Stop, Drop and Roll

17 January 2008 | Alameda Community | John Knox White

So I’ve started reading the East Bay Express on a semi-regular basis. Every so often there’s an item of interest and the news rack in right in front of my office, and it’s free. It’s win-win-win!

I open it up yesterday and the lead letter to the editor is from an old friend.

Defamation Destination

In her article, “Alameda Becomes a Destination” Kathleen Richards mentions my litigation against City of Alameda Transportation Commissioner John Knox White. But she neglected to mention that the court also dismissed an “anti-SLAPP” motion filed by Mr. White, through which he attempted to have the case summarily dismissed without consideration and his attorney’s fees and lost wages reimbursed to him. The court held that I had presented a prima facie case of defamation and appropriately denied Mr. White’s motion. While I learned that it is extraordinarily difficult to successfully prosecute a defamation case in California, Mr. White and his posse of cyber-bullies learned it can still be very expensive to falsely implicate someone in criminal behavior.

David Howard, Alameda

It’s amazing to me the amount of spin, effort and outright misinformation that Mr. Howard and his buddy Don Roberts like to throw out there about this case. For months Don was saying that I had filed a lawsuit (untrue) and that I had lost. In Don-land, motions to supress a BS lawsuit and filing a lawsuit are one and the same.

{Quick aside: for those unfamiliar, you can see my post here about the lawsuit}

I’ve written before about Howard’s attempts to spin his pathetic lawsuit into some sort of vindication for himself, despite the utter loss he suffered in court. The judge didn’t even come close to telling him he had a case. You can read the the judgement for yourself.

What was amazing to me, beyond the obvious “he’s still beating that dead horse?” feeling, was his attempts to propagandize his loss into some kind of victory. It is true that the jdge dismissed my motion to quash the lawsuit by saying that there was a prima facie case to be heard, but that just means that the judge felt that the comment I made was at least possibly defamatory, and that the court should look into it further.

Upon further consideration, the judge wrote a number of simple judgments that found that no defamation had occurred. In the judges words: “A reasonable person would have understood the word was not used in a defamatory manner.” Which is the legal definition of “Not Defamation.” In the next paragraph, the judge wrote: “it was clear to a reasonable person that the word was bandied about with an intent far removed from defamation…”

The judge went on to say that even if it had been said in a defamatory way, Mr. Howard is a public figure and had to prove that it had been uttered with malice and that Howard had not done so. And further, even if Howard had had a case, he hadn’t shown any ill-effects of said actions, and therefore it wasn’t actionable.

The idea that Howard (and Howard Sr., Mr. Roberts) feel free to play hard-done-by and continue to attempt to trot out obfuscations around the incident is laughable. Howard’s last sentence, about having cost me a lot of time and money and therefore having taught me a lesson speaks directly to the vindictive, political nature of his childish small claims court lawsuit. His recent letter is a continuation of said campaign.

Defamation is a purely legal issue, there’s no “technicality” to skate off on, Howard needs to realize his gamble failed. He cried wolf in order to make a point, lost and now needs to get over it.