Councilors Doug Morten and Phillip Barlow have sued citizen Sally Gump for defamation
By Kelly Moyer
The South County Spotlight, Oct 22, 2008
St. Helens resident Sally Gump, pictured here in her kitchen baking cookies for her son, a freshman at Western Oregon University, says she can't believe two city councilors have sued her for defamation of character. The two sides will meet in Columbia County Circuit Court next Monday.
Sally Gump had read the most recent court filings in her lawsuit against two St. Helens city councilors. She’d even highlighted passages and made notes in the margins of the rebuttal her lawyer sent over.
But somehow Gump missed the most attention-grabbing sentence.
“I didn’t notice it until my friend called and said, ‘Did you see this? They say you’re trying to overthrow the government!’ I was shocked,” Gump says.
It was the very last sentence in the three-page report councilors Doug Morten and Philip Barlow filed in the ongoing legal battle that started with Gump’s efforts to recall the two councilors and progressed into a defamation suit against Gump, a lifelong Columbia County resident.
The two sides will meet in Columbia County Circuit Court at 3:45 p.m. Monday, Oct. 27. The two councilors filed suit against Gump this summer, saying she had made slanderous remarks against them and had printed libelous material in a flyer for the recall effort.
In the most recent rebuttal, filed earlier this week by the two councilors’ attorney, James Huffman, of the St. Helens law firm Huffman and O’Hanlon, Morten and Barlow accuse Gump, a homemaker and mother of a college freshman, of “participating as part of an organized effort to take over the government in St. Helens” to prove malicious intent.
“Once I read that sentence I thought, ‘Oh my God. Are they serious? Are you kidding me?’” Gump says. “But now I just want my day in court. I want to hear what their case is against me.”
The court records show that Morten and Barlow are accusing Gump of purposely trying to ruin their good character in public by printing and stating false accusations against them.
“Her statements are willfully false or, at best, they are published in reckless disregard of the truth,” states Morten in court documents. “All of this circumstantial evidence … shows (Gump) has actual malice to make false statements.”
But proving a defamation case against Gump may be a lot harder than the two councilors reckoned.
Jack Orchard, a Portland attorney who specializes in libel law, told The Spotlight in August that the two councilors have an uphill battle in their case against Gump.
“Generally speaking, public officials have a very high bar to prove libel,” Orchard, who serves on retainer with the Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association, told The Spotlight.
“They have to prove what was said about them was said in a knowingly false way or that the speaker or writer had a reckless disregard for the truth.”
Barlow and Morten have been advised by their attorney to not speak publicly about their case against Gump.
As for the St. Helens mother, Gump says she is taking things one day at a time. She’s still collecting signatures to get a recall of Morten and Barlow on the ballot and she’s trying to stay as involved as ever in city politics.
“I have a saying that I’ve put by my computer, that keeps me going,” Gump says. “It says ‘Act like a duck – look fine on top of the water but paddle like hell underneath.’”
Gump says she’ll keep paddling until her day in court.
“I just can’t believe they sued me for exercising my First Amendment rights,” Gump says. “I’m not a vindictive person. I don’t hate them. I just wanted to show them that they can’t strong-arm citizens.”
Of Morten and Barlow, Gump says she agrees with some of the work the councilors have done in St. Helens.
“They’ve done good work in some areas but they need to listen to the needs of all citizens, not just a handful,” Gump says.
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