Stephen Goldin's MZB Site

This is a mirror of Stephen Goldin’s pages from SFF.net about Marion Zimmer Bradley. More notes here.

Child Sexual Abuse

MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY was a noted science fiction and fantasy author, with best-sellers to her credit and a large number of adoring fans. But MZB, as she was often called, had far less savory aspects to her as well. Most notably, she actively aided and abetted her husband, Walter Breen, in the sexual abuse and molestation of children. Before people cast too many tears over her death, they may wish to learn some of the harm she helped perpetrate in the world as well.
You can check out a timeline of events and read MZB’s excerpted testimony to learn how she behaved in this matter. You can also read the complete text of the sworn testimony she gave at her first two (out of three) depositions in a case against her, just to show we didn’t omit anything significant. (The third deposition will be posted if and when we get a copy in digital form; it’s equally revealing.) The only editing that has been done to the full text version is to disguise the names of people that had not previously been published in connection with these activities. Otherwise, the text is exactly as the court reporter typed it, with all the repetitions, evasions and lawyers’ wranglings that occur during such events. It’s tough slogging, but the truth is in there.
In the excerpts you’ll see that MZB admits having deliberately covered up her husband’s involvement in activities she knew were illegal and harmful. She took some pains to tell Walter not to molest her own children, but she didn’t care in the least what he did to other children. Readers will be able to judge for themselves the sort of moral character this woman possessed.
And lest you think that our timing is suspicious, please read our statement about that.

(10/24/2000) Elizabeth (Lisa) Waters recently published a “defense” of Marion. (For those of you unfamiliar with her, Ms. Waters was Marion’s lover and secretary, and earns a significant portion of her current income from administering Marion’s estate.) This so-called defense is mostly a slanderous attack against me and Mary Mason, and is crammed full of lies. Since Lisa has chosen to take the low road in this matter, Mary and I have no choice but to demonstrate what a self-serving liar she is. I have posted a >response to that defense, explaining in detail where and how Lisa is lying. I am also herewith publishing Lisa’s deposition in the case, verbatim. For those of you who don’t have the time or inclination to wade through the boring parts and the lawyers’ wrangling, I have the taken the trouble to collect the most interesting >excerpts of Lisa’s testimony. You can see for yourself that Lisa Waters has a long history of ignoring Walter’s and Marion’s crimes.

If you know anyone who might be interested in this information, please tell them about this site.

Note: This page originally appeared at http://sff.net/people/stephen.goldin/mzb/, but that subsite is permanently offline. Stephen Goldin’s new site is here, but it does not contain the MZB tree (that I found). Apart from bringing the code up to HTML5, adjusting URLs to my own naming system, and fixing a couple of typos, what precedes the rule above this paragraph is entirely Stephen Goldin’s work.