Denounced as anti-Semites, pair is owed millions
By Karen Abbott, Rocky Mountain News
March 2, 2004
The Anti-Defamation League must pay a former Evergreen couple it denounced as anti-Semites more than $10 million, after the U.S. Supreme Court refused Monday to review the lawsuit.
"This is the end of the case," said Bruce DeBoskey, director of the league's Mountain States Region, which includes Colorado and Wyoming.
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The widely publicized court battle drew friend-of-the-court briefs from a variety of national advocacy organizations worried that the danger of huge legal liabilities threatened their ability to work for good causes.
"There were 15 other human rights organizations that filed briefs in support of our legal position," DeBoskey said.
The U.S. Supreme Court did not explain why it declined to review the case.
"We're all disappointed," DeBoskey said. "But as a practical matter, through the entire process, we have continued to serve the community."
"We do remain committed to our fight against hatred and racism and bigotry and extremism and anti-Semitism," he said.
The dispute that raged for nearly a decade through the federal courts began when the Quigleys' dog fought with a dog owned by their Jewish neighbors, Mitchell and Candice Aronson, in their upscale foothills neighborhood.
The Aronsons called the ADL in 1994, after overhearing the Quigleys' telephone remarks on their Radio Shack police scanner. They said they heard the Quigleys discuss a campaign to drive them from the neighborhood with Nazi scare tactics, including tossing lampshades and soap on their lawn, putting pictures of Holocaust ovens on their house and dousing one of their children with flammable liquid.
The Aronsons were advised to record the conversations. Based on the recordings, they sued the Quigleys in federal court, Jefferson County prosecutors charged the Quigleys with hate crimes, and Saul Rosenthal, then the ADL's regional director, denounced the Quigleys as anti-Semites in a news conference.
The Quigleys got death threats and hate mail.
Later, everyone found out that the recordings became illegal just five days after they began, when President Clinton signed a new wiretap restriction into federal law.
The hate charges were dropped, and Jefferson County paid the Quigleys $75,000 after prosecutors concluded Dee Quigley's remarks to a friend were only in jest. Two lawyers on the ADL's volunteer board, who had advised the Aronsons, paid the Quigleys $350,000 to settle a lawsuit.
The Quigleys and Aronsons dropped their legal attacks on one another, and neither family paid the other anything. The Aronsons divorced. The Quigleys moved to another state.
But a federal jury found in 2000, after a four-week trial before Denver U.S. District Judge Edward Nottingham, that the Anti-Defamation League had defamed the Quigleys. The jury awarded them $10.5 million.
The ADL appealed, and the Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last year that the jury's award stood.
DeBoskey said the long legal proceedings allowed the ADL to set aside funds to pay the judgment if necessary. Some the money will come from insurance and some will come from other sources, including donors, but none will come from the ADL's operating budget, DeBoskey said.
Horowitz estimated the judgment now totals more than $12.5 million, once interest is included.
He said the Quigleys suffered greatly because they were branded as anti-Semites. William Quigley's career in the motion picture industry was virtually destroyed, Horowitz said.
"They cannot express how life-altering the ADL's actions have been," Horowitz said.
The Quigleys' children were affected because "they grew up during some of the most trying circumstances of this case," he said.
At one point, the family hired bodyguards. They received a box of dog feces in the mail. Their own Catholic priest criticized them from the pulpit.