Adam Meis­ter

City Coun­cilmem­ber Belinda Conaway (D-7^th Dis­trict) today dis­missed a law­suit she filed against the Exam­iner news­pa­pers, owner Philip Anschutz, and Bal­ti­more blog­ger Adam Meis­ter. The suit, filed in May, accused them of libel, defama­tion, and inten­tional inflic­tion of emo­tion dis­tress after an online col­umn by Meis­ter, pub­lished in March, pointed out pub­lic records indi­cat­ing that Conaway receives a homestead-tax credit in Bal­ti­more County because she claims as her prin­ci­pal res­i­dence a Ran­dall­stown home she co-owns with her hus­band. The law­suit asked for $21 mil­lion in damages.

The request for dis­missal was ten­dered by Conaway’s lawyer, Thomas J. Maron­ick, Jr., dur­ing a hear­ing before Bal­ti­more City Cir­cuit Court judge John Philip Miller. The hear­ing had been sched­uled to argue a defense motion that the case be dis­missed as a SLAPP suit, which stands for “strate­gic law­suit against pub­lic par­tic­i­pa­tion,” but was cut short with the plaintiff’s dis­missal request. Conaway, who was accom­pa­nied by her father, Bal­ti­more City Cir­cuit Court Clerk and may­oral can­di­date Frank Conaway (D), did not take ques­tions after the noon hear­ing. Her lawyer, Thomas Maron­ick, Jr., announced to reporters that “I’ll be tak­ing ques­tions, the Conaways will not.”

In the hall­way out­side the court­room, Maron­ick explained that “one of the duties that I have as a lawyer is to file suits in good faith,” say­ing he did so in this case, but that he had not seen the doc­u­ments Meis­ter had posted with the col­umn until “very recently, not more than a few weeks, maybe a month.” Though the documents–which include a Conaway-signed affi­davit swear­ing that the Ran­dall­stown home is her “prin­ci­pal residence”–were avail­able online with the col­umn that prompted the suit, Maron­ick said, “I’ve seen lot of things get doc­tored.” He said Conaway “lives in the city” and that cor­rect­ing pub­lic records show­ing oth­er­wise is “in process.”

Meister’s attor­ney, Alex Hor­tis, told reporters that Conaway, like all Amer­i­can politi­cians who’ve sworn an oath of office, have a “duty to uphold the [U.S.] Con­sti­tu­tion,” but “this law­suit under­mined the First Amend­ment, so I think that that’s appalling.” He said the out­come “sends a mes­sage to politi­cians” that they should “resolve pub­lic dis­putes in the pub­lic arena, and not a court­room.” If the suit had gone for­ward, Hor­tis said it “would have chilled free speech” and caused “self-censorship” among reporters. He also called for “stronger anti-SLAPP leg­is­la­tion by the [Mary­land] Gen­eral Assembly.”

Meis­ter, speak­ing loudly and excit­edly, said the law­suit “has been a big joke” and that Conaway was “cold-hearted and mean” in bring­ing it. He empha­sized the price he’d paid while the suit was pend­ing: silence about Conaway. “I haven’t been able to talk, haven’t been able to express myself,” he said. With the law­suit over, he spoke at length–alternately off-the-cuff and from a pre­pared statement–thanking Conaway for suing him, because “if not for this friv­o­lous law­suit, she would have had zero pri­mary oppo­nents” in the Sept. 13 Demo­c­ra­tic pri­mary elec­tion, “and nobody would have known about her house in Randallstown.”

Meis­ter, who lives in Reser­voir Hill, which thanks to this year’s redis­trict­ing is now in Conaway’s dis­trict, urged vot­ers “to vote for Nick Mosby” over Conaway in the Sept. 13 pri­mary. “And if you don’t live in the 7^th Dis­trict,” he added, “donate larges sums of money to Nick Mosby’s cam­paign.” When Meis­ter ran unsuc­cess­fully for the City Council’s 11^th Dis­trict seat in 2007, Mosby was one of his opponents.

Meis­ter also called on the City Coun­cil to “inves­ti­gate” the issue of Conaway’s res­i­dency, say­ing “she chairs the Bud­get and Appro­pri­a­tions Com­mit­tee” yet “she received the homestead-tax credit in Ran­dall­stown” in Bal­ti­more County. “This is shame­ful,” he said.

Tags: adam meister, baltimore city council, belinda conaway, Examiner, lawsuit