The Sarasota City Commission will decide on Monday, July 1, whether to approve additional money for Commissioner Kyle Battie’s legal fees, which have already exceeded the $15,000 originally approved.
The city commission should reject the request for more money.
Battie was sued for defamation by Kelly Franklin, a citizen, after he displayed an obviously fabricated paper printout of a racist image from a fake Facebook page, with her name prominently on it. Battie’s statement about Franklin was made at a January city commission meeting; he had received the image in question from the owner of the Corona Cigar Co. after it was allegedly delivered to Corona’s business address.
Battie brought the matter up as an agenda item he had demanded at the last minute, and no backup material was attached. The commissioners were not provided with the offensive image until nearly an hour into the meeting.
In the following months, Battie’s attorney filed a motion arguing that his client could not be sued for libel because he had “absolute privilege from liability.” On June 12, Circuit Court Judge Stephen M. Walker ruled in Battie’s favor; the judge relied on a 1983 U.S. District Court case that held that words “spoken or written by officers in judicial and legislative activities are protected by absolute privilege from liability for libel. However false, malicious, or ill-founded the accusation, no action will be taken in this State.”
It is important to understand that the question of whether Franklin was defamed has not actually been heard in court – despite the evidence appearing overwhelmingly in her favor. However, the outrageous blanket immunity afforded to government officials in Florida has prevented the case from moving forward in its current form.
As the courts have held, elected officials are fully protected from legal action, even if their motives are “bad or malicious.” But in this case, there is evidence from multiple public records requests that Battie knew a month before his public statements that the offensive image would never appear on Franklin’s Facebook page. Yet Battie waited a full month before putting this trumped-up issue on the City Commission’s agenda and unleashing a claim of racism against Franklin—and by extension, against CityPAC, a city watchdog group that has criticized the commission’s decisions in the past.
To this day, it is not publicly known where the faked print of a racist image came from, and no official action has been taken to investigate. According to City Attorney Robert Fournier, the City Commission does not have the authority under the city charter to investigate its own case.
So where does this leave us?
This leaves us, the citizens of Sarasota, forced to pay the legal fees of a city commissioner who rejected Franklin’s earlier offer not to take legal action if he would only publicly apologize.
More: ‘Sorry’ is the hardest word to say. But Commissioner Kyle Battie should say it anyway.
It is now clear that our elected officials are free to release false and reputationally damaging information about us, as long as they do so in the course of city business. And while limiting immunity through legislation is possible, it is unlikely, given that the Florida Legislature has exempted itself from the Sunshine Law—and has also taken steps to make it nearly impossible to bring ethics complaints against lawmakers.
At this point, the only recourse for elected officials who knowingly discredit, short of voting them out of office, is to make them pay for the legal quagmire that follows. When ethics and decency fail to make officials weigh their words, legal fees may be the answer.
Eileen Walsh Normile is a former Sarasota city commissioner and a member of the CityPAC steering committee. She previously served as an assistant prosecutor in the Union County Prosecutor’s Office in Elizabeth, New Jersey.
This article originally appeared in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Sarasota citizens should not have to pay Kyle Battie’s legal fees
