Stan Lee's brush with the law

Last week when posting about Stan Lee's new gay superhero I mentioned that his association with an FOB - Friend of Bill (Clinton) - nearly earned him a jail sentence. Our friend Patrick, who blogs at The Pagan Temple, asked for details. Here is the Cliff Notes version.

In the mid to late 90's Stan Lee befriended an attorney named Peter Paul - a friendship which was based in part on their shared left-wing political views. Paul was able to negotiate a contract for Mr. Lee with Marvel Comics which allowed him to work on outside projects. This led to Lee and Paul forming a company called Stan Lee Media, which later went public.

Paul and another corporate officer named Stephan Gordon illegally manipulated stock prices in the corporation in order to defraud investors. Part of the money they raised in this way was funneled into the campaign of Hillary Clinton who was running for her first term in the US Senate.

When the SEC discovered the illegal activities Stan Lee Media filed for bankruptcy and Paul fled to Brazil, but was later extradited back to the US. The SEC investigated Stan Lee's involvement in the affair but could not find sufficient evidence to disprove Lee's claim that he was only the creative side of the management team and had no idea what was going on in the financial side of the company, although Lee was on record approving of his companies efforts to help the Clintons.

My point is not that Stan Lee was personally involved in illegal activities but that his association with the kind of people who associate with Bill and Hillary Clinton landed him in the cross hairs of a federal felony investigation. The Clinton Machine is nothing more than an ongoing criminal enterprise and associating yourself with it, even peripherally, is asking for trouble.