Snyder, Suit Against D.C. City Paper Dropped

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Redskins owner Daniel Snyder drops lawsuit against
Washington City Paper

By Paul
Farhi, Published: September 11 | Updated: Saturday, September 10, 11:45
PM

Washington
Redskins owner Daniel Snyder dropped his
lawsuit against the Washington City Paper on Saturday, ending a
seven-month legal battle with the publication over an article that Snyder said
had defamed him.

Snyder had sought $1 million in general damages as
well as unspecified punitive damages from the weekly paper; its parent
company, Creative Loafing; and journalist Dave
McKenna. McKenna’s story in November, “The
Cranky Redskins Fans’ Guide to Dan Snyder,” was an unflattering account of
Snyder’s tenure as owner of Washington’s NFL team, with an encyclopedia-style
listing of alleged missteps and public-relations controversies over the
years.

Snyder
denounced the story and the newspaper, and filed suit in early February
after the newspaper declined to apologize or retract the piece.

But
people close to Snyder said the team’s owner felt vindicated when City Paper’s
publisher, Amy Austin, acknowledged in a story published in April that one
aspect of the story was not meant to be construed as literally
true.

“We prefer to focus on the coming football season and the
business at hand,” Tony Wyllie, Snyder’s spokesman, said in a statement
disclosing the withdrawal.

The Redskins open their season Sunday at
FedEx Field against the New York Giants.

Snyder agreed to dismiss his
suit, and both sides agreed to bear their own legal costs as well as to a
mutual release of future claims in negotiations that were completed Saturday
evening. City Paper said in a statement Saturday that the cost of defending
itself went “well beyond” the $34,000 its readers had contributed to a legal
defense fund. It did not say how much was spent.

City Paper has
maintained that Snyder’s lawsuit was meritless and an attempt to stifle
criticism of the Redskins’ owner. It stood by the story and McKenna from the
beginning.

“This is a great day for free speech,” said Michael
Schaffer, City Paper’s editor. “This is a great day for the citizens of D.C.,
which has a legal system that protects them from being bullied by people who
don’t like what was said.”

In his original lawsuit, Snyder said he was
defamed by several parts of the article, including the suggestion that he had
been kicked out as chairman of the board of the Six Flags amusement park chain
and had gone “all Agent Orange” by cutting down a stand of trees on federally
protected land that blocked river views from his Potomac mansion in 2004. He
also objected to the story’s assertion that he had been “caught forging names”
on consumers’ long-distance phone contracts while he headed a marketing firm,
Snyder Communications, before taking over the Redskins in 1999. He denied all
of those allegations.

Snyder also said that the story insulted his
wife, Tanya, a breast cancer survivor who has been active in efforts to
promote awareness of the disease, and that a photo illustration of him with
horns and a goatee was anti-Semitic.

But Snyder backed off most of his
claims about the story as settlement talks with City Paper and its attorneys
began this summer after the paper filed a motion to dismiss the
suit.

By the end, only the story’s statement about forgery was at
issue, said someone who has worked with Snyder. The owner and his advisers
became satisfied by assurances that the forgery comment referred to people who
worked for Snyder Communications, not Snyder himself, said the person familiar
with Snyder’s position, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is
not Snyder’s official spokesman.

The allegation in question involves
Snyder Communications and GTE Communications, which agreed to pay $2.5 million
to the state of Florida in 2001 to settle allegations of “slamming,” the
unauthorized switching of long-distance accounts. At the time, Florida
officials said they found “thousands of instances” in which employees of
Snyder’s company switched customers from their existing provider to GTE
without permission. GTE had hired Snyder’s company to market its phone
service. None of the parties admitted wrongdoing.

In his statement,
Wyllie said: “The lawsuit was pursued as a means to correct the public record
following several critical factual misstatements in the Washington City Paper
article. In the course of the defendants’ recently filed pleadings and
statements in this matter, the Washington City Paper and its writer have
admitted that certain assertions contained in the article that are the subject
of the lawsuit, were, in fact, unintended by the defendants to be read
literally as true.”

He added: “Therefore, we see nothing further to be
gained at this time through continuing the lawsuit. .?.?. The principle that
the truth and the facts matter in responsible journalism has been
vindicated.”

In a New York Times magazine article published Thursday,
Snyder was quoted as saying that he
never read all of the article he sued about. He said he sued “because I
heard all the details. But the entire piece? I’m not going to read
that.”

Legal experts had said that Snyder faced long odds of winning
the suit, in part because the law gives strong protections to the news media
in reporting about public figures.

The weekly paper stood firm as
Snyder amended his suit in April and refiled it in Superior Court in
Washington, moving it from its original venue in New York. The change enabled
Snyder to add McKenna, a District resident, to his list of
defendants.

Snyder’s case also appeared to be complicated by a new
District law that was designed to protect citizens against lawsuits intended
to intimidate them from reporting on matters of public concern.

The
anti-SLAPP law — for Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation — is
similar to laws in other states that require a plaintiff to demonstrate that a
lawsuit is “likely to succeed” on the merits and is not merely a pretext for
saddling a defendant with expensive legal bills to force the defendant into
silence.

City Paper, which was advised by First Amendment lawyer Floyd
Abrams, filed a motion seeking dismissal of Snyder’s suit under the SLAPP law
in June, only a few weeks after the law went into effect. Snyder’s
representatives said the filing did not affect their decision to drop the
suit.

A judge has not ruled on the motion, but the publication told the
court it intended to show “the improper purposes” behind his action. It cited
a letter to City Paper’s publisher last year from David Donovan, the Redskins’
former chief operating officer and general counsel, that threatened an
expensive legal battle unless Snyder received a retraction and an apology.
Snyder opposed the SLAPP motion, arguing in a court filing that the underlying
law was invalid because the District had overstepped its legal authority in
enacting it. With the suit’s withdrawal, the motion is now moot.

“Mr.
Snyder has more than sufficient means to protect his reputation,” Donovan
wrote at the time. “We presume that defending such litigation would not be a
rational strategy for [a company] such as yours. Indeed, the cost of
litigation would presumably quickly outstrip the asset value of the Washington
City Paper.”

McKenna said Saturday that Snyder’s camp asked him to
agree not to sue in exchange for withdrawing its lawsuit and that he complied.
McKenna writes for The Washington Post’s Style section on a freelance
basis.

McKenna’s article about the Redskins owner has become one of the
most-viewed stories ever on City Paper’s Web site.