A judge has dismissed a defamation lawsuit brought by two Belfast women against city officials and others who have come to be known as the “Belfast 8” and is having the women pay the defendants’ court costs.
The lawsuit, over whether the women had been accused online of running a brothel out of their Church Street home, had been scheduled for a trial Friday morning in front of Justice Robert Murray, but Murray dismissed the case with prejudice before the bench trial got underway.
Murray also directed Rose Woodford and her daughter, April Walker, to pay the court costs for the people they had tried to sue. The eight defendants in the case were Belfast city councilors Mike Hurley and Neal Harkness, as well as Cheryl Fuller, Mandy Marriner-Everett, Anne Saggese, Joshua Ard, Erik Klausmeyer and Allison Ames Goscinski.
Chris MacLean, the attorney for the defendants, said his clients had wanted the trial to go forward so their exoneration could play out live in front of people in the courtroom, even though Woodford and Walker had changed their minds and in August sought to drop the case.
“The gold standard is a dismissal with prejudice,” MacLean said, adding that the ruling prohibits Woodford and Walker from ever trying to revive their claims that the defendants had posted false information about them on Facebook. The defendants argued that Woodford and Walker fabricated the whole thing and that nothing defamatory had been posted online by them or anyone else.
MacLean said he and his clients never asked the judge to have the plaintiffs pay their court costs.
“The plaintiffs obviously weren’t able to prove their case,” MacLean said. “They didn’t even show up to court.”
MacLean said he had not yet added up the court costs incurred by his clients in fighting the lawsuit.
Seth Russell, Woodford and Walker’s attorney, said that it was his clients who wanted to have their case dismissed. He declined Friday to comment on their reasons for this, but in earlier court filings he wrote that they could not move forward with the case “due to numerous unrelated circumstances.”
“We’re happy the court granted our motion to dismiss,” Russell said.
