Oct. 3, 2002 – Sen. Adlah "Foncie" Donastorg amended a defamation lawsuit on Thursday that he had filed earlier this year against Innovative Communication Corp. and others — to make ICC's vice president for corporate affairs, Holland L. Redfield II, defendant.
More legal actions are to come, Donastorg said Thursday afternoon.
The action came in the wake of remarks made by Redfield on a radio talk show Wednesday morning. Earlier in the week, Donastorg publicly announced that ICC had hired private investigators to conduct an exhaustive investigation of him, his family, his associates and his friends in what proved to be a vain attempt to uncover wrongdoing on the part of any of them. (See "ICC executive: Investigation of senator justified".)
In March, Donastorg and his wife, Benedicta, sued ICC, the Daily News Publishing Co., Jeffrey Prosser and J. Lowe Davis, alleging defamation of character. Prosser owns ICC and The Virgin Islands Daily News, among other companies. Davis is executive editor and chief executive officer of the Daily News.
The suit, filed by lawyer Lee J. Rohn, alleges that the Daily News has "set out a concerted effort to slander, defame and cast in a bad light Senator Donastorg." It claims that the motivation for the slander is the fact that the senator has "diligently sought to have another ICC-owned company, Vitelco, audited, its rates reduced and its IDC benefits withdrawn."
IDC refers to the government's Industrial Development Commission, now the Economic Development Commission, which offers tax exemptions to spur corporate investment in the territory. The phone company was granted such tax breaks nearly five years ago.
Donastorg said he added Redfield as a defendant because of the ICC executive's allegations on the radio show. Redfield stated that Vitelco — the V.I. Telephone Corp., now Innovative Telephone — undertook the investigation because company officials believed Donastorg had taken a free trip to St. Lucia aboard an AT&T private plane. He said the probe was to see if there was "an unsavory relationship between the senator and our competitors."
Vitelco and AT&T were engaged in competition over the laying of fiber-optic undersea cable at the time.
"For him to insinuate that I was taking perks from AT&T is slander," Donastorg said Thursday. "I showed my attorney my passport, which has no St. Lucia stamp."
Donastorg said he remains bewildered by Redfield's comments. "I've never attacked him personally," the senator said. "I think he needs to back up and find a way to dismiss himself, and I'm not going to accept an apology."
He added, "Even with Watergate, they didn't go into anyone's bank accounts."
Donastorg said he will fill a separate suit against the three banks — VI Federal Savings Bank, Banco Popular de Puerto Rico and Chase Manhattan Bank — that revealed his account balances, which he said is against federal banking regulations. VI Federal has since been acquired by Puerto Rico's FirstBank, which also is in the process of acquiring the local Chase Bank operations.
Also, Donastorg said, a class-action suit is being pursued on behalf of all of the people affected by the investigation. "This is dangerous stuff," he said. "How do you justify all the people they investigated? These are things you only see in the movies."
The earlier lawsuit as amended on Thursday charges that the defendants conducted an in-depth investigation into Donastorg's life and that of his family and colleagues and his bank accounts to try to "find dirt"on the senator. It claims that Redfield's radio remarks constitute "defamation, slander, libel," "a conspiracy to discredit Senator Donastorg's reputation in the community" and "defamation, per se."
The suit asks for a jury trial. No court date has been set.
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