If they thought I had a wide reach with my blog, why wouldn't they do good work from the start?
My other blog posts about freelancers [0, 1] are to say that they did a good job and other people should hire them, so I'd imagine if they were thinking about the writeup, they'd want it to put more effort into making sure it's positive.
Those things are not mutually exclusive: I'm sure they intended to do good work from the start and they were scared of a bad review after they botched the job. When you terminated the contract they obviously wanted to minimize the damage.
The sibling comment captured what I would have written, so I'll just note that this submission has ~10x more points/comments than the one about having a positive experience hiring an editor.
A breach of contract liability. Once they had the money they will have to show something in court to justify keeping it -- if you were to dispute that requested work was not completed.
