by Paul Alan Levy
Last month, a Fells Point restaurant was able to use an apparently baseless threat of defamation litigation to secure a vote renewing its liquor license by the liquor control board despite considerable neighborhood complaints. Baltimore attorney Scott Marder apparently a demand letter to every one of the 15 neighbors who objected, alleging that they had made false statements, stating Choptank’s intention to sue them, and threatening them with spoliation sanctions if they failed to preserve all evidence of their statements about his client
The neighbors’ lawyer, Becky Witt, told me that her clients were intimidated, but that, when she called Marder and asked just that the alleged falsities where, Marder couldn’t remember any specifics. Marder denied Witt’s account of their conversation, but he refused say just what Witt had recounted incorrectly, just as he declined to tell me what alleged false statements had been made about his client. I conclude that his demand letters to the neighbors were baseless.
But Marder’s exercise in baseless intimidation appears to have been effective representation of his client: only three neighbors showed up at the license renewal hearing, and the objections were rejected for lack of substantial evidence.
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