by P.D. Lesko

Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP) is a tool used to dissuade individual critics and the media from publicizing information, facts, investigations, that businesses, schools, non-profits and others would like to end. For The Ann Arbor Independent, October was a banner month in fielding threats from lawyers: Billy Cole, the President/CEO of Supreme Felons, Inc., through his “legal advisor” Robert Burton-Harris, husband of the County’s Chief Asst. Prosecutor Victoria Burton-Harris, threatened a SLAPP suit if the newspaper adhered to the Michigan Freedom of Information Act that requires A2Indy to petition the Trial Court to compel Cole to release public records requested in Sept. 2024.

Robert Burton-Harris, who is an expungement and criminal defense attorney, maintains Supreme Felons, Inc. is not subject to FOIA, despite the fact that the language of the FOIA Act defines a non-profit that receives majority support from a public body as subject to the Act. It’s also possible Supreme Felons, Inc. is subject to the Michigan Open Meetings Act. The newspaper gave Billy Cole six weeks to turn over the requested records, a generous amount of additional time considering Michigan law requires records to be turned over within five business days from receipt of the request.

The newspaper’s only recourse is to file in Trial Court and ask a judge to compel Cole to turn over the requested public records.

Robert Burton-Harris threatened a SLAPP suit on behalf of Alize Asberry Payne, the County’s former DEI Dir. The newspaper, by using public records, discovered Asberry Payne had fabricated facts about her employment and education histories on her application to work for the County. She resigned on Aug. 16, 2024, but shortly before her resignation, she asked Buron-Harris to threaten a SLAPP suit, claiming the public records quoted in the article were defamatory. Asberry Payne, who never submitted a request for a correction prior to her lawyer filing suit, and who refused requests to answer questions and to comment, demanded the articles published be taken down.

“By definition, SLAPP suits do not have any true legal claims against the critics. People bring SLAPP suits because they can either temporarily prevent their critics from making public statements against them or more commonly to make critics spend all of their time and resources defending the SLAPP suits. Given their ability to stop individuals from exercising their right to free speech, over 30 states have adopted Anti-Slapp statutes that make it easier for defendants in SLAPP lawsuits to have the case dismissed at the outset, before spending lots of money on attorney fees. In egregious SLAPP cases, an Anti-SLAPP statute may even require the plaintiff to pay legal fees of the defendant.” — Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute

After publishing “Greenhills Head of School Accused of Sexual Abuse” on Oct. 28, Christopher Trebilcock, a labor and employment lawyer in Ann Arbor, at the behest of the Greenhills Board, sent a three-page letter threatening a SLAPP suit because the article could damage the reputation of Greenhills. Never mind that one outraged Greenhills parent, in a comment to the newspaper, said it was “insane” to employ anyone in a school who had been accused of sexual abuse. Never mind that the Board didn’t fully inform the school’s 1,200 parents until Oct. 29 that the Head of School was the subject of a CSC investigation by the AAPD.

The real problem, obviously, was that the newspaper had been tipped off, then investigated and published an article about the reported sexual abuse of a child under the age of 13 by the Greenhills Head of School.

As I told Greenhills’ Head of School Peter B. Fayroian and his lawyer Andrew Bossory of Joshi Law in an email when they threatened their SLAPP suit, SLAPP suits and threats of SLAPP suits are an affront to the First Amendment. Any threat to file a SLAPP suit against the A2Indy offends me personally. To add to the pure entertainment value of Fayroian’s legal hissy fit, though invited to do so, he never answered any request for a comment, or any invitation to submit a specific correction, just like Alize Asberry Payne.

Fayroian and Bossory went a step further: they filed emergency Ex Parte Motions (no hearing required) which asked a Trial Court judge to keep the newspaper from publishing the October 28, 2024 article about the Greenhills Head of School. In legalese, Fayroian’s request was one for “prior restraint.” Since 1931, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled against prior restraint of the media five times, including when the U.S. government asserted national security as the reason for the request. Lower court judges who ignore the rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court and grant motions for prior restraint are quickly reversed, and find themselves turned into figures of fun by the media. That is exactly what Fayroian and Bossory asked Circuit Court Judge Julia B. Owdziej to do. She denied their Motions.

Court records show Fayroian and Bossory, the Bully Bruhs, then filed a demand with Judge Tracy Van den Bergh which targeted Fayroian’s ex-wife to force her to produce documents that reveal every communication she’s had with the Ann Arbor Independent and me. Their thinking is, I think, the woman contacted me. Then, with her super-amazing powers of mind control plus the offer of someone to rake the leaves in my yard, convinced me to write “Greenhills Head of School Accused of Sexual Abuse.”

“As flippin’ if,” to quote a good friend whose kid went to Greenhills; in her opinion, she said, Fayroian is an insufferable, classist snob. The AAPD’s charge was somewhat more to the point. The “verified offense” in the AAPD report submitted to the Prosecutor was “CSC 2nd Degree -Forcible Contact,” a felony.

My friend added, “And as for people vouching for him saying he’s so kind, caring, good to kids…did they learn nothing from Larry Nassar?”

How did I find out? I was tipped, and not by Peter Fayroian’s ex-wife.

Peter Fayroian and his attorney solicited 38 vanity letters of reference from people (including other public persons) in order to discredit the claims of a 12-year-old who’d reported sexual abuse to the AAPD, among other agencies. Fayroian asked his Greenhills employees to write letters on his behalf, and the Board members let him do it. Then, he and his lawyer attached the 38 letters to a public court filing. On September 18, you might have felt a disturbance in the force as Circuit Court Judge Tracy Van den Bergh ripped Fayroian’s lawyer a new briefcase for attaching “a hundred” affidavits to his filing. All the letters, said Judge Van Den Bergh, irritated, were hearsay, useless.

Thirty-five of the 38 letters attached to the filing, many from adults who are mandated reporters, named a child who had reported being sexually abused; disgraceful mental health professionals, teachers and doctors opined on the happy mental state of a kid who’d told the AAPD, It [the sexual abuse] was very much deliberate, not a mistake.

I was stunned as I read through Fayroian’s court materials, and felt like I was reading a legal filing prepared by Lionel Hutz, the fast-talking lawyer in The Simpson’s. One of best Hutz quotes ever is this one: “Well, he’s [the judge] kind of had it in for me since I kinda ran over his dog. Well, replace the word ‘kinda’ with the word ‘repeatedly,’ and the word ‘dog’ with ‘son’.”

Fair use of public records, testimony of those appearing in Court and Court records (Motions, Orders, etc….) is an affirmative and airtight defense against libel suits. Michigan Courts have repeatedly ruled that a newspaper may rely on the accuracy of public records, such as police reports, testimony in court proceedings and other public court records.

My response to Greenhill’s lawyer-for-hire Trebilcock’s threat was the same as my response to Bossory’s threat: you have many different ways to solve your legal and reputational problems, but telling me what I may publish is not one of the options available to you.

In Editor and Publisher, there is a link to a piece by CNN Media Correspondent Hadas Gold. Gold compares the attacks on European media by authoritarians there, to the attacks on the U.S. media by Donald Trump. Sharon Moshavi is president of the International Center for Journalists and she told Hadas Gold, “Governments around the world controlled by authoritarians and strongmen, including Russia, Hungary, India, and until recently, Poland, have moved to muzzle the free press and crush dissent.”

Gold also quoted Anna Wójcik, assistant professor at Kozminski University in Poland. Wójcik said, “Journalists, especially investigative reporters, encounter harassment, [and] intimidation….”

Yep.

Greenhills and its Head of School have chosen to walk the path of the authoritarian in order to try to stifle reporting about a situation the Board should have dealt with more common sense and transparently from the get go. Instead, the Board decided that a 12-year-old’s reports of sexual abuse at the hands of their principal were better discredited and hushed up, until Oct. 29, 2024. That’s when Board Chair Neda Ryan issued a statement to Greenhills parents rife with inaccuracies, primary among which was that “AAPD declined the charges.” It was shockingly brazen misinformation, and contradicted by the contents of the AAPD report.

In June 2024, the newspaper filed and won its first FOIA suit in 11 years of publication. The County had denied a request for the background check done on an alleged serial rapist hired as a Sheriff’s Deputy. The newspaper sued and won the release of the record, which Judge Owdziej ordered redacted, indicating that the County should have done so, instead of denying the newspaper’s request.

Our family lawyer is a talented and pragmatic practitioner, a 50-year-old man who calls 63-year-old me, “kiddo.” The newspaper is represented by the ace media team at Butzel Long, legal Super Heros. I have a local lawyer versed in FOIA who gives advice.

As I told Bossory and Trebilcock, if you SLAPP me, I’ll write about it and do everything in my power to publicize the attack on my newspaper by you and your clients. I consider the threats evidence that the Ann Arbor Independent is doing a splendid job. Well, that and the fact that in 2023 the newspaper’s readership was just under 91,000 and, as of today, The A2Indy serves 208,000 readers. Huzzah!

Michigan’s Legislature is sitting on an anti-SLAPP bill that’s at the second reading stage. The Dems in Lansing should vote on it and Gov. Whitmer should sign the Bill into law. As the Michigan ACLU said in a public statement in support of the legislation, “Thirty-four states and the District of Columbia more broadly provide protection against lawsuits that seek to chill the exercise of freedom of expression. Now is the time for Michigan to follow their lead. We ask that the Michigan Legislature move HB 5788 with haste.”