The Appeals Court has upheld the dismissal of a defamation lawsuit leveled at Bolton’s DPW director Joseph Lynch.
According to court documents, Lynch and town resident Frank Chiodo squabbled for years over construction and maintenance issues in Bolton.
In 2019 Lynch supposedly contacted the town manger and reported that Chiodo might be burying tree stumps on his property. The town held a meeting to discuss the potential issue. Chiodo appeared, spoke to town officials, and even excavated sections of his land to prove that no stumps had been buried.
Following the town’s inquest, Chiodo filed a defamation lawsuit against Lynch. At one point, the town manager was deposed and made the following statement regarding his conversation with Lynch:
Mr. Lynch told me that he observed while Mr. Chiodo was clearing property that he owned across the street from the D.P.W. of trees, that in his opinion, he didn’t see a lot of material being shipped off the – or trucked off the property, and he speculated that Mr. Chiodo may be burying stumps on the property.
Lynch’s lawyers filed a motion for summary judgment. A superior court judge allowed the motion and essentially dismissed Chiodo’s lawsuit.
His attorneys appealed the decision. The Appeals Court agreed with the judge who dismissed the case.
The applicable case law states,
To prove defamation, a plaintiff must establish, among other elements, that “the defendant published a defamatory statement of and concerning the plaintiff” and that “the statement was a false statement of fact (as opposed to opinion). The plaintiff must specifically identify the allegedly false statement in the complaint. To be actionable, the identified statement “must reasonably be understood either as a statement of actual fact, or one that implies defamatory facts.. Statements that merely express a subjective view, are not statements of actual fact. (Citations and quotations omitted.)
Based on this standard, the lawsuit was rightly dismissed.
Here, while the complaint refers generally to Lynch’s “accusations” and “allegations” that Chiodo was burying tree stumps on his property, it does not identify any specific words spoken by Lynch, let alone identify a statement that could reasonably be understood as a statement of actual fact. To the extent Chiodo relies on [the town manager’s] deposition testimony, that testimony does not show that Lynch made a false statement of fact. As [the town manager] testified, Lynch “speculated” that Chiodo “may” be burying tree stumps and conveyed that this was his “opinion” based on his not “see[ing] a lot of material being . . . trucked off the property.” This constituted a nonactionable statement of opinion, as Lynch’s “use of cautionary terms” relayed that he was “indulging in speculation” based on what he saw occurring on Chiodo’s property.
The full opinion is attached below.