As you may know, the report issued by DA Kathleen Rice in June 2013 was filled with lies about Jesse that she hoped would turn public opinion against us and support her conclusion that he was not wrongfully convicted. In fact, according to Nassau County Supreme Court Justice F. Dana Winslow, the only reason for Rice’s distribution of this false information was to make Jesse appear to be “a bad guy.” Rice and two members of her staff issued a press release featuring these horrible lies, and then directly reached out to tabloid newspapers to plant awful stories about Jesse.
One example was her assertion that while he was in prison, my husband had written and distributed shocking pornographic stories about bestiality and pedophilia. There is nothing to support this claim, and had they done even the most basic due diligence and performed a simple Google search they would have discovered the material had been written by someone else and published in 2011. Jesse had a “misbehavior report” in his file regarding unauthorized literature (which he was found “not guilty” of possessing ) and it was this one item of information that Rice used to concoct this awful story. Her office emailed seven pages of disgusting pornography that they were alleging Jesse wrote and distributed to tabloid newspapers including the New York Post. Of course to our horror they and other news outlets ran with the story, resulting in dozens of stories about it.
Another example is that DA Rice justified her conclusion that Jesse’s wrongful conviction should not be overturned by telling the press that a “renowned psychiatrist” had once diagnosed him as a “psychopathic deviant” when in fact she knew that the source of this information had been completely discredited, had a conflict of interest and was not even a psychiatrist!
Our legal team repeatedly asked DA Rice’s office to retract her false statements and when she refused, we decided to file a defamation suit against her and the two information officers involved with releasing the damaging information. Her office responded by issuing a statement saying our suit is “meritless,” but her representative, Deputy Chief Robert Schwartz had already admitted in Nassau County Supreme Court that Jesse did not have any connection to this horrible pornography that Rice announced was authored by Jesse. Schwartz also stated that before issuing her report she did not perform even the barest minimum of due diligence it would have taken to see that her claims were not true.
I hope this helps to clarify what the defamation suit we’re bringing against DA Rice is all about. In simple language, we’re not suing for anything to do with the original charges, though those are also complete lies, but rather for the false material that made up the “Rice Report.” Since this information was included in the report specifically to discredit Jesse and make him, in the words of Justice Winslow, look like “a bad guy,” and is patently and demonstrably false, we were left with no alternative than to bring a defamation suit against DA Rice and her information officers.
When I think about this suit I am reminded of a scene from an episode of the West Wing. Josh Lyman, the Deputy Chief of Staff is talking with one of the lawyers fighting the tobacco companies. It is a David and Goliath scenario similar to our own. The lawyer fighting the tobacco company tells Josh that he has only 31 lawyers on a case against five tobacco companies with 342 lawyers. He remarks, “These people [tobacco companies] perpetrated a fraud against the public,” and adds “This is a fight worth winning.”
So it’s not just that Kathleen Rice’s acts were designed to make Jesse look like a bad guy, certainly that was part of it, but she created this fiction to embarrass witnesses who had come forward in Jesse’s defense, to frighten our supporters and to get rid of Jesse without having to address the merits of his claim to innocence. Rice’s lies have damaged us personally, and yes, that is a large part of why I care about this suit, but here’s why YOU should care about this suit: Rice also misled the public with this report. Government officials in positions of power should be held accountable when they lie.
She did not just hurt us; her acts disrupt the faith the public has in our government’s ability to govern fairly. This is a fight worth winning, not just on behalf of Jesse, but because holding government officials accountable for their actions and ensuring our institutions are trustworthy is actually an act of patriotism. This is a fight worth winning.
— August 28, 2014