Geneva, N.Y. -- Laurie Fine will announce this morning that she's filing a federal libel lawsuit against ESPN over its reporting of child-molesting accusations against her husband, fired assistant Syracuse University basketball coach Bernie Fine.

Fine's lawyers provided the 44-page lawsuit to The Post-Standard this morning, in advance of her news conference at Belhurst Castle, a swanky hotel in Geneva, 50 miles west of Syracuse.

The lawsuit accuses ESPN, reporter Mark Schwarz and producer Arty Berko, of irresponsibly reporting the allegations against Bernie Fine and taking Laurie Fine's words out of context to cast her in a false light.

The lawsuit says ESPN, Schwarz and Berko "spitefully destroyed Laurie Fine's reputation in an attempt to capitalize financially in the wake of the Penn State sex abuse scandal."

The defendants published false and defamatory information about Laurie Fine, including that she created "a space in which children could be sexually molested in secret," and that she witnessed her husband molesting children but did nothing to stop him, the lawsuit said.

Laurie Fine "has been forced to sell her family home...to escape the predictable aftermath of the defendants' continued malicious publication of certain false and defamatory statements," the lawsuit said. It said, Bernie Fine "has already moved to another state to escape the same."

ESPN Senior Vice President and Director of News Vince Doria referred comment to the company's communications department.

“We haven’t had the opportunity to review the complaint. We stand by our reporting," said Josh Krulewitz, vice president of communications at ESPN.

ESPN is owned by The Walt Disney Company, which earned $4.8 billion in fiscal year 2011, a record for the company.

The lawsuit, which Laurie Fine's lawyers said will be filed in federal court in Syracuse in the coming days, claims the cable sports channel doubted the validity of accuser Bobby Davis' claims for nine years, then relied on the questionable claims of Davis' stepbrother, Mike Lang, to justify broadcasting the story in November.

Laurie Fine and her lawyer, Lawrence Fisher of Pittsburgh, are scheduled to announce the lawsuit at 11 a.m. today.

Lang told The Post-Standard in 2002 that Bernie Fine never molested him. Then, after hearing about the sex abuse allegations against Penn State football assistant coach Jerry Sandusky, Lang told ESPN that Bernie Fine did molest him at Fine's Syracuse home when Lang was a boy.

Lang, 45, of Constantia, has never publicly explained the contradictory statements.

Laurie Fine's lawsuit says that in 2009 or 2010, Lang asked Bernie Fine to let Lang's two sons work as ball boys for SU, to show them the locker room, introduce them to players and "give them the same experience" that Lang had as a child.

Any credibility to Lang's accusations was "undone by Lang's request to place his sons within Bernie's close personal supervision," the lawsuit said.

At the time, ESPN knew Lang was suffering from financial hardships, and this should have compelled ESPN to further question his credibility, the lawsuit said.

Davis, 40, of Bridgeport, told The Post-Standard in 2002 and ESPN in 2003 that Bernie Fine molested him when Davis was an SU ball boy. But both news organizations decided at the time not to publish the allegations because there was no other accuser or corroborating evidence.

Get the news as it happens

Follow The Post-Standard live today as we blog from the Laurie Fine news conference in Geneva.

Our coverage will begin before the 11 a.m. announcement at the lakefront Belhurst Castle, and will continue with

live updates here

.

Laurie Fine's lawsuit claims ESPN took her comments in a tape-recorded phone conversation with Davis out of context to cast her in a false light. Davis secretly recorded the phone call in October 2002. On the recording, Laurie Fine didn't deny Davis' allegations that Bernie Fine molested him. In the recording, Laurie Fine says her husband needed help and that he thought he was above the law.

ESPN used excerpts from the phone conversation to imply that she was having sex with Davis - which Laurie Fine denied in the suit - and that she did nothing to stop her husband, the lawsuit said.

Davis was among many troubled children mentored and took into their home over the years, the lawsuit said. Bernie Fine started giving Davis money, and eventually Laurie told Bernie to "stop enabling Davis' debilitating reliance on their financial support," the suit said.

Davis regularly tricked the Fines into giving him money, including $5,000 to pay for bogus student loans, the suit said. Then Davis told Laurie that Bernie had molested him, and she told Davis that he'd crossed the line, the lawsuit said.

But the Fines decided to no longer lecture Davis, instead letting him make the accusations, the suit said.

"In light of the Fines' agreement to no longer 'go off' on Davis, Laurie would patiently suffer Davis' vilification of her husband with the hope that Davis would eventually outgrow the lies and his dependency upon her family for financial support," the lawsuit said, in what appears to be an explanation for Laurie Fine not denying Davis' allegations in the taped 2002 phone call.

SU fired Bernie Fine on Nov. 27, the same day that ESPN and later The Post-Standard published excerpts from the call between Davis and Laurie Fine.

After that, Laurie Fine also was thrust into the national spotlight when Davis filed an affidavit in a slander suit against SU head coach Jim Boeheim. In the document, Davis claimed that in the 1990s Laurie Fine had sex with SU basketball players, gave them gifts, lent them money and her car, and did a player's laundry.

Two of the four players whom Davis alleged had sex with Laurie Fine have told The Post-Standard it was not true. The others could not be reached.

Laurie Fine denied in her suit that she had sex with SU players.

Gloria Allred, an attorney for Davis and Lang, did not respond this morning to a request for comment on Fine's lawsuit.

The slander suit filed by Davis and Lang was dismissed last Friday by state Supreme Court Justice Brian DeJoseph.

Laurie Fine's lawsuit also cites ESPN's involvement in connecting Davis to another Bernie Fine accuser, Zach Tomaselli. After the allegations by Davis and Lang became public, Tomaselli called ESPN and Schwarz put him in touch with Davis, the lawsuit said.

Tomaselli recanted his allegations against Bernie Fine last month just before he entered state prison in Maine to serve a 39-month term for having sexual contact with a teenaged boy. Tomaselli said he lied about Fine because he had been sexually abused as a child by someone else and because he hated SU for beating his favorite team, the Kansas Jayhawks, for the national basketball championship in 2003.

The lawsuit claims ESPN "leaked Tomaselli’s story to The Post-Standard in order to falsely boost the newsworthiness of Tomaselli’s non-credible story." That is not true. Tomaselli contacted The Post-Standard directly in an email on Nov. 25.

Federal prosecutors, Syracuse police and the Secret Service are investigating the allegations against Bernie Fine, who has not been charged and has denied all wrongdoing.

Bernie Fine, 66, is not a plaintiff in the suit, which names only ESPN, Schwarz and Berko as defendants.

The lawsuit accuses the defendants of libel -- a claim that will require Laurie Fine to prove ESPN published false information about her. She will have to show the information was published with fault, the standard for which is different depending on whether she's considered a public figure, according to legal experts.

If she is found to not be a public figure, she would still have to demonstrate that ESPN published the information with "gross irresponsibility," the experts said. That would include a showing that ESPN made a gross departure from journalistic standards in publishing the information, the experts said.

If she's found to be a public figure, the standard of proof would be higher for her -- that ESPN published the information with malice and reckless disregard for whether it was true, experts said.

Contact John O'Brien at jobrien@syracuse.com or 470-2187.

A chronology of the Bernie Fine sex abuse scandal

Excerpt from 10/8/2002 taped phone call between Laurie Fine and Bobby Davis. Davis asks Fine if she ever saw Bernie Fine "do anything with anybody else" and refers to an incident in which he says Laurie Fine saw through a basement window her husband with Davis when Davis was very young.

Read an excerpt of the secretly taped 2002 phone call between Bobby Davis and Laurie Fine

ESPN's first story on Nov. 17 about Bobby Davis' and Mike Lang's allegations against Bernie Fine

ESPN's story about Bobby Davis' secretly recorded phone call with Laurie Fine

ESPN executive Vince Doria talks about ESPN's coverage of the Bernie Fine scandal

Laurie Fine v. ESPN