Letter to Camille

Hi Camille You have been sending me emails intended for Ellen Atkin. "What is your plan?" you ask. "We are praying for this." I hope this answers your prayers. My plan is to straighten out the vexed issue of journalistic ethics. Or at least you seem vexed by it. I can see your X posts although you have blocked me, so I followed your link to that Auticulture podcast just to find out why Jasun called me a "yellow journalist." He didnt really- he said making statements of fact without proof is "yellow journalism." In this case, I was talking about evidence that had been removed or hidden between one visit to the Cohen archive and the next, six months later. It's an interesting conversation with no real hint of yellow journalism. I was honest about what had happened but Jasun was impatient because my "proof" had vanished, therefore the whole story became unbelievable in his mind at the time. I talked about the difficulty of producing proof, even when something is clearly true. A single witness is ofte

n not believed. Statements need to be corroborated, and even then, mere corroboration is not proof. Let's cut to the chase: about "stealing stories." You've been accusing me of "stealing your story" for several years now, with Ellen's encouragement but never any proof. The first step would be to define what you mean by "your story" which you seem to imply is your autobiography, or everything that has ever happened to you. You have listed 14 points of similarity between your life story and mine. I'll just mention a few i remember. • We were both born in 1951, and had dads who were jazz musicians. Your dad was a well known professional composer and played in a famous orchestra, while my dad was a schoolteacher who played piano in an Air Force band at a remote base in British Columbia during WW2. A troop entertainer. So far, I see no "theft." • We both started keeping diaries at age 12. I dont know anything about your diary but maybe you started it after you moved to London in September 1963. I asked for and received a diary for my 12th birthday in April 1963 and for a few months I faithfully wrote in it. After a year, I burned it in my waste basket because it seemed nothing interesting ever happened to me. • We both were involved with the Rolling Stones. You met them twice in the US, once (i think) in Chicago in the mid to late 70s. You attended their concerts starting in London clubs in the early 60s. I had liked some of their early music but stopped paying attention to them after Sticky Fingers. I never met the band and didnt go to any of their shows until 1994 at age 43 in Toronto on the Voodoo Lounge tour, after which I saw them multiple times in various locations, New Orleans, Pasadena, Salt Lake City, Montreal, Berlin, Leipzig, London .. the list goes on. I became a Stones fan only after I was sent to Mustique by a Tibetan lama to deliver a message to Mick in 1992. My photo and name appear on the Voodoo Lounge CD-Rom which I found by accident in a bin in Pasadena in 1996. Does this sound like your life story? I could elaborate on how I gradually found out, in my late 60s, that Mick met my family in the 1950s in Montreal. Somewhere you have stated that I am now passing myself off as an expert on the 1960s London rock and roll scene. Nowhere have I ever written anything about London or its music scene as I never lived there. I am not a music journalist and never pretended to be. My story has nothing to do with London except that I went there on June 7 1963 for the launch of the Stones first AM single. How i got there, and who arranged it remains a mystery. Mick has said I wasnt invited. I apparently caused him stress by showing up unannounced as a drugged 12-year-old girl that they put in his bed. Two days later I was back home in Montreal with a baby doll pajama outfit from Mary Quant which my mother laundered and ironed. I wore it to bed for the next few years, never guessing how I.acquired it. I can't really see how this has anything in common with your story. Thousands of young women have met the Stones. Thousands of young women went to London in 1963. Millions listened to their music. My story is set almost exclusively in Montreal, from beginning to end, with short trips away e.g. to London and New York. I am only writing about me and my family who were Canadian victims of Tavistock psychiatrists based at McGill. I know this through my research. Your story, which I only know bits of, can barely be compared to mine. We lived in different countries and different circumstances. It would never occur to me to 'steal' someone's story to graft onto my own - it would be pointless and also disastrous from any perspective. The reason you believe I stole your story is that we exchanged texts in 2019 and back then I never mentioned going to London in 1963. That's because I had no recollection of that visit until after taking a 10 week course with Andrew Loog Oldham in 2020 in Kamloops, BC. A detailed flashback surfaced a year later. Unless you're a believer in False Memory Syndrome, you know repressed memories are not uncommon and often emerge years after a traumatic event. My visit to London in June 63 was highly traumatic. It began at a track and field meet on the grounds of a boys' reform school in the mountains north of Montreal. This facility was run by the same McGill psychiatrists who brainwashed my father in 1962. In June 1963 I travelled there by bus with my 6th grade classmates, two of whom I am still in touch with. They remember the bus trip but the rest is a blur - they agree this is strange. I woke up the next day in a filthy apartment in London. It was very hot. I remember walking on the Kings Road with Mick all the way to LSE. It was the last day of class but he had no term paper to hand in as he was dropping out to become a fulltime Rolling Stone. I remember what happened after I got back to Montreal in my Mary Quant baby dolls, and wrote my Grade 6 exams with a voice shouting in my head "You're no good, you will fail" etc. Two weeks later my father announced we were moving to British Columbia, we packed up the station wagon and drove west, 3000 miles across Canada in a week. My dad was a Cameron patient and likely had met Ellen Atkin's father, also a Cameron patient, who abandoned Montreal with his family at the same time, according to hospital records. I remember becoming depressed at our summer cottage later that summer. One day I told my worried mother that my heart had "turned to stone." She must have reported this to the McGill psychiatrists because a year later the Rolling Stones released their first original song "Heart of Stone" -- but I never heard of them or Mick Jagger until months later when I had started high school. One Sunday night I saw Mick singing on Ed Sullivan and went into shock because he seemed so familiar. Thirteen years later in 1977 some friends took me to New York to meet Mick Jagger. We met in a hotel in Manhattan. He was dressed head to foot in green leather and had shoulder-length hair. He was totally stoned. We couldn't stop laughing and I rolled off the bed onto the floor. My friends brought me back to Montreal on the bus the next day and I had no memory of the hotel encounter until 1993 when the scene on the bed came back in a vivid dream. Mick began messaging me frequently in the 1990s. I didn't know why but now realize he remembered me and especially my mother, who at 30 looked exactly like his current girlfriend. When i was writer in residence at the college in Kamloops, he messaged me constantly- it was very confusing. Does this sound like your story? I don't think so. Maybe there are similarities which you don't remember but either way, no "theft" -- I urge you to concentrate on your own writing and forget about mine. Ann On Fri, Oct 17, 2025, 3:11 p.m. CamilleBlinstrub wrote: Isn't that a bit strange? Yes I will wait. I can't access her pages at all. Keep praying. I wrote a post last night on Twitter that I think is quite good. We're both praying for this, Ellen. Brad is 100% on your side. Camille xx Sent with Proton Mail secure email. On Friday, October 17th, 2025 at 1:49 PM, Anne McLean wrote: I'm blocked again on FB so if you sent me messages and don't hear back its because i'm waiting to go through their security check Darn On Thu, Oct 16, 2025, 4:24 p.m. Anne McLean wrote: "and then I blocked her on her BI" she writes. (???) Then I realized she's referring to my British Invasion page as "BI" She would only abbreviate it like that if she and whoever she is writing to talk about it often-- like, they're constantly exchanging emails and strategies. Yes Don Lowe says I stalked Leonard constantly "everywhere" although he never leaves his hut... its ridiculous. Posner rewarded him with a special tribute night in his honour at the Hydra cinema - On Thu, Oct 16, 2025, 2:18 p.m. CamilleBlinstrub wrote: I wasn't responding to her anymore when she wrote this. She had posted three of my Facebook posts on the Stones & England. I changed the privacy setting & then blocked her on her BI from my Camille Blinstrub FB page. I plan to post from jasun about her being a yellow journalist on Twitter later. What is your plan? Thanks Sent with Proton Mail secure email. On Thursday, October 16th, 2025 at 10:03 AM, Anne McLean wrote: So - this past week it came to my attention that Camille Blinstrub aka Davis Russo has been actively contacting podcasters and others, repeating false information gleaned from prolific fabulator Ellen Atkin's Facebook and X accounts. What is most shocking is that Camille, the daughter of jazz composer William Russo, considers herself a credible witness to the London music scene and British Invasion, and has written articles, books, and given interviews on this history, apparently with little to no knowledge of the basics of journalistic practice and ethics. She repeats one-sided slander wholesale without checking facts, and without interviewing the victim. She conflates personal and public communication, using back channels to attack people she disagrees with. Like Ellen Atkin, she operates behind a wall of privacy settings, deleting or blocking comments and refusing all dialogue with the object of her slander campaign (in this case, me). She misunderstands the fundamental concept of plagiarism or "story theft" -- imagining that vague similarities like shared dates, places, and life experience are proof that I have appropriated her "story" as my own. Alarming false claims originating with Ellen Atkin, e.g. that I "stalked Leonard Cohen to his death" can be easily disproved. I had no contact with Leonard Cohen or his family for his last 20 years, except to phone him in 2004 on his 70th birthday to wish him happy birthday. If I had harassed and stalked him, there would be evidence eg phone calls, photos, copies of letters, notes, emails-- as there was for his ex-manager Kelly Lynch who was convicted and did jail time for criminal harassment of Cohen in the years leading up to his death. I began writing a memoir, in 2001, as an exercise in self-defense and truth-telling, after living next door to Cohen from 1983-96 in Montreal. Our twenty-year relationship broke up under the weight of rumors that he had molested his daughter as a child. I posted a first draft online in 2001, and later a revised version as The Man Next Door in 2014. I never "stalked" Cohen and in 1996 he still referred to me as an "ex girlfriend." As late as 1994 we were seen going out for dinner together in our neighborhood-- e.g. by musician John Jordan who writes about meeting us in a corner restaurant near Cohen's home. Camille Blinstrub, who never knew Cohen, is risking her own reputation by repeating junk gossip from her "good friend" Ellen Atkin whom she knows only via the internet - whereas I actually met and spent a week with Ellen in 2014, observing her awful behavior at a yoga centre where she was camped in her black SUV. After watching her insult and abuse other residents, and experiencing her irrational explosive rage one day when I was alone with her in her vehicle, I concluded she was a dangerous person, likely a sociopath. She repeatedly demonstrates many traits of a narcissistic borderline personality, and has been kicked out of one group and community after another. Her obsessive, angry online postings ought to be a red flag to any normal thinking person who reads them. It is truly incomprehensible to me that anyone would consider Ellen even remotely reliable and a "good friend" given her horrific track record as a pathological liar and bully. You would have to be living in a walled-off fantasy world, like Camille Blinstrub Davis Russo, whose mind has been marinating for years in "Christian" dogma and thrives on selfrighteous judgment of people she doesn't bother to get to know before composing her idiotic poison pen screeds behind their backs. I don't know what else to say except it's sad, pathetic and pointless - and I won't tolerate any more abuse from Camille or Ellen. Now that i'm back on X and can actually follow their crazy conversation, I will record and report everything that crosses the line into slander and harassment. This needs to stop now. Ann Diamond