BATON ROUGE – Louisiana Supreme Court Justice Jefferson Hughes is suing The Advocate for defamation over the newspaper’s coverage of the justice’s alleged actions in a child custody case in the 1990s.
The complaint, which was filed in June in the 18th Judicial District Court in Iberville Parish, criticizes the wording of an editorial about the judge’s failure to recuse himself in a custody case involving a 5-year-old boy. The editorial was published in the wake of The Advocate’s report that the attorney who once represented the boy's mother had been linked romantically to Hughes.
“On June 25, 2019, The Advocate published that an Advocate investigation ‘brought to light’ that in 1999, Judge Jeff Hughes refused to recuse himself and ruled in favor of the mother in a custody case while romantically involved with the mother’s attorney,” the complaint states. “This statement was false and made with knowledge that it was false, or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not, thereby defaming [the] plaintiff.”
Baton Rouge attorney Berkley Durbin
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The Advocate possessed evidence at the time that the attorney in question had withdrawn from the case in August 1998 and did not represent the mother at the time Hughes issued his decision in the case, the complaint says. But the newspaper also reported that the attorney, Berkley Durbin, remained involved in events surrounding the case since she represented the boy’s stepfather in a related criminal case in which the stepfather was accused of intentionally injuring the boy with scalding bathwater.
An appeals court eventually removed Hughes from the custody case. And a federal civil rights probe into the judge’s actions followed, along with a secret investigation by the Louisiana Judiciary Commission, The Advocate reported.
Scott Sternberg, the attorney representing The Advocate, defended the newspaper’s coverage of Hughes.
“This was important public-service journalism, and that’s why it’s been widely recognized as leading to increased transparency in the judicial system,” Sternberg told the Louisiana Record. “We think this retaliatory lawsuit will be dismissed.”
The Advocate will be answering the allegations in Hughes’ complaint, Sternberg said.
“We will be responding, and that’s all I can say right now,” he said. “We will be responding, and we stand by our reporting.”
Hughes' complaint calls on the newspaper to publish a correction approved by the judge on the front page of The Advocate for four Sundays in a row. Or, if the case goes to trial, Hughes is entitled to reasonable damages, the lawsuit says.