A former member of the Board of Education filed a civil lawsuit Monday against the president of the Board of Aldermen and the owner of a well-known political blog for allegedly allowing defamatory comments about her to be posted online.
Vulgar blog comments — published online two years ago — ridiculed Renee Luneau and accused her of committing at least three crimes.
Luneau is asking for damages in the amount of at least $15,000.
In addition to being a former Board of Education member, Luneau is a detective with the New Haven Police Department.
The lawsuit names Derby Board of Aldermen President Ken Hughes and Christopher Bigelow, of CTLocalPolitics.net, as defendants.
The lawsuit states the comments were posted on CTLocalPolitics.net, and that Hughes was the site’s “monitor and/or commentator.”
It does not accuse either Hughes or Bigelow of writing the comments.
Rather, the duo allowed the comments to remain on the site and “failed to make a reasonable and proper safeguards (sic) to prevent defamatory comments from being published on website known as ctlocalpolitics.net,” according to the lawsuit, filed by attorney William Wynne of Cheshire.
There is already bad blood between the Luneau family and Hughes, who is seeking re-election to the Derby Board of Aldermen and is the campaign manager for Republican incumbent Mayor Anthony Staffieri.
Luneau’s father, Ron, was an employee of the Derby Public Works Department. He was fired in December 2008 after a Board of Aldermen subcommittee investigated the alleged mismanagement of the city’s transfer station.
Hughes was the chairman of the subcommittee investigating the allegations against Ron Luneau and other transfer station workers.
Ron Luneau is fighting, through his union, to get his job back.
E‑mail and phone messages seeking comment were sent to Hughes and Renee Luneau. Those messages were not returned as of 4:30 p.m. Wednesday.
A call seeking comment was left with Renee Luneau’s attorney.
Bigelow, better known online as “Genghis Conn,” is the president of Connecticut Local Politics, LLC, which owns CTLocalPolitics.net. He referred questions to his attorney, Jennifer E. Mira of West Hartford.
Mira said the lawsuit is a waste of time and money.
She said the comments were not actually posted on CTLocalPolitics.net. The comments were posted on an independent blog that was given permission to use Web space provided by CTLocalPolitics.net.
“In this particular situation the comments posted were not posted on the site owned by Chris Bigelow. They were on a Web site hosted by Chris Bigelow’s Web site. It was on a different Web site. In essence, they are suing the wrong people,” Mira said.
Generally, Web site administrators and Web site providers are not responsible for comments posted to their Web sites, unless the administrator edits the comment in some way.
Blogs and their authors are protected under the Communications Decency Act, Mira said.
“It will be our position that the Communications Decency Act, along with the laws that govern public officials, will protect Chris Bigelow and his Web site for anything Renee Luneau is claiming,” Mira said.
Mira is not representing Hughes in the case.
Hughes was not a moderator at CTLocalPolitics.net, but, according to Bigelow, he was in charge of “Connecticut’s Smallest City,” an independent Derby blog to which CTLocalPolitics often linked.
“Connecticut’s Smallest City” is no longer online — and it is unclear if that is the site where the alleged comments appeared.
If Hughes was, in fact, in charge of the blog, he can’t be held liable for allowing offensive posts to remain on the blog, assuming he did not author or edit the comments, according to Daniel J. Klau, a partner with Pepe & Hazard, a law firm in Hartford.
Klau specializes in First Amendment litigation and is an adjunct professor at the University of Connecticut Law School.
“The basic rule is that moderators of Internet Web sites, blogs and what not, are not liable for content that they did not post,” Klau said.
The lawsuit, filed in Milford, has a return date of Oct. 29.
