One of the several lawsuits filed recently by Trout Point Lodge entrepreneurs Charles Leary and Vaughn Perret is due to play out on an international stage, when the pair and their lodging corporation take a defamation lawsuit and expected damages award into the United States court system to have the judgements against a popular Mississippi political blogger enforced.
The lawsuit against Doug Handshoe, publisher of the well-regarded Slabbed blog, has a scheduled damages hearing on Monday in Yarmouth before Justice Suzanne Hood and Handshoe is not expected to appear at the hearing. The defamation suit itself, in which claims were made about inappropiate connections between Trout Point Lodge and New Orleans politicians recently indicted on dozens of counts of fraud, was decided with a default judgement in favour of Leary, Perret and TPL.
Leary and Perret have expressed their intentions to move to courts in the United States in an attempt to have an American court deem a Nova Scotia Supreme Court judgement to be enforceable there. According to legal experts in the U.S., this could prove to be an exhausting and futile exercise for the former New Orleans organic farmers, who established Trout Point Lodge in the Kempt wilderness in 1997.
A recent concerted effort to establish "American laws for American Courts" and the acceptance of U.S. courts with the "Securing the Protection of our Enduring and Established Constitutional Heritage (SPEECH) Act" is a federal statutory law in the United States that makes foreign libel judgments unenforceable in U.S. courts, unless those judgments are compliant with the U.S. First Amendment. The act was written as a response to "libel tourism", which is the practice of using libel and defamation laws on one juristiction to exact large cash judgements in another. The law creates a new cause of action and claim for damages against the foreign libel plaintiff, if they acted to deprive an American of their right to free speech.
An early indication of how the U.S. Courts view the prospect of Canadian - or other foreign - litigants bringing suits in American courts is the June, 2011decision in the U.S.-based Investors Hub suit against Ontario-based Mina Mar in a SPEECH decision against the Canadian company attempting to enfoce a canadian defamation judgement, in which the court decided that "...orders entered in connection therewith are invalid and unenforceable in Florida."
The American Public Policy Alliance has established an agressive national campaign to have various states also enact "defamation tourism" statutes. In an interview with SCT, Handshoe indicated his intention to agressively defend his interests in U.S. courts and said that Leary and Perret are fooling themselves if they think the U.S. courts will be a pushover for their efforts. Leary and Perret have represented themselves in at least four lawsuits in Nova Scotia, including the Handshoe case.
Trout Point Ltd had previously sued the New orleans Times-Picayune and is currently engaged in lawsuit against Fox8 TV in New orleans, who is being defended by high-power law firm Stewart McKelvey in Halifax. That case is in its third year and has yet to emerge from the discovery phase, with a late October, 2011 major hearing on document production adjourned just five days before the hearing.
Recent court actions in New Orleans have revealed that former Pefferson Parish president Aaron Broussard is likely to have his 33-count indictment for various frauds increased to include charges that he used his properties near Trout Point Lodge as part of his scheme to illegally enrich himself to the detriment of the citizens he was elected to serve. Broussard is also named in many of the documents in the Fox 8 suit.
Note: Leary and Perret recently contacted SCT in order to gain access to any emails to or from Doug Handshoe and were advised to obtain a court order for that purpose.
