Fwd: Fwd: Response to your letter -

Back from Mexico, and there's some business I'd like to take care of.

I would like to arrange for Max to step down as trustee of the marital trusts. All that this requires is that each of you authorize him to do so. I've explained some of the reasons. There are others. In general, I want to make a clean break from what has been happening for the past few years. I would then like to appoint Richard Kahn as Trustee. As you know, he is the financial advisor/accountant I have been working with, extremely competent and trustworthy.

I hope this can be done quickly and expeditiously.

In brief, I've worked hard all my life and have managed to set aside funds to ensure your security and the security of your children -- the two houses trusts, in substantial sums. Valeria and I are very happy together. I think I now have the right to live the rest of my life in peace and tranquility, without constant financial concerns, in fact like everyone else I know.

Those who remain. You have perhaps heard that my old friend Ed Herman died a few days ago.

D

Dear Doddoy,

We were so saddened to hear about Ed Herman. What a terrible loss.

Love, Avi, Diane and Harry

Thank you for your detailed email. As we said before, our understanding of many of the specific points you make is quite different from yours, but we certainly are in agreement that you should be able to live in comfort and financial security. We wish that we could sit down together to try to work this out and communicate better as a family, but since it seems that we can't right now, we'll have to resort to working through the lawyers. As you know, their discussions are underway on the issues you've brought up.

One way to communicate better would be to know our respective points of view. I've written to you three long and detailed letters explaining my understanding of the situation. You have only told me that your understanding is quite different, but you haven't told me anything about what your understanding is, or what its source is. What do you see differently from what I have described in detail? Without knowing that, there's no way to communicate. I have no idea what your understanding is, except that it is quite different, for reasons that I do not know.

I do not like to leave matters to lawyers, not just because of the expense, but far more importantly because the differences in understanding are matters we ought to work out among ourselves. And again, that is not possible until you let me know what you think the situation is, and why.

To clarify, the lawyers are discussing certain technical matters, but not the issues I brought up in my last letter to you, or the earlier ones. That's personal, not for lawyers.

Dear Doddoy,

We have tried to discuss this with you but we have been frustrated—and even frightened—by the results. That's why we've asked you if we could meet with a mediator who could facilitate the discussion and make sure that we are able to actually hear each other. We would still like to do this if you are willing. Because some of the disagreements seem to be about basic facts—which could be clarified by outside sources—we have also asked if these outside sources (Bainco, Max) could be part of the conversation, or could be available to give us clear answers to some of the questions. We would still like to do this, too!

Love, Avi, Diane and Harry

I just don't understand this. I've explained the facts in detail, repeatedly, with no response. You've told me that you have a different understanding of the basic facts, but haven't told me what it is, or what are the questions to which you want answers other than what I have told you. That is why communication cannot proceed. So, yes, frustrating.

Evidently you regard this as an adversarial proceeding, requiring a mediator. I don't understand this either. I thought we were a family discussing matters relating to us. I have no idea what a mediator would be for. Mediating what? Another reason for my frustration.

As for Bainco and Max, I have explained in part what they have been doing, causing me plenty of harm. In part. As I've told you, there is a lot more. But what I have told you is more than enough to explain that they are not reliable sources who can be trusted.

If you want them to answer your questions, OK, but it would seem rather strange if I were to ask them about your financial affairs -- a matter into which I've of course never inquired, except by asking you questions if they came up. So I find all of this quite strange. If I have questions about your lives and circumstances, I would ask you, not some investment firm or lawyer, and I wouldn't request a mediator. I don't understand why it is different in my case, and this is something else I'd like to know the explanation for.

So, yes, frustrating. For these reasons.

Dear Doddoy,

We've tried to talk to you about your financial situation several times over the past couple of years, in person, by phone, and by e-mail. The process has been extremely unpleasant for us, and we presume for you as well. More importantly, it has not led to any enlightenment on any of our parts. Much of what we've tried to say you have flatly denied; some of it we think you simply haven't understood. You seem absolutely convinced that your beliefs are correct and absolutely uninterested in trying to look at the situation in other ways, to the extent that you can't even remember these exchanges. Much of what you've said to us conflicts directly with our personal knowledge of your history and with legal and financial advice from every source we've heard from. So the conversations lead only to more stress and heartache.

We are not willing to continue trying to discuss this with you unless something changes. One change would be to include a professional in the conversation who can resolve our differences in belief about basic facts. However, you have apparently decided that because you disapprove of some of the suggestions made by your former lawyer and financial managers -- many of which were based on choices you and Mommoy had made previously -- you will now not believe anything they tell you. That leaves us with no recourse to determine the truth about anything that happened between 2007 and 2016.

We have suggested a mediator as a last resort. Perhaps with a mediator we can at least listen to each other's beliefs and perspectives, even if we can't come to agreement on key points. Perhaps a mediator could even help us find a way to investigate the questions of fact and come to some conclusions that we could all accept.

Short of being able to talk to you openly, it's very important to the three of us to protect you from future financial catastrophe. We have been trying our best to do this, and will continue to try, regardless of what happens with our communication. We believe that Eric Menoyo designed your estate plan properly to protect the interests of all parties, and we will continue to work to ensure that the plan is administered in a faithful and professional way.

We also wanted to say that we have a different interpretation of how we have balanced respect, privacy, and autonomy, versus questions and interference, in our family history. You tell us that you deeply resent being asked questions when you request financial withdrawals, and you deeply resent our questions about your financial situation. You say that you are the only one being questioned in this way. But we don't believe that's the case. Historically, as a family we have been open with each other about our individual financial situations; we have watched out for each other and stepped in if we felt it was needed; and on the most concrete level, any request to access funds from any of the trusts has always required an explanation to go along with it.

In Avi's case, you and Mommoy interfered to tell her that something was going very wrong with Sandi and that she had to get professional help; to practically force her to go meet with a lawyer Mommoy found for her when she became convinced that Avi's marriage to Jon was causing harm; and to order Avi to go see a doctor and get on medication when she confessed that she couldn't handle things. That is: when Mommoy saw Avi doing fine, she didn't pry or interfere. When she saw her falling apart, she stepped in to help.

In Diane's case, she discussed her financial situation with Mommoy in a very open way on many, many occasions, leading Mommoy to offer her things like washing machines (we all know how that turned out) and more significantly, help with rent payments during a few years in Mexico, during a period when: Oxfam had stopped paying the rent, Gmo had stopped receiving his stipend as a grad student, and Diane was still suffering from a considerable salary cut imposed by Oxfam after the move to Mexico. Diane accepted her offer, which was a huge temporary help while she got herself back on her feet.

Furthermore, on the occasions when Diane has asked Bainco for money from the trust that is in her name, she is always asked to explain exactly what it is for. This happens even though the amounts have never been very large. If anything looks odd, the trustees come back to her with questions. Harry once even phoned her because what she was asking for seemed so strange and he was concerned that something was wrong (in case you are wondering what was indeed going on, it was a small Mexican peso loan to a friend in trouble, which Diane couldn't do by other means because she was traveling at the time, and it couldn't wait until she got back home). Diane has not found this questioning to be humiliating or prying - she assumes it is the terms of the trust and the trustees are just doing their jobs.

In Harry's case, at one point in the mid-1990s he unexpectedly owed $60,000 due to the Alternative Minimum Tax as a result of receiving stock options. He discussed this with Mommoy and her accountant, and they decided she would lend him the money to pay the taxes and he would pay her back once he had a chance to exercise and liquidate the stock options, several months later.

In the current situation, the reason we are asking you questions now (and never before) is that now we are hearing from you repeatedly that your financial situation is dire. We decided to ask you about your financial circumstances - not lightly, as we said in one of our many emails, but after much thought, given that we could see that your concern about it was causing you a great deal of stress and was leading to you taking important and possibly unnecessarily radical decisions. We continue to feel that you are misinterpreting your financial situation, and that this is causing you considerable anguish. It pains us greatly to see this, as we've said before.

We can tell from your tax requests that you have been spending many hundreds of thousands of dollars every year on personal expenses, even after having successfully eliminated the extra costs that you have mentioned as a drain on your resources (the Cape house, the gifts, Anthony's salary, etc). This is far out of alignment with what we know about your lifestyle. You and Valeria should live in comfort together -- no need to adhere to your old, fairly austere living conditions -- but your expenditures seem to go far beyond that, and seem to keep rising. This makes us worry and makes us want to intervene to try to help. It also makes the trustees worry that you are not managing your finances with attention to your possible lifelong needs. Nothing in the long and detailed letters you've sent us can begin to explain why your personal spending has shot up the way it has. We can see only little pieces of your situation, because of the secretive posture you've adopted in recent years, but the pieces we do see suggest a set of problems very different from the ones you've described.

We hope this helps to explain our position and our real concern. You are right that in our last emails (and in this one) we haven't gone point by point through your affirmations, explaining our different understanding of the basic facts, but as we said at the beginning of this email, we tried to do that in the past and it didn't work. We truly hope we can find a way to talk openly about the situation.

Love, Avi, Diane and Harry

I'm sorry, but this is surreal.

I have repeatedly spelled out the circumstances in extensive detail. Your sole response has been that you disagree, without once saying what you disagree with or why. I have never denied anything you have tried to say, for the simple reason that you have never said anything that could either be affirmed or denied, only that you disagree with what I've spelled out but without any indication of what or why.

In this letter, for the first time, you specifically address something I have written. You write: "We can tell from your tax requests that you have been spending many hundreds of thousands of dollars every year on personal expenses, even after having successfully eliminated the extra costs that you have mentioned as a drain on your resources (the Cape house, the gifts, Anthony's salary, etc)." What I wrote you however is quite different. To repeat: there is a mandatory withdrawal from the IRA. Half of that was distributed to children, grandchildren, and spouses. The other half was spent in taxes and management fees for the entire estate. Cape house, Alex's medical expenses and other gifts, Anthony's salary, etc., were from necessary withdrawals over and above the mandatory withdrawal, hence subject to exorbitant taxes, requiring additional withdrawal. That is before we even get to ordinary living expenses. The request had nothing at all to do with personal expenses, as you can see by just looking at my letters and running through the arithmetic. So the one case you now mention is flatly incorrect.

But this tells us how to proceed: tell me explicitly what you have in mind, and then we can proceed in a reasonable fashion.

There's a simple way out of this impasse -- not by setting up an adversary proceeding with a mediator, as you suggest, but by you telling me what you disagree with in what I have outlined to you and what your reasons are. You have not yet done that in a single letter. So, simply, why not do it right now, and then we can proceed.

Again, I've repeatedly spelled out the circumstances in extensive detail. So, simply, tell me what you disagree with and why. No mediators are necessary, just a direct response. Or if you feel that you have already done so, then re-send the letter in which you responded to my detailed account, telling me what you disagree with and why.

Meanwhile, while the impasse continues, I'm compelled to face constant aggravating and painful circumstances, not to speak of humiliating demands and by now significant costs. That can end if we simply resolve these matters quickly in a straightforward and simple way.

I haven't responded to the last part of your letter because it doesn't relate to the matter at hand. I was referring to Max's radical shift in stand, not to how affairs were managed in the past. To repeat, when distributions were made to family from the IRA, and taxes and management fees for the entire estate were drawn from the IRA -- exhausting the mandatory withdrawal -- Max, my lawyer, raised no question about the financial circumstances of the beneficiaries, nor should he have done so. But when I am requesting tax payments from the marital trust that was set up for M and me and the survivor for our lifetimes, all of a sudden he is making exorbitant and humiliating demands. What you describe below has nothing to do with this simple matter.

D

Dear Doddoy,

Please find attached a reply to your emails which we spoke with you about before Christmas.

As we've said before, based on past experience we have a lot of doubts about how well an email exchange will work. We did attempt, a few months ago, to use email to address one small, concrete issue: the loan from the marital trust and its conditions and interest rate. We thought it would be simple to resolve our different understandings, but in the end our multiple communications—even including an explanatory memo from the lawyer who set up the loan—did not manage to clarify things at all. Nonetheless, since you've asked several times for an email exchange about the broader issues, we're willing to try.

We know that what you asked for was for us to go through your detailed emails point by point and tell you what we disagree with and why. That isn't exactly what we've done here. Instead, this is our best attempt to explain the history and circumstances as we understand them.

Why have we done this? For a number of reasons. We think that many of your underlying assumptions are far off from reality, and that your understanding of the past, the present and what we are saying about these financial issues is deeply distorted. We want to start by looking at the larger, long-term issues, where we feel you have simply rewritten history.

The attached narrative is our best attempt to do this. Please keep in mind that it is based only on our memory and a handful of documents we've seen through the years. The numbers in particular are all rough approximations, since of course we don't have access to your legal and financial files. You may very well feel we're mistaken about some details. But in order to address those issues and come to an agreement on even the basic facts, we'd really like to meet face to face, with the help of the people who actually have the documents and the information to determine whether the things each of us believe are true or not. And, with a neutral mediator, who can ensure that we all are able to listen to and understand what the other parties are trying to say.

Love, Avi, Diane and Harry

Several black-box redactions over names and email addresses; "mailto" tokens visible in the header

Dear Doddoy,

We really hesitated to write our long letter to you last month. We only finally decided to write it because you insisted so many times that we do so. We think, and have thought for a long time, that we need to sit down face-to-face and work through our very substantial differences with you in how we understand your estate plan, financial history, and current situation. But after you asked us so many times in December to discuss it by e-mail, we decided to give that a try. We definitely didn't intend to be legalistic and adversarial, and we really regret that that's how you found our writing. We meant our letter as a heartfelt explanation of our perspective on the issues and how we want to help you understand the problem and fix it. But it doesn't sound like you've understood what we were trying to explain and express. This strongly confirms our feeling that e-mail is not a useful way for us to communicate about these issues.

I understood very well, and responded, pointing out that the information you have received from some source -- which you do not identify, despite repeated requests -- is flatly wrong. In the letter I wrote to you, to which this one was supposed to be a response (while avoiding everything I wrote), I already had explained in some detail why your picture is incorrect, throughout. I'm sorry that you ignored the letter, but I will repeat the main points below. If you want to sit down face-to-face, OK, though I think a conference call would make more sense.

I can only repeat what I said before. We surely should be concerned about one another. I've often been concerned about your decisions and choices, and felt that they were questionable or misguided. It never occurred to me that I should inquire into the details of your financial situation or your lifestyles or to supervise what you do. Rather, I just supported it, whatever my misgivings, financially and in other ways..C240 Same with Mommoy when she was alive, and contrary what you seem to believe (along with Max), we were a couple, making decisions jointly, not deciding separately how to allocate funds under her or my separate control, an idea so outlandish it never occurred to us, or to Eric, or to anyone until Max and you brought it up.

I do hope we can end this quickly, and pick up our lives without this bligh=. One practical step that remains is for you to request Max to withdraw as trustee of the Marital Trusts, so that, as before, I can select the Trustee of my choice, someone I can regard as reliable and trustworthy.

Thanks for your detailed and heartfelt reply. You've made it really clear how damaging it is to all of us to continue to pursue this conversation. We completely share your wish to be able to get back to the family relation that we also have treasured all these years, and as we've said, we want you to be happy and relaxed. We don't mean to ignore your points—we've read and thought deeply about every one of them. But we take to heart your words that you really want to end this interchange. We'd be willing to drop it at this point.

On the other hand, you say you want something more: to replace Max as trustee. Working that out with us will require some more conversation—maybe just a little bit, though. Can you start by telling us the status of the process already underway? Have you had a chance to look at the list of candidates that we proposed in January?

Love, Avi, Diane and Harry

Just back from some days away, including a talk in Oakland, at MECA. We spent some time with Amy and Alex, who visited us at our hotel. Even went to visit Alex's school. Amy told us that Alex came to the talk and stayed through. She said that Harry, Inti and his friend, and some others were there, but I couldn't see anyone in the audience (lights were too bright) and no one came up afterwards, a little to my surprise. We spent most of the day at the Oakland airport.

Alex had written to me that Sandi was pregnant, but I didn't know whether to believe it. Amy confirmed it, and said she would have the baby in Japan. Very welcome news.

About your letter, it's perfectly true that this controversy, which I do not understand, is very painful. And I'd very much like to see it resolved. It is the one blight on my current life, and an extremely severe one.

I'd of course like to end the interchange, but it can't really be ended in a satisfactory way by just sweeping the issues -- whatever they are, I don't understand them -- under the rug. I can't help supposing that there is something that you are not telling me, and it's important that I know what it is. What you have written can't be the basis for problems, whatever they are, for reasons I've explained in detail. I've informed you in great detail, and fully accurately, about what has been going on -- and as I mentioned, there is further serious malfeasance that you'll find out about in due course. But that is all under control now, and there is no reason that I can see for you to have the concerns that you expressed in your previous, as I already explained. If there is some other reason, you really should tell me about it.

One particular matter that I wrote you about remains a matter of serious concern to me. I described Max's interpretation of the marital trust, based on unpleasant legalistic chicanery. To repeat the main points, Eric set up the Trust in Mommoy's name for estate purposes. Trust law requires that the funds first pass through a Carol Chomsky Revocable Trust, then be transferred to the Marital Trust, where, of course, it is intended for the survivor. Seizing on this technicality, Max contrived a story about our dividing up our resources, with me responsible for my portion, and Carol responsible for her portion and for the children. This mad idea of course never occurred either to us, or to Eric.

We're sorry to hear that you haven't considered the trustee candidates we proposed. We do not accept your counter-proposal that Max step down and then you choose the new trustee. For one thing, if there is going to be a new trustee, it will have to be somebody we are all four comfortable with.

We will need some time to figure out if we still see a viable path toward replacing Max.

We realize there are a lot of other issues you've brought up, some of which involve serious and deep disagreements between you and us. Unfortunately, our experiences trying to discuss those issues with you have convinced us that we can't make any progress by email or telephone, so we're not going to respond here.

Love, Avi, Diane and Harry

Puzzled...CZ* You say there are deep disagreements, and that we can't make any progress by email or telephone. Do you have some other suggestion?

It would help if you would tell me what the disagreements are. I don't understand the reference to our experiences trying to discuss these issues. I know of no such experiences. Rather, I have repeatedly provided detailed accounts to which you have not responded. You wrote me your version of matters and I responded in detail showing that it is in part simply mistaken, and in part appears to adopt an assumption about the marital trust that Max offered, based on legalistic chicanery that I described, and that could not possibly have occurred to Mommoy and me (or Eric). I've asked you several times whether you agree with this interpretation, but you haven't answered. Unless you respond to this, I cannot understand why you have concluded that I cannot proceed as I have before, without discussion, to select a trustee for this trust.

Where matters now stand, then, is that I have responded specifically, point by point, to your version and you have not responded. Further, I have written to you detailed accounts to which you have not responded. And you haven't answered the one outstanding question. I do not understand then, what the disagreements are. Unless you can tell me what they are, it is correct that we cannot make any progress.

If there's something that you are not telling me, I wish you would. I do not see any disagreement other than your statement that there are deep disagreements.

No need to say how profoundly disturbing this is, even more so that you see the disagreements that you feel exist -- but cannot describe to me -- are irresoluble.

The latest from the children.