The Mystery of the Authorship of the Anonymous Letter of New Rochelle Part II

This is Part II in a 4-Part Series

DUBLIN, IRELAND (August 3, 2024) — After I came to believe that the author of the Anonymous Letter was more than likely Robert Yamuder, I reached out to him multiple times, was ignored, then inundated with threats from his lawyer. To this day, he has never replied to me.

The lawyer said I had asserted “false and defamatory claims” and that if I wrote or even suggested Yamuder was the author of the Anonymous Letter, he would file a defamation suit against me in New York State Supreme Court. She said he denied being the author of the Anonymous Letter.

In Part III of this series, I will detail the legal threats. Part IV will describe the reasons why I came to believe it was more than likely Robert Yamuder who authored the Anonymous Letter.

Part I was about my use of forensic linguistics software to generate an Authorship Determination report: Flint AI Report on Unknown Author. The analysis found, within an 80% — 85% level of certainty, that the submission was authored by Robert Yamuder.

I would have liked to have had this analysis in March, but it was not until the end of June that I had enough writing samples from Robert Yamuder to create a single document of about 1,200 words with which to make a statistically significant comparison to the Anonymous Letter at just over 700 words.

On March 24, having decided to use forensic linguistics to analyze the anonymous letter, I made a Freedom of Information request to get writing samples for Robert Yamuder. It was the day before all hell broke loose with Mayor Yadira Ramos-Herbert moving to fire City Manager Kathleen Gill on March 25, 2024, and a week after the legal threats began.

This is the story — told through email exchanges with the City Clerk and Corporation Counsel over the following three months — of my battle to get 20 emails to use as exemplars.