i'm just going to copy and paste my own words from some email threads... with some notes added here and there. you guys have a lot of wacky speculation going on here. the statute of limitations has run out on a civil suit, so i'll tell more of the story soon.

i get asked about this idea of an azoff conspiracy a lot. i have no evidence supporting it. but regardless of the factors that led me to acquire it, the leak was definitely used to the label's advantage, and directly enabled them to finally release it.

i believe delays would have continued without some sort of event.. be it a leak, or axl getting hit by a donut truck, or something that put axl / old guns into the public consciousness. they wanted to do a deal like best buy where they could just dump it for one lump sum because they didn't believe it would sell. for that to happen, best buy needed to believe people cared. the label used the hype about the leaks to close that deal. we have evidence of all of this from our investigation, and had we gone to trial, it would have been a big part of our case.

yes, people have drawn lines through billy/apc and nin connections. but you can't throw a rock in hollywood without hitting someone who worked on chinese democracy. i know people closer to it than billy. it's a small world.

my leaks didn't come from any of the apc or nin guys, or anyone i met at universal.

yeah, antiquiet wasn't "established" in june of 2008, but it was older than this thread says it was. we published an exclusive bombshell interview with josh homme in 2007, where he put interscope on blast and pissed off half the industry. we never waited for anyone to give us a story, we went out and took it. take that however you'd like.

re: "...When eventually allowed time to think, ‘Skwerl’ was able to pinpoint the origins of the Antiquiet leaks. With the context of Axl’s very public fall-out with Mr. Azoff as support, does anybody else suspect that Kevin Cogill came to the same apparently ‘bat shit crazy’ conclusion as Axl Rose?"

haha... message board kids have a lot of free time and very active imaginations.

when the fbi first asked me, i had a story, but i didn't know if it was true. and i wasn't about to give the fbi information i wasn't sure of. nor was i going to give them any names of anyone at all before speaking with a lawyer. by the time the case was over, we had investigated everything and confirmed what we needed to. and we confirmed that the original story was true. so i wasn't sure at first, but now i am.

not that someone just handed it to me in a back alley, i was going after it. but i had no idea if i'd been lied to along the way or not.

a lot of people have asked me about the azoff conspiracy theory. i haven't seen any evidence of it, and we went really deep. i'm afraid to say what is more likely, because then you guys will go crazy on that. but if there was someone behind some conspiracy, i wouldn't bet on azoff.

and it wouldn't need to be a conspiracy anyway, what you're talking about is just how labels work.

also, fernando's a bitch. and as i told syndicate, he had nothing to do with anything i ever got.

also there are about 10 new tracks out there.