If you'll remember, Janet Jenkins has been trying to get her daughter, Isabella, returned home after her former partner, Lisa Miller, fled the country with her more than three years ago. Two weeks ago, Jenkins filed a civil RICO suit against Miller and several persons and groups who helped Miller leave the country with Isabella, and helped her flout numerous visitation orders before then. Among the biggest names in the suit are several organs of the ministry network founded by Jerry Falwell--including Thomas Road Baptist Church and Liberty University Law School.
Earlier today, Liberty law school dean Mat Staver made his first public comments since being served with the RICO suit. In an interview with hardline forced-birth site LifeSiteNews, he claims that the suit is so frivolous that Jenkins' attorney should be sanctioned for filing it.
“This is outrageously frivolous,” Staver told LifeSiteNews.com. “It’s a press release filed in federal court. It is sanctionable, and we will pursue every recourse possible because this suit is defamatory. It’s filled with lies, it’s frivolous, and the attorney who filed it ought to be sanctioned…”
Staver also claimed that Jenkins' suit is in a similar vein to RICO suits filed against anti-abortion activists, and is nothing less than an attack on free speech. However, the
lawsuit charges that Staver and his acolytes at Liberty Law School and its affiliated law firm, Liberty Counsel, actively helped Miller flout a visitation order. It also alleges that Liberty Counsel might have known about Miller's plans to flee the country. The suit cites evidence introduced at the trial of Kenneth Miller, a Mennonite pastor convicted of helping Lisa Miller escape, that Phillip Zodhiates, the president of a Christian direct-mail firm named in the suit, made numerous calls to Liberty Counsel on the day Lisa Miller left the country. While Staver, Liberty Law School and Liberty Counsel were well within their rights to argue Lisa Miller's cause, the evidence in the RICO suit suggests that they were accessories to a kidnapping.
Staver has claimed from the start that he knew nothing about Miller packing up and leaving. But that is belied not only by the aforementioned phone records, but an FBI affidavit filed in 2011 stating that Miller was living at a house in Nicaragua owned by Zodhiates--and that his daughter, Victoria Hyden, is an administrative assistant at Liberty Law School. People for the American Way couldn't help but notice that at the time, Hyden was the only staffer at Liberty Law who didn't have a link to her biography page on the school's Web site.
About the only way I could see the Falwell ministry complex possibly having a leg to stand on is if there was evidence Jenkins abused Isabella. Indeed, LifeSiteNews contends that Isabella was indeed traumatized by the prospect of Jenkins taking her back to Vermont. But those claims have to be taken with a grain of salt in light of an NYT discovery that when Miller left four pet hamsters to starve to death when she fled with Isabella.
All things considered, if Staver tries to get Jenkins' attorneys sanctioned, the velocity with which any motion for sanctions will be denied should create quite a breeze.