Michael Crichton is an asshole

I figured as much from his performance at this year's Skeptics Society conference, where he refused to defend the scientific claims in his book State of Fear, but here's how he's responded to Washington journalist Michael Crowley's critique in The New Republic--by putting Crowley as a character into his most recent novel, as a child rapist with a small penis:

Alex Burnet was in the middle of the most difficult trial of her career, a rape case involving the sexual assault of a two-year-old boy in Malibu. The defendant, thirty-year-old Mick Crowley, was a Washington-based political columnist who was visiting his sister-in-law when he experienced an overwhelming urge to have anal sex with her young son, still in diapers. Crowley was a wealthy, spoiled Yale graduate and heir to a pharmaceutical fortune. ...

It turned out Crowley's taste in love objects was well known in Washington, but [his lawyer]--as was his custom--tried the case vigorously in the press months before the trial, repeatedly characterizing Alex and the child's mother as "fantasizing feminist fundamentalists" who had made up the whole thing from "their sick, twisted imaginations." This, despite a well-documented hospital examination of the child. (Crowley's penis was small, but he had still caused significant tears to the toddler's rectum.)

This appears to me (a non-lawyer) like libel per se and atrocious writing, but Crowley looks like he's only going to point out Crichton's assholishness rather than sue.

UPDATE (November 5, 2008): Many people are visiting this page today after the announcement of Crichton's death. A number are searching with the keywords "Michael Crichton atheist." Michael Crichton was an atheist according to a number of sites online (but not the Celebrity Atheists wiki), but that has nothing to do with his behavior described above.