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Mark Fainaru-Wada
A Mississippi judge dismissed a lawsuit on Friday against a non -profit media about his Pulitzer stories award on a well -being fraud scandal headed by former NFL star Brett Favre.
The lawsuit had been filed almost two years ago by former Mississippi Phil Bryant governor.
A decision against the newspaper could have forced Wolfe and Mississippi today to deliver confidential sources or face the charges of contempt of judicial charges that would result in significant fines on the website or perhaps even the jail for the reporter Anna Wolfe and her boss, editor in chief Adam Ganucheau.
But on Friday, the judge of the Madison County Circuit Court, Bradley Mills, dismissed Bryant’s claim.
In a statement, Mississippi’s lawyer today, Lee Crain, celebrated the dismissal of the “Defamation without foundation” of Bryant and described Wolfe’s stories “exactly the type of reports that the first amendment had the intention of protecting.” Crain said the ruling “ends once and for the entire unconstitutional crusader of Governor Bryant against Mississippi’s free press.”
However, Billy Quinn, Bryant’s lawyer, said the case “will probably end up in appeal before the Mississippi Supreme Court … This matter is far from finishing. Governor Bryant continues to trust the legal base and justice of his case.”
The case arose from a series of five parts published in April 2022 called “The Backchannel”, in which Mississippi today detailed a well -being fraud scandal of $ 77 million in the second poorest state in the nation. The stories described how, with the then governor Bryant in office, Favre and a handful of others obtained millions of dollars that were supposed to go to well -being families, but instead they were used in projects that included a university volleyball installation and a drug commotion company.
Shortly after Wolfe was awarded Pulitzer, the highest honor of journalism, Bryant filed a demand for defamation, changing the focus of the stories about poverty to a battle of the first amendment.
The stories, which never cited an anonymous source and were based largely on the material obtained from the email and the texts involved public officials, “discovered the depth of the participation of the former governor within an expanding well -being scandal that plagued his administration,” Mississippi wrote today at that time.
Bryant and Favre have said they didn’t know that money was designated for well -being families.
“The report speaks for itself. The truth speaks for itself,” Mississippi said today in his history responding to Friday’s decision.
