Article Published: Friday, March 12, 2004
1994 case closes with payout of $12 million
By Kieran Nicholson
Denver Post Staff Writer
A bitter, 10-year-old defamation case came to a close Thursday with a
former Evergreen couple receiving $12 million from the Anti-Defamation
League of B'nai B'rith.
William and Dorothy Quigley won a jury judgment in April 2000, six years
after their neighbors accused them of being anti-Semitic.
At a 1994 news conference, the ADL accused the Quigleys of perpetrating
the worst anti- Semitic incident in the area since the slaying of Jewish
talk-show host Alan Berg 10 years earlier. They were accused of
launching "Operation Aronson," an effort to run their Jewish neighbors,
Mitchell and Candace Aronson, out of town.
Criminal and civil complaints filed by the Aronsons against the
Quigleys, however, were eventually dropped by prosecutors or dismissed,
and the Quigleys countersued the ADL, which had championed the Aronsons.
The Quigleys, who now live in Massachusetts, were "victims of (the)
ADL's malicious defamations and wiretapping," Jay S. Horowitz, the
couple's attorney, said in a court document filed Thursday.
The ADL appealed the 2000 jury decision in favor of the Quigleys, but
the judgment was upheld by a federal appeals court in April 2003.
Thursday's payout of $12,169,557.61 represents the largest defamation
verdict in the history of Colorado and the largest Federal Wiretap Act
verdict in the history of the United States, Horowitz said.
In a written release, the ADL said it is "disappointed" that the U.S.
Supreme Court denied a petition seeking a review of the judgment against
the organization. The ADL will continue to fight "hatred, racism,
bigotry, extremism, anti-Semitism and threats to our democracy,"
according to the release.
The acrimonious case began in August 1994, when Mitchell and Candace
Aronson moved into a house two doors from the Quigleys in Evergreen. The
families clashed, and the Aronsons claimed it was because they were
Jewish. The Aronsons began tape-recording the Quigleys' cordless
telephone calls and making notes of other clashes.
Horowitz said the ADL "orchestrated a monstrous invasion of their
privacy and a destruction of their good name."
The Aronsons, who are now divorced, could not be reached for comment.
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