Wednesday, May 07, 2008
Editorial: Don't speak ill of Roger Woody
The Christiansburg developer isn't afraid to slap a multimillion-dollar lawsuit on critics.
From the RoundTable blog
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Roger Woody is acting like a bully. There's really no other word for it, at least none appropriate for these pages. The Christiansburg developer last week launched a legal attack aimed at silencing a quartet of town residents.
Woody owns a lot of land in Christiansburg and has built a lot of homes. One of his parcels on the northwest side of town sports a gargantuan pile of dirt. The weed-topped peak mars the landscape.
Not surprisingly, some town residents grew tired of looking at "Mount Woody." Two of them, Terry Ellen Carter and Tacy Newell-Foutz, operate a blog at thinkchristiansburg.com where they write about many local issues. One day, they took on Woody, his topsoil and the town that allows it to remain.
There's nothing illegal about Woody's pile of dirt. He follows the town code in his business. That's not saying much in a town with such lax development standards, but there it is. Legal isn't always pretty.
Woody could have responded to the bad PR amicably. He could have talked to critics and sought a mutually agreeable resolution to their concerns. Instead, he unleashed his lawyer.
Woody alleges that Carter and Newell-Foutz orchestrated a conspiracy to bring him down. Their mean words, he claims, cost his business millions. Never mind that the entire housing industry has tanked. Those meddling women and their blog must be responsible for his poor home sales.
He filed suit last week asking for more than $10 million in damages and punitive awards. Inexplicably, he also named Christiansburg residents Meghan Dorsett and Carol Lindstrom as participants in the conspiracy. They have nothing to do with thinkchristiansburg.com.
The suit also mentions The Roanoke Times, but not as a defendant.
There's a term for this type of lawsuit: Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation. A SLAPP suit threatens average citizens with overwhelming court costs and potential judgments if they don't shut up.
Virginia outlawed such lawsuits last year, but only in the context of speaking at public meetings. People who express an opinion online still risk facing a lawsuit from a developer used to having his own way in town.
If Woody wants people to speak well of him, he should deal with the dirt pile and other things that have tweaked residents, not file frivolous lawsuits intended to squelch public discourse.
