[StBernard] Former St. Bernard President Craig Taffaro pays $12, 500 to settle failed defamation suit

[Westley Annis]

Former St. Bernard President Craig Taffaro pays $12,500 to settle failed
defamation suit
Print Benjamin Alexander-Bloch, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune By Benjamin
Alexander-Bloch, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune 
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on December 04, 2013 at 2:39 PM, updated December 04, 2013 at 2:40 PM

Former St. Bernard President Parish Craig Taffaro has paid $12,500 to settle
a failed defamation lawsuit that he filed in 2012 against current Parish
President Dave Peralta and several other parish employees.

In that suit, Taffaro claimed that Peralta and others 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."

A federal judge in May dismissed Taffaro's suit, stating in part that while
the suit characterized the animosity between him and Peralta, it failed to
demonstrate how Peralta and others violated Taffaro's rights.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Karen Wells Roby last month ordered Taffaro to pay
$12,500 to St. Bernard in attorney fees and court costs.

Greg Rome, the attorney representing parish government, confirmed that he
gave the $12,500 check from Taffaro to the Parish Council on Tuesday
evening.

The Taffaro suit had 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 2012 "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."

But in May, U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman stated that the Taffaro suit
contained confusing, contradictory facts and that it alleged the "subjective
intent" of Peralta and other government actors without supplying facts
supporting how those individuals 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 said.

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."

Rome, the attorney representing the parish government and 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.