The facts of the MZB case

So I wrote the other day's ramble back when I was just realizing what exactly had happened, and as such it's rambly and unfocused and more "huh, rethinking things now" than establishing what all happened back then. And I wanted to write out the actual tale of what happened with the Marion Zimmer Bradley case out while my mind's still fresh from looking it up and I can still dig up most the links for my own future reference. As far as I can tell, no one's just written out the whole series of events in one place before, and trying to find out everything that happened is a pain in the ass, even with fanlore's help. (By which I mean half of the links in here I stole directly from there.)

I will note that I am not personally acquainted with anyone involved; I am relying solely on publicly available information to put all this together; and there's a whole lot of conflicting information on this case out there. I tried to rely on sources that had a direct relationship with MZB or the fan during this time period and otherwise reliable sources and ignore the 8th hand reports, but I am still almost certainly dead wrong on some aspects, and I have no idea which ones. There's also just a ton of stuff I have no idea about. Who brought in the first lawyer? How similar were the ideas? How incapacitated was MZB by her stroke? Hell if I know. All I can do is reconstruct the events as they happened as best as I can from the publicly available information. I'm just tired of having the only side written out in public are variously garbled versions of MZB's, since only having one side of a complex and contentious issue speak in public is always going to give you a bad answer.

(And in regards to the other MZB scandals I found while looking it up, I'm just going to say wow. Seriously.)

( Cut for length )