[StBernard] Former St. Bernard Parish president's lawsuit against current parish president dismissed

[Westley Annis]

Former St. Bernard Parish president's lawsuit against current parish
president dismissed

Print By Benjamin Alexander-Bloch, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune 
on May 20, 2013 at 3:30 PM, updated May 20, 2013 at 3:32 PM

A federal judge has dismissed former St. Bernard Parish President Craig
Taffaro's defamation lawsuit against current Parish President Dave Peralta
and several other parish employees. The judge said that while Taffaro's suit
characterized the animosity between him and Peralta, it failed to
demonstrate how Peralta and others violated Taffaro's rights.

The Taffaro suit claimed they had engaged in "creating bogus accusations
which were leaked to print and broadcast media ... and repeatedly providing
Taffaro's employer, the Jindal Administration, with false and bogus
accusations of wrongdoings."

The Taffaro suit asked for no less than $2.75 million in damages and claimed
that Peralta and other parish employees had violated Taffaro's civil rights,
his career rights and had intentionally inflicted emotional distress. It
stated a raid of Taffaro's storage unit in October "was the culmination of a
pattern of retaliation by Peralta against Taffaro because Taffaro fired
Peralta as CAO in October, 2008, and because Taffaro campaigned against
Peralta in 2011."

On Friday, U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman ruled that Taffaro had failed
to state a valid claim and agreed to dismiss the civil suit. 

Feldman stated that the Taffaro suit contains confusing, contradictory facts
and that it alleged the "subjective intent" of Peralta and other government
actors without supplying many facts supporting how those individuals
actually had violated Taffaro's constitutional rights.

"Taffaro leans heavily, indeed almost exclusively, on his allegations of
malicious conduct by the defendants and the need for the defendants to be
punished," Feldman stated.

Feldman added that "even assuming that Taffaro can prove dark ulterior
motives, it does not follow that these motives invalidate conduct that is
otherwise objectively justifiable."

Feldman wrote that Taffaro "seems to succeed only in portraying an
unpleasant rivalry against the backdrop of local politics."

Taffaro left office on Dec. 15, after losing a brutal re-election campaign
against Peralta. He is now the head of Gov. Bobby Jindal's hazard mitigation
office.

In February, attorneys for Peralta and other parish employees named in the
suit responded to Taffaro's allegations.

"While the allegations of the complaint could be the basis of a literary
work, they are not sufficient to properly state a cause of action under
federal or state law," Peralta's attorney, Leonard Levenson, argued.

Levenson labeled Taffaro's allegations "verbose and confusing" and later
wrote that Taffaro's complaint "is reminiscent of a Faulkneresque
'stream-of-consciousness-writing' with disordered chronology."

Gregory Rome, the attorney representing most of the other parish government
personnel named in the suit, argued that "Mr. Taffaro's complaint tries to
paint a picture of a Parish Government riddled with sinister actors working
in the dark to destroy him."


"Instead, it reveals Mr. Taffaro grasping at straws, carping about seemingly
every real or imagined slight he has ever received, and desperately trying
to justify his own bad behavior through the use of the federal courts," Rome
wrote.

Rome added, "defamation requires more than an allegation that someone did
something Mr. Taffaro did not like."

Others named as defendants in the suit were Donald Bourgeois of the parish's
Department of Recovery; Craig DeHarde of the Department of Recreation,
Culture and Tourism; Clay Dillon of the Department of Resident Services;
William McGoey of the Legal Department; and Jarrod Gourgues, a former
sheriff's deputy now in the parish's roads department.