For weeks in the run-up to Florida's primary, self-funded billionaire Senate-hopeful Jeff Greene sent daily glossy direct-mail attack ads suggesting that his Democratic opponent Kendrick Meek was a criminal because of Meek's mother's and former staff member's involvement in a real-estate development gone bad.
Late in the campaign, the Miami Herald and St. Petersburg Times ran articles questioning Jeff Greene's character, business dealings, and his potential involvement in a real-estate deal that landed his partner in jail.
Greene, whose $24,000,000 campaign vaulted him to the front in the polls, ultimately lost to Meek 31% to 57%. But in the aftermath, Greene has proven that he can dish it out but can't take it. He's hired public-figure libel expert L. Lin Wood to file a $500 million defamation suit against the newspapers who broke the story of Greene's checkered past.
The suit, filed in a Miami Circuit Court, opens a new chapter in the relatively new narrative of rich-self funded candidates who wage expensive media-based campaigns. This new type of candidate not only has unlimited funds and is unencumbered by the problems of having to run concurrent fund-raising and vote-getting campaigns, should they lose, they have the financial ability to sue everybody in sight.
A successful outcome in this defamation case, which seeks $250 million compensatory and an additional $250 million punitive, could have a chilling effect on robust press coverage of other campaigns. The blog Rose Speaks, which follows high profile trials, opines: "This folks is going to be the libel suit of all times"
The suit states in part that the papers and reporters listed in the suit, ..."[Defendants] abandoned journalistic integrity and ignored the fundamental canons of journalistic conduct while wholeheartedly embracing the publication of false and defamatory articles about Greene with Constitutional actual malice. As a result, Defendants crossed the threshold from speech protect by the First Amendment to enter the arena of actionable libel for which they must be held legally accountable." The suit further states that reporters and papers, "not only published the articles with the goal of destroying the personal, business and political reputation of Green, Defendants also urged that Green be criminal investigated by the FBI in connection with serious crimes." This billionaire, Jeff Greene, has the money to stay in this suit with only the best libel and defamation lawyer, L. Lin Wood, right up and through any trial. Like I said before the primary, the papers should have done a front page correction on all of the issues and addressing all of the points that Wood presented in his two letters to the papers before the Florida primary with. the corrections but also made it clear they might be a tad bias as both newspapers endorsed Greene’s opponent, Kendrick B. Meek in the primary last week.
Defamation actions of this type, since New York Times v. Sullivan, are notoriously difficult to win, Lin has prevailed, however in difficult cases before. He won for Richard A. Jewell, the security guard tried in the press for the 1996 Olympics bombing in Atlanta.
But if the defending counsel is able to get Greene's own campaign literature admitted as evidence, it will surely demonstrate that while Greene may have the money to prosecute a run for office and a defamation action, he doesn't have the experience or the cojones to conduct himself as the public figure he made himself when he filed his election papers.
In the complaint, Greene requests a jury trial; it will be a jury impaneled from registered voters who received the daily hate mail from Greene's campaign, and its very likely that jury will come to the same conclusion as St Petersburg Times Editor Neil Brown: "It is our firm opinion that the allegations in this lawsuit are preposterous. We believe Jeff Greene is a sore loser and he's blaming the newspapers because he can't accept the verdict of the voters."