This is one of the strangest stories of the week or year. Back in 2008, a group of parents at the Agora Cyber Charter school in Pennsylvania began questioning the financial affairs of the corporation that owned it. Agora was paying rent and management fees to another company, the Cynwyd Group, which June Brown, the founder of Agora, also owned.
In January 2009, the owners of Agora filed suit against the parents:
As parents tried to gather records and sort out the business relationships at Agora, they circulated emails expressing their concerns. They also complained to the state Education Department when the school did not provide information they requested.
In the suit filed in January 2009, Brown and Cynwyd Group charged that the parents had made statements that defamed and libeled Brown.
The complaint also alleged that the parents’ group had tried to interfere with Cynwyd’s contractual relationship with Agora “by spreading untruths about Dr. Brown and by implying that she had improperly used public funds.”
Brown and Cynwyd sought more than $150,000 in damages from the six parents for libel, slander, and civil conspiracy.
The parents denied the allegations and said they had merely sought information about the taxpayer-funded school their children attended.
Brown said the parents had defamed her and she had to defend her reputation. The parents had trouble paying for legal representation.
The suit dragged on, but in 2012, “federal grand jurors indicted Brown and charged her with defrauding Agora and her other charters of $6.7 million.”
The case against the parents remained active, to be addressed after the conclusion of the criminal trial. Brown’s criminal trial ended in a hung jury in 2014, and a retrial was canceled in 2015 after Brown’s lawyer said that she suffered from dementia. So, she escaped legal action, kept the money, but the parents were in limbo, still facing the charges of defamation that Brown had lodged against them.
Earlier this month, the charges were dismissed. The parents were relieved. One had used the family’s mortgage payment to pay a lawyer and lost her home fighting the lawsuit.
It does seem unjust that the parents were dragged through legal proceedings for more than seven years, accused of defaming Brown, even while she was under federal indictment for defrauding her charters of millions of dollars.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The strangest part to me about the charter mess in Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania is how anyone can “found” a wholly publicly funded entity.
It’s insane. There’s no risk- it’s 100% publicly-funded. They set their own salaries, sign contracts, buy property, all with public funds. Anyone can be a public employee under this system. They hire themselves.
I’m planning on “founding” a court or a fire station. I hope you guys won’t mind paying me the salary I decide I should get and funding my property purchases. If it doesn’t work out I’ll just walk away, so what the hell.
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“retrial was canceled in 2015 after Brown’s lawyer said that she suffered from dementia.”
Dementia?
Right.
How stupid do you have to be to buy that?
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doesn’t that sword cut both ways? Can a demented person sue someone?
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Lenny Rothbart: good catch.
😎
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These are sad times for Pennsylvania. The legislature and courts have been captured by the charter industry leaving Governor Wolf to fight for public education without too many allies. Despite the massive failure of cyber charters, they are still being green lighted.
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That was clearly a SLAPP lawsuit (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation).
These lawsuits are meant to intimidate and silence critics, who often cannot afford to pay for a legal defense.
Such lawsuits have been limited by law in a number of states (although the anti-SLAPP legislation is more comprehensive in some of those states than in others).
Pennsylvania is one of the states that has an anti-SLAPP law. Unfortunately, it only passed last year.
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It does seem unjust that the parents were dragged through legal proceedings for more than seven years, accused of defaming Brown, even while she was under federal indictment for defrauding her charters of millions of dollars.
Agree. Had not heard of the variant but this is a legal strategy also used by big corporations to drain dollars from a company before taking it over.
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I’ve read about corporations that use nuisance lawsuits to financially break the people who are blowing the whistle and investigating their fraud and lies. The corporate crooks know their lawsuit will lose in the long run if the whistle blowers have the money to defend themselves. But they gamble that the critic will not have the money.
Once the whistle blowers are broken mentally, physically and financially, they almost always break off their investigation into the often fraudulent corporation due to the pressure.
The tobacco industry did it to the scientist that blew the whistle on them.
The idea is to break the opposition by destroying them through legal costs most people cannot afford. I wonder how much of that $6.5 million went to the lawyers in this nuisance suit.
But what happens when a crooked industry takes on someone with the money to fight back.
The meat industry filed lawsuits against the Mad Cowboy and Oprah Winfrey when Howard Lyman, a 4th generation rancher, appeared on the Oprah show and revealed the horrible and unhealthy things corporate ranchers and/or feed lots do to fatten cattle and boost profits. The methods the meat industry uses has been linked to cancer.
To silence Lyman and Winfrey, the meat industry filed one lawsuit after another in state after state. When they’d lose one lawsuit, they file another on in another jurisdiction and go through the entire process again but with Winfrey’s deep pockets, they continued to lose repeatedly because she fought them to the end of each trial.
The meat industry last every court case becasue the evidence supporting the Mad Cowboy and Oprah was unbeatable.
I’m sure you can read all about the lawsuits somewhere on the Mad Cowboy’s Website:
http://www.debate.org/
This is exactly why Donald Trump files so many lawsuits — to silence anyone who attempts to reveal his repeated frauds and wrongdoings and punish anyone who dares to criticize him for almost anything.
http://fortune.com/2015/08/14/donald-trump-lawsuits/
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Trump threatened to sue Bill Maher over Maher’s claim that Trump was the spawn of a relationship between his mother and a baboon. .
It is the humane society who should have sued Maher . The remark was clearly a slander against baboons.
But on a serious note .
http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-coal-company-murray-energy-suing.html
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Lloyd, that is exactly their purpose, and that is why so many states (and DC) have passed anti-SLAPP legislation. I think it’s up to 28 states now. My state is one of them, it’s had such a law for a few years now.
Some of the states have legislation that is more robust than in other states.
It can be a tricky thing to write such legislation, because you also do not want to prevent lawsuits against individuals or groups of individuals who are maliciously slandering/libeling and lying about certain businesses, which can happen. But you also want to make sure that people with real grievances, who are publicly airing those grievances, are protected from these BS lawsuits meant to intimidate, harass, and silence them.
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I’m curious, if the parent group was part of the PTA would their insurance policy cover them in this incident? Do charters have PTA?
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Glad to see others know about SLAPP. I used it – I write a public education blog in Seattle called Seattle Schools Community Forum – and fended off someone trying to silence me. I didn’t win the SLAPP (the judges seemed baffled by it as it clearly isn’t used a lot) but I got her charge summarily dismissed. My accused got very nervous about her case after I countersued with the SLAPP. She backed off and went away.
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Good to hear that the law worked and in the backyard of the Gates Foundation where “engineering consent” by giving away billions to willing recipients has been, and still is, a major strategy to control almost every facet of education.
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This is not the only instance where the thieves are off the hook and the taxpayers suffer. up is down; night is day.
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I see no mention of the plaintiff having to reimburse legal costs. Wonder why we have to have a new kind of law (against ‘SLAPP suits). Decades ago I remember there was such a thing as throwing out (dismissing) frivolous lawsuits. Seems like this could have been dismissed on the face of it. What kind of justice postpones it for years (‘wait until the criminal case is decided’) then let’s the plaintiff walk away?
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