Taking Stock of Shirley Sherrod's Suit Against Andrew Breitbart.

[babylonsister]

http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=02&year=2011&base_name=taking_stock_of_shirley_sherro


Taking Stock of Shirley Sherrod's Suit Against Andrew Breitbart.
By Pema Levy | Posted 02/14/2011 at 01:37 PM


On Friday, Shirley Sherrod filed a libel and slander suit against Andrew Breitbart in D.C. Superior Court for his release of an edited video of her which resulted in her forced resignation from the USDA last summer. As I said last week in a column about why it's so hard to sue the media, the odds are stacked against victims. Sherrod will have to prove that Breitbart knowingly promulgated false information or recklessly disregarded the truth -- a feat that's so hard to do most libel cases get thrown out.

Last summer, when Sherrod mentioned she would consider a suit, John W. Dean of Findlaw's Writ blog spelled out why the suit would be so miserable:

What Breitbart will do if Sherrod files a lawsuit against him is to quickly create a legal defense fund, with the support and financing of like-thinking conservatives, and he will hire as nasty an attorney as is available ... Soon, he will be using the legal process to harass Sherrod by digging into every inch of her life, and perhaps even countersuing Sherrod for claims as to which she has no knowledge. It will be ugly, and she must plan on several years of intense unpleasantness.

Certainly, the case is already nasty. Breitbart has a statement on his website accusing Sherrod of ulterior motives. The statement claimed that Sherrod sued because of Breitbart's crusade against alleged fraud a case called Pigford v. Glickman -- a lawsuit that requires the USDA to pay African American farmers who were denied loans and assistance in the 1980s and 1990s due to racial prejudice. Breitbart is obsessed with the case and has immediately accused Sherrod of suing him because of his revealing work on what he calls the "Pigford fraud." Curiously enough, the gist of both the smear campaign against Sherrod and the hype over the Pigford case are basically the same: they are part of Breitbart's curious crusade against black farmers and the general paranoia that black people are out to defraud the government, with an implied cost to everyone else.

No one knows whether Sherrod will win her case, but it has enough merit to make it to the "discovery" phase of a trial in which each side has to turn over evidence. Even if she ends up losing, the information revealed -- emails, testimony, and other documents -- has the potential to be supremely damaging to Breitbart and anyone else involved. And it will be damaging because it's true.

[Erose999]

1. Its obvious to anyone that BriteFart edited the tape in a manipulative manner. But

the burden of proof is on Mrs. Sherrod and her counsel to put together a case that he did so knowingly.

I'm not sure what all she can obtain from him via subpeona as far as documents, E-mails, etc. But it should be pretty easy to prove that even if he was given an incomplete tape that he didn't do much to seek out the entire tape. If he knew it was an NAACP event then (if he were "responsible" and "held regard for the truth") he would have contacted the NAACP and tried to obtain a complete tape or transcript.

I really hope they put together a good case and sue that fool for everything he has. I hope after they are done with him he doesn't even have a pot to piss in.

[localroger]

6. Sherrod wasn't a public figure before -- malice might not matter

If it is determined that Sherrod wasn't a public figure before Breitbart published the video, then Sherrod doesn't have to prove knowledge, only negligence; and it's a slam-dunk that he published the video without even trying to find an original source. So I think Breitbart's liability will turn on whether Sherrod was a public figure. This is pretty well settled law, and just being known within your profession doesn't make you a figure of public curiosity sufficient to lessen your privacy rights.

I think Sherrod has about as close to a slam-dunk case as you can make here. I'm sure that the reason she waited 7 months (other than taking the delightful opportunity to serve him at CPAC) was that her legal team has been doing its homework. I'm sure they know what they will be facing from the other side and are ready for it.

Breitbart is a very substantial fool to say so much as one word about this case without a lawyer by his side. What I notice about this situation is that Sherrod has made it very easy for Breitbart's buddies to hang him out to dry. If they do, expect Breitbart to start squealing so he won't go down alone.

[blondeatlast]

7. That's what I was kind of thinking. There seems to be a common notion here that lawsuits

are filed without any forethought, preparation, or deliberation. That may be the case with the likes of Orly taitz, but real legal professionals aren't that foolish or stupid.

[damntexdem]

2. If she's selling stock in the suit, I'll buy some.

;-)

[blondeatlast]

3. My bet is she's in it for the discovery. She knows damn well this is bigger than

her own issues; if it wasn't, she'd not be going through the kind of hell I'm certain she's aware she's in for.

[fasttense]

4. Today Breitbart, tomorrow Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck. n/t

[calimary]

5. The very act of suing is of value. breitbart's gonna have to cough it up now - time AND money.

It will hurt him in the pocketbook - the church of choice for CONservatives. It will distract him, deplete his energies, fuzz up his focus, like diverting the water flow of a big river.

AND - there's a secondary value. Since he won't have the money to defend this all the way out, he's going to have to turn to donors and fundraisers. Which means OTHERS in the general bad-guy club are gonna have to get out their checkbooks. And people are gonna have to be hired or paid overtime to organize benefits and fundraisers even if it's just online. After all, SOMEBODY has to monitor those and stay on top of 'em, which means they can't spend all their time on their primary job. The ripple effect will be a VERY annoying inconvenience for breitbart and his flying monkey friends.

BESIDES - it not only deprives them of their precious money (for which they already had plenty of plans and targets), but it means they have less with which to fund other projects. I gave the example of my kid's band. They've earned a little money by now, which will go toward some larger equipment needs they now have. But the bass player's truck got broken into outside where they were playing a gig and they got robbed. The truck's window needs to be replaced. They've got a duct-taped trash bag in there in the meantime. Well, forget the original objective for their earnings. That money now needs to be diverted to something else - fixing Ted's truck's window. What they originally planned - now has to be put off. GRANTED - the koch brothers and the american enterprise institute and freedomeworks and other CON-backers are a hundred-brazillion times more well-funded than our boy's band. But maybe they'll have to trim the TV commercial budget a little in some markets which means one highly-targeted and expensively researched commercial will have a few less times per day part to reach people. Or maybe they can't give AS MUCH to CONservative-candidate XYZ as they'd planned to get an announcement out about a presidential or senate run, so that candidate then gets a later start and loses momentum, or maybe can't hire that One Extra Staffer that's needed just as badly in this one corner of the state that they'll lose if they don't have dedicated boots on the ground there. Maybe it's that one extra strategist they can't add on, or they can't give that one extra strategist the assistant or researcher he/she needs to be really effective.

We NEED-NEED-NEED-DOUBLE/TRIPLE-NEED people on the offense against these assholes - in EVERY way, and EVERYWHERE possible. And EVERY when and EVERY who and how. Attacking them and forcing them to react and forcing them into playing defense, and forcing them to keep their eyes peeled on so many fronts that it literally makes their heads spin.

THINK ABOUT IT: Doesn't it feel to you, sometimes, that we Dems and liberals and progressives are literally UNDER SIEGE at every point, at every minute, on every issue large/small relevant/irrelevant real/bogus and even some we never even heard of? I mean, honest to pete! It just never stops! They just always want to stir things up around us, non-stop. And You Can See What That Does - What IMPACT It Has. Look at us all grousing all the time, miserable, angry, depressed, bickering among each other - and we need to be focused 100% OUTWARD and 100% on The Bad Guys. In ANY way, large or small, that we can. ANY way to keep them off their game, off message, distracted, energy-depleted, overloaded, and overwhelmed. I want 'em literally dizzy and reeling on their heels every day because they just can't stay ahead of all this annoyance! And it starts to add up, cost-wise.

I just really believe in this. It's Perception Management and, well, what should we call it? Environmental Management? Proximity Management? Where you manage the surrounding scene, the trickle-down, the ripple-effect, the secondary and tertiary markets or impacts or layers of momentum.

I posted this on kpete's thread about Sherrod's filing the lawsuit:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=4731666&mesg_id=4732027

Sorry to be such a windbag but I think this is really important, if Democrats and Liberals and Progressives are ever going to turn the CONservative tide around. We have to be pro-active, and ruthlessly and relentlessly so. And I guess I'm hoping that somebody with clout or connections or positioning - someone who's able to do this on a more significant scale - who might be posting or lurking here (we KNOW some of 'em do), MAYBE this'll give somebody an idea. And even those of us who aren't in that league, we should ALL be thinking along these lines. Ideas big AND small can come from EVERYWHERE.

After all, look what all the little Davids of Anonymous are doing to Goliaths like HBGary and some of those other pirates (and Palantir, which already issued a public apology about it) AND the nasty publicity for them AND the people who hire them!

It promotes a chilling effect on the bad guys. So far they've been able to do what they've done because there hasn't been any big price to pay for any of their shit. They get their hands slapped or something, if at all. Vindictive partisan assholes like breitbart never had any fear that there'd be any downside for them for deliberately pulling shit like that (hey, NOBODY held a gun to his head and forced him to edit that Sherrod video). NOTHING happened to them for doing stuff like that. They all moved up and were more loudly hailed by their own supporters. And NOTHING happened to them - no consequences to face that they cared about. If they got heat from OUR side, they didn't give a damn. We were and are meaningless.

But start pinching them in the pocketbook - and they start feeling TRUE PAIN.