The Most Controversial Fitness Site On The Net!

From the desk of
George Spellwin
gspellwin@elitefitness.com
888-613-9136

Mr. Paul Gardiner
MuscleTech Research and Development, Inc.
7050 Telford Way, Suite 100
Mississauga, ON
L5S 1V7

January 31, 2002

Dear Mr. Gardiner,

This letter is in response to your attorney's letter of January 24, 2002.

Since 1996, elitefitness.com has provided discussion boards for the frank and honest discussion of fitness in general and the sport of bodybuilding in particular. Our own members moderate our boards, but the forums are uncensored. We remove posts that are hateful of any particular group of members, but that is largely all that is removed. Our goal is to stimulate conversation, not to stifle it.

Regarding your letter's allegations of our treatment of your company and products, EliteFitness.com has never advertised falsely, competed unfairly, did not disparage your products, nor have we interfered with your prospective economic advantage. In fact, not only have we never written about MuscleTech, but also I myself have never used a MuscleTech product. In fact, I was not even aware of the message threads that you are threatening to sue me over until your attorney brought them to my attention.

In the letter of January 24, your attorney informed me that MuscleTech enjoys an enormous amount of goodwill as well as a fine reputation. I have no basis upon which to disagree; however, your reluctance to make a simple post on the elitefitness.com site to clarify any possible misperceptions combined with your threats and drastic litigious response would seem to suggest otherwise.

When our members are critical of a company's products and practices, mine included, often, the company's principles will come participate on our discussion boards in order to better educate our members. Indeed, Patrick Arnold from ErgoPharm, Bill Llewellyn from Molecular Nutrition, and the late Dan Duchaine from Next Nutrition have all participated from time to time on our site and are all highly respected.

Regarding the demands in your letter, EliteFitness.com has never made any remarks about MuscleTech's products and we have no plans to make any at this time. The "real time" nature of our boards makes them impossible to censor, and indeed we would never censor our members speech even if we were able to. In fact, elitefitness.com is a place where our members can and do post critical comments about both the EliteFitness.com website and me. We do not remove or edit those comments, but instead we try to communicate our point of view.

As an example, when we launched our Platinum discussion board memberships, many of our members were outraged that we had to begin charging for services that had previously been free. But once they learned that the Platinum members were responsible for keeping our site online and enabling us to afford legal challenges like this one, they largely changed their mind. I would sincerely encourage you to come to elitefitness.com and to help educate us on your point of view and to tell us more about the "substantial time and money" devoted to "research and development." I'm certain that your time is very valuable, but surely, this would be a better use of your time and money than to attack a web site for allowing the free exchange of ideas.

Lastly, of everything in your letter, I am extremely concerned that a company which you have informed me enjoys such a fine reputation would ask us to violate the terms of our privacy policy and reveal to them the personal details of our members. I have reviewed your own privacy policy, and I notice that you, like EliteFitness.com, claim not to license, sell, or give away your member's personal information to any third parties. Your asking us to violate our own privacy policy and provide you with personal information about our members makes me suspicious that this may not in fact be the case. Indeed Mr. Gardiner, I would shut down the entire EliteFitness.com site before I gave out the personal information about even one of our members to you or to anyone else.

I sincerely hope that you will end this foolishness about a lawsuit and put that money instead into more of the research and development you informed me that you do so much of. And I know I can better spend my money improving the elitefitness.com site, than giving it to lawyers. If you do change your mind and decide that you would like to talk with me, you may call me at any time. Or preferably, if there are some misperceptions about your organization that you wish to correct, I hope to see you on our discussion boards making your perspective known. I am certain that education will be much less costly and much more effective than mounting a legal attack on our site, our members, and on me.