EARLY IN April 2009, my lawyer received an unexpected request from a former journalist, Jan M. Moberg (at the time the director general of the Norwegian media group Edda Media), and his lawyer.
Jan M. Moberg had just seen a rebroadcast of “The Millennium Millions,” a special report on Swedish television on how Stieg’s father and brother had come by his estate. During that program, the Larssons had mentioned that one of their ideas for “solving the problem” had been that I should marry Stieg’s father.
Jan M. Moberg and two of his friends, roused to indignation, wanted to launch a website—www.supporteva.com—that would bring me some moral and financial support. Calling themselves the Three Musketeers of Drammen, they saw their creation of this site as an application of the same philosophy of action and justice that animates the trilogy. Their objective was to collect money and open an account for me on the Internet, administered by their lawyer in Norway. I was pleasantly surprised by their professionalism, and my lawyer gave me the go-ahead to accept their offer.
THESE NORWEGIANS seem to have a particularly delightful sense of humor. The website, which was launched within three weeks and translated into several languages, invites Internauts to contribute a sum commensurate with the number of Stieg’s novels they have read and their degree of outrage over my predicament. On the Comments page, messages of encouragement come in from around the world, and I’ve received as many phone calls and emails from perfect strangers as I have from my own friends and acquaintances, all telling me that they were relieved to finally have a way to tell me publicly how they felt.
RIGHT BEFORE the site went online, Erland and Joakim Larsson donated 4 million kronor (a little less than $600,000) to Expo, on top of a previous gift of 1 million kronor (not quite $150,000). This news prompted the Norwegians to contact Expo and Searchlight, the two biggest antifascist magazines for which Stieg had written, to ask them to write about the site and publicize a link to it. The British magazine immediately allocated a large space on its website to this end. Expo, however, replied that my conflict with the Larssons was unfortunate, but that they couldn’t take sides in a private matter. The same point was raised by Norstedts, which declined to help.
ON MAY 25, 2009, Norstedts and the Larssons together awarded their first “Stieg Larsson Prize” of 200,000 kronor, almost $30,000, in memory of Stieg’s battles against injustice.
It was presented to Expo.