Mr. Levant has not always been the defendant, however. A few years ago he sued a small newspaper and a letter writer for libel, complaining among other things that the newspaper called him a “jerk,” and wrote “being a jerk on a national level doesn’t help you sell magazines, it just makes you look like a jerk.”
In the fall of 2007 — two years before Mr. Levant’s allegedly libellous blogging about Mr. Awan, and a week after the closure of his Western Standard print magazine — Fast Forward Weekly newspaper in Calgary published a letter by conservative activist Merle Terlesky that Mr. Levant claimed libelled him.
The Terlesky stuff I knew about, and have previously written about here. Anyone else out there who's been sued by Ezra over the years, I wonder?
6 comments:
Free speech is only for conservatives. Didn't you know that? ;)
Ezra launches a "Stand With Ezra" fundraising campaign to battle his political adversaries, occasionally other conservatives, most often Muslims or environmentalists. He is quite likely milking his Freedom Cruise audience of Alberta retirement home senior activists for contributions. He actually had the audacity to launch a libel suit against a former employee for complaining in a letter to the editor in a local Calgary publication that Ezra was a "jerk", a poor employer, mismanaged his business and took pleasure at "poking" insults at Muslims.
"Potentially devastating" slurs against his reputation, claimed Ezra, for which he then turned around and accepted settlement for the sum of $ 5,000...
I've met someone who was being sued by him and was very bitter, but I don't know details. It may have been connected to this claim made in 2003 that he was suing 177 Canadian Alliance members for defamation:
http://www.freedominion.ca/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=15995&start=15
I don't know what happened with this but it might be interesting to find out.
And Kinsella has stuff from 2001-2002 where he threatened to sue Chuck Strahl and others: http://warrenkinsella.com/oldsite/index.php?m=02&y=08&entry=entry080202-160703
One more link; Levant worked for Stockwell Day when Day was sued and helped fundraise to pay Day's costs. (Seems to me Alberta taxpayers ended up paying for that.)
http://www.freedominion.ca/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=3077
Bingo!
"The incident deeply divided party members in Harper’s riding association resulting in Levant and three other Calgary party members filing a $5.8-million lawsuit against other party members and executives over alleged defamation related to the nomination battle. (Calgary Herald, November 22, 2003)"
http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/eppp-archive/100/205/300/liberal-ef/06-01-06/https@www.liberal.ca/print_e.aspx@id=11253
So maybe Kinsella would have more
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