LIBEL by New York Times

by J. Edward Pawlick

Reserve Yours Now!

On July 17, 2002, there was a great victory! On that day, the legislature broke the law and violated the state Constitution. They demonstrated, where everyone could see, their enormous frustration. They had been unable to sway the citizens of Massachusetts, despite the continuing libels and dirty tricks that were played against them. The only way our opponents could "win" was to break the law.

We were ready to nail-down and celebrate our victory! But our allies didn't have the faith to understand what had happened.

The people understood, but our leaders did not, especially those at James Dobson's satellite, Massachusetts Family Institute. On July 18 they went flying off to Colorado Springs for more instructions. They never returned to the battleground.

Sally Pawlick and MCM were all alone. Her agreement with her consultant, Jim Lafferty, ended and he went back to consulting. There was only Sally and her office staff.

Just Beginning to Fight

Only an office staff . . . AND a state full of dedicated citizens who loved their state and wanted to keep it as the pro-family place it has always been, with mothers, fathers and children as the basic unit of our society.

But Sally was not a lawyer nor a politician. She was a mother and a grandmother who loved what she was doing in that realm. She had no desire at all to become "important," but she saw a job that needed to be done. On July 17, she was heartbroken because her third grandchild was born without her.

I had sold my legal newspaper company four years earlier with its 40 lawyers, 30 journalists, 30 sales people and another 20 accountants and assorted people, who were advising 30% of the practicing lawyers across the nation on important changes in the law. Shortly after that I had started Massachusetts News, which was more than a fulltime job.

It was obvious that Sally needed help. She was not used to this nasty world where the Boston Globe and New York Times would libel and lie about her personally and would do everything possible to stop the citizens from discussing the issues.

I had to change and go fulltime to helping Sally. All her friends had run away.

We Started Our Lawsuit

I was told by every lawyer in the state (and I am not exaggerating) that we could not sue anyone for violating the law and the state Constitution. If we did sue, they said, we would end up being forced to pay the lawyers for the other side as well as our own, under a new law known as a SLAPP suit. All the lawyers in the state continue to be frightened to death, with good cause, of SLAPP suits.

The lawyers laughed at me because I had not practiced law since 1972 when I started my legal newspapers, and never in Massachusetts.

By August 16, 2002, I had researched enough law all by myself to feel comfortable and we started suit. There was an instant change in the state. Bay Windows had been gloating about their "victory" in their Aug. 22 issue. But not in their August 29 issue. Their celebratory mood suddenly changed when they saw that we were still in business.

We started running advertisements on talk-radio, but we got financial help only from little people. All the big guys "knew" we had "lost." After all, they read the Boston Globe, don't they? They knew what was happening. We were merely "stubborn" extremists who didn't understand.

All the lawyers at the State House knew that the law had been broken on July 17. Could anyone doubt it?!? But the lawyers couldn't force Jane Swift to do the right thing. They could only advise her. Who was pushing her to break the law? No one knows, but it was clear that the Globe was running large, empathetic articles about Jane during the fall of 2002.

Sally and other loyal supporters of the Marriage Amendment started politely picketing Jane Swift in front of her office at the State House. There was no one to lead a large protest as we had had in June and July. This was a Sally-type protest, polite and sweet with Jane smiling back, but politician Jane was brazen, interested only in herself, not the Commonwealth.

We sent many mailings around the state in the fall to voters in districts where the legislators had violated the law on July 17. They caused great consternation and awareness. We weren't trying to target anyone, just keeping awareness about the terrible violation of our state government. The most outspoken had been Cheryl Jacques who said she would do "anything" to stop the Amendment. We must wonder if our mailing in her district caused problems which made her decide to leave the state and not run for reelection in 2004.

Mitt Romney didn't get it either. He publicly humiliated his wife, son and daughter-in-law who had signed the petition for the Marriage Amendment. All he was interested in was running for President, and he wasn't smart enough to see what everyone else did, that he was on the wrong side of the issue. He had won only because Tom Birmingham and Shannon O'Brien committed suicide by fighting the Amendment. An aide of his told a friend of mine recently that he is grooming himself for a run at the Presidency.

What finally "reached" Jane Swift was when I went back to being a "tough" lawyer and sent a FedEx to her home in Williamstown, which she received the day before Thanksgiving. It threatened a personal lawsuit if she didn't start obeying the law and call the legislature back for a vote as she was required to do under the state Constitution. Her own lawyers had been telling her all during the summer that that was her legal duty, but she had thought she could get away with it.

On Dec. 3, the day that I appeared before the full SJC on Sally's suit, Jane Swift shocked the state by asking the SJC what was required of her. Two days later, Senator Birmingham followed and filed his own request. They were both hoping that the SJC did not have time to answer before the year ran out.

On Dec. 20, the SJC advised both Swift and Birmingham that they had broken the law. This was exciting! It was exactly what Sally and I had sought. They could no longer argue what the state Constitution required. They could no longer say they hadn't done anything wrong. The Globe could no longer report that what Birmingham had done was merely a "procedural device." They had broken the law!

But the Globe didn't tell the truth on Dec. 21. They wrote that the SJC had vindicated Birmingham and Swift. It was Christmas time and nobody read the full text of the opinion. They all accepted the Globe's lie, including all the people on our side in the legislature. No vote was taken by December 31 as the SJC said was required under the Constitution.

Back Again on January 2, 2003

On Thursday, Jan. 2, 2003, Sally was back at the SJC filing a suit to have the SJC do something now that its Order of Dec. 20 had been ignored. We suggested that the SJC tell the new legislature that the two-year legislative session of 2001-2002 had forfeited their right to vote on the Amendment as well as their duty to vote. If the SJC couldn't think of a better remedy, they should just tell this to the 2003-2004 session and indicate to them that they would be the last session to consider this matter. If the politicians wanted to defeat the matter, they had to vote and obtain more than 75% of the vote.

It was really strange what was happening. But it is very clear at this point that Margaret Marshall and Pinch Sulzberger had a plan. They had been plotting it for years. They were going to begin gay marriage here in Massachusetts and ultimately put Marshall on the Supreme Court of the United States. The other Justices did not realize that yet.

When I first arrived at a single Justice session of the court in October 2002 and then before all the Justices in December 2002, it was clear that no one had read my brief before I arrived. It was very discouraging. But then the advisory opinion to Swift and Birmingham came down on Dec. 20, and the whole world changed. We had won!

But the court still refused to answer Sally's Complaint even though we were asking for exactly the same thing that Gov. Swift was asking. They threw out our suit by saying that Sally had no right to sue, anymore than any other citizen. But that was clearly not true under their own rulings from the past. They still trusted Chief Justice Marshall.

But there was someone, somewhere on the court, who could see the tremendous violation of our state Constitution and felt they had to answer the Governor and Senator, regardless of what Margaret Marshall wanted. We will probably never know who that was, although we could assume that one or more of the three dissenting judges were involved.

When the SJC filed their ruling which rejected our lawsuit and cleared their docket, you can be sure that the Globe reported that bit of news. We were a "failure" again.

Meanwhile, MFI had returned to the fight by offering a compromise to the other side. MFI would allow domestic partnerships and gay unions as long as the word "marriage" was never used to describe them. That is a little like Bill Clinton compromising with Monica. "I know you're worried about getting pregnant, Honey, so we'll only have sex on the odd days. Okay?"

It was difficult to know how we should react to this. We didn't want an internecine fight with our friends, and we tried to avoid it as long as possible, even though we were being characterized by the process as stubborn, foolish zealots.

My first meeting with the SJC concerning Sally's new lawsuit in 2003 was in February with John Greaney sitting as the Single Justice. He had been around for years and was like an old-shoe. He had hoped that he would be named as Chief Justice when Marshall was selected. He also acted very friendly to me, even unprofessional, at the Oral Argument in February 2003. He asked me the silly question as to why I thought Jane Swift had waited so long before doing something. It was not my business to speculate with him about the political processes of the Governor. That was a surprise. I was to learn later when Atty. Yogman appeared before him in the gay marriage case, exactly how nasty he could be when he had Margaret Marshall leading him.

Needless to say, Greaney turned me down before I even reached my home.

I had expected a team of lawyers to be representing Sally, but I couldn't find any lawyer, much less a team, who would even look at the case. But this old fire-horse wasn't doing badly. We had gotten an opinion from the SJC that the Constitution had been violated. That was vital!

Meanwhile, I could not continue my fulltime job as publisher of MassNews and also be a "team of lawyers" all by myself. Something had to give. We kept trying to get money from big donors, but no one even came close. They sometimes would waste our time by listening. But they never intended to help.

Then came the Goodridge case in March in which I had no direct contact. But the Justices certainly knew who Sally and I were. They knew we didn't have horns, and we often made sense, although Marshall and Greaney would never admit it. After reading the transcript and listening to a tape of the proceedings, hearing the intonation and inflection of the voices, it was readily apparent that Marshall and Greaney had made up their minds a long time ago. Greaney even assured Bonauto at the hearing that she was going to win.

So when I prepared for the oral argument before the full court in May, I was determined to talk about the gay marriage case. After all, don't forget that Sally's case was about an Amendment that would prohibit Margaret Marshall from imposing gay marriage as she had been scheming all those years. I didn't worry as to why I was before the court.

So all those Justices sat and listened to me on May 9 expound as to how the state was going to erupt in a way that would change our politics forever if they imposed gay marriage. They were attentive this time and then the Asst. Attorney General told them that MCM had a choice. We could return again next year, spend another $1.7 million, gather another 130,000 signatures with nasty, dangerous blockers all around and hope that the new legislature would follow the Constitution. At this, Justice Cordy started asking him many questions and showed that he was doing some deep thinking.

We'll never know how much I affected those judges, but at least they could see we were rational, good people. We didn't have horns.

Lawsuit Against New York Times

In April 2003, it became clear that I had worked long and hard for five years to alert this state to what a one-party, one-newspaper state was doing to them. They were losing their democracy. Although I had excellent people working with me on MassNews, there was no one on the horizon who could carry the whole load. I had to take it back to what I had planned originally, a superb Internet newspaper, not an expensive, four-color, print paper that had been forced upon us by the opposition who tried to kill us at birth. The world had changed a lot in five years and most people were now comfortable with the Net.

So, at age 76, I determined to scale back the paper and leave a resource for the people that would survive me.

But first we had to let everyone know how Pinch Sulzberger was ruining the New York Times and the Boston Globe.

I started suit against the New York Times for their libels against MCM and Sally on April 15. Soon, I had to answer a brief from the large Boston law firm. I studied about sixty cases and read many pages of commentary from the experts. I didn't know as much as the experienced Boston firm, but I certainly knew more than the federal judge. But she didn't care if I knew anything or not, she had formerly worked for Ted Kennedy, who had her appointed as judge. She threw out my lawsuit before she even sat down in her courtroom in the palatial, but ugly, palace on Boston Harbor.

It was only a few days before I realized that the judge had done a wonderful thing for us. I was now free to battle in an arena where everyone in the state would know what was happening. No more dark, dank courtrooms. It became obvious that I had to write a book.

And so began a grueling, three months of 18-hour days, seven-days a week which climaxed on Saturday and Sunday, November 29-30, 2003 and ended at 11 p.m. on Sunday with a courier leaving for a seven-hour trip to the book manufacturer, where he presented himself at 8:30 when they opened on Monday.

I had told the printer we were a newspaper and we always met deadlines, but they didn't really believe it until they saw him standing there on December 1.

So Now You Know

So now you know why we've been so quiet for the last year. We didn't want to ask you to go running around just for the enjoyment of running. But now there is plenty for you to do. Sally and I cannot save this state, but you can.

We will tell you how you can do so after the Christmas holidays on January 5. Please look for our message on that day.

By that time, some of you will have received my new book. Subscribers should look for their copy. Please read it. Many who got Kinko advance copies have been very enthusiastic.