They teamed up to write a book about bullying in the workplace and wound up in a legal battle over allegations of plagiarism, breach of contract and — yes — bullying.

Andrew Faas, a Canadian philanthropist and former executive with Shoppers Drug Mart and Loblaw, had the business background and office experience.

Barbara Coloroso, a bestselling American author and bullying expert, had the institutional knowledge and publishing know-how.

The match seemed perfect at the time, but their working relationship would come to a messy end. Nearly three years after they signed a deal with HarperCollins, the former colleagues are embroiled in an escalating dispute over the book that never was.

Faas is suing Coloroso for $1.1 million, alleging in a statement of claim filed in Ontario Superior Court that she did not complete her portion of the work by deadline and then unilaterally terminated their agreement with HarperCollins.

Coloroso has countersued for $1.5 million, alleging he committed “blatant acts of plagiarism and copyright infringement” from sources including Wikipedia.

Each is claiming the other breached the contract. He denies her allegations and she denies his.

“I am stunned and troubled because my reputation and good will accumulated over the last forty years is at stake,” Coloroso wrote in a September 2011 email to Faas and their editors, which is filed in her statement of defence.

In a response, Faas called her plagiarism accusations “slanderous” and said her email was a “classic case of deflection,” accusing her of failing to do the work required and then laying the blame on him.

Quoting the English writer William Hazlitt, Faas warned Coloroso about the stain her “malicious imputations” could leave on his reputation.

“Madam, this, as you more than anyone should know,” he wrote, “is a tactic used by bullies.”

Seemed a good match

The writer and the philanthropist were introduced in 2010 by a mutual friend who thought they would make a good team.

Faas, a former retail executive raised in Dresden, Ont., by parents who emigrated from the Netherlands, is a wealthy man whose charity, the Faas Foundation, supports not-for-profits in health care, medical research and education. He is a recipient of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee medal.

Faas, 64, has a special interest in the subject of bullying. Before he and Coloroso met three years ago, he had funded a symposium on the issue in schools and launched Iceberg Navigation, a consulting firm that works with companies to lower the risk of violence, bullying and harassment in the office.

Coloroso, 65, is an author and educator from Littleton, Colo., whose success in writing has earned her numerous television guest appearances, including a spot on Oprah. Her 2001 book, The Bully, the Bullied, and the Bystander, had been an international bestseller and she was interested in writing a companion piece about workplace bullying.

Faas and Coloroso agreed to join forces on the book and signed a contract with HarperCollins, Coloroso’s publisher, in October 2010.

The agreement came with a $100,000 advance to be divided between them in three equal instalments of $16,667 each, according to court records. They hired a lawyer to help them draw up a co-authors agreement, but didn’t end up signing it.

Faas began working on his portion of the book immediately, with the goal of meeting Coloroso in early July at his farm in Thornbury, Ont., to merge their work, according to his statement of claim. The deadline to submit a manuscript to HarperCollins was Aug. 1, 2011.

Emails exchanged between the colleagues, which were filed in court with Coloroso’s statement of defence, highlight how the relationship broke down.

Coloroso did not finish her contribution to the book by Aug. 1 and the pair, as a result, did not meet the deadline. This, for Faas, was “a source of great embarrassment,” according to his legal filings.

“When we met on July 4th it was apparent . . . that you had not even written one sentence!” he would write to his colleague in an email after things went sour.

Coloroso admitted in emails to Faas and in her countersuit that she did not complete her work on time, but downplayed the importance of the Aug. 1 deadline, which HarperCollins ended up extending by several months. She argues in her claim that editors repeatedly reassured them both that the deadline “was not a hard and fast rule,” and says she felt it was more important to get things right.

Meanwhile, Coloroso was spending much of the time she would have spent writing addressing a concern she alleges in her lawsuit was the more pressing problem: her co-writer’s alleged “copying issues,” as she phrased the allegation in one email.

Sometime in July, as Coloroso was editing Faas’s portion of the manuscript, she found several unattributed phrases that she knew belonged to other writers, according to her counterclaim. At first, she made the necessary edits herself and gently pointed out her concerns to Faas and his assistant, assuming he had made “an honest mistake,” she wrote in an email. Coloroso then began checking the rest of his copy and “discovered other instances of plagiarism and copyright infringement throughout the manuscript,” her counterclaim says.

In a response to Coloroso’s claim, Faas denies her accusations of plagiarism, improper attribution and copyright infringement and says he made “all or substantially all” of the changes she asked for. Coloroso alleges that when she removed the “offending material,” Faas only put it back in.

Coloroso also accused Faas of paying others to ghostwrite sections of the book for him, which she says was against their mutual agreement. Faas denied the allegation and said he used research assistants, but did the writing himself.

The dispute came to a head in mid-September 2011 when Coloroso sent a three-page email outlining her concerns and accusations to Faas and their editors. “I missed a deadline; you failed to meet this standard of integrity required of both of us in our contract with HarperCollins,” she wrote to her colleague.

Faas, angry that she “prematurely” brought editors into the discussion, fired back: “I stand by what I have submitted,” he replied. “On July 1 you had zero work done on it — and to date, other than edit my work — you have done zero. I am not prepared to do anything more!”

Coloroso denied not contributing to the book, arguing the introduction, format and 30,000 words of content belonged to her.

In an interview, Coloroso said she suggested Faas take all her “zero” work out of the manuscript and finish the book himself.

She proposed they end their mutual agreement, that he remove her work from the manuscript and move on to write his own book without her. But HarperCollins wouldn’t do the book without Coloroso on board. Faas told her that for either one of them to withdraw from the project would be considered a breach of contract.

In early November, Coloroso sent an email announcing her intention to “bow out” of the project, citing the alleged plagiarism and copyright infringement, the “negative and attacking tone” she believed the book had developed, and the difference in approach on important “professional and philosophical” issues in the work, her counterclaim says.

“All I have is my work and my reputation,” Coloroso wrote, “and I am not putting my name on this.”

Going solo

As the HarperCollins book contract expired in early 2012, Faas sued his former co-author.

In his claim, filed that May, he argues the book would have generated him $1 million in income and says he was “induced” to incur expenses totalling $100,000. He aims to recover those alleged damages at trial, plus legal costs.

In her counterclaim, Coloroso seeks $1.3 million in damages for breach of contract, a sum the writer claims she would have made in royalties and consulting work due to her already established reputation in the field. She seeks a further $200,000 in aggravated exemplary damages because of his alleged “high handed, oppressive and outrageous conduct.”

Both Coloroso and Faas said they paid back the $16,667 each they had received from HarperCollins as the first part of their advance.

HarperCollins refused an interview request for this story.

Faas has since found another publisher for a solo book on workplace bullying. The Bully’s Trap, which Faas’s company website says is due out Oct. 1 with Tate Publishing, was released online and made available in print for a brief period last month. The book’s page on the U.S. publisher’s online bookstore has since disappeared from the website without explanation. It is no longer available for sale.

Tate Publishing refused to speak to the Toronto Star for this story.

When the Star contacted Faas, he first asked to schedule an in-person discussion, but later cancelled the meeting, saying his lawyer advised him against it. He did answer questions in two separate phone conversations, during which he insisted there are “no plagiarism issues that I’m dealing with” and said the book is still due for release, as planned, this fall.

Faas said Tate Publishing sometimes makes books available for sale earlier than the official release date as a way to promote sales, but that The Bully’s Trap had been listed and then taken off the market because he needed to make some changes.

He described the changes as “normal editing that we would do on a book,” and nothing to do with plagiarism.

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“I believe that I’m being bullied by a bully,” he said. “A bullying expert.”

Coloroso is not a fan of that particular label. “I don’t believe in name-calling,” said the writer, who told the Star she couldn’t speak in detail about the case because it is before the courts.

The Star obtained a copy of The Bully’s Trap and ran it through a computer program that checks for plagiarism. With the help of the software, the Star identified more than two dozen passages that contain strong or word-for-word similarities with other online sources, including some of the same paragraphs Coloroso accused Faas of plagiarizing when they were writing together.

More examples of similarities

One section in his book, for example, which deals with the famous Milgram experiment, begins: “The Milgram Experiment on obedience to authority was a series of psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, which measured the willingness of study participants to obey a figure of authority, who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience.”

The passage is very similar to an archived 2010 Wikipedia page, which reads: “The Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience.” (The Wikipedia article has since been edited and is different now than it was three years ago, but the archived page can be viewed through a website called the Wayback Machine.)

Another line from Faas’s section on Milgram reads: “The experiments began in July of 1961, three months after the start of the trial of German Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem.”

The exact same line appears on the archived Wikipedia page: “The experiments began in July 1961, three months after the start of the trial of German Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem.”

Again, Faas: “Milgram’s testing suggested that it could have been that the millions of accomplices were merely following orders, despite violating their deepest moral beliefs.”

And Wikipedia: “Milgram’s testing suggested that it could have been that the millions of accomplices were merely following orders, despite violating their deepest moral beliefs.”

Other passages from a section in The Bully’s Trap that deals with cyberbullying are very similar to a 2005 paper published in the University of Toledo Law Review by Professor Darby Dickerson, which is available online.

“Schools should believe victims,” Dickerson wrote. “Of course, it is possible for a ‘victim’ to falsely accuse another student of bullying. Thus, the best practice is to take reports of bullying seriously and to investigate the situation as quickly and as thoroughly as possible.”

A passage that appears in Faas’s book is the same, but with the words “employers” and “employee” used instead of “schools” and “student.”

“Employers should believe victims,” the bully book reads. “Of course, it is possible for a ‘victim’ to falsely accuse another employee of bullying. Thus, the best practice is to take reports of bullying seriously and to investigate the situation as quickly and as thoroughly as possible.”

The chapter in Faas’s book on cyberbullying begins with a note that indicates the eight-page section is owned by Iceberg Navigation, Faas’s consulting firm, and was “commissioned and researched by Glenn Pound.”

Pound, a Toronto-based writer and communications professional, denies writing the chapter. In an interview with the Star, Pound said he was hired by Faas as a researcher in 2010 and provided “rigorously cited” background material, but had no control over the book’s content.

“I’ve been wronged here,” Pound said.

Faas, when asked about specific passages in his book that are similar to or the same as Wikipedia and other sources, replied that the book was “prematurely put online” and is still being edited.

“The document is being totally vetted to ensure that there are no issues,” he said.

But how, Faas was asked, did the passages from other sources end up in his manuscript in the first place?

“That’s a viewpoint,” he said, then added: “We’re talking about something that has not been released yet.”

Faas did not have an answer for how the manuscript could have been printed and turned into a book without being vetted, in the way he suggests it is now being vetted, in the first place.

“You’ll have to talk with the publisher about that,” he said.

Tate Publishing refused to answer questions about the book. Three senior employees did not respond to multiple phone calls and emails.

Neither the publisher nor Faas responded to emails that provided examples of word-for-word similarities between paragraphs in Faas’s book and six different sources. When alerted that he would be receiving such an email, Faas said: “I wouldn’t even bother with that, ’cause I’m not interested.”

“Because I know that the publisher and I’ve also instructed my lawyer to make sure that there are no issues relative to the book prior to its release,” he explained.

It was pointed out to Faas that it is typically the responsibility of the writer to make sure there is no plagiarism in his or her own work.

“The editor also edits,” he said.

Faas insisted, again, that the book is not “out there” — that it is not yet published.

“You’ll have to do your story,” he said, “based on whatever information you have.”