Monday, May 1, 2000

Mathur loses in court again

Quixotic Irvine Valley College Legal Battle is Over—For Now

From Community College Week, May 1, 2000
By Scott W. Wright

IRVINE, Calif.—The embattled president of Irvine Valley College has lost the final round of a legal campaign to muzzle his chief critic, part of a bizarre courtroom battle in which he accused the president of another college of conspiring against him.
            Superior Court Judge David McEachen in late March tossed out an invasion-of-privacy lawsuit filed earlier this year by Dr. Raghu P. Mathur, the president of Irvine Valley College whose tenure as CEO has been marred by one controversy after another.
            Mathur alleged in the lawsuit that a former Irvine Valley administrator illegally obtained confidential documents about him from his personnel file and then leaked them to a professor who publishes newsletters that frequently lampoon Mathur.
            But the judge sided with former Irvine Valley Vice President of Instruction Terrence J. Burgess, noting during a court hearing in March that Mathur presented no evidence and that allowing the lawsuit to proceed would violate a state law against stifling free speech.
            “It was pretty cut-and-dried,” said Burgess, now the president of Chabot College in Hayward, Calif. “The court ruled that Mathur didn’t have a shred of evidence. He didn’t offer a single piece of evidence to show that I had done what I was alleged to have done. And of course courts want to see evidence.”
            McEachen was the second judge to rule against Mathur in as many months. Superior Court Judge Michael Brenn[er] earlier dismissed claims against Roy Bauer, a tenured philosophy professor who has taught at Irvine Valley since 1986 and the publisher of the scathing newsletters, Dissent and The Vine.
            “This was outrageous, a huge affront,” said Burgess, who spent most of his career at Irvine Valley but left two years ago to serve as the president of Chabot. “These were just wild allegations. This guy is a pathological character. He’s just a flat-out liar.
            “My initial reaction to the suit was that I was astonished because these allegations were absolutely preposterous and wholly unfounded,” he adds. “The dastardly deed I was accused of having committed is an action that actually would have been impossible.”
            Neither Mathur nor his attorney, Michael Corfield of Laguna Beach, could be reached for comment. But Corfield told a local newspaper here that Mathur “probably” would appeal the court’s decision. Appealing, however, could significantly raise his legal costs.
            Under the law cited by both judges in dismissing the case, the losing side must pay all legal expenses. Burgess estimates the cost to defend himself against the lawsuit ran about $25,000; Bauer has said he has spent about $22,000 on the case.
            Mathur’s lawsuit stemmed from an item published in Bauer’s Dissent, a districtwide newsletter. The article stated that before he ascended to the president’s post, Mathur had been disciplined by the college for allegedly violating a student’s privacy.
            The newsletter alleged that Mathur distributed copies of the student’s transcripts in an attempt to discredit Burgess and had asked the college’s faculty senate to censure him.
            Bauer has refused to reveal how he obtained the damaging records regarding Mathur, telling Community College Week: “You know how a college is. Documents tend to float around. I got them. The charge that they were somehow stolen is just absurd.”
            In his lawsuit filed in January, Mathur contends that Burgess had friends pull the confidential memos from his personnel file and that Burgess then gave them to Bauer to publish.
            However, Burgess contends it is inconceivable that he could have leaked documents to Bauer because those files are maintained at the district’s headquarters, not at the college where Burgess might have access to them.
Mathur: "leadership is key"
            “Mr. Mathur has a huge dislike for me,” Burgess said. “I view this as retaliation against me on the one hand, but more of a convenient way to try and link Roy Bauer to these documents since I am no longer really in the picture at the college.”
            “Roy Bauer has been a huge critic of Mathur now for three years, publishing these two newsletters,” Burgess said. “The one thing that Mathur values is his sense of how other perceive him. He has an ego bigger than the planet.
            “He has wanted to shut Roy Bauer down forever and is looking for any means whatsoever to do so,” he adds. “I believe that Mathur thought he could just sue him and that would accomplish his goal of silencing Mr. Bauer.”
            In a 1998 newsletter, Bauer named a list of people he disliked. The list contained so many names that he likened it to a “two-ton slate of polished granite which I hope someday to drop on Raghu Mathur’s head.”
            Bauer wrote in another issue of the newsletter that he had fantasized about attending a funeral for a college district trustee during which Mathur and several other officials were “dispatched by a lurid gas emanating from the Great Man’s gaping mouth.”
            South Orange officials tried to reprimand Bauer for creating a hostile work environment but when the professor sued, a judge chided administrators for attempting to stifle Bauer’s First Amendment protected free-speech rights. The district has appealed.
            Mathur rarely comments publicly on the controversies. But last year he told the Orange County Register newspaper that such political commentary made him afraid for his life.
            He also said he has received death threats.

            “I think the threats taken as a whole about dropping granite, maiming, killing through lurid gas or using a gun, using a hatchet, any of those ways or some other ways I could be killed” are serious, Mathur told the newspaper.


3/23/00, Irvine World News

Judge dismisses second Mathur suit

By Laura Hayes

            A superior court judge has granted a motion to drop an invasion of privacy law suit filed by Irvine Valley College President Raghu Mathur against a former campus administrator.
            Mathur filed the suit in January against Terrence Burgess, a former vice president of instruction who is now president of Chabot College in the San Francisco Bay area. The suit claimed that Burgess obtained confidential documents from Mathur’s personnel file and gave them to Irvine Valley professor Roy Bauer, who published them in his newsletter Dissent over a year ago.
            Bauer reprinted a 1996 reprimand letter to Mathur from Daniel Larios, then college president, concerning the way Mathur had handled a student’s transcripts. Bauer also published a legal opinion from the district’s law firm advising the chancellor that Mathur’s conduct was in violation of federal privacy law. Mathur was chair of the physical sciences department in 1996.
            David McEachen is the second judge to grant the special motion, based on a section of the California Code of Civil Procedure that is intended to discourage lawsuits which attempt to chill free speech.
            In February, Judge Michael Brenner ruled in a related case filed against Bauer that Mathur’s performance of duties is a matter of public interest and that nothing about the published statements appeared untrue.
            “I think that Mathur has been understandably embarrassed by Roy’s publication of the Dissent, which very publicly discloses his activities as a public official,” said Burgess.
            To the charge that he stole the documents from Mathur’s file, Burgess said, “was an absolutely preposterous allegation. There was no evidence that it occurred and no mechanical opportunity for it to occur.
            “He needed a vehicle to connect to Roy, I was an opportunity. It’s time the district realizes the three years of grief they’ve had is all pointed to one thing, Raghu Mathur.”
            The motion places the burden on Mathur to show probability that he will prevail in his complaint of invasion of privacy. The judge ruled that the information was protected under provisions of the first amendment. Burgess also submitted evidence that the published documents were in the public domain in 1996 and widely known.
            “It’s always a matter of public concern how a public official does his job,” said Diana Gordon, Burgess’ attorney. “They (the public) have a right to know and it’s newsworthy.”
            In addition to ridding the system of frivolous lawsuits, a second purpose of the statute is to make sure the person who is sued recovers litigation costs, said Gordon. Therefore, the statute does not give the court discretion in awarding fees.
            Mathur’s recourse is to appeal to the superior court, running the risk of adding more to the total costs of the two cases, estimated at about $30,000.Mathur offered to not appeal the motion if Burgess agreed to cover his own court and attorney’s fees, and the offer was declined, according to Wendy Phillips, co-counsel for Burgess.
            Mathur referred phone calls about the case to his attorney, Michael Corfield of Laguna Beach.
            On Tuesday, Corfield said Mathur “probably” would appeal the ruling, but it has not been decided.

            “Essentially the judge took a law that pertains to defamation case and applied it to an invasion of privacy case,” said Corfield, explaining a basis on which he could appeal the ruling.

No comments:

Roy's obituary in LA Times and Register: "we were lucky to have you while we did"

  This ran in the Sunday December 24, 2023 edition of the Los Angeles Times and the Orange County Register : July 14, 1955 - November 20, 2...