A Santa Monica-based litigation law firm specializing in employee rights said today the Los Angeles Times attempted to demand $300,000 in “legal fees” from its client, the cartoonist and author Ted Rall.
Mr. Rall is suing the Times for defamation, blacklisting, wrongful termination and breach of contract. Shegerian & Associates founder Carney Shegerian described the Times’s request for Mr. Rall to post $300,000 to guarantee the Times’s attorney fees in the event they should win their anti-SLAPP motion as a “bully move against a freelance cartoonist.”
Mr. Shegerian said that “a corporation is egregiously inverting the very anti-SLAPP statute designed to protect
employees from big corporations.”
The court has since ordered the Times to lower its request to $75,000.
“It feels almost like they are forcing me to ‘pay to play’ if I am to see my day in court,” said Mr. Rall. “You would think after what happened, they would be issuing an apology and offering me my job back, not trying to bankrupt me after wrongfully firing me.”
Mr. Rall originally was hired by the Times as an editorial cartoonist in 2009. He published approximately 300 of his cartoons and more than 60 of his blog posts in the paper between 2009 and 2015.
At no time during his employment was Mr. Rall disciplined or written-up. He was consistently praised for his work.
In May 2015, Mr. Rall created, and the Times reviewed, approved and published, a cartoon titled, “LAPD’s Crosswalk Crackdown; Don’t Police Have Something Better to Do?”
In the accompanying blog post criticizing the LAPD’s crackdown against jaywalking as reported by the Times, Mr. Rall referenced his own previous experience of having been falsely arrested, unduly rough-housed and handcuffed by an LAPD officer, allegedly for “jaywalking.”
In July 2015, after the LAPD contacted The Times to question the accuracy of this cartoon and blog post, the Times decided to terminate Mr. Rall within 24 hours.
In his filed complaint, Mr. Rall explained that at no point did the Times allow him to speak to his regular supervisor, or to the editorial board to discuss his case — a violation of the Times’ Ethical Guidelines.
Shortly after the termination, the Times published a rare “Note to Readers,” indicating that the paper had doubts about the veracity of Mr. Rall’s blog post due to an audio recording they obtained of Mr. Rall’s original jaywalking incident. The note also stated that the Times would no longer be publishing Mr. Rall’s work.
The Times failed to follow the standard of procedure for authenticating evidence and thus did not have grounds to publicly
accuse Mr. Rall of falsifying information on his blog entry. After the Times’s note was published, Mr. Rall took it upon himself to have the audio examined by experts.
The enhanced version of the audio supported Mr. Rall’s version of the encounter. He presented this to the Times.
Despite this exonerating evidence, the Times published yet another article further defaming Mr. Rall.
“The Times’s suspicions about the veracity of Mr. Rall’s blog post were unfounded in that they failed to properly investigate the accusations and refused to acknowledge proof that Mr. Rall’s blog post was, in fact, accurate,” said Mr. Shegerian. “The public defamation and subsequent blacklisting of our client following blatantly wrongful termination should be enough of a slap in Mr. Rall’s face. But the demand now for this freelance cartoonist to pay the Times’s legal fees in advance of a trial demonstrates that not only does the L.A. Times not play by its own rules employment-wise, as we will demonstrate in court, it behaves in a vindictive and unfair manner as well.”
