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To: gao seng who wrote (221903)	1/24/2002 7:12:55 PM
From: gao seng	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

EATERIES SUE OVER ‘POISON' PROF'S SICK STUNT By DAREH GREGORIAN -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- January 24, 2002 -- A Columbia University professor who sent out bogus letters to 240 of the city's top restaurants, claiming they'd given him food poisoning, now has a real reason to feel sick - he's getting sued for $100 million. Business-school professor Francis Flynn sent out the letters last summer as part of a "research project" to find out how the restaurants - including Le Bernardin and Judson Grill - would respond. The half-baked idea came back to bite him, Columbia, and its business school yesterday, when six of the restaurants filed suit against them. The action by the owners and employees of Chez Josephine, 222, Caffe Bondi, Jezebel's, The Box Tree and Herban Kitchen charges the professor libeled them and caused "emotional distress." The owners "tore themselves and their employees apart. They wanted to know what they could have done to poison this poor man," said the restaurants' lawyer, Thomas Moore. He said Flynn's Ivy League employers are also responsible because "they set him up and let him conduct this experiment on how people's lives are destroyed." The junior professor unleashed his "poison" pen around town last August, sending out personalized letters to restaurateurs on Columbia stationery. The letters claimed he'd gone to their restaurants to celebrate his wedding anniversary, and left suffering from "nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and abdominal cramps." "Our special romantic evening became reduced to my wife watching me curl up in a fetal position on the tiled floor of our bathroom between rounds of throwing up," it read. The cooked-up complaint caused chaos at the restaurants, as the owners grilled their chefs, wait staff and food preparers, contacted their suppliers and reviewed their business records, Moore said. nypost.com