025, evergreen content will remain relevant despite other significant changes in Hollywood.
*The information about myths surrounding big-money lawsuits is revealing.
*33+ Tips, Tricks, Resources for Copyright Beginners
Niche Creativity.com
Examples of theft, creative theft, the subheading: And some cases are outrageous
https://nichecreativity.com/33tips-tricks-resources-for-copyright-beginners/
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