Ohio judge drops $50M lawsuit against paper

Associated Press

CLEVELAND

An Ohio judge taken off a high-profile murder trial has dropped her $50 million lawsuit against a Cleveland newspaper and reached an undisclosed financial settlement with an affiliated company that runs the publication’s website, an attorney said Friday.

Cuyahoga County Judge Common Pleas Judge Shirley Strickland Saffold and her adult daughter filed their lawsuit against The Plain Dealer, its parent company and the website operator in April over anonymous comments on the site that the newspaper said were traced to Saffold’s personal e-mail.

The inflammatory comments concerned the case of Anthony Sowell, a man who has pleaded not guilty to killing 11 women whose remains were found around his Cleveland home.

After the newspaper reported that the comments, including one critical of a Sowell attorney, had been connected to the judge, the defense team sought to have her removed from Sowell’s case. The Ohio Supreme Court agreed to do so, saying her removal was needed to avoid the appearance of bias.

The judge denied posting the comments and said they came from her daughter, Sydney Saffold, using a joint family account.

The Saffolds sued, claiming that the defendants released confidential information in violation of the website privacy policy. The suit was dismissed Thursday, said Brian Spitz, an attorney for the judge and her daughter.

Spitz said terms of the financial settlement with Advance Internet, the sister company that owns newspaper sites including The Plain Dealer’s cleveland.com, were confidential.

One of the website comments at issue lumped Sowell, 51, with a man who killed his fiancee and another who killed his wife with cyanide. Another comment criticized one of Sowell’s defense attorneys.