Wal-Mart is the most sued corporation in America, but I bet they don't
get sued for defamation very often:
A fired Wal-Mart Stores Inc. vice president accused the company on Thursday of sullying his reputation with public criticism and reiterated claims that he was terminated after he drew attention to misspending by an upper-level executive.
Jared Bowen sued Wal-Mart on Thursday for defamation, claiming the company has characterized him as "a liar, a thief, and a fraud."
The world's largest retailer fired Bowen about the same time former vice chairman Tom Coughlin was accused by the company of misspending up to $500,000. Wal-Mart has said Bowen was a part of the scheme.
But Bowen sought "whistleblower" protection and claimed that he raised concerns about invoices from Coughlin and that the company fired him for pointing out the problems.
If you read this diary regularly, you know I wrote about Jared Bowen
here and
here. Indeed, releasing somebody's college transcripts on your web site is a pretty slimy thing to do. So does Wal-Mart say it's sorry? Of course not. They keep misleading the general public:
Wal-Mart spokeswoman Mona Williams said Bowen invited media attention when he issued a news release on his filing a complaint with the U.S. Labor Department.
Williams said Bowen's suit did not refute Wal-Mart's statements about him and called the suit a "remarkably tight-lipped nonspecific response to our highly-detailed position statement."
"One would expect more than this innocuous general denial, unless there simply aren't facts in his favor," she said.
What she doesn't tell you is that Bowen's side of the story was in his original complaint to the Department of Labor under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in order to get whistleblower status. In this detailed report, Bowen's attorney writes:
In this case, Bowen will have no difficulty demonstrating that Wal-Mart's basis for his termination is false and/or unworthy of creedence.
How do I know what's in the complaint? Wal-Mart put it up on its web site with the other documents. [Seriously, how dumb is Wal-Mart? Or how dumb do they think we are?]
Wal-Mart also uploaded copies of the Wall Street Journal articles on the case. If you look at the 4/8/05 that started this whole thing, you'll see that WSJ saw internal Wal-Mart documents on the case. Where did the WSJ get them from? They don't say, but it has to be Bowen. After all, he had been fired by that time. He had nothing to lose, while everyone still with the company did. Who knows what else this guy is sitting on? The man was some kind of corporate accountant for heaven's sake.
Firing and then defaming the guy who knows where all the bodies are buried is a big, big mistake - unless there are more bodies buried out there than we can ever imagine and the company is desperate to keep it quiet.
I guess we shall see.
JR
