EdCone.com

Sykes updates the settlement negotiations in the suit against blogger Jeff Martin, aka Fecund Stench. 

Perhaps it's been settled already? 

Martin tells Sykes he plans to keep a low profile until the settlement is final. His current post at a new blog takes aim at a prominent local developer with the headline "Marty Kotis: Dumbass."

More from the kinder, gentler Martin here (do not click the link to the Fecund Stench blog in Gauger's post -- it's an abandoned and unsafe address).

If the goal of the legal action was to limit conversation about the business dealings and past transgressions of prominent local Tea Partiers, it was a failure. Even some of the content the plaintiffs deemed most offensive, although disappeared from Martin's blog, lives on in the public sphere via the lawsuit.

Jeff Gauger nails it in this morning's column about the defamation suit against local blogger Jeff Martin, aka Fecund Stench, by founders of a local Tea Party group: The core issue is the right of Americans to say terrible things, not the terribleness of the things Martin writes. 

Gauger makes a good case that the plaintiffs are public figures. He necessarily rehashes the backstory about strip clubs and sex offenses, facts the controversy has enshrined in Google searches forever.

And he cites some posts the plaintiffs claim to be over the legal line, including a prize-worthy line about Jodi Riddleberger founding Conservatives for Guilford County with “wads of bills still damp from the garters of strippers” and a reference to the imaginary malady of "erectile narcolepsy." These quotes presumably are cribbed from the lawsuit, through which at least some of Fec's material will live on long after the blog itself is gone. 

Bonus points to the N&R editor/publisher for including as an example of Martin's scabrous tone his own on-site nickname, "Wet Fart Gauger." 

One reader who thought less of the column than I did: Martin, as explained at his new blog.

Sykes: 

As part of the settlement terms, Martin would have to agree not to speak publicly about Douglas or Isabella Adkins, or C4GC co-founder, Jodi Riddleberger. 

Riddleberger contributes a column to the local daily. Could Martin write an LTE about it? Join a comment thread someone else started about it? Jodi is very active in local politics -- if she said or did something on behalf of CFGC, is that off-limits? 

Both Jodi Riddleberger and Isabella Adkins have public Facebook profiles and post frequent photos of themselves, often dressed up in costumes or in formal attire...The settlement terms require that Martin not publish photographs that might be considered private. 

"Might be considered private" by whom? Is a photo published on a public profile private?

This thing's got more holes than that book about the kid who had to dig all those holes (it was called Holes).

"I have never been involved at any point with the group in a formal or informal way."

--6th district congressional candidate Mark Walker, in the N&R, backpedaling furiously from his suddenly-toxic supporters in CGGC.

What counts as "informal" involvement? Anyone got pics or docs or anecdata to share re Walker's closeness with the group?

FWIW, I was leaning toward Walker in the run-off. 

Good coverage in the N&R of the ready-fire-aim satire lawsuit. 

Nice summary: 

At issue in the lawsuit: satirical blog posts in which Martin mocked the fact that members and financial backers of Conservatives for Guilford County, a Tea Party-inspired political action committee, include the owner of area strip clubs and a convicted sex offender.

Analysis: "[T]he lawsuit’s real damage could be to political candidates associated with the group."

And kicker: 

Greensboro Mayor Nancy Vaughan, who herself has been mocked by Martin’s blog in the past, said he can be crude and insulting — but that’s sometimes the cost of free speech.

“Jeff Martin’s style is parody. It’s satire,” Vaughan said. “Sometimes it’s very funny. Sometimes it’s not. But people didn’t take the things he wrote seriously. This group is only hurting itself with this lawsuit. It’s very ill-advised, just silly really.

Jeff Sykes covers CFGC's war on satire in the new Yes! Weekly:

Martin, who blogs under the pseudonym, Fecund Stench, lampooned Isabella Adkins and the group Conservatives for Guilford County often using a fictional character to relay experiences from the Greensboro strip-club scene.

The character, Tami Tightenloud, was described as a "dwarf, transvestite Hooters waitress" who would often find herself at strip clubs in Greensboro after hours. It was during these fictional encounters that Martin often wrote about members of C4GC.

The plaintiffs' lawyer on his clients: 

“They are quiet people,” attorney Culbertson said. "They are not trumpeters of a lot of negativity, unlike other people around here."

The first thing I said to Jeff Martin when he told me he was being sued was that his discomfort, expenses, marriage and livelihood were not my own, and so any advice I might have for him about fighting the suit was of limited value compared to his own needs and feelings. 

Still true. So I have to respect his decision to settle and, as I understand it, shutter the Fecund Stench blog and refrain from writing about the Adkins and Riddlebergers in the future.

But, still, dammit.

I hate to see a writer get bullied into silence, especially when his case seems so winnable, and he has ample legal resources and offers of funding at his disposal.

All that said, it's hard to see how this ends up as a win for the plaintiffs and CFGC.

The details of their personal lives and business that have percolated in the blogosphere for some time now will be in the N&R and Yes! Weekly tomorrow, and the damage to CFGC will be real.

The candidate they championed, Mark Walker, will be backing away quickly from their embrace, even as he's asked to explain his financial support of the organization and his relationship to the litigants; it's hard to imagine that attack ads leveraging those relationships are not on the way. 

So, lose-lose. Fitting, in a way, but kind of a drag.

Updates on the Fecund Stench lawsuit:

• Previous post, including link to lawsuit, here.
• Jeff Martin has contacted attorney Ron Coleman of the Media Bloggers Association, which provides pro bono legal aid to bloggers; Coleman has written the plaintiffs' attorney, Krispen Culbertson, urging him to agree to a swift, cooperative resolution. 
• The suit can't be welcome news to Mark Walker, who just forced a surprise runoff against Phil Berger Jr. in the 6th congressional district GOP primary. Walker, a former pastor from GSO, recently praised CFGC for its role in his campaign: "The endorsement of Conservatives for Guilford County helped his campaign, Walker said, both in the organization’s approval and in the shoe leather invested by its members on his behalf." 
• The N&R weighs in with a pop-gun report that manages not to link the Yes! Weekly article that broke the news, or to the lawsuit itself, or to make the connection to its own article about Walker. No link necessary.  

[Updates to this post, including its possible impact on the 6th district congressional race, here] 

A defamation lawsuit filed recently pits four members of Conservatives for Guilford County against a no-holds barred blogger in Greensboro.

Douglas Adkins, whose wife, Isabella Adkins is one of the most prominent members of the local political action committee, filed a defamation suit against blogger Jeff Martin of Greensboro.

Jeff Sykes covers the story.

I'm not a lawyer, but I've seen the lawsuit and this looks like a very heavy lift for the plaintiffs. 

Fec's stuff is often scabrous (even when it's not written in the voice of fictional transvestite Hooter's waitress Tami Tightenloud, as I believe to have been the case for at least some of the offending posts) but that doesn't mean public figures can shut him up. 

At his best, Fecund Stench is Guilford County's own, digital H.L. Mencken (and like Mencken, his use of racial and religious stereotypes can be an issue). At his not-best, duck.

Unfortunately, he disappeared his blog when the suit was served. I hope it can be reconstructed.

I'd expect a legal defense fund to be established for Martin if this goes on much further.