Philly's Power Players Bombard City Newspapers With Libel Suits

In the 1990s, the American Journalism Review dubbed Philadelphia “Libel City.” Plaintiffs, the journal noted, “included three state Supreme Court justices, a Superior Court judge, nine Court of Common Pleas (trial) judges, a Municipal Court judge, a U.S. attorney, Philadelphia’s district attorney … two City Council members and three mayors … not to mention state legislators, a state lottery official, the dean of a law school, a ranking state police official, a sheriff and a local union leader.” 

Most prominent was the 1990 victory by lawyer Richard Sprague, who had sued the Inquirer over a 1973 article accusing the former assistant district attorney of helping a man with state police connections beat a murder charge. Sprague won a $34 million judgment — reduced on appeal and later settled, but at the time the largest libel award in U.S. history. 

Today, the long, acrimonious relationship between Philadelphia’s newspapers and its power brokers continues. And Sprague is still leading that charge. The Inquirer and Daily News’ lawyers at Pepper Hamilton LLP are now fighting a deluge of libel actions filed by electrical workers’ union leader (IBEW Local 98) John Dougherty (aka Johnny Doc), U.S. Rep. Bob Brady, former Philadelphia Housing Authority (PHA) executive director Carl Greene and, last but not least, Sprague himself. (Sprague is also representing Doc and Brady.) While shrinking investigative-reporting budgets may have reduced the overall number of suits in play, the fact that they continue speaks either to the survival of tenacious reporting and politicians’ desires to chill critical speech or, if you prefer, to Philadelphia journalists’ incompetence and power players’ desire to clear their names.

Sprague has, as former DA Lynne Abraham put it in a deposition, a “reputation” that “he’ll sue you in a heartbeat” if he thinks you’ve libeled him — that is, asserted a fact in print while knowing it’s false. 

That, then, may explain this email exchange, now part of court records, between Dave Davies, then senior writer at the Daily News, and columnist Jill Porter. The emails followed a February 2009 column criticizing Sprague: 

“I liked that you led with a hard right to the jaw,” Davies wrote. Had there been, he asked, any reaction from “castle Sprague”? 

“Maybe,” Porter mused, “there will be a subpoena on my desk when I get in.” A letter from Sprague’s lawyer arrived two hours later. 

Porter’s column had compared Sprague to his former longtime client, state Sen. Vincent Fumo, saying Sprague was “something of a liar too.” In 2007, Sprague twice stated that Fumo had received bad legal advice (not from Sprague) that he did not have to retain certain emails that were later sought by federal investigators. After Fumo and Sprague parted ways, Sprague testified that he “doubted the truth of [Fumo’s story] very much from the beginning.” 

Sprague’s suit contends that he was not lying, just accurately representing Fumo’s position. “Anybody with an ounce of brains would realize” all he was doing “is relating what he is told by the client.”

AMAZINGLY, SPRAGUE’S ISN’T the only active libel suit over comparing a public figure to Fumo, who’s now serving time in federal prison. Doc is suing over two Inquirer editorials and a column by former staff writer Monica Yant Kinney, all dating to 2008 when he was running to succeed Fumo in the state Senate. At the time, Fumo was under federal investigation for corruption, while Doc was himself being investigated separately. The Inquirer, noting the federal allegations and various alleged conflicts of interests, editorialized that Doc “appears fully capable of matching the incumbent at his indictable worst.” Doc contends the columns were “the culmination of a continuous and systematic campaign to disparage” him, and crossed over into libel by accusing him of criminality.

There is, the papers’ lawyers respond, a “clear right to offer an opinion that someone who is the subject of an active criminal investigation is not the best choice for elected office.” 

Indeed, the investigation was front-page news at the time: Donald J. “Gus” Dougherty Jr., a contractor of no relation to Doc, had among other things allegedly provided $115,000 in free renovations to Doc’s Pennsport home and sold him a Wildwood condo at a discount. Gus was in 2008 sentenced to two years in prison, pleading guilty to not paying his required share, $869,000, to IBEW Local 98’s pension plan. 

Doc spokesperson Frank Keel said Gus, who also received nearly $1 million from a program giving subsidies to contractors facing nonunion competition, delivered the freebies without Doc’s knowledge. And though federal agents searched Doc’s home in 2006 and alleged that he broke the law, no charges were ever filed.

Yet lawsuits, as the publication of Davies’ and Porter’s once-private email banter demonstrates, can unplug deep documentary rabbit holes — including for the plaintiffs.

In Doc’s case, lawyers for the newspapers discovered a document probably more damaging than the allegedly libelous columns: a heretofore-secret FBI affidavit documenting probable cause for the 2006 search of his home. The affidavit — apparently placed accidentally in Gus Dougherty’s file — was attached as Exhibit A in a motion for the case’s immediate dismissal last December. It featured detailed allegations of Doc’s criminal wrongdoing, including an apparent “effort to conceal financial dealings,” related to $106,000 of allegedly unknown origin deposited into his bank account.

For the Inquirer, this was fodder for yet another front-page story on Doc’s hijinks. Doc was not happy: He claims Pepper Hamilton, which represented him during the FBI search, conspired to leak the affidavit. He is suing the firm for breach of contract.

Sprague, Brady, Doc and the newspaper were all contacted for this story. None of them responded.

LIBEL SUITS, BOTH in Philadelphia and nationally, appear to have declined in recent years, according to observers. Perhaps “newspapers and broadcasters have not been doing as much investigative reporting as they used to,” says media lawyer Carl Solano, of the Philly firm Schnader. “[Some] say that it’s just the economics of the times … that doing the type of reporting that provokes lawsuits is too expensive.” 

Filing a libel suit is also expensive, but the political payoff might be worth it for plaintiffs, says Zack Stalberg, president of the good-government group Committee of Seventy and a former Daily News editor. He worries that the newspaper industry’s economic crisis might further empower litigious public figures and chill newspapers. “Today, you’ve got to worry about what isn’t being published because of fear of a suit.”

One person that both dailies have extensively covered is former PHA director Carl Greene: A libel suit claims the Inquirer and Daily News published 246 articles about Greene from September 2010 to September 2011 — a series of “abusive muckraking attacks” that depict Greene “mismanaging PHA and its budget, misusing federal money, and engaging in criminal misconduct.” 

Greene claims that the articles, at a time when the papers were in bankruptcy, were a “desperate attempt to make the newspapers relevant and attractive to auction bidders and to generate much needed readership and revenue.”

Indeed, Greene’s lawsuit engages in elaborate media criticism, arguing that “in the 1970s … the Inquirer developed a style of reporting — so-called ‘investigative reporting’ — that became very popular because it generated a large number of industry awards.” That reporting, the lawsuit contends, “was a mix of fact, opinion and even judgment” that has “degenerated into a regular and repeated attempt to reach certain conclusions and work backwards from there.” The suit even suggests that the rise of “investigative reporting directly correlates to a decline in the overall role of print media in American culture.”

The complaint cited a 2010 article, “Shaking their hips on the PHA’s tab,” that portrayed a 2006 “diversity event” as a boondoggle, “focus[ing] on belly dancers in a way that demeaned the art form” and using a  photo of Greene and the dancers “to create the false impression that Mr. Greene had misused public money [and] engaged in sexually inappropriate behavior.”

Greene was fired in 2010, after reports he was facing foreclosure were followed by allegations that PHA had settled multiple sexual-harassment claims against him, and that he spent lavishly on gifts and parties and required employees and contractors to donate to parties in his honor. Greene checked into a psychiatric hospital that August. 

JOHN DOUGHERTY IS a controversial figure. But two articles, one about Dougherty and the second about Rep. Brady, also show the Inquirer accusing political leaders of bad behavior seemingly without doing their homework first. Whether those articles are libelous, it’s now up to the court to decide.

Doc’s suit against the Inquirer and columnist Karen Heller, filed over a November 2009 column, is a case in point: Heller knocked Local 98 for Christmas-light brinksmanship. She wrote: “Consider the punitive nature of doing business in the city. Why does it cost $50,000 to string lights in Rittenhouse Square? Johnny Dougherty stepped in and magnanimously waived the exorbitant fees his … union imposed in the first place. Now he’s Santa Doc. Next time, don’t charge so much and create the crisis in the first place.” 

Heller used her next column to apologize: Local 98 had nothing to do with the $50,000 bill. “I blew it,” she wrote. “Dougherty and his union generously donated their time … to repair, replace, and hang the lights.”

Brady’s lawsuit reflects a similar error — weirdly enough, also about lighting. An April 3, 2008, Inquirer editorial recounted Republican allegations that Brady had abused his clout to steer a lighting-design contract to a Philly company, and accused Brady of “screwing” taxpayers. The problem, as a front-page Inquirer story explained the next day: There was “no evidence” that Brady steered the contract.

The Heller suit is now on hold. Dougherty, wary of more negative press, has asked that he not be forced to take a video deposition without a commitment that the Inquirer will keep the tape private. His lawyers say he risks “further devastating public harm by the misuse of select film clips or sound bits.” 

“Snippets,” they worry, “could be used to make him look ridiculous.”

Greene is the one plaintiff here not represented by Sprague — perhaps because Sprague defended former Mayor John Street in a separate Greene defamation lawsuit. In that case, Sprague, who takes umbrage at being called a “liar,” argued that Street’s comment that Greene “lies about everything” was protected speech. 

Like Greene, Sprague believes the papers are out to get him, “permeated with the animus of past interactions.” The papers deny that. But it’s hard to imagine the unprofitable company enjoys paying these legal bills.

(daniel.denvir@citypaper.net)