As ‘Torment Saint’ continues to receive rave reviews and to be quoted everywhere as if it was the bible bringing new revelations, I continued to dig into it and find inconsistencies, discrepancies with previous reports. Of course, this is based on what I know about the case, and most people don’t pay attention to important details, which makes Schultz successful in his demonstration toward suicide.
However, Schultz never communicated with the family, and I am lucky enough to say I have. A member of the family, who was very close to Elliott, just wrote to me about the book, and let’s just say that this person was very concerned and upset about the content of the new biography. It s clear that Schultz wanted to release the book for the tenth anniversary of Elliott Smith’s death, which made him do a very hurried work, as pointed out this person:
‘W Schultz did not take the time to do a good biography’.
‘He has high aspirations without being willing to work with intellectual rigor’…. ‘It reveals the damage that can be done by mediocrity and naivete combined with ambition, ‘ continued this person.
How could a serious writer write this bio without even talking to many members of the family? This person wrote that it was indeed impossible ‘to do a meaningful biography without being able to speak with the person you are writing it for and without being able to talk with most of the people closest to him.’ and that ‘the so-called biography was doomed from the start when essential people were not available’.
In the last chapters, it is obvious that Jennifer Chiba is Schultz’s almost only source, and certainly the person who is at the center of the scene. The family person had this to say about this:
‘It saddens me that he didn’t make the effort to find out how unreliable and devious Jennifer Chiba is.’
This is totally opposed to Schultz’s deep conviction that Chiba was Elliott’s savior!
‘Valerie [Deerin] certainly deserves better. Jennifer Chiba was the successful stalker, not Valerie’, added the family member, who continued by saying that Schultz won’t probably never realize ‘how much he has done a disservice to Elliott’s reputation’
This is very clear, ‘My family deserves better ’ and I could not agree more.
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