Michael Arrington isn’t one to hide his legal battles, instead opting for transparency by airing them in public. So when it was reported that he had lost a libel case in the UK without actually fighting it, it didn’t take long for him to take to CrunchNotes to explain the situation.

The piece is just as vehement on those who reported on the situation as the person who filed the law suit in the first place.

Dennis Howlett, who writes an enterprise software blog for CNET, was the first to jump in, writing “The UK’s High Court of Justice has ruled that Michael Arrington and Interserve Inc libeled Sam Sethi” (wrong – we simply didn’t show up to court). He also says “Arrington/Interserve attempted to move the case from Sethi’s home ground to another jurisdiction. The UK courts thought differently” (wrong – the UK courts didn’t decide anything, we simply didn’t show up). The rest of his post is a love letter to Sethi.

Where did this come from? Why is a libel case being written about on an enterprise blog?

Recently Howlett asked me to write about a charity on TechCrunch. I Twittered about it (to hundreds of thousands of people) but never wrote about it on TechCrunch, it just wasn’t relevant. I guess that pissed Howlett off, because a few weeks later he was referring to me as a street hooker on Twitter. When I complained privately on Skype, his response was “I know – I do what I do as a ‘persona’ that people expect of me…gives me ‘ins’ to the ‘money.’”

Via.bloggasm.com