Paper Sues to Silence Cyber Attacks   

Former city councilman accused of slandering gay editors of California weekly.

TRACIE CONE AND ANNA MARIE DOS REMEDIOS knew there'd be plenty of unknowns when they jumped from working for a major metropolitan newspaper to owning a Hollister, California, weekly in late 1999.
But they never expected to have to reveal their private lives on their own front page. And they never, ever expected to file a $6 million lawsuit against a former city councilman for libel, slander, copyright infringement and a civil rights violation.
The trouble started in October, when a series of increasingly offensive Web sites anonymously attacked the paper, the Pinnacle; Publisher Cone; and columnist Bob Valenzuela. The sites linked Cone's name to hard-core lesbian pornography pages and falsely claimed Valenzuela had been arrested for child molestation. Several community members received anonymous e-mails directing them to the Web pages.
"There was so much malice in that, it wasn't just someone having an opinion," says General Manager and Editor in Chief dos Remedios. "If they just would have attacked the paper, our editorial stance.... The level of the attacks were so chilling."
The women, a gay couple who live on a ranch near Hollister, got Yahoo! and Hitstation Communication to take the sites down by claiming copyright infringement of a doctored photo of Valenzuela, in which a peace sign had been altered to show only his middle finger. It took filing the lawsuit and two subpoenas, plus some volunteer work by sympathetic computer gurus, to identify the person whose Internet account had been used to put up the first site: then-Hollister City Councilman Joseph F. Felice, according to attorney John V. Picone III.
"People had said stuff to us on the street" suggesting it was Felice, Cone says. "But there's no way that I would have thought that an elected official that's supposed to serve the whole community would've done something like this." Although, she adds, "who was sitting at the computer in actuality we don't know."
Felice did not return phone calls seeking comment. He stepped down from the council in December, after eight years in office. In December, before he was named in the suit, Felice made critical comments about the paper in the San Francisco Chronicle, which wrote that "he believes that the sites were designed to implicate him."
He has hired an attorney, says Picone, of the Menlo Park law firm of Fish & Richardson. The firm has taken over a portion of the Pinnacle's lawsuit from the newspaper's regular attorneys, offering to do it pro bono. The National Center for Lesbian Rights in San Francisco is offering legal aid, as well.
Cone notes that she saw the first Web site shortly after the Pinnacle ran a picture of Felice appearing to give the finger to the paper's intern photographer at a council meeting.
Since purchasing the Pinnacle from a local grocery store owner in November 1999 (see Bylines), Cone and dos Remedios, both formerly with the San Jose Mercury News, have transformed it from a shopper into a 36- to 40-page free community newspaper that won two awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association after its first five issues. With a circulation of 18,500, the paper has aggressively covered issues like higher housing costs and sewage treatment problems that have come with the explosive growth caused by nearby Silicon Valley. (Hollister's population is about 30,000.) Editorials have advocated a slower pace of development. The anonymous Web sites attacked those views, but with an ugly edge, branding Cone and dos Remedios as "the filth from up north."
The sites scared the two women. The day after they were alerted to the site, the main computer at the newspaper lost all of its accounting software, possibly because of a hacker. When they got home that evening, their five horses were out of the barn--something that had never happened before.
"We took a hate crime report on it up front," says San Benito County Sheriff Curtis Hill. "I've got all those sites burned onto a CD," though neither he nor the Hollister police thus far have found anything on the sites to warrant criminal charges.
So Cone, dos Remedios and Valenzuela decided to file a civil suit. "We felt so strongly that somebody's got to fight this fight," Cone says. "It's the reason why gay people are in the closet, [that] people can do this and get away with this stuff."
The suit asks for $6 million in general damages to be awarded to Pinnacle Publishing Co., Cone and Valenzuela, for infringement of copyright, trademark violation, libel, false light, slander, misleading representation of a business, and violation of a California statute outlawing threats of violence against someone based on their sex or sexual orientation. The suit names Felice and 10 John Does, to cover others who may have been involved.
The week the suit was filed, the Pinnacle ran a front-page story by a freelancer that explained the suit and revealed that Cone and dos Remedios are gay. Cone, a longtime reporter, and dos Remedios, a photojournalist and designer, say they were loath to put themselves in the news but felt they had no choice.
They say the community has responded warmly. A group of local supporters has raised more than $2,000 in a fund to help pay the legal bills; the women have spent $11,000 so far. Cone says she is uncomfortable with that effort, however, because of her role as a journalist, and says she doesn't know or want to know who has contributed.
Mayor Peggy Corrales, who took office in December, sat on the council with Felice and sided with him on a controversial housing development the newspaper opposed. She says she likes the Pinnacle, and called the Web sites "a very low thing to do."
Attorney Picone, who likes the paper, is a Hollister resident who asked his firm to take the case. "If you disagree with someone, you should confront them, put forth your own ideas, put them in the marketplace of ideas," and not do it anonymously, he says.
Sheriff Hill, a 33-year area resident, says the Pinnacle's new owners "have been a real good positive addition, taking a paper that was nothing but local advertising, turned it into a very good newspaper for our community in every way."
Despite the support, "I think we're just still sort of reeling from it all," Cone says. They haven't been the targets of any harassment since filing the suit. Both women caution outsiders against drawing unpleasant conclusions about the community they've come to love.
"I just hope that people don't portray this town as like [the Web sites], since it's certainly not," dos Remedios says. "Even though we've had to put in the paper that we are gay, it's not that people didn't know. It's that people realized afterwards, 'They're gay and I like them anyway.' "