Last week’s firestorm over a media outlet’s misreporting of Blake Masters’ position on access to contraception has drawn renewed attention to a defamation lawsuit filed earlier this year involving alleged media bias toward a former Republican employee of the Pima County Attorney’s Office.
Masters suggested a May 6 article by AZ Mirror recklessly misrepresented his opinion about contraception. And he believes the reporter did so with an obvious animosity toward a conservative gunowner.
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It is similar to the arguments put forth by Caitlin Day Watters who claims in her January 2022 defamation, slander, and libel lawsuit that the owner of the Arizona Daily Star and two employees “deliberately, willfully and maliciously published defamatory statements” about Watters in various articles and a column in 2021.
The articles were motivated, Watters argues, “by animus, bias and a political anti-gun, anti-Republican, and anti-Conservative agenda” which led the journalists to “deliberately, willfully and maliciously” publish defamatory statements about Watters, who at the time was a county prosecutor.
Those articles stemmed from ongoing stalking activities against Watters’ father, who is a Pima County justice of the peace. On Feb. 14, 2021, Caitlin Watters, her sister, and her father Adam Watters were present at the parents’ home when the suspected stalker, later identified as Fei Qin, drove by the house once again.
Before officers arrived, Qin and Adam Watters got into a confrontation which resulted in the judge firing a handgun. Qin was later convicted and sentenced to 18 months in prison.
But Caitlin Watters’ lawsuit contends readers of the Arizona Daily Star were left with the impression she had engaged in criminal activity for being at her parents’ home with a gun when Qin drove by. And that her presence that day was somehow connected to her subsequent resignation from the county attorney’s office.
“Defendants’ anti-gun rhetoric is evident in that the story advances the false implication that Caitlin was somehow participating in an illegal activity that played a role in her forced resignation by being in possession of a legally owned firearm on her parents’ private property on a Sunday afternoon,” the lawsuit states.
The result of the defendants’ actions, Watters claims, was “irreparable damage to her professional reputation” which could have been avoided if anyone from the Arizona Daily Star simply contacted Caitlin Watters about her resignation.
What the journalists would have learned, according to the lawsuit, is that Caitlin Watters began interviewing for a position with a prominent Tucson law firm “months before” the Feb. 14 incident. Further, they would have learned the law firm formally offered Caitlin Watters a job which she accepted before the incident with Qin.
“These false publications attacking and maligning Caitlin’s professional integrity are not a small matter that can be corrected by a token apology from the Defendants published in their paper. The internet holds onto these stories seemingly indefinitely and any search for Caitlin’s name now reveals this damning false newspaper account fabricated by the reporters,” the lawsuit argues.
The Arizona Daily Star defendants filed a joint report in March arguing the articles “are substantially true and thus absolutely privileged. Moreover, the pieces were based on fair and true reports of public records from the Pima County Sheriff’s Department, and, in the case of the article, the Pima County Attorneys’ Office as well, and are privileged for that reason.”
Further, the defendants contend the articles and column addressed a matter of public concern and that Watters, as a public official at the time, must prove falsity by clear and convincing evidence that the newspaper employees “subjectively knew that the article and column were false at the time of publication, which they did not.”
The case has been assigned to Judge Richard Gordon of the Pima County Superior Court. The parties have until Dec. 26 to engage in settlement discussions with a private mediator in hopes of avoiding a jury trial sometime in mid-2023.
