SLAPP Threats Don't Even Need To Become Lawsuits To Be Effective: Cop Gets Columnist Fired For Pointing To Picture Of Him With Racists

from the slapp'd dept

A few weeks ago, we wrote about a troubling SLAPP lawsuit in Charlottesville, Virginia against a local independent paper, C-Ville, and a UVA history professor. That post mostly focused on the lawsuit against the history professor, Jalane Schmidt, and the ACLU's decision to defend her in the lawsuit. We didn't have much information for how C-Ville itself is dealing with the SLAPP suit. However, given its response to another SLAPP threat, it appears that C-Ville is mostly caving.

Back in May, Molly Conger, an opinion columnist for C-Ville, who built up her reputation by reporting on local racists and what they're up to, wrote an opinion piece merely highlighting the fact that a Charlottesville police officer, Logan Woodzell, who had just been promoted, had also been seen in a photo passed around on social media "posing with James Napier of the neo-Confederate group the Hiwaymen and Tammy Lee of American Freedom Keepers (one of the militia groups sued by the city for its involvement in Unite the Right)."

Nothing in the column calls Woodzell a racist. She just raises questions about the process by which Woodzell was given a promotion, as well as gives her opinion that the promotion shows "poor judgment" and "a disregard for the concerns of a community." Nothing in any of that is remotely defamatory. It's either a clearly factual statement (the photo exists and had been shared on social media) or opinion about what it showed concerning the Chartolttesville police force and its police chief, RaShall Brackney. Indeed, Woodzell is barely mentioned beyond the opening of the piece.

However, according to a Twitter thread from Conger, a lawyer from the local police union then threatened the paper over the piece -- leading C-Ville to cave and end Conger's relationship with the paper. Here's a lightly edited transcript of Conger's tweet thread:

Earlier this year, I had a short-lived opinion column covering city politics (a subject I am very passionate about!) in a local weekly paper. It quietly disappeared two months ago. My relationship with cville weekly came to an end after the attorney for the police benevolent society, representing an individual officer in this case, threatened to sue both me and the paper. Specifically, the cop’s lawyer claimed I had defamed her client in this piece. I don’t know how I could possibly have been clearer. At no point have I ever claimed this individual police officer personally holds white supremacist views. I explicitly said that I do not allege anything of the kind. What I wrote and what I will continue to say is that the Charlottesville police department has been in absolutely no way held accountable for their inaction two years ago today. The image of a Charlottesville police officer with his arm around members of a white supremacist militia is a perfect illustration of a department choosing over & over to ignore the community it serves. It’s a picture of willful ignorance and complicity. Of harm through inaction. I’m not surprised a police officer and a former prosecutor would try to weaponize the legal process to silence a critic. I am surprised that the paper reacted with such incredible cowardice. The threat itself was just that. A threat. From a bully. It is not an actionable legal claim, it’s an empty threat from a bully.

Conger writes some more after that, and it's worth reading, but the crux of it was that a police officer, backed with a lawyer from his union, appears to have threatened a publication for writing a factual article that portrays the officer in a way he didn't like. And the paper ended that writer's column. That's cowardice.

But it also shows why these kinds of SLAPP threats are so common, even if they don't end up as lawsuits directly. They're quite frequently effective.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community. Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis. While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: free speech, jobs, logan woodzell, molly conger, slapp, threats

Companies: c-ville