PHILADELPHIA – A sitting Philadelphia judge stands by her second-time-filed defamation claims against online news outlet The Daily Beast, which she said damaged her standing as a jurist when it printed that she was aligned with the QAnon group.
The Honorable Paula A. Patrick first filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania on April 20 versus The Daily Beast Company, LLC (doing business as “The Daily Beast”) and its reporter Laura Bradley, both of New York, N.Y.
It all began when the plaintiff, Patrick, a judge in the Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas, ruled last summer that a controversial statue of explorer Christopher Columbus would remain in South Philadelphia’s Marconi Plaza, reversing earlier calls to remove the statue from public view.
The statue remains there currently, obscured from public view in a plywood box.
It became a source of controversy and a focus of racial injustice protesters in the summer of 2020, during social unrest in Philadelphia, after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Many in Philadelphia, a city with a large Italian-American community, said that the statue represented their ancestry. However, others claimed that Columbus and the statue which honors him is a symbol of racism and oppression.
Violent clashes took place between the statue’s defenders and protesters at Marconi Plaza in June 2020, resulting in police responding to the scene in order to control the crowd.
Though the Philadelphia Historical Commission and the City of Philadelphia Board of License and Inspection Review both decided in favor of the statue’s removal, Patrick ruled that the City’s grounds for removal were legally flawed.
On Oct. 9 of last year, defendant The Daily Beast subsequently published an article on the case, authored by its reporter Bradley, with the headline, “QAnon Linked Judge Rules in Unhinged War Over Philly’s Columbus Statue”.
QAnon is an overarching term for a group of Internet conspiracy theories which claim the world is run by an organization of Satan-worshiping pedophiles, and that such individuals include President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and George Soros, Hollywood celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey, Tom Hanks and Ellen DeGeneres, in addition to religious figures like Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama.
Patrick vehemently denied any connection to the QAnon group or their beliefs.
“The Daily Beast defendants specifically penned this malicious article for distribution and publication in Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania so as to maximize the impact on Judge Patrick and stain her reputation as a jurist in Philadelphia County. The Daily Beast’s knowingly false and intentionally misleading headline is defamatory and was done to harm Judge Patrick, whose politics apparently do not align with those of the Daily Beast defendants,” the suit said.
“The Daily Beast defendants used this knowingly false ‘QAnon link’ to punish a female, conservative African-American jurist for following the law and procedures related to the management of artwork in Philadelphia, as opposed to furthering its own agenda. The Daily Beast’s article was done to compromise Judge Patrick’s standing as a highly-regarded, honest and reputable jurist, in its own politically and woke-motivated attempt to further its own goals to cancel relevant history, by placing Judge Patrick in a false light with regards to her conduct as a jurist and her decision making related to a controversial issue of public import.”
The suit added Patrick has “suffered significant and permanent damages for the false light into which these articles have placed her.”
“In spite of widely available information and reporting that Judge Patrick was not affiliated with or otherwise ‘linked’ to QAnon, the Daily Beast defendants failed to properly investigate the outrageous claims attempting to link a well-respected jurist to a crackpot and unhinged conspiracy group known as QAnon; this failure has resulted in a permanent stain on her otherwise well-regarded and respected reputation, and anyone who searches Judge Patrick will be confronted with the false light presentation that Her Honor is somehow linked to, and therefore guided by, these QAnon lunatics,” the suit stated.
“Aside from a clear disregard for due diligence, the Daily Beast defendants’ publications is a malicious attack upon the character of a dedicated public servant. It is an unfortunate, but all too accurate, statement to say that these defendants value reckless, provocative articles in spite of knowing the truth. The false light into which Judge Patrick has been placed by these defendants has also caused significant professional, personal and emotional damages and harm to her. To the average reader, Judge Patrick is now forever linked to QAnon, as intended by these defendants.”
Patrick, an attorney since 1994 and judge since 2003, also launched an unsuccessful bid for a seat on the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania last year.
UPDATE
The Daily Beast and Bradley motioned to dismiss the case on June 17, standing by the story it printed and countering that Patrick’s false light claims fare no better than the first case she filed connected to these events, in state court.
“The Daily Beast article accurately summarized the two reasons why Judge Patrick recently had garnered substantial public attention. First, in the midst of her campaign for a seat on Pennsylvania’s high court, Judge Patrick gave a lengthy YouTube interview to a QAnon-affiliated talk show host whom she referred to as ‘Prophetess.’ During the interview, Judge Patrick told the Prophetess, ‘I love you guys, and I’m so happy to have met you…you guys are tremendous, and I thank you so much for the opportunity to speak to your audience,” the defendants said.
“During the interview, the Prophetess noted that Judge Patrick was considering attending an upcoming QAnon-affiliated conference, and Judge Patrick responded, ‘Yes.’ Judge Patrick also told The Philadelphia Inquirer that she had been introduced to the Prophetess by Mark Taylor, a QAnon leader who calls himself a ‘Prophet,’ and explained that he had been trying to help her with her Supreme Court campaign. Towards the end of the interview, the Prophetess showed a campaign ad for Judge Patrick, apparently supplied by her campaign. Judge Patrick subsequently appeared on a list of featured speakers for the QAnon-affiliated conference, ‘Patriots Arise, Awakening the Dead!’ But apparently she had second thoughts, later telling The Inquirer that she would not be attending and stating, ‘There’s no way I would link myself to anything that would be questionable like that.”
Due to this link and the lack of malice associated with the writing of the original article, the defendants argued that Patrick’s claims failed on the merits.
Counsel for Patrick responded to the dismissal motion on June 27, retorting that the defendants effectively admitted it was their belief that she was in fact a QAnon-linked judge, when that is not the case.
“In a direct attack upon Judge Patrick’s core integrity as a jurist, they fabricate a connection between that (phantom) [QAnon] link and her ruling in a case regarding a statue of Christopher Columbus – not only in the headline but in the lede, then in successive paragraphs – thus repeatedly suggesting the ruling was not based on the law and facts, but was a biased and/or corrupt one based on this asserted QAnon affiliation,” plaintiff counsel said.
“They contend, however, that what they have published is insulated from suit as protected opinion. They are wrong. In the first place, it is well-established that simply labeling something as opinion – even in the publication at issue, let alone retrospectively in a Court filing – does not make it so, and these attacks on Judge Patrick are not opinions but assertions of fact. Moreover, even assuming for the sake of argument they are opinions, they would not meet the standards to render them immune from suit as protected opinions, in any event.”
Patrick’s counsel found the defense’s invitation to the Court to decide, at this early point, “the issue of truth or falsity as a matter of law” as both “extraordinary” and “untenable.”
“As well-pleaded in the complaint, [these deeply disparaging assertions] are not true, they are false, and nothing in defendants’ highly selective, misleading and improper efforts to present a different version of facts at bar does or can justify any contrary conclusion, let alone as a matter of law. Indeed, as in all their arguments for dismissal under Rule 12(b)(6), this argument does not even address plaintiff’s actual claim, fundamentally, at all,” the response stated.
For a count of false light, the plaintiff is seeking damages jointly, severally and/or individually, in an amount substantially in excess of the jurisdictional limit, compensatory damages, punitive damages, attorneys’ fees, costs and interest, together with any further relief which this Court deems just and appropriate under the circumstances.
The plaintiff is represented by James E. Beasley Jr. and Dion G. Rassias of The Beasley Firm, in Philadelphia.
The defendants are represented by Kaitlin M. Gurney, Leslie Minora and Seth D. Berlin of Ballard Spahr, in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.
U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania case 2:22-cv-01520
From the Pennsylvania Record: Reach Courts Reporter Nicholas Malfitano at nick.malfitano@therecordinc.com