Local Official Sues for Libel over Allegations That He Has "Severe Mental Health Issues"; Court Says …

"truth is an absolute defense."

From Kelleher v. Town of Brookfield, decided earlier this month by Judge Brian Murphy (D. Mass.):

In 2023, while serving on the Brookfield Board of Health with Defendant Lepak, Plaintiff filed an Open Meeting Law complaint alleging that the Board of Health had published insufficient and inaccurate meeting minutes. The Massachusetts Attorney General agreed and ordered that the minutes be revised. According to Plaintiff, this was the inciting incident for an ongoing course of retaliatory conduct by Lepak against him. Defendant Simons now serves on the Brookfield Board of Health….

Plaintiff served Brookfield and Defendants Lepak and Simons with a "final [Americans with Disabilities Act ("ADA")] notice of lawsuit." "The next day, Plaintiff emailed Town officials to withdraw from all public meetings, citing safety concerns after a reported threat involving a FedEx driver and two high ranking [Brookfield] officials."

The following day, … each of the Individual Defendants applied for harassment prevention orders against Plaintiff …. "Within days," Plaintiff created and distributed flyers criticizing two of the Individual Defendants, Campbell and Lepak, who had just sought harassment prevention orders against him. Campbell thereafter sought an emergency harassment prevention order against Plaintiff, which was temporarily granted on an ex parte basis….

[T]he East Brookfield District Court held a hearing and granted the requests for harassment prevention orders. Prior to that hearing, Defendant Lepak requested and obtained a letter in support of her application from an individual who had made similar harassment allegations against Plaintiff. Plaintiff alleges that this letter "contained numerous false statements of fact," intended to defame him, and that it moreover contained quotes "lifted from [a] confidential ADA accommodation request, dated April 25, 2025, which was sent to Town officials and counsel," which the letter "mischaracterized … to portray Plaintiff as unstable and dangerous." Plaintiff further alleges that Defendant Lepak has elsewhere "published multiple false and defamatory statements about Plaintiff" in official communications, in the minutes of public meetings, on social media, and to the public.

There's a lot more (the whole opinion is over 7000 words long), but here's one passage that struck me:

Plaintiff alleges[, among other things, that] Lepak … "made stigmatizing and defamatory statements about Plaintiff's mental health status" on social media….

Defendants argue that Lepak's online statements about Plaintiff's mental health—that he has "severe mental health issues"—are true and thus cannot be defamatory. On this, the Court agrees with Defendants: Plaintiffs' own pleadings preclude him from arguing that the statements are materially false. See Compl. ¶¶ 163, 227 (alleging that Plaintiff suffers from complex post-traumatic stress disorder "that substantially limits major life activities including verbal expression, memory, and civic engagement under stress," such to qualify him as disabled under the ADA).

And while Massachusetts law "permits a plaintiff in a libel action to recover for a truthful defamatory statement if the plaintiff proves that it was made in writing with actual malice[,] … the First Amendment limits the scope of that statute such that 'a statement on matters of public concern must be provable as false before there can be liability under state defamation law.'" Plaintiff's own pleadings demonstrate that Lepak's statements were meant to color or inform Plaintiff's public acts and to "impugn[ ] Plaintiff's fitness for public participation and office." As such, "truth is an 'absolute defense'" to this part of the defamation claim.