The $10 million principle of the thing
After tears, jeers and more tears, WVIR is ordered to pay up for its cracked reporting
“Thirty-some years of my ambition to make something out of my life has been destroyed,” Sheckler wrote in court documents prior to the trial. “I have suffered so much mental anguish over this I don’t know how I stay alive.” On Friday, May 23, a City Circuit Court jury vindicated his anguish and gave him a reason to live—more precisely, a $10 million award in compensatory damages.
A Federal grand jury indicted Sheckler in March 2001 on one count of conspiracy to distribute and possess cocaine, although he was later acquitted. Novice reporter Melinda Semadeni of WVIR covered the indictment and falsely claimed, “DEA and JADE forces had confiscated 50 grams of crack cocaine and 500 grams of powder cocaine in a March 2001 raid on the home and business of Jesse Sheckler.” This single, erroneous sentence formed the crux of the multi-million dollar suit.
Sheckler alleges that WVIR’s report laid financial waste to his eponymous garage and used car business in Stanardsville and, according to his psychiatrist, left him with post-traumatic stress disorder. WVIR counters that broadcasts of Sheckler’s drug indictment, regardless of factual errors, would have had the same effect on his reputation and livelihood and, further, that a link between their broadcasts and the plaintiff’s ailments cannot be proven. News of the fabricated raid and drug confiscation aired on April 6 and 7, and again on October 29 and 30, 2001. No retraction has been issued, nor is one likely, since News Director Dave Cupp testified of one vague recollection in his 23 years at WVIR of issuing an on-air retraction.
The testimony of VCU mass communications professor Ted J. Smith opened Murray’s case, and in it, Smith stated that the most “bone-chilling” call a newsroom can receive, short of contact from the FCC, is a lawyer’s call regarding the facts in a story. Sheckler’s criminal attorney in 2001, Denise Lunsford, would testify that she contacted WVIR about their errors, although they never seriously addressed them. Murray made Smith’s claim his refrain, repeating—and savoring—the word “bone-chilling” almost hourly.
Murray pushed his next witnesses toward discrediting Semadeni. Her own video deposition rendered a barrage of equivocations, such as “I don’t recall” or “I really don’t recall” or “I believe so.” The hedging abruptly stopped when she was asked where she obtained the drug bust information. She remembered distinctly, it seems, her lack of fault. Assistant U.S. Attorney Bruce Pagel, she said. So the passing of the buck began.
Here’s a brief outline of the buck’s progress (don’t forget your trail of bread crumbs): Attorney Lunsford complained to Semadeni via telephone on April 7. When asked, Semadeni said Pagel was her source, but she referred Lunsford to Greene County reporter Nordia Higgins. Lunsford spoke to Higgins on April 9, but Higgins referred her back to Semadeni. Higgins and Semadeni exchanged e-mails. A WVIR employee passed a vague version of the complaint to News Director Cupp, who then told Station Manager Harold Wright. Then, nothing from either side until March 2002.
Enter Attorney Benjamin Dick. Dick testified in a later deliberation, which the jury did not hear, that he called Wright in March 2002 representing Sheckler. Dick’s inquiry into retraction elicited Wright’s purported response, “We’re not interested in a retraction. Go ahead and sue. We’ve got the best lawyer money can buy, and we stand by our story.” Presumably, although he would not comment, Attorney Albro is seeking the best writ of appeal money can buy.
When Sheckler, a big man with rough hands and a pencil moustache, took the stand next, Murray asked him how he felt when he saw WVIR’s report. Sheckler paused, bowed his head and, sobbing, replied, “I fell to the floor.” News Director Dave Cupp appeared moved, reporters Nordia Higgins and Semadeni listened with a flat, almost smug, affect and reporter Pedro Echevarria appeared to be nodding off. The plaintiff wept profusely all three days.
“What did people say to you?” Murray asked.
“It’s gotta be true. It’s on TV,” Sheckler replied, and a later string of Greene County witnesses seemed to confirm his assertion.
Sheckler’s wife and two daughters also testified through more tears.
“I don’t go out at night,” his wife Becky said, crying, “because I don’t wanna see people looking at me.”
Albro’s defense began with DEA agent Stan Burroughs, a man built like a linebacker. Burroughs arrested not only Sheckler, but also Sam Rose, to whom Sheckler loaned the $37,000 that brought his indictment. Convicted in October 2001, Rose drove lavish vehicles and made promises of lavish paybacks and—surprise!—dealt at least one kilo of cocaine per month. Burroughs said that Sheckler denied any financial relationship with Rose when confronted, telling him that anyone who made that claim “was a liar.”
Murray cross-examined Burroughs and, gathering his papers to finish, asked him, “Sometimes you get the wrong man, don’t you?”
“No,” Burroughs replied.
Leaning forward, Murray said, “You still think he’s guilty, don’t you?”
“Guilty as sin,” he said.
Albro objected, the judge sought order and Sheckler’s family gasped in disbelief.
To defend WVIR, Albro trumpeted erroneous reports regarding Sheckler’s indictment printed in both the Greene County Record, a newspaper with a circulation of 5,000, and the Daily Progress, papers whose representatives claimed to have acquired their inaccurate information from Pagel as well. Neither print report contained the fabricated drug bust.
“Rumor was spreading like wildfire” about Sheckler’s drug involvements, Record reporter Allen Browning testified.
In a coup de grace, Albro called Progress reporter Keri Schwab, who covered Sheckler’s indictment on April 11, 2001. Earlier, the grave and hard-hitting Pagel, who drafted Sheckler’s indictment, testified for the plaintiff that WVIR’s Semadeni visited his office and sobbed. Semadeni swore she had never seen Pagel until his testimony. Schwab admitted that it was she who had visited the Assistant US Attorney’s office and broke down in tears. The confusion and mistaken identity seems to speak to a low official regard for the press: one reporter’s the same as another.
Albro argued that Sheckler had an established history for his gastrointestinal problems, anxiety and depression, and that his arrest and criminal trial caused most of the harm. His witness, Dr. Bruce Cohen, a forensic psychiatrist, cited a litany of doctor’s reports filled with diagnoses and treatments of the very ailments Sheckler said WVIR caused, but which inconveniently predated the broadcasts and seemed to be linked to the anxiety of his criminal trial.
Asked by Albro for his professional opinion of the broadcasts’ direct harm to Sheckler, Cohen said with finality, “It is my opinion that you can’t come to an opinion.”
Poison dropped into the edge of a pool will eventually kill all life in the pool,” Murray said in his closing argument, drawing a metaphor to the continuing effects of defamation that goes uncorrected.
“You wanna talk about stress?” asked Albro in his closing, in a nod to Cohen’s testimony. “Would you want Stan Burroughs and Bruce Pagel after you?” If a retraction would have solved everything, he told the jury, then Sheckler should have asked for one, but since he didn’t, he deserved no compensation.
The jury disagreed.
“I wasn’t surprised,” Murray told C-VILLE in a post-verdict interview. “This man was terribly damaged by what WVIR had broadcast…. Maybe $10 million is too low,” he mused. “There is no price that can be placed on a man’s reputation.”
To win compensatory damages, a plaintiff must prove negligence, defined as deviating from a common standard of practice, according to defamation expert Tom Spahn, a partner in the firm McGuireWoods.
“It’s not uncommon for plaintiffs to win against media defendants,” Spahn told C-VILLE. “It’s very difficult to retain those on appeal. Nearly all of them are overturned. The appellate courts are more inclined in a First Amendment case to look at what happened, and most well-publicized verdicts are reversed and thrown out.”
“The money was not the issue,” Sheckler told C-VILLE. “It was the issue, but not for me personally….”
Sheckler interprets his trial as a sort of crusade.
“It’s gonna get in their pocketbook and sting the hell out of them,” he said of the $10 million award. “If we destroy that…we haven’t done our job…[and] I didn’t do what God put me here to do.”
And if the jury had not found in his favor?
“It would have completely destroyed my life,” Sheckler said over the phone between tears. “And I think I would have gone. I don’t think I would have stayed here. Even though the case is over with, I still have all kinds of dreams, nightmares, can’t sleep….”
Publishers, take note: This is not the last that will be heard from the suddenly lugubrious Sheckler.
“I’m gonna be writing a book about it. They definitely destroyed my life. It’s a mess,” he said. “You see, I’ve got to live with that for the rest of my life. At least I’ve got a chance to live now, whereas before, I don’t think I did.” —Aaron Carico
Double the fun
Local filmmaker seeks twins to shoot
“The idea just occurred to me—what if these Siamese twins that were separated found that they missed each other, and could they find someone to surgically reattach them?” asks local artist and filmmaker Russell Richards. “That’s basically what the story is about, it’s about conjoined twins who are severed, and who later try to get themselves reattached because they decided they liked things better the way they were before.”
That’s the premise of Richards’ new short film, tentatively titled Separation Anxiety, and the 33-year-old is anxiously scouring the streets of Charlottesville for twins, or even people who look a lot alike, to star.
If it seems a slightly bizarre, slightly comic, slightly unsettling sort of topic, that’s intentional. Richards says his films feature “a grotesquely over-the-top sort of humor.” This sensibility is on abundant display in his previous work, fetish (the film was shown at the Vinegar Hill Film Festival), a nifty little black-and-white number that treats the human foot with about as much care as it can be treated, with a twist.
He works fast—Richards anticipates wrapping his newest project up in a couple of days, after the cast is assembled. “I just need a day to shoot interiors and a day to shoot exteriors, and a couple of fittings because I need to design some costumes for the conjoined twins scenes,” he says.
The final version will be about five minutes long or shorter, the latest in a series of what Richards calls “short, perfectly wrought little films.”
Richards, who has a studio at McGuffey Art Center and supports himself as a printmaker and sculptor, is looking to make filmmaking his “principal career.” He cites directors such as David Cronenburg, Stanley Kubrick and Terry Gilliam as influences, “filmmakers who have kind of an imaginative flair or make a personal statement.”
Apparently, he already has something in common with many of the greats he admires: a dash of hubris.
“I’ve decided recently that filmmaking is just a real talent of mine,” he says. “I think I’m really good at it, and I think that it might provide me with a more certain future than art.”
After severing and reattaching twins, what’s next?
“I do have a feature film script that I’m working on now, called Lust of the Monster. It’s about a Creature from the Black Lagoon type of monster who goes to Hollywood and becomes a movie star.”—Paul Henderson
Resale for sale
In the world of gently used, twice is no longer nice
Pamela Juers has tried everything to attract customers to her children’s resale consignment shop. Every morning she drags a few select items—strollers, clothes racks, wooden toys—outside to attract visitors, only to roll them back inside by evening. She’s even taken a massive yellow “Kids Resale” sign and hung it upside down along the sidewalk in front of her store. But with the exception of a passer-by who regularly comes in to notify her, “Your sign’s upside down, you know,” nothing seems to be working.
When Juers opened My Silly Goose exactly two years ago at the Seminole Commons shopping center near Forest Lakes, business was booming. Each month sales grew by more than 10 percent, and on busy days Juers would see upwards of 30 customers. Last November, however, her business dropped off by more than 50 percent.
“Maybe the newness wore off, I don’t know,” says Juers. “But after November, business just stopped, and never, ever recovered.”
Juers isn’t the only one to feel the pain of the faltering consignment world lately. In April, the Junior League’s Opportunity Shop announced it would be closing its doors by the end of that month. And Evelyn Davison, co-owner of the children’s resale and consignment store Heaven to 7 on Zan Road says that although her location has been open only one year, she’s already feeling the pinch.
“I have terrific days, I have good days,” says Davison, “and then I have days I only get by.”
Although Davison and Juers think the problem is partly rooted in a local mentality to buy upscale, shiny and new, not everyone agrees. Tamar Pozzi, proprietor of Glad Rags on Commonwealth Avenue, says she’s had her best year in recent history, partly due to shoppers wanting to spend less in a slowing economy, and partly because she refuses to carry hard-to-move products such as children’s wear.
“When I started out, I was selling kids clothes and I gave up within one year,” says Pozzi. She then turned her focus to women’s clothes and jewelry. “Children’s resale is a very hard row to hoe—you have to sell a whole lot, for only a little money,” she says.
Still, some blame the recent failings of area consignment shops on the mindset of the general public that resale shopping is more hobby than necessity.
“The first time we really felt the pinch was around this past Christmastime,” says Marie Donella, who’s been running Nelly’s Place consignments on the Downtown Mall for a decade. “The department stores were offering such huge sales. It affected consignment.” Donella, by the way, also closed shop—perhaps temporarily—last month. She is uncertain if she’ll reopen after summer.
For Juers, she knows that if business at My Silly Goose doesn’t pick up soon, she will be forced, like others, to close her doors.
“I think if people just knew that I was so close to closing that they would come in,” she says.
Glad Rags’ Pozzi believes things might be turning around, based on her store’s performance. But Juers, who plans to hang onto her children’s resale boutique until her lease expires next year, isn’t quite as optimistic.
“Have you ever thought to yourself, ‘Geez, I wonder what ever happened to that store?’”—Kathryn E. Goodson