Moby has turned its caustic eye of doom-linkage on Figes and what it sees isn’t pretty. The man of a thousand sockpuppets finds he can’t darn the damage caused by his dishonesty and now, with his hand exposed and well-knit career unravelling, his supporters seem to have cold feet, and his luck seems to have run out—barefoot.  (Take that, restrained-metaphor!)

The British press this weekend was awash in reports that he could face multiple lawsuits and that his academic position may be in jeopardy, as well as with second looks into numerous past charges of plagiarism that journalists and historians now say Figes suppressed by constantly threatening expensive lawsuits.

“He now faces legal action from at least two of the authors he wrote about” in his Amazon reviews, according to a Saturday Daily Telegraph report. “There have been some large legal costs built up in the last week which I hope to retrieve from the Figes family,” Rachel Polonsky tells the paper. The Telegraph also notes that “Dr Polonsky said she would offer legal help to Prof [Robert] Service, the historian who initially sent an email to a dozen historians about the anonymous reviews. He was threatened with libel proceedings by Figes’s laywer.”