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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.