A 139-year-old newspaper closing after paying $1.1m for made-up mayor stories
String of false articles dubbed the mayor ‘Kickback Carlo’
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A 139-year-old Massachusetts paper was slated to publish its last editition Wednesday, after it agreed to a $1.1 million settlement in a defamation case filed by the mayor of the city of Everett, who accused the publication of falsifying quotes as part of a brutal smear campaign.
“What the Everett Leader Herald, its owner, and its publisher and editor did to my family and me — publishing article after article, accusation after accusation about me that they knew were false, that they knew they had no basis for, for the avowed purpose of destroying my reputation to serve their own personal financial interest — wasn’t just dishonest. It was corrupt,” Everett Mayor Carlo DeMaria said at a press conference after the settlement.
The settlement, announced Monday, ended a defamation suit originally filed in 2021, in which DeMaria accused the Leader Herald’s publisher and editor, Joshua Resnek, and owner, Mathew Philbin, of regularly putting out articles they knew to be false.
The pieces dubbed the mayor “Kickback Carlo” and accused him of taking bribes and committing extortion.
In the course of the suit, Resnek admitted to working to “drop bombs” on the mayor by writing false stories ahead of a mayoral primary.
The complaint alleged the men went after DeMaria in retaliation for the mayor not supporing Philbin’s business interests.
“Each week, 52 times a year, I invent the Leader Herald … The mayor is my enemy … It takes me two days away from important writing every week to create this s***,” Resnek wrote in one email included in court documents, according to Boston.com.
The Independent has contacted Resnek for comment.
He apologized for his conduct last year, saying he was “embarrassed.”
The Independent was unable to contact Philbin for comment.
With the demise of the Leader Herald, which began printing in 1885, the city is down to two local news publications.
“It will be very hard to find either local paper writing anything that isn’t pro-mayor or pro-administration,” Everett resident Paula Sterite told WGBH this week. “We’re stuck with propaganda.”
Observers said the case was a textbook example of defamation, which relies on showing an individual had “actual malice” in deliberately spreading false information that damages someone’s reputation.
“You will not find a clearer example of actual malice,” Northeastern journalist professor Dan Kennedy wrote in a recent blog post.
DeMaria’s attorney said he worries the newspaper’s fabrications will further harm Americans’ trust in journalism.
“I, like other people, note the lack of trust that Americans have in the media, wrongly or rightly or both,” Jeff Robbins told the Boston Globe. “This is the kind of set of facts which really does damage to journalists who work their tails off to do the right thing.”