Another take on Sue Scheff

[Anonymous]

http://cheapriboflavin.wordpress.com/20 ... o-we-have/

What choice do we have?
14
 
08
 
2007
 Before beginning, I would like to state that I am genetically and habitually predisposed to rampant bouts of paranoia, so it’s possible that even with a small dose of information I can blow things entirely out of proportion.

With that over with, I will tell a short story. While packing my computer cables and paraphernalia, I was watching a local TV station. After doing a little bit of research, I believe that it was 20/20, but I may be wrong. [Edit: I wasn’t wrong! Here’s the story that aired.] Much flipping was involved, in an attempt to escape a local news story about a woman burying her dead fetus. (Yes, isn’t Memphis lovely?) The story eventually touched on an interesting subject, and I started watching closely enough to pick up that there is a private company out there (Reputation Defender), that will keep an eye on what people are saying about you online and… for a fee… attempt to bury those negative remarks with positively-phrased comments, etc. One of their examples was a woman named Sue Scheff. Since I had my laptop out already, the internet was working, and her name’s alliteration piqued my interest, I immediately Googled her.

This is what I came across. It’s very detailed, and I’m afraid that after reading through some of it I noticed a particular bent that gave me a feeling of deja vu. Here’s a short synopsis:

What the story boils down to is this. Sue Scheff is a founder of PURE (Parents Universal Resource Experts). On 20/20 it sounded very pleasant, a business that is meant to help parents find the best places to send their troubled teens. After reading some of this other site, however, I found that it’s not entirely what it seems when described in under twenty words on a news program by someone who feels like a victim. It appears that it is common for consultants like Sue to both accept money from institutions they recommend to parents and, in some cases, ask for a fee when looking for an institution for a particular client. This is all well and good, except it seems that they also tend not to investigate these institutions as well as one should.

Now, I’m not wasting my time enough to investigate if any of those vague and general accusations are accurate. This is not what concerns me. (Well, it does, but only in the same way that a nameless homeless person concerns me.) What concerns me is why Sue would need to hire Reputation Defender. What would make someone who is the head of a company like PURE need to hire a private company to pore through the internet (doing many complicated Google searches, I’m sure) and bury negative content about her? Why would anyone want to make negative comments about her?

Without going into too much detail, this is the skinny: There was a big mess about personal information being leaked onto the web. Some parents who were clients of Sue’s either found out (if it the allegation is true) or thought that the information concerning their family and home had been unethically leaked to third parties. They, understandably, were very upset. This led to a vast amount of derogatory comments at a site called Fornits. I read through some of them, and while they’re certainly not pleasant, I’ve seen worse. Sue herself described some of these comments on 20/20, and the interviewer went on to describe the internet as some form of “People’s Courtâ€