Almost every factual assertion in the first New York Post excerpts from Tom Bower’s malicious novel about my wife and me is false, (and many are defamatory in Britain), except for the quotation from my e-mails to him, predicting that he would write a libelous onslaught, and declining his repeated, fawning pleas for an interview. There is dishonesty even here, as Bower claims that I predicted “stardom” for myself at my trial. I referred to our defense as “spectacular” not any performance of mine.

Bower’s claim to have known me since the 1980s refers to our one meeting, of 30 seconds, in 1987. Friends who spoke with him have recorded hours of his drunken promises to write a defamatory book, and given me the tapes. One called him a “laughing hyena.” I have a year to act on libels in the U.K. Our legal case will be heard in Chicago, starting in March, 2007. At the end of it, when I have been acquitted, those who have defamed me may then look forward to their own days in court, defending the indefensible.

To illustrate some of the factual errors; contrary to Bower’s assertions, I have never claimed to be anyone’s best friend, (any more than I have, as Bower claims, owned a Rolls-Royce with a purple interior). At the worst moment of the financial assault on me by the U.S. government, a friend and I canvassed some other friends about possible, (well-secured) loans to deal with a personal liquidity crisis American prosecutors were causing by making large amounts of money I had earned, inaccessible to me. I never mentioned any specific sum. Ten people were contacted and seven responded positively. As it has turned out, I was able to refinance some assets and have been able to bear the very heavy legal bills. I will see this through and ask no one to fight my battles for me.

Bower’s portrayal of my youth and family was an astonishing farrago of malicious falsehoods. My parents’ home did not have legions of domestic help, was far from a “loveless atmosphere;” there were no “all-night sessions” with my father, when I was a child or afterward, and never a “lecture” from him on “supremacy and manipulation,” nor a heritage of “prejudice.” My father was somewhat eccentric, but the most gentle and honest of men, and was vehemently opposed to any racial or religious prejudice.

He retired voluntarily, contrary to Bower’s version, from his position in the brewing industry, because he did not agree with the policies of the controlling shareholders. The company went into a profound decline after he left. He had no dispute with his chief associate, who was not guilty of the “rampant dishonesty” Bower claims to have unearthed, any more than I have been guilty, as Bower alleges, of “perfidy.”

I went with my parents and brother to the Bahamas once, for one week when I was six years old, at Easter time, not constantly, nor for months on end. I went to school in car-pools with neighbors, and never once in a Cadillac, as in Bower’s fictional account. I was not “overweight” when 14; I was unnaturally slender until I was past 30, (and this portly and ill-favored author is not a natural source for such reflections). My academic career did not end in failed law exams. I graduated well enough in law and also took an M.A. It is true that I had a sleepless night shortly before my law graduation. It is utterly false that, as Bower tells us, I “was on the verge, some believed, of committing suicide – the accumulation of his loveless childhood, his academic failure, and his social insecurity had become an intolerable burden.” None of them actually occurred, so they could not have been onerous. “One diagnosis suggested a narcissistic personality disorder.”

I have never had a psychiatric diagnosis, other than the assurance of my supervisor, when I was briefly a candidate-psychoanalyst, that I was not neurotic. The doctor for the English-speaking students in my French language law faculty gave me a sleeping pill, and told me to have a glass of whiskey. I took his advice, and it worked.

I was not, as Bower writes, accused by the “American authorities” of “fraudulent practices” in 1982, and the Canadian regulators at the time never suggested or considered for an instant that I had “defrauded Argus shareholders,” as Bower claims. These are simply inventions.

His keyhole, smut-mongering side-piece portrayal of my wife as a man-eating sex maniac prior to her marriage to me is disgusting. Before the beginning of the 15 years of completely happy, serene, marital fidelity we have enjoyed, I knew her socially for 15 years as a glamorous, but never unseemly woman. Even Bower knows better than to attach much credence to the ungentlemanly recollections of rejected men upon whom the professional and romantic sun set long ago. Some of the claims to intimacy with her, if one knows the individuals, are laughable and reminded me of the British parliamentary retort about being (in this case) ravished “by a dead sheep.”

Ever since this controversy began, the Post has been an endless source of falsehoods as inane and malicious as the Bower book commissioned by its publishing affiliate, HarperCollins. It was obvious from early on that, illogical though it was, this episode would probably go to a trial. “So foul a sky clears not without a storm.”(King John) All I have ever asked was a fair trial. I expect to receive one and have no doubt of its outcome. The Post would not even grant me that. In the first days of this vendetta, it brayed the sentence, before the verdict, and long before the charge. It never had any interest in the evidence.

The Post loses no opportunity to declare me jubilantly, and with implausible bourgeois affectations, to have been “disgraced,” and Bower writes of a “familiar tale of a tycoon’s rise and fall.” I don’t think so. I have not been disgraced; I have been violently assaulted and profoundly defamed. When this tempest fell upon me three years ago, I realized that much of the life I had worked 35 years to build was temporarily over and that I was thrown into a new life, maintaining my liberty, and some of what I had earned over the years, and fighting to retrieve my reputation. Curiously, I have adjusted quite well to it. It is a stimulating challenge, and I’m confident of the outcome. Barbara and I have successfully resisted the fiendish efforts to strangle us financially, and to intimidate and demoralize and ostracize us. The prosecutors will soon, finally, have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt the guilt of completely innocent people. They will fail, and justice will be done.

There have been disappointments in New York, but there and elsewhere, most people we thought to be friends have behaved as friends, and we are more grateful than we can say for their encouragement.

This is a play in three acts, as I tried to explain in my e-mails to Bower, but it was hopeless. He was writing a criminography; where the biographer begins with a judgment against character, then argues backward to invented or twisted “facts.” The egregiousness is already certain, as you are dealing with someone known to be wicked, as well as, in this case, pathetic. Almost every word of his malodorous pot-boiler will be dishonest and defamatory.

This raises two burning questions: since the first act was the Downfall of Conrad and Barbara Black, which has occurred officially, but has not occurred morally; and therefore has not really occurred at all, since character and reputation and integrity are all that are important here, not money or position, which can always be regained, replicated, or done without; and the second act is the Great Court Battle, which even Bower acknowledged to friends of mine I might well win; what are the Boweresque pestilences going to do in act three, when I have won? They may not wish to think of that now, but in a few months it will be our turn, and they will be thinking of little else.

And the second question is: How did the New York Post, frivolous though it was, become such a spigot of sewage, and how did its companion newspaper, the London Sunday Times, and their affiliate, HarperCollins, sink to such depths? What depraved them to the point of publishing such a torrent of libels? To pose the question is to answer it; everyone knows who is responsible for the collapsed standards of these entities. Eventually, he will have to answer for it.

Lord Black, a founding director of The New York Sun, is the author, most recently, of “Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom” (Public Affairs).