A deputy minister in the B.C. government is suing an NDP MLA for defamation for allegedly false claims made about a pay raise.
Athana Mentzelopoulos filed the civil lawsuit in B.C. Supreme Court on Aug. 15, accusing Victoria-Swan Lake MLA Rob Fleming of making false and malicious statements about her salary, an alleged pay raise, and friendship with Premier Christy Clark.
Fleming accused Mentzelopoulos of receiving a $30,000 pay raise last year, on top of a $217,000 salary, in a July 22 email to an NDP mailing list, as well as on a B.C. NDP website, according to Mentzelopoulos’s statement of claim filed in court.
Fleming characterized the payments as “Christy Clark’s insider payoff,” highlighted Mentzelopoulos’s past role as a bridesmaid in Clark’s wedding and contrasted the money with the dispute over education funding in the provincial teachers strike, the statement of claim said.
The comments were understood to convey a “dishonest scheme, cronyism and corruption” and served “a collateral purpose of harming the sitting Premier of British Columbia and her government,” the document said.
Mentzelopoulos is seeking an injunction barring Fleming and the NDP from continuing to write or broadcast the allegations. She is also seeking unspecified damages for harm to her reputation and feelings.
“Mr. Fleming has further aggravated the harm caused to Ms. Mentzelopoulos by refusing to issue a retraction and by failing to take steps to remove from the Internet the defamatory webpage referred to above, notwithstanding a request by Ms. Mentzelopoulos that he do so,” the court document said.
Mentzelopoulos is deputy minister in the Ministry of Jobs, Tourism and Skills Training, with responsibilities for intergovernmental relations. She was previously the deputy minister in charge of the government’s communications branch, and has worked for the federal government.
Fleming, the NDP’s education critic, could not be reached for comment.
Mentzelopoulos’s legal fees are not being paid by the province, said David Wotherspoon, her lawyer. “Athana commenced this without a view to having her fees paid” by the government, he said in an interview.
In some cases civil servants are indemnified to cover the cost of legal action resulting from their government duties.
Fleming has 21 days to file a response to the claim in court.
