MAINE
Portland Press Herald
BY SCOTT DOLAN STAFF WRITER
sdolan@pressherald.com | @scottddolan | 207-791-6304
While Freeport resident Paul Kendrick appeals a $14.5 million verdict against him in a complex defamation case, a federal judge held an unusual hearing Friday in which he encouraged the two sides to reach an out-of-court settlement instead.
Kendrick lost at trial in U.S. District Court in Portland last summer, but an appellate court in Boston issued a ruling last month that put the entire case in question by asking whether it ever belonged in federal court at all.
The appellate ruling raised so many new questions that Judge John A. Woodcock Jr., who presided over the trial, ordered all parties in the case to appear before him again on Friday.
Kendrick was accused of defamation after he began a widely broadcast email campaign in January 2011 in which he accused the American founder of an orphanage in Haiti of sexually abusing the boys in his care. Kendrick widened the campaign against the founder, Michael Geilenfeld, to include Hearts with Haiti, the North Carolina charity that raises donations to fund his orphanage.
The Portland jury did not believe the trial testimony by seven former orphans in Haiti about sexual abuse and found that Kendrick was reckless and negligent in making the accusations. It awarded actual damages of $7.5 million to Hearts with Haiti, and $7 million to Geilenfeld.
The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is still considering Kendrick’s appeal of the verdict, but it sent the unanswered question of whether federal court was the correct venue back to Woodcock to decide. If Woodcock decides the venue was correct, the appellate court would resume its review of the case.
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