Bork Litigation PR Firm Takes On Duke, Defends Litigation Website
The son of the man whose U.S. Supreme Court bid went down in flames in 1987 refuses to be borked by a court filing in a lawsuit filed by lacrosse team members.
Robert Bork Jr. runs a litigation consulting firm known as Bork Communication Group, which represents the plaintiffs’ law firm, Cooper & Kirk, in the 237-page suit (PDF posted by the lawsuit website maintained by the PR firm) against Duke University and the city of Durham, N.C. The plaintiffs are 38 lacrosse team members never charged in the case who say they nonetheless suffered damaged reputations and emotional distress when they were unfairly linked to a stripper who made a false claim of rape.
Bork’s father is a former federal appeals court judge whose rejection for the Supreme Court led to a new verb to describe intense criticism or the rejection that follows: being “borked.”
A memorandum (PDF posted by the PR firm) filed with a North Carolina federal court by Duke claims the plaintiffs’ efforts to publicize the lawsuit in a news conference, press release and website statement violated lawyer ethics rules, the Duke Chronicle reports. It asks the court to clarify how the court will apply the rule, which bars out of court statements that are likely to prejudice jurors.
Bork responded with a posting on the lawsuit saying, “Duke’s motion to keep information about this case out of the media is utterly meritless.”
The motion notes that the website is described as “the official source of information” about the plaintiffs’ suit, even though it expresses Bork’s views, and contends that the site is designed to attack the reputation of Duke-affiliated defendants. The motion says the website should be shut down. “Websites pose a particular problem” in the context of the prejudicial publicity rule, the motion says, since their content can be accessed anywhere and their content is constantly updated.
The motion also takes issue with this section in a press release, which closely tracks what it calls “incendiary language” in the plaintiffs’ complaint: “The suit says that … Duke officials actively blinded themselves to and suppressed exculpatory evidence; discredited exculpatory evidence that had been publicly disclosed; stood passively while faculty and student protesters waged a campaign of abuse and harassment against the lacrosse team members; issued statements and imposed discipline on the team that signaled the players’ guilt; and remained silent when an inexperienced nurse at its medical center falsely characterized a medical exam at Duke Hospital as indicating that a rape had taken place. … [Duke officials] lent credibility to the rape allegations by capitulating to an angry mob’s demands to condemn and punish the innocent players and their blameless coach.’”
Law professor Thomas Metzloff told the Chronicle the motion was “future-oriented” and appeared to be filed to inform the judge of about possible problems associated with prejudicial publicity rather than to reprimand the plaintiffs’ lawyers.
