But the name. I knew about the name.
In 2018 I was on a panel at a property conference, and a journalist chairing it asked me, pleasantly, at the end: and of course there’s the foundation that bears your name — how involved are you these days?
I said I had no relationship with that organisation.
And she said something warm about how modest that was, and moved on to the next question, and the room laughed, and that was that.
Afterwards I rang my lawyer and asked what it would take to get my name off a charity I had nothing to do with.
She was very good and very clear.
She said: we’d have to sue, and they’d defend it, and it becomes a public record. The hospital. Your parents. The bin bag. All of it, in a filing, and then in the press, with your face on it.
She said: it’s your call. But you should know what it costs.
I thought about it for about a week.
And then I let them keep it.
I was thirty-eight months into a company that was finally working. I had spent eleven years being a credit report and a police file and a case number, and I had just got to the point where nobody in a meeting knew anything about me except what I told them.
I was not going to let anybody put my leg in a newspaper again.
That was a reasonable decision. I have had four people tell me it was the right one, including my aunt, and I would defend it to anybody who asked.
It also ran for another seven years.
And a twenty-four-year-old woman filled in a form in March 2023 because she trusted a name that I had decided, in 2018, was not worth the fight.
I have not found a way round that one and I have stopped looking for it.
I did not pay the million.
I sent the file to the foundation’s auditors, to the trustee who had asked the question in the spring, and to the state attorney general’s charities division, all on the same afternoon.
There is a process and it is ongoing and there are things about it I have been asked not to write.
My mother has left eleven voicemails. I have listened to two.
In the second one she says that I have destroyed this family, and then, in the same message, that she has always been proud of what I have made of myself.
