Well, since the lawsuit is over (for now, anyway), I feel a little more comfortable giving some of my perspective into all of this.
For starters (and I'm pretty sure I mentioned it earlier in this thread), even though it's in the thread title, this is not really an "HG101 book". Through John used to write for my site, and I helped promote it, I have little to do with it beyond being a backer myself and helping with some production issues.
My involvement in this debacle began somewhere in late 2013, when I received a Facebook friend request from Agness, whose name I recognized from the interviews John had done a while prior, which I accepted. At this point, John e-mailed me to let me know about the troubles he ran into with the interpreters. Apparently what Agness was doing was going through his list of contacts and sending them similar requests, then they were going back to John and asking him "Why is the sister of your ex-project coordinator trying to contact me?" This made him really, really nervous since he expected they would probably try to get them to recant their interviews, and even at this point, felt they were trying to sabotage the project. (This ended up being a self fulfilling prophecy, because they did try to do this once John started lambasting them.) This is actually the only way, as far as I know, that Agness is involved, since she didn't do of the interpretation work.
I really didn't think too much about it until a few months later, when John went public with his problems. This prompted the libel suit, of course, but they also set up a website where they specifically named some of the backers, despite having nothing to do with the project. Agness also emailed me, asking that I remain neutral in their fight.
Beyond the fact that this would potentially open me up the libel suit, I thought John going public with this was a pretty bad idea, so I was definitely not going to join in this feud. I instructed John to keep any of his complaints against his interpreters off my servers (which he did), though apparently now Agness keeps complaining (not to me, since I blocked her on Twitter) that I didn't join her in sabotaging the book(s).
Anyway, I also learned that they were digging through the Kickstarter comments and contacting the people through any means necessary (including social networks, like with me) in order to "notify" them about the lawsuit. This makes me really uncomfortable, because while they've tried to rationalize this as being part of the legal process, I find that it amounts to stalking, so at that point I got super creeped out and defriended her.
Obviously things just got worse and worse from there, as John kinda disappeared from the public eye and the two sides continued to lob insults at each other. As a result of these issues, John has since resigned from HG101 (he actually hadn't had much to do with the site since he started up the Kickstarter a few years ago). We're still going to promote the upcoming volumes, since despite how he's poorly he's handled many aspects of this project and all of the negative vibes surrounding, in the end he does put out some really damn good work.
Latest review on Amazon really beats his book up, lol. I don't agree with most of the review, but it brings up a point worth mentioning: John talks about material he needed to redact in surprising detail. He gives hints for the kinds of discussions between him and interviewers that can't be communicated due to safety risks for either party. I'd rather not know about any of this if that meant wasting space for another interview (like the one with Naosuke Arai his opening KS pitch implicitly promised!).
I asked him about this, he wanted to leave it open for future questioning by other interviewers, and felt that it was better to relate that a story couldn't be told, rather than not telling at all. I agree that there were probably better ways to handle this.
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