“Marianne Skolek Perez, an Exemplary Gothic Detective, in some ways purer than journalists, lawyers or prosecutors!”
I recently came across an article written for “Medium”, an online publishing website, by author Dylan Evans. Here is a link to the complete article: Rule one: don’t confuse epistemic success with structural leverage | by Dylan Evans | Medium
The article dealt with something I was not familiar with – epistemic success with structural leverage. I discovered the definition was “relating to knowledge or to the degree of its validation and having influence or power to sway decisions, situations, or people.” The well-written and rather lengthy article focused on the criminal activities of the maker of a dangerous opioid called OxyContin, Purdue Pharma and its owners, the Sackler family.
For almost 24 years, I have been exposing the deaths and addictions to OxyContin caused by Purdue Pharma and the FDA in knowingly approving and promoting this dangerous opioid. My work has involved meetings with the FDA, Attorneys General, US Senators, Congressmen, and law firms, as well as having articles published in several newspapers throughout the country.
My hard work was rewarded with unscrupulous authors and filmmakers plagiarizing my work, which as an individual “walking the walk”, could be taken as quite a compliment.
I have never had the occasion to meet or speak with Dr. Evans, but appreciate his citing my research and diligence in being a woman determined to expose corruption to the highest levels. Here are some references to me in his article:
“The Accidental Detective – Marianne Skolek Perez is an exemplary gothic detective, and in some ways a purer one than the journalists, laws, or prosecutors. Her importance lies precisely in her structural mismatch with the system she confronts. She is not defeated because she is wrong, naive, or uninformed. She is defeated because she is the wrong kind of knower, acting in the wrong register, at the wrong scale.”
Perez is summoned not by curiosity but by catastrophe: a death in the night officially banalised as “respiratory arrest”. Like many gothic detectives, she begins with bewilderment – the sense that the administrative explanation does not line up with lived reality. She knows just enough to be dangerous as a nurse, she understands pharmacology, as a mother, she refuses abstraction, as a witness, she insists on causality. This places her in an epistemic no-man’s-land that gothic systems are exquisitely designed to neutralise.”
“Her early actions – writing to the FDA, attending conferences, asking questions – bring not documents or authority, but experience. At Columbia University, she encounters not secrecy but counter-speech: corporate reassurance, political deterrence, grotesque metaphors that reframe addiction as user error. The system does not deny reality; it reclassifies it.”
“Her collision with J. David Haddox, MD (Purdue Pharma) — sending him sprawling into folding chairs – is a breach of register. (This took place at Columbia University where Haddox was a keynote speaker minimizing the dangers of addictive OxyContin). She introduces the body, grief, and rage into a space that depends on discursive immunity. It is an eruption of the obscene. Real. Gothic systems punish register errors far more efficiently than lies.”
“Perez helps bring the system to court. She testifies. She attends sentencing. For a moment, this looks like success. But the false centre reveals itself. Minor executives absorb liability. Fines are survivable. The Sacklers remain absent. Her forbidden question – why have the Sacklers not been held accountable? — marks the moment of clarity and defeat. She has reached the centre only to find power already withdrawn.”
“Her story reveals a crucial truth: gothic systems are especially resistant to maternal detectives – figures of care, memory, continuity. She may witness and grieve, but she cannot decide. That is why her story is so disturbing. She does almost everything right, and the system survives anyway.”
“Unlike Perez, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, CT, is not disruptive. He files suits rather than naming villains, seeks reform rather than rupture, and operates within rules the system understands. This makes him manageable.” (I worked for six years with AG Blumenthal and his Assistant AG at holding Purdue Pharma accountable for the tsunami of deaths and addictions to OxyContin. Blumenthal ran for the US Senate and won. After his success at achieving his goal, telephone conversations and emails ceased between us. The writing on the wall was vivid to me.)
“Perez’s moral certainty floated without any attachment.”
Marianne Skolek Perez, an Exemplary Gothic Detective in the belly of the beast – far from being an exemplary gothic plagiarist.
