In a sprawling, 2,600-word screed on their official blog, the owners of Trout Point Lodge in the Kempt wilderness near the Tobeatic are decrying the actions of U.S. blogger Doug Handshoe and his Slabbed blog, saying that the blog has published defamatory and homophobic remarks on Slabbed.
Former Louisiana organic lawyers, farmers and cheese makers, Trout Point Lodge proprietors Vaughn Perret , Charles Leary and Danny Abel take great pains in the TPL blog to detail many of what they deem as transgressions of Hanshoe relative to his writing about the Lodge and owners as they relate to the two-year investigation and eventual federal indictment of New Orleans-area politician Aaron Broussard, his ex-wife and a colleague on 33 charges of fraud against the federal government. Handshoe has also written about a former business operated by the TPL principals and a lengthy lawsuit involving that business and ACOA.
The blog entry paints the TPL owners as casual acquaintances of Broussard and appears to minimize the involvement of Broussard in properties contiguous to or related in some way to TPL. The blog fails to mention the very serious federal indictments against Broussard and his former wife.
The Trout Point blog asserts its goal is to "set the record straight" and refers to another "sympathetic blog" iterating many of their assertions, some almost verbatim. This second blog, which debuted January 15 and which contains pointed attacks on Handshoe and others who have written about TPL (including SCT), appears to be written by someone intimately familiar with the business and legal machinations of Trout Point Lodge.
"This 'tit-for-tat', reporting by people who are engaged on either side in law suits," says a Nova Scotia attorney familiar with defamation cases, " is almost never appreciated by the courts, especially when these blogs contain defamatory or injurious statements or allegations themselves."
