There are Lies and Liars, and then there is Peter Swanson
As many of you reading this saw in mid December, I was subjected to a vicious attack on my reputation by Peter Swanson, someone who was actually once a coworker and friend. Unfortunately, we had a falling out in 2015, and since that time, Swanson has attacked me publicly not once, but four times. This last time, he posted on his Substack, and then spammed over a dozen Facebook sites with his article in his attempt to smear my reputation.
Three of those four previous times, he hid behind other people to do it. That’s real integrity there, isn’t it?
I have no idea what prompted this latest attack as I never think of Swanson, especially at this time as I was attending to my sick pup, who passed away just before New Years Day. I had far more important things than Swanson on my mind.
He’s irrelevant - however, he seems to be hyper aware of anything I do.
Many of my friends have suggested that I simply ignore Swanson, and those who agree with him. I’d love to do that, but as a result of Swanson’s lies, I’ve received several threatening comments, and plenty of disparaging ones. Naturally, they are all from people who have never met me, but nonetheless, they do concern me. These days, people get shot if someone gets angry at them for no reason, so I need to deal with this.
And no, I don’t think anyone is going to shoot me, but on Christmas Day, I had some woman come up to me on the dock and start yelling at me, calling me a “thief” and “scammer”, stating she'd "read the article". Then her husband came along and started in on me in a threatening manner, at which point I asked the boater I was talking with to call the police.
I really don’t need this crap, and I don’t feel I need to be threatened because of some lying, troublemaking, impotent jackass like Swanson.
Before I continue, I have two issues I want to address.
First, I want to thank everyone for their support, both online and in personal messages and phone calls. That kind of personal support from so many of you means more to me than you can possibly imagine. It made what happened a lot less painful.
Secondly - I have been a public figure in the boating and sailing business for going on 25 years. In all of that time, and you all know this, not once have I ever been accused of anything shady or dishonest. Seriously, if I were the kind of person that Swanson claims I am - would I have such a spotless reputation in this very public industry?
There are hundreds of people who can speak up about how I've personally assisted them in some fashion, sometimes small, sometimes not so small. It's a matter of paying it forward for me, to repay in some way the help I received when I was just learning about boating, about sailing, and about cruising. What Swanson claims about me doesn't match the record of who I am, and who you have come to know over the years. As you read on, please keep that in mind.
Swanson’s blog name, Loose Cannon, is quite appropriate. He has a reputation of being - shall we say, not quite accurate in his reporting - amongst members of the boating business. That pattern shows itself quite clearly in the Substack he published, and in other stories on his Substack in which his version of what happened is challenged by those involved, as you will see.
Prime example of how Swanson deceives people - he uses a newspaper story from over 20 years ago as his “proof” of what an evil monster I am, but doesn’t tell the whole story.
Swanson forgot to include this online comment from the newspaper itself, a comment which puts the lie to the story itself.
That’s a pretty damning omission on Swanson’s part. Makes you wonder just what else Swanson ignored in his storytelling, doesn’t it? I’ll come back to that point in a bit.
If you want the other side of the story, the truth of what happened, I published it some years ago, at https://seniorsplusstory.blogspot.com/2018/11/what-actually-happened.html#more
Read it and learn what really happened, what Swanson couldn’t be bothered telling you.
As we go through all of this, I realize that there are some of you who won't be convinced. That's fine. I know what's true and what isn't, and I don't need your approval. If you choose to believe Swanson, that's fine. There are a great many more people who know me, know who I am, and who know I'm telling the truth here.
That's because there is no advantage for me in lying about this. Only the truth will stop this charade, this character assassination, by someone who has repeatedly attempted to cause me trouble. As you will see, every word I say here is proven by the evidence I have.
In the media business, the proper way for a journalist to report a story, which was the way I trained my staff when I owned my newspapers, is to interview all parties to the story. Get both sides of the story in other words.
Petey didn’t do that, or he would not have gotten so much wrong. Or, maybe that's what he was trying to do. The facts didn't matter to him in other words.
Why didn’t he conduct proper interviews? Because his purpose was not to report a story, his purpose was to defame me, to cause as much damage to my reputation as he possibly could.
Why? He’s been angry with me since 2015 when we had a falling out. This is not the first time he’s pulled this kind of crap. It’s actually the fourth time. He lost a position he had when his boss demoted him over what he did in 2016. I have the emails and responses from his then boss on the issue. That, or his boss thought him incompetent, something I have little trouble believing as I once worked for him. He didn't last very long at that company, while I remained there for nearly ten years more.
He is not the sharpest pencil in the drawer in other words. Short of a few pixels.
So why not sue him over this crap for defamation? A lawyer has told me that it would cost in excess of $100,000 to do so. Petey hasn’t got a pot to piss in, so I’d never be able to get back that money from a court judgment, much less any judgement awarded. He’s not worth wasting that kind of money on, although I admit it would be entertaining to see him defend his crap in court, there is so much dishonest and wrong with it.
Now, let's get down to business. I'm going to copy parts of Swanson’s little story and point out the deceptions and the outright lies. Swanson’s remarks from the article will be centered and underlined to differentiate them from my comments.
“…before he bought a boat and came south, a judge in his hometown found that Moran
had participated in a scheme to cheat elderly retirees of their savings."
Swanson gets it wrong right from his first paragraph. I purchased the boat in Annapolis, from a Chesapeake Bay sailing charity. The boat was never in Canada until many years later. Secondly, I did not “participate” in a “scheme” - I sold advertising to two prominent local businesspeople who approached me and who were promoting an investment plan. Unfortunately, that plan was actually a Ponzi scheme.
The two men were not “accomplices” as has been claimed. They were advertisers and short of selling them advertising, I had no business arrangement with them. Swanson of course could not be bothered reading four days worth of court records to learn the truth.
On being questioned on the stand, Carrigan, the elderly plaintiff, was asked by his own lawyer:
“who was responsible for taking your money?”,
he replied “Peacock. Peacock took my money”.
Don’t believe me however, read the court transcript. It’s right there, at about 11:40 am on the first day.
Swanson then notes from the article:
Detective Carson stated that the only reason that Mr. Moran was not charged with fraud
in addition to Peacock and Anderson was that the prosecution needed a witness with
knowledge of the whole scheme…
There are a couple of things wrong here. First of all - I never testified during the trial about what went on. Was never called by the prosecutor, never put on the witness list. It was never, at any time, discussed with me by anyone. Feel free to read the transcript. You won’t find me there.
Next, Det. Carson was not on the case, he was not even on the same police force as the one that investigated the fraud. The case was transferred from the city force to the Ontario Provincial Police because it was a multi-jurisdictional case. Carson worked for the city police, and they didn’t have jurisdiction to investigate it.
Carson didn’t know what went on in the investigation, what decisions were made, what the actual findings were, because except for the first day or two, he was not involved.
On top of that, other than on the day of sentencing when I joined the victims to watch it go down, I never set foot in the courtroom during the trial.
Oh, and did I mention - of the five people defrauded, three of them spoke up in support of me to the police, and the fourth one had never met me. I’m told it’s really, really difficult to get convictions when the victims are on your side, or have never met you.
Again, Swanson didn’t dig deeply enough to get the facts. He never does. That’s why he didn’t bother with this little item from the newspaper article’s comment section, as I noted above, proving that the victims supported me.
I did? I thought I was in a 1988 Chevy Safari van, because my boat had never been in Canada. I purchased it in Maryland as I noted above. Thompson knows better.
And would that be the same Peter Thompson, a lawyer who claimed he was afraid of me and who tried to get a peace bond (in the US, a restraining order) against me, saying that I was responsible for “the unsolved murders of three Simcoe County businessmen”? Seriously, he said that, in court no less.
Problem was, there were no unsolved murders in the county. That was confirmed to the judge by my friend, Detective Dave Donalds, who testified on my behalf in court.
That would be the same Peter Thompson who told the court during his peace bond hearing that I hired a nurse to run down his client with her car. Honest, he said it, I am not kidding you here. The investigating officer for the accident confirmed this with me later. Again, read the court transcript. It’s all there.
I wish I was joking about all of this with the lawyer, but I’m not. I even wrote about it at the time in my newspaper. I gave you that link above.
Under oath, trying to cause me trouble in court, this fool of a lawyer actually made those claims. But heck, don’t believe me, go find the court transcripts and read it all for yourself.
My office at the time was in the building next door to Thompson’s office. We shared the same three car parking lot. Despite his “fear” of me, he never parked his car other than in that lot. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?
But these are the people Swanson is going to for his so called “facts”.
Swanson, being the prince among men that he is, offered me the chance in his hit piece to respond to his comments publicly. I’ve called him twice, sent emails, and guess what? He hasn’t honored his offer. Six weeks going on seven weeks later, I’ve still heard nothing from him.
Knowing what you now know, what you are seeing here, are you at all surprised by that?
I guess Petey doesn’t want to get caught lying, so now I have had to trot his lying ass out here in public so that the world can see what sort of scum he is.
But don’t take it from me…. I just got this text from someone else Swanson wrote about:
Swanson is an absolute joke and a certified POS he targeted my father and myself a few
years ago with the same. Half the truth and polished lies. All of his posts are click bait
and never fact checked. Keep your head up don’t let someone like that affect you in
anyway karmas always got a way of working these things out. Fair winds and following
seas to you my friend keep up the good fight and stay true to you and the truth
I want to be clear about one thing - I have only once commented on Swanson in public, and that was in 2013 when I commented favorably on Facebook about a column he wrote, and noted him as a “friend and colleague”.
Now, unfortunately, by spamming as many Facebook groups as he can and blocking me so I can’t follow what he’s done, by defaming me publicly, he’s made it necessary to speak about him. I find this distasteful, but it needs to be done.
Sadly, there’s more. Swanson wrote about the cruising couple known online as “Sailing SuperNova”. They had endured a pirate attack in the Caribbean, and Swanson demonstrated his lack of integrity in an article about them. I contacted the Supernova couple for details when I heard about what Swanson had done to them.
They followed up their text with the following message to me:
Basically he sent us a very demanding rude message right after we published the pirate attack video. We post videos in real time so it had just happened.
I think it was less then 24 hours later he had posted on Facebook a link to his website with a story about the attack. Almost everything he wrote was not true and there was no way that he could have had the information he was claiming to have.
He then signed up to our patreon and copied a post of our explanation of what happened and put it on his website. I believe you had to pay his website to read the full story. Im 100% sure its illegal to take someone's work and sell it on your site.
We kicked him off of our patreon and refunded his 8 bucks. We also sent him a message asking him to be a better person. We never got a response from him
Right there, that tells you all you need to know about Swanson. He doesn’t care about the truth, and he cuts corners to make up his stories, to the point of stealing other people’s work - because that’s what plagiarism is - stealing other people’s work.
The short version of this whole story is that I did not take anyone's life savings, I had no partners in my newspaper business. Nor do I have "multiple fraud judgements". That is an outright lie from an outright liar.
Yes, two men were criminally convicted for fraud. They had advertised an investment plan for seniors in my newspaper, much as many other businesses had advertised their products over the paper's ten year history.
Yes, I lost a civil lawsuit - because I didn’t have $40,000 to hire a lawyer to fight it. On top of that, there was an agreement in place to settle for $2000 and avoid a trial - an agreement that the other lawyer broke. I have the court documents, plus the letter from Thompson to prove that. Here's the letter for you. Again, Swanson couldn't be bothered to research the facts.
When I started getting calls from the victims of the Ponzi scam, I contacted the local police. They started an investigation based on the information I gave them - that’s where Carson came in - and a few days later, that investigation was transferred to the Ontario Provincial Police due to jurisdictional issues.
At no time was I ever threatened with being charged. The investigating force, the Ontario Provincial Police, sent me a letter of thanks at the end of the case for my assistance in locating and convicting the two men. I have called and asked their Freedom of Information office for a copy of that letter and will provide it as soon as I receive it. Hopefully, that will put this ugly incident behind us all.
I’d like to close with the following character reference I received after someone else tried to cause trouble for me some years ago. I’ll let it speak for itself.
To Whom it May Concern:
Sun, Oct 28, 2018 at 8:50 PM
This is a character reference for Wally Moran. My husband, son and I have known Wally for the last 6 years. We met Wally while doing research for a planned sailing trip from Toronto, Canada to the Bahamas. During many lectures, and personal conversations (some of which were over drinks), Wally was always a professional and gentleman.
He made such a good impression that we decided to join the first ICW flotilla led by Wally. During this trip we spent everyday on the water in the company of a dozen other couples and Wally for the better part of three months.
In that time Wally taught and led many novice and inexperienced sailors. He personally put himself at risk to help save our vessel during inclement weather. He was always courteous, professional and supportive to all the women involved with our flotilla.
Our son was the only child on the trip and Wally always went out of his way to make him feel part of the group. He was very protective, encouraging and supportive during a particular incident when a coleader was being mean, dismissive and belligerent to a women who questioned that co leader's opinion.
Once we arrived in Florida we parted company for several weeks, only to meet up again at anchor in Key Biscayne while waiting for a weather window. During this time Wally was instrumental in coming to the aid of a woman on another boat at anchor, trapped by her drunken and verbally abusive husband.
We have maintained a friendship with Wally since our time together on the water and we always get together when he is in town. I have seen him as nothing but gentlemanly and respectful of women.
Sincerely,
Cindy (redacted for privacy)
I have to say thank you here to all of you who notified me of Swanson’s online garbage so that I can deal with it with group moderators. All but one of them have removed Petey’s crap, and several have banned him from their groups for what he’s done. Please, if you see it again, report it as harassment to Facebook so that we can get rid of it.
If you have any questions about any of this, anything at all, I will be happy to answer them for you. I have nothing to hide, nothing to be ashamed of. Contact me via PM on Facebook, or by email.
Again, thank you everyone who has supported me, for believing in me and supporting the work I do on behalf of all sailors and cruisers.
I promise you, I am the person you have always believed me to be, and I always will be. I will always tell you the truth, because you honour me with your trust. You deserve no less than the truth.
Thank you.
Wally Moran
February 2, 2024
