Let’s start the new year with a discussion about a lesser known challenge that newsrooms face as they strive for financial sustainability: the nuisance lawsuit.
We’ve been dealing with a doozy, and for background, I can’t do a better job describing the case than our attorney did in the opening paragraph of a court filing late last year:
In September 2019, plaintiff Shawn Romer—then a practicing attorney with a history of substance abuse—paid his drug dealer to deliver him cocaine and to arrange for a woman to perform oral sex on him. The “woman” who arrived at Romer’s home that night was actually a missing 15-year-old girl, A.L., who was being trafficked by Romer’s drug dealer and who had been delivering Romer cocaine for several months. That night, Romer ingested cocaine with A.L., showered with A.L., watched pornography with A.L., and engaged in sexual contact with A.L. And when A.L. revealed that she was only 15 and threatened to report Romer to police, he paid her an additional $200 to keep quiet, and sent her away.
Romer does not deny any of this.
Romer sued us for defamation involving stories we wrote about his deplorable actions.
Defamation means damage to a reputation, and I ask you how one could possibly damage the reputation of a man who did what Romer did. What could you say about him that is worse than the truth? This lawsuit was preposterous.
Yet, we had to spend a considerable sum to fight it, money that otherwise would have gone to newsgathering. We also had to spend valuable time dealing with the case. I even canceled an episode of Today in Ohio, our weekday news analysis podcast, because I had to be in court and was unable to reschedule the recording.
Romer’s lawsuit was about two stories we published, stories that did contain fact errors. One story was about the filing of a disciplinary case against him while he was in prison for what he did with the 15-year-old girl, and the second was about the Supreme Court’s decision to suspend his law license indefinitely because of his criminal misconduct.
In the first, we incorrectly said that Romer first met the 15-year-old girl two years earlier, not months. We also incorrectly said he used cocaine with the girl several times, not just once.
In the second, he argued we incorrectly said he was in prison for taking a shower with the 15-year-old. He argued the reduced charges he pleaded guilty to did not include the showering, even though he admitted to that. It was a nonsense semantics argument. He was charged with crimes for the sum total of what he did, including the showering. He also argued the second story incorrectly said a woman he bought cocaine from before meeting the 15-year-old was being trafficked by the drug dealer. How that would harm his reputation is beyond me.
Do the two minor errors in the first story make you think less of Romer than you thought of him when you read about what he did with the 15-year-old girl?
His chief argument in the lawsuit is that by saying he met the girl two years earlier, we imply he watched a young girl mature from age 13 to 15 and must be a child predator who knew his victim’s age when he gave her drugs, watched porn and showered with her and paid her for oral sex. The fallacy of that argument: By pleading guilty to attempted corruption of a minor, Romer admitted he knew or should have known her age when he gave her drugs and paid her for sex. It doesn’t matter when he met her.
If common sense were the rule in courtrooms, our attorney could simply have stood before the judge and said, “C’mon. This is preposterous. It is not possible to damage this guy’s reputation beyond the facts of what he did.”
Courts don’t work that way. They work on legal arguments and precedents. Our skilled attorney, Dan Kavouras, wrote a brilliant brief laying out how proving a statement false for the purposes of defamation requires what he called a “substantial difference” between the literal truth and the words at the heart of the complaint.
Minor fact errors, like those in our stories, “do not amount to falsity so long as the substance, the gist, the sting of the libelous charge (is) justified,” he quoted from case law.
The inaccuracies alleged in Romer’s complaint do not affect the overall ‘gist’ or ‘sting’ of the Articles, which accurately reported that Romer was in prison and facing a disciplinary complaint because he: (1) paid his drug dealer to have A.L. deliver him cocaine and perform oral sex on him; (2) ingested cocaine with A.L..; (3) showered with A.L.; (4) watched pornography with A.L.; (5) engaged in sexual contact with A.L.; (6) paid A.L. not to report him to police; and (7) pleaded guilty to solicitation and attempted corruption of a minor with drugs based on his conduct with A.L. In other words, both Articles are substantially true.
You’re probably wondering what Romer wanted out of this case. Why would someone who did what he did come after us and subject himself to further examination in a courtroom?
He wanted our stories about him to disappear from Google searches, so that no one could search for his name and find his reprehensible behavior. Before he filed his case, his attorney got in touch to tell us about the errors and ask us to remove the stories from search engines. That was the first time we learned of the errors – nearly one full year after the first story was published.
We, of course, want to fix any errors we make, and upon learning of these, we did fix them. But there was no way we would remove this story from search engines. This is not a case for our Right to be Forgotten initiative.
We’ve received a lot of national attention in recent years as a leader in helping people who made minor mistakes in the past move on with their lives. We don’t believe a minor crime or transgression from years ago should follow someone for the rest of time. Upon request, we do remove those stories.
We’ve always said our Right to be Forgotten initiative does not apply to stories involving violence, sex crimes, crimes against children or corruption. Romer’s criminality ticks two of those boxes.
Beyond that, though, our chief guiding principle in deciding these cases is whether the value to the community of keeping a story visible is greater than the value to the individual of removing it.
This case is a slam dunk. Anyone with a 15-year-old daughter who gets into Romer’s orbit should be able to find our stories. The value to the community in protecting itself from this man is far greater than whatever he seeks in removing it.
Romer also wanted money. He reduced his demand at least once, finally settling on $12,000. I see that as a shakedown. Romer’s a lawyer. He knows how expensive it is for resource-challenged newsrooms to fight these cases, no matter how ridiculous they are. He and others who file nuisance suits figure that the financial pressures newsrooms face will coerce them into settling even when they are in the right, to save money.
Not us. Not here. We have the means to take a case like this to the mat, to see it through to the end. This is about principle, not dollars.
Fortunately, the end came sooner than later. The legal brief I’ve been quoting is from Dan’s motion to dismiss this lawsuit, largely on the grounds that it is ridiculous. A week after a hearing on Dan’s motion just before Christmas, Common Pleas Judge John Russo took the rare action of granting the dismissal, based on the strong arguments Dan had made.
Russo’s too much of a professional to ever say it, but I’ve got to think he marveled at the audacity of Romer as much as I did.
I’m at cquinn@cleveland.com.
Thanks for reading
