Vanquished Democratic Senate candidate Jeff Greene is still angry at the media, and he tells today's New York Times that he's prepared to sue the pants off of the St. Petersburg Times and Miami Herald for some of their reporting about his business and personal life. Greene says, "I want to send a message to every newspaper in the country: Do your homework. I deserve to have the record corrected, and they deserve to be punished.”
And the Palm Beach billionaire isn't fooling around. He's hired L. Lin Wood, a prominent libel lawyer who has previously represented Howard K. Stern (not The King of All Media but the guy involved with Anna Nicole Smith), the parents of Jon Benet Ramsey and the man who was falsely accused of being the Centennial Olympic Park bomber, Richard Jewell. Lin reportedly wrote letters to the editors at both dailies last month, but didn't receive the satisfaction he was seeking.
(The Times did print a front page retraction on a story that left the impression that boxer Mike Tyson had used drugs while hanging with Greene on his yacht, the Summerwind. The paper later ran a front-page correction clarifying that Tyson said he had not used drugs on the yacht)
Greene is still peeved about a story in the Times that said Greene was party to a real estate deal that left 300 California families homeless and a partner of his in jail.
That August 8 article was written by Kris Hundley and Caryn Baird, The somewhat complicated story included early in it a denial by Greene:
Geene insists he did nothing wrong. Yet the way he handled the deal left an opening for massive fraud and put him uncomfortably close to a man now under federal indictment.
Greene says the two stories ruined him and his chances of winning the Democratic nomination. With all due respect, I'll disagree with the real estate mogul that those two stories were the culprit. Of all the coverage given to the 55-year-old Palm Beach resident, nothing had more impact than the story written by Adam Smith on August 1 that depicted debauchery on the Summerwind.
This is where we first got the indelible imagery of "vomit caked all over the sides from the partying going on." Read below:
This article appears in Aug 26 – Sep 1, 2010.