The Strange Case of Steve Wilson

How a fraudulent crusader snookered the left-and is threatening the First Amendment

John Sugg from the May 2006 issue

(Page 3 of 4)

Facts were incidental to the froth and fury the case generated in the left wing of the media, beginning with the role of the hated Fox media juggernaut: When the reporters’ vitriolic attack on station management began, Fox didn’t even own WTVT. Murdoch’s conglomerate merely inherited the altercation when it assumed control of the station.

The verdict itself was misrepresented so often by the couple, and by credulous news organizations who took their word for it, that outlets ranging from the Associated Press to the St. Petersburg Times had to run corrections for misreporting that the ruling found the station’s coverage to be “distorted” by pressure from Monsanto. Lefty media outlets showed much less concern about correcting the record, so by the time The Corporation was filmed Wilson had no compunction about looking into the camera and declaring, “The jury determined that the story they pressured us to broadcast, the story we resisted telling, was in fact false, distorted, or slanted.” The jury, of course, did no such thing.

In 2002 broadcast reporter Kristina Borjesson included Akre’s self-serving account of the WTVT battle in her compilation Into the Buzzsaw, a collection of essays by journalists claiming they’d been screwed by Big Media. In an e-mail exchange with Borjesson, I inquired if she had vetted the claims of her contributors. She expressed angry surprise at the question, but confirmed that, no, there wasn’t any fact checking.

Project Censored, based at Sonoma State University, listed the Wilson/Akre campaign against Fox and Monsanto as No. 11 on its 2003 list of “most censored stories.” The list repeated in its headline the absurd mendacity that a “Court Ruled That the Media Can Legally Lie.” When I queried the project’s director, sociology professor Peter Phillips, about his failure to describe WTVT’s position, he responded by e-mail, “Knowing Steve and Jane personally for the past 8 years, I find your remarks about them ‘setting up’ the whole issue to become media martyrs offensive and outright stupid.”

And in an August 2004 Salon article, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hyperbolically declared that the Florida appellate court decision wasn’t an “ending that is happy for Akre and Wilson, or for American democracy.” Kennedy also adopted the argument that the decision gave the media carte blanche to lie. And he included this incredible quote he attributed to Wilson: “What reporter is going to challenge a network…if the station can retaliate by suing the reporter to oblivion the way the courts are letting them do to us?” Actually, you’ll recall, it was the reporters who sued the station. (In an e-mail exchange for this story, Akre denied that Wilson ever spoke with Kennedy.)

Making Do With a $1.4 Million Florida House

Wilson isn’t just getting sympathetic press treatment. He’s spinning his story into ill-gotten gold.

He holds himself up as the model of investigative reporting. In Detroit, for example, he exposed education officials lavishly furnishing their own offices while letting schools go underfunded. But when the tables are turned—as in my reporting on his case for the Weekly Planet, an alternative paper in Tampa—Wilson resorts to just the sort of behavior he decries in his targets: obfuscation, evasion, derision, and outright lies.

Wilson’s speeches and Web site (foxbghsuit.com), and reports by sympathetic journalists, frequently suggest that his legal fight with Fox put him and Akre into financial distress. Akre, for example, wrote in In These Times in 2001 that “somehow we will have to find a way to house and feed ourselves and our daughter, while simultaneously continuing to wage a full-time battle against a media giant.” Speaking to a University of Oregon audience, Wilson alluded to the statement that the “truth will set you free,” adding: “It set us free of our home and most of our life savings. It set us free, all right.”

To solve their purported financial troubles, the couple began aggressive fund raising a few months after filing their lawsuit for their “Citizens’ Fund for the Right to Know.” They have doggedly refused to give a public accounting of the funds collected. Yet I discovered during an investigation in 2003 that, according to public real estate records, the couple had quietly invested $1 million cash in September 2002 toward a $1.4 million home in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, near Jacksonville. Most people with a million bucks lying around aren’t struggling to find “a way to house and feed ourselves.”

In response to my inquiries, Wilson emailed: “Neither Jane nor I now own—NOR HAVE WE ever [sic] OWNED—a $1.4 million beach townhouse in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida.” The bellicose reporter hinted at litigation if my newspaper group printed an inaccurate report.

“Townhouse,” no, but “single-family house,” yes; at least according to the St. Johns County computer database, from which the information was obtained. For weeks, Wilson used the categorical house/townhouse discrepancy, an error made by database coding, to delay admitting his ownership and to avoid the real question—whether he used a fraudulent sob story to lure people into contributing money to his cause.

Despite Wilson’s public claims that all the money he raised was used for legal expenses, I managed to conduct an “unscheduled accountability session” with the reporter in 2003. After repeated questioning, he finally admitted that every dime contributed to his legal defense fund was one less dime Wilson and Akre had to take out of their own pockets. In other words, contributors subsidized the couple’s luxury lifestyle. But Wilson and Akre never made their wealth public.

Nor have they ever publicly disclosed the disposition of contributors’ money. In one of his few known revelations about the disbursement, Wilson admitted in a deposition, in response to questions about his finances, to spending some of the cash on manicuring his lawn. He claimed he replaced the money but refused to provide proof to reporters.

When Detroit citizens, in an online bulletin board, questioned Wilson’s ethics in hiding contributors’ money in a mattress to keep it from the Internal Revenue Service, Wilson sneered: “The money was facetiously said to be UNDER a mattress, not IN a mattress…but more importantly, THAT $5,000 was never alleged to be money collected for legal expenses—in fact it was long before such money was ever even accepted for that purpose. Ooops. Those damned FACTS are getting in the way again?”