December 3, 2024 – 2:19 pm
Last week I wrote about the apology from Salem Media to Mr. Mark Andrews for defaming him as an illegal voter in a film it distributed. Yesterday, the creator of the film, Dinesh D’Souza, issued a statement of apology to Mr. Andrews.
In the film, “2000 Mules,” Mr. Andrews is depicted as a “mule” who harvested fake ballots. In his statement, Mr. D’Souza explained that new information had recently come to light showing that the surveillance videos he used in the film, including the footage that depicted Mr. Andrews, were based on inaccurate information; and that, had he known that, he would’ve made the film differently. (The State of Georgia investigated and determined that Mr. Andrews was voting legally and hadn’t done anything wrong.)
This statement is not really an apology. It’s at best an acknowledgement of wrong, and comes across more like an excuse/explanation. It’s good that Mr. D’Souza is publicly acknowledging that he would’ve done things differently if he had had accurate information. But he doesn’t call it a “mistake,” and he doesn’t take responsibility for the “inaccurate information.” Instead, Mr. D’Souza blames others for providing him with the information, as if he had no responsibility himself to verify it before basing the film on that misinformation. Instead of acknowledging the harm he caused Mr. Andrews, which Mr. Andrews said included death threats to him and his family, the statement says he is “sorry for any harm he believes he and his family has [sic] suffered.” In other words, he doesn’t believe Mr. Andrews was harmed.
Strangely, he says he still has confidence in the premise of the film, that there was systematic election fraud in the presidential election of 2020. This undermines his assertion that the new information led to a new understanding which prompted the apology. If he really wanted to apologize sincerely, he would’ve omitted this paragraph.
Mr. D’Souza says he’s not apologizing in hopes of settling the lawsuit that Mr. Andrews has filed against him, but rather because “it is the right thing to do.”
November 25, 2024 – 5:33 pm
A Christian company apologized recently to a man it had defamed.
Salem Media Group distributed a documentary made by former Christian college president Dinesh D’Souza called 2000 Mules, which purported to explain how the presidential 2020 election results could not be trusted. It showed various Georgia voters, asserting that they were committing a crime by voting illegally. One of those voters was Mark Andrews, an African-American. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation had cleared Andrews of wrongdoing, finding that he was legally dropping off ballots for members of his family.
Mr. Andrews sued Salem Media Company, Mr. D’Souza, an organization called True the Vote, and other related parties for defamation in October 2022, alleging that he and his family received threats of physical harm, including death threats, as a result of the film and accompanying book. This spring, media outlets reported that Salem settled the lawsuit with Mr. Andrews for an undisclosed amount of money. Presumably the settlement also required a public apology from Salem Media Group.
The media reported this past May that Salem posted an apology on its website; I have been unable to find this apology on the Salem Media website. According to media outlets, Salem stated,
“It was never our intent that the publication of the ‘2000 Mules’ film and book would harm Mr. Andrews. We apologize for the hurt the inclusion of Mr. Andrews’ image in the movie, book, and promotional materials have caused Mr. Andrews and his family.” Salem also stated that it “relied on representations made to us by Dinesh D’Souza and True the Vote.”
Thoughts regarding this apology:
- Offender’s intent: not wise to lead with a statement about the offender’s intent. The listener doesn’t really care about the offender’s intent. The victim felt harm whether or not the offender intended to harm.
- Specific harm caused: Good apologies are not vague about the harm caused; they get specific. To say, “the inclusion of Mr. Andrews’ image…” reduces the offense to something innocuous. According to his court complaint, the movie accused Mr. Andrews of being a criminal, one of many “mules” who not only committed ballot fraud but also joined riots in Atlanta, burned people, pulled them out of their cars and beat them up. (Plaintiff’s Complaint, Para 41, p. 16). Although the film didn’t name Mr. Andrews, his face was apparently shown several times, as was his vehicle, including the license plate. The offense was not just the inclusion of Mr. Andrews’ image, but the implication that he was a low-life criminal.
- At least they didn’t say, “for any hurt this may have caused.” They said, “for the hurt…”
- Relying on someone else’s representations: This is actually another offense, not a defense. It’s rather surprising for a news organization to admit that it didn’t verify the truth of what it published. They could have turned this around by admitting that this was another thing they got wrong, and apologizing for this too.
- Future behavior: A statement describing what they learned from this, and what they’ll do to ensure it never happens to anyone else, would have lent more credence to this apology.
November 7, 2024 – 9:19 am
In a claim not seen often, a party to a mediation asked for sanctions for the other party’s failure to send someone with full settlement authority to the mediation. After Charles Leach died in his Tesla, which crashed and caught fire in 2021, his widow, on behalf of his estate, sued Tesla for wrongful death in a California federal court (Donna Leach v Tesla, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, 2023). The case went to mediation in September 2024. The lawyers for Mr. Leach’s estate claim that the two sides reached a deal in mediation, only to learn, hours into the mediation, that the Tesla representative, a products liability lawyer, lacked the authority to approve a settlement on his own. At this point, the plaintiff claims, they had already provided Tesla with confidential information. The estate lawyers felt that they had no choice but to breach the settlement agreement. The estate then asked the court to award it $9,600 in legal fees as a sanction against Tesla. They argued that Tesla violated a court order in failing to send someone with full settlement authority, and that they wasted their time going to mediation.
The court ruled yesterday that the estate cannot pursue sanctions.
Michigan’s court rules on mediation require that the attorneys attending a mediation must have the authority necessary to participate fully in the proceeding. MCR 2.410(D)(1). The court rule does not specify penalties for failure to comply. Parties lacking full settlement authority can be a frustration to a mediation, and the threat of sanctions might be one way to address the problem. But there are other ways, including careful preparation beforehand.
October 5, 2024 – 2:32 pm
A former president of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), Johnny Hunt, sued the SBC last year in federal court for defamation. This summer, the court (U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee) ordered the parties into mediation. They reportedly met in mediation for one day last month, on September 19, 2024, but did not reach an agreement. Now the case is headed for trial.
Courts have embraced mediation as a way for parties to settle their differences short of a trial. In contrast with a judge or arbitrator, the mediator has no power to decide the outcome; the mediator instead helps the parties to reach a resolution. The process itself can take many forms. The typical court-ordered mediation of a litigated case is conducted by an attorney-mediator who meets with the parties separately for a day to help them reach a compromise on a dollar figure to settle the case. I suspect that is the process that was used in this case.
A Christian alternative to “litigation mediation” encourages parties to deal with relational as well as substantive issues, and to apply prayer and Scripture so as to attain both resolution and reconciliation. In Christian mediation the mediator typically meets separately with each party, sometimes for hours over several weeks, until both sides are ready for joint session. Christian mediation is offered by several national ministries, including Peacemaker Ministries, the Institute for Christian Conciliation, and Crossroads Resolution Group. One need not file a lawsuit in order to initiate Christian mediation.
Christian mediation is the appropriate process for a conflict among church leaders. Christians are not supposed to sue one another in civil court (I Corinthians 6:1-7), and the financial remedy that Mr. Hunt seeks can be attained in Christian mediation. It also offers the possibility of healing the fractured relationship, which rarely occurs in “litigation mediation” but is important to God (see, e.g., John 13:34-35). I blogged about this case when it was first filed in March 2023 (see my post of March 25, 2023). It’s sad that both sides have continued in litigation instead of resolving it within the church.
It’s not too late for the parties to heed Jesus’ advice to “settle quickly” (Matthew 5:25) before this matter comes to trial.
Christians who do not want to end up in court with other Christians can use Christian conciliation clauses in their contracts, to ensure that any dispute goes through mediation and arbitration rather than litigation. This has been the message of Peacemaker Ministries for decades. We’re happy to see that Telios Law is promoting this concept in its excellent new series on “Preventing and Navigating Internal Church Disputes.” In Part VI, “Preventive Measures,” it observes that conciliation agreements are “an under-used tool in churches …. Conciliation agreements help resolve church disputes in a religious context that aims for reconciliation, rather than costly and divisive litigation.”
The Institute for Christian Conciliation has long endorsed a basic Christian conciliation clause that has been upheld in many a court case. It should be the standard dispute resolution clause in any contract to which Christians and churches are parties.
