139 Year Old Newspaper Shut Down Over Mayor’s $1.1M Defamation Lawsuit Win

David GilmourDec 19th, 2024, 7:27 am
 

Newspaper (Screengrab via X)[/caption]

The Everett Leader-Herald, a storied Massachusetts newspaper that was the mainstay of community coverage for nearly fourteen decades, is shutting its doors for good after a bitter defamation legal battle cost the paper $1.1 million over fabricated reporting about the mayor of Everett.

The settlement concluded a lawsuit initially filed in 2021 by Mayor Carlo DeMaria, who accused the paper’s leaders of orchestrating a coordinated smear campaign against him, one that painted him as a corrupt politician under the nickname “Kickback Carlo.”

According to DeMaria, the publication knowingly spread false stories aimed at destroying his reputation and furthering its own financial interests.

In court proceedings, the paper’s editor, Joshua Resnek, confessed to crafting fictitious allegations timed to hurt DeMaria politically. He even boasted that he would “drop bombs” on the mayor and conceded that he regularly invented stories.

“Each week, 52 times a year, I invent the Leader Herald … The mayor is my enemy … It takes me two days away from important writing every week to create this shit,” Resnek wrote in an email included in the case filings.

After the settlement, DeMaria said in a statement: “What the Everett Leader-Herald, its owner, and its publisher and editor did to my family and me — publishing article after article, accusation after accusation about me that they knew were false, that they knew they had no basis for, for the avowed purpose of destroying my reputation to serve their own personal financial interest — wasn’t just dishonest. It was corrupt.”

 

As a result, the newspaper, founded in 1885, will cease publication this week.

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