Wednesday, May 14, 2008
The controversial political leader and Democratic presidential candidate delivers a pointed warning: If you attack me, you risk being sued.
Jun 20, 2003 | With the threat of a defamation lawsuit against an obscure GOP state representative from Michigan, the Rev. Al Sharpton officially gave the political and media worlds notice on Thursday: If you intend to write negative things about the activist and fledgling Democratic presidential candidate, you had better be certain that you have your facts straight. But it's unclear whether Sharpton's team has as firm a hold on the ugly realities of his past as their threat would seem to indicate.
Sharpton's attorney, Michael Hardy, told Salon on Thursday that Sharpton is serious about the lawsuit against Michigan state Rep. Marc Shulman, and will likely file it if Shulman doesn't apologize within the next month for the allegations he made in a letter to a fellow Michigan politician.
Shulman, offended by Sharpton's invitation to keynote a local African-American community dinner, cited actions and quotations attributed to Sharpton that, in his view, illustrated bigotry. They included seemingly anti-Semitic quotes by Sharpton from the 1991 Crown Heights affair where tensions between blacks and Hasidic Jews resulted in riots and a murder, as well as a reference to "Socrates and them Greek homos" allegedly from a 1994 speech. Hardy acknowledged that the threatened lawsuit was just as much -- if not more so -- about firing a warning shot across the bow of those who may attempt to use Sharpton's controversial, occasionally demagogic past against him.
"Absolutely, we're sending a message," Hardy said. "It's not so much Rev. Sharpton as it is those of us around Rev. Sharpton who support him and want to protect his reputation." Opponents and reporters should know: "You can say whatever you want to" about Sharpton, "you can criticize him and you can satirize him, but if you're going to make allegations about him you had better be accurate or we will be there to challenge you on it."
Sharpton has emerged as one of the more litigious presidential candidates in recent memory, having sued myriad politicos and media outlets for defamation, including the New York Post, HBO, former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, and the Republican National Committee. Only his 2000 federal suit against the RNC and its then chair, Jim Nicholson, resulted in Sharpton's receiving an apology; in none of the above suits has he been awarded a cent in damages.
The move is an unusual one, to say the least, as it assures media coverage focusing on allegations that Sharpton has been anti-Semitic, anti-white, and in general a rabble-rouser, if only to parse which ones are correct, which are false, and which are in the eye of the beholder. While no credible political observers think Sharpton has a chance to win the Democratic presidential nomination, he does stand to be at least a minor force in the primaries, raising issues of importance to some African-American and liberal voters. The threatened lawsuit thus implies a certain acceptance that many voters already have negative perceptions of Sharpton and it's worth more to raise his controversial past so as to correct -- or at least fuzz -- the record than to avoid it altogether.
At this early point in the campaign, Sharpton is, at least according to polls, just as credible as some of the "top-tier" candidates pundits have anointed. According to a Quinnipiac University poll of Democratic voters earlier this month, Sharpton lags behind Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, Missouri Rep. Dick Gephardt and Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry on a national level. But, embarrassingly for their campaigns, he is in a statistical dead heat with Florida Sen. Bob Graham, North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, and former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean for fourth place. In South Carolina, where African-Americans could make up one-third of the Democratic primary voters, Sharpton consistently polls in the middle of the pack, ahead of Graham and Dean. Some in the media have speculated that the candidacy of former Ambassador Carol Moseley Braun, who is also black, is a strategy by some in the Democratic Party to divide the black vote and thus lessen Sharpton's importance in the primaries and caucuses.
Sharpton is -- as former Vice President Al Gore said during a March 1, 2000, primary debate when asked to condemn some of Sharpton's more incendiary contributions to Bartlett's -- "undeniably a person to whom some people in [New York] city look as a spokesperson." With Sharpton as an actual presidential candidate, many Republicans are licking their chops at the prospect of his competitors walking the line between condemning some of Sharpton's more offensive contributions to civic discourse while not offending minorities who make up much of the Democratic base.
This may have been at least a factor behind the May 1 letter that Shulman, the Republican chairman of the Michigan Legislature's appropriations committee, wrote to Derek Albert, chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party's Black Caucus. Shulman took issue with the Caucus' selection of Sharpton as keynote speaker at its May 9 awards dinner. Citing a number of allegations of anti-Semitism, Shulman accused Sharpton of "fostering anti-Semitism, racism, and hate." Such allegations are by no means new, and many are fairly credible. The Sharpton legal team charges that Shulman's sources -- he quotes from conservative sources such as syndicated columnist Mona Charen, Jay Nordlinger of the National Review, and a book called "Democrats Do the Dumbest Things" -- do not represent "fair, true, accurate or balanced reporting."
As with almost anything in the post-Clarence Thomas world of American racial politics, this dispute is not without its glaring ironies. Sharpton, of course, was himself sued for defamation by former Dutchess County assistant district attorney Steven Pagones, after Sharpton and other advisors to then-15-year-old Tawana Brawley falsely accused Pagones of kidnapping and raping Brawley in 1987. In 1998, Pagones was awarded $345,000 in damages, $65,000 of which Sharpton was to pay. Sharpton refused to do so. However, in March 2001, a number of black business leaders including Johnnie Cochran, former Manhattan borough president Percy Sutton, and Earl Graves Jr., the president of Black Enterprise magazine, agreed to pay Pagones on behalf of Sharpton. Pagones did not return a call for comment.
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