Massachusetts mayor who shuttered a libelous newspaper faces renewed corruption allegations
Now preparing for his seventh mayoral campaign, Everett Mayor Carlo DeMaria is accused of padding his salary with bonus payments and this time, the state of Massachusetts is pressing the City Council to take action.
EVERETT, Mass. For years, the mayor of a Boston suburb dreaded Wednesdays. That was the day when a local weekly would publish shocking allegations that he was on the take, sexually harassing women or under investigation by the FBI.
Friends trashed Everett Mayor Carlo DeMaria on Facebook over what the Everett Leader Herald printed. His father threatened to disown him — over stories the mayor knew were lies.
“They labeled me as a ‘Kickback Carlo.’ Accusations that I was settling all kinds of sexual harassment lawsuits, that I put a knife to a girl’s throat and asked for sexual favors,” DeMaria said. “It was awful. It was disgusting.”
Almost everything the paper wrote about DeMaria turned out to be fake, enabling him to win a $1.1 million settlement in December that finally shut down the nearly 140-year-old paper.
Such defamation victories are exceedingly rare under the Supreme Court’s “actual malice” standard for public figures. That willing disregard for the truth became abundantly evident when the paper’s editor swore in court to tell the truth, and admitted to fabricating story after story in an unrelenting smear campaign.
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