Sunday, August 03, 2008
Woody's suit is a pile of...dirt
Shanna Flowers
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As I reached for my bottle of smell-good the other morning, I inadvertently rubbed the perfume container.
When I popped off the top, a billowy smoke filled my bathroom.
As it cleared, a genie, eerily reminiscent of Denzel Washington, emerged from the bottle.
"Mistress," he asked, "what is your wish?"
Putting aside for a moment the thought that an apparition of Denzel stood at fingertip's distance, I realized the greater opportunity before me.
"Genie," I said, "I wish for as much money as Roger Woody."
"Why, Mistress?" he asked.
"Because," I replied, "there are a lot of people I'd like to silence. I'm going to sue them into submission."
By now, you've probably heard of Woody, the Montgomery County developer who stockpiled dirt that rose into a hill near hundreds of town houses he developed.
Woody has sued some women who (gasp!) aren't too fond of seeing his pile muddy the skyline. Some of them (gasp!) wrote about the hill on a blog, and (egads!) dubbed his dirt pile Mount Woody.
The women had T-shirts printed with the word "Woody-ville" superimposed on the pile, modeled after the famous sign that sits at the top of the Hollywood Hills.
His feelings hurt, Woody called his lawyer. The next thing you knew, Terry Ellen Carter and Tacy Newell-Foutz, Meghan Dorsett and Carol Lindstrom had to get their own lawyers to defend themselves.
Gag them with a lawsuit -- that's what Woody's trying to do.
Claiming the women conspired to hurt him and his business, Woody is seeking more than $10 million from them. Two of the women were included because they happened to be at a public meeting with the other two. That implied collusion, he has argued -- so they need to be sued, too. A judge is expected to rule within six weeks on the defendants' request to dismiss the case.
It's hard to understand how it could take six weeks to toss a frivolous case like this one.
A wealthy developer is worried because he was trashed on somebody's blog? Shoot, people routinely trash me on my own blog.
In court last week, Woody's attorney called the criticism an "all-out attack" against his client's character and business practices. The attorney said Woody lost business but offered no documentation.
Perhaps the lawyer never learned the old nursery rhyme: "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me." At the least, he should have learned about free speech.
Carter's lawyer, Jonathan Rogers of the American Civil Liberties Union, cited case law, but he noted that his trump card was the First Amendment.
Funny thing about that First Amendment. It protects the little guys with the courage to call out fat-cat developers.
