Flash forward to 2007. Ms. Wyler’s children were growing up, “An Inconvenient Truth” had just won the Oscar for best documentary and, as far as Ms. Wyler knew, there was still no reusable dry-cleaner bag on the market. (She says she was aware of the nylon Converta Bag, which I mentioned in my last column, but it was not being marketed as an enviro-friendly product.) She restarted her company with Ms. Williams, then bought her out. Ms. Wyler later entered a partnership with Mr. Leivenberg, a college friend.
A few days after first meeting Mr. Siegel and Ms. Nigrosh in 2008, Ms. Wyler and Mr. Leivenberg met them again for drinks at a Santa Monica hotel. The Reusenik camp did not demand that their new friends sign a noncompetition agreement before they shared information because, Mr. Leivenberg explains, people involved in eco-commerce often presume a shared altruism.
“Obviously, in hindsight, we were naïve,” he says.
At that meeting, Ms. Wyler says, Mr. Siegel used the phrase “hundreds of thousands of dollars” to describe what he was considering investing. (Mr. Siegel says he does not recall a number.) While Mr. Leivenberg and Ms. Wyler opted not to continue discussing a partnership, they say the parting was amicable. Four months later, a Hollywood dry cleaner alerted Ms. Wyler that he’d been pitched the Green Garmento.
When Ms. Wyler discovered that Mr. Siegel and his wife were involved, “I couldn’t breathe,” she says. She says she consulted a lawyer, who said a lawsuit would be expensive and, potentially, fruitless. Ms. Wyler’s husband, David, a television producer, took a different tack, sending Mr. Siegel and his wife an e-mail message with the subject line “Scum” that asked how they slept at night and called them “lower than dirt.”
When I asked Mr. Siegel about why he had not told me about Ms. Wyler, he sent an e-mail message mentioning that “Scum” missive. “We have a business and therefore a need to control our messaging; giving you reason to call someone who thinks of us as scum and is out to hurt us,” he wrote, “is clearly opposite to that.”
NOT long ago, Ms. Wyler says, she ran into the Green Garmento folks at yet another trade show. “You know what the menschy thing to do would have been?” she says she told the couple. “To just call and let us know that’s what you were doing.”
The couple’s response, which Mr. Siegel recently repeated to me, was that because another company called Safety-Kleen patented a similar garment bag in 1992 (then let the patent lapse in 2000), Green Garmento was in the clear.
“We researched it! You weren’t the first!” Ms. Wyler says the couple told her. To which she says she replied, “That’s not the point here.”
The other day, I asked Ms. Wyler what lesson she wants her three daughters to take from all of this. “Truth and honesty do win out,” she said. “Don’t you think that’s the lesson?” she asked, turning to Mr. Leivenberg.
“Yes,” he replied. “And sign a noncompete.”
E-mail: proto@nytimes.com.
