When Anna Wolfe won the Pulitzer Prize for her dogged reporting on the Mississippi welfare fraud scandal, she had no idea she might soon end up in prison.
But a little more than a year after she won journalism’s top prize for exposing how $77 million in federal welfare funds went to athletes, boyfriends and hobby projects, she and her editor, Adam Ganucheau, are weighing what to pack for an extended stay behind bars. They’ve been sued for defamation by the state’s former governor — a key focus of their reporting — and have been hit with a court order requiring them to hand over internal files, including the names of confidential sources. They say the order is a threat to journalism that they will fight back.
“If any of us go to prison, we’ll be the first to go to prison in the Mississippi welfare scandal,” Wolfe told NBC News, referring to the eight charges stemming from the entanglements, none of which have resulted in a sentence. “How can I promise sources that I’ll keep them confidential if that’s possible?”
For more on this story, tune into NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt tonight at 6:30 p.m. ET/5:30 p.m. CT or tune into your local station.
The case has attracted attention outside Mississippi as an example of how public figures can make life difficult for news organizations long before they ever provide evidence of the “actual malice” needed to prove libel cases. Mississippi Today, the independent nonprofit that employed Wolfe and Ganucheau, is asking the state Supreme Court to overturn the order. Bryant appointed four of the nine justices.
“Breaching the confidentiality of sources violates one of the most sacred trusts — and breaks one of the most vital tools — in investigative journalism,” Ganucheau wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed. “No serious news organization would agree to this demand.”
(Andy Lack, former chairman of NBC News, is executive chairman of the board of Mississippi Today.)
The plaintiff in the defamation case is Phil Bryantwho was governor when the scandal broke, first with a report from the state auditor, then with a flurry of reporting by Mississippi Today. Bryant — who has not been charged with a crime and says he did nothing illegal — claims the online news organization falsely accused him of criminal behavior.
He declined to be interviewed, but his lawyer, Billy Quin, said the trial is not about punishing good reporting.
“I didn’t sue them because they exposed $77 million of waste. He’s praising them for that,” he said. “The lawsuit is about defamation.”
The scandal came to light after Wolfe began asking questions about how a cash-strapped state was rejecting more than 90% of people who applied for assistance. She wanted to know where the federal money was going. Her questions led to a referral to the state auditor, who in 2020 released a damning report questioning more than $90 million in spending.
The details were stunning enough to make national news, but not surprising to many Mississippians. In America’s poorest state, where only a few thousand families qualify for welfare each year, white state officials and their aides have diverted vast amounts of federal welfare money meant for poor, mostly black, women and children, public records show.
The money instead went to well-connected people and their favorite causes, public records show, most of which had little to do with helping poor people. They included a more than $5 million volleyball facility at the University of Southern Mississippi, a project backed by former NFL football star Brett Favre, whose daughter happened to be on the volleyball team.
Favre, who has not been charged, also received $1.1 million for alleged promotional efforts. And a pharmaceutical company he owned stock in, Prevacus, received $2.1 million, according to public records. Favre lobbied the governor to help secure the money, according to text messages obtained by Mississippi Today.
“It’s 3rd and long and we need you to make it happen!!” Favre texted Bryant on December 26, 2018. Bryant responded, “I’ll open a hole.”
The question of Bryant’s role in the spending was a major focus of the reporting in the Pulitzer-winning series of articles called “The Backchannel.” It is now at issue in the libel case.
“The investigation, published in a multi-part series in 2022, revealed for the first time how former Gov. Phil Bryant used his office to direct the spending of millions of dollars in federal social services — money meant to help the state’s poorest residents — to benefit his family and friends, including NFL Hall of Fame quarterback Brett Favre,” Mississippi Today reported when the prize was announced.
Bryant disagrees with that and similar statements, saying he played no role in managing the money. The man who did, Quin said, is John Davis, the state’s health care director, who pleaded guilty to federal fraud and theft charges in September 2022 but has not yet been sentenced.
“The fact is, I did nothing wrong,” Bryant said in a May 2023 statement. “I was unaware of the wrongdoing of others. When I received evidence suggesting that people were embezzling money, I immediately reported it to the agency that is supposed to investigate these matters.”
Bryant did not sue after the articles were published in April 2022, and in fact the statute of limitations for defamation claims in Mississippi expires after one year. But in February 2023, Mississippi Today CEO Mary Margaret White misrepresented the reporting at a journalism conference in Miami.
“We are the newsroom that broke the story about $77 million in social funds meant for the poorest people in the poorest state in the country being embezzled by a former governor and his bureaucratic cronies and used for pet projects like Brett Favre’s state-of-the-art volleyball stadium at University,” she said in her video address.
Embezzlement is a crime, and Bryant has never been charged, let alone convicted. There is no indication that he is the target of an ongoing federal investigation into the welfare fraud scandal.
In May 2023 — a few days after the Pulitzer announcement — Quin sent Mississippi Today a notice of his intention to sue, citing the “embezzlement” comment. A week later, White publicly apologized, saying, “I was mistaken in the allegations against former Gov. Phil Bryant in the $77 million benefits scandal during a recent press conference. He has not been charged with a crime. My comment was inappropriate and I sincerely apologize.”
But Quin said her apology should have gone further, saying Mississippi Today has no evidence that Bryant embezzled money.
“The bottom line is, ‘You embezzled $77 million and the criminal authorities are doing nothing about it,'” he said. “So here we are to bring one of their favorite words, accountability, to the situation. Well, the rabbit has the gun now; we’ll see who’s going to be held accountable.”
Quin has since included more recent articles and argues that references to the Backchannel series amount to a “republication” that makes the entire work fair game.
“This series of defamatory comments has taken a huge toll on him,” Quin said. “He has a right to protect himself. He has a right to enforce his rights, just like anyone else.”
To win a libel case, a public figure must show that someone published false information with “actual malice,” or a reckless disregard for the truth. Quin said that’s why he needs the newspaper’s internal emails and the names of confidential sources, something journalists never want to provide. The brief calls for the materials to first be handed over to a judge, who will decide whether any evidence is relevant to a libel claim.
“It’s not a fishing expedition,” Quin said. “A judge is going through the records that you claim to be using to support your defamatory statements to determine whether they support what you said.”
But journalists are extremely reluctant to give the names of confidential sources to anyone, even judges.
“It would have a chilling effect on the sources that come forward,” Ganucheau said. “It would make journalists in Mississippi question how they’re collecting what they’re collecting, and whether they should be collecting it at all.”
Meanwhile, the fight against what she sees as a wrongful lawsuit is taking its toll on one of the state’s most experienced reporters.
“It makes it harder to do my job,” Wolfe said. “I mean, I’m working on a story that I think is of great importance and now I feel like I’m going to be sued for it. It feels like everything I try to report is met with the same level of gaslighting and intimidation and scrutiny. So it definitely affects my day-to-day life.”
And Wolfe said it’s not clear that more money is going to Mississippi’s poorest. According to state figures, in June, 1,423 families and 2,522 individuals received federal welfare subsidies administered by Mississippi, a state where 548,000 people live in poverty.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
