A former state lawmaker lost his appeal Wednesday of a lawsuit against the Benton Courier, which he argued had defamed him in a series of editorials.
The Arkansas Court of Appeals said the former state representative from Bryant, Dan Greenberg, had failed to show that any of statements printed in the newspaper were false.
There was also no evidence that the writer of the editorials, Kristal Kuykendall, intended to lie in order to harm Greenberg, according to the opinion by Court of Appeals Judge Raymond Abramson.
Abramson's opinion upheld a decision by Saline County Circuit Judge Grisham Phillips Jr., who threw out Greenberg's case in 2013.
Reached by phone Wednesday, Greenberg said he believed the court "made at least one mistake of law and one mistake of fact," but he declined to publicly elaborate.
He said he is considering appealing the decision.
The lawsuit stems from a series of four editorials that Kuykendall wrote in 2010 as Greenberg was running in a Republican primary for state Senate against Jeremy Hutchinson.
Hutchinson won the race and currently holds the seat.
Greenberg currently runs the Advance Arkansas Institute, a think tank. He is the son of Paul Greenberg, the former editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
In his complaint, Greenberg argued that Kuykendall was "angry and hostile" toward him. In the first editorial, she swore that she would never support him for elected office.
In subsequent editorials, the writer questioned whether Greenberg may have violated campaign ethics rules and accused him of taking newspaper headlines out of context for use in his campaign ads.
Kuykendall also wrote that she recalled Greenberg saying that everyone has access to health care because "all they have to do is go to the emergency room."
In his court appeal, Greenberg denied much of what Kuykendall wrote and attempted to show proof of her bias in communications she had with others.
Attempts to reach Kuykendall or an editor at the newspaper, now called the Saline Courier, were unsuccessful.
Kuykendall's writings and emails that she wrote to other officials indicated that she "harbored anger" toward Greenberg, Abramson wrote, but they do not prove that she purposely spread false information.
"Although Greenberg questions the quality of her investigation, the evidence demonstrates that Kuykendall did, in fact, investigate each of the statements made in her columns," Abramson wrote.
Metro on 05/25/2017