Ripped & Ravaged 

When reviewers told LDS romance novelist Rachel Nunes that a book titled The Auction Deal, scheduled for release in August 2014, seemed suspiciously similar to hers, she was sure it was a mistake. She hoped it was "just a similar plot," she recalls, never envisioning a stranger could possibly steal her story and rework it. But that's what Nunes now claims: A writer changed the point of view of her 1998 romance novel, A Bid for Love—and spiced up what was originally a Christian novel by adding some steamy sex scenes.

The conflict between the two writers would escalate far beyond charges of plagiarism. Nunes alleges the plagiarist used various Internet pen names to conduct a disinformation campaign showing "a clear plan of attack that I'm learning is used by many plagiarists." The alleged literary thief tried everything "to discredit and hurt me," Nunes says, claiming the writer "slammed my writing, threatened me professionally, and then dragged my extended family into the fray."

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Today, Nunes hesitates every time she receives a Facebook friend request, because she worries it could be from a supporter of her foe—someone "who could fling more rocks and mud in my direction." For her, the act of being plagiarized was so personal, it is difficult for her to talk about. "But with all the added drama in my case, it also feels like a literal physical attack. Feels, not felt, because I'm still dealing with it every day and could be for another year or more."

She complains about how much time she has lost dealing with the issue. Those were hours she could have spent with her husband and seven children, or writing another book. "The lifetime earnings I won't make on the book I didn't write in these past months is something I'll never recoup."

Meanwhile, the author of The Auction Deal has removed the book from Amazon.

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Nunes (pronounced Noon-esh) was born in Provo. She learned to read when she was 4 and began writing in the seventh grade. Until her recent run-in with the alleged plagiarist, Nunes enjoyed a prolific writing career as a Christian novelist. Now residing in Orem, she writes books ranging from romance and suspense to women's fiction and family drama, including Before I Say Goodbye, the Autumn Rain novels, and the Ariana series.

Rachel Nunes is a luminary in the LDS writing community, having published 48 books with the three largest LDS publishers, says local writer Heather Moore, herself the author of 20 novels and 16 novellas. "She is also the founder of the LDS Storymakers organization, in which she has mentored LDS writers from all over the country." Plus, Nunes serves on the Indie Author Hub board and has won the Whitney Award, a distinction honoring LDS writers. Her book, Daughter of a King, won Best Book of the year by the Independent LDS Booksellers Association.

Moore recalls how motivated she felt after taking a workshop from Nunes. "She talked about how she wrote 2,000 words a day. Sometimes it took a couple of hours, but most of the time it took the whole day," Moore said. "She said she'd often pick her kids up from school still wearing PJs. She frequently wrote with a toddler in her lap. As a young mom, it was a huge inspiration to me to know that I could set a word-count goal and that, sometimes, my family could have hot dogs for dinner, and it would be OK to follow my dreams."

A Complete Violation
When Sam Taylor Mullens self-published The Auction Deal on Amazon in the summer of 2014, Mullens may not have counted on the fact that Mullens and Nunes traveled in the same romance-novelist circles, and that the multiple reviewers who were sent a copy would remember Nunes' book, A Bid for Love.

Originally titled Love to the Highest Bidder, Nunes' book is a story about two art dealers—one from New York and the other from California—who meet and fall in love while bidding on an Indian Buddha statue. It was first published by Deseret Book, a publishing house for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Nunes got the copyright after the book went out of print and published a slightly revised e-book edition on Amazon.com titled A Bid for Love.

The Auction Deal, according to Nunes, has the same plot but is told in the first person. It is about an art dealer who bids on a sculpture in Beverly Hills and meets a Chicago gallery owner. Nunes understood that Mullens' book included sex scenes, another difference from A Bid for Love.

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In late July 2014, Nunes said several reviewers emailed her, telling her that Mullens' book was very similar to hers. "They said it was a copy of my book and that [the author] was claiming to have collaborated with me," Nunes says. Writing back to the reviewers, Nunes asked them to read her novel to confirm if it was true. Either that, she said, or send her a copy of Mullens' book. Nunes "was freaked out" by the idea of people writing reviews about a novel that was hers (with the exception of the sex scenes). She then found The Auction Deal author's email address and sent off a message asking for an explanation as well as an opportunity to review the book. She asked to see an ARC, or advance reading copy. "I still hoped that it just had a similar plot," she recalls.

Nunes says that Mullens claimed The Auction Deal evolved from a writing group before about two dozen beta readers reviewed it. Nunes says that Mullens refused to send an ARC but attempted to allay her concerns by saying the The Auction Deal would not be published.

Nunes said she emailed Mullens again requesting an ARC, saying that reviewers had said there were "eerie similarities" between the two author's books. If Mullens would just send the ARC of The Auction Deal, Nunes said she told Mullens, "I could look at it and then email the three people I've talked to about this and put it to rest. It shouldn't take me long to review it."

But Nunes says Mullens declined and also asked Nunes not to request an ARC from any other sources because, "If you are still a member of the LDS Church, I would not feel comfortable about sharing The Auction Deal due to the sexual content ... and there is a lot."

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Nunes claims that in an email exchange, Mullens said, "I do not write for a living, it is a hobby." Mullens allegedly said Goodreads had removed the link and that The Auction Deal would not be published in any form. With that, Mullens hoped the matter would be resolved because, according to email exchanges posted on Nunes' blog, reviewers were feeling "harassed." Nunes emphasizes that she never harassed any reviewers, claiming she sent them a single polite email and nothing further, unless they responded to her.

Nunes wrote back to Mullens, saying she was still confused about why she would not send her an ARC. "If you never read my book or copied it, then there can't be a problem, right? I don't want any money from you. I mean, I could just turn it over to my attorney if that were the case, because copyright infringement is a big deal. But I'm trying to believe what you say—that you haven't read my book or copied it. That is what you are saying, right?"

Looking back, Nunes said in a recent interview with City Weekly, "I know that she was trying to assuage my worry with her emails, but I realized right off that there was something very wrong because of her refusal [to send the ARC]. Plus, too many reviewers were saying it was the same book. Also, I had no guarantee that she wouldn't go ahead with publishing my book. I needed to know the truth so I could decide what to do."

A sympathetic reviewer finally sent Nunes the ARC of The Auction Deal on Aug. 8, 2014. That's when Nunes discovered that entire phrases were exactly the same, while other sentences and sections were summarized. "When I saw the ARC, I knew that everything the reviewers said is true. The entire plot, words. A complete violation. No wonder [Mullens] wouldn't send it to me."

Nunes said, "It felt like somebody came into my house and stole something very precious to me."

On Aug. 29, 2014, Nunes filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court, seeking $150,000 in damages for each copyright infringement.

Horrendously Expensive to Prosecute
Shawn Bailey is Nunes' attorney. In his "other" life, he is a published writer of a novel and short stories. When a friend of Nunes' wrote a blog post about Nunes and how she was having difficulty paying legal fees to file a copyright-infringement lawsuit, he thought he could help. He says he appreciates Nunes' accomplishments as an author and "what it takes to write a novel—the work and craft that goes into that. I could feel in my bones how it feels to do something creative and love it and want to share that with other people and also how it must feel to have that stolen by someone else and passed off as their work."

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Bailey says, "A lot of people would just back down, but she sees this as a fight worth fighting, as standing up for other creative people."

"I strongly believe in intellectual-property rights because they protect the ability of people to earn a modest reward for what they do," Bailey says. "Even though she has published many novels, it is also a labor of love, and people don't make big money unless they are J.K. Rowling, or a few others in the publishing world. Copyrights enable writers to put groceries on the table for their families."

Copyright laws give the owner of a copyright (often a publisher, author or both) the exclusive right, for a period of time, to benefit from copyrighted work by displaying, reproducing, distributing and making "derivative works" of that work. Bailey says suing for copyright infringement is the legal avenue for copyright owners claiming a violation of their copyright.

In contrast, Bailey says, plagiarism is a broader, ethical concept concerned with using the work of others without proper attribution. There is generally no legal claim for plagiarism. Some plagiarism is also a copyright violation (and vice versa) but the overlap between the two concepts gets muddied.

Further, copyright infringement is a civil matter, not a criminal one. "It is horrendously expensive to prosecute," Nunes said, noting it is also a federal offense. "You are victimized even more when you have to pay money to seek damages. And when a plagiarist rewrites a book by changing a few words, how many readers are going to ... realize it is plagiarized? ... It's so much easier to rewrite someone else's book than write your own."

Nunes says she didn't write for about six months after discovering the alleged plagiarism. She says she could have written two novels in that time, so the loss was huge. "Not only the loss of income," she says, "but the loss of the emotional connection I have with writing. Writing is how I relieve stress. Writers know that if you are not writing, your world is not OK."

Adding Insult to Injury
Not long after Nunes says she asked Mullens to send an ARC, she received an email dated Aug. 5, 2014, from Tiffanie Rushton, a woman claiming to be a friend of Sam Taylor Mullens. The letter alleged that a man who was a member of a writing group gave Nunes' manuscript to Mullens, telling Mullens it was no longer in print. The man claimed to have collaborated with the author on the original work and challenged Mullens to spice it up. The man had since died in a car accident, Rushton said, and as such, Mullens and Rushton did not feel comfortable questioning his family about the collaboration.

In the letter, Nunes says that Rushton went on to criticize her for requesting an ARC from reviewers, saying it was upsetting them. Rushton concluded by painting Mullens in glowing terms, letting it slip that Sam Taylor Mullens is, in fact, a woman. Not only that, but she is the mother of an autistic son who found time to volunteer as a counselor at a domestic-violence shelter and in classrooms as a teacher of "illiterate young moms," Rushton wrote. "Please do not discredit this wonderful woman in the small, indie publishing community," Rushton implored."They need her."

Court documents allege that Mullens emailed a reviewer, claiming to be Nunes' niece. The "niece" told the reviewer that Mullens had the original idea for Nunes' book, and that Nunes gave Mullens permission to rework the story. According to court documents, the "niece" wouldn't divulge Mullens' identity because Mullens' family didn't know she wrote about sex, and if they found out, she would get kicked out of her church and lose her husband.

Nunes also alleges that Mullens wrote to her under a pseudonym, claiming to be the niece of Sheri Dew, CEO of Deseret Book (the company that publishes Nunes' books). According to court documents, a Facebook post using the name of "Mercedes Booklover Drakos" stated, "Rachel [Nunes] feels threatened because I told her I would be contacting my aunt, Sheri Dew, and letting her know how she is handling the situation through reviewers and not through the author. Deseret Book and Seagull Book are appalled at the way she is handling the situation."

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The lawsuit further claims that Mullens used false identities to harass reviewers who spoke against Mullens, and that she utilized more than 20 aliases, or "sock puppets," to leave one-star reviews of Nunes' books on dozens of social-media websites. Nunes says she even found five one-star reviews for A Bid for Love under aliases dating two months prior to Mullens' book being published on Amazon, even before Nunes was aware of the The Auction Deal's existence.

These disingenuous book reviews are noted in Nunes' lawsuit, with Nunes claiming Mullens violated Utah's Truth in Advertising Act as well as the federal Lanham Act, as they allegedly caused harm to Nunes' reputation and book sales.

According to court documents, these false identities included names such as Jennifer Greer, Jennifer Booklover, Abby Forbush, Macey Forbush, Aubrey Powell, Mercedes Drakos, Bethany Johnson, Emma Koster, Lucy Evans and possibly others. Court documents allege that as Nunes uncovered Mullens deceitful actions, Mullens began a campaign to discredit Nunes through various means, such as the following comment by Mercedes Drakos (a purported alias) on Nunes' author page on Facebook: "I have lost a lot of respect for Rachel Nunes as an author and a person. She (is) harassing readers/reviewers online. In my eyes, she does not have the character trait of being kind, caring understanding or compassionate."

Nunes felt vulnerable and began having panic attacks. "[Mullens] was going on my Facebook and posting things. I felt attacked every time I opened my email, because I didn't know if there was going to be something more." She took action to protect herself: grabbing screenshots, communicating with attorneys, deleting posts, asking Amazon to take down reviews, trying to raise funds for her legal defense.

The timing couldn't have been worse for Nunes because her husband had recently gone part-time at his job, so the couple could start an author-related business, which was "horribly delayed because of this." Not only has the conflict taken over her life, "The biggest devastation of all is that I fear I'm neglecting my seven children," she says. "Even when I had a slice of time, working was impossible because of the emotional upheaval."

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Even after Nunes filed a complaint in federal court, Nunes alleges the harassment continued. Nunes would find both public and private posts on Facebook and her GoFundMe account that claimed Nunes' story was all a scam, she says. The posts also appeared to be written under aliases.

Volunteer investigators finally helped Nunes track down the identity of the sock puppets and that of Sam Taylor Mullens herself. While an online bio described Mullens as "happily married and living in beautiful Colorado with two daughters, a son and a schnauzer named Charlie," it turns out that Mullens is actually Tiffanie Rushton, the person Nunes said had written to her claiming to be a friend of Mullens. According to court documents, Rushton is from Layton, Utah. Nunes also notes that Rushton is a third-grade teacher for the Davis School District.

Rushton declined to be interviewed for this story. Her attorney, Brennan Moss, spoke to City Weekly, stating his client, Rushton, pulled the online copies and offered an apology to Nunes, but was rebuffed by Nunes.

Internet Forensics
Helping Nunes unravel Rushton's identity and connecting her to the sock puppets was an online supporter of Nunes', author John Doppler. A software developer in Southern California, Doppler says he stumbled across Nunes' blog by accident. After reading her story, he said, "it was pretty clear that she was an innocent victim. So I wrote to her to express my sympathy and offer any help I could."

Doppler has been involved in animal-welfare cases in the past, such as tracking down crush-video producers, animal hoarders and con artists. "With 20-odd years in IT," he says, "I've picked up some useful investigative skills. I was happy to put those to use in Rachel's case."

He and his team noticed distinctive traits in the mannerisms and cover stories used by the sock puppets that were disparaging Nunes. "We soon realized that we were dealing with one very prolific individual rather than a mob of cyberbullies."

Doppler and other online fans of Nunes' employed a type of "Internet forensics" whereby, "We sent email and private messages to the accounts we suspected," Doppler says. "Those messages contained a link that pointed back to web servers I own." The servers logged each user's IP address, the time of access and a unique code associated with the message. Doppler claims that every one of the connections came from the same IP address—from the same house.

At first, they only knew that the messages came from the same individual in Utah, Doppler says. But one day, Rushton allegedly clicked on a link sent to her personal email, and Doppler claims it matched the other IP traces. That breakthrough opened additional avenues of investigation. "Thanks to the hard work of some extremely dedicated and wonderful people, we were able to compile a daunting collection of evidence against Tiffanie," Doppler says.

Nunes claims that a number of the aliases Rushton allegedly wrote under were actual real-life names of students in her third-grade class. Nunes operates the blog, RachelAnnNunes.blogspot.com, where she writes about her lawsuit as well as news about her novels. When she wrote about her novel allegedly being plagiarized and made claims about Rushton's alleged use of the children's school-issued email addresses, Nunes said that, days later, a student's parent posted on her blog, asking that all the comments about Rushton be removed. "But the IP address showed the [comment from the "parent"] came from Rushton's computer," Nunes alleges.

Strange Fiction
New York Times best-selling science fiction author Dave Wolverton, who writes fantasy books under the name of David Farland, is the author of 50 novels. He became familiar with Nunes' situation and encouraged her to establish a GoFundMe page to raise money for her lawsuit. In an email to City Weekly, he wrote, "Tiffanie Rushton's alleged crimes against Rachel Nunes quite frankly constitute the most bizarre and disgusting behavior that I've ever seen in a plagiarism case. The idea that a third-grade teacher would steal an entire romance novel from another author, turn it into smut, sell it as her own, defraud customers by posting fake review using the name of her underage students, cyberbully the victim, then try to hide her crimes by pretending to be the parents of her students standing up in her own defense goes beyond the pale." He concludes, "If I, as a fiction author, were to make up a character who did these things, no one would believe it."

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Nunes feels that if someone had plagiarized Stephen King or J.K. Rowling, that person would face a legal challenge, but it is easier to get away with victimizing authors with more moderate sales who have yet to become a worldwide sensation. "The truth is," Nunes says, "that all authors are at risk, and this is becoming a huge problem. This is a new breed of plagiarist." Nunes wants plagiarists to know they can be prosecuted and held accountable.

Nunes' case is scheduled for trial in August 2016. Bailey explains that the attorneys are still in the process of discovery. He views it as pure luck one of the reviewers that Rushton asked to read her book had also happened to read Nunes' book. "What Rushton was doing [was] kind of ingenious. I suspect that she thought there wasn't a lot of overlap (between) people who read Christian romance novels, and ones that have the steamier love scenes."

Only Two Copies Sold
While Tiffanie Rushton could not be reached for comment for this story, City Weekly spoke to Brennan Moss, Rushton's attorney. Because of pending litigation and discovery, he says he can offer few specifics about the case. He cannot provide Rushton's explanation as to why the two books contain similarities. He says that as soon as Rushton was notified, she backed down right away and pulled her books. He adds that she was willing not to publish and she offered an apology letter, but those offers were rebuffed by Nunes, who also would not agree to a standard protective order.

"I think it warrants looking at the allegations and defenses, then looking at the level of response generated by Rachel Nunes," Moss said. "Even if Nunes' allegations are true regarding the plagiarism, only two copies of the alleged infringing work were sold, and both copies were purchased by the author. Even if both copies were not purchased by the author, the total revenue generated for the sales was approximately $4.00."

In an email to City Weekly, Moss wrote that Rushton immediately pulled the copies from the Amazon store when confronted by Nunes and offered to destroy all copies, and to issue an apology as part of a settlement. "Nunes rejected that settlement and is pushing the litigation extremely aggressively (seeking approximately $150,000 in damages). Nunes has refused to drop the issue and is causing both sides to spend tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees," noted Moss. He wrote that Nunes is also using the legal system to harass Rushton at her place of employment by sending vague subpoenas that ask for information such as "all information of plagiarized work of Rushton."

Further, Moss claims that Nunes is pursuing her story in the media giving her outdated book "a new bump in publicity." He argues that Nunes is leveraging her claim that she is the victim of terrible plagiarism (remember only two copies were sold) to raise thousands of dollars. "Nunes' refusal to seek a just resolution speaks volumes of her motivations. Rushton has attempted to settle with her appropriately but all offers have been rebuffed," he says.

"What I find interesting in this case is Nunes' overly aggressive approach to a case where the maximum violation was the sale of two books," Moss says. "What is troubling is that Nunes is attempting to ruin Rushton's career as a loyal educator, and shame her as a person and a member of her community."

According to the Davis County School district, Rushton is still employed as a grade-school teacher in the district.

Moss notes, "Copyright laws are meant to compensate people for damages they have suffered, not to penalize people. Nunes is trying to use the copyright statute as a punishment tool."

Nunes' attorney says the courtroom is the best place for a resolution. "At first, all Rachel hoped for was an acknowledgment that the book was plagiarized and an apology," Bailey says. "Far from an apology, she received all kinds of harassment and bizarre behavior. My sense is that some of that harassing behavior online continued after the lawsuit had filed, [which is] why she felt like she had to pursue it the way she has."

Today, in seeming opposition to the tactics she claims to have been the victim of, Nunes advises others who find out about her situation not to harass Rushton. She wants the conflict resolved in court.