St. Johns County's FEMA's reimbursement contractor filed a bogus libel lawsuit against political opponents in Louisiana. The lawsuit was dismissed. CRAIG TAFFARO paid $12,500 to settle the Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation. From New Orleans Times-Picayune (NOLA.COM).
Former St. Bernard President Craig Taffaro pays $12,500 to settle failed defamation suit
Former St. Bernard President Parish Craig Taffaro has paid $12,500 to settle a failed defamation lawsuit that he filed in 2012 against current Parish President Dave Peralta and several other parish employees.
In that suit, Taffaro claimed that Peralta and others had engaged in "creating bogus accusations which were leaked to print and broadcast media ... and repeatedly providing Taffaro's employer, the Jindal Administration, with false and bogus accusations of wrongdoings."
A federal judge in May dismissed Taffaro's suit, stating in part that while the suit characterized the animosity between him and Peralta, it failed to demonstrate how Peralta and others violated Taffaro's rights.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Karen Wells Roby last month ordered Taffaro to pay $12,500 to St. Bernard in attorney fees and court costs.
Greg Rome, the attorney representing parish government, confirmed that he gave the $12,500 check from Taffaro to the Parish Council on Tuesday evening.
The Taffaro suit had asked for no less than $2.75 million in damages and claimed that Peralta and other parish employees had violated Taffaro's civil rights, his career rights and had intentionally inflicted emotional distress. It stated a raid of Taffaro's storage unit in October 2012 "was the culmination of a pattern of retaliation by Peralta against Taffaro because Taffaro fired Peralta as CAO in October, 2008, and because Taffaro campaigned against Peralta in 2011."
But in May, U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman stated that the Taffaro suit contained confusing, contradictory facts and that it alleged the "subjective intent" of Peralta and other government actors without supplying facts supporting how those individuals had violated Taffaro's constitutional rights.
"Taffaro leans heavily, indeed almost exclusively, on his allegations of malicious conduct by the defendants and the need for the defendants to be punished," Feldman said.
Feldman added that "even assuming that Taffaro can prove dark ulterior motives, it does not follow that these motives invalidate conduct that is otherwise objectively justifiable."
Feldman wrote that Taffaro "seems to succeed only in portraying an unpleasant rivalry against the backdrop of local politics."
Taffaro left office on Dec. 15, after losing a brutal re-election campaign against Peralta. He is now the head of Gov. Bobby Jindal's hazard mitigation office.
In February, attorneys for Peralta and other parish employees named in the suit responded to Taffaro's allegations.
"While the allegations of the complaint could be the basis of a literary work, they are not sufficient to properly state a cause of action under federal or state law," Peralta's attorney, Leonard Levenson, argued.
Levenson labeled Taffaro's allegations "verbose and confusing" and later wrote that Taffaro's complaint "is reminiscent of a Faulkneresque 'stream-of-consciousness-writing' with disordered chronology."
Rome, the attorney representing the parish government and most of the other parish government personnel named in the suit, argued that "Mr. Taffaro's complaint tries to paint a picture of a Parish Government riddled with sinister actors working in the dark to destroy him."
"Instead, it reveals Mr. Taffaro grasping at straws, carping about seemingly every real or imagined slight he has ever received, and desperately trying to justify his own bad behavior through the use of the federal courts," Rome wrote.
Rome added, "defamation requires more than an allegation that someone did something Mr. Taffaro did not like."
Others named as defendants in the suit were Donald Bourgeois of the parish's Department of Recovery; Craig DeHarde of the Department of Recreation, Culture and Tourism; Clay Dillon of the Department of Resident Services; William McGoey of the Legal Department; and Jarrod Gourgues, a former sheriff's deputy now in the parish's roads department.
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