Steven Krivit vs. Andrea Rossi - Why?

I don't think this has been said. Krivit became a yellow journalist, seeking out and "exposing scandal." I first noticed him falling over the edge when he attacked Irving Dardik of Energetics Technologies, who is a well-known physician who developed what I'd call an "art," that was then considered by some to be quackery. Krivit won't tell you that the money for SKINR came from a grateful patient of Dardik's. Krivit made a big story out of Fleischmann refusing to see him when he tried to interview him in England. Basically, Krivit is the center of Krivit's world. When he was suspected of becoming biased due to large payments from a very likely source, given the massive shift he went through a few years back, his anti-"fusion" crusade, his response was to shut down the nonprofit so that no reports needed to be made.

His motive for originally reporting on Rossi would be obvious. It's LENR, or claimed to be so, and he is the world's foremost expert, in his mind. As soon as he saw major cause for suspicion, he began declaring "Rossi fraud," and repeating it in various ways over and over. He is not a careful reporter, he makes many mistakes. It occurred to me today to look back at his coverage. We now know a lot more than we did before Rossi v. Darden was filed.

How is he doing now? Here is his latest report, Is it accurate? I'll go over it.

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Cherokee Investment’s Darden Says Rossi’s Claims Are Fraudulent

Right there, a bit of misinformation or misdirection. Darden is indeed the CEO of Cherokee Investment Partners; however, Cherokee did not invest in Rossi, Industrial Heat did. Does Darden say that "Rossi's claims are fraudulent? Not exactly. Krivit is not subtle and not swift.

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Aug. 9, 2016 – By Steven B. Krivit –

Thomas Francis Darden II, the manager, president, and director of Industrial Heat, has concluded that Andrea Rossi’s Energy Catalyzer (E-Cat) claims are bogus, according torecent court filings.

Actually, no. The Amended Answer states more than one possibility. Further, a defense in a lawsuit is not necessarily a conclusion. It might merely be a possibility that is asserted. Filings can actually assert contradictory possibilities. So even if the defense (technically not Darden, but Jones Day, representing a series of defendants) did assert that Rossi's claims were bogus -- they didn't -- that is not necessarily a conclusion. What is actually said:

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... there were only three possible conclusions:
1) Leonardo and
Rossi’s claimed results, including the purported results from the Validation, were fabricated;
2) Leonardo and Rossi did not provide all of the E-Cat IP to Counter-Plaintiffs as was required
under the License Agreement in exchange for the $10 million payment; or
3) both.

So the first possibility is "it's bogus." The second isn't!

However, because Krivit has a firm belief in bogosity, long-term Rossi fraud, his story for years now, he does not recognize the difference. Jones Day focuses on Rossi business practices and conduct that made it impossible for them to confirm results in Florida. They focus on the agreements and terms violated by Rossi. Krivit actually does not understand the lawsuit and arguments and issues. He continues:

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Darden is also the founder and chief executive officer of the $2 billion private equity fund Cherokee Investment Partners, the parent company of Industrial Heat.

That is a Rossi trope and common error. Cherokee is not and has never been the "parent company" of Industrial Heat. This is gross sloppiness, and would also indicate that Krivit does not understand the issues behind part of the Motion to Dismiss, and the Rossi misrepresentation or comment that led the judge to deny dismissing the part of the complaint that was directed at Cherokee. He's basically clueless.

Originally, Industrial Heat was a new company, not owned by any other company, though there were various companies and individuals as shareholders. It appears that Industrial Heat was bought by IHHI, which was created to receive the Woodford investment of $50 million. The lawsuit, document 21, has:

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a. The parent company of IH is IH Holdings International Limited.

Krivit continues:

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On Aug. 6, the law firm Jones Day, on behalf of Darden and his associates, filed a complaint against Rossi and his company Leonardo Corp. in federal court in Miami, accusing Rossi of fraudulent misrepresentations.

Again, a lack of accuracy. On August 5, not 6, Jones Day filed an "ANSWER and Affirmative Defenses to Complaint , THIRD PARTY COMPLAINT" and this was amended on August 11. If I did not know better, I would think from what Krivit wrote that the Jones Day filing was an original complaint. No, it is a response to Rossi's lawsuit, and the countercomplaint that was appended to the Answer was also against Johnson, and Fabiani and their companies, and Penon.

The counter-complaint alleges Breach of Contract (two counts), Fraudulent Inducement (about the representations over the move of the Plant to Florida), and violation of the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act.

Then Krivit realleges his old stories about Rossi, including "He has served time in prison twice and been convicted of fraud." It is not clear that "fraud" is a fair description. This has long been obscure and controversial, and Krivit quickly took up the most lurid interpretation, apparently taken from certain journalists in Italy, and constantly repeated it. Krivit then gets into more meat:

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Despite this history, Darden and a dozen other investors gave Rossi an initial $11 million in the belief that Rossi had invented a low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR) power source that could produce excess heat at a rate of one megawatt.

Krivit made that up, it is typical mind-reading for him. Darden was aware of Rossi's history, and knew that Rossi was not reliable. Darden did not have that "belief," as far as I can tell. And not "1 megawatt." The Validation Test was at far less than that. Further, the total power was largely irrelevant, because it was simply multiplying up individual units -- if they worked. Further, the testing requirements that were set up did not require a megawatt. What was required was COP.

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In the history of the field, no scientist has ever been able to repeatedly demonstrate excess heat at any level. Sporadically observed excess heat has been at the level of about 1 Watt.

That's really hilarious. Excess heat has been demonstrated "repeatedly" many times by many researchers. Krivit is confusing this with "reliably." Individual, specific cathodes in FP Heat Effect experiments are quite variable, but, as an example, most cathodes in the SRI Energetics Technologies Superwave replication produced excess heat. That was published in the LENR Sourcebook, which Krivit edited with Marwan. Three cathodes produced almost or over two watts. An ENEA cathode reported in the same paper showed a power burst of 7 W. What is true and relevant is that Rossi was reporting power levels far in excess of anything reported before.

This is also a bit misleading. Most research is done at a small scale, following the caution set up by Pons and Fleischmann after that famous 1984 meltdown. If the effect is not under good control, it could suddenly work much better than expected, which could be very dangerous. Allegedly Rossi was close to explosion many times, and claimed that there were explosions, but nobody was hurt.

One of the big problems with Rossi's claims was the lack of any reliability data. Supposedly a one-year megawatt test would generate that data, but ... it does not seem that Rossi and Penon and Fabiani reported this, it's unclear. By the way, I should say that I think it likely that Rossi's claims have been fraud. But it is one thing to claim fraud and quite another to prove it, or, in the case before us, Rossi v. Darden, establish *some kind of fraud* by direct evidence.

(continued)

(continued)

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Darden not only ignored Rossi’s past but also ignored the first New Energy Times Rossi investigation. In June 2011, I went to Italy, interviewed Rossi and filmed a demonstration of his copper-pipe contraption. Twenty-four hours later, New Energy Times reported serious concerns about how Rossi was measuring heat output. Six days later, I posted a video on YouTube.

I consider it just about impossible that Darden was not aware of all this. Darden was not working alone. He consulted with experts in the field. Krivit has no idea.

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In response to the video, experts from around the world sent technical and engineering analyses to New Energy Times, and I published their reports in July 2011. It was obvious then that Rossi’s claimed excess heat was a fraud.

Actually, no. It was obvious that it did no prove XP. What Rossi did, over and over, was avoid independent testing that would establish the fact. That is obviously a warning sign: Krivit's error here is that he doesn't think Darden would know that. To him, the investment was a waste of money. However, Darden actually made money on this. This is completely missing from Krivit's understanding, because his analysis is partly incorrect and the rest is shallow.

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Darden was still promoting Rossi in September 2015, according to an interview in Fortune magazine. Darden warned readers about shady operators in the field.

“Cold fusion has such a checkered past and is so filled with hypesters and people with a gold-rush, get-rich-quick mentality,” Darden said. “We need to be calm, prudent and not exaggerate.”

Right. Now this sounds like someone who is aware of the possibility of fraud. By that time, in fact, Darden knew what was alleged in their Answer, as a high probability. They knew it from their failure to confirm any excess heat from any Rossi device. They knew it from Rossi's exclusion of their engineer, not only from the so-called "customer area" but from the whole plant. They almost certainly knew by then that the "customer" was phony.

None of this is even on Krivit's radar. His story is "Rossi is a Fraud, I have always known it -- since 2011 -- and they were stupid not to listen to me!"

Remarkably similar to Mary Yugo, in fact.

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In October 2015, Darden told Triangle Business Journal reporter Lauren K. Ohnesorge that the reason for the controversy surrounding Rossi was that scientists didn’t understand how his contraption worked. Ohnesorge wrote that, despite what Darden characterized as “online attacks” against Rossi and Industrial Heat, Darden was still committed to investing in Rossi.

At that point, Darden "investment in Rossi" had stopped. They were collecting almost $30,000 per month from the payments from JM Products, and paying Fabiani and Penon out of that, and probably had money left over. Krivit, again, did not study the materials and has no idea what happened, but wrote a quick story, within a couple of days. I suspect he did not bother to research what was being said on-line about the Answer, because he'd have seen that many of his ideas were false.

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By March 2016, the relationship between Rossi and Industrial Heat had gone cold. (March 10, 2016,Industrial Heat’s E-Cat Exit; March 29, 2016, Industrial Heat Goes Cold on Rossi; April 6, 2016,Convicted Fraudster Rossi Accuses Licensee Industrial Heat of Fraud; April 8, 2016, Industrial Heat Says Goodbye to Rossi).

Again, the documents show that the relationship was clearly in big trouble by February. They were communicating then through their attorneys, but the likelihood is that the rift arose long before that. Rossi's exclusion of Murray from the plant was in July, 2015. I think that IH consented to the Florida move because, by then, 2014, they knew that the Rossi technology did not work. And if offered $30,000 per month for the rental of the Plant, why not?

My intention is to look at prior Krivit reporting on Industrial Heat.

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A month later, on April 4, 2016, New Energy Times published a report by Luca Gamberale, an independent LENR researcher, that exposed how Defkalion Green Technologies, a former affiliate of Rossi’s, used similar methods to deceive scientists and business professionals.

That is entirely unclear. And calling Gamberale an "independent LENR researcher" is misleading. He was working for Defkalion Europe, the Defkalion licensee for Europe. That was a devastating report. It was published in 2014, and it's fascinating to see how Krivit justifies not writing about it then. It was huge news in 2014. http://news.newenergytimes.net…n-version-of-rossi-e-cat/ Krivit's claim that this report is about Rossi, in any way, is misleading. The particular artifact that Gamberale uncovered is probably not one that actually affected Rossi measurements.

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In the August 6, 2016, complaint, Darden and his associates wrote that Rossi’s device was never “independently validated by a scientifically reliable methodology to produce the energy” that Rossi claimed. Industrial Heat was never able to produce any measurable excess energy from Rossi’s device.

That is correct. What Krivit does not realize, though, is that never before had there been a sustained effort to "independently validate" the Rossi technology. There were, in 2012, when IH entered into the Agreement with Rossi, two basic choices for IH, intending serious investment in LENR: ignore Rossi or buy the technology. (A third choice would have been to pour money into efforts to duplicate Rossi's work. Very expensive, in fact. And, given that the Rossi Effect was probably bogus, also a waste of money.) It' would have been easy to ignore Rossi, that would have been the standard response to refusal to allow independent validation. But IH had something else in mind, and I doubt that it has even occurred to Krivit,

Basically, the subsequent events validated what IH had in mind. They established that Rossi's work could be ignored, which, by the way, does not prove he has no Effect, but that it was now quite safe to ignore it. After all, if he did pull a Surprise, they had a license, they would be in line for fabulous profits. Otherwise ... forgeddaboudit.

Then Krivit reports a few details from the counter-complaint (correctly).

Krivit has a timeline: http://newenergytimes.com/v2/s…nvestigation-Index2.shtml

it has:

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On Sept. 27, 2015, Thomas Francis Darden II, the manager, president, and director of Industrial Heat, spoke favorably to Fortune magazine about Rossi's E-Cat. “Rossi’s was one of the first investments we made,” Darden said. “We’ve been seeing the creation of isotopes and energy releases at relatively low temperatures — 1,000 degrees centigrade — which could be a sign that fusion has occurred.”

Krivit quotes Darden a bit out of context. Yes, that could be assumed to be about the E-Cat. However, "isotopes" probably was not. It may have been about the Lugano reactor, which was not an E-cat, but a particular element, a "Hot Cat," and by this time, IH knew that they could not validate excess heat from that (and they basically knew about problems with the Lugano report by 2015). So what was Darden talking about? Darden said more:

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... We have sponsored tests and more research for Rossi’s work. A group of Swedish scientists tested the technology, and they got good results. A number of other people say they are also getting positive results but these haven’t been confirmed. A Russian scientist, for example claims to have replicated Rossi’s work in Switzerland and got excess heat. That’s a good sign.

The "Russian scientist would be Parkhomov. But he wasn't in Switzerland. Darden also said, though:

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But let me make one thing very clear. We don’t know for sure yet whether it will be commercially feasible. We’ve invested more than $10 million so far in Rossi’s and other LENAR technology and we’ll spend substantially more than that before we know for certain because we want to crush all the tests. (Recently, we have been joined by Woodford Investment Management in the U.K., which has made a much larger investment into our international LENR activities—so we are well funded.)

Krivit then has

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Sometime between May 2, 2013 and Feb. 19, 2016, Industrial Heat raised $50 million from the Woodford Funds (including Woodford Patient Capital Trust, PLC and CF Woodford Equity Income Fund), predicated upon their claims that Industrial Heat had acquired Rossi's intellectual property. (Source: Federal District Court Case 1:16-cv-21199-CMA)

Krivit is here quoting Rossi's complaint, in part:

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69. During the Guaranteed Perforrnance Test, IH, DARDEN and VAUGHN each publically claimed, on several occasions, that they had "acquired Rossi's intellectual property" and upon information and belief, IH. DARDEN and VAUGHN undertook substantial fundraising predicated upon such claims.
70. Upon information and belief, IH, DARDEN and VAUGHN were able to raise substantial sums of money from numerous investors including, but not limited to, approximately Fifty Million Dollars ($50,000,000.00) from the Woodford Funds (including Woodford Patient Capital Trust, PLC and CF Woodford Equity Income Fund), predicated upon their claims that IH and/or IPH had "acquired Rossi's intellectual property."

Krivit is relying on Rossi's claim as fact.

The Complaint implies that the Woodford Investment was during the 1-year test, and it apparently was. I found the $50 million in share purchases, which had not been understood by Sifferkoll, they were from May, 2015. The investment was discussed on E-catworld in http://www.e-catworld.com/2015…5-years-of-due-diligence/ posted October 1, 2015.

That $50 million was very big news. There had not been that kind of investment in LENR for a very long time. Yet Krivit is still largely ignoring it, and the role of Industrial Heat in fostering LENR research. he doesn't show that he knows when it happened, though it's easy to find. But, see, Krivit decided that Rossi was a CONVICTED FELON, A FRAUD, and so any news supposedly about Rossi was irrelevant. That's what happens when we create fixed stories, and it happens even when we are right.

Krivit blew his bridges years back. Most researchers won't talk to him. Consider this, on that page:

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"The job of generating interest has been done mostly by one man: Andrea Rossi. He did this with showmanship and scale (475 kW). Industrialists don't care about scientific oddities (at least in their day jobs). But if you can generate 100's of kW for an extended period, unplugged, no sane energy technologist could fail to pay attention."
- Michael McKubre in an e-mail to LENR community (Feb. 21, 2015)

That would be on the private CMNS list. Krivit routinely violates privacy, while, ironically, he warned a researcher that I violated privacy. He knew about Krivit, so he told me. So I asked the list if I'd ever done that. Many answered, no, and, in fact, I'm trusted. I could, possibly, some day, make some mistake, I write a lot. Apparently, though, not so far. When in doubt, I ask.

I did look at the McKubre email. Let's say that the Krivit quote could be highly misleading. More than that, I don't want to reveal what McKubre actually wrote. Krivit should never have reported this (it is actually illegal) and it essentially says what was obvious to everyone. "Scale" would mean "claimed scale," with enough showmanship and show to make it seem like it might be happening, at least to some. If someone is claiming a half megawatt (which Rossi did in 2011), could any "sane energy technologist fail to pay attention"? Krivit might imagine that they should read Krivit and reject the claim out of hand, since Krivit is so reliable. (Not!)

What was obvious to most of the researchers, from 2011 on, was that Rossi was avoiding independent testing. However, many scientists would read the reports of, say, the Lugano team and say "this sounds solid." It really takes time and effort to study reports like that and discover possible problems. Those problems are not found by ready pronouncements of "fraud," based on ad hominem arguments about the history of the inventor, which themselves look biased.

What really happened with Petrol Dragon is not easy to determine.

The point here is that Krivit's journalism is cheap and sensationalist. That shows up in other comments in this thread, such as taking advantage of the Sterling Allen tragedy. That was classic Krivit. Full of hatred.

Krivit's video of Rossi and Levi and what he published back then were useful in understanding the problems with Rossi's demonstrations. However, it became a caricature, a rant, fixed polemic.

Rossi is in trouble. I don't like this at all. However, I do hold that we responsible for what we create. We are finding out more and more, and we may have a response from Rossi in a few days.

What is really weird on the page I quoted from is Krivit using Rossi as if he were a reliable source about Industrial Heat and Woodford, instead of checking these things out himself. Yeah, IH wouldn't comment to him. That's all over the field.

From the Fortune interview, I don't see Darden as a detail guy. He's a bit fuzzy on details. Quite simply, that's not his role, he is an idea man, and probably one who inspires others. Dewey Weaver may be much more involved on the detail side of LENR research, and likewise IH engineers and consultants. What I do know is that they are working with many of the best-known researchers, people definitely worth supporting.

And they have the money to do this. That is what Krivit truly missed.

Quote from Paradigmnoia

@Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax,
What Darden meant, I think, is that Rossi's work in Switzerland was replicated by a Russian scientist (almost certainly Parkhomov).This was misinterpreted once before (I forget where, but it has been repeated a few times since as though it was fact) as the Professors having replicated the reaction, in addition to a Russian scientist. Hoistad responded to enquiries about this with a denial that this was something that had been achieved or that he knew anything about. Hoistad did say something to the effect that they were working on something regarding the test, and would report any findings when they were done. And (publicly) silence ever since...

I think you are right. Thanks. The statement can be read that way.

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A Russian scientist, for example claims to have replicated Rossi’s work in Switzerland and got excess heat.

That is, the work in Lugano.
By this time, as well, serious problems were known about Parkhomov's work.

Now, what is a bit bizarre about this is that by this time, IH knew that there were serious problems with Lugano, and with Rossi's work in general. However, Darden strikes me as very much not a grasshopper. He talked about wanting to "crush the tests," and they were, at this time, watching a reactor in Doral and being paid $30,000 per month for power allegedly from it.

Under those conditions, I'd be inclined to wait. Not the time to blow the whistle! The situation was not getting worse, they probably had a small positive cash flow from the Plant.

Rossi was not giving them access, so .... when to intervene? We do not have a detailed history. Cooperation had clearly broken down by July, 2015. Dewey tells us that IH was requesting that Rossi help them get reactors working, and that Rossi replied he was too busy with the test. This is consistent with his excuse for not allowing the IH engineer access in July.

What was being set up was that IH would not pay Rossi no matter what happened in Doral. No ability to make devices that pass independent test, another demonstration was almost meaningless. They paid for IP, not for demonstrations, those were just a mechanism to set up something that might be fair. Unless, of course, manipulated as it was by Rossi.